Saturday, October 29, 2011
The Best Little Whore In Texas
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Early morning in a nearly filled corporate ballroom at the Cobb Energy Centre, a second-tier event stadium on the outskirts of Atlanta. It's late September, and a local conservative think tank is hosting a get-together with Rick Perry, whose front-runner comet at the time is still just slightly visible in the bottom of the sky. I've put away five cups of coffee trying to stay awake through a series of monotonous speeches about Georgia highway and port reform, waiting for my chance to lay eyes on the Next Big Thing in person.
By the time Perry shows up, I'm jazzed and ready for history. You always want to remember the first time you see the possible next president in person. But as every young person knows, the first time is not always a pleasant experience. Perry lumbers onstage looking exceedingly well-groomed, but also ashen and exhausted, like a funeral director with a hangover.
In a voice so subdued and halting that I think he must be sick, he launches into his speech, which consists of the following elements: a halfhearted football joke about Texas A&M that would have embarrassed a true fan like George W. Bush, worn bromides about liberals creating a nanny state, a few lines about jobs in Texas, and a promise to repeal "as much of Obamacare as I can" on his first day in the White House.
"I will try," he says, "to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can."
Then he waves and walks offstage. The whole thing has taken barely 10 minutes.
I can't believe it, and neither can the assembled crowd of Georgia conservatives, who hesitate before breaking into polite applause. I feel like a high school cheerleader who just had her leg jizzed on in the back of a convertible. That's it? It's over? That was Rick Perry's stump speech?
"Low energy, low substance," sighs Justin Ryan, one of the conference attendees. "That's sort of the candidate in general."
But this is America, remember, where one should never underestimate shallow. And Rick Perry brings shallow to a new level. He is very gifted in that regard. He could be the Adolf Hitler of shallow.
Perry's campaign is still struggling to recover from the kind of spectacular, submarine-at-crush-depth collapse seldom seen before in the history of presidential politics. The governor went from presumptive front-runner to stammering talk-show punch line seemingly in the speed of a single tweet, rightly blasted for being too incompetent even to hold his own in televised debates with a half-bright pizza salesman like Herman Cain and a goggle-eyed megachurch Joan of Arc like Michele Bachmann. But such superficial criticisms of his weirdly erratic campaign demeanor don't even begin to get at the root of why we should all be terrified of Perry and what he represents. After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone.
In an era when there's exponentially more money in politics than we've ever seen before, Perry is the candidate who is exponentially more willing than we've ever seen before to whore himself out for that money. On the human level he is a nonpersonality, an almost perfect cipher – a man whose only discernible passion is his extreme willingness to be whatever someone will pay him to be, or vote for him to be. Even scarier, the religious community around which he has chosen to pull his human chameleon act features some of the most extreme end-is-nigh nutcases in America, the last people you want influencing the man with the nuclear football. Perry is a human price tag – Being There meets Left Behind. And sometimes there's nothing more dangerous than nothing at all.
By the time Perry shows up, I'm jazzed and ready for history. You always want to remember the first time you see the possible next president in person. But as every young person knows, the first time is not always a pleasant experience. Perry lumbers onstage looking exceedingly well-groomed, but also ashen and exhausted, like a funeral director with a hangover.
In a voice so subdued and halting that I think he must be sick, he launches into his speech, which consists of the following elements: a halfhearted football joke about Texas A&M that would have embarrassed a true fan like George W. Bush, worn bromides about liberals creating a nanny state, a few lines about jobs in Texas, and a promise to repeal "as much of Obamacare as I can" on his first day in the White House.
"I will try," he says, "to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can."
Then he waves and walks offstage. The whole thing has taken barely 10 minutes.
I can't believe it, and neither can the assembled crowd of Georgia conservatives, who hesitate before breaking into polite applause. I feel like a high school cheerleader who just had her leg jizzed on in the back of a convertible. That's it? It's over? That was Rick Perry's stump speech?
"Low energy, low substance," sighs Justin Ryan, one of the conference attendees. "That's sort of the candidate in general."
