Two months till the best Mensa meeting ever. Visit the Banff Regional Gathering (September 11 through 13, 2009) amidst soaring peaks and world heritage sites. Combine world-class scenery, unique fossil fields, the low Canadian dollar and top minds to manufacture a memorable experience. Check out the RG web site at www.mensabanffrg.com for details. Do you like music, the arts, math, science, politics, games? Add your requests to the mix and book early through Vicki (vherd@shaw.ca) or volunteer for this superb RG, the best of the best.

General

 

We offer the challenge of new ideas and partnership with your true kin. Think about commenting on thoughts that glow with brilliance. Think coffee, martinis, books and movies, dinners, quizzes, anything that ravels up the tired sleeve of care. We’re informal, unstructured, and as diverse as hockey and astrophysics. Mensa Calgary is a community where members interact, network, support each other, and enjoy each other’s company. For further info, contact Vicki at vherd@shaw.ca.

 

 

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Passport Night

 

Also known as Flames night (depending on the season) etc, this spectacle is hosted by Robert Conn, Friday July 24^th, at Bottlescrew Bills (NE corner of 1^st St and 10^th Ave SW) starting at 6:00 pm. BB has an event called "Around the World in 80 Beers" so bring a toothbrush. RSVP by June 23^rd in case Robert needs to reserve a table (robertanddiana@telus.net).

 

 

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Mensa Test

 

The July date isn’t firm yet. If you encounter potential Mensans, invite them to try the test or post a notice wherever seems sensible. For a sample notice format, contact Vicki at vherd@shaw.ca or (403) 243-6144. We’ll advertise generally, but let Vicki have your ideas on PR and talk us up; everyone gains.

 

The test fee is $90, which covers two tests, receiving feedback on eligibility for Mensa membership, PLUS the first year’s membership if you qualify. (A note on timing: “year” means till the first December 31^st after your test, so as winter approaches, you have to consider whether to wait till January to apply. Chat with Vicki about this.) The two tests provide an enhanced chance to qualify. Full time students pay only $70.

 

A pictorial test is available if your mother tongue isn’t English and you don’t want your test scores to be disadvantaged by language.

 

To qualify for membership, you have to score in the top 2% of the population in one of the two tests.

 

Contact Vicki with questions and let her know if you want to write the tests so she can schedule resources. She’ll supply detailed directions to the testing location, which is usually room 2 in the basement of the W. R. Castell Central Library, 616 Macleod Trail SE, Calgary.

 

 

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MensaGenerationX

 

Viva the under-30s!! Ideas and participation are welcome. Contact Robert Conn at robertanddiana@telus.net

 

 

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CoffeeNights

 

Brighten your life at Mensa Calgary’s coffee evenings. If you need a quick pick-me-up, this is the place to go. The July date and place are uncertain, so watch this space as the days pass.

 

 

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DinnerNight

 

We’re reshaping Mensa Calgary, and the July dinner is uncertain. But someone may pick up the idea and run with it. Watch this space and contact Vicki at vherd@shaw.ca.

 

 

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BookClub

 

The June and July meetings are combined on Friday, July 3, 2009 @ 7:00 PM hosted by Chevy Johnston. The book choices are:

Filthy Lucre: Economics For People Who Hate Capitalism by Joseph Heath – Chevy comments "this book describes the economic fallacies of the right and left wings. It is very well reasoned and caused me to question my fundamental political beliefs." http://www.harpercollins.ca/books/9781554683956/Filthy_Lucre/index.aspx

 

4 Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferris – Chevy comments "this book was very inspirational and caused me to make several changes in my life plan. Much of it is about how Tim Ferriss lucked into becoming rich but there are excellent lessons to take away." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_4-Hour_Workweek   http://www.coachingacademyblog.com/?p=545

 

Also feel free to discuss any book of your choice. New members welcome. No holds barred. No RSVP required.

 

 

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SecondTuesdays(of the Month)

 

We gather Tuesday, July 14th, at 7:30pm, at Vicki’s house, hosted by Andrew Gerber in Vicki’s absence. Call Andrew for the address (403-200-2082). This is a golden opportunity to meet some of the new board members and help shape the direction of  our group. The idea is to mellow with peers, test-run grand or petty notions, fume at idiocies, and generally find a sympathetic and intelligent ear.

 

 

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OtherUpComings

 

Watch this space for Mensa hikes and other events.

