QuickLinx 10.21.09

THINK AGAIN

S.A. World Cup 2010 stadiums are beauties, but huge cost overruns, transport are worries. (UK Times)

Maybe the best argument ever for high-speed passenger rail in N.A. (Chris Nelder, Business Insider)

The Afghan war is all about local politics. Not grasping that means certain mission failure. (New Yorker)

Five technologies that could change how we generate and use energy. (Wall Street Journal)

Obama's not the enemy of free-market choice, it's the insurers and banks from whom he and Congress are demanding transparency and genuine competition. (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post)

Earth's most successful species? 1. Earthworms. 2. Algae. 6. Homo sapiens. (Daily Telegraph)

Canada slips to 19th from 13th in annual free-press ranking, U.S. jumps to 20 from 40. (CP)

HIGH & LOW FINANCE

FDA to crack down on misleading "Smart Choices" labelling of nutrition-deficient foods. (USA Today)

Buffett-controlled Moody's shameful role in the epic financial crisis. (McClatchy)

U.S. health insurers thinking about premium surtaxes on obese clients. (Slate)

Don't sweat the debt. And don't use it as a rationale to cut essential social spending. (Economist)

Brand loyalty has disappeared among car buyers. Only 20% of buyers trade for same brand. (NYT)

A&E

Maurice Sendak (below) says parents who fret Wild Things will scare kids can "go to hell." (UK Guardian)

Francesca Simon's 10 literary anti-hero faves, from Scarlett O'Hara to Tom Ripley. (UK Guardian)

Harry Potter rules, but Hannah Montana beats out Cinderella and Pooh among kids' faves. (UK Guardian)

Nobel laureate writer Jose Saragamo says Bible is a "handbook of bad morals." (Agence France Presse)

Berlin concert review: Diana Krall "has ascended to summit of showbusiness mountain." (UK Times)

THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY

Avocado, ginger, pomegranate and 7 other foods to get you in the mood. (UK Family Health Guide)

If we're told it's a grand cru, it tastes like one, even if it's plonk. (Frontal Cortex)

The must-have updated Larousse Gastronomique is here, bigger than ever. (Daily Telegraph)

I have a life. There's no time in it for Facebook "friends." (Boston Globe)

Save the Deli, David Lax's tribute to the endangered Jewish deli experience. (Barnes & Noble Review)  

Jim Kenzie's 10 dumbest vehicle options, from fog lights to leather. (Toronto Star)

Recession, clean-tech, has Americans emulating Europeans as cyclist commuters. (NYT)

The real story of Monopoly's origins are murkier than Hasbro lets on. (Wall Street Journal)

 

More U.S. right-wing lunancy.

Remind me never to win an award - or do anything - of which Peggy Noonan disapproves.

The former Reagan speechwriter, who parlayed that long-ago job into a columnist post at the WSJ and a regular spot on Sunday morning talking-head TV, has gone, well, bonkers, over Obama's Nobel prize.

Bear in mind the president himself has said "I'm not sure I deserve this." He promptly announced he would donate the $1.4-million prize money, And he accepted the award "on behalf of America and its values" - not quite what the folks in Oslo had in mind, I am sure. For all that, looney right just can't get over the infamy of a fellow American deemed worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

I can't - I don't imagine anyone could - do justice to Noonan's cry for help, her completed application form for self-admission to a dry-out spa where her delusions can be gradually drawn out, possibly through leeching, and "processed," as they say in the Therapy World. Noonan, in a WSJ column headlined "A Wicked and Ignorant Award" (the overtly Catholic Noonan is a theocrat who frames public policy according to her moral worldview), seems to think the Oslo committee's selection is an attack on America, or at the very least a denigration of it:

For instance: The Peace Prize judges won't see it this way, but America has gone to Europe twice in the past century to fight for peace. This is an old concept, and has to do with killing killers so they can't kill anymore. It cost America a lot to do this, and we kept no territory, as they say, beyond the graves where our soldiers lie. America then taxed itself and gave its wealth not only to its allies but to its former adversaries, to help them rebuild. We didn't actually have to do this. We did it to make the world better. We did it to foster peace. (They should give us a prize.)

