Op-Ed Columnist
Where Did ‘We’ Go?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.
I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.
And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.
Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.
What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.
Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.
Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.
Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.
And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.
Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.
The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.
Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.
I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.
We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.
NY TIMES

Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention
By: John L. Perry Newsmax
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.
America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:
# Officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."
# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.
# They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.
# They can see that the economy -- ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation -- is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.
# They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.
# They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America's troop strength is allowed to sag.
# They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.
# They can see the nation's safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.
So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?
Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?
Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?
What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, "I'm not interested in victory") that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse?
Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?
Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America's military leadership is lost in a fool's fog.
Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?
Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.
Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.
Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."
In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

50 Cent's 10 lessons for success in business - and in life
Success comes from seeking an advantage in each and every encounter, here the US rapper offers indispensable advice on how to win

Curtis J. Jackson III

Times of London
‘The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50 Cent or someone else. They do what everyone else does even if it doesn’t fit where and who they are. But you get nowhere that way; your energy is weak and no one pays attention to you. You’re running away from the one thing that you own—what makes you different. I lost that fear. And once I felt the power that I had by showing the world I didn’t care about being like other people, I could never go back.’ 50 Cent
1. See Things for What They Are - Intense Realism
Reality can be rather harsh. Your days are numbered. It takes constant effort to carve a place for yourself in this ruthlessly competitive world and hold on to it. People can be treacherous. They bring endless battles into your life. Your task is to resist the temptation to wish it were all different; instead you must fearlessly accept these circumstances, even embrace them. By focusing your attention on what is going on around you, you will gain a sharp appreciation for what makes some people advance and others fall behind. By seeing through people’s manipulations, you can turn them around. The firmer your grasp on reality, the more power you will have to alter it for your purposes.
2. Make Everything Your Own - Self-Reliance
When you work for others, you are at their mercy. They own your work; they own you. Your creative spirit is squashed. What keeps you in such positions is a fear of having to sink or swim on your own. Instead you should have a greater fear of what will happen to you if you remain dependent on others for power. Your goal in every manoeuvre in life must be ownership, working the corner for yourself. When it is yours, it is yours to lose - you are more motivated, more creative, more alive. The ultimate power in life is to be completely self-reliant, completely yourself.
3. Turn Shit into Sugar - Opportunism
Every negative situation contains the possibility for something positive, an opportunity. It is how you look at it that matters. Your lack of resources can be an advantage, forcing you to be more inventive with the little that you have. Losing a battle can allow you to frame yourself as the sympathetic underdog. Do not let fears make you wait for a better moment or become conservative. If there are circumstances you cannot control, make the best of them. It is the ultimate alchemy to transform all such negatives into advantages and power.
4. Keep Moving - Calculated Momentum
In the present there is constant change and so much we cannot control. If you try to micromanage it all, you lose even greater control in the long run. The answer is to let go and move with the chaos that presents itself to you - from within it, you will find endless opportunities that elude most people. don’t give others the chance to pin you down; keep moving and changing your appearances to fit the environment. if you encounter walls or boundaries, slip around them. do not let anything disrupt your flow.
5. Know When to Be Bad - Aggression
You will always find yourself among the aggressive and the passive aggressive who seek to harm you in some way. You must get over any general fears you have of confronting people or you will find it extremely difficult to assert yourself in the face of those who are more cunning and ruthless. Before it is too late you must master the art of knowing when and how to be bad - using deception, manipulation, and outright force at the appropriate moments. Everyone operates with a flexible morality when it comes to their self-interest—you are simply making this more conscious and effective.
6. Lead from the Front - Authority
In any group, the person on top consciously or unconsciously sets the tone. If leaders are fearful, hesitant to take any risks, or overly concerned for their ego and reputation, then this invariably filters its way through the entire group and makes effective action impossible. Complaining and haranguing people to work harder has a counterproductive effect. You must adopt the opposite style: imbue your troops with the proper spirit through your actions, not words. They see you working harder than anyone, holding yourself to the highest standards, taking risks with confidence, and making tough decisions. This inspires and binds the group together. In these democratic times, you must practice what you preach.
7. Know Your Environment from the Inside Out - Connection
Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the audience for their idea. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the appropriate supply. Do not be afraid of people’s criticisms - without such feedback your work will be too personal and delusional. You must maintain as close a relationship to your environment as possible, getting an inside “feel” for what is happening around you. Never lose touch with your base.
8. Respect the Process - Mastery
The fools in life want things fast and easy — money, success, attention. Boredom is their great enemy and fear. Whatever they manage to get slips through their hands as fast as it comes in. You, on the other hand, want to outlast your rivals. You are building the foundation for something that can continue to expand. To make this happen, you will have to serve an apprenticeship. You must learn early on to endure the hours of practice and drudgery, knowing that in the end all of that time will translate into a higher pleasure—mastery of a craft and of yourself. Your goal is to reach the ultimate skill level—an intuitive feel for what must come next.
9. Push Beyond Your Limits - Self-Belief
Your sense of who you are will determine your actions and what you end up getting in life. If you see your reach as limited, that you are mostly helpless in the face of so many difficulties, that it is best to keep your ambitions low, then you will receive the little that you expect. Knowing this dynamic, you must train yourself for the opposite—ask for more, aim high, and believe that you are destined for something great. Your sense of self-worth comes from you alone—never the opinion of others. With a rising confidence in your abilities, you will take risks that will increase your chances of success. People follow those who know where they are going, so cultivate an air of certainty and boldness.
