recortes

Milton Friedman on Google Video

2006-08-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

Excelente serie realizada por el GRAN MAESTRO.

Victor Davis Hanson: Surreal Rules

2006-08-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

The difficulties of fighting in an absurdly complicated region.

David Pogue: Canon HD Camcorder

2006-08-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

El review:

David Pogue: What War?

2006-08-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

Getting Hung Up on the Apple-Microsoft War

This week, Apple revealed some of the key new features in “Leopard,” the 10.5 version of Mac OS X that’s scheduled to ship in the spring. Apple and its most die-hard fans wasted no time in comparing it with Microsoft’s own imminent new operating system, Windows Vista. One banner at Apple’s Developers’ Conference said, for example, “Hasta la vista, Vista.” Another taunted: “Redmond has a cat, too–a copycat.”

Mac fans online are fond of pointing out that in the time it took Microsoft to release *one* new Windows version, Apple has released *five* new Mac OS X versions. (Of course, they’re less vocal about the fact that they’ve dished out $650 to keep up with these updates.)

Apple and many observers also point out that Mac OS X is a *better* operating system than Windows. I’m among them, especially if we’re talking about Windows XP. Mac OS X is far more logical in structure and more refined around the edges.

And it’s certainly more secure. The Mac is essentially virus- and spyware-free–and no, not just because its market share is so small the virus writers don’t bother with it. Mac OS X had security built in from the beginning, in ways that Microsoft didn’t add until Windows Vista (like requiring your permission when a program tries to install itself).

What baffles me, though, is why people get so hung up on the Apple-Microsoft war. As far as I can tell, there *is* no real war.

See, I’m fairly resigned to Windows’s dominance. If Microsoft changed nothing in Vista but the color scheme, Windows would still be the 90 percent market-share gorilla.

Why? Because the market-share figures includes sales of computers to corporations, which buy hundreds of PC’s at a time. And the corporate world long ago standardized on Windows. It makes no difference how superior Mac OS X or Linux may be; the world’s I.T. staffs will switch their entire companies away from Windows the day Rush Limbaugh votes for Hillary Clinton.

After all, the I.T. people know where their bread is buttered. If Macs are indeed less trouble-prone and complex than Windows PC’s, they’re doomed in corporations; the last thing the I.T. guys want to do is obsolete themselves.

The only legitimate fight, therefore, is for the souls of individuals and small business owners who actually have a choice of platform–people whose computer choice is dictated by their corporate employers. But these are just market-share scraps.

Apple does seem to be winning the scraps, by the way; Macs have actually picked up a couple of points of market share recently.

But big companies will always buy Windows. In my view, the die was actually cast the day I.B.M., supplier to corporate America, chose Microsoft decades ago. And when you accept that fact, this business about an Apple-vs.-Microsoft feud for dominance looks purely symbolic.

Maybe it would be best to keep this observation secret, though. The fantasy that the marketplace is actually up for grabs does do two good things: It drives Microsoft to improve Windows, and drives Apple to continue dreaming up new directions for the desktop operating system.

(For example, I had my doubts that Apple could come up with anything in Mac OS X 10.5 with as great an impact as the Spotlight instant-search feature did in 10.4.

But Leopard will include an automatic, invisible, whole-computer backup system called Time Machine. In times of hard-drive failure or human error, it will let you rewind either your operating system or even individual documents and windows to earlier versions. Remember, fewer than five percent of us have automatic backup systems in place, so this is huge. Yes, I know there are certain third-party software programs that do something like this–there always are. But it’s quite another matter when it becomes part of the operating system.)

Followers of both camps, in other words, can save themselves a lot of ulcers if they just acknowledge a few facts:

* Microsoft gets a lot of ideas from Apple; Apple also gets ideas from Microsoft. It doesn’t matter; the most expensive lawyers in Silicon Valley have established that it’s all perfectly legal.

* Microsoft has won the market-share war, because it dominates in corporations.

* Both companies are profitable and have very long futures ahead of them.

* If market share were measured by individual buying decisions (rather than quantity of computers), Apple’s rank would be much higher.

* Even if the grand prize for the “war” is individuals, families and small businesses, the perception of a much bigger war is useful; Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard may in fact be on completely different playing fields, but they’re both looking like the best versions ever.

Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy

2006-08-10T17:19:00.000-07:00

Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe

Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb," warns the website for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. "We have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin."

Graciously, Gore tells consumers how to change their lives to curb their carbon-gobbling ways: Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a clothesline, drive a hybrid, use renewable energy, dramatically cut back on consumption. Better still, responsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.

For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Gore is not alone. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has said, "Global warming is happening, and it threatens our very existence." The DNC website applauds the fact that Gore has "tried to move people to act." Yet, astoundingly, Gore's persuasive powers have failed to convince his own party: The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.

Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.

Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.

Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.

Peter Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.

Dilema judeo-progre

2006-08-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

Cuando la realidad te baja de la nube de pedos

Gracias Kirchner...

2006-08-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

por tus sobradas muestras de hombría e independencia. Con la frente alta vas a cenar esta noche en la rosada. Me pregunto como van a poner comida en la mesa los miles de afectados por tus bravuconadas.
(Nota: Gracias también a los políticos en Washington. Voy a estar pensando en ustedes cuando pague la frutilla. Cuándo nos daremos cuenta que los castigos arancelarios los paga el consumidor?)

Food: Summertime

2006-08-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

Recetas veraniegas:

Bread salad with tomatoes and arugula

Cucumber gazpacho

California summer pudding

Copiar un cd es ilegal?

2006-08-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

Depende...

2006-08-08T23:14:00.000-07:00

How Do You Spot An Anti-Semite?..

An old joke tells the story of an elderly traveler at the Vienna train station asking passersby whether they hate Jews. After a score of indignant "No's," one fellow finally admits that, why yes, he does hate them. "Thank goodness for an honest man!" exclaims the traveler. "Would you mind looking after my bags while I run to the men's room?"

Ahorrá ese latte

2006-08-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

Do long lines for Frappuccinos really explain Starbucks' disappointing results?

Medio Oriente antes de la Segunda Guerra

2006-08-08T23:01:00.000-07:00

Excelente galería de fotos:

The Eighteenth Brumaire of the Castro Dynasty

2006-08-08T22:56:00.000-07:00

Cuba's military coup marks the end of the revolutionary era.
By Christopher Hitchens

If there had been a military coup in any other Latin American or Caribbean country, even a fairly small or obscure one, I think it safe to say that it would have made the front page of the newspapers. But the military coup in Cuba—a nation linked to ours in many vital and historic ways—has not been reported at all. Indeed, in "Castro's Younger Brother Is Focus of Attention Now," by Anthony Depalma and James C. McKinley Jr., on Page 8 of the New York Times of Aug. 3, the very possibility of such an event was even denied:
[O]ne of the most telling aspects of his career is that in the nearly five decades that Raúl Castro has led the Cuban armed forces, there has never been a coup attempt or an uprising of rank-and-file soldiers against their officers.

Thus did the newspaper of record digest the interesting novelty that the new head of government in Cuba was, in fact, the five-decade leader of the Cuban armed forces! In other words, an overt military takeover was the main evidence that these things don't happen in Havana. Perhaps Raúl Castro's accession doesn't count as a "coup attempt" (since it was successful), let alone a "rank-and-file" mutiny, but the plain fact remains that, for the first time in a Communist state since Gen. Jaruzelski seized power in Poland in 1981, the army has replaced the party as the source of authority.

The even more grotesque fact that power has passed from one 79-year-old brother to a "younger" one who is only 75 may have assisted in obscuring the obvious. So may the fact that—continuous babble about his "charisma" notwithstanding—Fidel Castro has never taken off his uniform (except for the tailored suits he dons for appearances at international conferences) since the day he took power. Even my distinction between the army and the party may be a distinction without much of a difference. Cuba has been a garrison state run by a military caudillo for most of the past half-century. More than anything, the maximum leader always based his legitimacy on his status as commander in chief. The dynastic succession of his brother only formalizes the situation. As was once said of Prussia, Cuba is not a country that has an army but an army that has a country.

Nor does this army confine itself to the stern questions of political and military power. Under the stewardship of Raúl Castro, it has extended itself to become a large stakeholder in the few areas of the Cuban economy that actually make money. A military holding company known as "La Gaviota" oversees perhaps as much as 60 percent of Cuban tourist revenues. Large farms and resorts are operated by serving and retired officers reporting to Raúl, and according to the Depalma/McKinley story, he has also "sent officers to business schools in Europe to learn capitalist management techniques."

Awareness of all this makes it the more surprising that everyone seems to have forgotten the highly charged moment in 1989 when there did appear to be an important rift within the Cuban armed forces. On June 12 of that year, Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez was placed under arrest and accused of extreme corruption, dereliction of duty, and narcotics trafficking. Ochoa was no small fry. He had belonged to the original band of guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra, was a member of the 26th of July Movement that formed the inner core of the revolution, had been among those Cuban internationalists who tried to raise the flag of revolt in Venezuela and the Congo in the 1960s, and had headed the Cuban military missions to Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua. (To mention something of which Cubans can be proud, I should add that he was prominent in the military defeat of South African forces at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987, which contributed handily to the independence of Namibia and the ultimate defeat of apartheid itself.) Perhaps he had seen too much of the outside world. Perhaps, in that year of 1989, he was one of many Cubans who saw promise in Mikhail Gorbachev's program of glasnost and perestroika. Or perhaps he was simply guilty as charged—of colluding with the Colombian drug cartels in order to enrich himself and others. We shall never really know (or then again, we may be just on the verge of finding out), because the entire interval between his arrest and his death, and those of his associates, was a matter of four short weeks. His execution by firing squad was announced—after a special court martial—on July 13, 1989.

The man who made the long, rambling speech justifying the arrest and prejudging the verdict was Raúl Castro. Awarded the sort of TV time that was normally reserved for his brother, the head of the Cuban armed forces addressed the nation for two and a half hours instead of the allotted 45 minutes (one hopes he does not now fall into the habit of doing this) and amazed many Cubans who had been brought up to think of Ochoa as "sea-green incorruptible."

The moment was a significant one, because, in general, Cuba had been able to avoid the spectacle of the Communist "show trial" that had been inaugurated by Stalin in Moscow in the 1930s and pursued in even more grotesque form in Prague, Budapest, and Sofia after World War II. The only arraignment of a "factional" group in Havana had been in the mid-1960s, and it was paradoxically directed at a bunch of Moscow-line Stalinists allegedly led by Anibal Escalante. However, the show trial of Ochoa in 1989 was not a protracted ideological inquisition. It was a swift, ruthless business that produced immediate confessions, was conducted by a military "honor court," and concluded with an expeditious death sentence. All was decided within the framework of the military high command. Perhaps that should have been a warning of what was to come.

On the "new calendar" date of 18 Brumaire in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte used his troops to seize power in Paris, proclaimed himself the nation's first consul, and soon after announced that the French revolution had come to its end. (Karl Marx's celebrated essay on "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon," lampooning a much later and lesser French monarch than Bonaparte, gave us the overused jest about the relationship between tragedy and farce.) Now the 26th of July Movement has arrived at its own belated historical terminus. The new pretender, once again, is much less flamboyant and impressive. If we cannot yet say that Castro is dead and we cannot decently say "long live" to the new-but-old Castro, we can certainly say that the Castro era is effectively finished and that a uniformed and secretive and highly commercial dictatorship is the final form that it will take.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

Housing Market May Land Harder Than Economists Predict

2006-08-08T22:47:00.000-07:00

Del WSJ:

NEW YORK -- Home prices in some parts of the country are falling. Builders are scaling back. Bubble or not, the biggest housing boom in recent U.S. history is coming to an end.

Now here is the big question: How bad will the aftermath be? At this point, most economists expect a "soft landing," a gradual decline that won't derail the nation's economic expansion, now in its fifth year.

But there is a good chance they are being too optimistic. The boom has depended heavily on the upbeat psychology of consumers, builders and lenders. As moods swing, the landing could be very hard indeed.

"We could be underestimating the dark side," says Mark Zandi, chief U.S. economist at Moody's Economy.com and among the first to seek to quantify the housing boom's broader effects. "Euphoria could turn into abject pessimism very quickly."

With each passing data point, signs of the housing slowdown grow stronger. In June, total single-family-home sales fell 8.7% from a year earlier, to an annualized rate of 6.9 million -- the sharpest year-to-year drop since April 1995.

The government's report on second-quarter real gross domestic product, the inflation-adjusted value of the nation's output, showed that fixed investment in housing by companies and individuals declined at an annual rate of 6.3% in the quarter. That was a sharp change from a year earlier, when it was increasing at an annual rate of 20%. As of Friday, futures markets were predicting about a 5% drop in house prices by May 2007.

Still, judging by most economists' forecasts, the fallout from a slowing housing market doesn't look all that unpleasant. Typically, they expect the decline in housing -- and housing-related activity -- to shave about a percentage point off inflation-adjusted GDP growth in 2007, compared with the estimated one percentage point the sector contributed to growth in 2005. If business investment and exports accelerate as expected, that would bring inflation-adjusted GDP growth to about 2.8% in 2007, down from a forecast 3.5% this year.

Economists, however, have few clues on which to base their predictions. Today's housing boom differs radically from its predecessors. For one, it has been bigger and longer-lived. House prices are still more than twice the level of 1991, when the boom began. Even after the recent decline, June's rate of home sales is 40% above the 20-year average.

Much of the recent increase has been driven by an unprecedented flood of cash into U.S. capital markets. Global demand for U.S. mortgage bonds, competition among big national lenders and the advent of exotic loans have made it easier than ever to borrow money to buy a house -- and to turn rising home values into cash.

Because the market has risen so far, economists worry it has the potential to fall much harder than their main forecasts would suggest. As Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, put it in a speech last week: "We can't ignore the risks of more unpleasant scenarios developing."

One big question is how much the housing slowdown will affect consumers, whose spending accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy. If house prices plateau or fall, homeowners will feel poorer, and thus less willing to go out and buy more cars, boats and refrigerators. Typically, this "negative wealth effect" would be only about three to five cents of spending for each dollar of wealth lost.

But modern mortgage finance has magnified the effect of home values on spending, says Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs in New York. He estimates that when people take cash out of their homes through home-equity loans and refinancings -- which they were doing at an annualized rate of $558 billion in the first quarter -- they tend to spend about 50 cents of every dollar. If house prices merely stabilize, people's diminished ability to use their houses like automated-teller machines would subtract about 0.75 percentage point from annualized GDP growth in 2007, Mr. Hatzius says.

Another question is how fast home sales, and consequently home building, can fall. Even after the second-quarter decline, investment in residential construction accounted for about 6.1% of the economy -- close to a 50-year high. If, as some economists expect, housing investment merely returns to the long-term average of about 4.6% over the next two years, the decline also would shave 0.75 percentage point from annual real GDP growth.

But there is reason to believe home builders will have to pull back more sharply. That is because the leveling off of house prices changes the equation of homeownership. When mortgage rates were less than 6% and house prices were rising at about double that rate, people could reasonably expect to make more on their house's appreciation than they would pay in interest on their mortgages. Now, though, inflation-adjusted mortgage rates -- the interest rate on a typical 30-year mortgage minus the percentage rise in home prices -- are on track to turn positive for the first time since 2001.

When housing took a similar turn in the 1970s, new-home sales quickly fell to their long-term norm. This time around, that would entail about a 50% decline in sales, says Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at consulting firm High Frequency Economics. He estimates that the resulting decline in residential construction would subtract about 1.5 percentage points from annual GDP growth in each of the next two years. "It's a 15-year bubble unwinding in two years," Mr. Shepherdson says. "It's going to hurt."

If Messrs. Hatzius and Shepherdson are both right, the effect of the housing slowdown on construction and consumer spending alone would subtract more than two percentage points from economic growth in 2007, bringing it well below 2%.

But that isn't all. Economists can't quantify some risks, including the biggest: the chance that a sharp drop in house prices -- what economists call a "disorderly downturn" -- would leave many homeowners owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. If that led to a wave of foreclosures and losses on riskier mortgage-backed securities, banks and investors could get spooked and cut back on all kinds of lending -- a move that could snuff out economic growth.

"For me, the risk of a disorderly downturn is the greater one," Mr. Hatzius says. "That's a scenario that people would worry about a lot, because typically recessions are the result of a general unwillingness to lend."

August 22

2006-08-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

Que esto venga de una eminencia de la talla de Bernard Lewis significa que es para preocuparse.

By BERNARD LEWIS
August 8, 2006

During the Cold War, both sides possessed weapons of mass destruction, but neither side used them, deterred by what was known as MAD, mutual assured destruction. Similar constraints have no doubt prevented their use in the confrontation between India and Pakistan. In our own day a new such confrontation seems to be looming between a nuclear-armed Iran and its favorite enemies, named by the late Ayatollah Khomeini as the Great Satan and the Little Satan, i.e., the United States and Israel. Against the U.S. the bombs might be delivered by terrorists, a method having the advantage of bearing no return address. Against Israel, the target is small enough to attempt obliteration by direct bombardment.

It seems increasingly likely that the Iranians either have or very soon will have nuclear weapons at their disposal, thanks to their own researches (which began some 15 years ago), to some of their obliging neighbors, and to the ever-helpful rulers of North Korea. The language used by Iranian President Ahmadinejad would seem to indicate the reality and indeed the imminence of this threat.

Would the same constraints, the same fear of mutual assured destruction, restrain a nuclear-armed Iran from using such weapons against the U.S. or against Israel?

Muhammad's night flight on Buraq.

There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran's present rulers. This worldview and expectation, vividly expressed in speeches, articles and even schoolbooks, clearly shape the perception and therefore the policies of Ahmadinejad and his disciples.

Even in the past it was clear that terrorists claiming to act in the name of Islam had no compunction in slaughtering large numbers of fellow Muslims. A notable example was the blowing up of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998, killing a few American diplomats and a much larger number of uninvolved local passersby, many of them Muslims. There were numerous other Muslim victims in the various terrorist attacks of the last 15 years.

The phrase "Allah will know his own" is usually used to explain such apparently callous unconcern; it means that while infidel, i.e., non-Muslim, victims will go to a well-deserved punishment in hell, Muslims will be sent straight to heaven. According to this view, the bombers are in fact doing their Muslim victims a favor by giving them a quick pass to heaven and its delights -- the rewards without the struggles of martyrdom. School textbooks tell young Iranians to be ready for a final global struggle against an evil enemy, named as the U.S., and to prepare themselves for the privileges of martyrdom.

A direct attack on the U.S., though possible, is less likely in the immediate future. Israel is a nearer and easier target, and Mr. Ahmadinejad has given indication of thinking along these lines. The Western observer would immediately think of two possible deterrents. The first is that an attack that wipes out Israel would almost certainly wipe out the Palestinians too. The second is that such an attack would evoke a devastating reprisal from Israel against Iran, since one may surely assume that the Israelis have made the necessary arrangements for a counterstrike even after a nuclear holocaust in Israel.

The first of these possible deterrents might well be of concern to the Palestinians -- but not apparently to their fanatical champions in the Iranian government. The second deterrent -- the threat of direct retaliation on Iran -- is, as noted, already weakened by the suicide or martyrdom complex that plagues parts of the Islamic world today, without parallel in other religions, or for that matter in the Islamic past. This complex has become even more important at the present day, because of this new apocalyptic vision.

In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time -- Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined. Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. This was at first reported as "by the end of August," but Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement was more precise.

What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to "the farthest mosque," usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead -- hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

How then can one confront such an enemy, with such a view of life and death? Some immediate precautions are obviously possible and necessary. In the long term, it would seem that the best, perhaps the only hope is to appeal to those Muslims, Iranians, Arabs and others who do not share these apocalyptic perceptions and aspirations, and feel as much threatened, indeed even more threatened, than we are. There must be many such, probably even a majority in the lands of Islam. Now is the time for them to save their countries, their societies and their religion from the madness of MAD.

Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East" (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Se alquila

2006-08-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

Visto en Luis este excelente análisis sobre el control de alquileres.

Sociología: The New Gender Divide

2006-08-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

Interesante artículo en el NYT sobre el tema.

Europe's Willful Blindness

2006-08-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

Del WSJ Europe:

BRUSSELS -- Mounir Herzallah explains how it works. Following Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, he writes in a letter published last month in the German daily Der Tagesspiegel, Hezbollah took control of his South Lebanese village, setting up missile depots in bunkers. "The social work of the Party of God consisted of building a school and a residential home on top of these bunkers. A local sheikh explained to me, laughing, that the Jews will lose no matter what -- either because rockets will be fired on them or because the international community will condemn them if they attack the depot."

And so a Lebanese Shiite now living in Berlin sets the record straight on Hezbollah. It should be common knowledge in Europe that Hezbollah is an Islamo-fascist organization bent on the destruction of Israel. But Hezbollah's cynicism in triggering the death of innocents, as seen in the current conflict in Lebanon, is matched by Europe's cynicism in closing its eyes to reality. Instead, as last week's debate in the European Parliament shows, politicians and media are once again turning Israel into a pariah state.

The fact that Hezbollah is waging a proxy war for Syria and, especially, Iran, which shares Hezbollah's genocidal intention for the Jewish state, is played down. Pictures showing Hezbollah terrorists practicing the Hitler salute are rarely shown. Similarly, reports on the current conflict seldom mention that Hezbollah is using Lebanon's population as human shields -- presenting Israel with the terrible dilemma of either not protecting its own civilians or hitting back and risking hurting Lebanese civilians. This essential context is missing in much of Europe's public debate of the war.

The killing of civilians in Qana by an Israeli missile strike is a case in point. As usual, the Israelis had warned the population to leave the village, from where 150 rockets had been launched at Israel. As usual, Hezbollah had been firing from or nearby civilian structures. And as usual, none of this played a role during last week's debate in the European Parliament. As the word "massacre" was repeated in the European press, an uninformed observer of the lawmakers' discussions would have had to conclude that Israel killed the Lebanese civilians intentionally.

For French Communist Francis Wurtz, Israel's attack on Qana was a "war crime." The Parliament President Josep Borrell, a Social Democrat from Spain, stated categorically that "no right of self-defense can justify such an act." The head of the parliament's Social Democratic group drew the only possible conclusion: "We distance ourselves from those who bear responsibility for this and call on everybody else to distance themselves as well," Martin Schulz proclaimed. Mr. Shulz called for the isolation of Israel, not the terror organization morally responsible for the carnage.

Of course, for the European Union, there are no terrorists in Lebanon. Just last week, after 213 members of the U.S. Congress asked the EU to finally add Hezbollah to its terror list, Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, once again ruled it out, citing the "sensitive situation."

It's that same lack of principles dressed up as responsible policy that turns Hezbollah's terror sponsors, Syria and Iran, into "mediators." External affairs Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said last week that "whether we like it or not, Syria is an influential player." On Thursday, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos, a former EU envoy to the Middle East, took the road to Damascus, proclaiming a diplomatic breakthrough. The Syrians are "going to exercise all their influence on Hezbollah," he said. "Both Syria and Spain believe there is no military solution." Oh, if only those war-mongering Jews were a little more like that peace-loving dictator in Damascus, one could almost hear Mr. Moratinos sigh. The Spanish newspaper El Economista reported Friday that the Syrians denied having given any such promise of influencing Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy chatted up Tehran. Before heading into talks with his Iranian counterpart last week, the Frenchman had this to say about the state that wants to wipe Israel off the map: "In the region there is of course a country such as Iran -- a great country, a great people and a great civilization which is respected and which plays a stabilizing role in the region." Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, obviously pleased that his "stabilizing" ideas had found an appreciative audience, immediately reoffered his solution of the Middle East crisis -- the destruction of Israel. "Unacceptable," Mr. Douste-Blazy said. But then what? "Unacceptable" might be an appropriate adjective for lecturing your teenage son who just flunked his math test -- but as condemnation of threatened policide?

While Europe has no problem issuing disproportionate criticism of Israel's actions, it hews to a different standard for Jerusalem's mortal enemies. The idea that flattery might talk Iran or Hezbollah out of their raison d'être -- the destruction of Israel -- is criminally naïve. Such servility only serves to embolden them.

The same goes for calls for an immediate cease-fire. It is particularly perplexing that the French would have pushed for this during negotiations for the United Nations Security Council draft resolution announced over the weekend. After all, Paris will likely lead an international force for South Lebanon after such a truce.

The two positions seem mutually exclusive. If the French really want to send a robust force, one that would go after any Hezbollah cease-fire violations, they must have every interest in seeing the Israelis first finish the job to limit the risks to their own soldiers. This means either their calls for an immediate cease-fire were dishonest or the Israelis shouldn't get their hopes up that the new troops, should they ever arrive, would be much different from the current U.N. forces, which only monitor Hezbollah attacks without stopping them.

Above all, the EU tends to forget that this is not just Israel's war. Iranian missiles, possibly soon tipped with nuclear warheads, can reach parts of the Continent. It's in Europe's vital own interests that the mullahs in Tehran and South Lebanon be defeated in this fight.

Mr. Schwammenthal edits the State of the Union column.

Wikipedia

2006-08-04T12:52:00.000-07:00

Artículo en "The Atlantic Online" sobre Wikipedia

Max Boot: Messed Up Are the Peacemakers

2006-08-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

Otra buena columna del hawk del L.A. Times

Islam and Rape

2006-08-03T09:30:00.000-07:00

Women who are raped can face legal difficulties anywhere in the world. And nowhere is that more true than in the Muslim world, where a few countries -- including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan -- still incarcerate or execute raped women. Now Pakistan has a chance to set an example and change this despicable practice.

We're referring to "Hudood," a set of Quranic laws whose name is derived from "hud," meaning "punishment." While national versions differ, most Hudood laws legalize the prosecution of a woman for fornication if she cannot prove a crime was committed. In Pakistan, four Muslim men must have witnessed the event, and testify for the victim. If the woman can't produce those witnesses, she can be prosecuted for alleging a false crime. Penalties include stoning to death, lashing or prison.

Pakistan's Hudood laws were enacted under former President Zia ul-Haq in 1979, in his attempt to appease growing Islamist sentiment. In contrast to Indonesia and Malaysia, which have Hudood laws but essentially ignore them, Pakistan's laws have been enforced. Stoning and lashing are rare, but more than 2,000 Pakistani women now languish in jail, at last count, for Hudood violations.

Reforming Hudood is one of President Pervez Musharraf's most formidable challenges. Pakistan's hardline Islamic political parties, including the six-party religious opposition coalition that controls 60 of 342 seats in the National Assembly, are vehemently opposed to repeal or revisions to Hudood. Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest Islamist party in the coalition, has been particularly vocal.

A Muslim himself who sits atop a fragile political coalition, General Musharraf has already taken some action. Last month, he issued a decree that made 1,300 women awaiting trial on Hudood violations eligible for bail. To date, only about 300 have been released. This month the National Assembly is expected to review further amendments. The issue is so divisive that the law ministry won't publicly disclose details of the amendments, for fear the opposition will kill the proposal before it gets to parliament.

The government has a good case to press. According to official statistics, about 80% of the women currently in prison were convicted under Hudood laws. It's thought that thousands of rapes go unreported each year for fear of arrest or retribution. In March, 1,000 women demonstrated outside of parliament in Islamabad, demanding Hudood's repeal, while some 5,000 also rallied in Multan, a city in eastern Punjab. Among the latter rally's leaders was Mukthar Mai, who was gang-raped in 2002 by order of a village council as retribution for her 13-year-old brother's illicit affair with a woman of a higher caste. The event embarrassed Pakistan internationally and ignited a movement to repeal the law.

Mr. Musharraf must balance the wishes of Pakistan's hardline Islamic parties and the country's more moderate elements. Pakistan's nonreligious political parties command about 80% of the popular vote and represent a younger generation, who presumably are less concerned about punishments prescribed a thousand years ago than with democratic, fair policies. In revamping its Hudood laws, Pakistan has a chance to set an example for its Muslim peers.

2006-08-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

Esta (y del NYTimes nada menos) no es la primera referencia que veo sobre el tema. Israel con los ataques en el norte está preparando el terreno para impedir que Irán siga adelante con su ambición nuclear.

Books

2006-07-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Riches, By Benjamin Friedman

Taco Fiesta

2006-07-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

The perfect taco technique

Heat Wave

2006-07-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

Tanto escándalo por un poco de calor? Esto es moco y pavo comparado con un verano "tranqui" en Tucumán...

Teta v. fórmula

2006-07-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Fórmula: el nuevo cigarrillo?

iRegulation

2006-07-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

Buena columna sobre los problemas legales de Apple en Francia.

Globe-Trotter

2006-07-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

Del WSJ de hoy:

Axis of Hugo

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez is on a two-week tour du monde that began with a visit to Che Guevara's boyhood home in Argentina and will, after several stops, reach a climax alongside Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. This is more than just an itinerary; it's a kind of AAA guide through the world's rogue regimes and anti-Americans.

So it was no surprise that in London Mr. Chávez skipped Tony Blair. Instead, he paid a visit to London Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone, an ostensible progressive who finds common ground with firebrand Islamist clerics. Next up was scenic Belarus, the last full-blown dictatorship in Europe, which Mr. Chávez praised as a "model of a social state." Then on to Moscow, where he plans to squander his country's oil wealth on 30 advanced jet fighters and a license to build Kalashnikov assault rifles back home. Mr. Chávez has publicly fantasized about using the fighters to take out a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Caribbean. That's implausible, given how the U.S. would respond if he tried. But Venezuela's neighbors have plenty to fear from his Kalashnikovs.

As for Iran, this will be Mr. Chávez's fifth visit. Maybe he likes the food. Already Caracas and Tehran have cemented an alliance that goes beyond anti-American posturing and oil politics to include military exchanges, according to press reports. Who knows where the madcap Venezuelan will turn up next, but we'll lay odds that Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea are all high on his 50-dictatorships-to-see-before-I'm-deposed" list.

2006-07-25T15:30:00.000-07:00

PANFRIED CHICKEN BREASTS WITH OREGANO GARLIC BUTTER

Fidel en la Argentina

2006-07-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Insólito tributo a un dictador.

2006-07-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

Food: Zucchini

2006-07-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Interesante punto de vista de un columnista del WSJ sobre la situación en el Líbano. Me quedo con esta frase:

For France, the U.S. and the U.K., it would, of course, be tremendously embarrassing to recognize that they made a gigantic error in expelling Syria without having put anything its place, thus leaving a vacuum of power in Lebanon that Hezbollah has exploited. (A new principle of statecraft thus emerges: It is a mistake to follow the French even when they are right.)

2006-07-24T23:50:00.000-07:00

Gran debate entre liberales cuando de política exterior se trata. Lejos de ser novedoso, éste es un tema que siempre ha dividido a los liberales (libertarios en algunos ámbitos).

Veo dos posturas contrapuestas: idealistas y realistas.