 

1) Four Mensans have sowed confusion in their city. They are Allan, Beatrice, Carlo and Denise. How have they sowed confusion? They have formed a SIG, that’s how. Well, not quite. The real source of confusion is that each of them has a cat named after one of the other three people, and a dog named after yet another of the three. You guessed correctly that no two dogs and no two cats have the same name. I can tell you that Denise’s dog is named after the person who owns the cat Carlo, and Carlo’s cat is named after the same person. Beatrice’s cat is named after the person who owns the cat in turn named after the person who owns the dog Allan. So…. who owns the dog Denise?  

2) In Mensa Calgary’s ping pong tournament for 2008, there were 96 entrants. We devised a complex formula for the first round, which resulted in 80 entrants remaining after 32 games. Thereafter, we simplified: a person was eliminated after one loss. No matches were tied. How many games in all were played to determine the winner?

 

 

The answers to June’s puzzles were supplied in the June issue.

 

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

 

1) If the names are given corresponding letters of the alphabet, this is the ownership chart:

 

Owner             A            B            C            D

Dog                 C            A            D            B

Cat                  D            C            B            A

 

Therefore Carlo owns Denise the dog.

 

 

 

This weekend the extraordinary feat of the D-Day landings will be commemorated, with due recognition for the raw physical courage and logistical skill required to land 160,000 soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. But there is one actor in the D-Day epic who is unlikely to receive the credit he deserves, even though without him the effort might well have failed. He was not a soldier. As the citizen of a neutral country, he could have sat out the war. His was not a battle of bombs and guns, but of imagination and words. He spent most of the war in a house around the corner from Hendon Central Tube station.

 

He was brave, gentle, brilliant and also slightly potty. His name was Juan Pujol García, a Spanish spy codenamed “Garbo”. Pujol never went near the Normandy beaches, but he played a pivotal role, saving countless lives by helping to stave off a German counter-attack. Yet there is no memorial to him, his name is largely unknown and he died in obscurity in Venezuela 20 years ago.

 

       
 

 

Bald, bearded and bespectacled, Pujol was a most unlikely wartime hero. Born in 1912 to a liberal, middle-class Catalan family, he contrived to fight for both sides in the Spanish Civil War; deserted; happily admitted that he had never fired a gun, and emerged with a ferocious hatred of Nazism.

 

Three times he approached the British authorities in Madrid offering to spy for Britain. Rejected, he offered himself to the Abwehr, German military Intelligence, intent on betraying them, and was taken on.

 

Telling his new spymasters he was heading to Britain, he hopped over the border to Lisbon and began sending a stream of fictitious reports to the Germans, with information culled from guidebooks and magazines. Pujol had never been to Britain, and it showed. His reports were full of elementary mistakes – including the intriguing notion that “there are people in Glasgow who will do anything for a litre of wine”. His German handlers, however, were utterly convinced by him.

 

Meanwhile, Pujol’s messages were being picked up by Britain’s codebreakers. Who was this German agent, operating undetected in Britain, who seemed to know nothing about the place? Finally, in 1942, after another approach to Allied Intelligence in Lisbon, Pujol was identified as the mysterious German spy. He was whisked to Britain and put to work as a double agent.

 

His first codename, “Bovril”, was soon changed to Garbo, in recognition of his astonishing acting talents in the service of the Double Cross System, the systematic feeding of misinformation to the Germans that remains the most remarkable intelligence coup of this or any war.

 

Pujol’s messages to his Nazi handlers were flights of pompous poetry. He never used one word where eight would do. He assembled no fewer than 27 sub-agents, sources and informants. They were a motley crew, including Welsh Aryan supremacists, communists, Greek waiters, disaffected servicemen and crooks. The only thing they had in common was their non-existence.

 

In the run-up to D-Day, Garbo took centre stage for his finest performance. The deception plan covering the invasion was codenamed Fortitude; its aim to persuade the Nazis that, instead of attacking Normandy, the main thrust would be into the Pas de Calais. A vast fake US army was assembled in Kent, wireless traffic was confected and hints were dropped to less than reliable “neutral” diplomats. Many strands of deception were woven into Operation Fortitude, but none was more important than the double agent system, and of these none was more vital than Garbo.

