Do you suffer from the heartbreak of overcheeriness? Good news!

Does the internet encourage or discourage relationships? Do we encounter people we never would have otherwise, and form friendships and bonds that transcend geography? Or are internet relationships mainly projections, figments of our nerdishly fevered imaginations?

This, of course, is a topic of eternal interest in Left Blogostan, where such imaginations are not rare. It’s a popular fantasy to meet someone over the net, talk about all your deepest secrets and naughtiest fantasies, and end up falling in love. And it certainly makes sense to think that a hundred hours emailing is more revelatory than a couple hours drinking beer. I mean, both are important; but, say, 160 emails in forty days provides more data for calculating the Wall Street favorite, the running average. Muddy or shallow or repetitive or discombobulated thinking is inevitably exposed. Some level of contact might have been made.

So what do you think?

In the following bit Gibbon is discussing the German emperors from Charlemagne for about four centuries, and their intent to expand southward. But it was also relevant to England’s situation in Gibbon’s time; Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published between 1776 and 1789.

There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest. A torrent of barbarians may pass over the earth, but an extensive empire must be supported by a refined system of policy and oppression; in the centre, an absolute power, prompt in action and rich in resources; a swift and easy communication with the extreme parts; fortifications to check the first effort of rebellion; a regular administration to protect and punish; and a well-disciplined army to inspire fear, without provoking discontent and despair.

More lifted from Matt Steinglass at Accumulating Peripherals. When I was his age I was easily half as smart as him, but there’s been considerable slippage since. As an extra bonus, the next-to-last paragraph contains an excellent example of an infinitive that had to be split in the interest of clarity.

One of the things that chess grand masters encounter when they play machines like Deep Blue that can’t be beaten by humans is that the machine sometimes makes moves that don’t appear to make any sense. Humans play chess by “clustering” classes of moves that tend to work well according to higher-level strategic insights built up over long experience in playing the game.

Machines play chess by calculating, with brute force computation, which moves lead to the best possible outcomes over the next hundred-odd rounds of play. So machine moves occasionally look weird, from a human point of view; humans simply can’t calculate far enough out to see why they work.

When Obama was running against Clinton and Edwards in the primaries and adopted the position that mandates were a bad idea, many health policy wonks were baffled. At the time (January 2008), a theory occurred to me, which I proposed to a journalist friend over dinner.

Everyone knows that the problem with instituting community rating (i.e. everyone pays the same price for health insurance) without mandates is that healthy young people will opt out of buying health insurance. This in turn makes health insurance more expensive, leading yet more healthy people to opt out, creating a gradual death spiral for insurance companies.

Meanwhile, if, as in Obama’s plan, a government-funded insurance plan has been set up that offers taxpayer-subsidized affordable coverage, private insurers will soon be unable to compete. So, if you institute community rating and a public plan without mandates, who will start pressing you to institute mandates? The private insurance companies.

You shift the political landscape so that your enemies start to use their strength in the service of your goals. Jujitsu! And meanwhile, since the public mostly opposes “mandates” because they sound mean, you can use your anti-mandate stance to beat your primary opponents. Double jujitsu!

Of course, this seemed too conspiratorial and deep to be an actual explanation for what Obama was doing … But I think we are starting to get a lot of evidence of how Obama views politics, and one thing he does religiously is to not get out ahead of his constituency. Another thing he does is to try to rearrange conflicts so that interests are aligned with each other, not freezing each other into gridlock — so that his side can win without having to beat anyone.

Anyway, Obama is now saying mandates are going to be a part of the health care solution proposed in the upcoming budget bill. Apparently he now thinks he has the political strength to do the whole reform at once, universal care, mandates, and all. Maybe he’s wrong, but he hasn’t been wrong yet.

Once upon a time there was a Hundred Year’s War, one of my old history professors said. That was whittled down to a Thirty Year’s War, then a Nine Year’s War, then a Seven Year’s War, and then, finally, a Six-Day War. “So that’s progress,” he observed.

