“The Last Supper”? Right – that fresco painted in the late fifteenth century by Leonardo on a refectory wall in a convent in Milan. Researchers (and brothers) Brian and Craig Wansink were wondering how to compare food-portion sizes of today with those of centuries ago, and hit upon the idea of going to paintings from past periods to get that information, eventually settling on using Leonardo’s famous work.

They published their findings here, but unless you happen to be really into obesity studies, to the point of having a paid subscription to the Journal, that won’t tell you much. But the FR journalist has read the article, so you don’t have to. And as you probably would expect, the Wansink brothers’ careful measurements of plate and portion sizes in Leonardo’s work revealed that plate sizes have increased by 66 percent over the last five centures and portions by 69% (oh, and the size of bread-rolls by 23%).

                          

Sound strange to you, too? Reading the piece, one keeps searching for some sign that this is all satire, some big joke – but in vain. The firmest conclusion I can draw instead is that the author (unnamed; or maybe the entire FR editorial board) is under threat of blackmail to one Corné de Regt, who according to this article offers “the unique experience of the farm and cow-stall” as a means of reinvigorating burned-out business managers. At €900 a head, the rehabilitation sessions at his farm in the Dutch countryside can be individually-tailored to some degree, but are all based around a core of intense communal meditation sessions on the straw in the outbuildings. No laptops, no mobile telephones allowed – the only interruptions are contributed from the cows peacefully cohabiting the same space.

“In the final analysis,” De Regt claims, “all senses are stimulated in the cow-stall through meditation with the animals.” That includes most especially the sense of smell; as it turns out, De Regt often gets complaints from his city-slicker clients about the stink in there, but waves them off: that’s an integral part of the whole meditation process.

The doughty Dutch farmer also dismisses out of hand accusations he sometime hears that he is simply running a big swindle. On the contrary, his cow-seminars are “very popular,” and he spent years formulating the concept, inspired along the way by Goethe and by the Chinese concepts of Yin and Yang, of finding an opposite and reconciling with it to attain true inner harmony. And for those who can’t seem to locate that “inner me” even after several cow-sessions, De Regt’s has a Plan B: he sends them outside with an axe to chop some wood, and when finished with that to run to a near-by stream, strip, and plunge in to cool off. “Very refreshing!” enthuses the cow-guru.

                          

The hat-tip for the one noticing this first must go to Jillian Rayfield, affiliated with Talking Points Memo, and then just yesterday David Kurtz from the same site posted a slide-show on the subject. But I soon found my way to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the German- and English-language website belonging to the musical itself. Check it out: there’s some good information there, even if the English version is written by someone not in complete control of that language and with a fondness for the phrase inter alia (actually a Latin expression, for all you non-lawyers out there, meaning “among others”). The songs that make up the show will surely become hits, it says there, for “[e]xperts of the German music scene” are sure they have that “Earth Wind and Fire [sic] quality”! Even more intriguingly, we learn that “Hope” is the first “interactive musical,” during which most of the audience will sit on cubes (called “percussion chairs”) that double as instruments and so will be encouraged to drum (and even get up off those chairs to dance) along with the performers! Wow!

Right, so how have the reviews been so far? Of the two I can find, the one from the home-town paper the Frankfurter Rundschau (Border of Gaiety) cannot truly be regarded as independent, since the musical’s producers announce right on their site’s “News” page that the FR is a “mediapartner.” Yes, Barack Obama’s story (and a parallel plot-line about the troubles of a South Chicago community) does turn out to be a suitable subject for a musical, opines reviewer Judith von Sternburg, even though back in the real world, after a whole year in office, ugly Reality has already caught up with the President. Von Sternburg is independent-minded enough to label Hillary Clinton’s portrayal (performed by American actress and “Evita” veteran Tracy Plester, who needs only a quick wardrobe-and-wig-change to render Sarah Palin as well) as “a caricature.” Van Sternburg also manages to pick up on, and mention in her piece, the line spoken by the actor representing a son fighting in Iraq, who comes back home just as Obama is elected and declares that surely the war will soon be over now – something the stage-side English-to-German translator at the premier performance skips.

The other review is from the Financial Times Deutschland (Out of Office: Obama Mia!), by Willy Theobald, who it emerges did not attend the actual premier but rather a previous dress-rehearsal. At least that enabled him also to grab an interview with the show’s producer and director, Roberto Emmanuele, who declares to him “Musicals I generally find boring” – as indeed does Herr Theobald – but “I want to make a musical that is fresher [knackiger] and more innovative than all the others.” He goes on: “Our music has quite a lot of hit-potential,” and Theobald does admit that he finds many of the songs “rather infectious” (richtig mitreißend). In the end, the FTD reviewer gives those behind “Hope” a lot of credit, although he can’t resist wondering whether the work will soon need to add another act at the end – one about Yemen.

The verdicts so far out of Germany, then – as few as they are – seem largely positive. Is it perhaps time to go on-line to order your tickets as well as a round-trip flight to Frankfurt-am-Main? Here’s a final YouTube tidbit to help you make your decision:

                          

In actuality, though, these siren-systems are under threat: they cost too much, supposedly hundreds of millions of euros to maintain nationally. That datum comes from a recent examination of this issue in the Frankfurter Rundschau by Roland Knauer. Public authorities are increasingly shutting them down, in favor of setting up alternate warning systems for fire and civil defense officials employing TV, radio, and SMS.