Los idealistas se aferran a los principios con los que estructuran todo su pensamiento político, desconfiando por lo tanto del ser colectivo encarnado en el estado. Los realistas en cambio piensan que en las relaciones entre estados soberanos, al no haber un ordenamiento superior al que pueda recurrirse en busca de justicia (la ONU es un chiste de mal gusto), y al ser la fuerza el factor decisivo en esta relación-fricción, es preferible darle al estado los recursos y el poder necesario para asegurar la preeminencia de su sistema de valores en el orden internacional.

Me cuento entre los realistas. Creo que los idealistas olvidan que el grado de libertad logrado por la civilización occidental no es un regalo de Dios a la civilización europea, sino el resultado de costosas e interminables luchas contra el primitivo instinto de dominación y acumulación de poder.

La diferencia:

2006-07-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

Mientras algunos intentan maximizar la cantidad de víctimas civiles...

otros...

Israel continued to drop leaflets warning residents of southern Lebanon to leave their homes.

Todavía no me decido en cual lado están los buenos.

Patience is Wearing Thin

2006-07-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

Muy buen artículo de Victor Davis Hanson

2006-07-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

No se pierdan este articulo. Es increible lo que puede hacer una pastilla. Pensar que hay tanta gente que se automedica con estas cosas todo el tiempo. De terror.

2006-07-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Max Boot sugiere: Let Israel Take Off The Gloves

Arithmetic of Pain

2006-07-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

Excelente artículo en la columna de opinión del WSJ de hoy:

Israel has its air force, nuclear facilities and large army bases in locations as remote as anything can be in that country. It is possible for an enemy to attack Israeli military targets without inflicting "collateral damage" on its civilian population. Hezbollah and Hamas, by contrast, deliberately operate military wings out of densely populated areas. They launch antipersonnel missiles with ball-bearing shrapnel, designed by Syria and Iran to maximize civilian casualties, and then hide from retaliation by living among civilians. If Israel decides not to go after them for fear of harming civilians, the terrorists win by continuing to have free rein in attacking civilians with rockets. If Israel does attack, and causes civilian casualties, the terrorists win a propaganda victory: The international community pounces on Israel for its "disproportionate" response. This chorus of condemnation actually encourages the terrorists to operate from civilian areas.

While Israel does everything reasonable to minimize civilian casualties -- not always with success -- Hezbollah and Hamas want to maximize civilian casualties on both sides. Islamic terrorists, a diplomat commented years ago, "have mastered the harsh arithmetic of pain. . . . Palestinian casualties play in their favor and Israeli casualties play in their favor."

Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall

2006-07-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

Recorrida el fin de semana por mi edificio favorito de la ciudad.

2006-07-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

2006-07-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

Radio

2006-07-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

Excelente selección musical de David Byrne aquí (requiere iTunes). Cambia todos los meses, julio es mes de clásicos americanos de las primeras décadas del siglo XX interpretado por una gran variedad de artistas.

World War III?

2006-07-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

Comenzó verdaderamente el 11 de setiembre del 2001.
Pero es quizás en estos dias cuando esta materializandose el conflicto armado de gran envergadura. Irán viene demostrando desde hace ya varios meses su voluntad de liderar el bando opuesto a occidente. Israel y Estados Unidos están esperando el "Pearl Harbor" que justifique a ojos del mundo la gran incursión en tierras de los mullahs. Europa, a pesar de sus idas y venidas, es el corazón de occidente y no hay dudas que llegado el momento va a participar activamente del conflicto.
Me pregunto si Argentina habrá aprendido de los errores de la segunda guerra mundial. Me pregunto si esta vez estará del lado de la historia, o si se convertirá en el paraíso que alguna vez fue para los nazis. Sus amigos de hoy no me dan muchas esperanzas. Pero nuestra historia está mas cerca de occidente, y además, dos veces en los noventa hemos vivido en carne propia el terrorismo islamo-fascista. Qué momento, la verdad.

States of Terror

2006-07-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

Muy buen articulo en la editorial del WSJ de hoy sobre este nuevo conflicto. Es necesario llegar a la raiz del problema: Siria e Iran.

UPDATE:
Interesante punto de vista en el blog de la revista Foreign Policy:

"Iran, of course, has long bankrolled Hezbollah, and the Israeli government said yesterday it feared the two kidnapped soldiers were being taken to Tehran. But Syria is the nexus of regional instability, giving shelter to several of the most intransigent Palestinian militants, transferring arms to Hezbollah, and undermining Lebanon’s frail sovereignty.

Israel can brutalize Lebanon all it wants, but unless something is done to stop Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, from exporting instability to buttress his despotic regime, little will change."

Presidente sensible

2006-07-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

Nuestro presidente da claras muestras de sensibilidad. El domingo le tenia pena a los periodistas. Hoy son los radicales los que le dan pena.
Espero que algun dia le de pena la pobreza y la mediocridad que esta generando su regimen.
Es una verguenza este mamarracho de presidente de los argentinos.

Ethanol

2006-07-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

Carta abierta de Lula en el WSJ de hoy. Este podria ser un golpe muy duro a nuestros amigos de la edad de piedra en el medio oriente.

Save the Pakistani

2006-07-13T17:21:00.000-07:00

This commentary by John Baden nicely sums up the economic way of thinking about global warming. Baden cares more about Pakistanis than we do about polar bears. I suspect many will find the economist's way of thinking peculiar. But it surely is not heartless.

Los paises mas felices del planeta

2006-07-13T10:29:00.000-07:00

De "La Gaceta" de Tucuman

La Gaceta, el diario mas mediocre que uno puede imaginar, reproduce esta nota de Reuters. Este diario, que de vez en cuando reporta otras cosas ademas de la vida de Britney Spears, elige esta de miles de noticias para su tapa hoy.
Y vaya una mencion especial a los horrores gramaticales ("los ciudadanos... son los mas contentos") Muchacho, a colgar el cartel "Ce nezecitan heditores"

El país más feliz del planeta es una isla del Pacífico

Según un estudio que mide el bienestar, los habitantes de Vanuatu son los más contentos en la tierra. Argentina ocupa el puesto número 46.

Un índice que mide la felicidad de los habitantes en 178 países reveló que varias islas tropicales están entre las naciones más felices del planeta.

El Indice de Planeta Feliz, que contempla los niveles de consumo, expectativa de vida y felicidad, señaló que los ciudadanos de la pequeña isla de Vanuatu (en el Océano Pacífico) son los más contentos en la tierra.

El estudio -adelantado por el centro de investigación New Economics Foundation- mostró a Colombia en el segundo lugar y a varias otras naciones latinoamericanas en los primeros peldaños.

La nación más feliz de la tierra, según este índice, tiene una población de 209.000 personas y su economía gira alrededor de la agricultura a pequeña escala y el turismo.

Nic Marks, uno de los autores del estudio, sostuvo que el objetivo del trabajo es que el buen vivir no dedería estar conectado con los altos niveles de consumo.

Para Marks, el estudio reveló cómo podemos lograr vidas largas y felices para todos al tiempo que respetamos el medio ambiente.

Entre los primeros diez países del índice se ubican 7 naciones latinoamericanas (Colombia, Costa Rica, Panamá, Cuba, Honduras, Guatemala y El Salvador) y dos naciones del Caribe angloparlante (Dominica y San Vicente y las Granadinas).

Vanuatu es el único país de esa pequeña lista que no se ubica en el Hemisferio Occidental.

Según el índice, los países de alto consumo no aparecen muy arriba en la lista de naciones felices.

Por el contrario, muchas de las naciones más desarrolladas aparecen en puestos inferiores en la lista de 178 naciones, como Alemania en el puesto 81, Japón en el 95, y Estados Unidos en el puesto 150.

En ese sentido, Simon Bullock, coordinador económico de la organización no gubernamental británica Friends of the Earth, sostuvo que el informe probaba que la felicidad no tenía que ser lograda al costo del deterioro ambiental.

"La economía británica absorbe grandes cantidades de los recursos escasos del mundo, pero los ciudadanos británicos no son más felices que los colombianos, quienes usan muchos menos recursos", aseguró Bullock. (Télam)

Hace falta agregar algo a este absurdo total? Colombia numero 2?
Alguien por favor vaya a parar a los cubanos que se tiran en un neumatico al oceano, que sepan de este articulo. Y espero que las autoridades de los paises felices actuen con prudencia y pongan limites antes que las embajadas latinoamericanas esten abarrotadas de yanquis y europeos trantando de conseguir una visa al paraiso.

Why Do They Hate Us?

2006-07-13T09:29:00.000-07:00

Luis Opinador nos remite a este excelente articulo de Sowell. Muy vigente hoy mas que nunca, cuando el medio oriente es una caldera a punto de explotar.

Private Foreign Aid

2006-07-12T13:30:00.000-07:00

The LATimes has a superb set of articles on remittances, it focuses not just on remittances from the U.S. to Mexico but also from Japan to the Phillipines, Italy to Kenya and Florida to Haiti.

An Easier Way to Send Large Email Attachments

2006-07-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

An Easier Way to Send Large Email Attachments

Free Application Helps To Avoid Clogging Inboxes; Speeds Still Might Vary

99 Essential L.A. Restaurants

2006-07-11T17:25:00.000-07:00

Review del gran Jonathan Gold

The Immigration Equation

2006-07-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Excelente articulo en el NYT del domingo sobre inmigracion:

All things being equal, more foreigners and indeed more people of any stripe do not mean either lower wages or higher unemployment. If they did, every time a baby was born, every time a newly minted graduate entered the work force, it would be bad news for the labor market. But it isn't. Those babies eat baby food; those graduates drive automobiles.

Texto completo aqui:

Por lo menos, asi lo vi yo...

2006-07-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

Final del mundial. Ultimo post sobre el tema: el balance.

Mejor equipo: Francia.

Mejor jugador: Zidane.

Mejor partido: España - Francia.

Mejor gol: Segundo gol de Argentina a Serbia y Montenegro.

Mayor decepcion: Inglaterra.

Lo peor: la reticencia de la FIFA al uso de la tecnologia en jugadas dudosas.

Ataque a los medios: corriendo el eje del debate

2006-07-10T11:37:00.000-07:00

Por Roberto Cachanosky
En lugar de poner el foco en lo importante y discutir la constitucionalidad y la legitimidad de los Decretos de Necesidad y Urgencia, esta semana los argentinos nos distrajimos con las diatribas del presidente y su mujer hacia los periodistas y los medios de comunicación.

Los productores de carne deben estar contentos porque las diatribas del presidente contra la supuesta oligarquía vacuna quedaron, por el momento, en la historia. Es que luego de embestir contra los productores de carne, Néstor Kirchner se lanzó contra los militares, los que ahora parecen tener un pequeño respiro porque el que sigue en la fila es el periodismo, mientras Tabaré Vázquez también tiene ya una semanas de vacaciones de las agresiones del gobierno argentino.

Ir cambiando de enemigo parece ser una cuestión central en el gobierno de Kirchner para no aburrir a la gente. En realidad, aburre con tanta pelea, aunque trata de hacer menos monótona su letanía cambiando permanentemente de adversario. Al igual que en los casos anteriores, la ausencia de una sólida formación intelectual en la pareja presidencial (al igual que en muchos otros dirigentes políticos) determinó que resultara verdaderamente patético escuchar al presidente hablar de la libertad de prensa. Dijo Kirchner hablándole a los periodistas: “Si tiene que haber libertad de prensa, ejerzan la libertad de prensa, independientemente de lo que piense el dueño del medio en el que trabajan”. Realmente es curiosa la propuesta de Kirchner a los periodistas porque la independencia que les reclama no se condice con su propia intolerancia hacia quienes lo acompañan en su gestión. No veo cómo puede Kirchner hacer compatible esta exigencia de que los periodistas digan lo que quieran independientemente de lo que piense el dueño del medio que los emplea con sus sanciones a todos aquellos funcionarios que se apartan del discurso oficial.A su compañero de fórmula Daniel Scioli lo crucificó públicamente cuando éste dio su libre opinión sobre las tarifas de los servicios públicos. A Roberto Lavagna le pidió la renuncia cuando el ex ministro habló de sobreprecios en las obras públicas y fue a una reunión de IDEA sin la autorización presidencial. A una diputada de su partido, el Frente por la Victoria, la removió de la presidencia de una comisión en la Cámara de Diputados cuando ésta no estuvo de acuerdo con la política ganadera que aplica el Gobierno. Y ni qué hablar de los resonados casos de José “Pepe” Eliaschev y otros periodistas que trabajaban en medios de comunicación estatales.

Si el comportamiento de Kirchner no coincide con sus expresiones sobre la libertad de expresión que él reclama, más grave aún es el hecho de que reniegue del hecho de que los dueños de los medios de comunicación son los que arriesgan sus capitales para llevar a cabo un proyecto y tienen derecho a establecer una línea editorial determinada. Nada le impide a un periodista que trabaja en un medio privado irse de ese medio si no coincide con la línea editorial y arriesgar su propio capital para defender las ideas que sustenta. En otras palabras, no se le puede pedir al dueño de un medio de comunicación que arriesgue su capital, administre la empresa y la mantenga viva para que sus periodistas digan lo que quieran, incluso contrariando los ideales que pueden defender los dueños de un medio. Por lo tanto, Kirchner confunde libertad de expresión con financiamiento de esa libertad de expresión. Todo el mundo tiene que tener el derecho a expresar sus ideas sin censura previa, pero nadie tiene derecho a que otro ponga su propia plata para que él diga lo que le venga en gana. Nadie tiene derecho a exigirle a un tercero que le financie gratis la difusión de sus ideas, máxime si esas ideas no coinciden con las del dueño del medio.

En el caso particular de Kirchner, la situación es mucho peor, porque, como decía antes, el dueño de un medio de comunicación tiene todo el derecho a establecer la línea editorial que desea para su medio porque él es el que arriesga su capital. En cambio, Kirchner practica la intolerancia en la libertad de expresión utilizando un instrumento del cual no es el dueño, o no debería comportarse como si lo fuera. Me estoy refiriendo al Estado. Los medios de comunicación estatales no son propiedad del gobierno de turno, sin embargo, sus seguidores los utilizan como si fueran tales. Y no olvidemos los fondos públicos (que provienen de los impuestos que pagan los contribuyentes) y son utilizados arbitrariamente por el Gobierno para hacer publicidad oficial en los medios que son complacientes con su política.

De todas maneras, si algo han logrado Kirchner y su esposa en esta semana, fue correr el eje del debate. La realidad es que en vez de estar discutiendo la constitucionalidad y la legitimidad de los Decretos de Necesidad y Urgencia (DNU) y los superpoderes, se terminó discutiendo la libertad de expresión y los ataques del matrimonio Kirchner a los medios de comunicación.

Que el Congreso le otorgue poderes dictatoriales a Kirchner es tanto o más grave que su intolerancia contra los medios de comunicación. Con la cortina de humo de este tema, Kirchner logra esconder el fondo del debate, que es la destrucción del sistema republicano y la clara amenaza a la libertad de votar.

Si uno analiza la línea de argumentación para exigir poderes dictatoriales expresamente prohibidos por la Constitución, se va a encontrar con argumentos intelectualmente tan pobres como el de sostener que otros presidentes los utilizaron o, incluso, que algunos gobernadores hicieron uso de ellos. Esto no es debatir las ventajes o desventajas de los DNU, esto es sostener que si el otro lo hizo –aunque haya hecho mal las cosas– yo también tengo derecho a hacerlo. Hasta ahora, no ha sido demostrado que la suma de dos males sea igual a un bien.

La pobreza intelectual que impera en el Gobierno quedó, asimismo, en evidencia cuando sus funcionarios sostuvieron que necesitan los superpoderes para poder administrar eficientemente, como si la arbitrariedad en el manejo de los fondos públicos fuera sinónimo de eficiencia.

En definitiva, detrás de todo este barullo hay un claro debate que se está planteando: república vs. dictadura. El gobierno de Kirchner ha dado acabadas muestras de su desprecio por la idea de un gobierno limitado y sujeto a la ley, y lo que en última instancia está intentando es tratar de justificar su deseo de establecer un gobierno autoritario. Inventar permanentemente supuestos enemigos termina siendo funcional a su reclamo de poderes absolutos. Encolumnar a la gente detrás de él en la lucha contra el mal no es más que una vieja táctica de los gobiernos autoritarios para conseguir el apoyo incondicional de la población en el proceso de destrucción de la república. Para ello, necesitan promover proyectos destructivos en vez de proyectos constructivos, y sólo los intelectualmente mediocres o aquellos que no tienen los más mínimos principios morales están dispuestos a justificar y defender cualquier disparate contra el sistema republicano de gobierno.

Mi pronostico (y deseo) para manana...

2006-07-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

Llega el final del mes que tanto espere. Fue un mundial maravilloso.
Para mi no hay dudas que llegan a Berlin los dos mejores equipos del mundial.

Que gane el mejor.

Si tengo que arriesgar un resultado, aqui va: creo que Francia va a llevarse la copa. Porque fue de menor a mayor, porque tiene el mejor jugador de los ultimos tiempos, porque dejo en el camino a los pesos pesados.

Feliz final de copa del mundo!

Constitucion descartable

2006-07-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

No podemos tener un pais serio si estas cosas siguen ocurriendo y a nadie se le mueve un pelo. El personalismo, el caudillismo, el perpetuo avasallamiento de las instituciones republicanas a manos del gobernante de turno -especialmente en el interior de la Argentina- son una constante que no podemos superar. El dia que dejemos atras esta primitiva y autoritaria forma de hacer politica vamos a dar un paso muy grande en el camino (largo para nosotros) a la civilizacion.

Crisis constitucional en Tucumán
Como sucede en el nivel nacional con la nueva integración del Consejo de la Magistratura, que viola la exigencia expresa de equilibrio establecida por la Constitución nacional, la independencia y la imparcialidad del Poder Judicial también están gravemente amenazadas en la provincia de Tucumán.

El deseo de algunos dirigentes políticos de contar con jueces cercanos y leales, que eventualmente garanticen algún grado de impunidad operativa, parece estar contagiando a nuestra clase política en todos los niveles. Esto ocurre sin que la ciudadanía, aparentemente, advierta la enorme gravedad que implica, pues erosiona nuestras debilitadas estructuras republicanas basadas en la división de los poderes y en la noción de responsabilidad de los gobernantes. También pone en peligro las libertades civiles y políticas, y hasta la vigencia de los derechos humanos, expuestos a la arbitrariedad de quienes ocupan el poder público.

La reciente reforma constitucional en la provincia de Tucumán no sólo dispone en su artículo 90 que el gobernador y el vicegobernador pueden ser reelegidos -como era el deseo y objetivo central del cambio impulsado por el mandatario José Alperovich-, sino que también el Consejo Asesor de la Magistratura, organismo encargado de designar mediante un dictamen vinculante a los jueces de primera instancia, de las cámaras, los defensores y los fiscales, será en más organizado por el Poder Ejecutivo.

Esto supone hipotecar la independencia e imparcialidad de los jueces y conferir un inaceptable cheque en blanco en favor del circunstancial gobernador, lo cual ha provocado la reacción de algunos magistrados y hasta del propio Colegio de Abogados local. Ellos han cuestionado la reciente reforma constitucional en los estrados judiciales y han defendido de manera ejemplar y digna su independencia profesional frente a cuanto se muestra como un desafío a los principios republicanos.

Por esta razón, la Sala II de la Cámara en lo Contencioso Administrativo de Tucumán acaba de ordenar al gobierno provincial que suspenda la aplicación del decreto por el cual integró rápidamente el sospechoso Consejo de la Magistratura local, hasta tanto se resuelva el planteo legal formulado por el Colegio de Abogados tucumano, que busca la declaración de inconstitucionalidad del referido decreto. Una decisión judicial valiente y oportuna, que procura, con razón, evitar lo que pretende el Ejecutivo provincial, es decir, el hecho consumado. Así, los abogados de Tucumán han salido en defensa del principio central de la independencia e imparcialidad de la Justicia, que no debe ser nuevamente avasallado desde la política.

El avance sobre la Justicia y la habilitación de una cláusula de reelección indefinida conseguida por el gobernador Alperovich son una burla al equilibrio de poderes y un ataque a las instituciones republicanas.

Receta: Broiled Goat Cheese with Pumpkin Seed Sauce

2006-07-06T17:30:00.000-07:00

3/4 cup hulled pepitas
1 cup tomatillos
1/2 bunch epazote
1/4 bunch cilantro, stemmed
1/4 bunch parsley, stemmed
3 cloves garlic
1/2 jalapeno chile
1 to 2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 to 2 cups vegetable broth

3 tablespoons oil
1 pound goat cheese
tortilla chips

To prepare the sauce, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spread the pepitas on a baking sheet and toast, stirring occasionally, for 10 to 15 minutes, until evenly browned. Soak the tomatillos in cold water for a few minutes, the peel off and discard the husks. Place the pepitas, tomatillos, epazote, cilantro, parsley, garlic, jalapeno, and salt in a blender.

Add 1 cup of the broth and blend on high speed until a slightly lumpy puree is achieved. Thin with another cup of broth if necessary to fully blend, but try to use as little broth as possible (hs note: 1 cup was fine to this point)

Place a large straight-sided skillet or frying pan over high heat and add the oil. When the oil is hot, add the sauce, stirring to prevent spattering. Decrease the heat to medium and simmer for about 1 hour, stirring frequently and adjusting the consistency with broth when it gets thick and starts to spatter (hs note: I only ended up cooking it down for 30 minutes, and used another 1/2 cup or so of water). Check and adjust the seasoning with salt as necessary. Keep hot if using right away, or transfer to a container to cool. The sauce can be covered and refrigerated for 3 to 4 days.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Separate the goat cheese into 4 portions, and form each into a 1-inch-thick patty (this thickness allows the patties to bake quickly and evenly). Place the patties in individual 4-inch ramekins and bake for 3 to 5 minutes, until the cheese softens but still holds its shape. Carefully remove from the oven and ladle with the sauce over the cheese in a 1/2-inch layer. Serve immediately with the tortilla chips.

Serves 4 for lunch or 8 as an appetizer.

The fraud of primitive authenticity

2006-07-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

By Spengler

Two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples, according to anthropologist Lawrence H Keeley, who calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of its population to war each year.

This and other noteworthy prehistoric factoids can be found in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, a survey of genetic, linguistic and archeological research on early man. Primitive peoples, it appears, were nasty, brutish, and short, not at all the cuddly children of nature depicted by popular culture and post-colonial academic studies. The author writes on science for the New York
Times and too often wades in where angels fear to tread. A complete evaluation is beyond my capacity, but there is no gainsaying his representation of prehistoric violence.

That raises the question: Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, does popular culture portray primitives as peace-loving folk living in harmony with nature, as opposed to rapacious and brutal civilization? Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which attributes civilization to mere geographical accident, made a best-seller out of a mendacious apology for the failure of primitive society. Wade reports research that refutes Diamond on a dozen counts, but his book never will reach the vast audience that takes comfort in Diamond's pulp science.

Why is it that the modern public revels in a demonstrably false portrait of primitive life? Hollywood grinds out stories of wise and worthy native Americans, African tribesmen, Brazilian rainforest people and Australian Aborigines, not because Hollywood studio executives hired the wrong sort of anthropologist, but because the public pays for them, the same public whose middle-brow contingent reads Jared Diamond.

Nonetheless the overwhelming consensus in popular culture holds that primitive peoples enjoy a quality - call it authenticity - that moderns lack, and that by rolling in their muck, some of this authenticity will stick to us. Colonial guilt at the extermination of tribal societies does not go very far as an explanation, for the Westerners who were close enough to primitives to exterminate them rarely regretted having done so. The hunger for authenticity surges up from a different spring.

European civilization arose by stamping out the kind of authenticity that characterizes primitive peoples. It is a construct, not a "natural" development. One of the great puzzles of prehistory is the proliferation of languages. Linguists believe, for credible reasons too complex to review here, that present-day languages descend from a small number of early prototypes, and splintered into many thousands of variants. Wade says:

This variability is extremely puzzling given that a universal, unchanging language would seem to be the most useful form of communication. That language has evolved to be parochial, not universal, is surely no accident. Security would have been far more important to early human societies than ease of communication with outsiders. Given the incessant warfare between early human groups, a highly variable language would have served to exclude outsiders and to identify strangers the moment they opened their mouths.

What brought about civilization, that is, large-scale communication and political organization? Conquest is too simple an explanation. We have from Latin five national languages and dozens of dialects, but no comparable development out of the Greek of the earlier Alexandrian empire. Latin and its offshoots dominated Europe because Latin was the language of the Church. The invaders who replenished the depopulated territories of the ruined Roman Empire, Goths, Vandals and Celts, learned in large measure dialects of Latin because Christianity made them into Europeans.

Even in Christianity's darkest hours, when the Third Reich reduced the pope to a prisoner in the Vatican and the European peoples turned the full terror of Western technology upon one another, they managed to kill a small fraction of the numbers that routinely and normally fell in primitive warfare.

Native Americans, Eskimos, New Guinea Highlanders as well as African tribes slaughtered one another with skill and vigor, frequently winning their first encounters with modern armed forces. "Even in the harshest possible environments [such as northwestern Alaska] where it was struggle enough just to keep alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of killing one another," Wade notes.

A quarter of the language groups in New Guinea, home to 1,200 of the world's 6,000 languages, were exterminated by warfare during every preceding century, according to one estimate Wade cites. In primitive warfare "casualty rates were enormous, not the least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent's society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death, and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before eating them."

However badly civilized peoples may have behaved, the 100 million or so killed by communism and the 50 million or so killed by National Socialism seem modest compared with the 2 billion or so who would have died if the casualty rates of primitive peoples had applied to the West. The verdict is not yet in, to be sure. One is reminded of the exchange between Wednesday Addams (played by the young Christina Ricci in the 1993 film Addams Family Values) and a girl at summer camp, who asks, "Why are you dressed like someone died?" to which Wednesday replies, "Wait!"

Guiding the warlike inclinations of primitive peoples is genetic kinship, and the micro-cultures (such as dialect) that attend it. Christianity called out individuals from the nations, and gave them a new birth through baptism in a new people, whose earthly pilgrimage led to the Kingdom of God. Christians began with contempt for the flesh of their own origins; post-Christians envy the "authenticity" of the peoples who never were called out from the nations, for they have left the pilgrimage in mid-passage and do not know where they are or where they should go.

It is difficult to be a Christian, for the faith that points to the Kingdom of God conflicts with the Gentile flesh whence Christians come; but it is oppressive, indeed intolerable to be an ex-Christian, for it is all the harder to trace one's way back. Europeans have less difficulty, for the Italians never quite gave up their pagan gods whom the Church admitted as saints, and the Germans never quite gave up their heathen religion, which lived on as a substratum of myth and magic beneath the veneer of Christianity.

If the United States of America is the Christian nation par excellence - as I have argued on numerous occasions - then the predicament of an American ex-Christian is especially miserable. Americans do not have close at hand the Saints Days of Italian villages incorporating heathen practice predating Rome, or the Elf-ridden forest of the German north celebrated in Romantic poetry. They have suburban housing developments and strip malls, urban forests of steel and glass, Hollywood and Graceland, but nothing "authentic".

An overpowering nostalgia afflicts the American post-Christian, for whom the American journey has neither goal nor purpose. He seeks authenticity in nature and in the dead customs of peoples who were subject to nature, that is, peoples who never learned from the Book of Genesis that the heavenly bodies were lamps and clocks hung in the sky for the benefit of man. Even more: in their mortality, the post-Christian senses his own mortality, for without the Kingdom of God as a goal, American life offers only addictive diversions interrupted by ever-sharper episodes of anxiety.

With 90% of the world's more than 6,000 languages likely to disappear during the next hundred years, the search for authenticity will turn from an exercise in frustration into a source of horror. For those upon whom mortality weighs heavily, the object lessons in mortality from the disappearing peoples of the world will be a terrifying form of instruction indeed.

Will Mexico 'Jump to the Top'?

2006-07-06T10:22:00.000-07:00

By ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA

It is now almost certain, as of this writing, that Felipe Calderón, the center-right candidate of the National Action Party in Mexico's presidential election, has beaten Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-wing candidate of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, by a tiny margin.

The optimistic view is that Mr. López Obrador was gloriously defeated by Mr. Calderón, a modernizing reformer. But pessimists will point out that a third of all Mexicans voted for Mr. López Obrador, and between a fifth and a quarter for the center-left PRI (the third party in the race). This means that the majority remains divided between the kind of left-wing populism that has kept Mexico underdeveloped -- now represented by Mr. López Obrador -- and the PRI, a complex system of vested interests responsible for blocking every attempt at reform made by President Vicente Fox over the last six years. Both optimists and pessimists have a point.

Indigenous mythology and Western-style social utopianism -- of the kind that pits good revolutionaries against evil reactionaries, and local values against foreign perversions -- tend to produce populist messiahs like Mr. López Obrador. In the early 1900s, Mexican folktales began to be recorded again after a three-century hiatus. Many evoke a local king -- reminiscent of Montezuma, the Nahua ruler defeated by the conquistadors in the 16th century -- who has gone underground, but who will one day come back to save his people. Many of Mr. López Obrador's voters see him as that sort of redeemer.

Mr. López Obrador represents a renunciation of the idea that development comes from transferring responsibility from the state to civil society and embracing a full exchange with the world. He offered a presidency favoring popular legitimacy over institutional checks and balances (witness his promise to use referendums); a government that acts as the engineer of social justice (hence his promise to give a 20% raise to anyone earning under $800, and to spend $8 billion in social programs and another $20 billion in infrastructure projects); and limits to foreign capital (as in his idea to keep oil and electricity in "national" -- that is, government -- hands).

It is unlikely that Mr. López Obrador would have become a full member of the "axis" formed by Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro and Evo Morales, for the same reasons the PRI kept away from communist alliances when it dominated Mexico: Mexican nationalism. But a populist victory in Mexico would have invigorated other populists in Latin America. And the demagogic foreign policy establishment that used to be part of the PRI state would have likely come back, straining relations with the U.S.

Felipe Calderón, by contrast, understands the stakes better than the man he barely beat. Yet there is no guarantee that he will be a more effective reformer than Mr. Fox. The paralyzing dynamics in Congress, where Sunday's election did not produce a working majority, will pose major obstacles. Mr. Calderón is aware of how, in recent decades, South Korea, China, Spain, New Zealand, Ireland, Estonia and others joined what he calls "the top of the league" by unleashing entrepreneurial drive and creating conditions for capital accumulation. "I am tired of seeing Mexico in the middle of the table," he told me a few weeks ago. "It is time to jump to the top." And he seems eager to try. But if he is to prevent the populists from overwhelming his government and winning next time, he needs to look at why so many Mexicans voted for Mr. López Obrador and the PRI.