Since we’ve been in Afghanistan for over seven years now, you could say we’re backsliding with regard to the good professor’s standard of progress. And, of course, it’s going to get worse:

The United States is sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. President Barack Obama said in a written statement that the increase was “necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.”

The additional troops will arrive during the spring and summer and will bring the total number of American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan to about 55,000, along with 32,000 non-U.S. NATO forces.

In Imperial Hubris: Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror, the author recounts a conversation between a Russian intelligence official and his CIA counterparts in September 2001 about our upcoming invasion of Afghanistan:

“With regret,” the Russian said, “I have to say that you are going to get the hell kicked out of you.” One of the Americans responded in words that will someday be found in a U.S. military study about its failed Afghan war. “We’re going to kill them,” the U.S. official asserted. “We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.”

Don da Man thought we should all know about this. His question, and it is a good one: Where did the $4,300 wind up?

A Russian man died after guzzling a bottle of Viagra to keep him going for a 12-hour orgy with two female pals.

The women had bet mechanic Sergey Tuganov $4,300 that he wouldn’t be able to follow through with the half-day sex marathon.

But minutes after winning the bet, the 28-year-old died of a heart attack, Moscow police said.

“We called emergency services but it was too late, there was nothing they could do,” said one of the female participants who identified herself only as Alina.

You might be interested in how socialized medicine is working out for one American unfortunate enough to have it. Whole article here. Sample:

Even better is the speed, integration and comprehensiveness of the care. I can walk in unannounced any day and go to the walk-in clinic. I’ll wait a while, but get to see a doctor about my complaint relatively quickly.

I have a regular GP doctor there who calls me in every six months for another check up. They take the initiative to make the appointment and call me – and send me reminder letters – informing me of the time. The supportive lab work is done there too. Many specialists are in house. I now regularly see a rheumatologist there.

When any doctor or nurse working there needs to refer to my complete medical history, they just make a few key strokes and it appears on their computer screen. If they want me to have a blood test or an x-ray (or a sonogram or an EKG) they just hit a few more key strokes and send me down the hall for the procedure. Typically, I’m back in 30 minutes with the results already in their computer. If they want to order a medication, a few more key strokes and it’s ready for me down the hall at the pharmacy. They even have masseurs and nutrition counselors…

Good rant from The Rant:

…The desperation of the Republicans at this stage is a truly funny thing to behold. Jindal is being discussed as a possible nominee to run against Obama in 2012. The reason for that is obvious as well. There is no way in hell they’ll be able to run a white guy in four years. It will either be Bobby Jindal - or a white woman. Take that to the bank. Better yet, stuff it under your mattress.

Keep your eyes on these jackasses in the next few weeks. They’re going to to everything humanly possible to ensure that the president’s stimulus package is a complete and utter failure. Count on them to make statements in the press so reckless that the market responds in a negative way. As has been stated on this site before, they know their history. After FDR was inaugurated in 1933, they would not control the executive branch of our government for a full twenty years. Their very survival depends on the destruction of this country’s infrastructure. To hell with the American people…

…when it comes to political jiu-jitsu. From medieval Saudi Arabia:

It would be bizarre in any country to find that its lingerie shops are staffed entirely by men. But in Saudi Arabia — an ultra-conservative nation where unmarried men and women cannot even be alone in a room together if they are not related — it is strange in the extreme…

“The way that underwear is being sold in Saudi Arabia is simply not acceptable to any population living anywhere in the modern world,” says Reem Asaad, a finance lecturer at Dar al-Hikma Women’s College in Jeddah, who is leading a campaign to get women working in lingerie shops rather than men…

Rana Jad is a 20-year-old student at Dar al-Hikma Women’s College, and one of Reem Asaad’s pupils and campaign supporters.

