Dartmouth's John E. Wennberg wins prestigious Lienhard Award (Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs, 10/13/08)
Dr. John E. Wennberg today received the 2008 Gustav O. Lienhard Award from the Institute of Medicine for “reshaping the U.S. health care system” to focus on objective evidence and outcomes rather than physician preference as the basis for treatment decisions, and for his efforts to empower patients with greater input on decisions about their own care."John Wennberg is duly renowned for his impact on the evolution of health care delivery in the United States," said Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine. "His painstaking documentation of deep, regional differences in health care delivery and quality provided the foundation for many important changes in health care, including increasing recognition of the importance of evidence-based medicine to guide health care delivery and the movement toward patient-centered care. He is a man of courage, steadfast determination, and keen intelligence whose work is the basis for many improvements in health care quality and efficiency."
The 23rd recipient of the Lienhard Award, which comes with a $25,000 cash award, Wennberg is the founder and director emeritus of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and the Peggy Y. Thomson Chair for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. He is widely recognized for pioneering research on health care outcomes and patient-directed care. Using small-area analysis, a strategy developed by Wennberg and his colleague Alan Gitlesohn, he showed that rates of procedures in areas with similar populations varied greatly, and determined that the variations stemmed primarily from differences in physicians' treatment preferences. His discoveries challenged the medical profession to acknowledge that most care was based on tradition or opinion rather than on objective evidence of what is most effective.
Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls: James Buchan climbs aboard the first part of a trilogy set at the time of the opium wars: a review of Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (James Buchan, The Guardian)
This terrific novel, the first volume in a projected trilogy, unfolds in north India and the Bay of Bengal in 1838 on the eve of the British attack on the Chinese ports known as the first opium war. In Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh assembles from different corners of the world sailors, marines and passengers for the Ibis, a slaving schooner now converted to the transport of coolies and opium. In bringing his troupe of characters to Calcutta and into the open water, Ghosh provides the reader with all manner of stories, and equips himself with the personnel to man and navigate an old-fashioned literary three-decker.He begins in the villages of eastern Bihar with Deeti, soon to be widowed; her addicted husband, who works at the British opium factory at Ghazipur; and Kalua, a low-caste carter of colossal strength and resource. Moving downstream, we meet a bankrupt landowner, Raja Neel Rattan; an American sailor, Zachary; Paulette, a young Frenchwoman, and her Bengali foster-brother Jodu; Benjamin Burnham, an unscrupulous British merchant, and his Bengali agent, Baboo Nob Kissin; and every style of nautch girl, sepoy and lascar.
On their way to the "black sea", these characters are exposed to a suttee or widow-burning, a shipboard mutiny, a court case, jails, kidnappings, rapes, floggings, a dinner party and every refinement of sex. The story proceeds at pace without too much by way of coincidence, dreams or - the bane of this sort of book - the supernatural. This volume ends with the Ibis, storm-tossed, off Sumatra. I cannot tell whether we are headed for Mauritius or China, but am happy to sail.
Yet Sea of Poppies is a historical novel, which means that the story is only half the story.
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-AUTHOR SITE: Amitav Ghosh (Penguin Books)
-A pukka old pishpash : a review of Sea of Poppies (Sameer Rahim, Daily Telegraph)
While researching his doctorate at Oxford, Amitav Ghosh came across a collection of letters written by medieval Jewish traders. In one letter, an Egyptian merchant arranges an exchange of silk and cardamom with a friend in Bangalore; he also complains that a shipment of Indian pepper has been lost at sea.What really caught Ghosh's eye, though, was a mention of the Bangalore trader's "slave and business agent". This man, whose origins and name are uncertain, could easily have been forgotten by history. Ghosh spent the next 14 years tracking down the few references to him in other documents, travelling to Egypt and learning Judaeo-Arabic. What he found is told in his superb book In an Antique Land (1992).
Much of Ghosh's historical fiction has been driven by what he described in a note to The Glass Palace (2000) as "a near-obsessive urge to render the backgrounds of my characters' lives as closely as I could".
As well as his ability to portray character (even minor players are drawn with astonishing breadth) Mr Ghosh is renowned for giving his novels a haunting sense of place. “The Hungry Tide”, his previous work, drew plaudits for its portrayal of the beauty of the Sundarbans, the tide country of the Ganges delta.Here, he paints a lustrous picture of the heat and dust of colonial India: a mud-walled village hut floating like a tiny raft “upon a river of poppies”; airy merchants' mansions full of punkah-wallahs and protocol; the calls of boatmen floating across the silt- and salt-flavoured Hooghly river; and, in the midst of it all, the British-owned Sudder Opium Factory with its dead-eyed labourers slaving “as slow as ants in honey” in air as fetid as that of a “closed kitchen”. Most powerful is his portrayal of life aboard the Ibis as she plunges through the sapphire waters of the Bay of Bengal, her bowsprit pointing to the future, her sails cracking in the wind and her hold so hot “it was as if the migrants' flesh were melting on their bones.”