Mexican voters would have shunned Mr. López Obrador altogether were it not for the shortcomings of the reforms of the last two decades. What those reforms left untouched is as important as what they modified. Yes, financial stability was achieved and has been maintained -- Mexican bonds had a maximum maturity of only one year in 1985; the figure today is 20 years. And, yes, hundreds of inefficient companies were privatized and trade was liberalized to a significant extent. But the economy continued to suffocate under heavy taxation, government-protected monopolies, labor legislation whose rigidity is surpassed only by sub-Saharan Africa, and, above all, the absence of the rule of law. The result has been a socioeconomic system that is not productive or competitive enough.

Between the early '80s and the beginning of the new millennium, per capita GDP experienced zero growth. It has picked up a bit in the last three years, mostly due to spectacularly favorable international conditions. The small reduction in extreme poverty experienced lately is due to cash transfers that provide temporary relief. Millions have survived only through the informal economy (that employs a majority of the workforce), remittances from migrants, and bribery. A study by the private-sector Center for Economic Studies indicates that 34% of businesses paid $11.2 billion in bribes in 2004.

Mr. Fox's presidency has contributed to the resurgence of Mexican populism: He has undertaken no substantial economic reform, so millions of frustrated voters were ready to jeopardize political gains for the sake of populist expediency. It is true that the PRI blocked most attempts at reform in Congress these last six years -- but in a country where the presidency continues to be exceptionally powerful and the states depend on the federal government even for the collection of local taxes, that is only an excuse. The leadership just wasn't there.

According to the International Institute for Management Development, Mexico ranks 56th out of 60 countries in terms of competitiveness. To be competitive, a country must provide a secure legal environment in which companies have the expectation of profitable returns. Many companies have migrated from Mexico to China because of high transaction costs. Even when capital does come in (Mexico received a respectable $18 billion in FDI last year), the corporatist, mercantilist system holds back social mobility and productivity (which has grown at an average of only 1.2% a year in the last decade). Mr. Calderón must tackle a number of these bottlenecks if Mexico is to join the top of the league. The justice system, the tax code, labor laws, the pension scheme and the energy sector -- monopolized by a government-owned company responsible for keeping the industry undercapitalized -- need be opened up to serious market competition. All of this amounts to reforming the state. Quántica Consultores, a consulting firm, found that the two poorest quintiles of the population receive, in per capita terms, 21% of the benefits of government "social" spending while the top two quintiles get 40%.

When Hernán Cortés conquered Mexico, Montezuma mistook him for Quetzacoatl, the divine ruler of the ancient Toltecs who, according to legend, had disappeared. He paid for his mistake. Five centuries later, a majority of Mexican voters seem to have learned the lesson and take Mr. López Obrador for what he really is. Let us hope Mr. Calderón rewards them with a first-class package of reforms that makes sure Mr. López Obrador never comes within an inch of the Mexican presidency again.

Hinchas extranjeros

2006-07-05T17:34:00.000-07:00

Aca en Los Angeles se da el mismo fenomeno. Cuando jugaron Argentina y Brasil por las eliminatorias me fui con mi cuñado a un bar chileno en la zona latina. Decenas de hinchas con gorros, camisetas y demas insignias seguian el partido con la misma pasion que se vive en Buenos Aires o en Rio. Todos estos hinchas provenian de paises centroamericanos que casi no tienen chances de participar en un mundial: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. Y la rivalidad es tan intensa como la vivimos nosotros. "No nos ganan mas" le decia un guatemalteco a un desconsolado nicaraguense al final del partido en el que Argentina le gano a Brasil 3-1.

"Siempre hablamos de nosotros para referirnos a ellos (los argentinos). No nos damos cuenta de que no es nuestro país. Tampoco importa. Creo que si India alguna vez llega al Mundial y juega contra Argentina, posiblemente alentaré a Argentina", dice Debasish Dutta, un indio devenido argentino por mandato del fútbol. Para entenderlo, habrá que ponerse en los zapatos de Debasish. Fanático del fútbol hasta la médula le ha tocado nacer y vivir en un país cuya selección nacional no da pie con bola. ¿Tenía otra opción mejor que la argentina?

Los casos como el de Debasish son cada vez más. Existen cientos de naciones -habitadas por personas que aman al fútbol- que nunca van a los mundiales. Esos hinchas, adoptan un seleccionado de otro país y lo sienten como propio hasta el final de sus vidas, literalmente hablando. Tal es el caso de dos fanáticos de Argentina en Bangladesh. Jahangir Alam, un comerciante de 38 años, y Abdur Rauf, un sastre de 50 años, que murieron a causa de ataques cardíacos tras el partido entre Alemania y Argentina. No soportaron la emoción de los penales ni el dolor por la eliminación argentina.

Pero hay casos menos extremos. Rafiqul Islam, dueño de un local en la capital de Bangladesh, rebajó el té un 33% para los hinchas de Argentina. En lugar de cobrar 3 taka, pedía sólo 2 para los que alentaran a la selección albiceleste. El pequeño local cuenta con una TV en blanco y negro donde por las noches la gente se junta para ver los partidos del Mundial. Su negocio marcha bien, pero al contrario de subir los precios aprovechando las circunstancias, Rafiqul los bajó en beneficio de los hinchas argentinos. No ahonda en investigaciones sobre si los clientes dicen la verdad o mienten, cree en el fútbol es un acto de fe y lo aplica a su negocio.

En Nepal, la selección argentina es también siempre una de las favoritas. Maradona tiene mucho que ver con esto. Sushil Tapa colecciona desde hace años artículos sobre Diego y admite que lloró cuando acusaron al astro de consumir drogas. "Lo que los jugadores hagan fuera de la cancha no tiene importancia", dice con firmeza. Los nepaleses así como Sushil, rezan por la salud de Maradona y por el futuro de Argentina. Algunos locales incluso están convencidos de que nepaleses y argentinos tienen rasgos faciales similares.

En Calcuta, la segunda ciudad de la India, los seguidores locales de la selección argentina le ofrecen plegarias a sus jugadores. En varias ocasiones hicieron ceremonias con fuego invocando a dioses hindúes y abogando por la victoria argentina.

Pero sabemos que para ser un verdadero hincha argentino hay que tener una posición determinada con respecto a los máximos rivales, los brasileños. Pensar que esta rivalidad pueda entenderse más allá de las fronteras sudamericanas, es difícil de imaginar. Sin embargo, hay hinchas que entienden todo lo que hay que entender y además aquello que no tiene razón. Qué mejor ejemplo que el pacto que firmó un matrimonio hace unas semanas en el este de India. El marido, Probir Sanval, dejó por escrito que se comprometía a ayudar de por vida en la cocina si Argentina perdía con Brasil. Su mujer, menos osada, dijo que le compraría un pantalón y un sweater si los brasileros caían ante Argentina. Probir, un homeópata que durante el Mundial atendió a sus pacientes vestido con los colores de Argentina, confiesa que desde muy chico le gustaba el fútbol pero que cuando vio jugar a Maradona, se convirtió por completo. En las buenas y en las malas.

Y ahora tocó una mala. Tras la derrota con Alemania los hinchas argentinos en Bengala no podían creer lo que estaba pasando: su equipo se iba del Mundial. "El referí fue el responsable de la derrota" exclamaba Bhaswar Bannerjee, un ardiente hincha argentino. "Si hubiese dado el penal, mi equipo hubiese ganado ", agregaba. "Es imposible perder un partido después de haber jugado tan bien. Pero con 14 jugadores de Alemania (incluyendo a los 3 árbitros) jugando contra Argentina, la hazaña era difícil", se quejó Kashem. Ibrahim, el más enojado, iba más lejos: "Voy a cortar los cables de las casas de la zona. Si ya no puedo ver a Argentina jugar, tampoco quiero que otros vean jugar a los demás equipos".

Sin embargo, los ánimos mejoraron con la eliminación de Brasil al día siguiente. Entre los habitantes de algunas ciudades en Bangladesh, se volvía a la vida con la victoria francesa. Rinju, que se define como un gran fana de Argentina, declaraba al diario Xinhua Sunday: "Ya no me siento mentalmente tan deprimido, la derrota de Brasil me animó". Los medios de Bangladesh cubrieron con especial interés las reacciones locales tras las derrotas sudamericanas. En el diario Xinhua Sunday dicen que se realizaron lutos por Argentina y Brasil. El sábado fue el turno de los fans argentinos, quienes bajaron las banderas desplegadas en terrazas y balcones. El domingo, le tocó a las banderas verdes y amarillas.

recetas de Zuni Cafe

2006-07-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

Salt of the earth
Judy Rodgers knows the transformative power of a most basic ingredient.

JUDY RODGERS has firm opinions on salt. Well, to be honest (and that's the only way she would have it), Rodgers has firm opinions on many, many things, including such disparate topics as the unthinking use of lemon as an all-purpose acidifier, why Kennebec and Winnemucca are the perfect potatoes for frying, and the tip-driven inequities between waiters' and cooks' take-home pay.

These aren't knee-jerk opinions. The chef and co-owner of San Francisco's beloved Zuni Cafe has thought through these issues quite thoroughly, breaking each down in her methodical way.

In fact, a thoughtful, painstaking approach to cooking is the very spirit that informs her restaurant. While other chefs may range far and wide, tracking down the latest new dish, ingredient or technique, Rodgers would rather just dig a little deeper.

Though roughly 60% to 70% of the dinner menu at Zuni changes every night, it is based on a relatively small number of dishes. And some, such as roast chicken, Caesar salad and house-cured anchovies, have been on the menu almost every night since she took over in 1987.

Don't mistake that as a sign of a kitchen on autopilot. Rodgers still views every one of those dishes as a work in progress, and she is constantly measuring, timing and evaluating whether there is a way each could be improved. As she puts it in her critically acclaimed "The Zuni Cafe Cookbook": "Making even a simple dish three times in two weeks can teach you more about cooking than trying three different dishes in the same period. Pay attention to the process of making it, and to the small and large differences in the results."

That could be Rodgers' mantra: Pay attention to the details of cooking and think about what is going on. "Build your database," is how she likes to put it.

Rodgers' most-discussed culinary theory regards the salting of meat. Almost every piece of beef, lamb, fish or poultry that comes into the Zuni kitchen immediately gets a light dusting of salt, and then is set aside for as long as several days to "cure."

"It is a part of the restaurant's personality," she says. "The flavor of Zuni Cafe is pre-salting, and if I can't pre-salt, I can't get the right flavor."

Rodgers says pre-salting does two things: It seasons the meat all the way through rather than just on the surface, and it changes the texture of the meat, making it moister and more tender — in much the same way brining does.

Ask for details and you'd better be careful what you wish for. Rodgers might just invite you to San Francisco for a day of on-the-spot experiments.

The basement cook

THERE are two kitchens at Zuni Cafe: one upstairs where dishes are finished, and one in the basement where all the initial preparations take place. The first, the one the customers see, is light-filled and airy with warm wood and tile surfaces. The second is emphatically not, but it seems to be where Rodgers spends most of her time.

The two are joined by a long, steep staircase, and in the course of a day Rodgers must sprint up and down it at least a dozen times. At 49, she still has an air about her of Berkeley in the '70s. Tall and willowy, she wears her hair waist-length and straight and is given to dressing in brightly colored tights and short skirts, even when she's cooking.

But there is nothing airy-fairy about Rodgers. She believes in getting right down to business.

For this day's experiments, she has lined up four chickens (two cut up for frying: one cured, one not; two whole for roasting, the same arrangement); three beef sirloins (one uncured, one cured in salt only, one cured with salt and coarse pepper); two chuck roasts for braising (one cured, one not); and five thick pork chops (variously cured, brined and marinated). You might expect that each type of meat would take a different dose of salt, but Rodgers has calculated that about 1 tablespoon of medium-grain sea salt per 4 1/2 pounds of meat is the perfect ratio for everything. Instead, she says, it's the time spent curing that varies, from a couple of hours to several days. This depends on the type of meat — chicken and pork are denser than beef or lamb so they take longer — and the size of the cut.

Rodgers' salting is different from traditional koshering in that kosher chickens are salted and cured for only an hour, then rinsed with water, whereas Zuni chickens cure for anywhere from one to three days. As for the salt, Rodgers prefers a sea salt that she finds in bulk bins in the Bay Area that is somewhat coarser than fine salt, but much finer than that which is usually sold as coarse. It has the consistency of cornmeal. If you're using very finely ground salt, just use slightly less.

You might think early salting would result in drier meat because the salt would draw out moisture. But the way it seems to work is that over time, the meat reabsorbs the moisture, carrying the salt with it. Furthermore, because that moisture is loaded with amino acids and sugars, the meat browns better and forms a better crust.

Rodgers knew none of that when she started pre-salting. She was just following the instructions of Georgette Descat, a Parisian chef and one of her culinary godparents.

By her own admission, Rodgers comes from a very nongastronomic family in St. Louis. As a junior in high school in 1973, she was anxious to spend a year abroad, preferably in France, as she had studied the language. A neighbor who was a fabrics chemist at Monsanto mentioned he knew someone in Rouen, a textile city, who might be willing to host her.

That someone turned out to be Jean Troisgros, who with his brother Pierre was among the pioneers of nouvelle cuisine, at their three-star restaurant Maison Troisgros. For someone with even the most nascent interest in food, this was like landing in heaven.

Indeed, Rodgers dates the beginning of her culinary life to the very first meal she enjoyed chez Troisgros — not a Michelin-starred extravaganza with its famous salmon and sorrel, but a very carefully made ham sandwich that Jean Troisgros fixed upon her arrival at 4 a.m.

"That was when I started paying attention to food," she says. "Before then I was someone who fueled efficiently. But there was no turning back after that ham sandwich."

Life at the Troisgros' wasn't all wine-poached truffles (though there were those too). Much more formative for Rodgers were the family's dinners prepared by their sister, Madeleine Troisgros Serraille, who served perfectly executed versions of classic French home cooking.

"Salmon and sorrel is wonderful, but nothing beats a great blanquette," Rodgers says.

Duck's versatility

AFTER the Troisgros experience, Rodgers' great teacher was Pepette Arbulo, who had a small cafe in the Landes region, a great area for ducks, but not much else.

"That was a real awakening for me," she says. "I never noticed that I was eating duck two or three times a day, because people there had explored for a hundred years every possible elaboration of what was possible to do with all of those damned ducks they had, and had eventually winnowed all of those possibilities down to a few of the best. It was a kind of communal distillation.

"It wasn't an attitude of 'Here is what we have to do because we're so isolated'; rather it was a daily exploration of what they could do with what they had."

Between the two French stays was a stint in Berkeley at Chez Panisse, working with an all-star crew including Alice Waters, Lindsey Remolif Shere, Mark Miller, Jean-Pierre Moullé, Deborah Madison and Jeremiah Tower. Rodgers learned from all of them, but the most important lesson may have come from her mother, who hardly cooked at all. She was an instructor in fashion design at Washington University, and when Rodgers was 8, she gave her her first sewing lessons.

"She taught me that there was a right way and a wrong way to lay out a pattern on a piece of fabric, and that if I laid out the pattern the wrong way, it would mess everything up. It didn't matter if it was a great pattern and great material," Rodgers says.

"It's the same thing with cooking. You can have great ingredients and a fabulous imagination, but if you screw up at any of the steps, it doesn't matter what you were working with or what you imagined."

Fried to perfection

WHICH brings us back to that kitchen full of meat. The first finished dish we taste, the fried chicken, is fabulous. It's the dish that brought her to national attention in the 1980s, when she was cooking at the little Union Hotel in Benicia, northeast of San Francisco. (Ruth Reichl, then critic for New West magazine, called it "the most perfect example of that dish I have ever encountered.")

At first it's hard to say whether that deliciousness is because of the quality of the meat — it's cured for only two to three hours — or the glorious crackling crust. But pull some of the meat from the center of each sample, and there is a definite difference — the texture is fine-grained, not stringy.

Things come into clearer focus with the braised beef. Cooked in a red wine reduction until it is nearly falling apart, the regular chuck tastes like boiled beef. The pre-salted sample has a fuller flavor. The pork chops, which the grill cook has let go a little too long, are slightly dried out, except for the one that was brined. It is still tender and moist, but the sugar in the brine makes the meat noticeably sweet when compared with the others.

Rodgers doesn't like that, and though the flavor of the brine was not on the day's agenda, she vows to change the recipe.

The three beef fillets, roasted quite rare, are dramatically different. The unsalted is fine — it's a nice piece of grass-fed beef — but the pre-salted has much better flavor and is firmer in texture, so it slices cleanly, rather than in rags. And a hint of black pepper seems to have been carried to the center of the one that was peppered as well as pre-salted.

It is the roast chicken that is the coup de grâce, though, and that is fitting. Zuni's roast chicken is so popular that the restaurant goes through 350 birds a week — each one roasted to order in the wood-fired oven.

You can tell the difference between the birds just by looking. The pre-salted chicken is a uniform golden color, whereas the other is more mottled, with some gold, some pale and even some black charred spots.

The difference in flavor is even more pronounced. The bird that was salted just before roasting tastes like, well, chicken — nothing special, and the texture is a little stringy.

The pre-salted chicken is a revelation: The flavor is full and deep. It's not salty at all, but has a profound chicken taste. The meat is moist and tender; the texture is downright buttery.

Sure, it's a roast chicken. But it's not just any roast chicken. "That is the taste of a Zuni chicken," Rodgers exclaims. "That is the taste of Zuni restaurant. This is what I've always wanted to do: Serve dishes that weren't just playful and amusing, but were keepers. I like keepers."

Zuni Cafe roast chicken with bread salad

Total time: 1 hour, 10 minutes, plus 1 to 3 days standing time

Servings: 2 to 4

Note: This recipe is adapted from "The Zuni Cafe Cookbook" by Judy Rodgers. From 1 to 3 days before serving, season the chicken. Begin preparing the bread salad up to several hours before serving.

Roast chicken

1 (2 3/4 - to 3 1/2 -pound) chicken

4 tender sprigs fresh thyme, marjoram, rosemary, or sage, about 1/2 -inch long

About 2 1/4 teaspoons sea salt

About 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1. Remove and discard the lump of fat inside the chicken. Rinse the chicken and pat very dry inside and out. Be thorough — a wet chicken will spend too much time steaming before it begins to turn golden brown.

2. Approaching from the edge of the cavity, slide a finger under the skin of each of the breasts, making 2 little pockets. Now use the tip of your finger to gently loosen a pocket of skin on the outside of the thickest section of each thigh. Using your finger, shove an herb sprig into each of the 4 pockets.

3. Season the chicken liberally all over with salt and pepper, allowing about three-fourths teaspoon of sea salt per pound of chicken. Season the thick sections a little more heavily than the skinny ankles and wings. Sprinkle a little of the salt just inside the cavity, on the backbone, but otherwise don't worry about seasoning the inside. Twist and tuck the wing tips behind the shoulders. Cover loosely and refrigerate for 1 to 3 days.

4. When ready to cook, heat the oven to 475 degrees. (Depending on the size, efficiency and accuracy of your oven and the size of your bird, you may need to adjust the heat to as high as 500 degrees or as low as 450 degrees during the course of roasting the chicken to get it to brown properly.)

4. Choose a shallow flameproof roasting pan or dish barely larger than the chicken, or use a 10-inch skillet with an all-metal handle. Heat up the pan on the stove over medium heat. Wipe the chicken dry and set it breast-side up in the pan. It should sizzle.

5. Place the chicken in the center of the oven and listen and watch for it to start sizzling and browning within 20 minutes. If it doesn't, raise the temperature progressively until it does. The skin should blister, but if the chicken begins to char, or the fat is smoky, reduce the temperature by 25 degrees. After about 30 minutes, turn the bird over (drying the bird and preheating the pan should keep the skin from sticking). Roast for another 10 to 20 minutes, depending on its size, then flip back over to re-crisp the breast skin, another 5 to 10 minutes. Total oven time will be 45 minutes to 1 hour.

6. When the chicken is done, lift it from the roasting pan and set it on a plate. Carefully pour the clear fat from the roasting pan, leaving the lean drippings behind. Add about a tablespoon of water to the hot pan and swirl it.

7. Slash the stretched skin between the thighs and breasts of the chicken, then tilt the bird and plate over the roasting pan to drain the juices into the drippings.

8. Set the chicken in a warm spot (which may be your stove top) and leave it to rest while you finish the bread salad. The meat will become more tender and uniformly succulent as it cools.

9. Set a platter in the oven to warm for a minute or two.

10. Tilt the roasting pan and skim the last of the fat. Place over medium-low heat, add any juice that has collected under the chicken and bring to a simmer. Stir and scrape to soften any hard golden drippings. Taste — the juices should be extremely flavorful. The pan juices will be used to drizzle over the bread salad.

Bread salad and assembly

Generous 1/2 pound slightly stale open-crumbed, chewy, peasant-style bread (not sourdough)

6 to 8 tablespoons mild-tasting olive oil

1 1/2 tablespoons Champagne vinegar or white wine vinegar

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon dried currants

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar, or as needed

2 tablespoons pine nuts

2 to 3 garlic cloves, slivered

1/4 cup slivered scallions (about 4 scallions), including a little of the green part

2 tablespoons lightly salted chicken stock or lightly salted water

A few handfuls of arugula, frisée or red mustard greens, carefully washed, dried and torn

Spoonful of pan juices from the roast chicken

1. Heat the broiler. Cut the bread into a couple of large chunks. Carve off all of the bottom crust and most of the top and side crust (reserve the top and side crusts to use as croutons in salads or soups). Brush the bread all over with olive oil.

2. Broil the bread chunks very briefly to crisp and lightly color the surface. Turn the bread over and crisp the other side. Trim off any badly charred tips, then tear the chunks into a combination of irregular 2- to 3-inch wads, bite-sized bits and fat crumbs. You should get about 4 cups.

3. Combine about one-fourth cup (4 tablespoons) of the olive oil with the Champagne or white wine vinegar and salt and pepper to taste. In a wide salad bowl, toss about one-fourth cup of this tart vinaigrette with the torn bread; the bread will be unevenly dressed. Taste one of the more saturated pieces. If it is bland, add a little salt and pepper and taste again.

4. Place the currants in a small bowl and moisten with the red wine vinegar and 1 tablespoon of warm water. Set aside.

5. While the chicken is roasting, place the pine nuts in a small baking dish and place them in the hot oven for a minute or two, just to warm through. Add them to the bowl of bread.

6. Place a spoonful of the olive oil in a small skillet, add the garlic and scallions and cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly until softened. Don't let them color. Scrape this mixture into the bread and fold to combine. Drain the plumped currants and fold in. Dribble the chicken stock or lightly salted water over the salad and fold again. Taste a few pieces of bread — a fairly saturated one and a dryish one. If either is bland, add salt, pepper and/or a few drops of red wine vinegar, then toss well. Since the basic character of bread salad depends on the bread you use, these adjustments can be essential.

7. Pile the seasoned bread in a 1-quart baking dish and tent with foil; set the salad bowl aside. Place the bread in the oven after you flip the chicken for the final time. Remove the bread when the chicken is done.

8. Tip the bread into the salad bowl. (It will be steamy-hot, a mixture of soft, moist wads, crispy-on-the-outside-but-moist-in-the-middle wads, and a few downright crispy ones.) Drizzle and toss with a spoonful of the pan juices. Add the greens, a drizzle of vinaigrette and fold well. Taste again.

9. Cut the chicken into pieces, spread the bread salad on the warm platter and nestle the chicken in the salad.

Each of 4 servings: 831 calories; 55 grams protein; 34 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams fiber; 52 grams fat; 11 grams saturated fat; 193 mg. cholesterol; 1,399 mg. sodium.

Roasted or grilled fillet of beef with black pepper

Total time: About 25 minutes, plus 1 to 2 days standing time

Servings: 4 to 6

Note: From Zuni Cafe. Begin preparing the fillet 1 or 2 days in advance. If you can find a whole fillet of beef of 5 to 6 pounds, it will serve 10 to 12 people.

Fillet of beef, 2 pounds or more, trimmed of fat

Salt

Freshly cracked black pepper

1. Trim the meat of any thick layers of fat, leaving the thin streaks in place. These will melt as the meat cooks and be a vehicle for the pepper flavor. Leave the delicious, streaky "rope" of muscle that runs the length of the fillet attached, however tenuously, to the roast, but check for and remove large lumps of fat it might conceal.

2. Concerning the satiny "silver skin" that sheaths one face of the fillet: Where it is thin, soft and translucent, leave it intact. You won't notice this tender sinew once the meat is cooked. Where it is opaque and tough, near the fat end of the fillet, slide the tip of your knife just beneath the surface to remove a few thick strips of it. But don't bother being meticulous.

3. Season the trimmed fillet moderately overall with salt, sprinkling more heavily on the thick sections. We use a scant three-fourths teaspoon sea salt per pound of meat. Next roll the fillet in freshly, coarsely cracked black pepper. We use about 1 teaspoon per pound. To ensure even cooking, truss the fillet, one string every few inches. Cover loosely and refrigerate for 1 to 2 days.

4. About an hour before serving, heat the oven to 400 degrees or light a charcoal fire and remove the fillet from the refrigerator.

5. Sear on a hot grill or griddle, under a very hot broiler or, if somewhat awkwardly, curled in your largest skillet. For reference, take the temperature at the centers of both the thick and the thin ends of the fillet — they should be between 60 and 70 degrees. The meat will feel soft and limp. You can hold it for up to an hour this way before cooking.

6. To cook, place the seared fillet on a heavy, rimmed sheet pan in the oven or back on the grill over medium coals. If grilling, plan to turn the meat every 10 minutes or so. Whether roasting or grilling, start checking the doneness after 15 minutes. Check both ends. For a very rare fillet, remove the fillet from the heat when the center of the thick end registers 105 degrees (it will feel only barely firmer than before). For a very rosy medium rare, remove from the heat at about 115 degrees. For "just a little pink," cook to 125 degrees. At this point the tender muscle will begin to feel "flexed" firm. Cooking time will depend on the heat source and the thickness of the meat. A skinny fillet that was over 70 degrees to begin with may be very rare in less than 20 minutes.

7. If roasting a whole fillet, remember that the skinny end will cook faster, running about 10 degrees hotter than the fat end. This is convenient, if you want to offer a range of doneness. If you want the whole roast to emerge the same doneness, loosely wrap the skinny end with foil, shiny side out, when it tests about 95 degrees.

8. In any case, loosely tented, in a warm spot, the meat will continue cooking after you remove it from direct heat. Expect the temperature to increase about 10 degrees in 10 minutes. Although tenderness is not an issue with fillet, I think it has the best flavor if allowed to rest 10 to 15 minutes.

9. Because fillet is very tender, you can carve it as thinly or thickly as you like, but respect the mostly regular grain of the muscle. Don't remove the trussing strings on any part of the fillet that you don't intend to carve right away.

Each of 6 servings: 247 calories; 31 grams protein; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 fiber; 13 grams fat; 5 grams saturated fat; 95 mg. cholesterol; 463 mg. sodium.

*

Union Hotel fried chicken

Total time: 40 minutes, plus about 5 hours plus overnight standing time

Servings: 2 to 4

Note: This is the dish that first earned Judy Rodgers national attention back in the early 1980s, when she was cooking at the little Benicia Hotel northeast of San Francisco.

1 small (about 2 3/4 -pound) frying chicken

Freshly ground black pepper

Thyme

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon sea salt

1 2/3 cups cold milk

Flour for dredging

About 1 cup peanut oil for frying

1. Cut the chicken into 10 pieces (2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 wings and 4 breast pieces). Trim any gobs of fat, especially from the edges of the breast, they tend to burn. Save the back and fat for stock.

2. In a shallow bowl, toss the chicken parts with the pepper (allow about 1 1/2 teaspoons per pound of chicken), thyme leaves (about 1 teaspoon thyme leaves per pound), and sea salt and toss well. Cover loosely and refrigerate.

3. After about 2 1/2 hours, rinse off the salt in cold running water. Try to keep as much of the pepper and thyme as you can (the pepper and thyme will tend to cling). Drain the chicken well and place in a baking dish just large enough to hold all of the chicken in a single crowded layer. Add cold milk to barely cover. Stir to coat all of the chicken and spread the pieces in a single layer.

4. Leave the chicken at room temperature for 2 hours, stirring a couple of times to encourage even de-salting.

5. Dredge the chicken in flour, lifting the chicken pieces directly from the milk so they are very wet and will hold a lot of flour. Make sure the skin is neatly stretched over the muscle in a natural position. Tap lightly to shake loose stray flour and place on a cooling rack on a baking sheet so that the pieces are barely touching. Refrigerate overnight, uncovered.

6. Before cooking, bring the chicken to room temperature to speed up cooking and encourage even browning.

7. In a cast iron pan, heat the peanut oil over medium-high heat. (As you add the chicken, the oil level will rise. If the chicken is ever more than half submerged, ladle out some of the oil.) Test for temperature by dipping the edge of the chicken into the oil — it should sizzle modestly but immediately.

8. Add the chicken pieces, tapping off excess flour before placing them in the oil. Don't crowd or overlap the chicken pieces. If the pan is not large enough, fry the chicken in two batches. Don't worry that the coating is sticky. Start with the thighs, then the drumsticks, then wings and upper breasts, and finish with the breast tips. This is the rough order of how long it will take them to cook.

9. Adjust the heat slightly as necessary to maintain a discreet sizzle. If the oil gets too hot, reduce the flame slightly. You can also add a few tablespoons of cool oil to the pan, being sure not to pour it onto the chicken pieces. If a piece is browning unevenly — say the tip of the drumstick is browning too fast — or only part of a piece is pale, you can prop the piece against the side of the pan so that the done part sits above the oil, or, so long as all the pieces have set a good crust, you can prop one piece against another so that only the part you want to keep browning is submerged.

10. Use tongs to turn the chicken, not a fork, which would pierce the skin. Turn when the cooked side is pale gold, about 9 minutes. Don't assume that all pieces will brown evenly — the pan may not transfer heat evenly throughout.

11. Brown the other side in the same way, then turn back over one or two more times to refine the browning of both sides. The curing helps the chicken retain moisture, so there is little harm in leaving the pieces in the hot oil an extra minute or two to get the tastiest, crispiest golden crust.

12. Set the chicken on paper towels to drain. Don't stack it — you just made a perfect crust, don't let the steam destroy it. Serve immediately.

Each of 4 servings: 612 calories; 45 grams protein; 27 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams fiber; 35 grams fat; 8 grams saturated fat; 166 mg. cholesterol; 532 mg. sodium.

In the World of Fine Wine, There'll Always Be a France

2006-07-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

By ERIC ASIMOV

PERMIT me to speak briefly in praise of France.

Yes, France, the greatest wine producing nation in the world.

Don't look so shocked. I've heard about the Judgment of Paris, the famous blind tasting in which French and American wines went glass-to-glass in 1976, and the French lost. I know all about the greatness of California cabernets and shiraz from Australia, and I understand that the French lag in the clever global marketing of instantly recognizable brands of wine.