“Girls don’t feel very comfortable when males are selling them lingerie, telling them what size they need, and saying ‘I think this is small on you, I think this is large on you’,” she says. “He’s totally checking the girls out! It’s just not appropriate, especially here in our culture.”

Campaigners are calling for a boycott of all lingerie stores that are staffed by men.… “The concept is flawless,” says Ms Asaad. “The concept of women selling women’s underwear to other women is so natural that any other option is just invalid.”

And from medieval Louisiana, as reported by A.J. Liebling in The Earl of Louisiana, his 1961 biography of Governor Earl Long:

“Earl is like Huey on Negroes,” Tom said, “When the new Charity Hospital was built here, some Negro politicians came to Huey and said it was a shame there were no Negro nurses, when more than half the patients were colored. Huey said he’d fix it for them, but they wouldn’t like his method.

He went around to visit the hospital and pretended to be surprised when he found white nurses waiting on colored men. He blew high as a buzzard can fly, saying it wasn’t fit for white women to be so humiliated. It was the most racist talk you ever heard, but the result was he got the white nurses out and the colored nurses in, and they’ve had the jobs ever since.”

Always alert for signs of human intelligence in the blogosphere, I was happy to come across Accumulating Peripherals just now (thanks to Neighbor Jim). A small sample:

Sarah Palin notes in a new right-wing propaganda film that the media employed search and destroy tactics against her: “We are going to seek and we are going to destroy this candidacy of Sarah Palin’s because of what it is that she represents.”

Palin is right that the media deployed a search and destroy strategy against her, and that this was every bit as poor a strategy as it was in Vietnam. Like the Viet Cong and the NVA, Palin has simply retreated to her base areas, where the media have been unable to effectively pursue her, and keeps resurfacing at times of her choosing to harass and entrap media forces. The NVA called this strategy “clinging to the belt” of the enemy, engaging them only when one has a temporary advantage, then melting away in the face of counterattacks.

What the media needs to do is shift to a “clear and hold” counterinsurgency strategy, creating secure Palin-free zones where citizens can pursue their interests in peace and safety, and allowing Palin to sit out in her bases — the mountains, the deep jungle, the tunnel complexes — as her strength gradually withers until she is no longer a threat.

Interesting stuff in Al Jazeera from Professor Mark LeVine of the University of California, Irvine. Excerpts:

Rapid development in computer, communications and transportation technologies fueled an economic productivity which led to unprecedented growth in corporate profits.

Meanwhile, this process weakened the ability of workers to maintain wage growth at a rate comparable to productivity and profits.

In fact, around 1970 real wages for most non-management workers stopped increasing, and have stayed flat, and even declined, since then.

Wolff explains that rather than fight against the erosion of their incomes, working and middle class Americans began to work even longer hours, and then take on second and even third jobs, in order to continue to consume apace with the upper classes.

In comparison, less consumption-obsessed workers in Western Europe now work 20 per cent less than they did in the 1970s…

So far, the Obama administration has sought to inject enough money into the US economy to ease up the restrictions on credit and stimulate the economy through tax breaks and infrastructure programs.

What few Americans, politicians and ordinary citizens alike, have thought to consider is whether the financial system that the new administration is trying to rescue — essentially, the “American Way of Life” — should even be saved.

After all, a long-term drop in global consumption is one of the few conceivable ways to stop the slide toward the tipping point of global warming and environmental degradation, not to mention the increasingly violent resource wars and global poverty, that are the inevitable outcome of a world economic system premised on limitless growth and consumption.

(CNN) — A Seattle man has been charged with insurance fraud for allegedly sinking his own yacht because of “financial pressure and frustration with the maintenance” of the vessel, authorities said…

From Gail Collins today:

We are trying not to get too fixated on the fairness aspects of the bailout. However, this approach seems to resemble a plan in which you fix a classroom that’s distracted by one disruptive pupil by sending said troublemaker to a private school in Lucerne equipped with an on-campus ski lift while the rest of the kids stay at Millard Fillmore Elementary, sharing textbooks…

Instead of dancing around the problem, can’t we just have the government take over the impacted banks, hire all the unemployed bond traders to figure out how much the toxic assets are worth, dispose of them for whatever the market will bear and then sell the newly reconstituted banks back to private investors? That was Sweden’s approach, and it worked rather well.

