A Bit of Fiction

My dear friend Roi Sagir from Nahariya, Israel wrote this short story for an Israeli publication some two years ago, and now it’s been translated into English. I had no idea he was such a talent with the pen, but it hardly surprises me…

(warning: contains risqué material)


I, Fahed

by Roi Sagir

I’m a Jew, but I look like an Arab. Even in Israel there are places in which I look like an Arab. I have a black beard, black eyes and black hair. I don't wear a black suit, I don't wear a black skullcap or a black hat, so I cannot be considered to be a member of the "Shas" party ultra-orthodox Jewry. On the bus to Ramat Hasharon there are a number of women who see me and their makeup peels off their wrinkles from fear. I enjoy traveling to Ramat Hasharon, although I have nothing to do there. In Germany too, just like Ramat Hasharon, I'm an Arab.

This morning I took the underground train toward central Munich. Eva was also traveling on the train. She's German, with handsome features, light hair and expensive shoes. Some 900,000 people travel on Munich's underground train on a regular workday, waiting in 92 stations. The underground was built ahead of the 1972 Olympics. Eva sat in the train and read a book. She was on her way to work. She's a graphic editor in a feminist culture magazine. She has tenure and well-formed opinions.

I sat next to her. The train had already stopped in two stations. People boarded and disembarked, boarded and disembarked, with extinguished looks in their eyes and correct conduct. A regular silence, similar to the silence of yesterday and the day before yesterday. I peeked at Eva's book. The words Die Zweite Intifada were written on the top of the page.

Black Bird

I asked Eva whether the book she was reading was interesting. She examined me with her green eyes and said it was. I continued to pester her and asked for the author's name. She showed me the cover and it turned out to be a biography of Arafat. "Arafat," I said, "mmmm." She ignored my remarks, checked the author's name and said it. I asked her what she thought of Arafat. She answered that she didn't agree with everything in the book, and stretched with self-importance.

I smiled at her and scratched my black beard. I asked her what she thought about the conflict. She said that the Palestinians are miserable, that they are victims. I presented myself as Fahed, and asked whether we could meet up again sometime. She thought about it a bit. Before she got off the train we decided to meet in the evening.

I waited for her at a café on Ludwigstrasse. When she showed up, I took a chair and offered her a seat. Then I ordered us drinks. She chose a colorful drink in a large glass with a stem and shiny sticks sticking out of the orange liquid. She offered me the pineapple. I refused. She moved uncomfortably in her chair, looked around and bit her lips. Three men were sitting on the bar and most of the tables were empty, except of two. After looking at the tables in the café, she told me about her work and presented her opinions, of which she was very proud. The magazine she was working for covered exhibitions, installations and published progressive and radical editorials – so she said. Mainly, she added with her back straight and a raised finger, the works of women in developing regions.

She asked whether I objected to female circumcision. I answered that it was barbaric. And what do I think about veils? I told her that they, the women, choose themselves to wear veils. She cleared her throat.

"And family pressure!" she said decisively.

I was silent. Her green eyes stared at mine and she demanded a response with sealed lips.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my trousers and escaped her stare. Maybe she doesn't want to be the little woman tonight, I thought. I tried to guess what Fahed would have done when the manlystand encountered such resistance.

I squeezed my feet and said angrily, "family, what do you understand about the Arab family?" She flinched. "Maybe I don't understand," she said and added an apologetic giggle. "Maybe you should tell me a little about it, Fahed."

My cock quickly became hard. I sipped my beer slowly, enjoying the warmness in my lower body.

"I have five siblings," I started telling her on my great family at home. Then I was telling her on myself. "It's sometimes hard in Germany, but I'll be finished with my studies soon and I'll go back, no problem. It's better at home, but also here in Germany, it's nice here. Don’t be offended."

"No, no, I'm not offended, it's alright," she laughed. "You're cute."

I stretched my shoulders back and look around toughly. I then slightly scrunched my mouth with self importance and said, "You know, here in Germany people have a lot of money, but they don't know how to give respect. I mean, not everyone, but a lot of people. Look, people here don't look out for each other, every person is on his own. For us, the entire family is behind you, whatever you do."

Eva softened up and answered quietly, "The culture is slightly different here, Fahed, in Germany the law protects you. But I don't want to talk to you about these things now." And then she put her hand on the center of the table and asked, "Do you feel comfortable with me, Fahed?"

Continue reading I, Fahed.

This is Ridiculous

Feist appeared on Letterman to sing “1234” – my favorite song from her latest album “The Reminder” – and just check out the talent who showed up to back her with “oohs” & “aahs”, and hand claps and arm-warmers:



The gaggle includes members of the Broken Social Scene (Feist is also a member of this supergroup, of course), The New Pornographers, Mates of State, The National, Grizzly Bear and Nicole Atkins. Leslie is quite the muse, it would seem.