 

From the MI5 safe house in Crespigny Road, Hendon, Pujol fired off more than 500 radio messages between January 1944 and D-Day, a fantastic web of deceit from his posse of bogus agents. The deception was astonishingly successful. On the day before D-Day Garbo warned the Germans that an attack was imminent, too late for the enemy to respond, but early enough to boost Pujol’s status with the Nazis still further. Three days after D-Day Garbo was still warning his German handlers that the attack on Normandy was a feint and the real assault would come near Calais.

 

Throughout July and August 1944, the Germans kept two armoured divisions and 19 infantry divisions on the Calais coast, waiting for an attack that never materialised and giving the Allies time to reinforce the Normandy bridgehead.

 

Had Rommel used those divisions to counterattack in Normandy, the tide of war might have turned. But Pujol’s masterful deceptions held firm and the Nazis never rumbled him. Six weeks after D-Day he was awarded the Iron Cross by order of the Fuhrer. He was simultaneously awarded the MBE, in secret. After the war, Pujol was spirited away to Caracas, where he died in 1988.

 

Pujol is a reminder that war is fought with brains as well as bullets and that not all war heroes wear uniform. D-Day was won by Churchill and Roosevelt, by the thousands who fought and died at Normandy. But it was also won by an eccentric Spanish civilian with a vivid imagination who wanted, he said, to make a contribution “to the good of humanity”.

 

Today our leaders gather in Normandy. I will be making a small alternative pilgrimage to a nondescript house in Hendon, to remember a different sort of war and a very different sort of warrior, who fought D-Day in an upstairs room, telling wonderful lies.

 

It might have been officially declared today [June 11^th], but it has been clear for several weeks that the world is experiencing the first flu pandemic for 41 years.

 

The surge of infections in Australia that prompted today’s announcement was far from the first sign that swine flu is spreading freely around the globe. Rather, it has presented the World Health Organisation (WHO) with evidence so overwhelming that it could no longer ignore facts that have been obvious to most scientists and public health officials for some time.

   

A pandemic is declared, according to WHO definitions, when at least two continents report “community-level outbreaks” in which some new infections cannot be traced to known cases.

Several European countries started to experience such sporadic cases last month — The Times revealed on Saturday that more than ten of these have been identified in Britain — which would have given the WHO ample justification to confirm that the pandemic had started.

 

Why, then, has it waited until now to make its move?

 

The first answer is that swine flu has become political. The United Nations’ member states, including Britain, have been urging caution for fear that declaring a pandemic too early might provoke panic.

 

Though a pandemic disease need not be especially severe or lethal — the term describes the ease with which it spreads — this remains poorly understood. Most people associate pandemic flu with the vast body count of 1918-19, when 50 million people died, and it is clear that swine flu is not going to be anywhere near that catastrophic.

 

The second ground for delay was that the WHO’s pandemic alert system has just six phases, with level six signifying a full pandemic. Move to level six too early and there is nowhere to go to alert the public to an escalating danger when cases really start to mount up.

 

The organisation has thus held back for as long as it possibly could, but the confirmation of more than 1,000 cases in Australia and Chile, as well as in the US and Mexico, has forced its hand.

 

There was also a danger that moving to level six prematurely could lead some countries to activate pandemic plans drawn up around the more lethal H5N1 virus, which would have been a costly overreaction to the more moderate H1N1 strain.

 

The WHO’s circumspection has been criticised as inertia by some scientists, who argued that its decision to ignore evidence of community transmission effectively renders its pandemic alert system meaningless.

 

What really matters, however, is not whether the H1N1 pandemic is officially declared, but how public health authorities around the world are responding to it — and most countries have been on a pandemic footing since swine flu emerged as a serious threat in April.

 

In Britain the move to level six will have little if any practical significance. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) is already using measures such as school closures to slow the spread of swine flu, and it had ordered enhanced testing for the virus in hospitals before the pandemic was declared.

 

The move will underline scientists’ warnings that a much more extensive outbreak is likely in the autumn, when schools return and Britain moves into the flu season.

 

The WHO decision will not immediately trigger the manufacture of pandemic flu vaccine in place of the seasonal variety. The production run for the northern hemisphere flu season is almost complete and a seed virus for making a new vaccine is not quite ready, so a switch next month remains likely.

 

That means that while Britain has ordered vaccine to cover the entire population, the first batches will not arrive until October at the earliest, by which time the autumn infection spike might have begun. The HPA will thus have to prioritise, vaccinating first NHS and essential workers and then vulnerable groups.