10. Confront Your Mortality - The Sublime
In the face of our inevitable mortality we can do one of two things. We can attempt to avoid the thought at all costs, clinging to the illusion that we have all the time in the world. Or we can confront this reality, accept and even embrace it, converting our consciousness of death into something positive and active. In adopting such a fearless philosophy, we gain a sense of proportion, become able to separate what is petty from what is truly important. Knowing our days to be numbered, we have a sense of urgency and mission. We can appreciate life all the more for its impermanence. If we can overcome the fear of death, then there is nothing left to fear.
Extracted from Robert Greene and 50 Cent’s new book The 50th Law, published by Profile Books

Is The Shawshank Redemption the best film ever?
Christopher Goodwin Times of London
Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption, has words for the millions of people who believe his 1994 prison drama is the greatest film of all time. “I think that’s a little crackers, to be honest, especially when you think of the other films on the list.” He means films such as The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Lolita, Vertigo and foreign-language contenders like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
But, hey, pointy-headed film critics can have their high­falutin’ crushes. There’s no getting round the fact that The Shawshank Redemption, which stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, is consistently being voted the best film ever in all sorts of readers’ polls. It currently sits atop the 250 best movies of all time on the world’s most popular cinema website, imdb.com, as it has done for most of the past decade. Darabont, who is both slightly bemused by and immensely proud of its astonishingly deep resonance with audiences, points to a framed cover of Empire, the popular British movie magazine, on the wall behind the desk in his office. Empire’s readers have also voted Shawshank their favourite film of all time.
What gives? How has a film set mainly in a bleak prison, in which women are barely glimpsed, by an unknown first-time director, adapted from a little-known Stephen King novella, become such an enduring crowd-pleaser? Shawshank tells the story of the friendship of two prison inmates, Andy, played by Robbins, and Red, played by Freeman. It’s a film that can make strong men — including the rugby star Jonny Wilkinson, who loves it — blub like babies and insist that they will change their lives pronto. Devotees quote its life-affirming mantras: “You can get busy living or get busy dying”; “Fear can keep you a prisoner. Hope can set you free”.
What makes Shawshank’s remarkable staying power even more intriguing is that it barely made a splash when it was released in September 1994. Small-town reviewers liked it, but sophisticated big-city critics were snooty. Kenneth Turan, of the Los Angeles Times, in a review that still makes Darabont wince — “downright hateful”, he calls it — said that the film “makes us feel we’re doing harder time than the folks inside”. The Washington Post observed: “The story becomes incarcerated in its own labyrinthine sentimentality.”
“Films that play their cards from the heart are often viewed as not hip enough to like,” Darabont counters.
The film’s box office was disappointing. It took only $18m when it was first released. Darabont says he was nonplussed, because he knew how much people liked the film when they saw it. A few months later, it had a second lease of life when it was unexpectedly nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture, best actor for Freeman, best cinematography for Roger Deakins and best adapted screenplay for Darabont. Unfortunately, it won none, and the nominations brought surprisingly few new people into cinemas: it made only $10m more when it was rereleased. “I couldn’t understand why, even with seven Oscar nominations, we still couldn’t beg people to come to the theatres,” Darabont says. “I think because it was a ‘prison movie’, people didn’t really want to sit through what they thought was going to be a bummer.”
By the time The Shawshank Redemption was out of cinemas, a few weeks after the Oscars, it had made only $28.3m at the US box office. It had barely recouped its production costs of $28m, less than half the total spend once prints, marketing and Oscar campaigns have been paid for. And that might have been the sorry end of it.
Fifteen years later, sitting in his spacious office in a Spanish-style house in Los Feliz, just east of Hollywood, Darabont clearly relishes his memories of his first and best-loved film. A large, enthusiastic and engaging man, with a deep, sonorous voice, heavy-lidded eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, a bald pate, a long, angular nose and a greying goatee, he favours loud Hawaiian-style shirts and loose white cotton trousers. He gets up to pad around the room in bare feet, a born storyteller.
Although they didn’t meet until around the time he made Shawshank, he says he had been in contact with Stephen King since the early 1980s. In 1983, he had directed a short, The Woman in the Room, adapted from one of King’s short stories. The bestselling author, as he has done with a number of aspiring film-makers wanting to adapt his stories, allowed Darabont an option to make the film, for only $1. King was pleased with the result, and in 1987 Darabont optioned another King story, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption — again for $1 — which he always hoped would be the first feature he’d direct. By the time he did, he had become a successful screenwriter, whose credits included A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Why did he want Shawshank to be his directorial debut? “The love and hope and optimism to be found in even bleak circumstances really spoke to me,” he says. But why? “Probably because of a lot of personal experiences. Coming to these shores as a child of refugees who had left their homeland with just the clothes on their back.”
Darabont’s parents had fled Communist Hungary in 1956. He was born in a refugee camp in France. The family came to the USA on a boat soon after. When he was about five, after his parents had split up, Darabont, his mother and brother settled in LA. His father ended up in San Francisco, working as a machinist for United Airlines. Darabont attended Hollywood High, where he says he spent most of his time doing theatre. After school, he managed to get a job as a PA on Hell Night, a low-budget movie. He then worked for a number of years as a set dresser. “That was my film school,” he says. “As a set dresser, you learn a tremendous amount. You see a lot of directors working with a lot of actors, the good and the bad.” All the while he was writing, in the hope of becoming a director.