Nonetheless, no country comes close to matching France, either in setting demanding standards for its wine industry or in producing such a variety of consistently excellent wine. Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and the Rhone go without saying, but those famous regions are simply the most visible. From Jurançon in the southwest to Jura in the east, from Nantes on the Atlantic to Alsace on the German border, France makes wines that are endlessly compelling and should be endlessly inspiring.

Why is it necessary for me to state what should be obvious? Because a prevailing attitude toward France and its wines, in the New World at least, seems stuck somewhere between pity and glee for an industry supposedly rotting from within.

New World producers and journalists like to jeer at the sacred French notion of terroir as a myth constructed to preserve French status in the industry, and they laugh at the rigidity of the French appellation rules, which dictate what French growers can plant, where they can plant it, and how they should tend the vines. The European Union's recent decision to spend millions of dollars in an effort to diminish a European wine glut by digging up vineyards and turning excess wine into ethanol contributed to a confused perception of industry-wide crisis. The perception springs from an oversimplification of the French wine business, and no doubt a bit of wishful thinking.

The latest chorus of American gloating was heard around the time of the 30th anniversary celebration of the Paris tasting, even as many of these same gloaters were lining up to pay record prices for the heralded 2005 vintage of Bordeaux. When French winemakers were understandably reluctant to participate in yet another re-enactment in May, American wine writers were quick to play the cowardice card. And when the event feebly played out, and the Americans won again, writers exulted.

"Sacré bleu! Make that red, white and blue," Linda Murphy wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle, which can perhaps be forgiven for boosterish support of an industry in its backyard. In maybe the unkindest blow of all, Hollywood is apparently considering a movie version of the original event, based on the book "Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine" (Scribner, 2005), by George M. Taber.

Maybe it's payback for years of supercilious French sneering at the American wine industry. Or maybe Americans just need to lash out to pump themselves up with competitive energy, like football players pounding their lockers in an adrenalin-fueled frenzy. Any way you look at it, American wine partisans have got themselves a punching bag and they call it France.

Business-oriented types look at the French wine industry as old and tired. Through rigidity, bureaucracy and lack of creativity, they say, once-dominant France clings to old and outdated ways, and can no longer compete with modern wine powers like Australia, the United States, Chile and South Africa.

Those sympathetic to France heave a sigh, shrug their shoulders and say, What can you do? Meanwhile, some of the harshest critics are among the French themselves, particularly growers and winemakers in less prestigious areas, or entrepreneurs who feel hamstrung by French wine laws.

Make no mistake. France's troubles, as far as the wine business goes, are many. Consumption at home has dropped precipitously as the culture that once prized the long lunch and the arduous construction of a meal has taken a route toward convenience foods, quickly gobbled. The quest for productivity in a globalized economy, no doubt, has also taken its toll on daytime consumption, while stricter drunken-driving laws have also had an effect. Troubled fortunes in the wine economies of Bordeaux and the Languedoc are well known, if not well understood. And France's share of the wine export market has tumbled as well.

What's crucial to understand is that France has two entirely different wine economies, and one should not be confused with the other. The first produces oceans of cheap, occasionally palatable wine, sold for immediate consumption under lowly appellations, like plain Bordeaux or Beaujolais, for example, rather than the more prestigious and more specific St.-Julien or Juliénas. This industry is indeed in a deep crisis, with many growers hurting badly. Historically, much of this wine was for domestic consumption, and this segment has taken the biggest hit as the market has shrunk. Producers who would like to sell these wines overseas say they feel hampered because they cannot compete against the cleverly branded bottles of New World producers, who often use winemaking techniques unavailable to French producers.

The other industry makes the middle to high-end wines, those sold around the world, consumed in restaurants and reviewed in publications like Wine Spectator. Producers like Sylvain Pitiot, who makes the seductive, voluptuous Clos de Tart, a grand cru Burgundy, are doing exceptionally well, regardless of how many gallons of French wine the European Union wishes to convert to fuel. Like Clos de Tart, much of the high-quality end of the business is prospering.

In many ways, the French A.O.C. laws, for appellation d'origine contrôlée, which protect quality at the top, are simultaneously responsible for the demise of the low end. In other words, the law that insures the meaning of St.-Julien by dictating what the wine is made of and how it is labeled can stifle the producer of ordinary Bordeaux, who might want to legally blend some syrah into the cabernet sauvignon, or call the wine by a cute, memorable brand name — not Yellow Tail, but maybe Red Head. But while a producer in the Languedoc might wish he could pull out all his grenache and replace it with syrah, a Burgundy producer like Mr. Pitiot would be appalled at the idea of somebody wasting precious pinot noir territory by replacing it with merlot.

It may be that both ends of the French wine industry can only work at cross purposes, with the Old World tradition of exalting specific place names struggling against the New World merchandising power of the brand name. For France to try to accommodate the low end by compromising the standards that have insured its high-end dominance might in the end be catastrophic for the whole industry.

"Europeans should realize they can't play that New World game," said Neal Rosenthal, an American wine importer who is devoted to the concept of terroir. "They're better off protecting what they have and making sure people better understand the reasons behind it."

Not that the standards can't be beneficially modified. In a recent column in Decanter, a British consumer magazine, Michel Bettane, the French wine critic, suggested that St.-Émilion would be a fine place to plant chardonnay, which is currently not permitted under A.O.C. rules. Maybe so. And as in any bureaucracy, a stultifying rigidity often makes rational decision making difficult. But on the whole, the A.O.C. rules do far more to protect greatness than to prevent it.

While a further decline on the bottom end of the industry will have a tremendous social and human cost in France, it won't undermine the greatness of French wines. It's possible to imagine that France will be joined at the top by countries like Italy and Spain, which produce distinguished, singular wines like Barolo and Rioja, and are working hard to improve the quality in distinctive regions that have long been ignored.

It's harder to imagine New World countries like the United States and Australia reaching the same pinnacle. Their leading wines, whether made of cabernet, chardonnay, shiraz or pinot noir, will always be measured against the French, and regardless of the blind tasting here or there, few people really take seriously the notion that the New World wines will surpass the French reference points on a large scale. What's more important about New World wines is how they have improved their quality on the low-to-middle ranks, to the point where today it is possible to say that very few bad wines are produced.

No, France will always set a standard, barring some sort of colossal, self-destructive move, like gutting its appellation rules. Should that happen, Americans and the rest of the world would then have great cause to jeer.

Jason Dunham

2006-07-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

Este artículo del 2004 ha quedado para siempre grabado en mi memoria. Gracias a los miles Jasons que estan poniedo su grano de arena para que otros países tengan su propio 4 de julio.

In Combat, Marine
Put Theory to Test,
Comrades Believe

MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 25, 2004

AL QA'IM, Iraq -- Early this spring, Cpl. Jason Dunham and two other
Marines sat in an outpost in Iraq and traded theories on surviving a
hand-grenade attack.

Second Lt. Brian "Bull" Robinson suggested that if a Marine lay face
down on the grenade and held it between his forearms, the ceramic
bulletproof plate in his flak vest might be strong enough to protect his
vital organs. His arms would shatter, but he might live.

Cpl. Dunham had another idea: A Marine's Kevlar helmet held over the
grenade might contain the blast. "I'll bet a Kevlar would stop it," he
said, according to Second Lt. Robinson.

"No, it'll still mess you up," Staff Sgt. John Ferguson recalls saying.

It was a conversation the men would remember vividly a few weeks later,
when they saw the shredded remains of Cpl. Dunham's helmet, apparently
blown apart from the inside by a grenade. Fellow Marines believe Cpl.
Dunham's actions saved the lives of two men and have recommended him for
the Medal of Honor, an award that no act of heroism since 1993 has
garnered.

A 6-foot-1 star high-school athlete from Scio, N.Y., Cpl. Dunham was
chosen to become a squad leader shortly after he was assigned to Kilo
Company, Third Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment in September 2003.
Just 22 years old, he showed "the kind of leadership where you're
confident in your abilities and don't have to yell about it," says Staff
Sgt. Ferguson, 30, of Aurora, Colo. Cpl. Dunham's reputation grew when
he extended his enlistment, due to end in July, so he could stay with
his squad throughout its tour in the war zone.

During the invasion of Iraq last year, the Third Battalion didn't suffer
any combat casualties. But since March, 10 of its 900 Marines have died
from hostile fire, and 89 have been wounded.

April 14 was an especially bad day. Cpl. Dunham was in the town of
Karabilah, leading a 14-man foot patrol to scout sites for a new base,
when radio reports came pouring in about a roadside bomb hitting another
group of Marines not far away.

Insurgents, the reports said, had ambushed a convoy that included the
battalion commander, 40-year-old Lt. Col. Matthew Lopez, of Chicago. One
rifle shot penetrated the rear of the commander's Humvee, hitting him in
the back, Lt. Col. Lopez says. His translator and bodyguard, Lance Cpl.
Akram Falah, 23, of Anaheim, Calif., had taken a bullet to the bicep,
severing an artery, according to medical reports filed later.

Cpl. Dunham's patrol jumped aboard some Humvees and raced toward the
convoy. Near the double-arched gateway of the town of Husaybah, they
heard the distinctive whizzing sound of a rocket-propelled grenade
overhead. They left their vehicles and split into two teams to hunt for
the shooters, according to interviews with two men who were there and
written reports from two others.

Around 12:15 p.m., Cpl. Dunham's team came to an intersection and saw a
line of seven Iraqi vehicles along a dirt alleyway, according to Staff
Sgt. Ferguson and others there. At Staff Sgt. Ferguson's instruction,
they started checking the vehicles for weapons.

Cpl. Dunham approached a run-down white Toyota Land Cruiser. The driver,
an Iraqi in a black track suit and loafers, immediately lunged out and
grabbed the corporal by the throat, according to men at the scene. Cpl.
Dunham kneed the man in the chest, and the two tumbled to the ground.

Two other Marines rushed to the scene. Private First Class Kelly Miller,
21, of Eureka, Calif., ran from the passenger side of the vehicle and
put a choke hold around the man's neck. But the Iraqi continued to
struggle, according to a military report Pfc. Miller gave later. Lance
Cpl. William B. Hampton, 22, of Woodinville, Wash., also ran to help.

A few yards away, Lance Cpl. Jason Sanders, 21, a radio operator from
McAlester, Okla., says he heard Cpl. Dunham yell a warning: "No, no, no
-- watch his hand!"

What was in the Iraqi's hand appears to have been a British-made "Mills
Bomb" hand grenade. The Marines later found an unexploded Mills Bomb in
the Toyota, along with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade
launchers.

A Mills Bomb user pulls a ring pin out and squeezes the external lever
-- called the spoon -- until he's ready to throw it. Then he releases
the spoon, leaving the bomb armed. Typically, three to five seconds
elapse between the time the spoon detaches and the grenade explodes. The
Marines later found what they believe to have been the grenade's pin on
the floor of the Toyota, suggesting that the Iraqi had the grenade in
his hand -- on a hair trigger -- even as he wrestled with Cpl. Dunham.

None of the other Marines saw exactly what Cpl. Dunham did, or even saw
the grenade. But they believe Cpl. Dunham spotted the grenade --
prompting his warning cry -- and, when it rolled loose, placed his
helmet and body on top of it to protect his squadmates.

The scraps of Kevlar found later, scattered across the street, supported
their conclusion. The grenade, they think, must have been inside the
helmet when it exploded. His fellow Marines believe that Cpl. Dunham
made an instantaneous decision to try out his theory that a helmet might
blunt the grenade blast.

"I deeply believe that given the facts and evidence presented he clearly
understood the situation and attempted to block the blast of the grenade
from his squad members," Lt. Col. Lopez wrote in a May 13 letter
recommending Cpl. Dunham for the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest
award for military valor. "His personal action was far beyond the call
of duty and saved the lives of his fellow Marines."

Recommendations for the Medal of Honor are rare. The Marines say they
have no other candidates awaiting approval. Unlike other awards, the
Medal of Honor must be approved by the president. The most recent act of
heroism to earn the medal came 11 years ago, when two Army Delta Force
soldiers gave their lives protecting a downed Blackhawk helicopter pilot
in Somalia.

Staff Sgt. Ferguson was crossing the street to help when the grenade
exploded. He recalls feeling a hollow punch in his chest that reminded
him of being close to the starting line when dragsters gun their
engines. Lance Cpl. Sanders, approaching the scene, was temporarily
deafened, he says. He assumed all three Marines and the Iraqi must
surely be dead.

In fact, the explosion left Cpl. Dunham unconscious and face down in his
own blood, according to Lance Cpl. Sanders. He says the Iraqi lay on his
back, bleeding from his midsection.

The fight wasn't over, however. To Lance Cpl. Sanders's surprise, the
Iraqi got up and ran. Lance Cpl. Sanders says he raised his rifle and
fired 25 shots at the man's back, killing him.

The other two Marines were injured, but alive. Lance Cpl. Hampton was
spitting up blood and had shrapnel embedded in his left leg, knee, arm
and face, according to a military transcript. Pfc. Miller's arms had
been perforated by shrapnel. Yet both Marines struggled to their feet
and staggered back toward the corner.

"Cpl. Dunham was in the middle of the explosion," Pfc. Miller told a
Marine officer weeks later, after he and Lance Cpl. Hampton were
evacuated to the U.S. to convalesce. "If it was not for him, none of us
would be here. He took the impact of the explosion."

At first, Lance Cpl. Mark Edward Dean, a 22-year-old mortarman, didn't
recognize the wounded Marine being loaded into the back of his Humvee.
Blood from shrapnel wounds in the Marine's head and neck had covered his
face. Then Lance Cpl. Dean spotted the tattoo on his chest -- an Ace of
Spades and a skull -- and realized he was looking at one of his closest
friends, Cpl. Dunham. A volunteer firefighter back home in Owasso,
Okla., Lance Cpl. Dean says he knew from his experience with car wrecks
that his friend had a better chance of surviving if he stayed calm.

"You're going to be all right," Lance Cpl. Dean remembers saying as the
Humvee sped back to camp. "We're going to get you home."

When the battalion was at its base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., the two
Marines had played pool and hung out with Lance Cpl. Dean's wife, Becky
Jo, at the couple's nearby home. Once in a while, Lance Cpl. Dean says
they'd round up friends, drive to Las Vegas and lose some money at the
roulette tables. Shortly before the battalion left Kuwait for Iraq,
Lance Cpl. Dean ran short of cash. He says Cpl. Dunham bought him a
550-minute phone card so he could call Becky Jo. He used every minute.

At battalion headquarters in al Qa'im, Chaplain David Slater was in his
makeshift chapel -- in a stripped-down Iraqi train car with red plastic
chairs as pews -- when he heard an Army Blackhawk helicopter take off.
The 46-year-old Navy chaplain from Lincoln, Neb. knew that meant the
shock-trauma platoon would soon receive fresh casualties.

Shortly afterward, the helicopter arrived. Navy corpsmen and Marines
carried Cpl. Dunham's stretcher 200 feet to the medical tent, its green
floor and white walls emitting a rubbery scent, clumps of stethoscopes
hanging like bananas over olive-drab trunks of chest tubes, bandages and
emergency airway tubes.

The bearers rested the corporal's stretcher on a pair of black metal
sawhorses. A wounded Iraqi fighter was stripped naked on the next
stretcher -- standard practice for all patients, according to the
medical staff, to ensure no injury goes unnoticed. The Iraqi had plastic
cuffs on his ankles and was on morphine to quiet him, according to
medical personnel who were there.

When a wounded Marine is conscious, Chaplain Slater makes small talk --
asks his name and hometown -- to help keep the patient calm and alert
even in the face of often-horrific wounds. Chaplain Slater says he
talked to Cpl. Dunham, held his hand and prayed. But he saw no sign that
the corporal heard a word. After five minutes or so, he says, he moved
on to another Marine.

At the same time, the medical team worked to stabilize Cpl. Dunham. One
grenade fragment had penetrated the left side of his skull not far
behind his eye, says Navy Cmdr. Ed Hessel, who treated him. A second
entered the brain slightly higher and further toward the back of his
head. A third punctured his neck.

Cmdr. Hessel, a 44-year-old emergency-room doctor from Eugene, Ore.,
quickly concluded that the corporal was "unarousable." A calm,
bespectacled man, he says he wanted to relieve the corporal's brain and
body of the effort required to breathe. And he wanted to be sure the
corporal had no violent physical reactions that might add to the
pressure on his already swollen brain.

Navy Lt. Ted Hering, a 27-year-old critical-care nurse from San Diego,
inserted an intravenous drip and fed in drugs to sedate the corporal,
paralyze his muscles and blunt the gag response in his throat while a
breathing tube was inserted and manual ventilator attached. The Marine's
heart rate and blood pressure stabilized, according to Cmdr. Hessel. But
a field hospital in the desert didn't have the resources to help him any
further.

So Cpl. Dunham was put on another Blackhawk to take him to the Seventh
Marines' base at Al Asad, a transfer point for casualties heading on to
the military surgical hospital in Baghdad. During the flight, the
corporal lay on the top stretcher. Beneath him was the Iraqi, with two
tubes protruding from his chest to keep his lungs from collapsing. Lt.
Hering stood next to the stretchers, squeezing a plastic bag every four
to five seconds to press air into Cpl. Dunham's lungs.

The Iraqi, identified in battalion medical records only as POW#1,
repeatedly asked for water until six or seven minutes before landing,
when Cpl. Dunham's blood-drenched head bandage burst, sending a red
cascade through the mesh stretcher and onto the Iraqi's face below.
After that, the man remained quiet, and kept his eyes and mouth clenched
shut, says the nurse, Lt. Hering.

The Army air crew made the trip in 25 minutes, their fastest run ever,
according to the pilot, and skimmed no higher than 50 feet off the
ground to avoid changes in air pressure that might put additional strain
on Cpl. Dunham's brain.

When the Blackhawk touched down at Al Asad, Cpl. Dunham was turned over
to new caretakers. The Blackhawk promptly headed back to al Qa'im. More
patients were waiting; 10 Marines from the Third Battalion were wounded
on April 14, along with a translator.

At 11:45 p.m. that day, Deb and Dan Dunham were at home in Scio, N.Y., a
town of 1,900, when they got the phone call all military parents dread.
It was a Marine lieutenant telling them their son had sustained shrapnel
wounds to the head, was unconscious and in critical condition.

Mr. Dunham, 43, an Air Force veteran, works in the shipping department
of a company that makes industrial heaters, and Mrs. Dunham, 44, teaches
home economics. She remembers helping her athletic son, the oldest of
four, learn to spell as a young boy by playing "PIG" and "HORSE" --
traditional basketball shooting games -- and expanding the games to
include other words. He never left home or hung up the phone without
telling his mother, "I love you," she says.

The days that followed were filled with uncertainty, fear and hope. The
Dunhams knew their son was in a hospital in Baghdad, then in Germany,
where surgeons removed part of his skull to relieve the swelling inside.
At one point doctors upgraded his condition from critical to serious.

On April 21, the Marines gave the Dunhams plane tickets from Rochester
to Washington, and put them up at the National Naval Medical Center in
Bethesda, Md., where their son was going to be transferred. Mrs. Dunham
brought along the first Harry Potter novel, so she and her husband could
take turns reading to their son, just to let him know they were there.

When Cpl. Dunham arrived that night, the doctors told the couple he had
taken a turn for the worse, picking up a fever on the flight from
Germany. After an hour by their son's side, Mr. Dunham says he had a
"gut feeling" that the outlook was bleak. Mrs. Dunham searched for signs
of hope, planning to ask relatives to bring two more Harry Potter books,
in case they finished the first one. Doctors urged the Dunhams to get
some rest.

They were getting dressed the next morning when the intensive-care unit
called to say the hospital was sending a car for them. "Jason's
condition is very, very grim," Mrs. Dunham remembers a doctor saying. "I
have to tell you the outlook isn't very promising."

A Marine kisses a helmet standing in honor of Cpl. Jason L. Dunham
during a service at Camp Al Qaim, Iraq.

She says doctors told her the shrapnel had traveled down the side of his
brain, and the damage was irreversible. He would always be on a
respirator. He would never hear his parents or know they were by his
side. Another operation to relieve pressure on his brain had little
chance of succeeding and a significant chance of killing him.

Once he joined the Marines, Cpl. Dunham put his father in charge of
medical decisions and asked that he not be kept on life support if there
was no hope of recovery, says Mr. Dunham. He says his son told him,
"Please don't leave me like that."

The Dunhams went for a walk on the hospital grounds. When they returned
to the room, Cpl. Dunham's condition had deteriorated, his mother says.
Blood in his urine signaled failing kidneys, and one lung had collapsed
as the other was filling with fluid. Mrs. Dunham says they took the
worsening symptoms as their son's way of telling them they should follow
through on his wishes,.

At the base in al Qa'im, Second Lt. Robinson, 24, of Kenosha, Wis.,
gathered the men of Cpl. Dunham's platoon in the sleeping area, a spread
of cots, backpacks, CD players and rifles, its plywood walls papered
with magazine shots of scantily clad women. The lieutenant says he told
the Marines of the Dunhams' decision to remove their son's life support
in two hours' time.

Lance Cpl. Dean wasn't the only Marine who cried. He says he prayed that
some miracle would happen in the next 120 minutes. He prayed that God
would touch his friend and wake him up so he could live the life he had
wanted to lead.

In Bethesda, the Dunhams spent a couple more hours with their son.
Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee arrived and pinned the Purple
Heart, awarded to those wounded in battle, on his pillow. Mrs. Dunham
cried on Gen. Hagee's shoulder. The Dunhams stepped out of the room
while the doctors removed the ventilator.

At 4:43 p.m. on April 22, 2004, Marine Cpl. Jason L. Dunham died.

Six days later, Third Battalion gathered in the parking lot outside the
al Qa'im command post for psalms and ceremony. In a traditional combat
memorial, one Marine plunged a rifle, bayonet-first, into a sandbag.
Another placed a pair of tan combat boots in front, and a third perched
a helmet on the rifle's stock. Lance Cpl. Dean told those assembled
about a trip to Las Vegas the two men and Becky Jo Dean had taken in
January, not long before the battalion left for the Persian Gulf.
Chatting in a hotel room, the corporal told his friends he was planning
to extend his enlistment and stay in Iraq for the battalion's entire
tour. "You're crazy for extending," Lance Cpl. Dean recalls saying.
"Why?"

He says Cpl. Dunham responded: "I want to make sure everyone makes it
home alive. I want to be sure you go home to your wife alive."

Nothing of importance happened today

2006-07-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

Two hundred thirty years ago today, the Continental Congress adopted Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. On that same day, July 4th, 1776, George III, king of England, wrote in his diary, "Nothing of importance happened today."

Acá puede escucharse una lectura de uno de los documentos mas importantes de la historia de la humanidad:

Dream is over

2006-06-30T14:45:00.000-07:00

Depresion total.

Y ahora viene lo peor de todo. Los insufribles de siempre que van a decir que nos dejo afuera el arbitro (se equivoco muy poco en realidad, y por suerte no pito un penal claro de Ayala), los que van a decir que nunca tenemos suerte (esta es la cuarta vez que definimos por penales en un mundial, la primera vez que perdemos), los que van a putear a los jugadores y especialemente a Riquelme (ni eramos los mejores antes de perder, ni somos lo peores ahora que perdimos, Argentina tiene un equipo que me ha hecho sentir orgulloso por las bolas que ha puesto.)

Y ahora?

Espero que Pekerman se quede. Por su dedicacion. Por su etica. Por su serenidad. Y porque sino se viene el exgordo ex?droguix Maradona que es sinonimo de caos. Este equipo ha hecho un esfuerzo tremendo y ha puesto en la cancha de futbol toda la pasion y la garra que se tiene que poner para llegar a la final. No llegaron. Pero lo dejaron TODO. Mi aplauso interminable para cada uno de ese estelar grupo de jugadores.

Ahora hago barra a muerte por Brasil. O Portugal. Brasil es un pais en el que la gente vive y respira futbol. Es un pais en el que la gente llora de alegria y vive la pasion del mundial igual que la vive el pueblo nuestro que supimos concebir. Es un pais golpeado -como el nuestro- que encuentra un unico consuelo y una poca de distraccion en el futbol. Por esto y mucho mas, el amarillo es mi color a partir de ahora.

Mexican Watershed

2006-06-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

New vs. Old

WSJ, June 29

Mexicans head to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, and the choice they face is notably stark: Accelerate the pace of modernization that began in the mid-1980s or, because progress has been achieved a little slowly, revert to the economically populist and insular ways of old Mexico.

While there are five candidates in the race, polls indicate the presidency will go either to Felipe Calderon of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), who represents the first alternative, or Andres Manuel López Obrador of the far-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), who represents the second. The two are running in a statistical dead heat, some eight to 10 percentage points ahead of third-place candidate Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Anything can still happen in a three-man contest, but the decline of the PRI candidate is remarkable given that that leftist party dominated Mexico from 1929 to 2000. But Mexico began to change some 20 years ago, chipping away at one-party rule and opening to the world. On the economic front, thousands of government-owned businesses were privatized and trade tariffs began to come down. Thirteen years ago Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Six years ago it held free elections for president and unseated the PRI. Amazingly, that transfer of power was not accompanied by an economic meltdown, the usual Mexican pattern.

This is progress. But for many Mexicans the transition has been too slow. Over-regulation of business still damps animal spirits. Key parts of the economy -- telecom, oil, natural gas, electricity, cement and transportation, among others -- remain de facto monopolies, damaging productivity growth, job creation and Mexican competitiveness.

Mr. López Obrador has used this underperformance to tap into nostalgia for old Mexico, with its closed, centrally planned economy. He wants to renegotiate Nafta. He rejects the opening of Mexico's corn and bean markets to U.S. exports, now slated for 2008. He promises Mexicans an FDR-style New Deal that would include a massive public works program and a government-subsidized blitz to build one million homes for the poor. Critics also fear an authoritarian streak, based on his track record as a Mexico City mayor who defied judicial rulings and had a penchant for calling out the mob.

Left-wing populists are hardly new in Latin America, of course. In the worst case, they become more authoritarian and statist in power, like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Others discover they can't govern this way and turn pragmatic, as with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva. Mr. López Obrador has fallen in the polls as his opponents have compared him to Mr. Chávez, and he has rejected any connection. A López Obrador victory would nonetheless be a stern test of how committed Mexico is to joining the global march toward freer economic and political development.

Mr. Calderon -- energy minister before winning the PAN nomination -- offers a very different program. He promises to simplify the tax regime, allow private "partnerships" for deep water oil exploration, and rid the country of monopoly privilege. He's also committed to preserving fiscal and monetary stability, the one area where current President Vicente Fox's administration has done well.

Mr. Calderon draws most of his support from the northern half of Mexico -- traditional PAN strongholds and prime beneficiaries of Nafta -- as shown in the nearby map of areas where each candidate is leading in the polls. He also does well with the Mexican middle class, which is finally getting on its feet after three decades of profligate government spending, corruption and the devastating currency devaluations of 1976, 1982 and 1994.

A stable peso has since led to low inflation, and interest rates have followed. In recent years markets for consumer credit and mortgages have developed. Retail competition has given Mexican consumers a taste of what is possible. Still, the benefits have flowed slowly and unevenly, and Mr. López Obrador continues to draw support from the leftist intelligentsia, government bureaucrats and the country's impoverished south.

For Americans, the stakes in this election could hardly be greater. Tom Tancredo and friends may believe that the only thought the U.S. need give its southern neighbor is the height of the wall it plans to raise between them. But if Mexicans are able to build on the liberalizing trends of the past 20 years, their appetite for El Norte is bound, over time, to diminish. And if they revert to the populist habits of yore, no American wall will be high enough to keep the flood of desperate workers out.

Mas sobre el tema aqui.

Pobre Paul

2006-06-28T13:10:00.000-07:00

Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite (and Mr. Smith, and Ms. Jones, and Mr. Williams, and.....)

Lots of media are noting that today Paul McCartney turns 64 – notable chiefly because McCartney wrote and sang, as a Beatle, the song “When I’m 64.” Of course, many of these reports also mention Paul’s recent separation from his second wife, Heather Mills, and the fact that she’ll get a sizeable share of his fortune of $1.5 billion.

I don’t care about McCartney’s personal life, but I do love Beatles’ music. I’ve loved it since, as a five-year-old boy on February 9, 1964, I sat in my grandmother’s lap and watched the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

When I read of McCartney’s fortune, I’m struck by how puny it is compared to the amount of pleasure he’s contributed to humankind. Consider:

If each viewer of only the Beatles’ first two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show deposited $1 into an account in return for watching the Beatles on these telecasts, this account would have had in it, on February 16, 1964, $143.7 million. (The number of people who tuned in to the Beatles’ February 9, 1964, appearance was 73 million; the number who tuned in one week later for their second appearance was 70.7 million. These data are here.)

If this money were invested at the historical rate of return earned by U.S. stocks, it would have earned an annual return, on average, of eight percent. Today, this account would be worth about $3.5 billion.

Divided equally among John, Paul, George, and Ringo, Paul’s share today would be $875 million – more than half of his current net worth. And this from only a small payment made 42 years ago by each viewer of a mere two episodes of an American television show. Add the value of the pleasures McCartney helped to bring to us from the Beatles’ other appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show – the value of the Beatles’ many live performances around the globe – the value of their many albums that continue (now mostly in CD form) to be played – the value of the Beatles’ movies such as "A Hard Day’s Night" – the value that McCartney’s music post-Beatles brought to countless people.

And the man is worth only $1.5 billion! Because no one forced him to write and perform and record music, I’ll certainly not argue that McCartney is undercompensated. But I do insist that his net worth of $1.5 billion is paltry, puny, insignificant compared to his contributions to humankind.

Quite a bargain.

2006-06-28T10:46:00.000-07:00

SUMMER AND SMOKE
Alluring scents, captivating flavors. At long last wood grilling, in all its nuanced glory, comes home.
L.A. Times Food Section

IN the beginning, there was wood. And it was good. But it was awfully inconvenient.

The appeal of wood smoke is almost primal. In fact, just those two words by themselves are enough to make you hungry.

Along with the smells of ripe tomatoes and perfect peaches, wood smoke is an integral part of summer's sweet perfume. It lends depth to the flavor of chicken, sweetens the taste of pork and helps give steak its sizzle.

It's so delicious that some restaurants even build their menus around it. But until fairly recently, unless you were a barbecuing insider, it was pretty difficult to get that bouquet in your backyard.

Now all that has changed. Cooking with real wood flavor has become so easy you can do it every day.

Finding wood for grilling has always been a problem — especially in urban Southern California. You can't just go lighting any old logs you find. Fireplace wood — mostly pine and cedar — contains sticky resins that will coat your food. Some woods will burn too fast to be any good; others will burn too slow.

Even if you did manage to find good wood, you'd have to add another hour or so to the cooking process to allow the fire to burn to coals and rid itself of the unwanted flavors most woods have.