You might glibly describe Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, already long-listed for the Booker Prize, as Moby Dick with a little Treasure Island thrown in. A motley crew of ship hands, migrants, and officers sets course for Mauritius in an American slave ship refashioned to transport labor, opium, and eventually soldiers for China’s Opium Wars. Ghosh, who splits his time between India and Brooklyn, rose to worldwide recognition with The Glass Palace, an equally epic novel about Indians in Burma, and he’s long been preoccupied, like V. S. Naipaul, with Indian migration. “Much of the nautical world in the nineteenth century consisted of Asians,” he says, “yet Asians never figure in the historical record.” His own entry into the ledger is peppered with an indecipherable Esperanto invented by sailors from Portugal, Bengal, Shanghai, etc.There’s a glossary of sorts, and Ghosh makes no apologies for his pidgin-riddled sentences. “When Melville says ‘the mizzenmast,’ who today knows what that is? The idea that language is a warm bath into which you slip in a comfortable way, to me it’s a very deceptive idea.”
Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, the first volume in his "Ibis trilogy", revisits in new, breathtakingly detailed and compelling ways some of the concerns of his earlier novels. Among these are the incessant movements of the peoples, commerce, and empires which have traversed the Indian Ocean since antiquity; and the lives of men and women with little power, whose stories, framed against the grand narratives of history, invite other ways of thinking about the past, culture and identity. [...]The broad canvas of Sea of Poppies displays many features of a sensational novel – a widow rescued from the funeral pyre, a court trial, runaways, disguise, heroic exploits, vengeful acts, murder. A controlling theme running through the many strands of plot is the question of identity.
Cut off from their roots, in transit, and looking ahead to a fresh start, the migrants are prone to invent new names and histories. For some, like Paulette, disguised as an Indian coolie to escape her guardian, the "layers of masking" do no more than bear witness to a human being's "multiplicity of selves". For others, like Zachary, the second mate, the truth is bleaker by far. The son of a slave and her white master, he will always be bound, it seems, to a brutal history and the stigma of colour. All have stories to tell and secrets to hide. Like the sketches of people which Deeti finger-paints as keepsakes for her "shrine", their narratives tease the mind with discontinuities and suggestiveness; and, as with Ah Fatt the opium addict's descriptions of Canton, his old home, "the genius... lay in their elisions".
With the colourful characters, another bedazzling aspect of Sea of Poppies is the clash and mingling of languages. Bhojpuri, Bengali, Laskari, Hindustani, Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and a fantastic spectrum of English including the malapropisms of Baboo Nob Kissin, Burnham's accountant, create a vivid sense of living voices as well as the linguistic resourcefulness of people in diaspora. The "motley tongue" is as much a part of the cultural scene at the lower reaches of the Ganges, and of the multi-layered history of the subcontinent, as the collision of peoples on one of the great rivers of the world.
THE BRITISH VERSION of history glosses over the time when this country was the world's biggest drug pusher. Afghanistan now produces the poppies to supply Europe's heroin. But two centuries ago it was British fortune seekers in India who turned the banks of the Ganges into a sea of poppies and tried to force refined opium on the reluctant Chinese. They almost succeeded.Despite the emperor's decrees banning the drug that dulled his subjects and addled his empire, British traders kept shipping out jars of opium to Canton, counting on the growing number of addicts to defy his orders. In the end, they used force - denouncing Chinese restrictions on free trade, and persuading London, shamefully, to wage the notorious opium wars.
Against this background, Sea of Poppies paints a poignant picture of the human devastation of this trade.
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The Empire Strikes Out: Interview: Soldier-scholar Andrew Bacevich talks about his hot new foreign policy book, a less-costly Afghanistan strategy, and why he's disappointed with both McCain and Obama. (Michael Mechanic, October 13, 2008, Mother Jones)
Mother Jones: In terms of foreign policy, do you think it matters who wins next month?Andrew Bacevich: It matters, but not nearly as much as the candidates would have us believe. And this is a disappointment to me. I had hoped that an Obama candidacy would help to create conditions in which we would have a debate over the fundamentals of foreign policy and national security policy. I think what we're ending up with is a debate over operational priorities: McCain is arguing, "Elect me president and I will deliver victory in Iraq, which is the central front in the global war on terror." Obama says, "Elect me; I will send more troops to Afghanistan because that's a central front on the global war on terror." That difference is based on a consensus that the global war on terror provides the correct framework in which to think about US national security policy. [...]
MJ: During the first debate, Obama noted that China is active in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. He said, "The conspicuousness of their presence is only matched by our absence, because we've been focused on Iraq. We have weakened our capacity to project power around the world because we have viewed everything through this single lens." That struck me as an affirmation of our militaristic foreign policy.
AB: I think that you're correct. It's signaling his deference to a conception of America's role in the world. "Global power projection" is one of those cornerstone concepts that implies a big military establishment, high military spending, and a network of bases scattered around to support and sustain the projection of power.