But this is America, remember, where one should never underestimate shallow. And Rick Perry brings shallow to a new level. He is very gifted in that regard. He could be the Adolf Hitler of shallow.
Perry's campaign is still struggling to recover from the kind of spectacular, submarine-at-crush-depth collapse seldom seen before in the history of presidential politics. The governor went from presumptive front-runner to stammering talk-show punch line seemingly in the speed of a single tweet, rightly blasted for being too incompetent even to hold his own in televised debates with a half-bright pizza salesman like Herman Cain and a goggle-eyed megachurch Joan of Arc like Michele Bachmann. But such superficial criticisms of his weirdly erratic campaign demeanor don't even begin to get at the root of why we should all be terrified of Perry and what he represents. After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone.
In an era when there's exponentially more money in politics than we've ever seen before, Perry is the candidate who is exponentially more willing than we've ever seen before to whore himself out for that money. On the human level he is a nonpersonality, an almost perfect cipher – a man whose only discernible passion is his extreme willingness to be whatever someone will pay him to be, or vote for him to be. Even scarier, the religious community around which he has chosen to pull his human chameleon act features some of the most extreme end-is-nigh nutcases in America, the last people you want influencing the man with the nuclear football. Perry is a human price tag – Being There meets Left Behind. And sometimes there's nothing more dangerous than nothing at all.
Good Design
After cofounding the London design agency Tangerine, Ive was hired in 1992 by Apple’s then Chief of Industrial Design Robert Brunner after a Tangerine consultancy with Apple. He gained his current position at Apple in 1997 as Senior Vice President of Industrial Design after the return of Steve Jobs, and since then has headed the Industrial Design team responsible for most of the company's significant hardware products. Jobs made design a chief element of the firm’s product strategy and Ive proceeded to establish the firm’s leading position with a series of functionally clean, aesthetically pleasing and remarkably popular products.
The work and principles of Dieter Rams, the Chief of Design at Braun from 1961 until 1995, have influenced Ive's work. In Gary Hustwit's documentary film Objectified (2009), Rams states that Apple is the only company designing products according to Rams' ten principles of "good design".Rams' ten principles of "good design"
- Is innovative - The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
- Makes a product useful - A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
- Is aesthetic - The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
- Makes a product understandable - It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user's intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.
- Is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.
- Is honest - It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
- Is long-lasting - It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today's throwaway society.
- Is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
- Is environmentally friendly - Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
- Is as little design as possible - Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
Cargill - Quiet Giant
by David Whitford with Doris Burke, Fortune
Greg Page's only misgiving about the job offer he received from Cargill in 1974 was that it was from Cargill. He had grown up in tiny Bottineau, N.D., six miles from the Canadian border. His dad was the local John Deere dealer, who also owned an 800-acre hobby farm with 40 cows. "Cargill has historically had probably mixed sentiments about it out on the prairie," says Page. "That's who you sold your grain to." Farmers knew that if they didn't keep their wits about them, they might well get squeezed by the food giant. You knew to "keep a weather eye out," he says.
Page took the job anyway. He labored happily "in close proximity to livestock" for his first 24 years at Cargill, beginning with the feed division, then in meat, at home and abroad, until he was picked for bigger things. Eventually he was promoted all the way, in 2007, to chairman and CEO of the country's largest private company. Today he runs a business that is vastly larger and more influential than the Cargill of his youth.
With $119.5 billion in revenues in its most recent fiscal year, ended May 31, Cargill is bigger by half than its nearest publicly held rival in the food production industry, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Fortune 500). If Cargill were public, it would have ranked No. 18 on this year's Fortune 500, between AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) and IBM (IBM, Fortune 500). Over the past decade, a period when the S&P 500's revenues have grown 31%, Cargill's sales have more than doubled.