Darabont says that once he had finished the Shawshank script, it was surprisingly easy to get the money, from a company called Castle Rock, part-owned by the director Rob Reiner, which had a deal with Columbia Pictures. The casting of the two leads was, Darabont recalls, “an amazing piece of luck”. Particularly the suggestion, from an executive at Castle Rock, to cast Freeman as Red, when the story, and Darabont’s script, had him as a white Irishman. Darabont is amused that Red is being played by the black actor Reg E Cathey in the new West End stage adaptation at Wyndham’s Theatre: “The notion of him ever being white and Irish is long gone.”
The production went reasonably smoothly, Darabont says. “I was working with a genius cinematographer, Roger Deakins [the British director of photography who has worked frequently with the Coen brothers, on No Country for Old Men, for example]. He moved a little slower than I would have preferred, but I just had to adapt my expectations of what I could shoot every day.” Most of the film was shot in the old Ohio State Reformatory, by then disused, just outside Mansfield, Ohio. The last day of the shoot was on the Caribbean island of St Croix, which doubled for the idyllic Mexican beach resort Andy dreamt of during his 20 years in jail. “Boy, after being trapped for three months in that big, bleak prison, this stone monument of man’s inhumanity to man, getting to that beach was unbelievable. It was a mirror of reality, for the journey and the movie.”
Unlike today, when almost every movie is edited on computer, Shawshank was cut and spliced together on physical film by the editor Richard Francis-Bruce, who was also nominated for an Oscar. When Darabont first screened the film in front of an audience, he realised there was one sequence that didn’t work. “It was betweenthe time that Red gets paroled and when he gets to the tree to discover what Andy has left there for him. We had five minutes showing how he’s not equipped to make it on the outside, that he’s institutionalised.” Darabont says the footage was good, “But the audience was ahead of the movie.” They already knew Morgan Freeman was institutionalised because he had told them that in a previous scene. “So the audience got impatient because he’s out of prison, they know there’s a tree he’s got to get to, and I’m telling them all this other bullshit they don’t need to know.” So he took it out.
After the disappointment of the film’s initial release and its failure to win any Oscars, Darabont moved ahead with his career. As well as scriptwriting and rewriting work, he has made two more films adapted from Stephen King stories — The Green Mile, another prison drama, starring Tom Hanks, and The Mist. He says King wasn’t disappointed Shawshank hadn’t done better when it was first released.
“Stephen is not a guy who’s sitting there counting his dollars. To him, it’s the satisfaction of having the story told well. That’s what keeps him in the game. It’s not the book contract that keeps him writing. He does it because he has to. He has no choice. He’s a very pure creature that way. And let’s not forget, it was Stephen King who dreamt up this magnificent story. I was just the conduit. I was not the creator.”
Darabont says it was about five years after Shawshank was released that he realised it was beginning to have an extraordinary, resonant afterlife. It was being screened every few weeks on the TNT cable network in America, and millions of people who hadn't caught it in cinemas saw it on video and later on DVD.
People started writing Darabont amazing letters, about how the film had helped them lose 100lb, or escape abusive marriages, or how they’d left jobs that had been slowly killing them. All because The Shawshank Redemption had inspired them to. One man even wrote an essay in Newsweek about how Shawshank had helped him cope with the terrible debilitation of motor neurone disease. (Darabont has since been in touch with him and his family, and has become involved with raising money for research into the disease.)
“This movie really meant something for him. You cannot trade that for better opening-weekend box office. When I was a child dreaming of making movies, it wasn’t about the opening-weekend box office. It was about touching people on a deep, human level, the way that movies I loved were inspiring to me at that age. As a film-maker, you want to have one of those that you share with the world.”
But that’s really not very hip, is it?

Tenants Making Way for Subway Ask: You Want Me to Move Where?
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM NY Times
Finding an apartment in Manhattan can be tough. Just ask the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Next year, dozens of New Yorkers in some of the city’s wealthiest ZIP codes are set to be evicted to make way for the long-delayed Second Avenue subway, and federal law requires the transit agency to find them comparable new homes. So far, it has not been going so well.
Dave Zigerelli was told to consider low-income housing across from an on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge. The first apartment shown to Nicolle Poian was half the size of her own. Ann and Conrad Riedi, ensconced in the same rent-stabilized apartment for 40 years, said they were encouraged to move out of Manhattan — and their dog, Biscuit, might not be allowed to come along.
“They told us to think outside the box,” said Ms. Riedi, 64.
The Riedis’ apartment, a big three-bedroom in a stucco-walled walk-up, is one of 60 homes on the Upper East Side that will soon be converted into ventilation shafts, public stairwells and electronics hubs, the infrastructure for the $4.5 billion underground line, scheduled to open in 2017.
The transportation authority said that it was doing its best to accommodate residents who want to stay in the neighborhood, and that no one was being forced to leave the area. Affordable housing was suggested to residents who might be eligible, said a transportation authority spokesman, Kevin Ortiz.
But the options for tenants are limited. At first, Mr. Ortiz denied that the relocation service hired by the authority, a national real estate company called O. R. Colan Associates, had suggested that residents move outside their district, which stretches from East 59th Street to East 96th Street. Given an e-mail message showing that one tenant was encouraged to consider housing in Harlem, at East 116th Street, Mr. Ortiz said the authority wanted to offer as many choices as possible.
