Philharmonic

Taliban Interview

NATO

From: Le Figaro
by Arnaud de la Grange

European Defence: Paris wants support from London

As is the case for Washington, the Brits would be prepared to accept that Europe have its own operations headquarters.

France wants to win over Britain to its conception of NATO and European Defense. Without an understanding with the other true European military power, Paris knows that nothing is possible. One thus has to revive "the spirit of St-Malo", that which governed the French-English summit which inaugurated European Defense in 1998.

The French stance is that of ceasing to play bad boy in the Atlantic Alliance, in an effort to win over those who normally put the breaks on European Defense, the U.S. and Britain most of all. Thus a series of advances: opening the possibility of re-joining NATO's integrated military ; announcing French re-enforcements in Afghanistan, and most importantly, taking part in the true war against the Taliban, in the eastern and southern parts of the country. This in place, the great negotiation can begin on NATO-Europe. European-level defense will only come to be with the capacity to plan and carry out an operation in an autonomous fashion.

THE RISK OF DUPLICATION

This implies that a headquarters worthy of the name be established. Britain has always refused this, in the name of avoiding unnecessary "duplication" with outlay for NATO, in effect Shape, the great headquarters of the alliance established near Mons in Belgium. They have argued that that the EU could use these same NATO facilities, as per the accords known as "Berlin+", for certain operations.

Britain seems today more receptive to the idea of giving the EU an "operations headquarters" in Brussels. "But they would like to see this new structure capable of coordinating the civilian capacities of the EU and the military ones of NATO," explains a diplomatic informant, " which is good, but one must be careful so that this technical approach does not downplay the political ."

If there is openness in London, it is because there is as well in Washington. At the end of February, the U.S. ambassador to NATO gave a speech that was noticed in Paris and London. Victoria Nuland recognized that Europe should be able to "act in an independent manner" and, while remaining vague, she admitted that Europe could legitimately argue for a proper center for planning and training.

Washington no longer sees European Defense as unthinkable. The "All-NATO" approach encourages Europeans to rely on this life-insurance and keep their defense budgets low, which is a problem when the time comes to find serious allies.

Still in the hopes of bringing Britain on-side, Paris would accept to only gradually assume more responsibilities within NATO. The job of number two, for the Allied forces in Europe, always goes to the British. And the latter remain well attached to their de facto status, as first lieutenant for America within NATO.

Polygons

Health Care

I have not seen Michael Moore's movie Sicko about the lack of health care in the United States, but I am sure it is suitably biting. With 45 million uninsured Americans, there is matter for concern. The reviews I have read also mention that he makes much of the Canadian system of universal care which, we are told, he much favors ( and won't get). The insurance companies are not about to roll over and die, there are only so many Harvard med school graduates to go around, and so forth.

What is the system like in Canada, and are there some aspects of that system that could transfer. It is true that there are long waits for many surgical procedures. That is because there are only so many hospital beds 'open' at any one time, only so many operating rooms 'in business'. And the high-end expertise often gets hired away to the U.S. It's like being on a budget, or a diet. Because the demand for health services can easily get out of hand. But a child who has been waiting for a long time for an organ transplant gets his picture in the papers, or a fund gets put together so that someone in need with a rare condition can get care elsewhere. Those are our limits.

I once read somewhere that the old need to be old the way the young need to be young. That is they need to express their condition of maturity, need to be recognized for what they are experiencing. Those at end-of-life need company, need to talk about dying. Surely all that need not be medicalized.

Pregnant women need to be medically cared for, reminded of the dos and don't. Given vitamins and food vouchers.

I, personally, am a great consumer of health information. And diet and exercise. And trends in mental health care. And the latest beauty products. The New York Times sends me a health feed every week. It all comes with my Internet connection.

American statistics in any field are often misleading because there are sub-populations that account for almost all the down-end figures (and mask just how well-off the non-minorities are). It is not always the Blacks, although it might be for something like teen pregnancy. There are also regional differences (like anybody who doesn't live in the greater Boston area). Michael Moore comes from a relatively isolated part of the country which might well be experiencing a shortage of medical personnel. American political discourse just doesn't cover that kind of issue.

