Not sure if you have seen this already, but just in case:

In Love with Trains | Tony Judt - The New York Review of Books (Volume 57, Number 4 · March 11, 2010)

According to the literary theorist René Girard, we come to yearn for and eventually love those who are loved by others. I cannot confirm this from personal experience--I have a history of frustrated longings for objects and women who were palpably unavailable to me but of no particular interest to anyone else. But there is one sphere of my life in which, implausibly, Girard's theory of mimetic desire could be perfectly adapted to my experience: if by 'mimetic' we mean mutuality and symmetry, rather than mimicry and contestation, I can vouch for the credibility of his proposition. I love trains, and they have always loved me back.

Just ran across it in an old copy of the NY Book Review.  Unfortunately, only the preview is available on the website (unless you pay for the rest).  Let me know if you are interested, and I can scan and send you the rest of the article.

The point is not to be right, but to get to right.

FT.com / Global Economy - Soros warns Europe on brink of disintegration

... "It is 50-50 whether the eurozone breaks up. The damage that break up would cause is so great, that I think that as people realise it, they will pull back from the brink," Soros told the Financial Times in an interview. "But we are at the brink now...a solution has to be found in a matter of days."

<...>

"Greece is willing to take the steps and has taken steps which are necessary to get through this crisis. Now Europe has to do its part to help Greece through," he said.

"Unfortunately there are problems with Germany because it does not want to be the deep pockets helping out the profligate southerners which got into trouble. [But] if that is the case, the euro is in danger and the European union is in danger. I just hope that Germany will be helpful."

Soros, who famously made around a $1bn profits almost two decades ago by betting on sterling's exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, argued that "having a common currency was very sensible for a common market." However, he stressed that Europe now faced a test. "Is there the political will to keep Europe together? If there is not I think that there will be a process of disintegration."

<...>

"Currency traders find it very difficult right now to speculate because public opinion is very much aroused. If I were running a hedge fund now I would be wary of making money because the political consequences would be too severe," he said. "I don't think that hedge funds are playing much of a role [in the current crisis] - it is not fertile ground. There is a kind of witch-hunt looking for someone who is profiting."

The point is not to be right, but to get to right.

Imminent strike at UPR = Imminent vacation for yours truly.
:-)

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

Tax prep. GRRR.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The weather is again quite cool, which I did not mind that much as I have been working this weekend. :-)

I am supposed to be revising for my exam tomorrow, but it's quite strange cos I'm finding it hard to get going.

It's a subject with which I am perhaps over-familiar so I feel blase about it. I read my short notes and nothing comes up that I don't mostly know and the few tables I actually think might be worth sitting down and learning are pretty tedious and pointless. So I'm disinclined, so I'll be popping in and out as I chunter through it slowly but I'm not in my usual mad panic revision frenzy and I'm not used to that.

keep to the Fen Causeway

It is fifth year since I left my hometown Yakutsk, a capital of Sakha republic in Far Eastern Russia, and astonishingly I never felt need to learn local news, except few things I have known from calls to relatives and friends. Not so much you can talk about in telephone conversations.

Many things changed, many people I knew very well or was acquainted shortly had some success, they are still in the media spotlight, others disappeared or just maintain low profile. Today I was catching up browsing media there.

Overall development in such remote corner of the world would surprise many. Former president of the republic Mr Nikolayev (who was responsible for the surge in development of the region and construction boom in 1990s) is the first deputy Chairman of Russian senate in Moscow and just concluded official visit to Washington where he had participated in Arctic nations conference and had talks with officials of Obama adminisrtation and US Senate (like Mr R. Lugar). He also met expats-Sakha living in US.

Mr Nikolayev and expats in DC.

But enough of politics. What bother local media there? Everything you can find in your local newspapers, weather, criminal chronicle, politics, finance and scandals. The cinema theater in just few minutes from my home organized movie festival and there were dignitaries like Ms Alferova (she is well known in Russia for portraying Constance de Boinassier from popular movie Three Musketeers) and Yakutsk's Orthodox archbishop Zosima. At openeing ceremony there was big scandal with one young journalist Mr Gorodetsky (I knew him well) asking from dignitaries outrageous questions. He was thrown out from FM radio station Victoria (where he was my colleague, I had a program there), right now he is editor-in-chief of tabloid "Yellow Yakutsk". So he questioned movie star over her newly found attachment to Orthodox church and charitable activities. Ms Alferova was outraged and press conference abruptly ended with her screams how she hates the yellow press journalist.