Tehran's bazaar stays shut in VAT protest (AFP, 10/13/08)
"Inflation of around 30 percent has to manifest itself in one way or another. This strike is a sign of the dissatisfaction of the middle class with the economic policies of Ahmadinejad," economist Saeed Leylaz told AFP.A senior Iranian businessman sees the bazaaris' move as a protest against the government's economic policies in general.
"This movement goes beyond union demands," said Mohammad Reza Behzadian, former head of Tehran's chamber of commerce and industry.
"This government has made its decisions without ever considering the opinion of economic experts and businessmen. It is a normal reaction to this attitude."
Iran's bazaaris play an important political as well as economic role. The merchants contributed to the collapse of the shah's regime during the 1979 Islamic revolution when they went on long strikes.
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Health Savings Accounts' Last Chance?: : Consumer power has gained some ground during the Bush administration. Now voters have a decision to make — whether to extend that progress or roll it back. (INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY, October 13, 2008)
HSAs may turn out to be early victims of the Democratic health care regime, though the Obama campaign also wants to cut back funding for the privately run Medicare Advantage plans. They won't be rolled up overnight — that's hard to do when more than 6 million Americans, according to insurance industry data, were covered by HSAs and related high-deductible health plans at the start of 2008. But their growth is likely to be crimped by new limits on who can open them and how easily they can be used.The tax-deductibility of annual HSA contributions is a natural target for Democrats. Anyone, no matter how high their income, can take the deduction now. This makes HSAs something of an IRA substitute for high-income earners who don't get the IRA tax break. It would not surprise us if a Democratic Congress and White House capped the deductibility at, say, $60,000 for joint filers. This would slow the growth but probably not kill HSAs.
But there's another way to kill a program: Make it so hard to use that no one cares if it survives. HSA money now can be spent tax-free on medical care without having to file a lot of paperwork. Earlier this year, however, the House passed a bill that would have set up a system to review and verify every HSA outlay as a legitimate expense.
That measure could have regulated HSAs out of existence, but insurers and other HSA advocates raised an outcry, and it died in the Senate. A similar bill might not be stopped so easily if the Democrats have a filibuster-proof Senate majority and hold the presidency.
IBD/TIPP Tracking Poll: Day One (Investor's Business Daily, October 13, 2008)
In contrast to other polls, which show Obama leading McCain by 4 points (Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby) to 11 (Newsweek), the IBD/TIPP Tracking Poll debuts today with Obama up just 2 points with 13% (including 25% of independents) undecided. The poll was conducted Oct. 6-12 among 825 likely voters.
Senegal fans go on the rampage after World Cup bid ends in disappointment (Sportsmail, 14th October 2008)
Rioting fans pelted Diouf and his team-mates with rocks and glass bottles, broke down fencing and invaded the pitch before armed riot police escorted the players back to their dressing-room.They remained barricaded in the stadium for three hours before being smuggled out through a side exit.
England head coach Fabio Capello has personally requested a game against Spain next February, but after five English players were abused by large sections of the Bernabeu crowd four years ago the FA are reluctant to return to Real Madrid's stadium.Shaun Wright-Phillips, Ashley Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Jermain Defoe and Jermaine Jenas were barracked in one of the most blatant examples of racism seen in Europe in recent years that earned the Spanish federation, the RFEF, a £45,000 fine.
The FA's stance over the game was warmly welcomed by Kick It Out, the anti-racism campaign group, but in Spain there was little sympathy for the FA's position.
The Houston Dynamo have banned a fan from attending their matches indefinitely following a racially charged insult directed at D.C. United goalkeeper Louis Crayton following the teams' 0-0 tie on Sunday afternoon.
Italy have indefinitely banned their own supporters from away games after trouble flared during the Azzurri's goalless draw in Bulgaria on Saturday. [...]A section of the travelling support threw bottles at the Bulgarian fans and made fascist salutes and chanted fascist slogans.
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Campaign Myth: Prevention as Cure-All (H. GILBERT WELCH, M.D, 10/07/08, NY Times)
The term “preventive medicine” no longer means what it used to: keeping people well by promoting healthy habits, like exercising, eating a balanced diet and not smoking. To their credit, both candidates ardently support that approach.But the medical model for prevention has become less about health promotion and more about early diagnosis. Both candidates appear to have bought into it: Mr. Obama encourages annual checkups and screening, Mr. McCain early testing and screening.
It boils down to encouraging the well to have themselves tested to make sure they are not sick. And that approach doesn’t save money; it costs money.
Increasing the amount of testing for an ever-expanding list of problems always identifies many more people as having disease and still more as being “at risk.” Screening for heart disease, problems in major blood vessels and a variety of cancers has led to millions of diagnoses of these diseases in people who would never have become sick.
Likewise, recent expansions in the definitions of diabetes, high cholesterol and osteoporosis defined millions more as suddenly needing therapy. A new definition of “abnormal bone density,” for example, turned 6.8 million American women into osteoporosis patients literally overnight.
These interventions do prevent advanced illness in some patients, but relatively few. Any savings from preventing those cases is dwarfed by the cost of intervening early in millions of additional patients. No wonder pharmaceutical companies and medical centers see preventive medicine as a great way to turn people into patients — and paying customers.