Time Warp

The NY Times takes a look at the style and fashion of Mad Men, one of my fav shows on the tele these days…


A Return to That Drop-Dead Year 1960

By RUTH LA FERLA
August 23, 2007
NY Times

“I’M from Bay Ridge. We have manners,” Peggy, the pony-tailed secretary, scolds the colleague who has just propositioned her in “Mad Men,” the new drama on the cable channel AMC. Do Peggy’s colleagues at Sterling Cooper, the turbo-powered advertising agency where she works, fall a little short in that department?

No matter. They have style.

The “girls” in the steno pool, the nakedly striving junior executives, the smooth-talking bosses and their stay-at-home wives have done their best to acquire the veneer of graceful gestures that stand in for real courtesy. Their mannerisms, and their sleek appurtenances, come with the turf: the steel-and-glass landscape of Madison Avenue in 1960, where burled wood and frosted-glass-panel interiors form a sumptuous backdrop against which the players stride about in sheaths and glen plaid suits.

Taking it all in, viewers may find themselves hooked, not just on the show’s artfully shaded characterizations and plot twists, but on its insistent attention to detail. To a style aficionado, “Mad Men” is that rare TV show in which an ashtray, a lipstick or an aerosol tin gets star treatment, and is a protagonist in its own right.

Why not? “The story is told in the details, and those details have their own life,” said Matthew Weiner, who conceived and wrote the series. Spiffed up by amber lighting, the camera lingering almost lewdly on a whiskey tumbler, a gilded compact or the polished surface of a conference table, those details reflect the growing materialism of the Eisenhower years.

Jaeger-LeCoultre watches, Delman pumps and Buick sedans are as essential to the action as a glistening smile or arched brow — projections of the characters’ idealized selves. His hair slicked with Brylcreem and flashing cuff links, Don Draper, Sterling Cooper’s brooding creative director, can imagine himself an impenetrably suave Lothario. In her scarlet-lined kimono, Midge, his mistress, can convince herself that she is a faintly louche, spirited adventuress. Floating into a party, Betty, his wife, can play the suburban princess in crinolines and pearls.

That fixation on objects, surfaces and status signifiers also holds up a mirror to the fetishistic obsessions of the present day. It would hardly seem alien to an aspiring red-carpet queen swinging an outsize Balenciaga tote, or to an ambitious young Manhattan trader girded for battle in a Hugo Boss suit.

Or, for that matter, to a fashion addict, who would surely note that the show’s aura of pulled-together formality is in step with the look of the runways, which returned this fall to mannerly 1950s-inflected tailoring.

From a modern vantage, it is easy to forget that 1960 was a watershed. An election loomed, the Pill became widely available, and there dawned a conviction, one later promoted by Andy Warhol and his ilk, that image trumps content, that style and substance may in fact be all but interchangeable.

The seeds of that notion were planted during the newly prosperous postwar years. Happiness then was not some hard-won spiritual attainment. In Don’s glib assessment, it was rather “the smell of a new car ... freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams: ‘Whatever you’re doing, is O.K. You are O.K.’ ”

In such a climate, a presidential candidate could turn unembarrassed to an agency like Sterling Cooper to rev up his image. Who knew better than Madison Avenue’s tastemakers that putting him across was largely a matter of packaging? As Don is told by Roger, his mentor: “Consider the product: He’s young, handsome, a Navy hero.

“Honestly, it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince America that Nixon is a winner.”

Like Nixon’s infamous five o’clock shadow, a dusting of grit mars the otherwise sleek surfaces of “Mad Men.” That is by design, said Mr. Weiner, a former writer and producer of “The Sopranos.” Not a single prop is an afterthought, he said. “The metal fixture that clasps like a clothespin onto the guest towel — my grandmother had it, my mother had it,” Mr. Weiner said. “It’s actually written into the script.”

Roughly $2.5 million went into the filming of each episode. “All of that money has been funneled onto the screen,” he added, down to the conference tables coated in cigarette ash, and the homely touches bestowed on the characters — wrinkled shirts, sweat stains, ill-applied makeup — that lend the show an air of authenticity.

“The period is usually very glamorized,” Mr. Weiner said. Production teams, he pointed out, generally look to films like “The Best of Everything,” or Vogue or Architectural Digest, to ferret out examples of the crystal tumblers, towering beehives and pristine swing coats thought to typify the period.

“I told them that’s not the way it works,” Mr. Weiner said. “We are not doing a show from the perspective of the movies. We are doing a show about the people who watch those movies. Often they are imitating what they see.”

