Today, on my way to work, I listened to a National Public Radio report on the state of the health care system in Germany, a report which concorded globally, if not in the details, with my own experiences with the health care system in France. In terms of the actual report, the general thrust was to attempt to dispel illusions that Americans typically have about social health care, and as such, was accurate and also well argued, though given NPR's small audience, one which will fall, literally, on deaf ears. This is a big redwood tree, falling in the forest, but alas, few are there to hear it.

One piece of it, the Intro, really struck me as the first time in US media I have heard a theme we talk about often and which Americans, average Joe Six-pack Americans, simply don't get:

Germany has the world's oldest universal care system and is arguably the most successful. Like Americans, most Germans get their health coverage through their employers. But Germany's rich pay higher premiums to subsidize insurance for the poor -- a principle the Germans call "solidarity."

There's that word: Solidarity. And it's not just Germans calling it by name. It is the expression of our shared European values, of each according to ability, to each according to need. Or, if you prefer a less Marxian giving of the phrase, it is the product of a shared belief that we are all in this together. And it is a concept truly foreign to the values of Americans, for whom the overriding, if inefficiently and unevenly applied, value is Charity.

Stirling Newberry, an American intellectual (yes, there are a few) from the center-left tradition, published a bit of a tract on energy, the environment, and how it relates to future developments and what he sees as the coming "progressive century".

Newberry makes a case for the view that, like the absolutist 18th century, the present "reactionary" century is in the process of reaching the logical end of its internal contradictions of perpetual "growth," which fuels a degenerate version of freedom, a freedom of those few who profit from the reactionary economic system via passive rents. Let's first look at what he means by "degenerate" version of freedom:

Mathematically, freedom is the search for Nash Disequilibria: where individual actors can unilaterally act to improve their position...Liberty is the reverse, it is the search for Nash Equilbiria which have a positive tendency. That is actors acting together to make the net sum of human activity better. Each has degenerate forms. The degenerate form of Freedom does not regard the sum of the payouts from the matrix of choices as being important. That's dense, let's unpack it.

Think of all of the choices possible to an individual. Some will be better, some will be worse. If the better choices require other actors to cooperate in being better, then the actor cannot make themselves better off without cooperation. We can describe then three sets of choice regions, one where an actor can choose to be better off without cooperation, one where the actor receives disproportionate compensation, which means that integrating the choice matrix leads to the first case, and those choice regions where an actor must make other actors as least as much better in sum as himself.

The degenerate case of Freedom is one which does not regard how well others are doing as important, or postulates that there is no second order matrix of relative goods. Since it is easy to construct the first, and to empirically show the second, the degenerate case of Freedom rests on denial of mathematics or history, or both.

The degenerate case of liberty is the reverse, it is the worship of the Nash Equilibrium itself, without regard to the positive feedback state. This degenerate case leads to paralysis. These degenerate cases can produce an oscillator: those who fear change clinging to degenerate co-dependency, and those who chafe at the co-dependency wanting disruptive unilateral action for its own sake.

If not bored yet, follow me over the fold.

Diary rescue by Migeru

An op-ed in the New York Times, forwarded to me by a relative, reminded me of some of the low-frequency cultural noise I was hearing a couple of weeks back when in Paris. As simple math would have it, 1968 was 40 years ago today, and elements of the generation which produced it then are now commemorating it now. (As an aside, why do we now mark the importance of events at 20, 30, 40 year intervals? when was the old fashioned half-or full-century deemed insufficiently contemporary? Commercial reasons?). And so, the so-called "paper of record" in America would have it's word to say, for the benefit of those few literati and glitterati in America who still have some material basis to be referential to Paname, on an event which largely missed the US.

When reading, please note the religious (re-)conversion of the author, J.-C. Guillebaud, a journalist of some reputation. This is important for reading certain aspects of the article, which might also explain its publication in this American newspaper. As is often the case, what the Grey Lady in charge at the New York Times sees as fit to print tells us more about the Grey Lady, and what she thinks her readers want to read, than about what is being covered.