If preventive medicine were effective in improving the nation’s health, it might warrant these added expenditures. But you can’t assume it is. Early diagnosis may help some, but it undoubtedly leads others to be treated for “diseases” that would never have bothered them. That’s called overdiagnosis.
Rule Two: If you ignore it you'll likely get better without them anyway.
Rule Three: If you get really sickj there was nothing they could have done. They "heal" healthy people who they overdiagnosed.
Questioning Obama (Dan Balz, 10/13/08, The Trail: Washington Post)
The presidential race is not over, but at this point, Obama has a better chance of becoming president than McCain, and as a result, the questions ought to be going toward him as much or more than McCain -- questions not of tactics but of substance.Obama has dealt deftly with the economic crisis -- at least in a political sense. Unlike McCain, he was fairly calm during the first days after Lehman's collapse and the government bailout of AIG.
He stayed in close contact with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke and with Democratic congressional leaders. He both embraced the sense of urgency to act on the $700 billion bailout package and offered criticisms of the administration's initially sketchy plan. His criticisms were in line with changes that Congress made before eventually approving the package.
But it's not clear that he has had any better ideas -- or put them forward more aggressively -- than Paulson and Bernanke when it comes to dealing with the crisis in the credit markets. It's not clear that he has pushed ideas that would have dealt with the crisis more effectively. At every turn, he has voiced support for the general course the administration has outlined, but he's not been far out ahead.
Nor is it evident that he has dealt realistically with the impact the economic crisis may have on the next president. He has not backed away from ambitious plans for a second stimulus package, for dramatically expanding health care, for reducing dependence on foreign oil or for other spending plans that long have been part of his campaign agenda.
Changing circumstances have not changed his view of what can or should be done if he becomes president. It would be helpful to voters to know now, rather than after the election, whether he will take a zero-based look at everything and rearrange priorities.
Maddon leading the cultural revolution (Howard Bryant, 10/13/08, ESPN.com)
The hazing from the establishment is also part of the game's self-policing reflex, a reminder that a business this hard requires a certain humility, that nobody can outwit the game. But that is only part of it. Respect for the business often manifests itself in petty professional jealousies that are tempered only by success -- say, for example, by a 97-win season with a team that had lost 90 games in every year of its existence. For the past century, the sport has developed a dictionary of snarky terms designed to keep the creative thinkers and the wackos alike in line, such as: "He thinks he invented the game, just ask him," and, "It's just baseball. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel." Maddon once used four outfielders in a defensive shift against David Ortiz. Earlier this season, Maddon brought in the right-handed Dan Wheeler to face Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer, the Twins' murderous left-handed tandem. In September, when Maddon wrote out a lineup of eight right handed hitters to face the right-handed Mike Mussina, the whispers started again (there's a lot of reinventing going on over there).There is another segment of the establishment convinced they find his methods contrived, another new-age guy trying to tinker with a game that has been played for 150 years with no reason to go against the book. The book is the book, after all, for a reason. Left-handed hitters have a general advantage against right-handed pitchers. Right-handed hitters are generally at something of a disadvantage against right handed pitchers. Even the best hitters in the sport have a 70-percent chance of making an out, and even the hottest hitters at their supernova best are ever better than even money to come through in a given situation. Why, then, in Texas on Aug. 17, with a four-run lead over the Rangers and the bases loaded did Maddon order to intentionally walk Josh Hamilton ? The Rays won that game.
"More than anything else, I'm trying to get us to play the game the way it was played in 1920. I'm a traditionalist," Maddon said. "I want to play in the simplest way. I believe that. I think people are really reading it the wrong way. I want my defense to play catch. I want my pitchers to have command of the fastball first. I want my hitters to have a two-strike mentality.
"But I don't think I feel vindicated by our success. I think its validation. You wait a long time for this, and now you have a chance to do it. I believe in what we do. What we do is well-thought out. Sometimes we get it right on the field, but it's always intuitive."
If Maddon is not the Phil Jackson of major league baseball, it is only because he is more Catholic than Zen. Or is he? When the Red Sox took Game 1, 2-0, in part due to Daisuke Matsuzaka's remarkable adeptness at playing in traffic but also because of the Rays' inability to finish a wobbly fighter, Ortiz said he knew the reason: The Rays were tight, their faces froze, eyes as big as saucers at the gravity of the situation. The Red Sox had won the first battle, and now they were advancing forward with psychological warfare before the next game had even been played.
And yet the next day, Maddon agreed, essentially conceding macho points -- or, to the hard-liners of the old guard, he used the spotlight to publicly throw his team under the bus.
"Here's why I agreed with it: because it happened. Why deny it?" he said. "This is a process. What would be the point in denying it? My attitude was get it out there, face up to it and then you might even have a greater effect on your ballclub, because they don't want to be embarrassed. Their competitive fires are going to kick in, and I guarantee you this club isn't going to back down from anyone thinking they aren't ready. I slept for nine hours last night, and that was after a really tough loss."