It would be a pity if, given the present configuration of candidates for the Presidency, improvements in the delivery of heath care could not be agreed on. Many Americans are feeling left out.

CREST

In The Pink!

Banking Crisis

I've been following the continuing banking crisis in the European press and find a lot of what is being described as repetitive and confusing. Which I gather is part of the problem. Hard to tell exactly what is going on. At fault, though, would appear to be the ability of banks to by-pass traditional prudence in lending behaviour by emitting tradeables against their assets-backed loans such as mortgages. The housing market slows down and disaster strikes. Yet this mechanism is part and parcel of how the world economy now works and involves transfers of funds that make industrial development possible in emergent economies. There is no going back: that is the argument from today's Le Monde.

Is there greed in the system: more likely confusion because there are as well secondary products, some very sophisticated on those troublesome tradeables, in the hope of squeezing high immediate returns on what is long-term debt. And tut!, some banks have created companies to buy back their own emissions. Conceptual difficulties, argues Le Monde.

Governments - certainly with the help of Central Banks - will need to help untangle all that. Sigh!

If the volume of money transactions is starting to create scale problems, there might be solutions in terms of what can be allowed at what level of play. Traders will always be traders but market ideology was developed in the context of mercantilism: national economies looking for advantage, backed by war, with innocent colonies to be had. Today's requirements are for liquidity to make economic development possible in more or less monetized parts of the world, the wars are largely police-actions and the colonies are on Mars. Let's get real.

Kiss-Kiss!

Jupiter

Jupiter

Tan Function Problem

L'Hospital

The Spitzer Issue

New York City is the convention capital of North America and some 40 million tourists visit the city every year. Certainly the governor of New York would have some ideas on the issue of escort services and prostitution. Indeed, one might expect the job to come with a book of redeemable coupons. It is this aspect of the whole Spitzer issue which is being overlooked by the media, but one feels it is lurking underneath.

Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and escort services are tolerated in New York. If one turns into the other, there is scandal. I am not entirely sure why. If sex happens in the context of an escort event, it is a mutual accident. Need one worry about more than that.

It is humiliating and a crime against humanity to force young women onto sexual slavery. I certainly agree. But old guys who travel a lot need to have dinner and the condition on which a young woman will join one involves a money transaction - utterly reasonable from the point of view of the struggling young woman. Why would she make an effort otherwise. She lives in New York; the city is hers. He is old, it is a pollution charge.

Arnold Schwartzenegger is being put through the coals for travelling by plane (and thus wasting gas and creating carbon pollution) every day to have dinner with his children. Isn't this at heart the same problem.

For those too young to know, menopause is a strange time. One has the age and experience to be totally at ease handling certain situations, and lower hormone levels gives one a great deal of self-assurance. The man can finally be cool with the hot lovely, a bit the way I am currently feeling about doing math, I would think.

I have been doing research to try to find out how many hotels there are in New York - a phenomenal number I vaguely recall - but came across this lovely story on Wikipedia. The late actor Richard Harris, who played Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series, was staying in the Savoy Hotel in London before his death. As the dying man was being wheeled out of the hotel lobby, he raised his finger and announced: "It was the food!". Maybe it was.

Fun Fakes

French Revolution

From Albert Soboul, La Revolution Française, Presses universitaires de France, 1967.

The planned economy instaured in the autumn of 1793 in response to pressure from the masses answered, from the point of view of those who governed, less to a theoretical conception of what social organisation should be than to the requirements of national defense: they needed to feed, equip, arm the men massively recruited, provide necessities to those in the cities, all the while external commerce tainted by the blocus and all of France like an besieged fortress. The requisition affected all the material resources of the country, limiting free Enterprise. A necessary complement to the requisition, generalized taxation as of the decree of September 29 1793 defined imposed profit margins (5% for the wholesaler, 10% for the retailer), put the brakes on speculative ardour, restrained the liberty to profit. Nationalization affected production in varying degrees, especially that of armaments and war goods, and external trade, but essentially as a function of military needs, the Committee for the Public Good refusing to nationalize civilian necessities.