Imperfect creatures, they mix and match at home, placing a streamlined silver-tone coffee brewer in front of rustically patterned cafe curtains. Their drawers are full. So are their garbage pails.

Even their hair and accessories are not always tidy or up to date. “We looked at Vogue, but we also looked at the Sears catalog,” Mr. Weiner said. In the idealized world of a ’50s movie, Don might drive a Cadillac. In “Mad Men,” he drives a Buick LeSabre. In “The Best of Everything,” Hope Lange is coiffed to perfection, not a hair out of place. On “Mad Men,” chignons tumble, pageboys wilt.

“The secretary has to have a hairstyle that will basically degrade over five days of the week,” Mr. Weiner explained. “And each character has a closet — she will wear the same six dresses during a single season.”

At times throwaway gestures betray an infatuation with Hollywood and distinguish the characters from their modern counterparts. Women deftly roll down their stockings and shut their compacts with a definitive click; men flick at their lighters and habitually tug at their ties. As Mr. Weiner pointed out, they loosen the knots in private, but snap them back into place the moment a female enters the room.

An uptight move, it did not betoken good manners exactly. But it was good style.

The L.A. Model

An interesting glimpse into the shaping of L.A. as we know it today…

We're 'Pasadena-izing'

By and large, Los Angeles is growing just the way it is supposed to.

By William Fulton
August 26, 2007
LA Times

William Fulton is the publisher of the California Planning & Development Report, the president of Solimar Research Group and a senior scholar at the School of Planning, Policy and Development at USC.

New York is not Tokyoizing. Chicago is not Shanghaizing. And Los Angeles is not Manhattanizing.

True, the density of L.A.'s population is increasing, especially downtown, in the Mid-Wilshire district and in Hollywood. But carving out a few thousand condos in old downtown buildings is hardly proof that L.A. is "Manhattanizing." If anything, the city overall is "Pasadena-izing" -- becoming more of a collection of centers around which new housing (condos and apartments) and commercial spaces are being built.

Los Angeles ran out of raw land more than 20 years ago and therefore had to move beyond the traditional suburban ideal of single-family homes on tree-lined streets. So it, along with older suburbs stretching from San Fernando to Westminster, is doing what cities have done throughout history -- building up instead of out to accommodate the housing needs of a growing population and an ever-changing set of construction and space requirements for businesses.

This isn't always pretty. But the end result is what L.A. needs to be -- a more urban city.

Some critics, however, contend that development in L.A. is more out of control than ever. The opposite is the case: New real estate development is not dispersed around the city but is largely concentrated near rail transit lines and busway stations. The resulting centers vary in size and scale: Some are like villages -- as along Ventura Boulevard throughout the San Fernando Valley -- while a few -- downtown and Century City -- are taking on Manhattan-like densities. But together they add up to a Los Angeles-style approach to urbanism, one in line with the basic concepts of L.A.'s planning policies adopted more than 30 years ago.

In the 1970s, when L.A.'s suburbs began sprouting, the city adopted, in 1974, an innovative general zoning plan that called for high-density development around 38 centers in the city, connected by transit, that would absorb most of the growing population. These centers would allow permanent preservation of the vast fields of single-family houses located between them.

The "centers concept," as it was called, was the brainchild of Calvin Hamilton, city planning director from 1964 to 1986. At a time when planning orthodoxy argued that cities had to be "mono-nuclear" -- built around one extremely dense center, like Manhattan -- L.A.'s plan was nothing less than revolutionary. Hamilton's visionary plan acknowledged that L.A. was "poly-nuclear" -- a place with many centers, of varying sizes, all of which had to be strengthened for the city to accommodate new growth.

Blueprint from the original 1970s
“Concept Los Angeles General Plan”

Over time, L.A. has become more dense. But this hasn't always happened around the centers identified in Hamilton's plan -- Westwood, Century City, Warner Center in Woodland Hills, among them. Oftentimes, developers had the political juice to build tall buildings wherever they wanted, whether their ideas followed the city plan or not, in large part because of the size of the city's 15 councilmanic districts. Each council member effectively serves as the mayor of a city with a population of close to 300,000. Running in that kind of district requires a lot of campaign money, which developers are more than happy to provide.

The growth around the Beverly Center is a good example of what developers used to get away with, general plan or no general plan. The area is not one of the city centers named in Hamilton's scheme. It wasn't targeted for a rail transit station -- and still isn't today, even in the most pie-in-the-sky long-range plans. Yet once construction of the Beverly Center began in the early 1980s, the surrounding area built up with other high-density retail and housing development

This kind of rogue development happens far less today. That's not because L.A.'s politicians have had a spine implant. Rather, it's happening because the construction of L.A.'s rail transit lines has made Hamilton's designated city centers far more attractive places to build. Indeed, in the last decade, more and more large-scale development in L.A. has occurred around rail transit -- especially the Red Line, Los Angeles' subway.