The answer is that Americans will never do anything that Sweden does. Never have, never will. Don’t argue with me. It’s a rule.

The title above is a quote from Ronald Reagan at the 1988 Republican National Convention. He was trying to access a John Adams quote, “Facts are stubborn things,” but something more appropriate to the man and the occasion popped out.

The essay below is from my neighbor Jim, more of whose stuff can be seen here.

Compare and contrast:

1980 may seem kind of arbitrary as the jump off for the end of empire, but the economics bear it out. Under Reagan, government disbursements and revenues, as a share of GDP, jumped a full six percentage points. More, if you include his unfunded moral hygiene mandates.

All the Republicans talked Rand, Friedman, inter alia, but they acted like straightforward right wing military Keynesians. Military Keynesianism is of course nothing new in the US. But prior to 1980 there was a dominant Bismarckian consensus (have I dropped enough names yet?) that it had to be matched by social spending, otherwise the exercise of hard power would eventually become financially unsustainable.

You cannot extract surplus value — i.e. have capitalism — in great heaping bushel baskets unless you have a government willing to exercise single payer monopsony power over basic human needs, basic scientific research and renewable sources of the energy needed to drive all this. Lo and behold, the exercise of hard power is now done on credit, with only the threat of mutually assured destruction holding our creditors at bay.

I suppose one could point to a cultural shift in the eighties, as there certainly was one, but I prefer a bit more systemic determinism.

The political economy of capitalism is easiest to manage through psychological terrorism. It’s a cheap and effective way of outsourcing the quotidian enforcement of corporate feudalism to vigilante moral panic artists. There’s no shortage of people willing to enforce for free. Hell, they’ll even pay for the dubious privilege.

People become inured to this, querulous and rebellious, and the terrorism has to be stepped up. Red scares have to be coupled with ethnic scares, drug scares, satanic child care scares and so forth. Going against that, as Carter did in an achingly minuscule way, is a positive step for capitalism and a negative step for capitalists. Their enforcement costs look to climb. People who aren’t constantly depressed and frightened get a little feisty.

Under Reagan, the “clever” work-around was burgeoning unfunded mandates to make the states take on domestic psychological terrorism, and yanking the social safety net away, while the central government threw surplus value to the cretinous capitalists, hand over fist. It’s been down hill ever since.

I can’t see why anyone would want to be president after Bush. It’s not a sane thing to do. I thought, and still think, that the Democrats would have been better off throwing the election. McCain would probably not have lasted four years and right wing military Keynesianism would have been discredited for a good long time. Getting stuck with cradling the appalling, ghoulish offspring that are roving mindlessly over a dying empire would have ruined him, and the most cretinous of the cretinous capitalists.

The Democrats could have trotted out old social democratic wine in new bottles and enjoyed thirty or forty years of crowing from the top of the DC shit hill. So it goes, I guess. And my goodness, doesn’t Carter look like a saint in comparison to every asshole that’s come since.

From CNN:

(CNN) — Shark attacks on humans were at the lowest levels in half a decade last year, and a Florida researcher says hard economic times may be to blame…

“To have a shark attack, you have to have humans and sharks in the water at the same time,” Burgess said. “If you have a reduction in the number of people in the water, you’re going to have a reduction in the opportunities for people and sharks to get together.”

This from my nephew Will Doolittle, columnist for the Glens Falls PostStar.

Usually, I reject the proposition that “times have changed,” especially when the speaker means “for the worse.” The good old days were very bad, in some ways.