 

As the southern hemisphere is entering the flu season now, the experience in countries such as Australia, Chile and Argentina will be watched closely by British health officials and scientists.

 

A priority will be to identify any particular population groups who appear to be especially vulnerable, so that they can be targeted for early vaccination. Scientists will also look closely at the effectiveness of school closures and other containment measures to judge whether they should be implemented here.

 

 

"Has Obama’s election prompted a rightist backlash?" the BBC’s website asked after the killing of an abortion doctor in Kansas and a gun attack on Washington’s Holocaust Museum. The piece of analysis that followed reached the sensible yet ultimately unhelpful conclusion that the election of Barack Obama "may have intensified" right-wing violence, but it didn’t "create" it.

 

A police investigator examines bullet strikes in a door at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on June 11, a day after a shooting left a security officer dead and the gunman wounded. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press) But whoever suggested that Obama created it by getting himself elected, him being black and all? Surely no one sane. Even that nice Shep Smith on Fox is alarmed by the increasingly violent tone of the emails Rupert Murdoch’s network is getting from its viewers. He should see the ones I get.

         

The U.S., as the BBC concludes, "is a country where the existence of extreme ideas on the fringes of mainstream life and the wide availability of firearms create a potent cocktail."

But the BBC and commentators like Paul Krugman are far too genteel on this subject. It falls to me to be forthright.

 

I wouldn’t call the accused Washington killer, James von Brunn, 88, a "potent cocktail." I’d call him your basic Lee Harvey Oswald (and yes, he was a lone gunman). I cannot wait to hear how a geriatric white supremacist who had already been imprisoned for a terror attack on the Federal Reserve managed to get a gun in the first place. That is a real achievement, and I don’t mean on the part of the gunman. The gun setup in the U.S. is an invitation to the maiming and killing of citizens.

 

Will they never learn?

 

To my increasing dread, that includes presidents. Will they never learn? As the Guardian reported back in 2007, "Since the killing of John F. Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century."

 

No one knows how many guns there are in the U.S., but one study put it at 215 million, with more than half of all U.S. households having one. I was shocked to hear that von Brunn had taken his gun to Washington – even Oswald didn’t get that close to his dream – but remembered that last year the Supreme Court overturned a ban on handguns in Washington. It’s as if they were putting a fresh minnow on a hook and dangling it for any crazy old pike that came along.

 

How did a sad manipulated schizophrenic like Scott Roeder, the alleged killer of Dr. George Tiller, get his hands on a gun? The question is rather, how could he fail to?

 

Von Brunn and Roeder are a type, they’re the type that kills presidents and that’s why the U.S. has to take things down a notch, as Obama has put it.

 

Americans are what I sadly but accurately term Escalators. Present them with any situation and they will overreact. Unlike that retro British Second World War poster so unaccountably popular right now, Americans will not "Stay Calm and Carry On". They will consternate, inflate and run wildly off in all directions. Their Patton always overcomes their Bradley. This is their greatest strength and their sorriest weakness, why I love them and so admire their culture, and why they still fill me with despair. They’ll always want to take it up to 11, and I fear for them.

 

Canadians, in contrast, abhor the escalator. They will take the stairs. The down stairs. Yes, it’s boring here but we bleed less.

 

Back to the Americans, pounding up the escalator. They heard a sound. Buy a gun. More guns. Bigger guns. Another school shooting? Arm the professors. Hell, arm the students. Why not save time and pre-shoot people?

 

Americans use illegal drugs with great energy. Jail the dealers. The users. Longer sentences. Make them mandatory. Build bigger prisons. Make them supermaxes.

 

Vietnam War lost? Stay on that military escalator, into Afghanistan, Iraq. Can’t fight IEDs? Build drones. Take that tech higher.

 

The savings and loan debacle? Keep it up. The dot.com bubble. The collapse of a no-rules Wall Street. The housing catastrophe. Fail bigger! Fail better!

 

Terrorists are as impossible to fight as the Vietcong? They won’t fight conventionally? Torture them. Outsource the torture.

 

That escalator keeps on churning, and not just because of Fox News. It’s time for that wondrous country down south to de-escalate.

 

It won’t end gloriously. In the days after Jacqueline Kennedy cleaned her husband’s brains off the pink pillbox hat she wore to Dallas, she said that he had died for nothing. "He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist."