But those numbers alone don't begin to capture the scope of Cargill's impact on our daily lives. You don't have to love Egg McMuffins (McDonald's (MCD, Fortune 500) buys many of its eggs in liquid form from Cargill) or hamburgers (Cargill's facilities can slaughter more cattle than anyone else's in the U.S.) or sub sandwiches (No. 8 in pork, No. 3 in turkey) to ingest Cargill products on a regular basis. Whatever you ate or drank today -- a candy bar, pretzels, soup from a can, ice cream, yogurt, chewing gum, beer -- chances are it included a little something from Cargill's menu of food additives. Its $50 billion "ingredients" business touches pretty much anything salted, sweetened, preserved, fortified, emulsified, or texturized, or anything whose raw taste or smell had to be masked in order to make it palatable.
Despite Cargill's extraordinary size, strength, and breadth, it has long been remarkably successful at keeping out of the public eye. But the days when the company could get away with saying nothing and revealing less are over. "I think the world has curiosity about where its food comes from that is more earnest than it's been in the past," says Page, who earlier this year took the unprecedented step of allowing Oprah's cameras inside a Cargill slaughterhouse. (No video of the actual slaughtering, however.)
Read more:
Greg Page's only misgiving about the job offer he received from Cargill in 1974 was that it was from Cargill. He had grown up in tiny Bottineau, N.D., six miles from the Canadian border. His dad was the local John Deere dealer, who also owned an 800-acre hobby farm with 40 cows. "Cargill has historically had probably mixed sentiments about it out on the prairie," says Page. "That's who you sold your grain to." Farmers knew that if they didn't keep their wits about them, they might well get squeezed by the food giant. You knew to "keep a weather eye out," he says.
Page took the job anyway. He labored happily "in close proximity to livestock" for his first 24 years at Cargill, beginning with the feed division, then in meat, at home and abroad, until he was picked for bigger things. Eventually he was promoted all the way, in 2007, to chairman and CEO of the country's largest private company. Today he runs a business that is vastly larger and more influential than the Cargill of his youth.With $119.5 billion in revenues in its most recent fiscal year, ended May 31, Cargill is bigger by half than its nearest publicly held rival in the food production industry, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Fortune 500). If Cargill were public, it would have ranked No. 18 on this year's Fortune 500, between AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) and IBM (IBM, Fortune 500). Over the past decade, a period when the S&P 500's revenues have grown 31%, Cargill's sales have more than doubled.
But those numbers alone don't begin to capture the scope of Cargill's impact on our daily lives. You don't have to love Egg McMuffins (McDonald's (MCD, Fortune 500) buys many of its eggs in liquid form from Cargill) or hamburgers (Cargill's facilities can slaughter more cattle than anyone else's in the U.S.) or sub sandwiches (No. 8 in pork, No. 3 in turkey) to ingest Cargill products on a regular basis. Whatever you ate or drank today -- a candy bar, pretzels, soup from a can, ice cream, yogurt, chewing gum, beer -- chances are it included a little something from Cargill's menu of food additives. Its $50 billion "ingredients" business touches pretty much anything salted, sweetened, preserved, fortified, emulsified, or texturized, or anything whose raw taste or smell had to be masked in order to make it palatable.
Despite Cargill's extraordinary size, strength, and breadth, it has long been remarkably successful at keeping out of the public eye. But the days when the company could get away with saying nothing and revealing less are over. "I think the world has curiosity about where its food comes from that is more earnest than it's been in the past," says Page, who earlier this year took the unprecedented step of allowing Oprah's cameras inside a Cargill slaughterhouse. (No video of the actual slaughtering, however.)
Read more:
Friday, October 28, 2011
The Psychological Study of Smiling
by Eric Jaffe, APS
A smile begins in our sensory corridors. The earcollects a whispered word. The eyes spot an old friend on the station platform. The hand feels the pressure of another hand. This emotional data funnels to the brain, exciting the left anterior temporal region in particular, then smolders to the surface of the face, where two muscles, standing at attention, are roused into action: The zygomatic major, which resides in the cheek, tugs the lips upward, and the orbicularis oculi, which encircles the eye socket, squeezes the outside corners into the shape of a crow’s foot. The entire event is short — typically lasting from two-thirds of a second to four seconds — and those who witness it often respond by mirroring the action, and smiling back.