But the part of me that wants to say, “When I was a kid ...” flares up when I read stories like the one in Wednesday’s paper about the two 16-year-olds from Cambridge charged with felonies. They were charged when someone called the State Police after spotting a plastic sled the teens had placed by the road, near the house where one of them lives.

On the sled were a soccer ball wrapped in foil, some wire and a battery pack. Also on the sled was a note that said: “If you touch this, you will be shot.”

They had put this hodgepodge by the road Sunday night because another friend, with whom they often play war games, was supposed to be riding his bike down the road that night to join them. But the friend didn’t show up, and the teens didn’t collect their creation right away Monday. Someone else saw it and was scared by it.

I spoke recently with Anthony Jancek, the father of Nicholas, who was charged. Nick had never even had detention before this happened, Mr. Jancek said. Anthony Jancek doesn’t blame anyone but his son, whom he has grounded, he said, “until the court date, at the very least.”

And Nick, on his own, is writing letters of apology to the person who got scared, and to the troopers who had to spend time dealing with a soccer ball on a sled.

Nick’s good manners and his maturity — when the troopers showed up, he told them exactly what happened, Mr. Jancek said — are encouraging. And Mr. Jancek’s good parenting, insisting that Nick take responsibility, is great.

But, as an uninvolved party, you can’t help thinking, “What the heck?”

And right after that thought come the memories of the things you did when you were a kid, and the times you got caught, and the punishments. What you probably don’t remember are the felony charges you faced.

Because, despite all the understandable precautions officials must take, it is crazy to be charging kids with serious crimes for goofing around with each other. We used to understand, but don’t any longer, that kids need some latitude, so they can learn lessons without collecting big black marks on their records.

But times have changed, and for the worse.

…were never at Guantanamo Bay. They were in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the White House:

Recent interviews with troops from the early days at Guantanamo confirm that the “worst of the worst” charge was suspect from the very first encounters with the detainees. There wasn’t any reliable vetting. Although the first troops on the ground at Guantanamo were led to believe that they would be receiving the “worst of the worst,” the detainees themselves seemed from the start to be far from the dangerous men they had expected — symbolically, individuals who, according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, were capable of chewing through hydraulic cables on board the transport planes but who it turned out arrived with rotting teeth and weakened physiques.

Overall, the U.S. military was blindsided by who they received at Gitmo and by the condition in which the detainees arrived. Arriving dehydrated, and startlingly thin, the detainees were mostly not only small and weak, but did not even speak the languages which the troops on the ground had been told to expect. Many came from countries outside of the Afghanistan/Pakistan area. Some did not even seem capable of any dire acts.

Among the earliest arrivals, one was apparently an octogenarian; another was over ninety. One was a diagnosed schizophrenic. However possible the danger quotient of these first arrivals, the inclusion of these cases made the team at Gitmo suspect that the vetting process had been haphazard at best.

Later investigations have shown that most of the detainees were not captured directly by U.S. troops. Instead, the U.S. paid bounties to, or otherwise received the prisoners from, Pakistani boarder guards and Northern Alliance troops. There was no single profile for the detainees; instead they seemed like a ragtag and miscellaneous group. Nor did they arrive with information.

The pocket litter that detainees were carrying when captured – materials that trained police would have carefully preserved and labeled for use during interrogation – came stuffed randomly into bags but was often not separated per individual. Doubts about the identities of the detainees were registered by visiting Congresspersons and by members of the Bush Administration, but these doubts never seemed to go anywhere.

Thus began the story of defending a mission that seemed in part fraudulent from the start. As the general in charge has noted in retrospect, it took a petty officer to put a detainee on the plane to Guantanamo and an order signed by the President of the United States to get him out.

For Jim Kunstler it’s all about the oil — and who am I to argue? I remember Jimmy Carter putting the solar panels on the White House roof and Ronald Reagan tearing them down as one of his first acts in office. I remember the Republicans laughing at “moral equivalent of war,” and pointing out — oh, clever, clever Republicans — that its acronym was MEOW. But why go on. You remember too.