America hasn't just helped the world, it literally lit the world with its inventions, which are the product of its freedoms. The lights under which the Peace Prize judges read, and rejected, the worthy nominations? Why, those lights were invented by an American. The emails the committee members sent to each other, sharing their banal insights on leadership? They came through the Internet. Who invented the Internet? It was a Norwegian bureaucrat with a long face and hair on his nose and little plastic geometric eyeglasses? Oh wait, it was Americans. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are healthy because they have been inoculated against diseases such as polio. Who invented the polio vaccine, an enfeebled old leftist academic in Oslo? Nah, it was a man named Jonas Salk. He was an American.

Well, so were Nobel recipients Pearl S. Buck, Milton Friedman and Martin Luther King. Americans have dominated the Nobel economics and science prizes the way the NYT cornered the Pulitzer since that prize's inception. Americans took both Nobel's awarded in economics this year. So from whence comes this idea that the Nobel committees have it in for Americans?

America in the mid-20th-century fought in two theatres to protect America from the terrifying encroachment of fascism. The subsequent Marshall Plan was self-interested, a humanitarian imposition of American free-market values on a continent where communism was still widely potent. And a means of creating an economically and politically stable buffer between the U.S. and the emerging new U.S. enemy, the Soviet Union. It most definitely was not charity, something we "didn't actually have to do." The postwar U.S. policy of Soviet containment, as conceived by George F. Kennan and quickly adopted as U.S. policy for two generations, required it be done to protect America's national security and corporate interests.

That's the bizarre part of the column, dashed off by an American patriot who wears her parochialism on her sleeve but is ignorant of the recent history of her own homeland. Then Noonan's rant turns into a fact-checker's nightmare.

Many innovators share credit for electricity, going back to Ben Franklin. But the alternating currrent in Noonan's household - and by which the Norwegian judges read - was developed by Nikola Tesla, a Croatian. (Edison developed direct current, more dangerous and unsuitable in most non-industrial applications.)

The Internet was indeed a U.S. creation, tracing its roots to the Darpanet, developed by the Pentagon to enable scientists to exchange information among university computers worldwide. The Internet as we know it, however, is the World Wide Web. The Web made the information superhighway, as it was once quaintly known, useful to Noonan and billions of others by assigning an address to each of millions and then billions of Web pages. Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working at the Swiss-based CERN labs, invented the Web.

Antibiotics were first identified by a Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, and the first antibiotic treatment by Alexander Fleming of Scotland, whose Adam Smith contributed mightily to the American ethic of raw capitalism. Shakespeare didn't set foot in the New World. The composition commonly known as the New World Symphony was written by a Czech. Commercial banking was perfected by Italians, investment banking by the Rothschilds. Television was invented in Russia, as was The Nutcracker and The Cherry Orchard. A Canadian invented standard time and the BlackBerry, The internal combustion engine, still in ubiquitous use worldwide, was invented in the 1880s by German's Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz independent of each other. The theory of relativity and modern psychoanalysis were pioneered by an ethnic German of Swiss nationality and an Austrian, respectively. A Spaniard gave us Don Quixote. The rocket propulsion systems behind the Apollo program orignated with the genius in rocketry of the Germans and Russians. The plastic hula hoop, an icon of 1950s America, was invented by an Australian, Alex Tolmer. One could go on.

Noonan, like Madonna, invented herself. I'll grant that.

 

QuickLinx 10.16.09

TRENDS

Apple's new Tablet will reinvent personal computing. (Newsweek)

Early reviews on BlackBerry Storm 2 are positive, worthy rival to iPhone. (Christian Science Monitor)

New LRTs are suceeding in transit-hostile Phoenix, Denver and Salt Lake. (New Republic)

Time to stop knocking suburbia. It works. (Daily Telegraph)

HEALTH, FITNESS & RELATIONSHIPS

German men are the worst lovers, Spanish best, Canadians 10th-best, survey finds. (Daily Telegraph)

Words to use in that all-important first online dating response. (OKtrends.com)

It takes longer than the advertised 21 days to exchange a good for bad habit. Try 66 days. (Slate)

People more likely to wash their hands if they're shamed into it. (National Post)

When it comes to brain damage, football's no better than dogfighting. (Malcom Gladwell, New Yorker)

101 uses for a woman. (Times of London)  #11. Their method of navigation ("No, the other left.")