Other muscles can simulate a smile, but only the peculiar tango of the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi produces a genuine expression of positive emotion. Psychologists call this the “Duchenne smile,” and most consider it the sole indicator of true enjoyment. The name is a nod to French anatomist Guillaume Duchenne, who studied emotional expression by stimulating various facial muscles with electrical currents. (The technique hurt so much, it’s been said, that Duchenne performed some of his tests on the severed heads of executed criminals.) In his 1862 book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, Duchenne wrote that the zygomatic major can be willed into action, but that only the “sweet emotions of the soul” force the orbicularis oculi to contract. “Its inertia, in smiling,” Duchenne wrote, “unmasks a false friend.”
Psychological scientists no longer study beheaded rogues — just graduate students, mainly — but they have advanced our understanding of smiles since Duchenne’s discoveries. We now know that genuine smiles may indeed reflect a “sweet soul.” The intensity of a true grin can predict marital happiness, personal well-being, and even longevity. We know that some smiles — Duchenne’s false friends — do not reflect enjoyment at all, but rather a wide range of emotions, including embarrassment, deceit, and grief. We know that variables (age, gender, culture, and social setting, among them) influence the frequency and character of a grin, and what purpose smiles play in the broader scheme of existence. In short, scientists have learned that one of humanity’s simplest expressions is beautifully complex.
Read more:
Other muscles can simulate a smile, but only the peculiar tango of the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi produces a genuine expression of positive emotion. Psychologists call this the “Duchenne smile,” and most consider it the sole indicator of true enjoyment. The name is a nod to French anatomist Guillaume Duchenne, who studied emotional expression by stimulating various facial muscles with electrical currents. (The technique hurt so much, it’s been said, that Duchenne performed some of his tests on the severed heads of executed criminals.) In his 1862 book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, Duchenne wrote that the zygomatic major can be willed into action, but that only the “sweet emotions of the soul” force the orbicularis oculi to contract. “Its inertia, in smiling,” Duchenne wrote, “unmasks a false friend.”
Psychological scientists no longer study beheaded rogues — just graduate students, mainly — but they have advanced our understanding of smiles since Duchenne’s discoveries. We now know that genuine smiles may indeed reflect a “sweet soul.” The intensity of a true grin can predict marital happiness, personal well-being, and even longevity. We know that some smiles — Duchenne’s false friends — do not reflect enjoyment at all, but rather a wide range of emotions, including embarrassment, deceit, and grief. We know that variables (age, gender, culture, and social setting, among them) influence the frequency and character of a grin, and what purpose smiles play in the broader scheme of existence. In short, scientists have learned that one of humanity’s simplest expressions is beautifully complex.
Read more:
Friday Book Club - West With the Night
From Wikipedia:
West With the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa), in the early 1900s, leading to a career as a bush pilot there. It is considered a classic of outdoor literature, and in 2004, National Geographic Adventure ranked it number 8 in a list of 100 best adventure books.
Beryl Markham was a British-born Kenyan aviatrix, adventurer, and racehorse trainer. During the pioneer days of aviation, she became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.
West With the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa), in the early 1900s, leading to a career as a bush pilot there. It is considered a classic of outdoor literature, and in 2004, National Geographic Adventure ranked it number 8 in a list of 100 best adventure books.Beryl Markham was a British-born Kenyan aviatrix, adventurer, and racehorse trainer. During the pioneer days of aviation, she became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.
When she was four years old, her father moved the family to Kenya, which was then British East Africa, purchasing a farm in Njoro near the Great Rift Valley. Although her mother disliked the isolation and promptly returned to England, Beryl stayed in Kenya with her father, where she spent an adventurous childhood learning, playing and hunting with the natives. On her family's farm, she developed a knowledge of, and love for horses. As a young adult, she became the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya.
Impetuous, single-minded and beautiful, Markham was a noted non-conformist, even in a colony known for its colourful eccentrics. During her lifetime she was married three times. She also had an unconcealed 1929 affair with the Duke of Gloucester, the son of George V. The Windsors promptly cut the romance short; Hubert Broad had an affair with Beryl and he was named as the accomplice in the divorce by Mansfield Markham. After her Atlantic crossing, she returned to be with Broad. He was also a great influence in her flying career.