And as a friend who is chef at a restaurant where a wood-fired grill is central to the kitchen says, to use it well you have to learn to cook not only the food, but also the fire at the same time. Getting the fire to the right point and keeping it there, and juggling the daily changes in hot spots are every bit as tricky as judging the exact moment a pork chop is done.

In the interest of convenience, most grillers use charcoal, which is wood that has already been burnt clean. You can find it either in its lump form or in briquettes — lump charcoal that has been ground down to dust and then stuck back together in uniform shapes so it burns evenly.

These are very convenient and work pretty well, if all you're interested in is generating heat. But they add precious little flavor to whatever you're cooking.

To get that wood-smoke flavor, the best solution for the backyard griller is wood chips. And there's good news on that front.

Picking the perfect chip

WOOD chips — they basically look like what you might sweep up off a carpenter's floor — have been around forever, but until not so long ago they could be found only at barbecue shops that catered to the hardwood hard-core. Lately, however, they've been showing up at even my neighborhood supermarket. And a visit to a gourmet grocery last week turned up six kinds of wood chips.

These are simple to use: Just soak them in water for a half-hour or so, then toss them on the fire once it's going. They work great, pumping out smoke like there's no tomorrow.

But the sudden availability of all of these choices is a little overwhelming. Apple, cherry, mesquite — even chips made from old wine barrels. Which one to choose? Should you go with hickory, the traditional choice of most pit barbecuers? Or would oak — the California wood of choice — be better? Should you use the same wood for a beefy tri-tip as for a delicate chicken breast? And what about fruit woods, such as apple and cherry?

To find out, I fired up a couple of grills in my backyard one day and worked my way through seven types of wood chips, using each to cook pork, chicken and beef. By the end of the afternoon I was sweaty and pretty well smoked myself, but at least I had some answers.

The first thing that needs to be said about using these wood chips may seem obvious: Smoke tastes like smoke and that is the dominant flavoring. If you're expecting dramatic differences from one variety to the next, you may be disappointed. It's not a mustard and ketchup thing, but more like the differences between different types of mustard.

But there are differences, even if they are nuanced, and they do affect the way the smoke flavors the meat.

The first big difference is intensity. Some chips make foods taste profoundly smoky, whereas others add only a grace note. The smokiest woods, in roughly descending order, are hickory, oak and cherry. The mildest are the wine cask chips, pecan, apple and mesquite.

Another difference is an elusive quality that I suppose you could call "sweetness," though that seems like an odd attribute for something such as wood smoke. This isn't true sweetness — like sugar — but maybe the absence of the harsh qualities you sometimes find in wood smoke. The sweetest woods are mesquite and apple. That same quality is also there in cherry and hickory, though it's a little harder to discern because they are so smoky.

Also, some chips have distinctive flavor notes. I found a peculiar nuttiness in pecan wood, but to me it tasted more like peanuts than pecans. The wine cask wood actually did carry an undertone of red wine.

There was an elusive characteristic in the flavor imparted by oak smoke that I found appealing but had a hard time describing. Finally, it occurred to me that what I liked about it was that it seems to be smoky but always in a graceful way. It's more Chanel No. 5 than Brut 33.

So which woods go best with which meats? For strong-flavored beef and lamb, I'd recommend hickory, oak, cherry and apple. For mild chicken and fish, use mesquite, apple or pecan — and because of the others' fruity qualities, probably only mesquite for fish. For pork, use cherry, hickory, pecan or apple.

I started the fires in the usual way. As far as I'm concerned, a chimney starter is the only way to go. These are nothing more than bigger and slightly fancier versions of the old coffee can starters your dad may have used.

As for the charcoal, grilling purists usually prefer lump because it burns a little hotter and leaves less ash to clog the grill's vents. Briquettes don't get to quite as high a temperature, but they last much longer. The bottom line is that for the 30 minutes it takes to grill most foods, the two work about equally well.

When the coals are ready, spread them evenly if you're cooking something small, which will cook quickly. That gives you the most surface area exposed to the greatest amount of heat.

More often, though, you'll probably be cooking things such as steaks, pork chops or even roasts, which are thicker and will take a little longer. For these foods, pile the coals against one side of the grill, leaving the other side empty. This gives you a hot spot on which to sear the meat, and a cooler area where it can cook to an even doneness.

A big part of the art of grilling is juggling these two zones — moving meat from high heat to low, and occasionally back again, in order to get it perfectly cooked. If you want to add more coals, scatter them across the top of those that have already been lighted. They'll be ready in less than 10 minutes.

Match your meat

AFTER all my experiments with wood chips, it was time to turn theory into practice (and dinner), coming up with three main courses that highlight the best combinations of wood smoke and meat.

Butterflied leg of lamb is one of my favorite cuts for grilling. Have the butcher bone it for you, and if you're not getting a full leg, make sure you get the half that comes from the butt, not the shank. There's much more meat and a lot less sinew.

One of the great advantages to a butterflied leg is that there is a wide range of thickness in the meat. This translates into a wide range of doneness. When the thick part from the back of the leg is rosy medium rare (about 115 degrees), the thin parts from the front will be medium. Perfectly cooked meat for both you and Uncle Earl.

Grill it over oak or cherry or — even better — the chips made from wine casks; you really do pick up a subtle flavor of red wine. The tapenade served with the lamb is an especially good complement; it gets an herbal complexity from fennel seed and a little bit of Pernod liqueur that is stirred in right at the end (add it too early and it loses its fragrance).

Because halibut is so lean, it can be a tricky fish to grill. It dries out almost instantly. And with so little fat to lubricate it, it tends to stick to everything it touches. That's an easy problem to solve, though: Wrap it in a sheet of prosciutto.

The prosciutto renders a little fat, moistening the meat and keeping it from sticking. More important, the salty pork taste is a wonderful complement to the subtle flavor of halibut. Mesquite is the best wood for this recipe, because it adds a mild, slightly sweet taste of smoke that doesn't overwhelm the fish.

Serve the fish with a bright salad of gold and red grape tomatoes. These are among the earliest varieties of tomatoes to ripen, and considering all of the weather-delayed planting this spring, they are among the best-flavored in the market right now.

Pork tenderloin has to be among the most underappreciated cuts of meat for grilling. It has good flavor, is reliably tender and stays moist (especially when brined).

And it takes only minimal preparation. The main thing you have to do is remove the tough, shiny silverskin that coats part of the muscle. Leave it on and the tenderloin will become misshapen during cooking. It's easy to remove: Slip a paring knife under one end of the silverskin, grab a good hold and then pull up, scraping against the silverskin with your knife. You'll have to repeat a few times until it's all gone.

Use cherry, pecan or apple for the tenderloin. These are slightly sweet woods that are just a little smokier than mesquite, so they balance perfectly with the flavor of the pork.

Serve the pork with this Tuscan version of home fries. Cook quartered potatoes on the stove top very slowly with red onion until the onion caramelizes and the potatoes crisp and brown on the outside. For the last 10 minutes, add just a hint of rosemary to balance the sweetness of the onions.

Though steaks and hamburgers are great for every-night meals off the grill, these dishes are worthy of being the centerpieces at your next big-deal dinner party, and without requiring much additional effort.

Early in the day, prepare the meat and fix whatever side dishes you choose. Then just before the guests arrive, start the fire — it'll be ready to cook on by the time you're done with drinks and appetizers.

Put the meat on the grill and breathe in that mingled perfume of wood smoke and sear. That's the sweet — and now even convenient — smell of summer.

Wood chips are available at selected barbecue supply stores, hardware stores and supermarkets including California Charcoal & Firewood in Commerce, (323) 780-6000, http://www.calchar.com ; Barbecues Galore stores; Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH) stores; Lowe's stores; Ralphs markets; and selected Bristol Farms markets. Online sources include http://www.barbecue-store.com and http://www.amazon.com .

*

Grilled butterflied leg of lamb with olive-fennel tapenade

Total time: 55 minutes, plus 2 hours marinating time

Servings: 6 to 8

Note: Use wine cask chips for this, or oak or cherry. Prepare the tapenade while the meat is marinating.

Grilled leg of lamb

1 (2 1/2 -pound) butterflied leg of lamb

3 to 4 cloves garlic

1 teaspoon kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

3/4 cup red wine

1. If the lamb has been tied into a roll, untie it and lay it flat, skin-side down. There will be a range of thicknesses to the meat, with some areas fairly thin and some very thick. Slice partway through the thickest portions to allow the meat to lie flat.

2. Slice the garlic into thin slivers. Turn the lamb over so that the skin side is facing up. Use a paring knife to cut slits all over the skin side roughly a half-inch deep and a half-inch apart. Stuff a garlic sliver into each slit (it's easiest if you use the tip of the knife to hold the slit open; don't worry about everything being perfectly neat).

3. Sprinkle both sides of the meat with salt and pepper and place it in a zip-lock bag. Pour the wine over the lamb, press out all the air and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours to marinate.

4. When you're ready to cook, soak about 2 cups of wood chips in water to cover. Light the coals and when the coals are glowing hot, empty them into one side of the grill, banked against the side. Drain the wood chips and place on top of the coals.

5. Pat the lamb dry with a paper towel and place it skin-side down over the hottest part of the fire. Sear the lamb 3 to 5 minutes per side, until browned.

6. Turn the meat again and move it to a cooler part of the grill and cover. Cook 10 minutes on one side, turn and cook about another 10 minutes, until a thermometer inserted into a thick part of the meat reads 115 degrees. That makes about 30 minutes cooking total. After allowing the lamb to rest, this will give you a range of doneness from medium-rare to medium.

7. Remove the meat from the grill and set aside 10 minutes to rest before carving against the grain. Serve with tapenade on the side.

*

Olive-fennel tapenade

1/2 pound pitted black olives in brine

2 teaspoons minced garlic

1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seed

1/2 teaspoon red wine vinegar

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon Pernod

1 tablespoon minced parsley

1. Rinse the pitted black olives, shake them dry and place them in the bowl of a food processor.

2. With a mortar and pestle, pound the garlic and the fennel seed into a coarse paste and add it to the black olives along with the vinegar and the olive oil.

3. Pulse into a coarse paste that holds together; add a little more olive oil if the mixture is too dry. Cover tightly and refrigerate until ready to serve.

4. When almost ready to serve, remove from the refrigerator and stir in the Pernod and parsley. Makes 2 cups.

Each of 8 servings: 254 calories; 27 grams protein; 3 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram fiber; 14 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 85 mg. cholesterol; 390 mg. sodium.

*

Prosciutto-wrapped halibut with grape tomato salad

Total time: 25 minutes

Servings: 6

Note: Use mesquite wood chips.

6 halibut fillets (2 pounds), about 2 inches thick

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

6 slices thinly sliced prosciutto (about 3 ounces)

1 1/2 pounds yellow and red grape tomatoes

6 basil leaves, thinly sliced

1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoons red wine vinegar

1. Cut the fillets into equal-sized pieces about as wide as a slice of prosciutto. Because of the size of a halibut fillet, you will probably end up cutting across the fillet, making pieces that are roughly square.

2. Lightly salt and pepper the fish. Lay a prosciutto slice on the work surface and put a piece of halibut in the middle of it. Fold the ends around the halibut. It will look a little messy on the side where the ends meet, but don't worry; you'll serve it with that side down. Refrigerate the halibut until ready to cook.

3. Cut the tomatoes in half and place them in a bowl. Add three-fourths teaspoon salt and toss to coat well. Set aside to let the salt draw out some of the tomato juice.

4. When you're ready to cook the fish, soak about 1 cup of wood chips in water to cover. Light the coals in a chimney and when the coals are glowing hot, empty them into the center of the grill. If there aren't enough coals, add more on top and wait until they are glowing as well. Drain the wood chips and place on top of the coals.

5. Toss the tomatoes with the basil, olive oil and vinegar.

6. Spray a grill basket with nonstick cooking spray or rub lightly with oil. Place the halibut packages in the basket and place over the fire. Cook, uncovered, on one side until the prosciutto has lightly crisped, 4 to 5 minutes. Turn and cook until a knife inserts easily into an uncovered part of the halibut, another 4 to 5 minutes. Don't overcook the halibut; even with the prosciutto wrapping, it will dry out pretty quickly. Total cooking time should be about 10 minutes.

7. Carefully open the grill basket, making sure the prosciutto doesn't stick to it. Place the halibut packages on a large platter with the neatest side facing up. Spoon the tomato salad around the outside of the platter, sprinkle with black pepper and serve immediately.

Each serving: 253 calories; 37 grams protein; 6 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams fiber; 9 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 60 mg. cholesterol; 760 mg. sodium.

Brined pork tenderloin with `Tuscan home fries'

Total time: 1 hour, 20 minutes, plus overnight brining time

Servings: 6

Note: Use cherry, apple or pecan wood chips.

2 (1-pound) pork tenderloins

Kosher salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1/2 gallon water

1 1/2 pounds waxy potatoes

1 large red onion (about 2/3 pound)

1/4 cup olive oil

1/2 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary

1. Trim the pork tenderloins, removing any loose pieces of meat. Remove the silverskin: Slip a paring knife underneath it and cut one end free. Grasp that end tightly and lift up, scraping the silverskin with the knife to separate it from the meat. Repeat until all silverskin is removed. Place the tenderloins in a zip-lock bag.

2. In a large bowl, stir together one-third cup salt, sugar and water until completely dissolved. Pour the mixture over the tenderloins, seal tightly and refrigerate overnight.

3. About 90 minutes before serving, cut the potatoes into pieces about the size of walnuts. Cut off the top and bottom of the red onion and cut the onion into half-inch wedges. Place the potatoes and onion in a heavy skillet, sprinkle with 2 teaspoons salt and drizzle with the olive oil. Toss to coat well.

4. Place the skillet over medium-low heat, cover and cook for 30 minutes, checking after 15 minutes to stir. Stir gently to keep from separating the potatoes from the browning surface: shaking the pan from side to side will free most of the potatoes; those that stick can be gently pried loose with a thin spatula.

5. After 30 minutes, remove the lid and continue cooking, carefully stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are well-browned and crusty, another 30 to 40 minutes. Add the minced rosemary, reduce heat to very low and continue cooking another 10 minutes. The potatoes will hold this way until ready to serve.

6. While the potatoes are cooking, start the pork. Soak about 1 1/2 cups of wood chips in water to cover. Light the coals in a chimney and when the coals are glowing hot, empty them into one side of the grill, banked against the side. Drain the wood chips and place on top of the coals.

7. Pat the pork tenderloins dry with paper towels and place the meat directly over the flame to sear for 3 to 5 minutes. Turn and sear on the other side for another 3 to 5 minutes. Move the tenderloins to the cooler part of the grill, cover and cook 6 to 10 minutes or until the temperature reaches 150 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.

8. When the tenderloins are done, remove them to a carving board and let them rest 5 to 10 minutes. Slice them into half-inch thick medallions and put them on a warmed platter along with the crusty fried potatoes. Serve immediately.

Each serving: 348 calories; 32 grams protein; 21 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams fiber; 14 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 84 mg. cholesterol; 426 mg. sodium.

Secondhand Smoke: It's All Bad

2006-06-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

The surgeon general says findings are 'indisputable': No level of exposure is safe, and the children of smokers are especially at risk.

June 28, 2006

Twenty years after the first surgeon general's report on secondhand smoke, the evidence is now "indisputable" that the noxious fumes are a major health threat that kills an estimated 50,000 people each year, a new federal study said Tuesday.

There is no level of exposure to smoke that is safe, and the children of smokers are at special risk, Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona said in releasing the new report.

"I am here to say the debate is over, the science is clear," Carmona said during a televised news conference from Washington. "Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance. It is a serious health hazard."

Studies in the two decades since the first federal report confirm that secondhand smoke is linked not only to heart disease and lung cancer, but also to breast cancer, childhood cancer, nasal sinus cancer, ear infections and asthma. Recent results have also shown a clear link to sudden infant death syndrome.

The only way to combat the health threat, he said, was to follow the lead of California and 15 other states and ban all smoking in public buildings.

The report estimated that about 30% of indoor workers are not protected by smoke-free laws.

Carmona said parents should protect the health of their children by stepping outside their homes before lighting up.

"So many children are exposed in the home," said Thomas Glynn of the American Cancer Society. "If we do nothing else, we need to protect children because they are more vulnerable and the effects are lifetime effects."

For everyone else, Carmona said, the best advice is simply "stay away from smokers."

Among the report's major conclusions:

• Exposure of nonsmokers to tobacco smoke increases their risk of both heart disease and cancer by as much as 30%.

• Even a brief exposure to tobacco smoke can increase risk, especially for people with heart and respiratory diseases.

• Segregating smokers is not an effective technique for preventing exposure of nonsmokers, and even the best available technology does not cleanse the air adequately.

• There is no evidence that smoke-free laws have significantly reduced sales at bars and restaurants.

The number of smokers in the U.S. has declined sharply since the 1964 surgeon general's report linking smoking to health problems.

The report eventually led to warnings on cigarette packages, advertising restrictions and health education programs that have helped reduce the smoking prevalence rate among adults from 42.4% in 1965 to 20.9%, or 44.5 million people, in 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.

The drop in smoking has been accompanied by a decline in cancer rates, although until recently, that decline has been overwhelmed by the growth in population. But the American Cancer Society reported in February the first decline in the absolute number of cancer deaths since 1930. The decline was small — a drop of only 369 out of about 557,000 in 2003 — but the results were attributed in large part to the smoking decreases.

Between 1988 and 2002, the report said, the percentage of adult nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke has been halved to about 43%. That exposure was determined by measuring blood levels of a key nicotine byproduct called cotinine.

Even among those exposed, the median level of cotinine has dropped about 70%. About 20% of children have been exposed to secondhand smoke at home, and their cotinine levels are twice those in adults.

The report is simply a compilation of research conducted in the last two decades. Nonetheless, experts hope it will galvanize public sentiment in much the same way that the 1964 report on smoking and health did, accelerating the momentum toward an extension of smoke-free laws to cover nonsmokers who are now unprotected.

Carta abierta

2006-06-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

de un profesor de Michigan State University a la Asociación Musulmana de la universidad en relación a las protestas por las caricaturas de Mahoma

Visto en el opinador:

Dear Moslem Association:

As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France.

This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceeded with your infantile "protests." If you do not like the values of the West — see the 1st Amendment — you are free to leave.

I hope for God's sake that most of you choose that option.

Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.

Cordially,

I. S. Wichman, Professor of Mechanical Engineering

2006-06-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

De Juan Pablo Varsky

No podía fallar otra vez. Repleta de frustraciones, su historia en la nazionale no le admitía un fracaso más. Hace cuatro años lo habían expulsado en octavos contra la Corea de Hiddink. El impresentable árbitro ecuatoriano Byron Moreno le mostró la segunda amarilla y la roja por simulación de penal. Luego, los azzurri perdieron por un gol de oro. Ni siquiera sacaron del medio después del cabezazo de Ahn. Volvió a decepcionar en la Euro 2004. En pleno partido ante Dinamarca, escupió como guanaco al rival Christian Poulsen. Fueron tres salivazos, como un geiser. Recibió tres fechas de suspensión y no pudo ayudar al equipo, eliminado en la primera etapa. Hasta ayer Francesco Totti la pasaba mucho mejor en Roma que en Italia. En el club tiene currículum con títulos. En la selección, prontuario con condenas.

Nacido en la capital italiana, siempre vivió allí y rechazó cualquier oferta de mudanza. Milan lo sedujo en su etapa adolescente con escuela privada, casa y un gran contrato. Ya consagrado, Real Madrid lo cortejó para sumarlo a su grupo de galácticos. La respuesta fue siempre la misma: no, gracias. Nadie me mueve de mi lugar en el mundo.

Así define la revista alemana Spiegel su vínculo con la Ciudad Eterna: Totti es a Roma lo que Woody Allen a Manhattan. Cambia el tema recurrente en sus vidas. Lejos del psicoanálisis y el judaísmo, el de Francesco es el gigantesco Edipo que tiene con su mamma Fiorella, toda una celebridad. “Podría sobrevivir mucho tiempo sin comida, sin agua y sin aire. Pero no duraría ni un minuto sin mi hijo”, dijo la persona más temida por el fantasista.

Hasta hace muy poco tiempo, todos los Totti vivían juntos. Ahora, Fiorella habita la casa de al lado y suele cocinar pasta para los compañeros y amigos de su bambino . Está prohibido criticar su obra maestra, los bucattini alla matrisciana . El delantero Antonio Cassano, hoy en Real Madrid, lo sabe. Se animó a semejante afrenta y salió eyectado del hogar que lo había cobijado durante unas cuantas semanas.

La fama no logró alterar sus rutinas. Toma capuchino en la cafetería de sus amigos, se corta el pelo en la peluquería de toda la vida y compra los zapatos en la zapatería de siempre. Por eso lo quieren tanto en Roma. “Sigue siendo el mismo de siempre”, diríamos en la Argentina. Con una cuenta bancaria millonaria y una esposa tan famosa como él. Ilary Blasi era presentadora de TV cuando llegó el flechazo. Se casaron hace un año y ya son padres de Christian, un bebé de siete meses que le inspiró el festejo del chupete.

Cuando confesó que nunca había leído un libro en su vida, empezó a ganarse la fama de tonto e ignorante. Proliferaron los cuentos: sabías que Totti tardó cuatro meses en armar un rompecabezas que decía “de 2 a 3 años” y dijo que era un genio porque lo había hecho en menos tiempo ¡Durísimo!

Primero se enojó y después tomó la inteligente decisión de reírse. Publicó dos volúmenes de “Los mejores chistes sobre Totti contados por mí mismo” que rompieron el mercado literario en Italia. Las ganancias fueron destinadas a obras de caridad.

Ningún futbolista italiano dona tanto dinero en beneficencia como Totti. Pero su contribución más importante se produjo durante la invasión norteamericana a Irak, apoyada por el gobierno de Berlusconi. Insurgentes iraquíes habían secuestrado a la periodista italiana Giuliana Sgrena. Una marcha con miles de manifestantes no logró conmoverlos. Ese domingo, Totti salió a la cancha con una remera blanca que decía “Free Giuliana”. El custodio iraquí vio esa imagen y liberó a la periodista. Totti era su héroe y obedeció su orden.

Después del vergonzante salivazo a Poulsen, se tomó en serio su profesión. Estaba haciendo su mejor temporada hasta que le rompieron el tobillo. Se recuperó en cien días y llegó al Mundial. Discontinuo ante Ghana, invisible con Estados Unidos e insoportable ante República Checa, Lippi lo mandó al banco contra los australianos. Entró por Del Piero, tocó dos pelotas con clase y otro impresentable árbitro le dio la oportunidad de cambiar su historia azzurra con un penal. La clavó en el ángulo y anotó el gol dorado. Australia ni siquiera pudo sacar del medio. Esta vez, Francesco Totti no falló.

YouTube

2006-06-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

With NBC Pact, YouTube Site
Tries to Build a Lasting Business
Internet Video Service Sketches

By KEVIN J. DELANEY
June 27, 2006

Over the past decade, large media and tech companies have tried to build mass-market services offering video over the Internet. Someone has finally succeeded big: a startup with 35 employees and an office over a pizza restaurant.

Through YouTube Inc.'s Web service, consumers view short videos more than 70 million times a day, ranging from clips of unicycling jugglers and aspiring musicians to vintage Bugs Bunny cartoons and World Cup soccer highlights recorded from TV. Users post more than 60,000 videos daily, with a limit of 10 minutes for most clips.

The big question for YouTube now: Can it turn this loose bazaar of videos into an enduring business?

It will take a step in that direction today when it gets a big endorsement from General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal. NBC plans to announce that it will make available on YouTube promotional video clips for some of its popular shows, such as "The Office," "Saturday Night Live" and "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." NBC plans to market its new fall lineup using clips on YouTube, and is holding a contest for consumers to submit their own promotional videos for "The Office." It will also buy ads on the site and promote YouTube with mentions on television. That's a significant step for NBC, which earlier had demanded that YouTube take down clips of its programming. (Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. has made a deal1 to distribute movies and TV shows via Guba.com.)
[Steve Chen]

YouTube is a classic Silicon Valley garage-to-glory tale. Two friends, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, started a company in a garage to tackle an issue they were grappling with personally: how to share home videos online. They maxed out Mr. Chen's credit card on business expenses before a financier bankrolled them. They built a huge consumer following under the noses of richer, better-known companies with vastly larger payrolls. The young company burst forth as the dominant player.

But for every Apple Computer Inc. or Google Inc., Silicon Valley's history is filled with dozens of hot startups that gained 15 minutes of fame but couldn't sustain their brief success. YouTube's executives, including some alumni of Internet flameouts, are now furiously planning strategy and making deals to sustain their upward arc.

YouTube's 29-year-old chief executive, Mr. Hurley, and its 27-year-old chief technology officer, Mr. Chen, see two big challenges. The first is to figure out how to make money. The second is to address concerns of copyright holders that many of their TV and movie clips, music videos and songs are available through YouTube without permission.

Messrs. Hurley and Chen, who worked together at eBay Inc.'s PayPal electronic-payment unit, are trying to tackle both issues with a major stroke. They're quietly building an online-ad system with Google-scale ambitions, which they intend to use to entice producers to post their best videos on YouTube. When the system rolls out later this year, YouTube will share revenue from ads that appear alongside some videos with the producers of those videos. Messrs. Hurley and Chen hope that Hollywood will come to see YouTube much as it now views network TV: a legitimate means of distributing content with revenue and promotional payoff.

With stepped-up ad sales, YouTube could become a bigger target for lawsuits. While much of its content consists of home-shot videos, critics say the most-viewed items often involve some type of copyright infringement. On a recent day, top-viewed videos included clips from "Today" and "The Daily Show," a shaky "Radiohead" concert video and World Cup soccer highlights recorded from TV.

YouTube says it removes clips when content owners request it, under a procedure outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. In some cases, copyright owners such as TV producers put the clips on its site themselves in order to generate buzz or to test ideas.

NBC has been among the media companies most actively requesting YouTube to take down videos that users have uploaded without permission. With today's agreement, NBC seeks to promote its shows to YouTube's audience while getting assurances that material it doesn't want on the site will be removed. "YouTube has done their work on protecting copyright and we have assurances from them they will continue to do so," says NBC Universal Television Group Chief Marketing Officer John Miller. "They are a bright light, they have a lot of traffic," he adds.

Based in San Mateo, Calif., YouTube got its start in February 2005, after a dinner party attended by Mr. Hurley, who studied design in college and sports shoulder-length hair, and Mr. Chen, a Taiwan-born engineer with small hoops in each ear. They took videos of the party, but grew frustrated when they tried to share the footage with friends. They set out to build an online service that would let them do just that. At the time, Mr. Chen was still working at PayPal. Mr. Hurley, who had designed PayPal's current logo during his 1999 job interview there, was doing consulting work.

They set up shop in Mr. Hurley's Menlo Park garage. In May 2005, they released a test version of the site on the Web with no marketing. Early videos available prominently featured Mr. Chen's cat, PJ.

Building a Following

The site quickly built up a following. It stood out from the growing corps of online video services, including an offering from Google, for its simplicity. YouTube serves up videos from its Web site directly or from other sites where people insert them, generally not requiring users to download any special software. To accomplish this technical feat, YouTube drew on open-source software and wrote its own code. The service can handle about 110 video formats and 64 audio formats used by digital photo and video cameras and cellphones.

It also let consumers display its videos on other sites, such as blogs or personal pages on News Corp.'s popular MySpace social networking service. Users could easily upload the video and email links to YouTube videos to each other. The influential techie site Slashdot's mention of YouTube helped boost traffic.

After seeing Mr. Chen at a party last summer, former PayPal Chief Financial Officer Roelof Botha put some clips from his honeymoon in Italy on the site. Now a partner at venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital -- known for backing Apple, Cisco, Google and Yahoo, among others -- Mr. Botha invited the YouTube co-founders to his office in mid-August. Mr. Botha says that their project shares a key attribute with some of those tech legends: "building something for a personal need that winds up being universally useful."

By September, users were viewing YouTube videos more than a million times a day. Plotting strategy with Mr. Botha in October, the YouTube founders still believed their main business opportunity involved individuals sharing home videos. The next month, they announced Sequoia had injected $3.5 million to help finance the company.

But it started becoming clear to YouTube that users were sharing more than just their own videos, and viewership stretched far beyond circles of friends. By the time of the site's official public release on Dec. 15, consumers were viewing YouTube videos more than three million times daily. Millions of users had watched clips starring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho posted by sneaker giant Nike Inc. A few days later, someone posted to YouTube a skit from NBC's "Saturday Night Live" dubbed "Lazy Sunday," featuring two grown men rapping about cupcakes, red licorice candy and "The Chronicles of Narnia" film.

After it turned up among user favorites on the site, Mr. Hurley on Dec. 28 emailed a contact at NBC. He asked whether NBC had provided the clip itself, and volunteered to remove it from YouTube if the video had been shared without NBC's permission. The NBC staffer replied that he didn't know the answer, but would look into it, Mr. Hurley says.

Consumers viewed "Lazy Sunday" six million times before NBC on Feb. 3 contacted YouTube to request that it be removed, along with hundreds of other clips including Jay Leno monologues and video from the Winter Olympics.

Run-In With MySpace

YouTube's rising popularity led to run-ins with others. In December, MySpace blocked users from playing YouTube videos on their MySpace pages. Consumer outcry followed and MySpace activated the YouTube feature again. A News Corp. executive later said MySpace was concerned that the YouTube videos contained porn, and only reactivated them once YouTube had given it assurances about porn filtering. (YouTube says it removes any pornography after users point it out.) Shortly after the incident, MySpace released its own video service to compete with YouTube.

As YouTube users began complaining that the system was slowing, the company spent more on technology. In January, it began displaying limited advertising to help offset its rising costs for computer equipment and telecom lines. Mr. Chen predicts YouTube will open one new data center with computers to run its service each month this year.

Thanks partly to its use on MySpace and the Saturday Night Live clip, YouTube quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Amateur video enthusiasts created their own video tributes to "Lazy Sunday" that they titled "Lazy Monday" and "Lazy Muncie." Videos of young people, including two Chinese students, hamming it up in front of Webcams while lip synching to popular songs were viewed millions of times.

Along the way, the entertainment world began exploring how it might benefit from YouTube's audience. The Weinstein Co., a movie company run by producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, in April premiered the first eight minutes of the film "Lucky Number Slevin" on YouTube. Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Vantage movie unit last Friday posted exclusively on YouTube an 83-second animated clip poking fun at Al Gore to promote its "An Inconvenient Truth" film. By midday yesterday, it had been viewed nearly 600,000 times. "As a marketer you almost can't find a better place than YouTube to promote your movie," says Andrew Lin, vice president for interactive marketing at Paramount Vantage. Viacom owns YouTube rival ifilm.