…Then, in 1979, the Ayatollah tossed out the Shah of Iran, we got another dose of oil problems, and a year later, President Jimmy Carter’s clear-eyed view of the oil situation as “the moral equivalent of war” got overturned in favor of Ronald Reagan’s dreadful Hollywood nostalgia projector. As usual in times of severe social stress, the public got delusional. Mr. Reagan was very lucky. During his tenure, two of the last great non-OPEC oil discoveries came into full production — Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and the North Sea — and took the leverage away from the Islamic oil nations who had been making us miserable with their threats, embargos, price-jackings, and hostage-takings.

Americans drew the false conclusion that Ronald Reagan was an economic genius (a similar thing happened in Great Britain with Margaret Thatcherism). The price of oil went down steeply while they were in office. Britain could kick back and enjoy it’s last remaining industry, banking, on a majestic cushion of energy resources. The USA resumed its major post-war industry: suburban sprawl building. Reaganism got elevated to the status of a religion, though it was little more than a twisted version of Eisenhower-on-steroids. Under Reagan, WalMart embarked on its campaign to destroy every main street economy in the nation. The Baby Boomers came back from the land, clipped their pony tails, discovered venture capital, real estate investment trusts, securitization of “consumer” debt, and the Hamptons. Greed was good. (No, really....)

If, like me, you have entered the funhouse of late middle age you will soon discover that the mirrors distort not only how you look but what you hear.

Did that refined-looking woman next to you at the lunch counter really say, “Could you teach me to booger, sleaze?” And if she didn’t say that, what did she say? You haven’t a clue, so you retreat into safe territory: you take umbrage. “Excuse me. I beg your pardon. What did you say?”

The woman carefully, patiently, repeats her request: “Could you reach the sugar for me, please.”

“Oh, the sugar. Of course, the sugar. Yes, indeed, here’s the sugar. I thought you said, ‘Could you teach me to booger, sleaze?’ Guess the old ears aren’t what they used to be, heh, heh.” The woman, who knows a dangerous crank when she sees one, flees, leaving her coffee untouched and you with the ambient sounds of the coffee shop rushing in and out of your ears like a stormy surf.

On another occasion, in a restaurant of a more ambitious attainment, the well-practiced waiter announces the special dishes of the day: “To start, we have frombitch mit a colloquy of marsupials; we have bollocks in a volcanic seduction; and the soup is a shame of steamed hillary. Our special entrées today are boorish men polished with offal, stallions of grief cooked with mallets and arctic tokes. The fish of the day is a blast from the south pedantic, coached in trite slime and served with potatoes oh Bataan, geeks and praised hentai.”

One way out of this nightmare is to wait for your wife to order and then tell the waiter you’ll have the same thing. This would work better if your wife didn’t so often choose the blast from the south pedantic, but at least you are spared the humiliation of admitting that you didn’t understand a single thing about the chef’s specials, including the soup of the day, which, on second hearing, still sounds like shame of steamed hillary. You hope you’ll have more luck with the dessert menu but you know better. The last time you faced dessert choices at this same restaurant it was between critter moles and something called, ‘Do you hear me, Sue?’ Unable to choose one mystery over another, you said you didn’t want any dessert — the exact opposite of the truth.

And so it goes in the funhouse. Aspects of living that once brought pleasure and enrichment are now cause for dread. Concerts, the movies, the theater are all now a source of anxiety. And worst of all is going to parties because going to parties means meeting people who have names.

“Paul, I’d like you to meet Glotis Blizzard and his wife, Tarantula. He’s a friend of Dumpster Pudding. Didn’t you and Dumpster grow up together?