Markham chronicled her many adventures in her memoir, West with the Night, published in 1942. Despite strong reviews in the press, the book sold modestly, and then quickly went out of print. After living for many years in the United States, Markham moved back to Kenya in 1952, becoming for a time the most successful horse trainer in the country.
Markham's memoir lingered in obscurity until 1982, when California restaurateur George Gutekunst read a collection of Ernest Hemingway's letters, including one in which Hemingway lavishly praised Markham's writing (and attacked her character):
| “ | "Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West With The Night? ...She has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book." |
Intrigued, Gutekunst read West with the Night and became so enamored of Markham's prose that he helped persuade a California publisher, North Point Press, to re-issue the book in 1983. The re-release of the book launched a remarkable final chapter in the life of the eighty-year-old Markham, who was lauded for her three final years as a great author as well as flyer.
Read more:
PHANTOM WATER EDIT from Chris Bryan on Vimeo.
First known photograph taken of a surfer. Hawaii, 1890.
via:
Moon Shot
[ed. History of the first golf shot on another planet. Not the longest drive ever recorded which has been estimated to be nearly a million miles, but who wouldn't like to have this honor? Interestingly, both shots were made with a six-iron.]
by Mike McAllister, PGATour
Somewhere in the Colorado home of Laura Shepard Churchley is a collapsible golf club consisting of five aluminum tubes held together with plastic o-rings. Running through the hollow middle is a thin string attached to a small handle. At the bottom is the club head of a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power 6-iron from the early 1970s.
It is a replica of the most famous golf club in American history -- the one Churchley's father, Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard, used 40 years ago to hit two golf balls on the moon. (...)
Not to worry. Another replica of the club can be found at the World Golf Hall of Fame museum in St. Augustine, Fla. It sits under a spotlight inside a glass case near the front of the museum's special "Shanks for the Memory" exhibit that pays tribute to one of Admiral Shepard's friends, comedian Bob Hope -- who, as it turns out, was the inspiration for the idea of taking a few swings on the lunar surface.
Unlike Churchley's replica, which was built a decade ago at her request by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, the Hall of Fame's club is one of three that Shepard himself commissioned in 1971. In a gesture of goodwill, the club was originally given to a space museum in Japan before the Hall of Fame acquired the piece for its permanent collection.
Mark Cubbedge, who has traveled around the world to acquire artifacts and memorabilia for the Hall of Fame, is the museum's collections manager. As such, he has touched -- delicately, to be sure -- every piece the museum owns.
Almost every piece.
"It may be the only thing in the museum I haven't handled," he says, a tone of reverence in his voice.
Other replicas are out there. One is in the Smithsonian. Churchley's two sisters each own one. But where is the real club, the one that Shepard used on Feb. 6, 1971 as he and astronaut Edgar Mitchell wrapped up their lunar stay at Fra Mauro base?
It resides in the Arnold Palmer Center for Golf History at the USGA Museum in Far Hills, N.J. Tucked safely under thick glass walls in a display simply labeled, "The Moon Club," it was donated by Shepard -- at the request of another comedian friend, Bing Crosby -- during a ceremony at the U.S. Open at Winged Foot in June, 1974. (...)
"The moon club is the most popular artifact in the museum," museum director Rand Jerris says. "People come just to see the club. But what's fun for me is to see the people who don't know that it's here. When they see it, it's a moment of disbelief. They had no idea the club survived.
"Everybody just loves it. I get more questions asked about the club than any other artifact we have. They crave the information."
So, Jerris was asked, how would he describe the moon club?
"Well," he begins, "it's a funny-looking piece ..."
Read more:
by Mike McAllister, PGATour
Somewhere in the Colorado home of Laura Shepard Churchley is a collapsible golf club consisting of five aluminum tubes held together with plastic o-rings. Running through the hollow middle is a thin string attached to a small handle. At the bottom is the club head of a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power 6-iron from the early 1970s.