Short and sweet, formalizing plans for Saturday PM. Thinking we start the apero at 18h30 at Le Dalou, 30 Place Nation, Metro Nation (of course).

I have reservations for 8 at 21h30, at l'Inédit Café, Angle rue de la Lancette et 4, rue Taine. Very good food and cheap (everything under EUR 10) We can walk from Nation or, if lazy, take the metro. Metro is Daumesnil.

 

Well, not exactly. Instead, we had the Olympic torch come to Paris only to be doused by those who would pursue their own political agenda at the expense of those of the proper center of attention: Olympic athletes.

Today, the Olympic flame came to Paris, and an opportunistic mayor, who likely wants to someday be President, joined with a craven party, which went so far as to call into question French participation in upcoming Olympic Games. I mean, what the fuck? We see now a political faction in France obviously bent on exploiting, for domestic political purposes, the world's premier showcase for personal struggle in pursuit of achievement, for fairplay, for human triumph over adversity and, ultimately, peace. I can't wait to see what the clueless fucking morons come up with next in America while they continue to not give a shit about the millions of women and children who are still homeless in that country due to their chosen economic system.

And I don't even want to go into the behaviour of the Greens, chosen marketing partners of the PS. Holy shit. Given the behaviour their leadership today I would have thought fuckin' McDonald's opened up a Soylent Green restaurant at Montparnasse. Except wait wait, Noel Mammaire (faute d'orthographe faite expres) would probably approve of the latter over the former,  on grounds of, in combination with soixante-huitard style free love, it's a renewable resource and cuts down on global overpopulation.

We may as well just quit putting on these games.

Today, the spirit of the Olympics, a flame lit at Mount Olympus last week as it was two thousand years ago, and carried around the world, this year to Beijing, has been pissed on by the unserious left in France.  As in Socrates days, those who never did so well at sports were out in force in the streets to spoil that spirit and participate what they are good at...being anti-social and disruptive.

So, the cocktail weenie circuit, military version, has descended upon Bucharest today. Nato yet again extols the virtues of the outdated alliance, now repositioned to fight wars in "the south" all the while, inexplicably to Russia, expanding eastward.

For the next couple of days, Washington will try to cojole other Nato members to ante up some more troops to die in its forgotten war in Afghanistan. In fact, perhaps some of our atlanticist "contributors" have already made their way to the cheerleading section of the gala?

Thankfully, we have Dimitri Rozogin, Russia's ambassador to Nato, to cut through the bullshit.  

It's funny, living in America, I seldom get the impression, watching the news, that anything is fundamentally and severely wrong with the state of Anglo-American capitalism in the US. The candidates are not really talking about it. The business pages, to be sure, talk about the housing crisis here, the credit crunch there, but you have to listen hard because every other day, we also hear about a rally which shows that the fundamentals are really strong, corporate profits as a percent of GDP are really quite good and so on.

So as you crane your neck and listen hard, you can and do hear about different dots in the matrix of the unfolding financial crisis in US markets, but rarely does anyone in America connect those dots.

Fortunately, we have the IMF to cut through the American press bullshit...

Over the past few years, the likelihood of a significant financial crisis in Anglo-American financial markets, and consequent economic stresses centered in both countries, has been a topic of regular commentary and analysis on these pages. In fact, a collaborative topical discussion of the matter and likely outcomes was published here on ET shortly after the long out-of-power Democratic Party was installed in both houses of Congress in the United States. To the surprise of many commentators back then, America's so-called opposition took the reins of power in the halls of its legislative branch. Alas, this power has been used to little, if any, effect on the fiscal, social and economic matters we often discuss.

In light of recent market events, and the first bank failures in decades, first in the UK and then in the US, it would be a good time to revisit that discussion.

Back then, we were discussing how the Euro had surpassed the dollar in terms of circulation. Now, we're observing that the US is no longer the largest economy in the world. All of this quite predictable, and predicted.

Au cas ou vous l'avez pas encore vue...

Sorry, too much here is untranslatable....