"Manhattanization" is occurring where it can -- mostly downtown and to a lesser extent in Mid-Wilshire and Hollywood -- because these locations can absorb greater density. They are transit-rich and already have a strong backbone of jobs, housing and services. This makes them more attractive to politically powerful developers.

The rest of the metropolitan constellation is densifying too, but at a much different scale. The prototype for most of this growth in Los Angeles and Orange counties is Pasadena, which has a texture of three- to five-story buildings, a fabulous mix of housing, retail, office buildings and cultural institutions, a lot of parking garages and great "walkability." The result, citywide and regionwide, is a rich urban mosaic, with a few extremely dense centers, dozens of smaller-scale downtowns, hundreds of villages and vast swaths of single-family neighborhoods that are unlikely to change.

Blonde is as Blonde Does

From this weekend’s Miss Teen USA competition:

The Largesse of Largo

I’m headed to the Fairfax supper club Largo tonight to see and hear up close and personal my musical hero Aimee Mann (rock the fuck on?), and here I stumble upon what seems to be a new upcoming film put together by Flanagan, the proprietor, spotlighting the slew of amazing performances that have gone on there over the years. The venue's artist caliber vs. intimacy ratio is unmatched in this city.



Tonight should be killer.

The American Left's Silly Victim Complex

Maybe it's because the author of this piece, Matt Tiabbi (a contributing editor/columnist at Rolling Stone and author of Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire) is a member of the movement he slams, or maybe it's because Adbusters (the anti-consumerist activist publication) is the vehicle, but this scathing indictment of the current state of American “liberalism" rings especially true.

If the well-intentioned left is to realize any of its goals or greater potential, it may want to heed this call to action...

The American Left's Silly Victim Complex

by Matt Tiabbi

May 23, 2007

Adbusters

The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself. There’s just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds – it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless, something that burrows maybe, with no eyes and too many legs. No child would bring home a wounded liberal and ask to keep it as a pet. More likely he would step on it, or maybe tie it to a bottle-rocket and shoot it over the railroad tracks.

The word has a chilling effect even on the people who basically agree with most of what it stands for. I myself cringe, involuntarily as it were, every time someone calls me a liberal in public. And I’m not the only one. When I called around for this article about the problems of American liberalism to various colleagues who inhabit the same world that I do – iconoclastic columnists and journalists who’ve had bylines in places like The Nation – they almost universally recoiled in horror from the topic, not wanting to be explicitly linked in public with the idea of the American left.

“Fuck that,” responded one, when I asked if he wanted to be quoted in this piece. “I’d rather talk about my genital warts. I’d rather show you pictures of my genital warts, as a matter of fact.”

“Ugh. Not sure I want to go there,” read one e-mail.

“I really wish I wasn’t associated with the left,” sighed a third.

When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that’s a bad sign, and it’s worth asking what the reasons are.

A lot of it, surely, has to do with the relentless abuse liberalism takes in the right-wing media, on Fox and afternoon radio, and amid the Townhall.com network of newspaper invective-hurlers. The same dynamic that makes the junior high school kid fear the word “fag” surely has many of us frightened of the word “liberal.” Mike Savage says liberalism is a mental disorder, Sean Hannity equates liberals with terrorists, Ann Coulter says that “liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole.” These people have a broad, monolithic audience whose impassioned opinions are increasingly entrenched. In the pseudo-Orwellian political landscape that is modern America, to self-identify as a liberal is almost tantamount to thoughtcrime, a dangerous admission that carries with it the very real risk of instantly and permanently alienating a good half of the population, in particular most of middle America. That reason alone makes it, in a way, wrong and cowardly to abandon liberalism and liberals. If Ann Coulter wants to call all of us fags, well, then, fine, I’m a fag. For the sake of that fight, I’ll stay a liberal till the end of time. But between you and me, between all of us on that side of things, liberalism needs to be fixed.

At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Continue reading The American Left's Silly Victim Complex.

Moore “Umbrella”

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who fell in love with Rihanna’s “Umbrella” this summer against his will…

Beastie Boys @ the Greek Theatre, Sun 8/19

I think I probably saw the Beastie Boys play live more times than any other group during my high school days. They were raw energy – not angry like Rage Against the Machine, just pure fun. But after 1994’s “Ill Communication”, they took an extended inter-album break, only to return later with a string of less-than-stellar offerings. So, at some point, I guess I just figured me and the Beasties were done for. It was good times, but alas, game over…

Fast forward a decade and then some: earlier this year I found myself with this nagging sensation that, you know, maybe this is it, my last good chance to see these old friends perform in a recognizable form. Even though I caught a quick glimpe on the tele of their honky performance at Live 8, I thought I’d give them one last shot.