“We’re doing our due diligence,” he said. In the case of the Harlem apartments, he added, “No one seemed to be interested.”
Under federal law, the transit authority must find replacement housing deemed “comparable,” a phrase that officials have interpreted to mean an apartment of a similar size and rent, in the same neighborhood or nearby. If the tenant chooses a more expensive replacement, the authority must pay the difference in the rent for three and a half years.
But New York’s real estate market makes this an onerous task. Many of the residents live in rent-regulated units that cost far less than similar ones in the neighborhood. Rents could be an additional $1,000 a month.
Such a situation was not anticipated by federal eminent domain law, which says the authority is obligated to pay each tenant up to $5,250 in subsidies over the three and a half years, a pittance on the Upper East Side. In a pamphlet distributed to tenants, a sample case involves a move from a $500-a-month apartment to a $600 one.
The authority said it planned to spend more than the required amount to assist the tenants. So far, the agency has had no problem finding rent-stabilized units in the area, said Mr. Ortiz, the spokesman. (O. R. Colan referred questions to the transportation authority.)
But some tenants have rejected those units, saying they did not live up to expectations.
“Not exactly equivalent” is how Ms. Poian, who pays $1,850 a month for a one-bedroom at 253 East 72nd Street, described the choices she was given. An apartment several blocks away was “half the size” of her own, she said, and the kitchen was about as big as a sidewalk square. “They said I could find a different one for $1,800,” she said. “I said you’re out of your mind.”
Marc Shatzman, 23, moved last month from Ms. Poian’s building, where he had lived in a studio for a little over a year. Although his moving expenses were covered by the transportation authority, he used his own broker after rejecting the options provided by O. R. Colan.
“They kept trying to show us low-income housing,” Mr. Shatzman said. “They kept trying to see if somehow we could come up with some numbers that would qualify it for us.”
Sally Ardrey, who pays $1,600 a month for a one-bedroom at 257 East 72nd Street, said traditional measures of an apartment’s fitness were being ignored. “I was informed that light, view and big windows are not important,” she said.
Mr. Riedi, 76, has lived in the squat building at 83rd Street and Second Avenue since he was 12. When he and his wife married in 1969, they moved down one flight to a rent-regulated five-room apartment, now $1,120 a month.
Like other tenants, the couple was urged by the relocation agents to consider moving to 250 East 60th Street, a housing development beneath the Roosevelt Island tramway. The building faces a traffic-clogged intersection at the entrance to the Queensboro Bridge.
The Riedis balked, saying the location would be dangerous for elderly residents. They said their agent also suggested that, because of their fixed income and the limited rent subsidy, they should consider moving out of Manhattan.
Tenants can find apartments through their own broker, but the relocation service must agree to the price based on a formula.
“Tenants are matched up with three units, based on what they can afford to pay and what their needs are,” Mr. Ortiz said. “We’re not in any way, shape or form saying you have to do this, you have to move there.”
But tenants may be left with little choice. “There are many rent-stabilized units on the Upper East Side and Yorkville, but the problem is people are already living in them,” said Stephen Love, a broker at Ardor Realty.
Anticipating these problems, the authority approved a program in 2007 to rent vacant apartments and hold them for displaced tenants. That never happened, though the authority did spend more than $200,000 to rent empty units in the buildings it plans to acquire, to mitigate relocation costs and legal troubles.
Six tenants have already moved out, according to the authority.
But after decades of living by the site of a long-planned subway line, the Riedis are not prepared to go just as the project comes to fruition.
Ms. Riedi, her voice straining, said she and her husband had been scared since the eviction proceedings began. “We were married in here,” she said. “We lost our first baby. We mourned the death of our child. There’s history in this apartment. How do you take the memories?”

Michael Jackson finally laid to rest

a private and sombre burial ceremony at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California.
London Times
The singer — whose death at the age of 50 has been ruled a homicide by the Los Angeles County coroner — was interred within Forest Lawn’s Great Mausoleum, under a stained glass window depicting The Last Supper by Leonardo de Vinci.
His body lies close to that of Walt Disney and Larry Fine of the Three Stooges.
The 200 or so guests at last night’s ceremony included the singer’s family — his brothers all wearing black suits with red ties, sequined gloves and blue armbands — and close friends of the late singer. The latter included the actor Macaulay Culkin; the singer Stevie Wonder; Dame Elizabeth Taylor; and the baseball star Barry Bonds.
Jackson’s former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, wept openly as the singer’s gold-plated casket arrived in a black hearse.
At the start of the ceremony, his children placed a crown on their father’s coffin to signify the final resting place of the King of Pop. During the ceremony, several guests made speeches and Gladys Knight sang the gospel hymn His Eye Is on the Sparrow.
All of the guests had received a nine-page embossed invitation to the burial, which included colour photographs of Jackson, alongside a quote from the singer’s 1992 book Dancing the Dream: "If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with."
After arriving in a motorcade of more than 26 stretch limousines and SUVs, the guests sat on white folding chairs, arranged outdoors on green fake turf in stifling heat, with members of Jackson’s former dancing troupe — dressed in what looked like military cadet uniforms — acting as ushers.