Maddon believes in psychological construction as much as calisthenics. There was the time during spring training when the military's traveling baseball team was on a furlough from Iraq and asked Maddon if it could take batting practice with the Rays. Maddon agreed, but went a step further: He asked the soldiers to talk to his team about Iraq, about life when life isn't about losing a tough game and still earning more than 99 percent of the population, but actually is a game of life and death. After the soldiers, Maddon invited Dick Vitale and Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive coordination Monte Kiffin to speak to his team.
Then there was the game in Tampa last season when Ortiz walked by Maddon and caught a whiff of Maddon's style. Ortiz recalled the exchange.
"I said to him, 'What kind of cologne is that? It smells good.' He said, 'You like that?' and I said I did," Ortiz said. "I made a motion to him, during the game, that I wanted a bottle of it. And after the game, he had left some for me. It was sitting there on my chair. You gotta like a man like that."
And then there was the time in late September, when Tampa Bay stumbled and Boston surged and the Rays were about to walk the Trail of Tears: a nine-game road trip through Toronto, Boston and New York. The lead had dwindled and there was the inevitable talk that the time had come for the cute little Rays to go back to the kids' table and let the adults from Boston, New York and Los Angeles handle the business of the playoffs and of thinking big.
So Maddon showed even more style and put some money behind it. He ordered three dozen of the trendy Ed Hardy tattoo art T-shirts, by Christian Audigier at $150 apiece ("bold graphics, foil overlays and rhinestone accents add edgy drama to a classic short-sleeve T-shirt," according to a Nordstrom description). The reason was to signal to his players that they had approached a pivotal moment, and the shirts represented both solidarity and a feathery, important message.
It was bad enough that Maddon had turned spring training into a regular destination for the speaker's bureau, but now the establishment blanched that he had gotten too close to his players, always the death knell for any manager, especially a 54-year old grandfather of two. Trying to act hip was the worst thing a manager could do, or so went the conventional wisdom. The players would treat him like a substitute teacher. The snickers could be heard in every American League corridor.
"I told them this was the most important road trip in this franchise's history," Maddon said. "I saw it as a way to relate to the guys. Look, I'm 54, but you have to remain contemporary in your thinking. I don't agree that you have to accept and say, 'This is who I am and I can't go any further, and I can't relate to the next group of guys coming up.' I think that's wrong."
But that didn't mean he could not recognize when the leash extended out a bit too far. Take, for example, the night of July 25, when the Rays bounced back from a series-opening loss in Kansas City with a 5-3 win. The Rays had lost seven straight road games, and Maddon praised his team publicly for the win, explaining the importance of road wins to any playoff team.
But privately, he let his team have it. It was the first time the Rays had really seen Maddon's temper, the cerebral side locked away. Hurricane Joe obliterated the clubhouse.
"It wasn't something I like to talk about," Cliff Floyd said. "But he saw things he didn't like. It wasn't just about winning. We won the game. It was about playing the right way. He wanted accountability."
After the blowup, the Rays won 16 of their next 22 games.
"I knew that was the time. I laid it on the line," he said. "I treated them like men. I treated them with respect, and when I saw that it wasn't working, I knew it was time to take a different approach. It wasn't the winning. Here's what I wanted to avoid: when you win like that, sometimes you think you can always win any way you like. The winning can mask bad habits, but only temporarily.
"I could see it building," Maddon added. "But I wanted to make sure I did it on the road, because I didn't want it to linger. I wanted no stain of negativity in our clubhouse."
"People say, 'Aw, he's trying to reinvent the game,' and I say 'Yes, he is,'" said former big league player and manager and current television broadcaster Buck Martinez. "Of course he is, because that's what you have to do over there. They have new uniforms, new attitude, new everything. It is a total cultural revolution because they've never had a culture of winning. That's what he's trying to do, and it's absolutely appropriate."
This game has been played before, most recently in Oakland, when A's general manager Billy Beane began articulating a philosophy that reassessed how players were scouted and which set of player tools held greater value for clubs that could not compete financially for the most complete players. The resultant cacophony, culminating in the best-selling book, "Moneyball," infuriated Beane's contemporaries, who believed he was attempting to bring a new orthodoxy to the grand old game. He had gotten too big, in ego and intellectual capacity; he was (here's that word again) reinventing.
"You have to be committed to the belief that what you're doing is best for your situation," Beane said. "And what you've done outside the box could quickly become the norm. I'm sure his response is the same as ours was: Move forward with what you think is best. Besides, how can you get on a guy who wears such stylish glasses? They look great."
"I Will Follow Him": Obama As My Personal Jesus (Maggie Mertens, 9/18/08, The Smith College Sophian)
Obama is my homeboy. And I'm not saying that because he's black - I'm saying that in reference to those Urban Outfitters t-shirts from a couple years ago that said, "Jesus is my homeboy." Yes, I just said it. Obama is my Jesus.While you may be overtly religious and find this to be idol-worshipping, or may be overtly politically correct and just know that everything in that sentence could be found offensive, I'm afraid it's true anyway.