All in all, it was good fun, if a bit campy. Sometimes it felt like I was watching an SNL skit lampooning the B Boys as over-the-hill rappers. Mike D, especially - he looked, sounded and moved like a complete joke out there (pic below). MCA & Ad-Rock were much better, however.

It was great to see them perform such old favs as “Sure Shot”, “Brass Monkey”, “So Whatcha Want” and my personal all-timer, “Pass the Mic”. But, surprisingly, the brightest moments seemed to be the new instrumental pieces from their most recent offering, “The Mix-Up”. Maybe they’re just tired of the old material, but only during these new songs did their performance seem truly earnest (and not a campy homage to their younger form).

The true hero of the night was actually Mix Master Mike who was a beast on the decks. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of turntablism, but man, he was astounding…providing beats, samples and the live remix treatment to most of the tunes. In fact, the entirely fresh soundscape he laid for “So Whatcha Want” may have been the highlight of the night for me.

The show was just what I expected: a less-than-inspired, but nostalgically entertaining trip down memory lane. I’m glad I saw the Boys one last time before they officially go the way of Mick Jagger.

(pics via LAist)

We're a Proud Bunch

(click to enlarge)

Do tell...

The fine people (actually, person) at PostSecret have put together a video that illustrates what the site’s all about. It's a nice primer for the uninitiated.



Fresh secrets are posted there every Sunday.

Meltdown

As the home lending market comes crashing down, you have to wonder whether someone’s to blame. Were we the victims of an overly-optimistic industry blinded by their generally healthy chase for capital, or did greed lead to fraud which led to thousands of people losing their home and savings for no good reason (not to mention the bigtime investors who took it in the rear, as well)?

The Financial Times digs deeper. I have a feeling this is a story that will be around for some time to come…

As subprime bites, US investigators look for culprits

By Brooke Masters and Saskia Scholtes
Wednesday Aug 8 2007
Financial Times

At the height of the US subprime lending boom, taking out a mortgage could not have been easier. Low credit score and history of bankruptcy? No problem. Income too low to qualify for a mortgage? Inflate what you earn on a "stated income" loan. Nervous that your lender might check up on your "stated income"? Visit www.verifyemployment.net.

For a $55 fee, the operators of this small California company will help you get a loan by employing you as an "independent contractor". They provide payslips as "proof" of income and, for an additional $25, they also man the telephones to give you a glowing reference should your lender need it.

But perhaps the most absurd aspect of the US subprime mortgage market in recent years is that lenders became so generous with credit provision for out-of-pocket borrowers that very few checks were ever made.

That left the system extraordinarily vulnerable to widespread fraud, a possibility that federal and state prosecutors across the US have begun to look into. With the subprime crisis expected to cost investors between $50bn (£24bn, €36bn) and $100bn, according to the US Federal Reserve, these investigations could transform it from a market correction to a full-blown national scandal.

At the root of the subprime problem was easy credit: lenders and their brokers were often rewarded for generating new mortgages on the basis of volume, without being directly exposed to the consequences of borrowers defaulting. During several years of strong capital markets and strong investor appetite for high-yielding securities, lenders became accustomed to easily selling the risky home loans they made to Wall Street banks. The banks in turn packaged them into securities and sold them to investors around the globe.

Such ease of mortgage funding allowed thousands of borrowers to get away with fraudulently mis-stating their incomes, often with the encouragement of their brokers. More ambitious fraudsters appear to have taken out multiple mortgages and walked away with the cash.

Karen Gelernt, a partner at law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, says: "The difficulty is getting a handle on the size of the problem, because there is no real mechanism for reporting fraud for most originators in this market. In fact, they had every incentive not to report."

Fraud has been detected up and down the financing chain: just as borrowers have lied to get better rates and larger loans, mortgage brokers and loan officers have lied to borrowers about the terms of their loans and may also have lied to the banks about the qualifications of the borrowers. Appraisers, likewise, have lied about the value of the properties involved.

"The recent rapid expansion of the subprime market was clearly accompanied by deterioration in underwriting standards and, in some cases, by abusive lending practices and outright fraud," Ben Bernanke, Fed chairman, recently told lawmakers. With mortgage rates rising and house prices falling, subprime borrowers have been defaulting at record rates.