101 uses for a man. (Times of London)  #89. Watering the toilet seat. What is it, a plant? (1)

WORK & MONEY

More equal societies almost always fare better. (London Review of Books)

Study finds nasty bosses aren't evil, just insecure. Like you didn't know that. (Toronto Star)

Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase are meltdown's big winners. (NYT)

Calvin Trillin's argument: Wall Street, refuge for B students, crashed after the smarties arrived. (NYT)

Trillin a bit tongue-in-cheek, but some stats back him up. (Baseline Scenario)

Actually, blame falls on unorthodox "outsiders" crashing Street's old boy's club. (New Republic)

The "too big to fail" doctrine for errant banks is prohibitively costly. (UK Guardian)

The world's "crappiest" job. (Yangtze Evening Post)

A&E

Roman Polanski's art and abominable behaviour don't diminish each other. (Daily Telegraph)

Samuel Johnson was a sexist xenophobe who understood human nature. (Daily Telegraph)

In her latest novel, Atwood again revels in dystopia. (London Review of Books)

Aspiring authors had better be social-networking bloggers. (Shouts & Murmers, New Yorker)

Chinese read health and wealth self-help books - and that's about it. (Der Spiegel)

Bill Murray is world's best comic actor, says latest co-star, George Clooney (Times of London)

John Cleese on what made "Fawlty Towers" work. (Reuters)

Comic Sarah Silverman's "Sell the Vatican. Feed the world." a YouTube hit. (Globe and Mail) (video) 

Hitchcock interview with Tom Snyder from 1973's "Tomorrow" resurfaces. (metafilter.com) (video)

The 50 best (worst?) movie villians. (Times of London) (2)

 

THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY

Black is back - ack! How unoriginal. And the lint... (New York Observer)

Why I dislike Lululemon more than ever. (FiredForNow.com)

The 50 most annoying things about the Internet. (Daily Telegraph)

Can you really tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his face? (Slate)

What poker teaches us about notables who've mastered the game. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

  
(1) I found this commenter a tad discouraging. "Karen Tips wrote: '#102. Digging in the garden. My late husband was a great hand at digging up planting beds, tilling, making big holes for shrubs, etc. That is what I miss most about him.'" I know how the English obsess over their gardens. But doesn't the time Ms. Tib's husband sang "I Remember You" when asking her hand in marriage at the Savoy trump messing about with dirt?

(2) Fewer things worse than a movie villain you can't work up a real hate for. Some of my favourites: Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man, Dennis Hopper in Speed, and the psychos in the first Dirty Harry and in Air Force One.

Tuned out.

Day 649

Hartford - Lawrence F. Cafero Jr. (R.-Norwalk), Connecticut house minority leader, speaks while Rep. Barbara Lambert (D-Milford) and Rep. Jack Hennessy (D-Bridgeport), assistant majority leader, play card games and another colleague catches a game on ESPN, during an emergency debate on a $1-billion (U.S.) state budget shortfall. (Photo: Jessica Hill, AP)

From the Hartford Courant, Aug. 31, 2009.

About two months ago, I won 55 consecutive games of Free Cell. Alas, I work from home, and Gus was my only witness. In Connecticut's lower house, I could easily have had five, six fellow lawmakers back up my story.

For the purposes of this blog, the inception of the Great Recession in the U.S., the epicentre of the crisis, is taken as the start date for the global slump. The U.S. has been in recession since December 2007. 

 

Okay, maybe a prize will help motivate you...

Day 636

So far, only JohnnyK (who did very well) has taken my 10-question "How well do you know Hawai'i" quiz, in honour of its 50th anniversary of U.S. statehood.

Are you going to let JohnnyK win by uncontested acclamation? I know he'd like some competition.

So, here's the deal. The three best-scoring contestants get a free CD, hand-crafted by moi, of songs by the answer to question #3. No need to provide snail-mail addresses with your answers. I will seek those only from the three winners.

Admittedly, the very high regard I have for the answer to question #3 might not be shared by all the winners. But I can pretty much guarantee that someone near and dear to you does share that high regard. And your generosity in gifting your GR prize will win you big points for being a quiz whiz and thoughtful.

For the purposes of this blog, the inception of the Great Recession in the U.S., the epicentre of the crisis, is taken as the start date for the global slump. The U.S. has been in recession since December 2007.