Glotis Blizzard? Tarantula Blizzard. Has everyone gone mad? I don’t want to meet anyone named Glotis Blizzard and, no, I didn’t grow up with someone called Dumpster Pudding. After five minutes of this you are ready to go home but you see your wife is deep in conversation with a woman you have met before, a woman you remember liking, a woman whose name you think you know. You approach with a jaunty step.

“Paul,” says your wife, “Look who’s here. You know Weedy Pustule.”

Weedy Pustule? Weedy Pustule? Nobody in the world is named Weedy Pustule! You shake hands, nod, smile, and try to convince Weedy Pustule with an animated array of hand gestures and facial expressions that you appreciate what she is saying. This is not easy because what she seems to be saying is: “Woof a bladder of latex aspirin and nosegays. Gonnif relegate a tome of rancid blatherskite?”

Oh, oh, that last sounded like a question — the most dreaded moment of all. Except for those blessed rhetorical questions requiring no answer, questions are the undoing of the otically challenged. The speaker regards you with bright expectation. You open your mouth to reply with… with what? You haven’t the slightest idea what she said, so you can only return her smile and reply in kind: “Surely the grubs and skives will blend blithely with the gonnifs.”

She smiles uncertainly. You smile back. The moment is awkward. Uncertainty fills the air. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a garble.

I once did a five-year stretch teaching at Harvard, and so this story came as no surprise:

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading…

In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view. “I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

Although I would get used to it soon, I was astonished the first time a student complained about his (usually it was a boy) grade. In my own student days I’d have gnawed my arm off rather than beg a professr to raise my grade. It was a simple matter of self-respect.

In a compulsory freshman course called “Contemporary Civilization” we were required to turn in weekly book reports from a long reading list. For my first one I naturally picked a book I had already read and dimly remembered. I knocked out a necessarily vague puff piece between breakfast and the nine o’clock class. The professor gave me an A-, not even noticing that I had got the protagonist’s name wrong.

Plainly, then, I could coast through the semester. Next time I’d even read a book that was new to me, write my report while I still remembered it, and get a sure A. I picked Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos, finding it to be a weak effort by the master. I got a C-.

Did I debase myself by complaining? I did not. I did the manly thing. I read a new book each week, and set down exactly what I thought about it. Even then my taste was exquisite and my standards so high that no book ever entirely met them. And I never got a grade higher than a C.

To ease the pain I set up a little business selling book reports to other students in the course, the fee to depend on the grade. I found each book to be a masterpiece, fully deserving of its place on the professor’s book list. The lowest grade I ever got was an A-.

Here are dispatches from what we like to think of as part of the civilized world. This story couldn’t have been written in any European country. Well, maybe Romania.

“For a lot of people, it’s a choice between being able to survive in New York and getting health insurance,” said Hogan Gorman, an actress who was hit by a car five years ago and chronicled her misadventures in “Hot Cripple,” a one-woman show that was a hit at last summer’s Fringe Festival. “There was no way that I could pay my rent, buy insurance and eat.”

Nicole Polec, a 28-year-old freelance photographer living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said she has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and has a client who procures Ritalin on her behalf from a sympathetic doctor who has seen Ms. Polec’s diagnosis. Ms. Polec’s roommate, Fara D’Aguiar, 26, treated her last flu with castoff amoxicillin — “probably expired,” she said — given to her by a friend.

When Robert Voris last had health insurance, in 2007, he stockpiled insulin pumps, which are inserted under the skin to constantly monitor blood-sugar levels and administer the drug accordingly. He said the tubing for the pump costs $900 a month, so lately he has instead been injecting insulin with a syringe. But Mr. Voris, 27, a journalism student at the City University of New York who works at a restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is constantly worried about diabetes-induced seizures like the one that sent him to the hospital last summer. (Because it happened at work, his boss covered the ambulance and other bills.)

This from Bristol Palin, for whom I hope all goes well.

(CNN) — In her first interview since giving birth, the teenage daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said having a child is not “glamorous,” and that telling young people to be abstinent is “not realistic at all.”