Dow jumps 938 as governments pledge bank aid (Tim Paradis, 10/13/08, AP)
Wall Street has stormed back from last week's devastating losses, sending the Dow Jones industrials soaring a nearly inconceivable 938 points after major governments' plans to support the global banking system reassured distraught investors.The Dow by far outstripped its previous record for a one-day point gain, 499, reached during the waning days of the dot-com boom in 2000.
The largest ever two-week drop in average gasoline prices has local drivers eager for more."It's $3.15 by my house," said Aimee McCune, 21, of North Huntingdon, who was enjoying a sunny morning in Market Square before heading to work. "Every morning, I drive by and look at it, and it's gone down almost every day." [...]
"Plummeting oil prices and caving gasoline demand have combined to bring the biggest retail gasoline price cut in the history of the market," said Trilby Lundberg, who compiles the survey.
...are giving away a whole shelfload of books.
The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama (JIM RUTENBERG, 10/13/08, NY Times)
Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.
An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.
He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”
Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.
Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.
“Everybody uses my research as a takeoff point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”
As for his background, he said: “I’m a colorful person. There’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”
When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said Mr. Martin was clearly expressing his opinion and not necessarily fact.
It was not Mr. Martin's first turn on national television. The CBS News program "48 Hours" in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, "See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits," to what it called his prolific filings. (Mr. Martin has also be known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.
He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.
In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation.
Hiroshima Revisionism: An Interview with Robert Maddox (Victor Fic , 10/13/08, HNN)
"I regard Hiroshima [revisionism] as the greatest hoax in American history."--Robert MaddoxIf the atomic bombing of Hiroshima released tremendous heat and blast physically, the debate over its justification can be intellectually incindiary. Robert Maddox, a veteran historian, is now the leading thinker in a broad effort that exposes revisionist critics of the atomic strike as guilty of impoverished or dishonest analysis. Maddox was trained at Rutgers University and taught at The Pennsylvania State University. He edited a volume of essays, The Myths of Revisionism: Hiroshima in History.
VF: Cite the chief mistakes that you insist the leading revisionists make.
RM: Without question, Alperovitz’s most significant “contribution” was his assertion that Japan would have surrendered as early as spring, 1945 provided only that it be permitted to retain its sacred emperor. Truman and [Secretary of State] James F. Byrnes knew this through intercepted Japanese messages but refused to make the offer because they wanted the war to continue until the bombs could be used. This appeared to support his theme that the bombs were not dropped to defeat an already defeated Japan, but rather to awe the Soviets. His “evidence” consisted of pretending that whenever the word “peace” appeared in a Japanese message, it referred to surrender. See my first chapter in "Hiroshima in History" for details, and for other examples of his methods. Despite [how] this scam has been exposed numerous times, some revisionists still use it. [...]
VF: A key revisionist charge insists that Truman bombed to scare the Soviets so they would not enter the war but would bow to US power after it. What is your defense?
RM: [He] asked the USSR all along to get into the war. Truman went to Potsdam for the main or the major reason of getting Stalin in. When the Soviets entered the war on August 8th, Truman called an impromptu press conference to make the announcement because he was enthusiastic. The US ambassador to Moscow Averill Harriman was told how effective he had been in following instructions for getting the Soviets in. It was psychologically important and would pin down Japanese troops on the homeland away from Kyushu [the designated invasion beach].
VF: The peace movement condemns the attack as triggering the nuclear arms race. Is this the right cause-effect chain? If so, isn't it impossible to support the mission?
RM: This is absurd on its face. The Soviets had their own atomic program in place long before Hiroshima and knew through espionage all about the US effort. There would have been an arms race even if the US did not use the bombs against Japan.
Oven-fried chicken is fast and healthful (Jane Jarrell, 10/12/008, Dallas Morning News)
1 large egg
1 tablespoon water
½ teaspoon coarse salt
¼ ground pepper
½ teaspoon dried rosemary or thyme
6 chicken breast halves, thawed and patted dry
4 cups cornflakes, crushed
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Preheat oven to 400 F. Combine egg and water in a medium-size bowl. Beat and set aside. Add all dry ingredients to a large zip-top bag. Dip chicken into the egg wash and then place in the bag. Shake to coat chicken breast, and continue until all pieces of chicken have been coated. Arrange chicken on a rimmed cookie sheet and bake until cooked through, about 30 minutes.
The Debt We Owe to Trade: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein (Jeffrey Tucker, 10/11/08, Inside Catholic)
After finishing the book, I found myself thinking about its contents constantly. Its subject is so ubiquitous that it is hardly ever closely analyzed. The time period stretches from age to age; the geography covers the planet; and the items covered include spices, coffee, silk, pigs and pork, precious metals, oil, and, really, just about everything else. Bernstein demonstrates thousands of times that the world as we know it would be unrecognizable without trade, and shows that trade has shaped who we are in ways that none of us fully recognizes. The historical detail is amazing. The writing is scholarly but clear and fascinating on every page. [...]