And finally I was reading interview with Masha Dubrovskaya, free lance photographer from Yakusk, she had lived also in India for many years but I never met her personally. The photo of Himalayan mountains above is hers, it's amazing. She likes Asia and currently shuttles between Bali and Thailand with her Indian boyfriend Ajay. It's wonderful to know that I am not alone.

Ajay and Masha

If All Chinese Had Wheels

by Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlich
New York Times (March 16 1972)

Now that the People's Republic of China has been admitted to the United Nations and American leaders are jetting to Peking, it is inevitable that we will be hearing more proposals for trade and aid to help the Chinese bring themselves up to "our standard of living". The idea of helping less developed nations "industrialize" or "catch up" seems as American as baseball. Few people question the common wisdom behind these programs, the idea that the developing areas of the world can somehow catch up with contemporary consumptive standards of living in industrial societies.

The emergence of China as a needy superpower must surely generate a re-evaluation of these beliefs. First, it is doubtful that the Chinese will ever reach our current standard of living; indeed it is not certain that this is even possible. But, more important, it is questionable whether such an achievement would be desirable, from any point of view. If the level of industrialization in China could be increased to the point that each Chinese family possessed an automobile and other amenities of industrial society, the effect on China and the entire world would be catastrophic. This observation immediately raises the point, of course, that the US should be considered overdeveloped by virtue of having attained a level of per capita consumption far in excess of that to which the bulk of humanity can realistically aspire.

Some very basic figures shed light on the development dilemma. There are currently at least 750 million people in mainland China. By contrast, the population of the United States is slightly over 200 million. Since there are more than 3.5 Chinese for every American, it would require some 3.5 times the present United States resource consumption to sustain China at current American levels. Such affluence in China would necessitate a tremendous shift in world consumption of raw materials.

Wind power

Oil, Not China, Is The Real Destroyer Of America's Trade Balance

UBS's head of Asia-Pacific economics argues that the real global trade imbalance isn't U.S.-China, it is U.S.-oil. As shown below, current account surpluses from fuel exporting-nations have been a far larger driver of total global trade imbalances coming from emerging markets.

(...)

Thus the U.S. could use a little less finger-pointing at China... and a lot less foreign oil usage... if it really wants to correct its global trade imbalance.
This is a huge argument against U.S. trade protectionism since protectionism would miss the largest cause of America's trade deficit while only hurting U.S. export prospects by pissing off trade partners.

Wind power

We had a very English breakfast of crumpets and fresh roasted coffee. Well, ok, maybe the coffee isn't English...  However, my crumpets need help.  They were good, but I've had better. And it seems as if the commercial ones that I've eaten have some grain, like corn, in them, to give them more texture and flavor.  Anyone have a recipe?  I used the one from the King Arthur Flour webpage.  

And it's still corn beef time!  I cooked the corn beef that I brined myself and plan to make hash with the last of the beef.  It was wonderful and himself says that 'it was tolerable'.  Time to get another one in the crock  :-)  

80's and sunny here!  Should have planned a picnic.  
   Elaine

What does it say about Soros that one of his top guys was at that Manhattan dinner with Goldman Sachs and Paulson and a few others where there was a lot of talk about Greece. We know that shortly after that dinner, the CDS market for Greece blew up. We know the cost of Greek debt skyrocketed after that as well (before any Greek restatements of yearly deficit which occurred in November). We know that people at that table had intimate knowledge of Greek debt. We know what the people at that table at for dinner.

As well, the Greek restatement of finances was only for this year (2010) and not prior years. The debt to GDP was at 100% every year since 2004, and this year's restatement from 6.7% to 12.7% is a matter of 15 billion euros, which surely could not have been the cause of all the panic.