It is a replica of the most famous golf club in American history -- the one Churchley's father, Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard, used 40 years ago to hit two golf balls on the moon. (...)Not to worry. Another replica of the club can be found at the World Golf Hall of Fame museum in St. Augustine, Fla. It sits under a spotlight inside a glass case near the front of the museum's special "Shanks for the Memory" exhibit that pays tribute to one of Admiral Shepard's friends, comedian Bob Hope -- who, as it turns out, was the inspiration for the idea of taking a few swings on the lunar surface.
Unlike Churchley's replica, which was built a decade ago at her request by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, the Hall of Fame's club is one of three that Shepard himself commissioned in 1971. In a gesture of goodwill, the club was originally given to a space museum in Japan before the Hall of Fame acquired the piece for its permanent collection.
Mark Cubbedge, who has traveled around the world to acquire artifacts and memorabilia for the Hall of Fame, is the museum's collections manager. As such, he has touched -- delicately, to be sure -- every piece the museum owns.
Almost every piece."It may be the only thing in the museum I haven't handled," he says, a tone of reverence in his voice.
Other replicas are out there. One is in the Smithsonian. Churchley's two sisters each own one. But where is the real club, the one that Shepard used on Feb. 6, 1971 as he and astronaut Edgar Mitchell wrapped up their lunar stay at Fra Mauro base?
It resides in the Arnold Palmer Center for Golf History at the USGA Museum in Far Hills, N.J. Tucked safely under thick glass walls in a display simply labeled, "The Moon Club," it was donated by Shepard -- at the request of another comedian friend, Bing Crosby -- during a ceremony at the U.S. Open at Winged Foot in June, 1974. (...)
"The moon club is the most popular artifact in the museum," museum director Rand Jerris says. "People come just to see the club. But what's fun for me is to see the people who don't know that it's here. When they see it, it's a moment of disbelief. They had no idea the club survived.
"Everybody just loves it. I get more questions asked about the club than any other artifact we have. They crave the information."
So, Jerris was asked, how would he describe the moon club?
"Well," he begins, "it's a funny-looking piece ..."
Read more:
Current Events: The Spotlight Now Shines on Italy
by James B. Stewart, NY Times
It finally dawned on me this week that the value of my retirement account might depend on Silvio Berlusconi.
You know Mr. Berlusconi. He is the billionaire prime minister of Italy who not only owns much of the Italian media but also provides them with ample material through his escapades. By his count, Mr. Berlusconi has survived 577 police interrogations and 2,500 court appearances related to innumerable legal and political scandals, not to mention enough suspected sexual adventures to top Hugh Hefner. (...)
This might have remained diverting tabloid fodder for most people outside of Italy, but this week the country moved to center stage in the European debt crisis, pushing Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain at least temporarily into the wings and allowing Mr. Berlusconi to assume what seems to be his natural place, which is in the spotlight. On his 75-year-old shoulders rests the task of shoring up Italy’s finances so that the European Central Bank buys more Italian sovereign debt, to gain French and German support for a larger bailout fund to protect Italy’s banks, and to keep Italy from becoming another Greece and plunging the world into an even more devastating financial crisis.
This remains the case even after the latest effort by European heads of state to put the crisis behind it. Nothing they said could change the fact that Italy has $2.6 trillion in sovereign debt outstanding, the fourth-largest debt in the world after the United States, Japan and Germany. Much of this has to be rolled over — $54 billion in February 2012 alone, according to a Goldman Sachs report. Italy is the world’s eighth-largest economy. Both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s recently downgraded Italy’s debt ratings and warned of more to come, pushing up borrowing costs and widening credit spreads.
Greece’s debt is modest by comparison, and the fierce effort waged by European banks to avoid a huge write-down on the value of their Greek loans was less about Greece then about setting a precedent that could extend to Italy and other heavily indebted countries. Outside of Italy, French banks have the biggest exposure to Italian sovereign debt — over $500 billion, according to Goldman Sachs. And who knows what institutions (including American ones) insured all that debt? (...)