The temperature in Glendale — a suburb of Los Angeles still affected by smoke from nearby wildfires — had reached 37C during the day, but cooled to under 27C in the evening.
After the hour-long ceremony, which didn't start until about an hour and a half after its scheduled time of 7pm, guests made their way to an Italian restaurant in nearby Pasadena, for a catered event described in the invitation as "a time of celebration".
Unlike Jackson’s memorial concert last month, the burial remained largely private, with fans and press alike kept at arm’s length. Although a pooled video feed of the arriving guests was made available by the Jackson family, it was cut off sharply as the proceedings began. Meanwhile, the Glendale police department had set up an exclusion zone outside Forest Lawn — enforced by uniformed and plainclothes officers — and the Federal Aviation Authority restricted all flights within a three-mile radius, to stop news helicopters from hovering overhead.
Nevertheless, flights above 3,000ft were allowed, and cable news channels, including CNN, broadcast silent footage taken from circling aircraft throughout the ceremony.
Although the cost of the burial has been kept private, it was described by one lawyer this week as "extraordinary". Before going ahead with the ceremony, the administrators of Jackson’s estate had to prove to a judge that it could afford the interment fees — the singer’s crypt takes up 12 burial spaces — along with the $150,000 (£92,000) cost of policing the ceremony, and other related expenses.
"Mrs [Katherine] Jackson and her family wish to honor her son by a funeral that seeks to offer solace to his multitude of fans and by which the family also may be comforted," wrote Burt Levitch, a Jackson family lawyer, in documents submitted to the court.
It remains unclear how or if fans and tourists will be able to visit Jackson’s resting place. Forest Lawn typically attracts about a million visitors a year, most of whom come to see the tombs of celebrities.
Designed in the early 1900s as an antidote to "unsightly, depressing" traditional graveyards, Forest Lawn’s theme park approach to death was satirised by the British writer Eveyln Waugh in his 1948 novel The Loved One.
Not all of Jackson’s family wanted him to be buried there: Jermaine Jackson lobbied for his brother’s body to be buried in a Graceland-style museum at his former Californian ranch, Neverland. But many locals objected — the property is located in rustic "wine country", north of Santa Barbara — and the singer’s 79-year-old mother eventually decided on Forest Lawn instead. In any case, it is thought that Mrs Jackson believed that her son wouldn’t have wanted to be buried at Neverland, because the ranch had become synonymous with the child abuse allegations that dogged the later stages of the singer's career, and resulted in his trial in 2005, at which he was found not guilty on all ten counts.
Forest Lawn is also only a 20-minute drive from Mrs Jackson’s home in Encino, a wealthy part of the San Fernando Valley. She lives there with Jackson’s three children, Prince, Paris, and Blanket, after a custody arrangement was reached with their mother, Debbie Rowe.
Although Jackson’s burial brought an end to speculation about the singer’s final resting place, it won’t end the controversy over how he died. Ever since his death was ruled a homicide — his brain was temporarily removed from his body for testing by the coroner — there have been rumours that the singer’s former doctor, Conrad Murray, is facing imminent arrest.
Dr Murray, paid $150,000 a month to treat Jackson before his planned comeback tour in London, had been giving his patient a hospital-grade liquid anesthetic via an IV drip — "magic milk" as the singer called it — to help him sleep.
He was also giving Mr Jackson several different kinds of sedatives. The doctor’s lawyer has said that his client did not give the singer anything that "should have" killed him.

Why Jaycee Dugard Bonded With Her Kidnappers
By: David Berreby SLATE
It’s shocking when children bond with their torturers—but it’s also normal.
Why Jaycee Dugard Bonded With Her Torturers
In December 1871, a young couple left England for India, leaving their two kids behind in the care of a family they'd found in a newspaper ad. The son was about to turn 6; his sister was 3. It would be more than five years before they saw either of their parents again.
For the children, life with their parents had been easygoing and rambunctious, but things were different in “the House of Desolation,” as the boy called the foster family home. The lady of the house was a religious fanatic who hated the boy, beat him mercilessly, and talked mostly about hellfire. Her own son proved to be a sadistic bully. School was just another gauntlet of beatings and ridicule. When his mother finally returned and leaned over to kiss him, the boy instinctively held up his arm to ward off a punch.
The House of Desolation is well-known because the boy was Rudyard Kipling, who, in his autobiography, answered the questions that are always asked about abused children during the first shock of discovery: Why didn’t they tell anyone? Why did they cooperate? Those questions are being asked now about Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was, police say, held for 18 years by the couple who kidnapped her at age 11. Why didn't she tell anyone? How is it possible that Dugard not only raised the two daughters she had by her alleged kidnapper with him and his wife, but also worked in his printing business?
To Kipling, this sort of question reflected a lack of understanding of children, and childhood: “Children tell little more than animals,” he wrote,”for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.” Dugard’s stepfather has said that she feels guilty for “bonding” with her torturers. But hard as this may seem at first to grasp, it would be strange, given the nature of childhood, if she had not done so.
That may, in fact, be the creepiest aspect of the case for many people, especially parents. The alleged kidnapper Phillip Garrido and his wife fed and clothed their victims, set up rules for the household, defined the boundaries of their lives. Though Garrido appears to be out of his mind [2], those acts aren't evidence of his madness. Quite the opposite: Giving food and shelter and setting boundaries are what all parents and parent-substitutes are supposed to do. And even when the parenting is a grotesque parody of the real thing, children accept the signs of care as “eternally established”—the way of their world.