 

It was cheap and pathetic and over, whether it was 1963 in Dallas or 1968 in Memphis and Los Angeles. Obama is the last best hope. Please don’t let it end.

(by heather mallick, CBC, 15June2009)

 

Germany has devised the ultimate in credit crunch vending machines: Gold to Go.

 

After inserting your euros in the slot there is a familiar whirring noise as if the machine is readying itself to spit out a can of lemonade or a bar of chocolate. Instead there is a satisfying clunk as a prettily wrapped bar of the world’s favourite precious metal thuds into the dispenser.

                                         

"It’s better value than the bank, " Romy Erhardt of TG-Gold-Super-Markt told The Times, "And it’s very convenient — no waiting time — you just put in your cash and a minute later you are an investor in gold."

The prototype gold-dispenser has been installed in Frankfurt airport and today there was a queue of passengers mulling over whether to buy one gramme, 5 grammes or ten grammes of gold.

 

The one-gramme bar was available for €30 (£25). Other options — rather like a high-end coffee machine it has five selections — included a Maple Leaf Five Canadian dollar coin and a Kangaroo Fifteen Australian dollar coin. Both represent about one tenth of an ounce of gold and the price on today was hovering around €80.

 

"The price is updated every 15 minutes," Ms Erhardt explained. "The vending machine is linked to the computer which we use for our online gold outlet."

 

The margins are lower than those offered by banks but fluctuate at about 20 per cent higher than market prices. That is the price of being able to pick up your gold before boarding an aircraft and having it packaged in a metal case labelled "My Golden Treasure".

 

A less sophisticated version of this Gold to Go machine was installed in Frankfurt’s main railway station last month and has been doing well. The company hopes to put 500 of the machines throughout Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

 

They are riding on the crest of a wave of investor interest in gold as the market price edges up towards $1,000 for a troy ounce.

 

Online gold dealers — who offer a discreet armoured-car delivery for large purchases — are reporting boom times. The World Gold Council said that individual purchases started to rise dramatically in the last quarter of 2008 and have broken all records in the first quarter of this year.

 

Above all, small individual investors — nervous about the future of the dollar and other currencies — are buying and selling the metal. In the US, the gold equivalent of Tupperware parties have caught on and the idea has spread to Britain.

 

The Michigan based company My Gold Party — a housewife acts as a company agent and invites her friends to her home to have their gold rings and bracelets professionally valued — has been taken up by 28 US states.

 

The online company Cash4gold.com meanwhile is reporting 25,000 transactions a month. And Exboyfriendjewelry.com — whose testimonials are full of stories about the cathartic effect of selling jewelery given by former husbands and lovers — is thriving.

 

The Germans are particularly interested, partly because of the collective memory of the currency collapse after two world wars.

 

Some high street jewellers even buy dental gold to be melted down. "German investors have always preferred to hold a lot of personal wealth in gold, for historical reasons," said Thomas Geissler, head of the Stuttgart-based TG-Gold-Super-Markt.

 

There is a German fascination with gold that goes even deeper than anxiety about failing currencies. One of Germany’s best loved fairy tales, a classic bedtime story, features a donkey that excretes gold coins every time that one shouts the magic word "Bricklebrit!"

 

To make sure that no one tries a similar trick with the Frankfurt gold vending machine, the company has positioned it near high-resolution closed circuit television cameras and given it an armour-plated casing.

 

 

While British voters can look forward only to the squirming of a lame-duck Prime Minister and a discredited House of Commons, America is starting one of the most important policy debates in its modern history. Barack Obama describes his promise to create a system of healthcare that would guarantee to all Americans the basic medical treatment taken for granted in other advanced democracies around the world as the defining issue of his presidency.

 

President Obama’s attempt to reform healthcare could set the US’s political direction for a decade and will certainly be a more decisive influence on its economic future and the long-term solvency of the US Government, than the recent arguments about bank bailouts, toxic assets and federal deficits.

       

Europeans are usually shocked that 47 million citizens of the world’s richest country have no health insurance and so could, at least in theory, die because they cannot afford medical care. Whether America’s traditional insistence that citizens should take responsibility for their own healthcare is proud self-reliance or shameful inhumanity is a matter of political perspective. But increasing ideological polarisation has prevented a consensus forming on whether medicine should be viewed as a “public service” or be treated simply as a form of private consumption no different from food, clothes or housing.