The fallout is working its way up from the retail level – forcing people out of their homes and lenders into bankruptcy. Investment banks have lost revenue as investors back away from mortgage securities and a handful of high-profile hedge funds have collapsed – most notably two highly leveraged funds managed by Bear Stearns (NYSE:BSC) . The crisis has contributed to turmoil in financial markets in recent weeks and could threaten the health of the US economy as lenders tighten access to credit, putting a drag on consumer spending.

Continue reading As subprime bites, US investigators look for culprits.

The Process Enacted

This is quite creative.

Of Posthumans and the Matrix

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

By JOHN TIERNEY
August 14, 2007
NY Times

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”

Poor Little Guys...

From designer Murray Moss (via LAist).

Have Money, Will Forget Class

Fine Diner to Riffraff: Tipsy Tales of 4-Star Benders

By FRANK BRUNI
August 1, 2007
NY Times

THE Bordeaux was flowing, the foie gras abundant and the well-heeled epicures at Daniel were having a refined old time when suddenly all eyes turned toward a table against one wall and all conversation ceased.

Jean-Luc Le Dû, a sommelier in the restaurant, looked in that direction, too. And he saw her: the woman making like a dancer on a pole at Scores.

She stood facing the rest of the dining room. First she took off a vest or a jacket, as best Mr. Le Dû remembers. Then she went to work on her blouse.

Just as she was getting to her bra, the maître d’hôtel got to her. Thus her drunken, wobbly stint as a stripper ended, and so did her dinner. She and her date, a smiling, sloshed man who had seemingly egged her on, were escorted to the door.

“She was not necessarily attractive or young, so it was disruptive,” complained Mr. Le Dû, who left Daniel several years ago and now owns a wine shop in Greenwich Village. “If she were beautiful, it might have been different. People might have been cheering her on.”

At Daniel? Hard to believe. But then Mr. Le Dû’s story provides a reminder that a 1985 Burgundy casts the same dark spell as a 2007 peppermint schnapps. That in a four-star temple as surely as a starless dive, some diners drink too much: way, way too much.

And that when they do, they act in all the expansive, untamed and humiliating ways you might expect, transplanted to settings in which you don’t expect them. The inebriation comes at a higher price, but it looks much the same. It looks randy. Sloppy. And — how best to put this? — sickly.

That’s one of the most striking lessons in a book about the restaurant Per Se to be published by William Morrow in the fall.

In “Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter,” Phoebe Damrosch recounts the years she spent hustling through the restaurant’s gilded corridors above Columbus Circle, and she writes that “more people throw up in the dining room of Per Se than your average college bar.”

She hadn’t exactly foreseen that, she said in a recent telephone interview. “You’d think that people would be on better behavior at a restaurant like Per Se,” she said.

“What you end up realizing,” she added, “is that people are the same everywhere.”

Others who have tended to the tipsy masters and mistresses of the universe agree.

“If anything, a large bank account enables one to forgo normal levels of decorum, because you don’t have consequences,” said Rocky Cirino, a manager at the restaurant Cru, who previously worked at Daniel. “I’m thinking of several people whose station in life has enabled them to bypass normal civility and caution.”

I should note that I am mentioned frequently in Ms. Damrosch’s memoir but that I keep my dinner down. I should also note that Per Se is by no means the only celebrated restaurant where, thanks to the torrent of spirits and the indulgence of the moment, very fine food tends not to stay put.

“Happens all the time,” said Joseph Bastianich, one of the principal owners of the Italian restaurants Del Posto, Babbo and Felidia, among others. His voice had the bored, blasé tone of someone stating the patently obvious.

It happens even outside the confines and privacy of the restrooms?

“Oh, yeah, in the dining room, all over the table, on their dinner companions,” Mr. Bastianich said. “You’ve never seen that?”

Um, no.

“Well, you go out to restaurants a lot,” he said. “Maybe you’ll run into it before you’re done. Hopefully, you won’t get splashed.”

Hopefully.

Other scenes would be more amusing to witness — like a rather famous one that transpired at the Four Seasons late one afternoon many years ago.

At the end of a long lunch three well-dressed, then undressed, women in their mid-20s decided that the marble pool in the center of the main dining room looked like a nifty spot for a dip, said Julian Niccolini, one of the restaurant’s owners.

So they took one, wearing nothing more than their panties, he said.

Asked about their motivation, Mr. Niccolini answered: “I’m not going to say the word drunk. They were very happy. They were very excited.” As well they should have been. A wealthy gentleman nearby had been buying them their drinks, which included bottles of Montrachet, Cristal and Cheval Blanc. The total bill came to more than $7,000, Mr. Niccolini said.

He said the incident, which ended when a maître d’hôtel rushed over with tablecloths to cover the women up, was one of about a dozen times over the years when happy, excited customers at the Four Seasons took happy, excited splashes in the pool. The spectacles seldom elicit protest, he said.