It may well be that they have no choice—that acceptance is innate, because of the way children are built, wherever they are raised. If that were true, then certain aspects of family life should be the same in all cultures. And in fact, they are. As Duke University anthropologist Naomi Quinn has pointed out [3], comparative studies of child-rearing have found universal traits in the ways that parents everywhere “engineer the child's experience” in order to raise him or her.
One of those universals, no surprise, is routine and constancy—the small, unchanging certainties that make even the weirdest domestic life feel eternally established. Child-rearers everywhere struggle to make the kids' world a place where the family rules always hold. And parents everywhere connect their lessons to strong emotions. Americans tend to praise good behavior more than Chinese parents, who are more likely to instill shame over lapses, Quinn writes, but the strategy is the same: Make the child remember what is important by connecting the lesson to an intense feeling, whether induced by fear or the desire to please.
A third universal is connecting the child's actions to moral feelings: Mothers and fathers everywhere don't just say, “Don't do that!” They say, “That's bad! That's wrong!” Quinn writes: “Brought home with evaluations of the learner's goodness and badness, these lessons are even more motivating and unforgettable."
From police accounts, the Garrido household sounds like a place in which these basic parenting strategies were used. Shelter for Dugard and her children consisted of shacks and patched-up tents, but it was shelter. Strong emotions? Dugard was snatched from her home at age 11 and gave birth to her alleged kidnapper's child at 14. No one ever said the strong feelings of child-raising had to be positive.
Then, too, the boundaries of the victims' lives were sad, but they were boundaries. Neighbors' stories [4] suggest that Garrido taught the girls to avoid talking to outsiders, and to say they were “home-schooled.” That must sound familiar to anyone who has escaped an insular religious upbringing. In fact, Garrido's determination to isolate the children from the wider world doesn't look very different from the actions of religious parents of all denominations. One former Jehovah's Witness [5] remembers explaining to another child “that I was not allowed to be friends with her. I also explained that sometimes I forget and asked her to remind me not to talk to her in the future. We were only SIX!”
The control that authorities say Garrido had over his victims was not that of a brainwashing monster— it was that of a parent. “I'm so proud of my girls. They don't know any curse words,” Garrido told Ally Jacobs, the Berkeley police officer whose suspicions about the children cracked the case. “We raised them right. They don't know anything bad about the world.” Garrido’s approach to child-rearing even included the typical parent's decision to let the children attend neighbors' birthday parties. That methods of raising children are deeply alike even as ideologies vary is, of course, the reason people don't agree where to draw the line between a religious household and a crazy-cult one.
As a number of psychiatrists and therapists have said [6], part of the work ahead for the three victims, Dugard and her two children, will consist in reconciling their new, free lives with their old one. Removed from the circumstances that made them act as they did, they may have trouble forgiving, or even understanding, their former selves. But a look at memoirs by children [7] raised in cults [8] suggests their prospects aren't all bleak.
As for Kipling, whatever you might think of his work, he obviously didn't suffer a ruined life. And in reflecting back on his years of misery, he said, he found a kind of freedom. The House of Desolation, he wrote, "drained me of any capacity for real personal hatred for the rest of my days. So close must any life-filling passion lie to its opposite.”

After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm

By JOHN MARKOFF
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross’s laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world.
Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics. Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster and more powerful than today’s transistors.
The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits. Increasingly, transistor manufacturers grapple with subatomic effects, like the tendency for electrons to “leak” across material boundaries. The leaking electrons make it more difficult to know when a transistor is in an on or off state, the information that makes electronic computing possible. They have also led to excess heat, the bane of the fastest computer chips.
The transistor is not just another element of the electronic world. It is the invention that made the computer revolution possible. In essence it is an on-off switch controlled by the flow of electricity. For the purposes of computing, when the switch is on it represents a one. When it is off it represents a zero. These zeros and ones are the most basic language of computers.
For more than half a century, transistors have gotten smaller and cheaper, following something called Moore’s Law, which states that circuit density doubles roughly every two years. This was predicted by the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart in 1959, and then described by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, in a now-legendary 1965 article in Electronics, the source of Moore’s Law.
Today’s transistors are used by the billions to form microprocessors and memory chips. Often called planar transistors, they are built on the surface (or plane) of a silicon wafer by using a manufacturing process that precisely deposits and then etches away different insulating, conducting and semiconducting materials with such precision that the industry is now approaching the ability to place individual molecules.
A typical high-end Intel microprocessor is today based on roughly one billion transistors or more, each capable of switching on and off about 300 billion times a second and packed densely enough that two million transistors would fit comfortably in the period at the end of this sentence.
In fact, this year, the chip industry is preparing to begin the transition from a generation of microprocessor chips based on a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers (a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers in width) to one of 32 nanometers — the next step down into the microcosm. But the end of this particular staircase may be near.
“Fundamentally the planar transistor is running out of steam,” said John E. Kelly III, I.B.M.’s senior vice president and director of research.
“We’re at an inflection point, you better believe it, and most of the world is in denial about it,” said Mark Horowitz, a Stanford University electrical engineer who spoke last week at a chip design conference in Palo Alto, Calif. “The physics constraints are getting more and more serious.”