But such theoretical and moral issues are no longer the driving force behind US healthcare reform. Whether or not voters have undergone a moral conversion, America has suddenly become aware that its present healthcare system is unaffordable. As Mr Obama pointed out to the American Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union largely responsible for thwarting President Clinton’s health reforms, carrying on with the status quo is no longer an option. The mind-boggling cost of healthcare, not bank bailouts or property foreclosures, threatens the US Government with bankruptcy and the whole economy with stagnation.

 

US healthcare costs have long been out of line with costs in other countries. The US spends $2.5 trillion or $8,100 per head on healthcare, 17.6per cent of its GDP. This is half as much again as the 11 per cent of GDP spent in France and Germany and almost double the 9 per cent in Britain and the OECD as a whole. The world’s next highest spender is Switzerland at 12 per cent. Yet medical outcomes, such as cancer and cardiac survival rates, are generally no better than the OECD average and substantially worse than in France, Switzerland and Japan.

 

Until recently, however, these vast disparities made no impression on US public opinion. Americans simply assumed that the rest of the world was out of step: their system might cost more, but it delivered more innovation and greater patient satisfaction than “socialised” medicine.

 

In a mirror image of the false dichotomies distorting the healthcare debate in Britain, where US-style privatisation is presented as the only alternative to a state-run NHS, Americans have generally reacted to all reform proposals with horror, pointing to the inadequacies of the British system, while ignoring the experience of other countries. France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Australia and Japan, for instance, combine public and private provision in ways that deliver far better medical outcomes and greater customer satisfaction than the British system, at far lower cost than the US.

 

So what is different this time? Last year’s financial crisis has focused attention on economic priorities as never before. Politicians and international investors suddenly realise that America’s long-term solvency is threatened not so much by the $1.8 trillion temporary deficit created by the credit crunch, but by the looming insolvency of Medicare and Medicaid, the publicly funded parts of the US healthcare system. They cover only 30 per cent of Americans, yet are as costly as Britain’s entire NHS and will suffer deficits of trillions of dollars in the next decade if present trends persist.

 

In the US business community and on Wall Street, the idea of increasing government involvement in healthcare is gaining widespread support for the first time. The obvious reason is the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler, both forced into bankruptcy largely by the ruinous costs of health insurance that they had contractually guaranteed to employees. The fate of the automobile companies, effectively handed over to their unions in lieu of future health insurance, has been a cautionary tale. All large US employers have realised that offering workers private health insurance puts them at a big cost disadvantage against international competitors whose workers are covered by government-financed plans – and in extreme cases, such as automobiles, this exposure puts the survival of entire industries at risk.

 

Most importantly, individual Americans, whose borrowing power has vanished in the credit crunch, realise that extravagant medical costs are a luxury they can no longer afford. White House officials note that average wages have increased by only 3 per cent since 2000, but health insurance premiums have rocketed by 58 per cent. The long-term erosion of US living standards by health costs is strikingly illustrated in the chart, which shows that America’s “excessive” consumption, widely seen as the most fundamental cause of world economic instability, has been due entirely to health spending.

 

By marshalling evidence such as this, President Obama should be able to convince Americans that their present healthcare system is unsustainable and threatens individuals, the nation and the Government with bankruptcy.

 

But can he come up with a better alternative? This will mean overcoming powerful lobbies – doctors, medical companies and hospital businesses that profit from medical extravagance; trial lawyers who sue them; unions that use healthcare trusts as a recruiting tool and an instrument of corporate power and, finally, the health insurers that manage the whole sorry mess.

 

If Mr Obama can overcome this unholy alliance of vested interest on the Right and Left, his place in history will be assured. If not, the crisis from which the US economy is now emerging, will be just a mild portent of things to come.

 

 

Just before noon on Friday, June 19, the Islamic republic died in Iran. Its death was announced by its “supreme guide”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had come to praise the system but buried it instead. Khamenei was addressing supporters on the campus of Tehran University, transformed into a mosque for the occasion. Many had expected him to speak as a guide, an arbiter of disputes – a voice for national reconciliation. Instead, he spoke as a rabble rouser and a tinpot despot.