Yet one could see the first signs of social democracy. Neither Montagnards nor Jacobins could envisage integrating the popular masses into the bourgeois nation other than through accession to property as defined in terms of Eighty-nine. It is no longer argued that one should put the right to property second to that of providing subsistence, nor to propose it as " a social institution defined by law", as had been suggested by Robespierre in his version of a Declaration of rights, April 24 1793. But the Mountain finally gave satisfaction to the peasants, July 17 1793, by the absolute abolition, without indemnity, of all lordly rights. The decree of October 22 1793 forbade property owners to require from farmers and lease-holders any replacement payment ( but how seriously was this applied?). While this transfer of revenue was taking place, the transfer of property accelerated: the lands of those nobles who had emigrated sequestered as of February 9 1792, put up for sale the following July 27, would be offered in small lots of 2 to 4 acres ( as of the decree of of June 3 1793), payable over 10 years ( delay augmented to 20 years through the decree of September 13). On June 10, a decree authorized the breaking-up of communal goods, on the condition that one-third of the inhabitants make the request. The culminating point of these measures tending to create a nation of small property-owners, was reached through the decrees of 8 and 13 ventôse year II (February 26 and march 3 1794), which deprived suspects of their goods ("He who proves himself to be the enemy of his country cannot there be a property-owner", according to Saint-Just), to be transferred to indigent patriots. It is not here a question of a "program for a new revolution", as Albert Mathiez has suggested, but a political and social measure well en scribed in the bourgeois revolution: confiscation was never other than a means of struggle against the aristocracy, accession to property being a factor of social consolidation. Partisans in their hearts of economic liberalism, the followers of Robespierre and the Montagnards both were reluctant to intervene in agricultural reform: deaf to the demands of the Without-proper-pants of the countryside, they never considered reforming land-leasing nor the breaking-up of large farms into small lots. The same boldness and the same timidity can be found in attempts at new social legislation. The right to social assistance was sanctioned in a decree dated 22 floréal year II (May 11 1794) which opened in each department a book of national welfare, but available only to the inhabitants of the countryside: retirement income for the old and the infirm, allocations for mothers and widows with children, free medical home-care - so many measure which pre-figure social security.

"Let Europe take note that you no longer want a destitute man nor an oppressor on French territory, had declared Saint-Just, on 13 ventôse...Happiness is a new idea in Europe."

Stunning

On Becoming

I recently had the pleasure of seeing one of the current films referencing Jane Austen, and indeed that is what it's down to. In the information age, there is such a void of cultural silence to be filled that even the dead are dusted off. On Becoming Jane is a film with some biographical attachments to Jane Austen's life. It is, on the face of it, light and nothing much happens. It is in story-line rather terrible: Jane was forced into spinsterhood and early death because she could not afford to marry, not the man or a man she could love anyway. It is an angry film, about something . The episode it describes- if true - is so close to an ordinary life-event in the life of all women to make one uncomfortable. What else is new.

Ann Hathaway creates a larger-than- life heroine. Her Jane is a winner and one is left to conclude that women of merit get the awful fate they deserve. My Jane, the one whose picture is in Wikipedia - drawn by her spinster sister Cassandra - is petite and has smiling eyes. She was mischievous. Her works - for me - are wonderfully shallow. The larger questions are never touched on, they are the background, the unspoken to the domestic and the trivial. She must have had great fun writing these, it was an escape for her to do so and the questions being touched on must have been NOT questions to her.

Which brings me to Wikipedia. The New York Review of Books is currently running an article on how Wiki was put together. It was eye-opening for me to learn that Wiki has uploaded, for the fun of its editors, entire encyclopedias which are in the public domain, like an early 20th century Britannica. That is where that wonderful sense of authority comes from in historical articles - we are still in the Empire - the whole lovingly updated and re-polished for current use.

I do not view Jane Austen's books as chick-lit. Jane A. was a witness to her age, an age of terrible certainty. Characters leave the drawing room to go off to war, come back from India, lead or not dissolute lives. She shares that moment in history with all of human culture. It is easy reading but so are the dialogues of Plato once one gets pass the silly notion that a group of grown men are going to have dinner together without women to discuss grand ideas because Socrates is such a stick-in-the-mud. The voice of the human spirit. Does anyone ever ask a male writer who he is writing for. So tell me, Ian McEwan, who are you writing for: the guys, right?

Large Convex

Thin-lens Optics

Candela

Spring Break 08