Many computer scientists have been warning for years that this time would come, that Moore’s Law would cease to be valid because of increasing technical difficulties and the expense of overcoming them. Last week at Stanford University, during a panel on the future of scaling (of which the shrinking of transistors is one example), several panelists said the end was near.
“We’re done scaling. We’ve been playing tricks since 90 nanometers,” said Brad McCredie, an I.B.M. fellow and one of the company’s leading chip designers, in a reference to the increasingly arcane techniques the industry has been using to make circuits smaller.
For example, for the past three technology generations Intel has used a material known as “strained silicon” in which a layer of silicon atoms are stretched beyond their normal atomic distance by depositing them on top of another material like silicon germanium. This results in lower energy consumption and faster switching speeds.
Other researchers and business executives believe the shrinking of the transistor can continue, at least for a while, that the current industry standard Mosfet (for Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect-Transistor) can be effectively harnessed for several more technology generations.
Technology executives at the Intel Corporation, the world’s largest chipmaker, say they believe that by coupling more advanced photolithographic techniques with new kinds of materials and by changing the design of the transistor, it will be possible to continue to scale down to sizes as small as five nanometers — effectively taking the industry forward until the end of the next decade.
“Silicon will probably continue longer than we expect,” said Michael C. Mayberry, an Intel vice president and the director of the company’s component research program.
Both Intel and I.B.M. are publicly committed to a new class of transistors known as FinFETs that may be used as early as the 22-nanometer technology generation beginning in 2011 or 2012. Named for a portion of the switch that resembles a fish fin, these transistors have the dual advantage of offering greater density because they are tipped vertically out of the plane of the silicon wafer, as well as better insulating properties, making it easier to control the switching from a 1 to a 0 state.
But sooner or later, new materials and new manufacturing processes will be necessary to keep making computer technology ever cheaper. In the long term, new switches might be based on magnetic, quantum or even nanomechanical switching principles. One possibility would be to use changes in the spin of an individual electron to represent a 1 or a 0.
“If you look out into the future, there is a branching tree and there are many possible paths we might take,” Dr. Mayberry said.
In Dr. Ross’s laboratory at I.B.M., researchers are concentrating on more near-term technology. They are exploring the idea of constructing FinFET switches in a radical new process that breaks away from photo etching. It is a kind of nanofarming. Dr. Ross sprinkles gold particles as small as 10 nanometers in diameter on a substrate and then suffuses them in a silicon gas at a temperature of about 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes the particles to become “supersaturated” with silicon from the gas, which will then precipitate into a solid, forming a wire that grows vertically.
I.B.M. is pressing aggressively to develop this technology, which could be available commercially by 2012, she said. At the same time she acknowledged that significant challenges remain in perfecting nanowire technology. The mushroom-shaped wires in her laboratory now look a little bit like bonsai trees. To offer the kind of switching performances chipmakers require, the researchers must learn to make them so that their surfaces are perfectly regular. Moreover, techniques must be developed to make them behave like semiconductors.
I.B.M. is also exploring higher-risk ideas like “DNA origami,” a process developed by Paul W. K. Rothemund, a computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology.
The technique involves creating arbitrary two- and three-dimensional shapes by controlling the folding of a long single strand of viral DNA with multiple smaller “staple” strands. It is possible to form everything from nanometer-scale triangles and squares to more elaborate shapes like smiley faces and a rough map of North America. That could one day lead to an application in which such DNA shapes could be used to create a scaffolding just as wooden molds are now used to create concrete structures. The DNA shapes, for example, could be used to more precisely locate the gold nanoparticles that would then be used to grow nanowires. The DNA would be used only to align the circuits and would be destroyed by the high temperatures used by the chip-making processes.
At Intel there is great interest in building FinFET switches but also in finding ways to integrate promising III-V materials on top of silicon as well as exploring materials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, from which the company has now made prototype switches as small as 1.5 nanometers in diameter, according to Dr. Mayberry. The new materials have properties like increased electron mobility that might make transistors that are smaller and faster than those that can be made with silicon.
“At that very small dimension you have the problem of how do you make the connection into the tube in the first place,” he said. “It’s not just how well does this nanotube itself work, but how do you integrate it into a system.”
Given all the challenges that each new chip-making technology faces, as well as the industry’s sharp decline in investment, it is tempting to suggest that the smaller, faster, cheaper trend may indeed be on the brink of slowing if not halting.
Then again, as Dr. Mayberry suggests, the industry has a way of surprising its skeptics.

Michael Jackson’s final home

Diane Dimond Daily Beast

As of Thursday September 3d 2009, is even stranger than his Thriller video, sitting atop 13 stories of secret catacombs housing Satanists and gypsies. Diane Dimond tours the tomb.
There are fewer places more beautiful than Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. It’s a park-like 300 acres of rolling hills, massive trees, majestic marble statuary and soothing water features. Hubert Eaton, a devout Christian, took over an existing graveyard in the early 1900s, and designed it to mark a new and glorious beginning, rather than the end of something.
Michael Jackson will lie in repose over no fewer than 13 subterranean floors, each holding intriguing secrets. As one cemetery insider told me, ”It’s sort of the opposite of the stairway to heaven.”