The Bernstein book helps keep all the controversy about globalization in context. There is absolutely nothing new about globalization. Nothing. The progress of "globalization" has been on its current trajectory for the whole of recorded history. This trade has made the world ever more prosperous. And why? Because trade has permitted populations across the globe to cooperate to their mutual betterment. Without trade, the human population would shrink and most all of us would die. Even a slight curtailment of trade can bring on economic depression and dramatically shrink our standards of living.
It is one of the great failings of the human race that we tend to regard the wealth that surrounds us as a given, something that is just part of the world that will last forever and requires no work to acquire. Part of the reason we have this habit of mind is our general tendency to contemplate only what we experience in our lifetimes. But the wealth that surrounds us is the fruit of the whole of history, the accumulated capital of the human race from the whole of history. We are born into it, it grows while we live, and then we die. To help us appreciate the bigger picture requires careful education and study that broadens our mind.
This is precisely what Bernstein's book does. It takes us outside of the here and now and help us understand the big picture, and he does this by looking at the details of goods traded in lands far away in all times. The book is beautifully written and wonderfully interesting on every page. I can't recommend it enough.
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Indirect approach is favored in the war on terror: The U.S.' elite armed forces are still carrying out operations, but they're also using a new tactic: teaching military allies how to fight for themselves. (Peter Spiegel, 10/13/08, Los Angeles Times)
Weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, a small team of Green Berets was quietly sent to the Philippine island of Basilan. There, one of the world's most virulent Islamic extremist groups, Abu Sayyaf, had established a dangerous haven and was seeking to extend its reach into the Philippine capital.But rather than unleashing Hollywood-style raids, as might befit their reputation, the Green Berets proposed a time-consuming plan to help the Philippine military take on the extremist group itself. Seven years later, Abu Sayyaf has been pushed out of Basilan and terrorist attacks have dropped dramatically.
"It's not flashy, it's not glamorous, but man, this is how we're going to win the long war," said Lt. Gen. David P. Fridovich, the Army officer who designed the Philippine program.
Fridovich is part of a quiet but significant transformation taking place within the most secret of the U.S. military's armed forces, the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, which encompasses the Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Delta Force and similar units from the Air Force and the Marines.
SOCOM Commander Adm. Eric T. Olson, who was appointed to the post in July 2007, is shifting emphasis away from the high-profile raids that were the hallmark of the early years of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts. Instead, Olson has stressed "indirect action": training friendly militaries to better fight terrorism and violent separatists within their own borders. [...]
The dramatic rescue of 15 hostages by the Colombian military in July was similarly striking because that military has trained for years under U.S. Special Forces teams to combat the leftist rebel group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The success of indirect action depends on strong, long-term ties to foreign militaries. But the demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made it more difficult to cultivate those relationships. Nearly 80% of Special Operations deployments go to the Middle East or central Asia, representing a "vacuum that's sucked away some of our forces from other countries," Olson said.
Olson also must contend with the fallout from pre-Sept. 11 U.S. sanctions against countries plagued by terrorism that barred the U.S. military from working with local armed forces.
"You can go ahead and figure out where those places might be, but there's opportunity we might have missed there," said Fridovich, who declined to name specific countries.
U.S. officials in the past punished Indonesia for military abuses in East Timor and targeted Pakistan for unauthorized nuclear testing.
An Economy You Can Bank On (CASEY B. MULLIGAN, 10/10/08, NY Times)
The non-financial sectors of our economy will not suffer much from even a prolonged banking crisis, because the general economic importance of banks has been highly exaggerated.Although banks perform an essential economic function — bringing together investors and savers — they are not the only institutions that can do this. Pension funds, university endowments, venture capitalists and corporations all bring money to new investment projects without banks playing any essential role. The average corporation gets about a quarter of its investment funds from the profits it has after paying dividends — and could double or even triple that amount by cutting its dividend, if necessary.
What’s more, it’s not as if banking services are about to vanish. When a bank or a group of banks go under, the economywide demand for their services creates a strong profit motive for new banks to enter the marketplace and for existing banks to expand their operations. (Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase are already doing this.)
It’s important to keep in mind, too, that the financial sector has had a long history of fluctuating without any correlated fluctuations in the rest of the economy. The stock market crashed in 1987 — in 1929 proportions — but there was no decade-long Depression that followed. Economic research has repeatedly demonstrated that financial-sector gyrations like these are hardly connected to non-financial sector performance. Studies have shown that economic growth cannot be forecast by the expected rates of return on government bonds, stocks or savings deposits.
It turns out that John McCain, who was widely mocked for saying that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” was actually right. We’re in a financial crisis, not an economic crisis. We’re not entering a second Great Depression.
How do we know? Well, the economy outside the financial sector is healthier than it seems.
One important indicator is the profitability of non-financial capital, what economists call the marginal product of capital. It’s a measure of how much profit that each dollar of capital invested in the economy is producing during, say, a year. Some investments earn more than others, of course, but the marginal product of capital is a composite of all of them — a macroeconomic version of the price-to-earnings ratio followed in the financial markets.