Neither do the annual bacchanals of one of Le Bernardin’s most loyal patrons.

Eric Ripert, Le Bernardin’s chef, said that this regular celebrated his birthday there every year, renting out a private room with an adjoining kitchen upstairs and donning chef’s whites to cook alongside Mr. Ripert. He has his first glass of his beloved Montrachet sometime between 4 and 5 p.m.

It’s never his last.

“During the course of the night he drinks maybe five or six bottles,” Mr. Ripert said, explaining that the man nonetheless manages to remain vertical because he is “probably 6-foot-5, and he’s probably 400 pounds. I mean, he’s a monster. He’s huge.”

And on his most recent birthday, after many of those bottles had been drained, he teetered downstairs in his chef’s whites, commenced a showy promenade through the main dining room and accepted compliments from the people there, who understandably took him for one of the kitchen staff.

This much he’d done before, but he broke new ground with his next trick, which was to instruct servers to bring caviar over to this table, Champagne over to that one. And Mr. Ripert said that Le Bernardin ate the cost of these haute freebies, because the tanked titan is such a good customer, and his heart is as big as the rest of him.

Besides, he wasn’t flashing or fondling anyone around him, as many an intoxicated omnivore apparently does. Chefs, sommeliers, managers and servers at New York’s finest restaurants all have their sex stories, all of which they attribute to the loss of inhibition with the advent of inebriation.

There were the man and woman at Bouley who kept the staff at the restaurant past 2 a.m. because they had locked themselves in a bathroom, where the sounds they made over the course of more than 30 minutes at least let the staff know that they hadn’t passed out.

At Cru one night several diners complained that the door to one of the two small restrooms must be broken, because it hadn’t budged in more than 15 minutes.

“We kept knocking and knocking and getting no answer,” recalled Robert Bohr, the wine director, in a telephone interview. “So we put the key in.”

And as the door opened, a young man and woman hastily gathered themselves together and just as hastily zipped back to their table. “The guy had a self-satisfied look on his face,” Mr. Bohr said. “The woman kept her eyes lowered.”

Sometimes drunken diners don’t even bother to seek a private sanctuary for their libidos.

“People are often doing things underneath the table,” said a veteran server who has worked in many of Manhattan’s premier restaurants, including Gotham Bar & Grill and Fleur de Sel. The server asked not to be named for fear of angering past or future employers.

“The darker the restaurant, the more romantic the restaurant — there’s going to be some activity,” she said.

Ms. Damrosch said that at Lever House, where she worked before Per Se, she learned, “There’s always the Janet Jackson moment, when things pop out of dresses.”

Accidentally?

“You never know,” she said.

New York may be a better theater for this sort of thing than most other big cities in this country. Restaurateurs said that diners here often drink more heavily than diners elsewhere, because they’re more likely to be taking a taxi or the subway home.

And for the same reason, servers don’t have to be as vigilant about cutting a customer off.

“I just notice that people seem freer,” said Stephen Starr, who opened Manhattan offshoots of his hit Philadelphia restaurants Morimoto and Buddakan early last year. “In Philadelphia people are very careful not to go too far. It’s a car city. I mean, we drive five blocks.”

That’s not to say Philadelphia can’t compete. According to news reports, it was there, at Le Bec-Fin, that a well-lubricated, pot-bellied patron traded taunts with foie gras protesters on the sidewalk outside by leaping up and down, which presumably caused considerable jiggling, and bellowing, “This is what foie gras did to me!”

He then went inside the restaurant, pulled down his pants, exposed himself and pressed himself against a glass door, so the protesters could see.

Getting naked, or trying to get naked, or getting partly naked, or encouraging the companion on the far side of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape to get naked: these are some of the most common effects of a goblet or snifter too many.

The others?

Belting is big. At Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., and Picholine, chefs or managers had stories about diners who stood up, reared back, and broke into song, loudly and long enough for all the dining room to hear and all the diners in it to be transfixed.

Sleeping is popular. Karen Waltuck, one of the owners of Chanterelle, remembers that she was closing up one night and minutes away from leaving when two lingering lawyers informed her that they hadn’t seen one of their friends for hours.

Ms. Waltuck found the errant friend, but only after jimmying the lock on a restroom door. There he was, sprawled across the floor in his suit and tie.

“He’d probably been that way for an hour and a half,” she marveled. She roused him, and off he went. “I don’t remember him being embarrassed,” she said.

Mr. Bohr and Terrance Brennan, the chef at Picholine, described an elderly woman famous at top-tier restaurants around the city for her habit of dozing off during long dinners with her husband, a fanatic for Montrachet and Bordeaux.