 

At issue was the June 12 presidential election that millions of Iranians, perhaps a majority, believe was rigged to ensure the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a two-thirds majority. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic republic has organised 31 elections at different levels. All have been carefully scripted, with candidates pre-approved by the regime and no independent mechanism for oversight.

 

Nevertheless, the results were never contested because most Iranians believed the regime would not cheat within the limits set by itself. Elections in the Islamic republic resembled primaries in American political parties in which all candidates are from the same political family but the contest is free and fair. The June 12 election was exceptional because three of the four candidates challenged the results.

 

Once the initial shock had passed, everyone looked to the supreme leader to find a way out of the impasse. Instead, Khamenei came out with a long lyrical monologue, hailing the election as a “miracle” and a “triumph for Islam”. Never before had Khamenei commented on the results of elections beyond accepting them as an expression of the popular will. The Khomeinist system was supposed to be 80% theocracy and 20% democracy, regardless of how bizarre the combination looked.

 

On Friday, the 20% democratic part disappeared, as Iran was transformed from an Islamic republic into an Islamic emirate headed by the Emir al-Momeneen (Commander of the Faithful) Ali Khamenei. As Iranians marched in the street in support of more freedom and democracy, Khamenei served notice that he was determined to lead the country in the opposite direction.

 

A sign that the self-appointed emir wanted to jettison the republican part of the system was there for all to see. The diminutive Ahmadinejad was relegated to the third rung of the faithful praying behind Khamenei. Sandwiched between two mullahs with giant turbans, he was almost hidden from public view. For almost a week the usually voluble Ahmadinejad has been kept off the airwaves. Suddenly the office of the president has become irrelevant. Ahmadinejad is there not because the people wanted him but because the emir found “his views closer to mine than the views of others”.

 

Khamenei’s decision to kill the Islamic republic may lead Iran into uncharted waters. The move has split the establishment as never before. All prominent figures of the “loyal opposition”, including former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, boycotted the Friday gathering. Nearly half the members of the Majlis, Iran’s ersatz parliament, were absent – along with most members of the Assembly of Experts, a body of 92 mullahs supposed to supervise the work of the supreme leader. Many senior figures of the military/security establishment were significantly absent, too.

 

If Khamenei had hoped to intimidate the protesters into accepting the results, he was quickly disappointed. No sooner had the “emirate” been born than millions of people throughout Iran were on the rooftops shouting, “I will die, but won’t accept humiliation!” A week of nationwide protests has claimed at least seven lives. Khamenei’s intervention has been followed by a wave of arrests. The supreme leader has tried to divide the opposition by offering public assurances to Rafsanjani and Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, the former parliamentary Speaker, that they would not be prosecuted on corruption charges as threatened by Ahmadinejad. Nevertheless, both men still refuse to endorse Ahmadinejad’s re-election.

 

As the principal face of the opposition, Mir Hossein Mousavi has come under pressure to wind up the movement. Yesterday Abbas Mohtaj, the head of Iran’s security council, issued a veiled death threat. Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi’s wife and principal campaign manager, has retaliated by publishing a poem through Twitter and SMS sent to millions of Iranians: “Let the wolves know that in our tribe / If the father dies, his gun will remain / Even if all the men of the tribe are killed / A baby son will remain in the wooden cradle”.

 

For the past three days the regime has held back its security forces while tightening the lasso around the opposition leadership, especially Mousavi. He is under virtual house arrest.

 

Today there are two Irans. One is prepared to support Khamenei’s bid to transform the republic into an emirate in the service of the Islamic cause. Then there is a second Iran – one that wishes to cease to be a cause and yearns to be an ordinary nation. This Iran has not yet found its ultimate leaders. For now, it is prepared to bet on Mousavi. The fight over Iran’s future is only beginning.

 

 

BASEL, Switzerland — Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane.

He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth’s bedrock.

 

All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

 

Hastily shut down, Mr. Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco.

 

Residents of the region, which straddles Lake and Sonoma Counties, have already been protesting swarms of smaller earthquakes set off by a less geologically invasive set of energy projects there. AltaRock officials said that they chose the spot in part because the history of mostly small quakes reassured them that the risks were limited.

 

Like the effort in Basel, the new project will tap geothermal energy by fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep to extract its heat. AltaRock, founded by Susan Petty, a veteran geothermal researcher, has secured more than $36 million from the Energy Department, several large venture-capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Google. AltaRock maintains that it will steer clear of large faults and that it can operate safely.