Still, there were bumps. C-SPAN asked YouTube to take down popular clips of an appearance by television personality Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in April. C-SPAN distributed the clips free through Google's video service.

Some top tech and entertainment executives have lambasted the company -- while others have showed grudging admiration. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates in May told attendees of The Wall Street Journal's "D" technology conference that, given the copyright issues and the lack of a clear path to profitability, his company would be "in a lot of trouble" if it did what YouTube has. But he also acknowledged spending time on the site. "I saw a bunch of old Harlem Globetrotters movies up there the other night, it's great," he said.

Google and other YouTube competitors also stepped up their games. Google simplified its video-upload interface to match what YouTube had been offering. Yahoo this month upgraded its video service to allow consumers to submit videos directly to it, competing more squarely with YouTube.

Rumors have circulated in recent months that some major media companies have expressed interest in buying YouTube. In response Mr. Hurley says the company is not for sale. He says an initial public offering in the future is a possibility.

The YouTube co-founders decline to provide many specific details of the ad system they expect to gradually begin rolling out next month. But they say they're not fond of commercials that play before a user can watch a video, known in the industry as "prerolls." YouTube recently hired Yahoo sales executive Tony Nethercutt to build its sales team.

Submission by Cellphone

Consumers can now submit videos from their mobile phones, and Messrs. Chen and Hurley say they one day should be able to view YouTube clips on phones and other devices. They say they'll potentially expand beyond video to audio and other content.

For now, YouTube remains by far the most-visited video site on the Web. It attracted more than 20 million U.S. users in May, compared with 11.1 million for Microsoft's MSN Video and around seven million for both MySpace's video site and Google Video, according to research firm NetRatings Inc. YouTube says behavior indicates that users are most interested in viewing clips three minutes or shorter.

"We're at the fork in the road where Google was at maybe four or five years ago before they rolled out" their current ad model, says Mr. Chen.

A big question is whether more advertising and promotions will drive away some users who like the site's edgy feeling. Consumers spoke up earlier this year when YouTube's home page began to highlight in yellow links to videos from official content partners, questioning the preferential treatment. In response, YouTube quickly removed the yellow highlighting from the page.

Lo peor del mundial:

2006-06-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

No. No son los arbitros. Lo peor del mundial es la posicion ortodoxa y cada vez mas dificil de entender que ha tomado la FIFA respecto del uso de la tecnologia en el futbol.
En el año 1930, cuando se realizo el primer torneo en Uruguay, un italiano, para saber que ocurrio en una jugada discutida, tenia que abrir el diario del dia siguiente y confiar en la veracidad y el criterio de un periodista apostado en Uruguay. Este hacia de ojos y oidos para todo un pais. La decision del arbitro en una jugada clave que transcurrio en una milesima de segundo era juzgada por un reportero que, vaya uno a saber desde que angulo panoramico (y pasional), vio la jugada. El mundo cambio desde entonces. Hoy desde todos los rincones del planeta se ve una jugada clave desde todos los angulos imaginables. Todos quienes estan siguiendo el partido analizan una jugada dudosa una y otra vez en un periodo de 15 segundos, enfocada esta desde 4 o 5 angulos diferentes.
No se entiende como a esta altura del partido la FIFA se niega a abrir la posibilidad de que un segundo arbitro desde una cabina con veinte pantallas pueda asistir al arbitro principal, quien seguiria contando con la ultima palabra a la hora de la decision final.
Despues del fracaso del 2002 por la forma en la que Italia, España y Estados Unidos se despidieron del torneo, solo para contar los errores mas gruesos, la FIFA mantiene una posicion ridicula que pone un manto de injusticia e incertidumbre constante en un juego que podria ser mucho mas transparente sin perder el dinamismo que lo caracteriza.
La FIFA pretende eximirse de toda responsabilidad tirando todo el peso sobre los arbitros. Blatter ayer dijo que el arbitro ruso que dirijio Portugal - Holanda deberia haberse sacado una amarilla a si mismo. Los arbitros no son peores ahora, siempre existe un gran margen de error humano en un juego tan rapido en el que un jugador tiene que controlar la conducta y el accionar de otros 22. La gran diferencia hoy es que la tecnologia reduce ese margen de error a un minimo para todos quienes siguen el partido. Para todos menos uno, el arbitro.
Yo le sacaria roja a la FIFA.

Messi y Tevez de arranque

2006-06-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

Es la propuesta del Victor Hugo del futbol. Nada me parece mas acertado.
Este es su analisis del partido contra Mexico:

El diablo anduvo dando vueltas, pero fracasó una vez más. Flotaba en la ciudad en la que Goethe imaginó a Mefistófeles sacando vino de la nada en las mesas de la Auerbachs Keller (hechizando a un grupo de estudiantes que al despertar creían que había sucedido un milagro) la idea de que lo imposible, para el gran engañador, era conseguir que México derrotara a la Argentina.

Más todavía durante los 90 minutos, cuando los jugadores de La Volpe mejoraron sensiblemente lo hecho en el Mundial. Al mismo tiempo, entre los argentinos algunas respuestas individuales demasiado modestas confundían a los espectadores.

El "milagro" futbolístico de Leipzig amenazó al torneo. Pero al diablo le quemaron la cola Messi, Tevez y Aimar, los tardíos y, sin embargo, trascendentes cambios que vinieron a darle a la Selección de Pekerman un perfil decididamente ganador. Y la noche de la seductora ciudad de los pasajes que unen deliciosas plazas, la que daba un pasaje a cuartos, terminó como Dios manda...

No porque sea argentino, sino porque de vez en cuando el fútbol deja hacer a la justicia y nadie dudaba antes -ni dudó luego del partido- de la superioridad material de la Argentina. Aun en los pocos momentos complicados, cuando se estuvo en desventaja, al principio, y en un par de salvadas del Pato que fueron decisivas, la Argentina era más.

Menos que lo esperado, pero evidentemente un equipo de distinta categoría. Si hasta más de un suplente albiceleste sería titular en los verdes, mientras que, salvo Rafael Márquez, ningún mexicano de los actuales sacaría de su puesto a los muchachos de Pekerman.

No obstante estas apreciaciones, México demostró que tenía mucho más para dar. En términos tácticos y anímicos el equipo dio magníficas respuestas, jugó con aplomo, astucia, amparado en el paraguas del aceptado favoritismo argentino. Y para disuadir a cualquiera que imaginase a México apichonado, salió a pelear en el centro del ring y aplicó el primer golpe importante.

El mérito albiceleste fue la compostura, el buen estilo que, aun jugando nada más que regular, le permitió acomodar el partido a sus necesidades. Y tuvo más la pelota y fue más agresivo, no porque estuviera pugnando por el empate, lo cual había llegado con afortunada premura, sino para ganar el partido.

En eso se apoyaba la confianza que el equipo seguía provocando. Pero no se hacía la diferencia y los cambios (los ingresos de Messi y Tevez) se demoraban sin que pudiera entenderse por qué José quería seguir teniendo razón con Saviola y Crespo a cualquier precio o había imaginado un partido de 120 minutos. Afortunadamente, al decidirse, lo hizo con un plus muy valioso como Pablo Aimar. La película que se vio entonces pareció continuar la saga del partido con Serbia.

Dicen que no hay mal que por bien no venga y este podría ser un caso más. Messi y Tevez estarán desde el comienzo ante Alemania, o estamos entendiendo todo mal.

Berlín, la más melancólica de las capitales del mundo, con la atmósfera de esa ciudad que supo de la fiesta, la decadencia y la resurrección, aguarda por un partido entre dos potencias futbolísticas, una de las cuales tiene la enorme ventaja de ser local. Una forma de contrarrestarla es oponer a la supremacía de la tribuna adversa una superior condición técnica en el terreno.

Saviola y Crespo podrían ser "alemanes". Tevez y Messi, en cambio, son diferentes y superiores en sus calidades. Juegan a otra cosa -no solamente con relación a sus compañeros- y las complicaciones que generan no son las que enfrentan los alemanes.

Si Alemania, como México, logra acotar a Riquelme (sedado por el asalto inmediato de varios rivales cuando le pasan la pelota) los goleadores no participarían. En cambio, Tevez y Messi pueden abrirse camino por si solos y aliviar la carga que, en solitario, pesa sobre Juan Román.

No tanto el resultado como la forma en que se dé el mismo, si es una derrota, definirá la nota del seleccionado de Pekerman. Tiene parciales brillantes, buenos y regulares. Pero necesita hacer una gran presentación para que si se tiene que volver a Buenos Aires sea dejando instalado el aprecio más alto.

Hay jugadores con los que parece que ni el diablo puede y la Argentina los tiene. Hay jugadores que permitirán festejar en la mismísima puerta de Brandeburgo, abriéndose camino a todo, empezando por las semifinales del Mundial.

In Brazil, Unpaved Path to Excellence

2006-06-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

By LARRY ROHTER

How does Brazil do it? Year after year, World Cup after World Cup, soccer stars seem to roll out of here like cars off a factory assembly line.

First came the generation of Pelé, Garrincha, Tostão and Rivelino, followed by Zico, Falcão and Socrates. Since the mid-1990's, Romário, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and now Kaká, Adriano and Robinho have further burnished Brazil's reputation for unmatched excellence. To the average fan around the world, Brazilian soccer appears to be a powerful, well-oiled machine.

But those who know it best are aware that the reality is far more complicated, that the country's record five World Cup championships are more a result of popular passion for the beautiful game, as it is often called here, than of any organized apparatus that methodically finds and develops players.

"There is no system in Brazil," said Carlos Roberto de Oliveira, who, playing as Roberto Dinamite, was a member of the Brazilian national team in the 1970's and early 1980's. "Everything happens on a random, haphazard basis."

To hear Brazilians tell it, organized professional soccer here is chaotic, corrupt and in perpetual disarray. But the game itself is so deeply ingrained in daily life — and in Brazilian identity and self-esteem — that its strength at the grass roots more than compensates for those deficiencies at the top.

Familiarity with soccer begins early, producing a bottomless pool of talent. By age 3, a boy has probably learned how to dribble the ball, and by 7 he is playing the informal sandlot version of the game with his pals in any open space they can find — a clearing in the jungle, an empty lot in a large city, a pasture or on the beach — and maybe sleeping with the ball, if he is fortunate enough to afford one.

Despite the considerable economic advances it has made over the last generation, Brazil is still a country with millions of poor among its 185 million people. And it is the poor who have traditionally seen success in soccer as their fastest ticket to prosperity and prestige.

Of the 23 players on the national squad competing in Germany this month, only three come from a background that would be considered middle class here. Most of the players, whether they were born in cities or in the countryside, come from families that are humble, the preferred term for poverty here.

Their success breeds only more success, especially now that the globalization of soccer has made Brazilian players increasingly in demand for teams all over the world. When a poor boy sees that a player like Ronaldinho, considered the best in the world going into the World Cup, can earn 28 million euros (about $35 million) a year, it encourages him to aim high and devote himself to the game.

"There are now so many role models, and no glass ceiling," said Alex Bellos, the author of "Futebol: Soccer, the Brazilian Way." "Go into any shantytown or urban center, and you're sure to find someone who had a mate at school who played with Ronaldo or knows someone else who is a pro footballer. The idea is more than a dream, it's a reality."

That hunger for success, however, does not explain the extraordinary inventiveness and fluidity with which Brazilians play the game. Some of the country's most knowledgeable analysts see that skill as a response to the confusion and unpredictability of daily life here, which has made Brazilians adept at what is called dribbling around rules and barriers.

"We Brazilians are accustomed to having to improvise, to being creative when we are in a tight spot," said Tostão, now a popular commentator whose real name is Eduardo Gonçalves de Andrade. "It's the foundation of our music and art, too, and that intuitive ability to sidestep the rules and improvise on the spot is what distinguishes the great player from the excellent."

As Brazil urbanizes and as it becomes harder to find open spaces, the game is also moving indoors, to gymnasiums in a form known as futsal. Ronaldinho and Robinho came out of that setting — the soccer equivalent of arena football in the United States.

"Futsal teaches players a capacity to create in a small space," said Juca Kfouri, one of Brazil's most influential and outspoken soccer commentators. "Then, when they get to play on the grass, on that larger stage, they can glory in really having room to create."

Traditionally, the path of a Brazilian player was clearly defined from the moment he was spotted playing sandlot ball, usually by an amateur scout who was often a fan of a local team. He was signed by that team as a teenager, passed on to a larger regional club if he showed promise, sold to one of the 20 or so teams with large national followings, and finally, if he was very lucky, ended his playing days in Europe.

Throughout his career, however long it lasted, a player was little more than a piece of merchandise. If he offended management or wanted too much money, he could easily be replaced because he had few contractual rights and there was always more talent waiting in the pipeline.

But when Pelé, the country's greatest player, became sports minister in the mid-1990's, he made an effort to change the system. Using his prestige, he managed to push legislation through the Brazilian legislature that was meant to reduce the power of clubs and give players more control of their careers.

The so-called Pelé Law has weakened the clubs, commentators agree, but it has also ended up benefiting agents more than the players. The agents, or impresarios, as they are known, have increasingly assumed responsibility for finding promising players, who are signed to personal management contracts and parked at clubs willing to showcase them until their value increases and they can be sold to a European club, sometimes while still teenagers.

"In the last decade, this has become an industry," Tostão said. "The clubs don't have as many scouts out there as they once did, people who will call out of love for a club and tell them they have to see a kid. Today, it's all the impresarios and their personal networks of scouts, which I think is a bad thing because they grab the kids and put them under their personal control."

In hopes of getting an early look at future stars, teams in Italy, England, Spain and Belgium have either bought pieces of Brazilian clubs or signed development deals with them. They are also bypassing the clubs and the player agents by sending their own scouts to scour the backlands and the urban slums for exportable talent, as Major League Baseball teams do in places like the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

Brazilian law and international rules forbid teams to sign players who have barely entered their teens. But to get around that restriction, European teams are now offering jobs as drivers or cooks to the parents of promising young players, who are then taken to Europe and enrolled on their junior squads.

Private soccer schools are also growing in importance as sources of players. These operate independently of clubs and for the most part do not receive support from the Ministry of Sports or the Brazilian national confederation. The confederation has a $165 million contract with Nike, but is widely criticized for contributing little to development programs for Brazilian youth.

Roberto Dinamite is one of several former players who operate such academies. Born and reared in Duque de Caxias, a working-class suburb of Rio, he has established the headquarters of his Roberto Dinamite Institute across the street from the rutted field where he was first spotted at age 10 by a scout for the Vasco da Gama club.

His school in his old neighborhood has functioned for little more than a decade. But it has produced one player who is on the Brazilian national junior team, another who plays for PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands and two who are signed to teams in Rio.

More than 150 boys, ages 7 through 16, participate in the program. On a cool and windy afternoon the day before Brazil's debut in the Cup, a group of 13-year-olds was going through a drill that required them to run a zigzag among a row of traffic cones, then take a pass with the right foot, dribble and finally kick the ball with the left foot.

"All of these kids know how to play, and every one of them wants to be the next Ronaldinho," Roberto Dinamite said. "But if there is even half a Ronaldinho here, or at some other school like this, then Brazil is going to remain atop the heap."

vamos!

2006-06-23T23:49:00.000-07:00

36 Hours:Hollywood

2006-06-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

Del NYT:

"Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood, and you'll find the real tinsel underneath," Oscar Levant, that Algonquin wit, once observed. And though the lights do shine brightly for the fabulous here, the back streets of this gritty pocket of Los Angeles hold hidden gems for the everyman. Wander a recently dolled-up stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and cut into side streets that lead to unexpected pleasures. Discover restaurants stylish enough to make West Hollywood blush, or head to the rising hills and discover Hollywood's most becoming angles. Try something wacky — don't even look at Mann's Chinese Theater. Hollywood is on the rise again, and the granddaddy of glamour and glitz has never looked better.

Friday

5 p.m.

1) Quiet on the Set

Tucked into the last curve of a residential street in the Hollywood Hills, where Weidlake Drive dead-ends, a plain white sign marks an entrance. Open the gate, make a hard left, and you will stumble on the striking landscape of the Hollywood Reservoir. From this spot at the Mulholland Dam, you can take in sweeping views of the deep blue reservoir, the rolling mansion-lined hills and the legendary Hollywood sign. The reservoir was built in the early 1920's by William Mulholland to try to ease Los Angeles's water shortages, but the history doesn't end there. That enormous pinkish-orange house on the hill to the right of the sign was Bugsy Siegel's and later belonged to Madonna. "Chinatown" was filmed here. Most recently, landslides closed parts of the hiking path that circles the lake; so for now, just sit back and savor the silence.

7 p.m.

2) Try the Elvis

In East Hollywood, a Thai Town is rising. And along the stretch of Hollywood Boulevard between Bronson and Normandie Avenues there is no shortage of Thai restaurants — but only one has a Thai Elvis impersonator. At Palms Thai Restaurant (5900 Hollywood Boulevard, 323-462-5073), locals knock elbows over steaming noodles to tunes courtesy of a man they call the Thai Elvis. He's Kavee Thongpricha (you can call him Kevin), and he punches in on Friday and Saturday nights at 7:30 sharp. Culinary nerds will want to head straight to the back of the menu. Listed under Wild Things are peppery, garlicky frogs' legs ($15.99) and crispy fish maw — fried air bladder — salad ($7.99).

10 p.m.

3) Heels on the Bar

There's plenty of scene to be found in the Hollywood night, which is exactly why Birds Cafe (5925 Franklin Avenue, 323-465-0175), a rotisserie chicken-cum-local watering hole, sounds so much better once 10 o'clock rolls around. Sitting on a leafy block of Franklin Avenue, Birds fills up late with spillover from the Upright Citizen Brigade Theater (5919 Franklin Avenue, 323-908-8702; www.ucbtheatre.com/la) next door and 20-somethings unwilling to cough up the gas money to go to the nearby Silver Lake neighborhood. Slip into an oversize leather booth for a couple of pints or grab a table on the patio and watch the passing hipsters — or, as one regular calls them, Charlie Browns. Word has it that if you stay late enough, you may be pulled onto the bar to dance.
Video: 36 Hours in Hollywood
Cindy Price spends 36 hours in Hollywood and experiences a side of the city that most people never see.

Saturday

11 a.m.

4) The Egg Man

Right next to the looming presence of a Church of Scientology building, you'll find the charming Square One Dining (4854 Fountain Avenue, 323-661-1109), a three-month-old restaurant that serves a fantastic breakfast all day. Though the menu has more complex offerings, Philip Fox, the owner, prides himself on directing rookies to the straightforward egg dishes to showcase his farm fresh, and often organic, ingredients. "The eggs we'll serve next week are in the chicken today," he swears.

1 p.m.

5) Easy, Trigger

You are welcome to head out on foot through Griffith Park for a distant glimpse of those famous nine letters, but nobody walks in Los Angeles. Opt for a horseback ride at the Sunset Ranch (3400 North Beachwood Drive, 323-469-5450; www.sunsetranchhollywood.com), Hollywood's last dude ranch. The guided one-hour trip ($25) wanders along canyon edges to allow for stunning views of the park, the Bronson Caves and the inescapable sign. But the horses are gentle, and the guides confident and funny as they punch up the trip with bits of history and legend — and all the gray areas between.

3 p.m.

6) Toxins Out

Ever wonder what West Coasters are going on about with all their sage oils and chakras? Lord knows, but it's high time someone found out. Celebrities and laymen alike flock to Golden Bridge Yoga (6322 De Longpre Avenue, 323-936-4172; www.goldenbridgeyoga.com) for classes, but it's still easy to book a massage at its recent addition, the Amrit Davaa Wellness Center. It offers almost a dozen different treatments, but if you closed down Birds Cafe the night before, it's best to book Hari Narayan. In just over an hour, Ms. Narayan's raindrop-technique massage ($90) pledges to detoxify you physically — and mentally. 5 p.m.

7) Fat of the Land

All right, wheat-grass warrior. Let's get some chili dogs into you before you pass out from clean living. The venerable Pink's still reigns with the fanny-pack set, but Skooby's Hot Dogs (6654 Hollywood Boulevard, 323-468-3647), above, a relative newcomer, has some frankfurter connoisseurs saying it surpasses Pink's. After eating your fill, follow the trail of Hollywood stars and take a left at La Brea. Two Iranian brothers do ice cream with panache at Mashti Malone's (1525 North La Brea Avenue, 323-874-6168), a Hollywood haunt seriously dedicated to uncanny flavors. Celebrities order in bulk, craving Mashti's concoctions of rosewater saffron, or faludeh, a rice-starch sorbet. Dig into a bowl of full-fat orange blossom, and watch the parade of Size 0's file past. Ah, to be young, happy and not looking for an acting job.

7 p.m.

8) Chiller Theater

If the weather is good, snag a bottle of wine and head over to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, 323-469-1181; www.hollywoodforever.com). Every Saturday night in the summer, a kinetic crowd descends on the lawn for Cinespia's (www.cinespia.org) film screenings. The creepy magic here is undeniable: the palms swaying against the velvet sky, the safety-in-numbers spookiness of walking among the graves, the crystal-clear screenings of classics like "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Birds." Doors open at 6:30 for the 8:30 show, and the lawn fills up fast.

11 p.m.

9) Bowery West

Hollywood is suddenly awash in so many trendy late-night restaurants, you'd think you'd died and gone to Manhattan. Speaking of which, right next door to the hipper-than-thou Magnolia on Sunset Boulevard, is the Bowery (6268 Sunset Boulevard, 323-465-3400), a discreet little joint fitted out to replicate a New York bar. Check out the tin ceilings, which the owner, George Abou-Daoud, notes were shipped in from Williamsburg in Brooklyn. The burger ($9) is top-notch, but more important, how is the Manhattan at the Bowery? Served over rocks on a hot summer night, it's just a touch sweet. But hey, so is the service.

Sunday

10:30 a.m.

10) After the Big Sleep

Are you tired of being fabulous yet? Even superstars need a day of rest, and so the City of Angels declared: Let there be brunch. Off Vine (6263 Leland Way, 323-962-1900), above, might be the prettiest little restaurant in Hollywood, mostly because it doesn't feel Hollywood at all. Tucked away in a bright, century-old bungalow and surrounded by flowers, Off Vine's large garden patio is the kind of place that persuades you to linger over Bloody Marys ($7) and eggs Benedict ($10.95) all day. And you know what? This is Hollywood, kid. You go right ahead.

The Basics

Besides Los Angeles International, there are several smaller airports near Hollywood, including ones in Long Beach, Burbank and Ontario, that are used by low-cost airlines including JetBlue and Southwest. Check www.sidestep.com for a comparison of prices.

In a pinch, anyone can find a room in Hollywood — Super 8's and Holiday Inns abound. If you book ahead, though, there is also some nice midrange lodging.

The Hollywood Roosevelt (7000 Hollywood Boulevard, 323-466-7000; www.hollywoodroosevelt.com) was recently overhauled. Weekend rates start at $189. From the dim lobby to the minimalist rooms, the hotel has a young, urban feel. A stroll down to the über-trendy pool will have you dropping your jaw at the scene or giggling — depending on your sensibility. Either way, welcome to Los Angeles.

Just a couple of blocks away, the Magic Castle Hotel (7025 Franklin Avenue, 323-851-0800; www.magiccastlehotel.com) starts at $169 a night and has a near-perfect track record among the quarrelsome users of TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com). Situated just off the touristy section, this boutique hotel has a residential feel; in fact, the pool area bears an uncanny resemblance to the set of "Melrose Place."

A Vote for Venezuela Is a Vote for Iran

2006-06-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

There are elections taking place this fall that will have a major impact on Americans. But we're not talking about congressional races at home. This balloting is for the five non-permanent U.N Security Council seats that will open up in 2007.

In Latin America, the competition between Guatemala and Venezuela for the U.N. Security Council seat that Argentina will vacate at the end of this year is of particular importance.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has made it clear that when it comes to geopolitics, his preferences lie with hostile states like Iran, Cuba, Sudan and North Korea. A seat on the Security Council, where the presidency also rotates monthly, would give the Venezuelan strongman ways to make those preferences operational at the multilateral level.

Five of 15 seats on the Security Council are permanent (held by China, Russia, France, Britain and the U.S.). The other 10 slots are two-year terms (see our table). Only permanent seats have veto power but to pass a resolution requires nine ayes. That means every seat matters and if Venezuela gets on the council, it could help block a resolution -- that has not been vetoed -- against its much-admired ally Iran.

Guatemala announced its candidacy for this seat in 2002, but in 2005 Venezuela also threw its sombrero in the ring. U.N. rules say that each region can select its own candidate for an open seat. But if "consensus" around one candidate cannot be reached regionally, the full U.N. general assembly votes in secret ballot. Both Guatemala and Venezuela are working hard to shore up votes for that eventuality.

The Venezuelan ambassador to the U.N. warned the world recently that a vote for Guatemala is a vote for the U.S. There's a grain of truth to that since Guatemala is an American ally, with a government that shares our world-view on multilateral efforts to contain despots. But what is truer still is that a vote for Venezuela is a vote for Iran, which shares the current Venezuelan values of tyranny and aggression.

Guatemala points out that it is a founding member of the U.N. but has never had a seat on the council. It also argues that small countries with valuable experience in the region are too often overlooked for the Security Council and that the last time any Central American country had a seat was in 1997-98.

Yet the Guatemalan campaign goes well beyond arguments about bureaucratic musical chairs. In its drive to win approval from the U.N. membership, it has been accumulating an impressive record of international cooperation by pitching in on a variety of U.N. efforts.

Chief among its qualifications is its active role in international peace-keeping. Coban, in Guatemala, is now home to a Central American regional peacekeeping school and training center. Today, Guatemalan peacekeepers are in the Congo and in Haiti, and military observers and officers are in five other African nations, including Sudan. In January eight Guatemalan peacekeepers were killed in the Congo. In expressing U.S. support for Guatemala's candidacy this week, a State Department spokesman noted the fact that "Guatemalans have shed blood for the U.N.," making the country "a strong candidate, and deserving of support."

Guatemala says it would also bring to the job invaluable lessons from its own bitter 35-year civil war and its success in finding peace since 1996. By sharing this history, it maintains that it can help strengthen U.N. peacekeeping efforts, help countries resolve conflicts and play a positive role in postconflict activities. The U.N. membership seemed to acknowledge the seriousness of Guatemala's efforts recently when it voted the tiny country onto the new human-rights council with 142 votes.

Guatemala emphasizes its democratic credentials, as well as its view that the seat is a voice for the region, not for its own national interests. Compare this to the Venezuelan campaign, which rests largely on oil "diplomacy" and the capacity to push anti-American buttons around the U.N.

It may seem strange that Venezuela has any support in the region. Over the past seven years, its meddling in its neighbors' domestic politics have earned it a reputation as a bully. Mr. Chávez is persona non grata in more than a few Latin nations. Many countries are worried about Venezuela's big spending to acquire fighter jets and 100,000 kalishnikovs from Russia. Yet, despite all this, the Chávez government has money, and this has allowed it to advance its cause.

Of the 33 members in the region, 12 are from English-speaking Caribbean islands. These poor economies (many of them crime-ridden) have become heavily dependent on subsidized Venezuelan oil and on Cuba's legendary traveling doctors and teachers. It wouldn't be surprising if some of these countries were to line up with Venezuela.

Argentina, once a haven for Nazis and more recently a harbor for accused Spanish and Chilean terrorists, is also a Venezuelan pawn now. The country has been so incompetent about managing its resources that it too needs charity from Mr. Chávez, making it about as independent from the oil dictatorship as Bolivia and Cuba. More surprising is Brazil's decision to side with Mr. Chávez, who as Bolivia's unofficial energy adviser orchestrated the confiscation of Brazilian assets there recently. Apparently, the eternal Brazilian struggle to prove that it can challenge U.S. "hegemony" in the region trumps the need to regain dignity and protect its investments abroad.

In spite of all this, Guatemala has the solid backing of the more serious democracies in the region -- such as Colombia and Mexico -- and insists that it will not withdraw its candidacy. That means that in all likelihood the vote will probably go to the General Assembly. Guatemala believes it can win that ballot. Let's hope so. If not, Latin America will have handed Iran a victory that is likely to threaten world peace.

Organización de Naziones Unidas

2006-06-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

Visto en el Opinador:

por Alejandro Tagliavini

El Secretario General de la ONU, Kofi Annan, acaba de anunciar una "nueva era en los derechos humanos" Sin duda, de rojo o de negro, Hitler estaría de acuerdo.

Por primera vez se reunieron en Ginebra los miembros del recién creado Consejo que reemplazó a la desprestigiada Comisión de Derechos Humanos de las Naciones Unidas, disuelta en marzo pasado después de 60 inútiles años de existencia. El siglo XX fue marcado por la victoria sobre dos totalitarismos, el nazismo tras el triunfo aliado, y el estalinismo, con la caída del Muro de Berlín. En nada de esto tuvo la ONU mérito alguno, desde su rimbombante "Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos" en 1948.

¿Que haría que este nuevo Consejo funcione? Organismos de defensa de los derechos humanos lamentaron que formen parte de este nuevo organismo países como China, Argelia, Arabia Saudita, Azerbaiyán, Bangladesh, Cuba, Nigeria, Pakistán, Rusia y Túnez. Estados Unidos decidió no participar.

Frente a los representantes de los 47 países miembros Kofi Annan, abrió los debates. Esta primera sesión, que continuará hasta el 30 de junio, estará destinada fundamentalmente a elaborar los métodos de trabajo. Es decir, estos “capeones de los derechos humanos” establecerán los procedimientos para monitorear el respeto a las personas. ¿Admitirán las cámaras de gas?

Para mostrar hasta qué punto es pura hipocresía, el Canciller argentino, Jorge Taiana, presentó la iniciativa franco-argentina para crear una Convención para la Protección de Personas contra las Desapariciones Forzadas. Informó el diario bonaerense La Nueva Provincia que, el viernes 4 de julio de 1975, una bomba estalló en el bar porteño El Ibérico. La finalidad del atentado fue asesinar a un oficial naval. Murieron un mozo y una mujer; fueron detenidos Jorge Enrique Taiana y su esposa. Taiana, quien hace treinta años se dedicaba a poner bombas y matar gente, como canciller se llena ahora la boca con la defensa de los derechos humanos. Hay hipocresías siniestras.

Pero las mentiras de la ONU no terminan aquí. La Asamblea General deberá elegir, en octubre, a los cinco miembros no permanentes del Consejo de Seguridad para 2007-2008. Venezuela competirá con Guatemala para obtener el asiento que Argentina dejará y que, tradicionalmente, corresponde a América Latina.

Guatemala anunció su candidatura el 11 de junio de 2002. Desde entonces ha estado trabajando para conseguir apoyo. Se presume que la mayoría de los países Centroamericanos la favorecerán, al igual que Perú, países de la Unión Europea, de Africa y Asia. México, Colombia y Estados Unidos ya anunciaron que la apoyarán.