“They’re super-old blue bloods and they drink only expensive wine and eat only in expensive restaurants,” Mr. Bohr said. “She sleeps through the intermission between each course, and then her husband wakes her up. She gets woken up to take bites.”

Mr. Bohr cast alcohol as the quintessence of a gateway drug, saying it’s usually the smashed diners who smoke marijuana in the restrooms at Cru — this has happened a half-dozen times, he said — or come back from the restrooms with a case of the sniffles and a much diminished appetite.

But sometimes the doings of the four-star drunk are less brazen, more poignant.

Workers at Jean Georges still wince at the memory of the gentle, sweet woman who made the journey from the restroom, through a vestibule, across the breadth of the adjoining restaurant Nougatine and back to her table with the entire back of her dress tucked into her pantyhose.

“The walk of shame,” recalled Lois Freedman, director of operations for Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurants.

It was nothing compared with the walk of a woozy diner elsewhere. A manager privy to the incident recounted it on condition the restaurant not be identified, because it’s a very nice restaurant.

And at this very nice restaurant, earlier this year, a regular sat at the bar — first with just one companion, then with several more — and ordered thousands of dollars worth of red wine. There was a $400 bottle of Rioja. There was a $3,500 magnum of Burgundy.

At a certain point he had to go. So he stumbled to a restroom, where he stumbled into a vase, knocking it over and shattering it. Surveying the wreckage, he apparently decided he should use a different commode. Sadly, he didn’t get to it in time.

He soon returned to his perch at the bar and to his companions, but in a more pungent condition. They had the good sense to persuade him to call it a night.

He had some good sense, too.

He didn’t set foot in the restaurant again.

Oil into Blood

A teaser trailer is now out for Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming film “There Will Be Blood”, to be released in November. PT is one of my fav filmmakers of the day, his “Magnolia” probably being in my Top 10 of all-time. And now, it seems that after five years of quiet, he’s returning with a genre he hasn’t tried before: period piece.

“…Blood” is an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel “Oil!” and stars Daniel Day Lewis (another favorite of mine) in deep make-up (pictured here). According to the studio, it is “a story about family, greed, religion, and oil, centered around a turn-of-the-century Texas prospector in the early days of the business.” Nice.

As if the title and studio synopsis weren’t enough of a giveaway, the trailer portends the dark madness PT has in store for us:

Conflicting Interests

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Australian singer Sia for some time now. I love her because her voice is hauntingly beautiful and she conveys emotion that can throw your heart against a wall. I hate her because just about everything else she does outside of singing reminds me of an awkward and slightly deranged six-year-old child.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. When posted up beside her at the Bird & the Bee show a few months ago, I found her oddly entertaining and inspiring – a lost refugee of Neverland bouncing up and down in carefree glee. Then again, when she appeared on Nic Harcourt’s KCRW program in Jan. 2006, she was so nervous she resorted to unimaginably dirty and inappropriate schoolyard humor, which resulted in Nic uncharacteristically pleading with her to sing, please, but to not speak any further. (You can hear the 40 min. set – and his begging her to shut up – here.)

So, I guess it’s really no surprise that the Zero 7 contributor and purveyor of such fine solo offerings as “Breathe Me”, the song that sent off the Six Feet Under series, would release the great first single from her new LP via a video that is simply shockingly hideous and disturbing.

I present you the ever-infuriating Sia Furler with her new single “Buttons”. She should have called it “Please Listen to My Music But Don’t Look at Me”, but whatever…



Since Daft Punk is such a popular subject around here these days, I figured I’d have to post this at some point or another. Sure, he’s about as easy to hate as Barry Bonds, but once in a while, Kanye does do it right. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that he has the producing genius of Jon Brion behind him. Anyway, here’s the Hype Williams-directed vid for his new single “Stronger”, which takes the hip-hop groove and infuses in the deep flavor of robot:

Kanye West - Stronger
Uploaded by Sugarwill

Finally, my guilty pleasure of the summer. I just can’t get away from this song no matter how hard I try. The hook is sick. The beat makes me jealous. And, damn, does she know how to move it…

A Chance at Something Other than Defeat?

An interesting assessment of the situation on the ground in Iraq:


A War We Just Might Win

By MICHAEL E. O’HANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK
Op-Ed Contributor

July 30, 2007
NY Times

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks — all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups — who were now competing to secure his friendship.

In Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived.

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.

But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).

In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army’s highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.

In the past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few “jundis” (soldiers) to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless — something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.

The additional American military formations brought in as part of the surge, General Petraeus’s determination to hold areas until they are truly secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.

In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.

Another surprise was how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.

In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the war had known little about governance or business but were now ably immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a decent life.

Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.

In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.