In August, Mr. Berlusconi promised ambitious reforms to get the European Central Bank to buy Italian debt. Among them were raising the retirement age, raising taxes on the wealthy and opening up the professions to more competition. By last Sunday, as European leaders prepared for a critical meeting on the debt crisis scheduled for Wednesday, Mr. Berlusconi had accomplished none of that.
Read more:
It finally dawned on me this week that the value of my retirement account might depend on Silvio Berlusconi.
You know Mr. Berlusconi. He is the billionaire prime minister of Italy who not only owns much of the Italian media but also provides them with ample material through his escapades. By his count, Mr. Berlusconi has survived 577 police interrogations and 2,500 court appearances related to innumerable legal and political scandals, not to mention enough suspected sexual adventures to top Hugh Hefner. (...)
This might have remained diverting tabloid fodder for most people outside of Italy, but this week the country moved to center stage in the European debt crisis, pushing Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain at least temporarily into the wings and allowing Mr. Berlusconi to assume what seems to be his natural place, which is in the spotlight. On his 75-year-old shoulders rests the task of shoring up Italy’s finances so that the European Central Bank buys more Italian sovereign debt, to gain French and German support for a larger bailout fund to protect Italy’s banks, and to keep Italy from becoming another Greece and plunging the world into an even more devastating financial crisis.
This remains the case even after the latest effort by European heads of state to put the crisis behind it. Nothing they said could change the fact that Italy has $2.6 trillion in sovereign debt outstanding, the fourth-largest debt in the world after the United States, Japan and Germany. Much of this has to be rolled over — $54 billion in February 2012 alone, according to a Goldman Sachs report. Italy is the world’s eighth-largest economy. Both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s recently downgraded Italy’s debt ratings and warned of more to come, pushing up borrowing costs and widening credit spreads.
Greece’s debt is modest by comparison, and the fierce effort waged by European banks to avoid a huge write-down on the value of their Greek loans was less about Greece then about setting a precedent that could extend to Italy and other heavily indebted countries. Outside of Italy, French banks have the biggest exposure to Italian sovereign debt — over $500 billion, according to Goldman Sachs. And who knows what institutions (including American ones) insured all that debt? (...)
In August, Mr. Berlusconi promised ambitious reforms to get the European Central Bank to buy Italian debt. Among them were raising the retirement age, raising taxes on the wealthy and opening up the professions to more competition. By last Sunday, as European leaders prepared for a critical meeting on the debt crisis scheduled for Wednesday, Mr. Berlusconi had accomplished none of that.
Read more:
When the Words Don’t Fit
[ed. Love, fate, persistence. Nice story.]
by Sarah Healy, NY Times
Shortly after I turned 21, a boy handed me a poem. It was folded and folded until the words were concentrated and tucked away, handwritten black letters turned and flipped inside a small square.
During the flight, I felt his eyes trying to catch mine as I turned and pretended to look for something behind me. The voice we used when ordering drinks, the way we stood to pull this or that from the overhead compartment: everything was choreographed for the benefit of the stranger across the aisle.
And then the plane landed and made its way to the gate. In my memory, it was evening and the rain had just subsided. Somewhere between the gate and my parents’ waiting car, he handed me the poem.
That was almost 13 years ago. I had been flying home from college for the weekend for my sister’s wedding — or rather, the celebration of her marriage. My family wasn’t big on weddings in the save-the-date, banquet-hall sense. So this was the small, elegant party held after she and her husband had eloped. Our tradition wasn’t to have weddings but to have elopements.
My parents had eloped. They had known each other for less than three months and had been on only a handful of dates before they went to a justice of the peace and took vows they meant and kept. My mother had been working at a welcome station in Florida. She handed my father a glass of free orange juice. That’s how they met: my mother with her thick dark hair and crystal-blue eyes, my father in his naval uniform.
I was proud of that, the story of my parents’ beginning. It was a glass of free orange juice, but it could have been a poem.
“Did you hear that a boy gave Sarah a poem?” my older sisters whispered. They were enamored with the idea, and I passed around the white sheet of paper with its pale blue lines so they could read it.
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Illustration: Brian Rea
Thursday, October 27, 2011
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