En cambio, Venezuela presentó su candidatura en febrero. Argentina, Chile y Brasil le darán su voto. Además de otros “pacíficos” países, como Siria y algunos miembros de la Unión Africana. Y ya Chávez anunció que realizará una gira por Vietnam, Rusia, China y las muy “seguras” Irán y Corea del Norte, a fin de promover su ingreso al Consejo de Seguridad.

Según el vicepresidente venezolano José Vicente Rangel, las naciones que voten por Venezuela "contarán con el apoyo de un país dispuesto a servir a los intereses de la paz”. El embajador de Venezuela ante la ONU aseguró que "ésta (la ONU) será una trinchera: trabajaremos para denunciar, para desenmascarar". Ya se ve a qué se refieren con paz: trincheras. Para los simulacros de guerra que se organizan en muchos estados venezolanos, por orden de Chávez quién asegura que Estados Unidos planea una invasión, se reclutan civiles que reciben entrenamiento militar: trotan, aprenden el manejo de armas, tanques y minas. Los niños son entrenados para esconder comida y las personas ancianas pueden colaborar en tareas de retaguardia. Según cifras oficiales, hay aproximadamente 100.000 reservistas. Inspirados en los combatientes del Vietcong, han cavado túneles en donde se guardarían alimentos y armas.

Así pues, van los derechos humanos y la seguridad internacionales. Eso sí, los ciudadanos que observamos a la ONU hacer la vista gorda y hasta legitimar a estos dictadores militaristas, tenemos que pagar (por vía impositiva) la vida, al mejor estilo príncipes medievales, de estos funcionarios multiestatales que conforman las Naziones.

Bonding, Buenos Aires-Style

2006-06-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

By MARTIN KRAUSE
June 23, 2006

Argentine President Néstor Kirchner today concludes his four-day visit to Madrid, where he hopes to finish his country's dangerous tango with delinquent debt of over $1 billion owed to Spanish investors. The rest of the world, however, remains a wallflower. What about the $5 billion owed to Italian pensioners, the $5 billion owed to German and Dutch investors, or the well over $10 billion owed to Americans?

Still, Mr. Kirchner's Madrid visit signals an about-face in Argentine debt politics. With the largest debt default in history -- $143 billion -- on his hands, suddenly he is willing to deal with investors who refused to accept the meager terms of his country's 2001 restructuring. Speaking with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero yesterday, Mr. Kirchner said Spain's debts will be honored "because it is our economic and moral obligation." The rest of the world must wonder, to paraphrase Napoleon, if Argentine morality ends at the Pyrenees.

In the 1990s, Argentina saw a period of dramatic growth after years of political and financial turmoil. This renaissance was not fueled by domestic investment; sufficient funds simply did not exist. Nor would enough funding have come in from the IMF or World Bank. Rather, Buenos Aires looked outside its borders for sources of hard currency. Given its penchant for not honoring its debts, Argentina was forced to offer high-interest bonds to lure new investors -- even with the guarantee of a government-issued bond.

The Argentines found takers primarily in their European brethren -- hundreds of thousands of Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch pensioners and individual investors. All told, Europeans bought more than $28 billion worth of the bonds, fueling Argentina's wild ride.

Sadly, history tends to repeat itself. Reserves rapidly diminished as Argentina's foreign debts matured. Instead of difficult but necessary belt-tightening, Argentina's political leaders refused to slow the train down. Instead of honoring its international obligations, Buenos Aires chose to give its debt a "haircut" by offering its creditors an unprecedented 70% reduction in face value -- the largest such default in history.

In typical bond-default restructurings, nine in 10 bondholders are willing to accept a new deal. But only three-quarters took Argentina's offer of a paltry 30 cents on the dollar.

Not surprisingly, Spaniards aren't the only ones demanding that Buenos Aires honor their debts. Earlier this week Italians protested in front of the Argentine Embassy in Rome, calling on new Prime Minister Romano Prodi to demand repayment of their investments. An estimated 450,000 Italian families, investors and pensioners bought into the promise of billions in Argentine bonds offering relatively large returns for a seemingly safe investment in government-issued debt.

With a new government in Italy, President Kirchner has an opportunity to heal the wounds of having defaulted on the savings of thousands of Italians. Mr. Prodi won with such a small margin that he cannot afford to avoid any issue affecting Italian voters. And with Italians holding some $5 billion in Argentine debt, much is at stake.

Actually gaining access to these funds is not going to be an easy task for Mr. Prodi's fledgling Italian majority. It will not be easy for Mr. Kirchner either. When the Argentine Congress approved the debt renegotiation package in 2005, it strictly forbade any new opening of the process. The idea was to encourage as many bondholders as possible to participate, avoiding future speculation. In order to reopen the deal the Argentina Congress would have to repeal this "padlock" bill.

Buenos Aires may not have a choice. Even though the Argentine economy has shown a steady budget surplus of around 3.5% of GDP over the last three years, this growth is not enough to service all of the debt payments currently due. This is true despite the fact that the Argentine government was able to cancel all of the debt it owed the IMF.

The Kirchner administration plays to the masses as well as any government. But the Casa Rosada must understand that the Argentine economy is reaching ominous capacity constraints. Further growth -- and political success -- will require new foreign direct investment. And once-bitten investors will think twice about pouring money into Argentina again unless the government takes positive, market-friendly action to soothe its existing, disgruntled bondholders. For starters, Mr. Kirchner could abandon the reckless market interventionism that has led his government to impose price controls on utilities, tax exports and sometimes suspend beef exports to the U.S.

Savers around the world have one good reason to hope for economic sanity in Argentina: political self-preservation. Mr. Kirchner has a keen eye on how his policies will affect both his re-election prospects in next year's polls, as well as his legacy. Barnstorming foreign capitals proves that Mr. Kirchner is seeking investment to keep his economy growing. With foreign investment lagging, he surely knows that he must eventually return to the bond markets he burned in 2001.

Un equipo consolidado en sus virtudes

2006-06-22T17:39:00.000-07:00

Por Víctor Hugo Morales

Sin desenvainar, por presencia y actitud, con la gallardía de quienes han demostrado tener resto, la Argentina le ganó a Holanda. Es verdad que los goles no fueron anotados en la historia de los mundiales, que no hay estadística que los registre, pero esa fue la diferencia. Los goles fueron de Maxi y Tevez, se presume. Y tal es el partido que ha de comentarse en esta página, hartos de que sean los resultados los que le dan razón a todo.

Vamos a correr diez centímetros los palos para tener razón, para negarle a la estadística ese empate con el que pretende despojar a la verdad de sus atributos.

Que Holanda no generara por su cuenta una sola jugada ofensiva, que a su pretensión de ser el rey teniendo la pelota se le cayera la corona a los pies de Riquelme, Messi, Tevez, Cambiasso y Maxi, y que los 30 mil hinchas vestidos de naranja bajaran el volumen de sus voces hasta la retirada perpleja por el bosque que rodea el estadio, fue la obra de un equipo consolidado en sus virtudes.

La actitud que ha cambiado a partir de dejarle a Mascherano la responsabilidad de ser, él mismo, dos número cinco, y que esto no implique perder a Cambiasso, ha puesto a la Argentina veinte metros mas adelante que el resto de los equipos del Mundial. La medida de la profundidad no es el solitario jugador que la mayoría pone contra los zagueros rivales, sino el sitio donde empiezan a marcar los delanteros, el número de jugadores que están en actitud ofensiva cuando se tiene la pelota.

La calidad de la defensa no sufrió alteraciones por los ingresos de Milito y Cufré, aunque para ser justos debe decirse que el resultado fue dos a uno, culpa de un penal absurdo que cometió Gabriel, increíblemente no sancionado por el árbitro y del que debe tomarse nota, porque el Mundial, tan breve, no perdona errores de esa naturaleza.

Sin embargo, tácticamente, ambos suplentes jugaron con una solvencia que traslada los elogios tributados al equipo, al plantel utilizado hasta el momento.

Si Riquelme pudiera resolver más rápido la salida, no condicionando siempre su talento a una exagerada retención de la pelota y de los tiempos, el rendimiento propio y el del equipo sería aun más difícil de contrarrestar. Cuando acelera y participa con su increíble claridad mental, en el ritmo de los más atrevidos, la Argentina se empina hasta la cresta de la ola más alta del torneo.

La grandeza de Mascherano, la solvencia implacable de Ayala, la fiereza de Maxi y ese Pato imperturbable que domina el área en cada centro o mano a mano, sumados a la habilidad y rapidez de Tevez y Messi, fueron demasiado para una Holanda que voló bajo y sin imaginación a partir de los cambios que realizó Van Basten.

Los europeos no quisieron quemar naves para recibir el bonus de jugar ante México, ya que en eso, imprevistamente, se ha convertido el seleccionado de Lavolpe. Holanda jugó a salvar la ropa, defendió el llamativo historial que tiene ante la Argentina y guardó su poderío para una ocasión más definitoria. La del próximo domingo, por ejemplo.

Entonces, la Argentina se quedó con el grupo y con ese derecho de afrontar ahora un partido que tiene -en la superficie- solo el riesgo de lo que parece ganado de antemano. Herido por una guerra impiadosa contra su director técnico, México ha sorprendido con un juego que, hasta hoy, es un inesperado e inexplicable retroceso en la evidente superación internacional de los últimos años.

Cuesta encontrarle una vuelta negativa al partido, pensándolo desde la vereda argentina, con los antecedentes y el presente en la mano. Como el de Ghana superando a Brasil, lo de México derrotando a la Argentina se presenta como un batacazo que nunca se ha visto en los mundiales.

La camiseta, la calidad de los jugadores, la condición espiritual de estos días, aleja demasiado a un cuadro del otro. Solo porque esto es fútbol, tan absurdo a veces, podría entenderse un resultado negativo para Argentina.

El diablo tendría que meter la cola, y hay que cuidarse. Aun flota en el ambiente, en el humo espeso y el olor a cereza de la Auerbachs Séller -la cervecería donde transcurre alguna escena del Fausto de Göethe, en pleno corazón de Leipzig- el espíritu burlón de Satanás.

With Friends Like These

2006-06-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

By YVES ROUCAUTE

The old Continent is wilting in the global war against terror, just as it did when faced off against fascism and then communism. When at today's summit with U.S. President George W. Bush the European Union will once again take its ally to task over Guantanamo, it will expose its own, not America's, most serious moral crisis of the post-Cold War era. A philosopher -- a French one no less -- can try to set the facts straight and offer some Cartesian good sense.

Faced with dark forces that want to destroy our civilization, we might recall that the U.S. is not only Europe's ally but the flagship of all free nations. If America can sometimes make errors, the sort of anti-Americanism that drives the hysteria over Guantanamo is always in the wrong. Guantanamo, though, is not an error. It is a necessity.

Demagogues, and European parliamentarians are among the shrillest, claim that it's inconceivable to keep prisoners locked up without trying them in courts of law. With this simple statement they annul -- or, better, ignore -- customary law and legal tradition as well as basic human-survival instincts. Whether they are legal or illegal fighters, those men in Guantanamo had weapons; they used them; and they will likely use them again if released before the end of the conflict. This is the meaning of their imprisonment: to prevent enemy combatants from returning to the battlefield, the only humane alternative to the summary execution of enemy prisoners practiced by less enlightened armies. Which French general would have released German prisoners in 1914, before the end of that great war, at the risk of seeing these soldiers mobilized again? Which American general would have organized the trial of 10 million German soldiers, captured during World War II, before Berlin's unconditional surrender?

The release "without charges" of, so far, a third of Guantanamo prisoners doesn't mean that those still imprisoned are innocent, as some claim. Similarly, the release of Waffen SS members "without charges" was no admission that they should have never been imprisoned in the first place -- or that their comrades who were still locked up were victims of undue process. Only those Nazis who committed crimes against humanity or war crimes, and whose crimes could be proven in a court of law, were tried at Nuremberg.

The demagogues further complain about Guantanamo's isolation and the secrecy around it. Isolation? When Hitler attacked Britain, was Winston Churchill wrong in sending captured German soldiers to isolated camps in Canada from which they would be released only five years later, after the end of the war? He forbade the exchange of information between the prisoners to make it impossible for them to direct networks of Nazi sympathizers and spies inside and outside the prison. This was a rather sensible measure and one that is also necessary to combat Islamist terrorists, who plan their attacks in loosely connected networks and have demonstrated their capacities to expand these networks in French and British prisons.

Secrecy? This is a common practice in warfare, designed to obtain information without letting the enemy know who has been caught or when. It lets us try to infiltrate and confuse terrorist groups. It saves thousands of lives without harming the prisoners.

As for the wild accusations of torture, the European Commission and Parliament would be well advised to investigate with caution. Terrorists have been trained to claim, in case of capture, that they're being tortured to win sympathy from free societies. Abuses happen. Republics make mistakes. But they forever differentiate themselves from tyrannies in that violations of the rights of man tend to be punished. In abusing prisoners, a Western soldier breaks the law and undermines the moral foundations of his country. American military courts made no such mistake when meting out stiff penalties to the disgraced soldiers of Abu Ghraib.

But where is the evidence of torture in Guantanamo? The famous incriminating report of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, whose members include communist China, Castro's Cuba and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia among others, was based purely on the testimony of released Islamists. Not one member of the commission even visited the camp, under the pretext that they couldn't question prisoners in private.

What about the docu-fiction "The Road to Guantanamo," winner of the Silver Bear at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, which told the story of the three "innocents" kept "for no reason" in Guantanamo? Consider the tale told in this film. Leaving the U.K., supposedly for a wedding in Karachi, three British lads of Pakistani descent somehow ended up 1,200 kilometers away in Kandahar, an al Qaeda command center in Afghanistan, allegedly in order to hand out "humanitarian aid." Our unlucky strollers then arrived with Taliban reinforcements in Kabul before going for a walk with them to the Pakistani border, where they were arrested "by accident." We are asked to believe, on top of this unbelievable story, their accusations of torture that mysteriously left no marks.

The three Guantanamo suicides earlier this month were treated as the much sought-after evidence that will bring about the closure of the camp. Did we have to release Nazi leaders after the suicide of Göring? Did we have to close German prisons after the suicides of Rudolf Hess or the Baader-Meinhof group? Should French prisons be closed because 115 prisoners took their lives in 2004 alone? Well, some of them actually should. Many French prisons and detention centers for asylum seekers are truly horrific. But they are of little concern to the anti-American demagogues.

Instead of joining Kant's "Alliance of Republics," which is the key to victory against Islamic terrorism, these politicians lead the EU into the traps set by the terrorists. While soldiers from free republics are fighting together as brothers for the freedom of Afghanistan, in Brussels and Strasbourg demagogues sow division and battle the "American enemy." From Swiss parliamentarian Dick Marty, who reported on the "CIA flights" for the Council of Europe, to Martin Schulz, the president of the Socialist group at the European Parliament, the alliance among free countries is rejected and relations with the CIA described as "complicities." Even though the accusers confess they have "no evidence at all," they insist the "secret prisons" where terrorists are kept without trial are real. They embellish the story with more than 1,000 flights -- "torture charter flights" -- supposedly arranged by the CIA.

The real strength of republics must be measured by the courage to fight for them. On this side of the Atlantic, this strength, once again, is lacking.

Mr. Roucaute, a professor of political science and philosophy at Nanterre University, is author of "Le Néo-conservatisme est un humanisme."(P.U.F., 2005).

Tabblo

2006-06-21T09:47:00.000-07:00

Vamos a tener que probar esto...

A Photo-Sharing Web Site
Offers New Services

Sharing digital photos online can be easily done using a Web site like Kodak EasyShare Gallery or Shutterfly to store the images for online viewing. These sites are usually rather basic, with a focus on allowing friends and family to see your digital images. And they generally work well -- permitting others to look through your photos in a slideshow format, buy prints or gift items, and even make comments about the images.

But most of these photo Web sites don't offer you the chance to design handsome lay
outs for your photos, nor do they offer simple on-screen editing options that work with the ease of a software program.

This week, we reviewed the beta (or pre-release) version of a new photo-sharing Web site called Tabblo (www.tabblo.com1), from Boston-based Tabblo Inc., that will be officially released on June 30. Tabblo differs from other Web-based sharing sites. It's a so-called "Web 2.0" service, meaning it functions like a software application, offering features like dragging and dropping and editing all on the same Web page, without the annoying constant reloading that characterizes so many photo sites.

Tabblo also puts special emphasis on presentation, allowing you to arrange your photos in collages and designs with descriptions, rather than as straightforward slideshows, so as to add a little flair and style to your photos. The company calls these photo montages "tabblos." If you really like the tabblo that you create, you can order high-quality printed posters of them in 11x17 inches for $10, or 8.5x11 inches for $8.

We've been playing with Tabblo for the past week, arranging digital shots into collages -- some with text descriptions and some without. Katie made a tabblo of pictures from a friend's graduation party, and Walt made one of photos from the Journal's recent "D: All Things Digital" technology conference.

We used various background colors, photo sizes, style arrangements and image effects, and got results that required very little effort on our part yet still looked professional and polished. An 11x17-inch Tabblo poster that we ordered turned out to be an attractive keepsake that displayed a bunch of photos all at once, eliminating the need to leaf through stacks of prints or scroll through hundreds of digital files.

Tabblo also encourages community interaction through its Web site, so that the tabblos become a form of simple social networking. Just as MySpace.com lets you create a list of "friends," Tabblo.com allows you to add people to your "circle" so that you can see when those people create new tabblos. You can even make tabblos that combine your own photos with those belonging to people in your circle, if they allow you.

The Tabblo Web site works on both Windows and Mac operating systems, using Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows and Firefox and Safari on Macs.

The process for building a tabblo is straightforward. Three tabs labeled View, Upload and Make at the top of the screen walk you through the steps. In View, you can see all of the tabblos that you've already made, as well as a list of those in your circle of friends. In Upload, we quickly added photos to our Tabblo accounts using Java uploader, one of five options offered by the site. Integrating your photos from Flickr.com -- another photo-sharing site -- is one of the five options, if you have an account.

After uploading our digital photos from the conference and the graduation party, we progressed to the Make step, which included four steps of its own: Pick Photos, Choose Style, Edit Tabblo and Share Tabblo. The Pick Photos screen is well designed, with a panel on the left showing all uploaded photos and those from people in your circle. A panel on the right called My Lightbox stores photos that you drag and drop in for use in a tabblo.

In Choose Style, we worked our way through three decisions about our tabblo: photo shape (square or rectangle), layout and theme; 512 total style combinations are offered. The layouts included one with Polaroid-style photos, another with big and small images combined with text and another layout with interlocking photos of differing sizes. For the theme, we chose Bold from a list that included Baby Pink, Wedding Traditional and Museum.

The Edit Tabblo section was especially impressive. We easily dragged photos all around the screen, seeing which fit in the best places of our collage layout and automatically swapping out other images. It was smooth and quick, exactly like working in a full-blown program stored locally on a PC, instead of a Web site stored on a distant server.

In a few instances, the automatic-layout mode made some shifts and adjustments that we didn't like, but for the most part they made the tabblo look better. If you'd rather make all adjustments manually, a manual-layout option is also available.

We had a little trouble with fonts -- when we increased the font size of some text entries, the lettering appeared jumbled and words looked like they ran together. But Tabblo fixed this problem before our column was finished.

Tabblo displays your digital photos in a stylish way and offers editing features that work like those in a software program, rather than a Web site.

When we moused over each photo, buttons and controls appeared. These included a Remove Picture button and four on-screen editing options in the top left of each image: Collapse, Scale & Pan, Show Effects and Rotate Photo. Scale & Pan was very useful, instantly showing a window in which we could zoom in or out and pan around the image. Show Effects altered the image to black and white, sepia, oil paint or negative style.

All of these changes took just a few seconds for each image -- quite a switch from the constant refreshing and reloading of Web pages that are commonplace on other photo-sharing sites.

A box filled with more editing options is constantly present at the right of your screen, offering options for changing text colors, background colors and other settings. After tweaking to our heart's content, we continued on into the Share Tabblo section. Here, we could opt for our tabblo to be seen by anyone, just those in our circles, people we invited or just ourselves.

If your tabblo is set to Public or sent to someone using an invitation, those viewing it won't have to sign in. If the tabblo is sent to those in your circle, those people must sign in with their Tabblo account information, which they'll already have (by being in a circle). This week, Tabblo will introduce a shareable link which can be sent to others for use without login credentials.

We ordered an 11x17-inch poster from Tabblo and were impressed by how striking it looked. The wedding posters, which the company sent us as examples, were truly stunning.

As of June 30, when Tabblo is available for use in its finished format, it will offer, among other things, larger posters for $20, frames for the 11x17-inch posters and 25-cent 4x6-inch prints.

Tabblo.com offers a clean interface with smart features that save time, and our digital images really looked sharp in all of the layouts that we tried. If you want people to see your photos in a more-personalized way, Tabblo is a good service that will change the way you look at online photo sharing.

Losses, and the Losing Losers Who Hate Them

2006-06-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

By MICHAEL J. AGOVINO

MINNOW and superpower alike last week could still dream of hoisting the World Cup on July 9 in Berlin, but by Tuesday, some teams will be boarding planes home, wondering what went wrong. It won't be too long, though, before the losing players might be found on a quiet beach in the Maldives, their misery consigned to memory.

Not so the losing fans. It has been said that losses are more devastating, and lasting, for them.

Famous upsets in sports abound — the accomplished Soviets losing the 1980 "miracle on ice" Olympic hockey game to the college-age Americans; the United States "dream teams" being beat in basketball — but it is still soccer, by far the most popular sport, whose results are so entangled with a nation's history and sense of identity.

If it's tempting to suggest a link between national character and the ways nations have coped with defeat, the slim catalog of responses — especially to humiliating losses, or those at the hands of geopolitical rivals — probably says more about how similar people are. They blame themselves. They blame the other guy. They weep. They stew. They act stoic. They act up.

One favorite response is scapegoating. In 1950, Brazil, the host and favorite, lost in the final to Uruguay. The author Alex Bellos, in his book "Futebol: Soccer, the Brazilian Way," writes that the goalkeeper, Barbosa, "became the personification of the national tragedy." He died 50 years later, apparently unforgiven by his countrymen.

Although Brazil has suffered cataclysmic defeats in addition to 1950's, it has won a record five World Cups.

"Brazilians, to generalize awfully, are emotionally bipolar," Mr. Bellos, who divides his time between England and Brazil, said in an interview. "Everything is either the best in the world or the worst in the world. They have a superiority complex in terms of football, yet the flipside is a developing nation's crushing insecurity complex. When they win they forget their problems. They are the happy, party-loving. When they lose it reinforces a sense that they are useless and predestined towards failure — not just in football but in everything."

The Dutch are not known for public displays of emotion, but Holland's loss to West Germany in the 1974 World Cup Final is "burned into the Dutch psyche in the way that Dallas, 22 November, 1963 haunts America," David Winner writes in "Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football." There was open weeping. Mr. Winner cites a study of that loss that concluded, "The defeat of 1974 is the biggest trauma that happened to Holland in the 20th century apart from the floods of 1953 and World War II." He quotes a Dutch psychoanalyst: "There is still a deep, unresolved trauma about 1974. It's a very living pain, like an unpunished crime."

Since then, the Dutch, still steeped in Calvinist ethos, albeit secular, have had an unusual string of bitter defeats, but according to Mr. Winner, they "go numb and pretend it doesn't matter. They shrug and don't talk."

The Italians, who like the Dutch have had a series of improbable last-minute implosions, turn not so much operatic, as per stereotype, but somewhat paranoic, according to the new book "Calcio: A History of Italian Football" by John Foot of University College in London. The referees punished Italy to favor the host South Korea — that was the chorus heard from Palermo to Milan in 2002. In 2004, the Danes colluded with those evil Swedes and played to a deliberate 2-2 draw that ousted the Italians, the dark thinking went.

The English, says the novelist Nick Hornby, author of the soccer memoir "Fever Pitch," would rather pin blame on an individual on their own team, either a manager or player (David Beckham in 1998 for committing a silly foul in front of the referee; the goalie David Seaman in 2002 for misjudging Ronaldinho's blooping shot — or was that a pass?). But in an interview Mr. Hornby said, "It's been so long since England have won anything in soccer that it feels as though real contenders come from a parallel universe England can't seem to break their way in to."

William W. Kelly, an anthropologist at Yale who teaches a course called "Sport, Society and Culture," said he is "leery of national character as an explanation for anything, including sports behavior."

He added: "The Brazilians, the Germans, the Italians and the English, among other national teams, have all had shocking early exits in modern World Cup play, followed by fans behaving badly and media and politicians pointing fingers. I'm not sure that there has been enough difference in their reactions to attribute them to a collective personality."

Sam Mchombo, a linguistics professor at Berkeley who has lectured on soccer in identity formation, is similarly reluctant to impute reaction to collective personality, but he does note that many of the African nations, given their meager resources, are just happy to have qualified for the cup, and the reactions to the losses, he said, "have not been irritable or violent but rather with a degree of stoicism or grace."

Few reactions to loss on the pitch could be more starkly bleak than the one Ryszard Kapuscinski describes in his book "The Soccer War," about the cup qualifying games between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, and the ensuing madness.

"Eighteen-year-old Amelia Bolanios was sitting in front of the television in El Salvador when the Honduran striker Roberto Cardona scored the winning goal in the final minute," he writes. "She got up and ran to the desk which contained her father's pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart. 'The young girl could not bear to see her fatherland brought to its knees,' wrote the Salvadoran newspaper El Nacional the next day. The whole capital took part in the televised funeral of Amelia Bolanios."

Losing in the World Cup isn't the only way to pummel self-esteem. Not qualifying, like the two-time champion Uruguay, who inexplicably lost to Australia in a playoff, can be painful too. Eduardo Galeano, whose aphoristic book "Soccer in Sun and Shadow" is often quoted, said in an e-mail interview, "When we Uruguayans suffer a humiliating defeat, we confirm that we are no more than a fiction in history, a mistake on the map, a bad joke of God or Devil."

The not-so-unwelcome anti-Americanism

2006-06-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

Excelente articulo (medio viejo, abril del 2005)

On Being Disliked
by Victor Davis Hanson

Last year the hysteria about the hostility toward the United States reached a fevered pitch. Everyone from Jimmy Carter to our Hollywood elite lamented that America had lost its old popularity. It was a constant promise of the Kerry campaign to restore our good name and "to work with our allies." The more sensitive were going to undo the supposed damage of the last four years. Whole books have been devoted to this peculiar new anti-Americanism, but few have asked whether or not such suspicion of the United States is, in fact, a barometer of what we are doing right — and while not necessarily welcome, at least proof that we are on the correct track.

The Egyptian autocracy may have received $57 billion in aggregate American aid over the last three decades. But that largess still does not prevent the Mubarak dynasty from damning indigenous democratic reformers by dubbing them American stooges. In differing ways, the Saudi royal family exhibits about the same level of antagonism toward the U.S. as do the Islamic fascists of al Qaeda — both deeply terrified by what is going on in Iraq. Mostly this animus arises because we are distancing ourselves from corrupt grandees, even as we have become despised as incendiary democratizers by the Islamists. Is that risky and dangerous? Yes. Bad? Hardly

At the U.N. it is said that a ruling hierarchy mistrusts the United States and that a culture of anti-Americanism has become endemic within the organization. No wonder — the Americans alone push for more facts about the Oil-for-Food scandal, question Kofi Annan's breaches of ethics, and want investigations about U.N. crimes in Africa. If we are mistrusted for caring about those thousands who are inhumanely treated by a supposedly humane organization, then why in the world should we wish to be liked by such a group?

EU bureaucrats and French politicians routinely caricature Americans, whipping up public opinion against the United States, even as they fly here to profess eagerness to maintain the old NATO transatlantic ties. Is it to our discredit that what Europe has now devolved into does not like the United States?

Mexico, we are told, is furious at the United States. Mexico City newspapers routinely trash Americans. Vicente Fox usually sounds more like a belligerent than the occasional visitor at the presidential ranch. That is not so bad either.

In short, who exactly does not like the United States and why? First, almost all the 20 or so illiberal Arab governments that used to count on American realpolitik's giving them a pass on accounting for their crimes. They fear not the realist Europeans, nor the resource-mad Chinese, nor the old brutal Russians, but the Americans, who alone are prodding them to open their economies and democratize their corrupt political cultures. We must learn to expect, not lament, their hostility, and begin to worry that things would be indeed wrong if such unelected dictators praised the United States.

The United Nations has sadly become a creepy organization. Its General Assembly is full of cutthroat regimes. The Human Rights Commission has had members like Vietnam and Sudan, regimes that at recess must fight over bragging rights to which of the two killed more of their own people. The U.N. has a singular propensity to find flawed men to be secretary-general — a Kurt Waldheim, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, or Kofi Annan. Blue-helmeted peace-keepers, we learn, are as likely to commit as prevent crimes; and the only thing constant about such troops is that they will never go first into harm's way in Serbia, Kosovo, the Congo, or Dafur to stop genocide. Even worse, the U.N. has proved to be a terrible bully, an unforgivable sin for a self-proclaimed protector of the weak and innocent — loud false charges against Israel for its presence in the West Bank, not a peep about China in Tibet; tough talk about Palestinian rights, far less about offending Arabs over Darfur. So U.N. anti-Americanism is a glowing radiation badge, proof of exposure to toxicity.

The EU is well past being merely silly, as its vast complex of bureaucrats tries to control what 400 million speak, eat, and think. Its biggest concerns are three: figuring out how its nations are to keep paying billions of euros to retirees, unemployed, and assorted other entitlement recipients; how to continue to ankle-bite the United States without antagonizing it to the degree that these utopians might have to pay for their own security; and how not to depopulate itself out of existence. Europeans sold Saddam terrible arms for oil well after the first Gulf War. Democratic Israel or Taiwan means nothing to them; indeed, democracy is increasingly becoming the barometer by which to judge European hostility. Cuba, China, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah — not all that bad; the United States, Taiwan, and Israel, not all that good. Personally, I'd rather live in a country that goes into an anguished national debate over pulling the plug on a lone woman than one that blissfully vacations on the beach oblivious to 15,000 elderly cooked to well done back in Paris.

Mexico, enjoying one of the richest landscapes in the world, can't feed its own people, so it exports its poorest to the United States. Its own borders with Central America are as brutal to cross as our own are porous. Illegal aliens send back almost $50 billion, which has the effect of propping up corrupt institutions that as a result will never change. Given its treatment of its own people, if the Mexican government praised the United States we should indeed be concerned.

Who then are America's friends? Perhaps one billion Indians, who appreciated that at a time of recession we kept our economy open, and exported jobs and expertise there that helped evolve its economy.