When the profit per dollar of capital invested in the economy is higher than average, future rates of economic growth also tend to be above average. The same cannot be said about rates of return on the S.& P. 500, or any another measurement that commands attention on Wall Street.
Oil tipped to bottom out at US$50 (Tamsin Carlisle, October 13. 2008, The National)
Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that earlier warned of US$200 oil, has joined other analysts who now see $50 as a more likely near-term price for a barrel of crude. [...]The analysts predicted that $50 oil could become a reality as early as December. It is currently trading at $81 a barrel.
Mexican Crisis Holds Lessons for U.S. (DAVID LUHNOW, 10/13/08, Wall Street Journal)
[M]any of the lessons of the Tequila Crisis and others like it apply to the U.S.Among the most important: Don't be ruled by ideology -- stay flexible and act decisively. Help those with mortgages they can't pay. Take stakes in troubled banks. Don't expect to turn a profit on government investment.
"Do whatever it takes to restore confidence," Mr. Ortiz said in an interview. "Once you lose it, it's very difficult to get it back."
In today's globalized financial markets, once trust is blown, the markets will often overreact and the crisis will spin out of control. As a result, policy makers may need to take steps they never imagined taking. The longer they wait, the worse the pain. We are already learning this lesson the hard way.
In nearly all financial crises, the government usually reacts too slowly at first. In the case of the U.S., the Federal Reserve and Treasury tried to put out each fire as it flared, first bailing out Bear Stearns, then insurance giant AIG, then lender Washington Mutual.
At some point, an event happens that causes the market to lose confidence. In Mexico, it was a failed attempt by the central bank to gradually devalue the peso, a move that destroyed the bank's credibility. In the U.S., it may have been letting Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. fail, a move that created uncertainty among investors as to which financial institutions would be saved and which wouldn't.
Since then, authorities in both the U.S. and Europe have been scrambling to catch up to the crisis. "Despite all of the measures that have been taken, the authorities are now behind the curve ," Mr. Ortiz said in remarks Sunday to the Institute of International Finance in Washington. "It's better to err on the side of doing too much rather than doing too little."
In the end, Mexico acted directly to tackle the underlying problem of bad debt by launching a program to restructure mortgages, with banks, borrowers and the government all sharing loses.
The key to a mortgage restructuring: "Keep it simple," says Vincent Corta, who led Mexico's bank bailout program for several years. "We tried fancy schemes that didn't work. We ended up saying, 'OK, you pay half your mortgage, and we'll pick up the other half.' "
Mexico's bank bailout itself didn't ward off a major economic recession, although the country was also dealing with a currency crash. But within a few years, Mexican banks were healthy and the economy was growing again.
What lasted longer was political bitterness linked to the bailout, which was seen as having helped rich bankers at taxpayers' expense.
MORE:
IMF and G-7 Say They Will Not Let Banks Fail: Western financial leaders assure an anxious world that all bank deposits will be guaranteed and any necessary steps will be taken, however unorthodox. (Pete Engardio, 10/13/08, Der Spiegel)
Now the great confidence game begins. In high-powered forums that accompanied the G-7 and International Monetary Fund in Washington this past weekend, Western financial leaders sought to assure panicky bankers and money managers in no uncertain terms that all of the measures needed to halt a worldwide meltdown are in motion.While short on the details many market analysts had hoped for, the broad brushstrokes of forceful, coordinated action by Western governments were unveiled: No more Lehman Brothers-like failures of major financial institutions will be allowed. All bank deposits will be guaranteed. The banking systems of the G-7 nations will be flooded with almost unlimited liquidity. And if all that fails, any other tool -- regardless of how economically unorthodox -- will be used if needed. The British government's widely anticipated move to take majority control of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and HBOS is expected to be the first of many such actions across Europe. Fifteen European Union countries that use the euro as currency met in Paris this weekend. They pledged to provide guarantees of new bank debt through 2009, authorize the purchase of preferred shares to invest in problematic banks, and provide recapitalization funds where needed.
The message of Banque de France Deputy Governor Jean-Piere Landau at an Oct. 12 breakfast meeting at Washington's elegant Willard Intercontinental Hotel was typical. "I think the conditions for stability are met," Landau declared. "It is very difficult to see why there will be no stabilization." At a nearby hotel, Richard Fisher, president of Dallas Federal Reserve, told a crowd of international bankers that U.S. authorities "can and will restore order in the credit markets" and "will continue to pursue every avenue and every option."
American wins Nobel Prize for Economics (The Local, 13 Oct 08)
US economist and columnist Paul Krugman has been awarded the 2008 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. [...]While traditional trade theory assumes countries are different, and thus export different goods and services, Krugman tries to explain why global trade is dominated by countries which have similar conditions and which trade in similar products.
His theory relies on the concept of ecomonies of scale, which holds that that many goods and services can be produced more cheaply when produced in mass volumes. In addition, Krugman postulates that consumers demand a wide range of goods, resulting in small-scale production for a local market being replaced by large-scale production for the world market.
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