But this otherwise majestic place sits atop some dark secrets, ones that, as of this Thursday, Michael Joseph Jackson will rest upon as well. I was able to glimpse an advance peek at the King of Pop’s eternal throne, and the reality is stranger than his Thriller video, sitting atop more than a dozen floors of secret subterranean burial sections housing the remains of ancient devil worshippers and Gypsies, sacrificial fonts and crypts decorated with pentagrams and a secreted area with shelves housing at least a thousand abandoned urns containing the ashes of souls no one claimed.
My recent behind-the-scenes tour of the cemetery was conducted by a man who had worked there for several years in a job that had him into the bowels of every single building, the entire breadth of the grounds, and he knew the place like the back of his hand.
“There’s Spencer Tracy’s plot -- and over here Errol Flynn’s,” says my guide, pointing to the appropriate places. After rounding a corner of one elaborate building, he motioned toward an out-of-the-way flower bed, pulled back a low hanging palm frond and said, “Hardly anyone has ever seen this.” He pointed to a plaque which read: Walter Elias Disney. Engraved underneath: “Ashes scattered in paradise.” Resting below, at the foot of a Little Mermaid statue, was a small stuffed Mickey Mouse.
Inside the mammoth Freedom Mausoleum, my guide points to a low marble bench and then up to the wall where a side-by-side crypt held the remains of Gracie Allen (1902-1964) and George Burns (1896-1996). He explains that every Tuesday for decades, Burns would sit on that bench and visit with his departed soulmate. The simple legend on their crypt reads: “Together Again.” Nat King Cole’s crypt is above and to the right.
Downstairs in this particular building, down into more marble walls holding the remains of members of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers, Alan Ladd, Dorothy Dandridge, Clara Bow and many others, my chest tightens. It was like breathing in a heavy dose of musty mold - a rotting suffocating smell that forces staffers to leave open opposing doors so the breeze can carry at least some of the smell away. This smell of death cropped up randomly, in various buildings, throughout our excursion.
The talk of workers on the property today is of exactly where Michael Jackson will spend eternity after his final family memorial service, scheduled for Thursday at Forest Lawn’s Great Mausoleum, inside the elaborate Memorial Court of Honor. In that hall Jackson’s casket is scheduled to be staged under a stunning stained glass rendition of Leonardo da Vinci’s "Last Supper" masterpiece. It occupies one entire wall.
This location likely would have met with Michael’s approval. He once commissioned his own special Last Supper painting and for years it hung directly over his bed at Neverland Ranch. In Jackson’s version he occupies the center space where Jesus is usually seen and instead of the disciples there are some of Jackson’s heroes painted in, among them Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley and Little Richard.
After the hoopla surrounding Jackson’s death dies down, maybe in a year or more, cemetery workers speculate that Jackson will be permanently buried in the uber-expensive “Golden Key” section of Forest Lawn, which is outlined with a prohibitively tall brick wall. Only family members in possession of a special key can enter this rarified space where the likes of Mary Pickford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Humphrey Bogart are interred. It’s a vast and lavish area of the cemetery surrounded with glittering marble statues and elaborate sarcophaguses.
But for now, sources tell me, Michael Jackson will be stored in a crypt almost directly underneath the Last Supper masterpiece.
To get to that spot my guide showed me a wide marble staircase, roped off to keep the public out, but clearly visible as going down. The first sunken level is where it’s expected Jackson will be held. Standing at the top of these stairs is like standing on the top floor of an apartment building and being able to see all the levels of staircases. It has an eerie feeling to it and, according to multiple sources, this is the route to the secret underground catacombs.
Michael Jackson will lie in repose over no fewer than 13 subterranean floors, each holding intriguing secrets, some could date as far back to the late 1800’s. As one cemetery insider told me, ”It’s sort of the opposite of the stairway to heaven.”
When asked to confirm these areas a Forest Lawn spokesperson denied they exist.
But my sources, including another ex-Forest Lawn maintenance man and a mutual acquaintance of both employees to whom they gave contemporaneous accounts over the years, give descriptions that are rich with detail.
“There is a level where devil worshippers were once interred,” my guide tells me. “It’s complete with devil statues, pentagrams and an area where worshippers conducted weird services.”
Continuing down there is another level said to be dedicated to some of Los Angeles’ original and very wealthy industrialists and their families. They rest down behind ancient hardcore steel gates off to each side of a long main corridor. These are the departed rich who wanted to spend eternity away from the prying eyes of common citizens. Families with names like Williamson and Wilkinson and Miller. According to my sources, the Miller family, of Miller beer, has ancestors interred in these underground spaces.
Another subterranean area, according to the guide, was set aside as the final spot for wealthy gypsy families, the figurines on their crypts otherworldly, and as recently as the 1960s, my sources say, their families would stage elaborate get-togethers to honor their dead relatives.
Many doors remain padlocked deep within this labyrinth but when two workers opened one they discovered a room lined with shelves holding crematory urns for military men, police officers, nurses and city workers who were cremated gratis and held all these years because there were no families to claim them.
Both men told me when their duties required them to be in these underground spaces they often felt the eerie presence of some of the forgotten occupants.
“I’m not a supernatural, ghost-y kind of guy,” the guide told me as we continued our tour, “but more than once when I was down in those places I felt cold and clammy fingers brush against the back of my neck. I knew I was alone down there – but I wasn’t really alone, you know?”
Sounds like a real life Thriller location -- and one whose history would likely delight Michael Jackson.
Diane Dimond has covered Michael Jackson since1993