Millions of Japanese trust America as well. Unlike the Chinese, who on script vandalized Japanese interests abroad in anguish over right-wing Japanese textbooks, Americans — who at great cost once freed China — without such violence urge the Japanese to deal honestly with the past. After all, the Tokyo government that started the war is gone and replaced by a democracy; in contrast, the Communist dictatorship that killed 50 million of its own and many of its neighbors is still in place in China. At a time when no one in Europe seems to care that Japan is squeezed between a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear China, the United States alone proves a reliable friend. The French, on spec, conduct maneuvers with the ascendant Communist Chinese navy.

Eastern Europeans do not find the larger families, religiosity, or commitment to individualism and freedom in America disturbing. Apparently, millions in South America don't either — if their eagerness to emigrate here is any indication.

It is the wage of the superpower to be envied. Others weaker vie for its influence and attention — often when successful embarrassed by the necessary obsequiousness, when ignored equally shamed at the resulting public impotence. The Cold War is gone and former friends and neutrals no longer constrain their anti-American rhetoric in fear of a cutthroat and nuclear Soviet Union. Americans are caricatured as cocky and insular — as their popular culture sweeps the globe.

All that being said, the disdain that European utopians, Arab dictatorships, the United Nations, and Mexico exhibit toward the United States is not — as the Kerry campaign alleged in the last election — cause for tears, but often reason to be proud, since much of the invective arises from the growing American insistence on principles abroad.

America should not gratuitously welcome such dislike; but we should not apologize for it either. Sometimes the caliber of a nation is found not in why it is liked, but rather in why it is not. By January 1, 1941, I suppose a majority on the planet — the Soviet Union, all of Eastern Europe, France, Italy, Spain, and even many elsewhere in occupied Europe, most of Latin America, Japan and its Asian empire, the entire Arab world, many in India — would have professed a marked preference for Hitler's Germany over Churchill's England.

Think about it. When Europe orders all American troops out; when Japan claims our textbooks whitewash the Japanese forced internment or Hiroshima; when China cites unfair trade with the United States; when South Korea says get the hell off our DMZ; when India complains that we are dumping outsourced jobs on them; when Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians refuse cash aid; when Canada complains that we are not carrying our weight in collective North American defense; when the United Nations moves to Damascus; when the Arab Street seethes that we are pushing theocrats and autocrats down its throat; when Mexico builds a fence to keep us out; when Latin America proclaims a boycott of the culturally imperialistic Major Leagues; and when the world ignores American books, films, and popular culture, then perhaps we should be worried. But something tells me none of that is going to happen in this lifetime.

Who can stop the rise and rise of China? The communists, of course

2006-06-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

By Mark Steyn

Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the
inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle
Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The
Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of
external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions,
unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances
always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of
architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the
mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what
appears to be a squalid hovel."

Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If
you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation
destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return
cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby
Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever
higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale
boutiques in the streets below.

The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal
that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-à-vis JFK)
now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally
less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's
sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the
unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have
squashed America like the cockroach she is.

Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a
young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my
career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington
Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily
in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the
world to be an American journalist right now."

Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who
was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever
since.

What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner
observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is,
in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid
hovel. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more
journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a
correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April
while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the
Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after
declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how
the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you
can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is
like for the local boys.

China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong
Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China
the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about
everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely
unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as
zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old
techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in
public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council
member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most
significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has
4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea
is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a
provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way
that a mob boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not
the behaviour of a psychologically healthy state.

How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will
happen when they collide? If the People's Republic is now the workshop
of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop.
It's unclear, for example, whether they have the discipline to be able
to resist moving against Taiwan in the next couple of years. Unlike
the demoralised late-period Soviet nomenklatura, Beijing's leadership
does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most outside analysts,
they do not assume that the world's first economically viable form of
Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free - or even
free-ish - society.

Mao, though he gets a better press than Hitler and Stalin, was the
biggest mass murderer of all time, with a body count ten times' higher
than the Nazis (as Jung Chang's new biography reminds us). The
standard line of Sinologists is that, while still perfunct-orily
genuflecting to his embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square, his
successors have moved on - just as, in Austin Powers, while Dr Evil is
in suspended animation, his Number Two diversifies the consortium's
core business away from evildoing and reorients it toward a portfolio
of investments including a chain of premium coffee stores. But Maoists
with stock options are still Maoists - especially when they owe their
robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus.

The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end,
scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the
products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also
the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It
makes almost all Disney's official merchandising, yet it's also the
country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China's
contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old
China's contempt for the concept of all private property: because most
big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another)
government-controlled, they've failed to understand the link between
property rights and economic development.

China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a
millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is
something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a
resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from
liberating the creative energies of your people - and Beijing still
has no interest in that. If a blogger attempts to use the words
"freedom" or "democracy" or "Taiwan independence" on Microsoft's new
Chinese internet portal, he gets the message: "This item contains
forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech." How pathetic is
that? Not just for the Microsoft-spined Corporation, which should be
ashamed of itself, but for the Chinese government, which pretends to
be a world power but is terrified of words.

Does "Commie wimps" count as forbidden speech, too? And what is the
likelihood of China advancing to a functioning modern stand-alone
business culture if it's unable to discuss anything except within its
feudal political straitjackets? Its speech code is a sign not of
control but of weakness; its internet protective blocks are not the
armour but the, er, chink.

India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than
China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own
ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40
one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian
petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where
internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because
they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are
already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on
investment capital is already much better in India than in China.

I said a while back that China was a better bet for the future than
Russia or the European Union. Which is damning with faint praise:
trapped in a demographic death spiral, Russia and Europe have no
future at all. But that doesn't mean China will bestride the scene as
a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about a "Chinese
century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a
second American century". But wishing won't make it so.

China won't advance to the First World with its present borders
intact. In a billion-strong state with an 80 per cent rural population
cut off from the coastal boom and prevented from participating in it,
"One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three
or four systems. The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with
America, India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting
on Beijing will find the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of
bull.

The Airbus Debacle

2006-06-20T09:28:00.000-07:00

By RICHARD ABOULAFIA

Production delays. Political infighting. Cost and time overruns. Sounds like a typical day at any large aircraft corporation, and last week's news of another big setback for delivering Airbus's A380 550-seat mega-jetliner fits this pattern. Yet the market isn't taking all these problems at the European plane maker in stride, wiping away much of Airbus parent company European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co.'s gains since it was created six years ago. Investors were far more understanding a few years back when Boeing went through similar crises. A double standard? If only it were so.

The biggest problem for Airbus today, to put it gently, is that its superjumbo should never have been born. The A380 program was launched in 2000 in the face of considerable skepticism. Aircraft were getting smaller, not larger. New technologies allowed long-range travel with great economies. Passengers wanted direct flights offering more choices, more often. Airlines wanted smaller planes to get rid of discount travelers. The A380 was a $13 billion bet on a shrinking niche.

Not surprisingly, the giant plane has proven unpopular. In the six years since its birth, it has won 159 orders, including 45 from Emirates, a carrier pursuing the unusual strategy of ordering scores of each type of plane to meet high growth expectations.

In the same period, the mid-sized long-range widebodies, led by Boeing's new high-tech 787, have racked up more than 700 orders. One notch larger, 300/400-seat planes have garnered another 500 orders led by Boeing's 777. The A380/747 niche is 5%-10% of the market by value of total annual deliveries; the smaller widebodies comprise half.

Worse, after securing the small list of customers that actually need a few planes this big, the A380 order book has grown at only a very modest pace for the last four years. Other than Emirates, no airline has ordered more than a token number. The mid-size 250/300-seat market, meanwhile, is gathering steam, with blue-chip carriers such as British Airways, Lufthansa and even Emirates now shopping for new long-range jets in this class.

Airbus is desperately seeking resources to compete with the 787 and 777 with its own new plane. Customers criticized its initial offering, the A350, so it now needs $10 billion to create an all-new family, the A370 series. But money and engineers are tied up in the A380 program. When the superjumbo delay news broke, Singapore Airlines ordered 20 787 "Dreamliners," casting a no-confidence vote in Airbus's ability to fund the A370. Meanwhile, Boeing might follow the 787 with a new narrowbody, necessitating an Airbus response to compete in that 40%-45% of the market.

This means that, with the A380, Airbus is racing to deliver something that's a mere sideshow. The delays are simply bitter icing on an unpalatable cake.
* * *

How did this disaster happen? When Airbus was born in 1970, it was a defensive creation, a way for Europe to save its legacy jet industries from U.S. dominance. They pooled their resources with government support and created a European widebody, the A300. The first 20 years weren't easy, but Airbus did much better than other European jetliner projects like the notoriously money-losing Concorde.

Starting in the late 1980s, Airbus moved from defense to offense. It launched the A320 narrowbody and A330/340 widebody families. It helped drive Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas out of the market. By 1997, Airbus and Boeing formed a duopoly. That carried political implications for American-European relations.

Airbus still enjoyed government nurturing. It was the only notable success for publicly funded European industrial policy. European politicians were eager to underwrite and take credit for an impressive achievement. When Airbus created plans for the world's biggest jetliner in the mid-1990s, they knew they could count on government support.

Airbus didn't need to be overly careful with the A380's bottom line. Government launch aid was good for one-third of development costs. These loans were legal under the terms of the U.S.-EU 1992 jetliner aid agreement. Private cash was easier and cheaper to get since investors knew Europe's hapless taxpayers would be the last to be repaid.

If the market for large aircraft looked dubious, well, Airbus proposed duty-free shopping courts and restaurants aboard its new jumbo, unrealistic and borderline-absurd ideas designed to stimulate airline demand. From a business standpoint, this "whole new way to fly" was nonsense. Yet bureaucrats saw national pride at stake, hence a slam-dunk reason to invest public cash. They've basked in reflected glory, with European prime ministers and officials attending every major A380 milestone. Jacques Chirac, the French president, responded to last week's news by expressing "total confidence" in the program. That looks to be wishful thinking from a government that enjoys messing around in its nation's industries.

A board of diverse, apolitical and independent shareholders would never have tolerated the risk associated with such a shallow business case. Here the distinction from Boeing's difficulties becomes apparent.

A few years ago, Boeing looked like it was in Airbus-like dire straits, yet the situation was in fact very different. Before launching the 787 in 2004, Boeing spent eight years shortchanging its product line but returning billions to shareholders. Airbus spent a fortune on its product line, but misinvested horribly, jeopardizing return on investment. Thus, it was easy for Boeing to start raising cash for the 787. Meantime, investor patience with Airbus is running thin, just as its parent company seeks buyers for some of the shares that its major French and German industrial shareholders, Lagardère and DaimlerChrysler respectively, are looking to dispose of. EADS also needs money to buy BAE System's 20% Airbus stake. Adding to EADS's woes, market regulators are investigating large share sales in March, before the A380 news went public, by senior company executives, including the French co-CEO, Noël Forgeard.

Boeing has also suffered technical snags with its jets, most recently its ambitious and risky all-composite body for the 787. But Boeing pursued the right market segment. Even if the 787 stumbles, Boeing would recover, since that plane satisfies strong demand and brings in cash. Airbus, by contrast, is merely racing to build a handful of A380s so it can transfer resources to a more important aircraft.

Airbus faces a difficult path. Even if it can fund a new jet family, it doesn't have much credibility with customers right now. Airbus needs to do a brutally honest assessment of the A380 and determine whether it will ever turn cash positive, and whether it is worth the risk of losing ground in the other 90%-95% of the market for civilian aircraft. Canceling the A380 program altogether should be an option on the table.

Resources and customers need to be found for the A370. Unless it happens fast the program won't get going until after Boeing runs off with the up-front demand. And a chastened Airbus will have learned an important lesson from the A380: Easy public money comes with a high price.

Mr. Aboulafia is vice president of analysis for Teal Group Corp., a Washington-based aerospace and defense consultancy.

Curiosa convocatoria a la inversión

2006-06-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

El gobierno se llena la boca tratando de convencer a los inversores extranjeros de las bondades de invertir en el país pero con sus acciones ahuyentan incluso a los más arriesgados.

Mientras el gobierno se dispone a impulsar una oficina pública para atraer inversiones, Kirchner ha dicho que quiere que vengan inversiones extranjeras, al tiempo que De Vido dijo que la Argentina estaba abierta a las inversiones del exterior.

Lo curioso de estas declaraciones y convocatorias al capital extranjero es que se formulan en un contexto en el cual las empresas del exterior se van del país pegando un portazo, otras pegan el portazo y le inician juicios al Estado argentino por incumplimientos de los contratos y otras, hartas de tantas arbitrariedades en las reglas de juego, optaron por entregar las llaves de las compañías y desearnos que Dios nos ayude.

Estas convocatorias a las inversiones también se hacen en un momento en que buena parte del empresariado local, salvo honrosas excepciones, está atemorizado de abrir la boca y formular la más mínima crítica a las políticas públicas. El que no tiene miedo a sufrir un ataque desde el atril presidencial, le teme a las hordas piqueteras adictas al gobierno o a alguna “profunda” inspección de la AFIP.

El estado de temor en el mundo empresarial es realmente llamativo dentro de un gobierno que se supone democrático, estado de temor, insisto, que no es extensible a todos los empresarios argentinos, dado que algunos pocos han privilegiado su condición de ciudadanos y denuncian los atropellos institucionales del actual gobierno.

A tal punto llega el miedo que, el martes pasado, en mi programa de cable que se emite por la señal Política y Economía, Luis J. Ramos formuló una acertada y valiente crítica al comportamiento del gobierno (la entrevista completa, clickear). El gran mérito de Luis Ramos consiste en que es un empresario muy conocido del sector inmobiliario y, sin embargo, demostró un gran coraje al momento de decir las cosas tal cual son. Esa actitud de valentía se tradujo en infinidad de llamadas y mensajes de correo electrónico que recibí, en los que felicitaban a Luis Ramos. ¿Qué demuestra esto? Que la gente, por un lado, está cansada de tanto patoterismo pero, por el otro, no se anima a hacer lo que hizo Luis Ramos. Levantar la voz, no ya como empresario, sino como un hombre que antes que empresario se siente ciudadano.

Ahora bien, si unos se van pegando portazos, otros haciendo juicios y muchos están atemorizados de hablar, ¿quién puede pensar que alguien va a invertir en la Argentina? ¿Qué resultados positivos puede tener una nueva oficina estatal para atraer inversiones si todo el que pone plata en Argentina es tratado como el enemigo? ¿Quién puede confiar seriamente en las convocatorias de Kirchner y De Vido a invertir, si la condición para poner plata en el país es someterse a los caprichos y amenazas públicas del gobierno? ¿Quién puede pensar en invertir en un país en el cual el señor Moreno parece disfrutar haciendo el papel del guapo del 900? ¿Quién puede poner su capital en la Argentina para que luego el gobierno le diga a qué precio tiene que vender, qué costos tiene que tener, cómo debe abastecer el mercado y cuánto tiene que ganar?

Por supuesto que siempre va a haber algún pseudoempresario que, rindiéndole pleitesía al gobierno, consiga algún nicho de mercado para hacer un negocio. Sin embargo, esos pseudoempresarios deberían pensar varias veces lo que van a hacer, porque este gobierno ha demostrado en infinidad de oportunidades que aquellos que confiaron en él luego fueron traicionados y sentenciados sin la más mínima compasión. Eduardo Duhalde, María del Carmen Alarcón, Rafael Bielsa y Daniel Scioli son algunos de los ejemplos que pueden darse al respecto. Si los aliados políticos del gobierno fueron sancionados inmediatamente por expresar sus propias ideas, ¿por qué un empresario prebendario no va a sentir el rigor del poder en el momento más insospechado?

Considerando que las instituciones han sido arrasadas y el poder se ha concentrado en una sola persona, al estilo de los gobiernos autocráticos, el riesgo institucional argentino pasa a tener nombre y apellido: Néstor Kirchner. El que invierte en la Argentina sabe que el futuro de su capital no depende tanto de su habilidad como empresario, sino de los humores presidenciales, justamente la antítesis de lo que ocurre en los países que han conseguido desarrollos económicos sostenidos gracias a la vigencia de un Estado de Derecho que hace previsibles las reglas de juego que regirán en el futuro.

Sin embargo, los riesgos de invertir en la Argentina no se limitan, solamente, a los caprichos gubernamentales dada la ausencia de un gobierno sujeto a la ley. El otro gran riesgo tiene que ver con una estructura de precios relativos que hace agua por todos lados. Salarios artificialmente bajos medidos en dólares, fuerte emisión monetaria para sostener el tipo de cambio, precio de los servicios públicos atrasados, problemas en el abastecimiento de combustible y energía, controles de precios por doquier, entre otros, crean un escenario a futuro que se traduce en un secreto a voces: vamos de cabeza a otro Rodrigazo, cuya intensidad sólo Dios sabe cual será. Aunque todos saben, incluso el gobierno, que la ensalada de precios relativos que se ha montado para disfrazar la realidad inflacionaria conduce a una crisis futura.

Ese secreto a voces también conspira contra cualquier convocatoria a realizar inversiones en la Argentina porque nadie va a animarse a poner un peso en este contexto de incertidumbre. Es más, muchos deben tener fresca en la mente aquella famosa frase de Kirchner, al inicio de su gestión, frente a empresarios españoles, cuando les preguntó: “¿Quién los asesoró en los 90 para que ustedes invirtieran en la Argentina?”. Viendo el escenario económico e institucional actual, en el futuro otro presidente puede preguntarle a alguien que tenga la temeridad de invertir en nuestro país: “¿Quién lo asesoró? ¿No sabían que los precios relativos estaban totalmente distorsionados e íbamos de cabeza a otro estallido? ¿No sabían que las reglas de juego eran totalmente imprevisibles?”.

En definitiva, las convocatorias de Kirchner y De Vido a los capitales extranjeros para que vengan a la Argentina no se condicen con el comportamiento del gobierno frente a las inversiones ni con las reglas de juego que imperan en estas latitudes. En todo caso, lucen más a una postura frente a la opinión pública similar a la convocatoria al pluralismo político del 25 de mayo, que a una verdadera convicción sobre la necesidad de atraer capitales.

64 Remixed

2006-06-18T12:31:00.000-07:00

'64' Remixed: A Birthday Present for The Future

Today, Sir Paul McCartney turns 64. It is a condition that he imagined incorrectly when, more than 40 years ago, he wrote "When I'm 64," beginning with the memorable lines: "When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now."

Sir Paul, with a full head of hair, is marking the occasion by shuttling among his lavish city, shore and rural properties, getting over the breakup of his marriage to a 38-year-old model.

Even for the rest of us, aging is not what it used to be. Forty-year-old sexpots from "Desperate Housewives" now appear on the cover of People magazine proclaiming that "40 is the new 30." It is no longer novel when great-grandparents blithely announce they are about to walk the Great Wall of China, saying "80 is the new 60."

What could Paul have been thinking?

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,

Who could ask for more?

Will you still need me, will you still feed me,

When I'm 64?

McCartney's anthem to antiquity needs a rewrite. We propose the following as a scenario for 40 years from now.

As I get younger, Rogaine my hair,

Many years from now.

Will you still be ogling my Viagra stash,

Vintage T-shirts, old hippie hash?

If memory drugs fail and I can't find home,

Will you lock the door?

Will you still see me, will I still be me,

When I'm 104?

The fountain of youth has finally arrived,

Ain't technology grand?

You can surf and ski and run your marathon,

If you find sky-diving a yawn.

Botox for wrinkles, lipo for sag,

Who could ask for more?

Will you still see me, will I still be me,

When I'm 104?

Every summer we can rent a villa on the coast of Spain

Let the young folks pay.

We shall hoard our stocks.

Great-grandchildren on your knee,

Vera, Chuck and whatshisname.

Send me an e-mail, crank up your blog,

Stating point of view.

Tell me how your mutual funds are gaining ground,

Social Security -- it's still around.

Praise now that buyout, 401K,

Mine forevermore.

Will you still see me, will I still be me,

When I'm 104.

Cuando tenga 64

2006-06-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

La leyenda cuenta que Paul compuso esta cancion cuando tenia 16 años.
Hoy domingo 18 de junio celebra su cumpleaños numero 64 el mas grande.

Feliz cumple, genio...

Kissinger's Guide to Watching the World Cup

2006-06-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

Couch-Potato Diplomacy: Kissinger's Guide to Watching the World Cup

By FREDERICK KEMPE

For sports fans frustrated with the World Cup's excruciatingly low scores, the world's most famous diplomat has some advice: The game's appeal isn't about the goals.

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, Nobel Prize-winner and lifelong soccer connoisseur, compares the game to warfare or theater. With many American sports, he says, "you can segment them into individual moves," which translate into lots of statistics that fans track avidly -- like batting averages for baseball and completion percentages for football. By contrast, "soccer is more of an unrelenting drama," with no timeouts, commercials or water breaks, and limited opportunity for substitutions.

With the TV at his Park Avenue office in New York tuned to the Switzerland-France match, Dr. Kissinger offers a tutorial on the fine points of soccer, a game Americans are notorious for failing to grasp. Atop his dated Sony Trinitron television set rest icons from baseball, his other favorite sport: autographed photographs of New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and shortstop Derek Jeter. "The rest are just world leaders," he says with a wink, sweeping his arm along two long windows lined with dozens of other signed pictures.

While Dr. Kissinger is no less a Yankees fan than a soccer aficionado, he watches the two sports differently. With baseball, he is more laid-back. He cheers for his favorite team, and revels in "the game's great periods of latitude," with its moments of relaxation between points of high drama. He munches on hot dogs and chats with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who frequently invites Dr. Kissinger to his box.

He is less partisan when it comes to soccer, savoring its ebbs and flows of frustration, elation and ultimately exhaustion. "Soccer gets me at a relatively high pitch of attention," he says. He plans later this month to attend a World Cup semifinal match and also the finals, regardless of who is playing. He's fascinated with how national characteristics translate into playing styles: Brazil's unbridled joy, England's noble purpose, Germany's grim determination.

Dr. Kissinger keeps an eye on the TV and the Swiss team's surprisingly strong first-half showing against a French team that on paper is far superior. "I don't want to say anything anti-Swiss, but this is against expectations," he announces. As the match continues, Dr. Kissinger offers up some up other tips for appreciating this year's Cup:

Take your eye off the ball. "Soccer is a game that hides great complexity in an appearance of simplicity," he says. "It looks like 10 people chasing a ball. But they have to be coached scientifically so that they know where to move when the ball is in play."

Dr. Kissinger studies the patterns that teams try to create with their movements, whether they are predominantly attacking teams (which he prefers) or defending teams (which has become more the norm, to his chagrin).

"Oh, my God," Dr. Kissinger says, interrupting himself, as a French player fails to kick the ball into the net when he receives a perfect pass in front of the goal. "A deadly striker would have scored there."

Note the three primary playing styles -- but also the way globalization is homogenizing them. Dr. Kissinger separates the approaches to the game into three broad types: English, European continental and Latin. The traditional English style focuses on winning through athleticism -- kicking the ball deep and long and then outrunning the opponent, with defenders and attackers well-defined. With the European style, six players typically move forward and pass skillfully and four players remain back. That said, they often shift positions so that defenders can become attackers.

His favorite is the Latin approach, which is about style as much as substance. "When a Brazilian team is in good form, it looks like a ballet coming down the field. There are two troubles with the Brazilians: One is they get so infatuated with their dancing and acrobatics that they sometimes forget to shoot goals. The other is they often don't have a good goalkeeper. My explanation is that he doesn't like staying back and not joining the fun."

Dr. Kissinger worries that globalization is "brutalizing" the Brazilians, who have lost some of their Latin panache. All but three of their 11 players have had their styles dulled by playing in the highest-paying but more-conformist European leagues, he says. The English have also shifted to a more European style. Meanwhile, Dr. Kissinger says Germany is playing a more spontaneous and cheerful attacking style this year, which contrasts with the country's history-laden pessimism.

He has high praise for the Argentinians. "They have many of the skills of the Brazilians, but are ruthlessly oriented toward scoring goals and doing whatever is necessary to win," he says.

Don't underestimate the element of exhaustion in close games. Mr. Kissinger notes that goals are often scored late in the match when players are most fatigued.

It's near the end of the French-Swiss game, and though the French have improved in the second half, there still is no score. Dr. Kissinger delivers his verdict: "The French, while still elegant, have become stodgy," he says. "The French don't have the killer instinct or the killer capability."

New Chowhound

2006-06-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

Laptop Critics:Where the Web's Foodies Dish

When Nell Ingerman recently discovered that her favorite neighborhood restaurant -- a Mexican place in Manhattan called Baby Bo's Cantina -- had boosted prices and swapped enchiladas for wild salmon, she was outraged. She planned to collect complaints and present them to the manager.

But she didn't have to. The restaurant's owner, Bo Quijano, emailed her and promised to bring the old menu back. He'd read a message she'd posted on a popular foodie Internet Web site called Chowhound.com1. He even posted an apology, confessing that in a good-faith effort to improve the menu, "I simply got carried away."

To the chagrin of some restaurants and professional food critics, a lot of the most influential -- and opinionated -- advice on where to eat these days comes from Web sites and blogs. On sites like Chowhound, eGullet.com and Mouthfulsfood.com, members of the foodie community praise and pillory restaurants, post photos of what they ordered for dinner and share recipes and food-shopping tips.

Now Chowhound, widely considered the granddaddy of the virtual dining world, is about to undergo a radical transformation. Late next week, it will be relaunched by CNET Networks, the San Francisco-based Internet media powerhouse that acquired the site in December for an undisclosed price.

As anyone who's ever scanned the site knows, Chowhound's plodding, primitive message-board software makes Craigslist.org, the famously no-frills online community bulletin board, seem state-of-the-art. No more. I got a sneak peek at the new site and found a highly polished graphical interface and infinitely more user-friendly message boards.

Within a month or so, Chowhound will become part of a much broader new CNET food Web site called Chow.com, although Chowhound.com will still be accessible as an independent site. The people at CNET say they also intend to broaden Chowhound's horizons; currently it centers mostly on a few big U.S. cities.

Whether Chowhound's diehard community of food junkies will accept the overhaul -- which includes a new requirement that users register to post messages -- remains to be seen. "It is not our intention to alienate anyone," says Mike Tatum, CNET's general manager of lifestyle, noting that the new site adopts many user suggestions. Adds Chowhound co-founder Jim Leff: "It still has that hip vibe to it. That's what makes me psyched, and that's why I'm still here running it."

Mr. Leff, a 43-year-old New York jazz trombonist and writer, says he and a friend founded Chowhound "as a lark," a means for people to share their dining discoveries -- "the good stuff, the treasures, the kind of things that I want to pound my fist into the table when I eat them." (This is a guy who, in his online dining diary, describes routinely driving 70 miles each way to get takeout pizza from a favorite haunt in New Haven, Conn.)

He says he hoped to attract a few hundred "fellow eaters" to the site, but it eventually drew tens of thousands and required so much maintenance that he nearly shut it down. The way he describes it, CNET came to the rescue in the nick of time. He won't say whether the takeover made him rich.

To keep itself honest, Chowhound accepts no restaurant ads and tries to remove any postings that seem to come from restaurant employees. Even Mr. Quijano's confession soon disappeared.

That attitude appeals to users like Dian Tanuwidjaja, a civil engineering graduate student at the University of California in Los Angeles. She says she trusts the site because "people like me" contribute and "no one's paying them to give their opinions."

Being a closet foodie myself -- I once confessed that my four favorite words in the English language are "all you can eat" -- I decided to put Chowhound to a test. Using the handle "Minuteman," I posted a message asking for suggestions for dinner in Acton, Mass., a somewhat rural town of 20,000 about 25 miles northwest of Boston.

After moving there last summer, I discovered that, amid the Dunkin' Donuts and pizza joints, Acton has at least one first-class eatery, a country-style French restaurant called Number 5 Strawberry Hill. I was curious what the Chowhounds thought of the place and whether there were other great local food finds I had missed.

But the picture of Acton painted by my fellow Chowhounds was grim. "Having lived near Acton for 11 years, I have yet to find a good restaurant in the area," one respondent wrote. "In Acton, there is nothing worth eating" except at a pizza place, added another. Declared a third: "In Acton proper, I think you're out of luck."

Two posters suggested an upscale Italian place in neighboring Concord, Mass., called Serafina Ristorante. It wasn't in Acton, but I decided to take my wife and try it anyway. It's in a nondescript strip mall, next to a video rental place, and the décor, to put it gently, is unremarkable. The food -- we had a plate of baked, breaded oysters that were on special, a mesclun salad with apples and goat cheese, a simple seafood stew and Chilean sea bass with roasted tomato and onion -- was generally good. But the prices seemed steep; the stew was $27.

Moreover, the place was no match for our Acton favorite. Somehow the outspoken community of Chowhounds had failed to discover it.

Del L.A. Times

2006-06-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

Festival Erupts With Argentine Cup Victory

BUENOS AIRES — Argentines could only hope the national squad was not as tense as this normally buoyant capital city found itself on a chilly but clear South American morning.

Traffic was light, and Argentines gripped their coffee cups, mumbled nervously and nibbled at croissants while eyes were focused on television sets. Teachers readied TVs for those students who showed up so they would not miss the unfolding national drama.

As play began across the Atlantic, business mostly halted at cafes, shops and offices. All eyes turned toward the ubiquitous screens. The rattled voices of hyperventilating play- by-play men echoed along the strangely deserted streets.

With every Argentine goal, the collective anxiety eased, until today's 6-0 thrashing of Serbia-Montenegro finally unleashed an impromptu street festival — and a sigh of relief.

"This is a great day for our fútbol," said Ruben Russo, 38, a casino worker who was one of several thousand revelers at the Obelisk, the trademark monument downtown. "This day will be remembered forever."

Four years after the national team was humiliated in a first-round ouster in Asia, Argentines seemed confident after their cherished squad convincingly qualified for the round of 16.

In a single match, doubts about the team's abilities, coach and chemistry were seemingly dispelled. And they triumphed with the kind of style and panache that is much appreciated in this soccer-fixated nation, which has watched neighboring Brazil garner cups as its teams failed to advance.

The game also featured the debut in Germany of Lionel Messi, whose presence fans have been clamoring for. Messi promptly set up one goal and scored another.

The nation's honor, buffeted by economic and political upheaval and 20 years without a World Cup championship, was restored — for now.

"When the players first gathered on the field, I was a bit scared," acknowledged Gaston Zeta, 27, a mechanic. "But our side played together as a team more than any Argentine squad I've ever seen."

So focused were Argentines on the Mundial that the 20th anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges — arguably the nation's greatest writer, one who wrote disapprovingly of his countrymen's passion for fútbol — was largely overlooked this week.

Instead of examining Borges' legacy, Argentines analyzed the myriad moves of José Pekerman, the national team coach, and contemplated the injured thigh of the young idol Messi. By today's delirious and wondrous finish, nothing else in the world seemed quite so important.

Andrés D'Alessandro of the Times' Buenos Aires bureau contributed to this report.

Cronica de una mañana soñada

2006-06-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

2006-06-16T14:29:00.000-07:00