Year: 2006

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Don’t Be Frank

Jonathan Lethem has an open letter to Frank Gehry, enumerating reasons to pull out of Bruce Ratner’s “development” project for Brooklyn:

The proposal currently on the table is a gang of 16 towers that would be the biggest project ever built by a single developer in the history of New York City. In fact, the proposed arena, like the surrounding neighborhoods, stands to be utterly dwarfed by these ponderous skyscrapers and superblocks. It’s a nightmare for Brooklyn, one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our lives and, I’d think, to your legacy. Your reputation, in this case, is the Trojan horse in a war to bring a commercially ambitious, but aesthetically—and socially—disastrous new development to Brooklyn. Your presence is intended to appease cultural tastemakers who might otherwise, correctly, recognize this atrocious plan for what it is, just as the notion of a basketball arena itself is a Trojan horse for the real plan: building a skyline suitable to some Sunbelt boomtown. I’ve been struggling to understand how someone of your sensibilities can have drifted into such an unfortunate alliance, with such potentially disastrous results. And so, I’d like to address you as one artist to another. Really, as one citizen to another. Here are some things I’d hope you’ll consider before this project advances any further.

I’d write more about it, but I’m way hungover from last night’s foray to Fenway Park. On the positive side, I maintained my cover throughout (“I’m a Kansas City Royals fan!”) and thus didn’t get killed by the local fans. More later.

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It ain’t Camp Gitchy Gloomy

Official VM buddy Mitch Prothero has an article on the meanest Palestinian camp in Lebanon in this week’s U.S. News and World Report.

In any Palestinian camp or neighborhood, the walls are adorned with posters depicting “martyrs” of the fight against Israel. But in Asbat’s neighborhood, the Iraq battlefield is evident: The main road has been renamed “Martyrs of Fallujah,” and the signs glorify men killed fighting alongside Zarqawi or in suicide attacks against U.S. troops or Iraqi Shiite Muslims.

No word on why Lebanon never tried to assimilate the refugees into its population, of course. Read more.

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Gaza into the Abyss

In the Washington Post yesterday, Charles Krauthammer had a column on the poor Palestinian family that got blown up on a beach in Gaza. After explaining that the explosion could not have been due to an Israeli shell fired in response to nearby rocket launches into Israeli neighborhoods, he writes,

Let’s concede for the sake of argument that the question of whether it was an errant Israeli shell remains unresolved. But the obvious question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel — and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?

Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians’ classic and cowardly human-shield tactic — attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists — and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested — it’s a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it’s another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel’s preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic “Israeli massacre” picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.

Krauthammer then goes on to ask exactly why terrorists in Gaza are bothering to launch rockets into Israel, since, y’know, Israel pulled out of Gaza and withdrew behind pre-1967 borders. He sums it up as the same mindset that I always ascribed to Arafat: it’s a lot easier to be a terrorist/victim than a statesman.

In my opinion, one of the key functions of the Israel’s withdrawal from the territories and construction of a wall — besides keeping Palestinians from homicide-bombing inside Israel’s new borders — is to force the Palestinian people to look at themselves as citizens of their own state. Quite early in the withdrawal, we began hearing stories that Palestinians were not happy that Yasser’s cousins had all the good jobs.

My buddy Mitch Prothero commented in a recent article that the foreign press isn’t interested in covering the civil war going on in Palestinian society. He doesn’t say explicitly that this is because it goes against the accepted narrative of the Palestinians as the oppressed victims of the Zionist conspiracy, but I think that’s a big part of it (another big part is that journalists don’t want to get shot at).

Just as Brendan O’Neill has brought up some very-difficult-to-stomach aspects of the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan in his recent columns, there are parts of every story that we gloss over to keep from facing the messiness of reality, or to keep from sullying the purity of our outrage.

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Short Bus

Last week, I had a little ramble about Boeing’s manufacturing issues with the 787 Dreamliner. This week, it’s Airbus’ turn to get raked over the coals, as its gigantor-plane, the A380, is going to have shipping delays because of wiring problems.

Airbus’ stock got hammered for this, and now there are some questions about stock sales by executives and their families, according to this WSJ (registration required) piece:

One key question surrounds large stock sales by [co-CEO of Airbus’ parent company] Mr. Forgeard, three of his children and other top EADS managers in mid-March. “We were not aware, not the shareholders, not the directors” of the A380’s problems at that point, Mr. Forgeard said. He said the troubles with the A380 surfaced in April, and that in late May they still seemed surmountable. EADS stock plummeted 26% Wednesday after the announcements of the delay and a profit warning. The stock price rose by Friday to €20.50 ($25.85). It remained well below prices in March, when Mr. Forgeard exercised €2.5 million worth of options at €32.01, and three of his children each sold €1.4 million worth of shares at the time at €32.82, according to the French stock-market regulator AMF. Board members Francois Auque and Jean-Paul Gut also sold shares.

The BusinessWeek piece on Airbus discusses more of the problems with the A380, which seems to me like the giant-SUV of airplanes. It’s funny that the European company comes up with that model as its big splash, while the U.S. company comes up with the smaller, lightweight, fuel-conscious 787.

I find the workings of various industries fascinating, but the airplane and airline businesses are particularly interesting to me. The battle between Boeing and Airbus helps me think about the role government subsidies and the WTO; changes in materials, manufacturing and design paradigms; economy-of-scale strategies for travel routes, and why the hub-and-spoke model collapsed; and how emerging markets are shaping policy (have any of you guys flown on Singapore Airlines or Emirates?).

(Update: More on the story — and how it affects airlines — at the NYTimes.)

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Measure for Mermaid

If you’re in NYC and got a hankerin’ for some Shakespeare, former VM buddy John Castro (not-so-long story) is launching his new theater company tonight with Measure For Measure. Dates, times, location, tickets, etc. are at the Hipgnosis Theatre site.

I’m not planning on being there, for a variety of reasons. Opening night is out because I’m pretty stressed out from writing my Top 20 Pharma Companies report (nice job by Wyeth, not reporting that it’s fired 750 sales reps), and I’ll be probably be parked in front of the big screen to watch game 4 of Mavs-Heat. Also, I’ve never read M4M and I’m afraid to pick up another book while I still have 500 pages of The Power Broker remaining.

Besides, if I were to go into NYC tonight, it would be to catch ABC over at the Canal Room. Now That is one fine suit . . .

Maybe we’ll go next weekend, but our big excursion is likely going to be the Coney Island Mermaid Parade! I haven’t been to Coney Island since I was a little kid, and I’m usually away at conferences on parade weekend, so I’m hoping we get good weather and can get blisteringly drunk while watching my erstwhile favorite bartenderess try to win the Best Marching Group award (her group came in 2nd last year as the Mir-Maids).

I kinda doubt we’ll be in any Shakespeare mood after something like that, but hey.

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Megaton

Foreign Policy looks at six megacities (pop. 10+ mil.) and why they might collapse.

Evidently, Mumbai’s weather is so bad, the city even gets hailstorms of criticism. (Thanks. I’ll be here all week.) But seriously: 37 inches of rain in 24 hours?