Late Spring 1992 found Denmark in a tight spot, having in early June that year narrowly rejected, in a referendum, the Treaty of Maastricht. And, what may have been even more importantly for many regular Danes, the promising home side had only just failed to qualify to that year's European Cup tournament in neighboring Sweden, classed behind war-torn Yugoslavia in group qualifying play. The prospect of the coming summer looked as dull and grey as January on Fyn.

But Denmark's luck was to turn in a matter of a few short weeks. First, political  turmoil in Yugoslavia prompted its football side's expulsion from the tournament; Denmark were in. The political situation, however, appeared a bit more intractable. Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, Denmark's outspoken  centre-right Foreign Minister, who had spearheaded European efforts to recognize the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and, in so doing, set the tone for EU relations with the former Soviet Union for years to come, was headed to Lisbon to salvage Maastricht.

On Gay Marriage and Revolution: The Metamorphosis of the Western Family

Essay by Michel Onfray, originally appearing in Libération, fall of 2003. Translated from French by Redstar

When Maréchal Pétain took down the French Republic in 1940, he discarded the slogan, inherited from the Revolution, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," preferring a new trilogy: "Work, Family, Fatherland." I would suggest that one can see, more or less, to the Right as well as to the Left, (that is to say when the left are not trying to pass themselves off as the right, as has often been the case since May 1981) a certain faithfulness, to this day, to these contradictory conceptions of the world.

Those who loved a Pétain who, as one well knows, liked neither Jews nor communists nor homosexuals nor intellectuals, had both a date of birth and, fortunately, a burial. Its genealogy is judeo-christian, to be precise, the 1st century of our era, beginning with Paul of Tarsus - one in need of convincing might read his appalling series of epistles if one sees fit. In France, its passing is Parisian, in May of 1968 on the barricades; please refer for details to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus .

Yes, you heard that right! You can vote in the upcoming US election. See below for details.

As some of you may know, I've never been all that thrilled with voting in the US. I know it'll get you tarred and feathered in left-blogistan to say this, but the fact of the matter is that Ralph Nader, whatever his imperfections, was right when he said the following while announcing his candidacy for President in 2000:

The unconstrained behavior of big business is subordinating our democracy to the control of a corporate plutocracy that knows few self-imposed limits to the spread of its power to all sectors of our society. Moving on all fronts to advance narrow profit motives at the expense of civic values, large corporate lobbies and their law firms have produced a commanding, multi-faceted and powerful juggernaut. They flood public elections with cash, and they use their media conglomerates to exclude, divert, or propagandize. They brandish their willingness to close factories here and open them abroad if workers do not bend to their demands. By their control in Congress, they keep the federal cops off the corporate crime, fraud, and abuse beats. They imperiously demand and get a wide array of privileges and immunities: tax escapes, enormous corporate welfare subsidies, federal giveaways, and bailouts. They weaken the common law of torts in order to avoid their responsibility for injurious wrongdoing to innocent children, women and men.

A million homeless children in the US. 82 million Americans who lack or have woefully inadequate healthcare insurance. Healthcare spend, at 16% of GDP, is 65% higher than neighboring Canada (universal, government-run).  Hundreds of thousands continue to die in Iraq. We understandably look with a mix of disappointment and disgust upon our ruling elite in Washington, who cannot get modest versions of popular bills enacted on the our behalf.

Looking at the facts on (and in the ground] it's hard to see progress being made for working people. One almost wants to give up and say pox on the entire political elite. But that would be wrong. In fact, it is possible to, like Obama says, bring people from both parties together to get things done. In fact, a lot of progress is being made, locally and at the state level. You just have to look in different sections of the newspaper than you are accustomed to looking.

But since it is apparently now ok to post blank diaries with diacritical marks for titles, I figured what the hell.

And in light of recent dust-ups on the nature of the world as viewed through here a scientist there a humanities lens, I figured it might be useful to examine just how different people from the variously  hostile philosophical traditions really are. And what better way to examine this than by observing how each group confronts that very prosiac puzzle which is the changing of a lightbulb.

Here on the lefter shades of the web dial we constantly hear about how the grotesquely huge budget deficit is a GOP, Bushite-inspired wingnut disaster. Profligate "borrow & spend" policies are bankrupting our children's future, or other similar liberal whingeing. It's causing the dollar to plunge as furriners refuse to bankroll our public debt, interest rates are about to go through the roof and don't even talk to me about inflation!