 

But in a report on seismic impact that AltaRock was required to file, the company failed to mention that the Basel program was shut down because of the earthquake it caused. AltaRock claimed it was uncertain that the project had caused the quake, even though Swiss government seismologists and officials on the Basel project agreed that it did. Nor did AltaRock mention the thousands of smaller earthquakes induced by the Basel project that continued for months after it shut down.

 

The California project is the first of dozens that could be operating in the United States in the next several years, driven by a push to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and the Obama administration’s support for renewable energy.

 

Geothermal’s potential as a clean energy source has raised huge hopes, and its advocates believe it could put a significant dent in American dependence on fossil fuels — potentially supplying roughly 15 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2030, according to one estimate by Google. The earth’s heat is always there waiting to be tapped, unlike wind and solar power, which are intermittent and thus more fickle. According to a 2007 geothermal report financed by the Energy Department, advanced geothermal power could in theory produce as much as 60,000 times the nation’s annual energy usage. President Obama, in a news conference Tuesday, cited geothermal power as part of the “clean energy transformation” that a climate bill now before Congress could bring about.

 

Dan W. Reicher, an assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration who is now director of climate change and energy at Google’s investment and philanthropic arm, said geothermal energy had “the potential to deliver vast amounts of power almost anywhere in the world, 24/7.”

 

Power companies have long produced limited amounts of geothermal energy by tapping shallow steam beds, often beneath geysers or vents called fumaroles. Even those projects can induce earthquakes, although most are small. But for geothermal energy to be used more widely, engineers need to find a way to draw on the heat at deeper levels percolating in the earth’s core.

 

Some geothermal advocates believe the method used in Basel, and to be tried in California, could be that breakthrough. But because large earthquakes tend to originate at great depths, breaking rock that far down carries more serious risk, seismologists say. Seismologists have long known that human activities can trigger quakes, but they say the science is not developed enough to say for certain what will or will not set off a major temblor.

 

Even so, there is no shortage of money for testing the idea. Mr. Reicher has overseen a $6.25 million investment by Google in AltaRock, and with more than $200 million in new federal money for geothermal, the Energy Department has already approved financing for related projects in Idaho by the University of Utah; in Nevada by Ormat Technologies; and in California by Calpine, just a few miles from AltaRock’s project.

 

Steven E. Koonin, the under secretary for science at the Energy Department, said the earthquake issue was new to him, but added, “We’re committed to doing things in a factual and rigorous way, and if there is a problem, we will attend to it.”

 

The tone is more urgent in Europe. “This was my main question to the experts: Can you exclude that there is a major earthquake triggered by this man-made activity?” said Rudolf Braun, chairman of the project team that the City of Basel created to study the risks of resuming the project.

 

“I was quite surprised that all of them said: ‘No, we can’t. We can’t exclude it,’ “ said Mr. Braun, whose study is due this year.

 

“It would be just unfortunate if, in the United States, you rush ahead and don’t take into account what happened here,” he said.

 

 

Italian prosecutors were trying to establish yesterday whether US bonds with a face value of $134 billion seized from two alleged smugglers were real or counterfeit.

 

The bonds were found when the two men — said to be Japanese but as yet not identified — were arrested while attempting to cross into Switzerland from Italy by train at the frontier town of Chiasso this month. Prosecutors in Como said that the two men had hidden the bonds in the false bottom of a suitcase.

 

Police said that Chiasso was a notorious crossing point for currency and bond smugglers but the sums involved this time were “colossal”. The amount of $134 billion would place the two travellers as the fourth most important investors in US debt, well ahead of Britain ($128.2 billion) and just behind Russia ($138.4 billion).

 

The bonds were described as being 249 US Federal Reserve bonds each worth $500 million, plus ten Kennedy bonds with face values of $1 billion, in addition to various other types. Police said that the two men had stayed at a hotel in Milan last Tuesday. Instead of taking the express train to Lugano, they had boarded a slow commuter train from a suburban station to attract less attention.

 

Although Switzerland and Italy adhere to the Schengen accords on frontier-free travel, customs officers from both sides who still watch travellers became suspicious, Italian reports said.

 

Police said that there was cause for concern even if the bonds turned out to be forgeries, since it would amount to a counterfeiting scam “on an unprecedented scale”.

 

 

 

This column is in the shop for adjustment. We look forward to a revival in the August issue.