“It’s just, like, I’m not living for myself anymore. It’s, like, for another person, so it’s different,” Bristol Palin told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “And just you’re up all night. And it’s not glamorous at all,” she said. “Like, your whole priorities change after having a baby…”

The best option is abstinence, the teen said, but added that she didn’t think that was “realistic.”

Friends of Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity and the Fuller Center for Housing, are petitioning Congress to honor his life’s work. They’re shooting for 10,000 signatures, and as of this moment (they’ve just started) there’s only 659. So add yours. From the petition:

Following what appeared to be a routine cold and congestion, the man who spent his life envisioning a world without shacks entered just such a place with his Lord suddenly on February 3, 2009, to the unspeakable grief of his family, friends, and supporters around the world. He was buried at Koinonia Farm within 36 hours of his death as hundreds of supporters around the world flew or drove in overnight to celebrate his life.

A simple wooden grave marker made of pecan wood read, “Like he told Clarence, ‘You made it, Millard! You made it.’ Faithful to the end.”

Among other songs, those gathered sang “Happy Birthday” to Millard and steadfastly determined to carry on his life’s work until his vision of a world with no more shacks reaches completion.

Hint: the Lady is behind Door (b) …

Focus just on the big four money center banks: Citi, B of A, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan. According to this estimate, they need around $450 billion. Meanwhile, their combined market cap is only about $200 billion — and part if not all of that market cap surely represents the “Geithner put,” the hope that stockholders will in effect get a handout from the feds.

Given these numbers, it’s extremely hard to rescue these banks without either (a) giving a HUGE handout to current stockholders or (b) effectively taking ownership on the part of we, the people. Of these, (a) would be politically unacceptable as well as bad policy — but the Obama administration isn’t ready to go for (b), because it’s not in our “culture”.

Hence the perplexity of policy. Our best hope right now is that the “stress test” will make (b) inevitable — that Treasury will declare itself shocked, shocked to find that the banks are in such bad financial shape, leaving government receivership unavoidable.

As seen on Wall Street:

Many of you have been wondering how eight babies could fit into one human being. Have I got a link for you!

As Americans reading this, we must all feel terribly proud. We are merchants of death to the whole civilized world, and then some:

…Dr. Fosse was describing the effects of a U.S. “focused lethality” weapon that minimizes explosive damage to structures while inflicting catastrophic wounds on its victims. But where did the Israelis get this weapon? And was their widespread use in the attack on Gaza a field test for a new generation of explosives?

The specific weapon is called a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME). In 2000, the U.S. Air Force teamed up with the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The weapon wraps high explosives with a tungsten alloy and other metals like cobalt, nickel, or iron in a carbon fiber/epoxy container.

When the bomb explodes the container evaporates, and the tungsten turns into micro-shrapnel that is extremely lethal within a 13-foot radius. Tungsten is inert, so it doesn’t react chemically with the explosive. While a non-inert metal like aluminum would increase the blast, tungsten actually contains the explosion to a limited area.

Within the weapon’s range, however, it’s inordinately lethal. According to Norwegian doctor Mad Gilbert, the blast results in multiple amputations and “very severe fractures. The muscles are sort of split from the bones, hanging loose, and you also have quite severe burns.”

Most of those who survive the initial blast quickly succumb to septicemia and organ collapse. “Initially, everything seems in order but it turns out on operation that dozens of miniature particles can be found in all their organs,” says Dr. Jam Brommundt, a German doctor working in Kham Younis, a city in southern Gaza. “It seems to be some sort of explosive or shell that disperses tiny particles that penetrate all organs, these miniature injuries, you are not able to attack them surgically.” According to Brommundt, the particles cause multiple organ failures…

Thought this video of David Axelrod was interesting — not so much for the content but because it gave me for the first time a feeling for the man’s personality. Which seems to mix, like his boss’s, calmness with firmness.