Meanwhile, over in wingnuttia, we are told that Dear Leader's tax cuts have reduced the US deficit to a mere 1.2% of GDP,  lower than the post-war average.

How is an honest, economic-minded and politically-plugged in person to evaluate these competing claims? Well, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't matter.

There's been much talk lately on these pages about how the state of real estate markets in the US, and the "meltdown" of mortgage-backed securities, are crises in American Capitalism. Jerome here on ET and bonddad over on dKos are sounding off on how crappy the US economy is performing, and how the US real estate meltdown is turning into a crisis of epic proportions.

Ever the contrarian, I'm not seeing this as the disaster that either make it out to be. Nor do I think the real scandal has anything to do with the actions of the big swinging dicks at Merrill Lynch, Countrywide or Citigroup.

Don't get me wrong, these guys are scumbags, and the weather outside is indeed frightful. But these guys have always been scumbags, that's why they run investment banks and not Secours Catholique. And there's no more a crisis in financial markets today than observed in the past, to wit, the US currency crisis in the 1970's, Black Wednesday, the S&L crisis in the US or the Japanese real-estate bubble of the '90's. Bad stuff, but no economic paradigm shifting event.

Promoted by Migeru

Yes, thank you Dr. Wolfowitz.

Bear with me here, folks, I know it's counter-intuitive, but I think we might be missing the forest so as to better focus on that greasy-haired worm-infested tree of a man that is Paul Wolfowitz. How's that, you say?

Well, because Paul's doing us a big favor. Every day the pissant holds out in his barricaded World Bank office causes serious damage to that institution. And that's a good thing.  Paul, you see, may be morally on par with one of Nero's sycophantic advisors, holding the fiddling tyrant's violin case while the latter watched Rome burn. But unlike Rome, the World Bank is worthy of fire.

Perhaps under the radar for many, but some interesting things are going on in Poland these days, the timing of which seems rather odd. Poland's government has whipped up a Red Scare, which seems modeled on America's initial de-Ba'athification efforts in Irak. They seem intent on clearing the entire civil service of anyone associated with the former Communist regime, in even quite ambiguous ways, and on prosecuting, again, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, a former Communist-era dictator, responsible for imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981.

The driving force behind it? President Lech Kaczynski, and his twin brother Jaroslaw, two far-right, homophobic and xenophobic demagogues who rose to prominence fighting corruption and are now fighting charges of cronyism themselves.

Poland may be volunteering to point missiles at Moscow (er... I mean Teheran) for Washington, it may be running secret prisons for the CIA, it may be violating the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by participating in extra-ordinary renditions, and it may have extra time left over to cover up CIA use of its landing strips from EU Parliament investigators, but that doesn't mean they don't have time, nearly twenty years on (and despite the fact that prosecutions have already taken place), to go on a good old fashioned purge of former Communist party members. Vigorous government, indeed (there's Kaczynski right here):

The Post had a rundown of the witch-hunt over the week-end, below the fold.

From the diaries - whataboutbob

Interesting news item came across the screen this AM over here in North America for which I found the write-up. See, there's been this controversy here surrounding the sport of hockey and the prevalence of fighting in it, with the head disciplinarian of the NHL, North America's Elite hockey league, publicly announcing he's looking into banning it like they do in more, shall we say neutered parts of the hockey world. He does says this because there've been a few high profile injuries due to fighting, such as what resulted from this one:

Where's the political connection in all this? Well, as is usually the case with such controversies, someone's come out and done a poll, and the results are quite interesting. Fortunately, the polling outfit saw fit to put a little political spin into the
questionnaire, the results of which can be found below the fold.

Not satisfied with the War on Terra (tm), the US government, with its allies in the New Europe(tm), plan to re-open the Cold War (hat-tip to my Dad's paper).

Putin will no doubt have some thoughts on what follows below the fold (as would any Russian leader, though expect to see the Americans play "Russia's descent into undemocratic authoritarianism" card to the hilt on this).