But you can likely rather quickly grasp the problem with this: for extended hours each day (usually roughly corresponding to what we call “night”) most of us prefer to be unconscious and blissfully out of reach of any TV, radio, or SMS message. Murphy’s Law, on the other hand, suggests that if/when the next disaster comes, it will more than likely hit during precisely such a period.

Not to worry: Knauer’s article is all about another solution that the famous Fraunhofer Research Institute in Germany has come up with. His title hints at it: Alarm thanks to horn-concert. You may be soundly asleep at 3:00 in the morning, but it’s a pretty sure bet that you’ll nonetheless hear a warning about incoming enemy missiles, or floodwaters, if all-of-a-sudden the cars parked outside start blasting their horns in unison.

This isn’t technically possible right now. (“Thank God!” I hear some of you exclaim.) But what is going to make it feasible within the next few years, at least in Europe, is the “eCall” technology that the European Commission has decreed be installed in every car sold after September, 2010. “eCall” was originally designed to send out automatically an emergency message, complete with GPS location-coordinates, whenever there’s an accident. This means rescue services can be dispatched precisely to the trouble-spot in short order, whether the driver(s) of the vehicle(s) in question even remain(s) conscious or not. The system can also be further modified to enable public authorities, in effect, to send an emergency message to each car, instructing it to honk its horn. (Knauer adds here “naturally only if the motor is shut down.” I suppose the logic here is that you don’t want the active driver of a vehicle startled by the sudden, autonomous sounding of that vehicle’s horn.)

So far this proposal is but a twinkle in some engineer’s eye at the Fraunhofer Institute. But calculations also indicate that only 14% of a given population of autos need to deploy this emergency feature for it to be effective and that, if approved, implementation should take only two-to-four years (presumably after “eCall” becomes mandatory in new EU cars).

                          

In fact, that Office reports that there were signs that growth actually re-commenced already in this year’s first quarter, although the cumulative total for 2009 does stand now at minus 3.5% (and is still expected by the government and some leading economic institutes to come out at minus 6% for the year). Even better is the year-on-year comparison with 2008′s second quarter, which itself was minus 7.1%. (I’m assuming all these growth/shrinkage percentage figures are normalized to an annual basis.) Increased private and governmental consumption, as well as construction, get the main credit for the upturn – plus the singular fact that German imports have lately contracted even more than their exports, thus sharpening further the world-beating performance of that champion German export-surplus machine.

Still, you don’t have to be too much of a skeptic to ask “So what? What does this new, surprising, but small growth number really mean?” So the (uncredited) FR reporter turned to a handfull of economic analysts from leading banks and think-tanks to get their opinions. Analysts from Commerzbank and Unicredit (an international bank, Italian in origin) are very optimistic, stating for example that “The recession is over, and has reached its end earlier than everyone thought. . . . According to our calculations we will see a V-shaped recovery in the second half of this year.” Call me congenitally gloomy, but I find the remark from Jens-Oliver Niklasch, of the Landesbank Baden-Württemburg, to be rather more enlightening:

The question is, how enduring [this "end-of-recession"] is. Many problems we have not solved, the banking sector just like before is especially reliant upon the State’s debt-shield. As long as it is not clear that the banks’ capital base is robust, we cannot assume that the Crisis is past. Japan is a cautionary example here.

                          

Check out that article title again (with whose translation I promise I took only very slight liberties), though: could someone kindly e-mail to me the German expression for “damn with faint praise”? Kirchgeßner’s purpose here is clearly to bend over backwards to cast the Czech presidency in the best-possible light. His piece’s very first sentence (i.e. after the lede) is “Probably no country has encountered such hostility during its EU presidency as the Czech Republic,” going on to cite all the EU and other national officials (especially the French) who cast doubt on the Czechs’ very competence to handle the assignment, and who continued to cruelly snipe at them thereafter – mostly behind-the-scenes, of course. What is more, it turned out to be a tough time to take up the job, what with the world financial crisis, Israel’s attack into Gaza, new disputes about ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, etc. – oh, and also the latest installment of the perennial Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute, which actually gave the Czechs the opportunity to mediate effectively and so chalk up an early success to their credit.

In reality, though, Kirchgeßner’s piece might just as well have been quite a bit shorter; all he really needed to do was cite the no-confidence vote of March 24 and then come full-stop. Because when you’re EU president you just don’t do that, you just don’t break up the government that for six months is more than a national government, that is in fact entrusted by the rest of the EU to provide at least a little trans-national leadership and for sure quite a lot of trans-national administrative effort and leg-work (to consult, set up meetings, establish agendas, etc.). Numerous other countries, with domestic political scenes just as fractious as the current Czech one or even more so (e.g. Italy), have taken care in the past to start preparing long beforehand to call a temporary truce to their national political conflicts to ensure that they could provide the governmental continuity for the EU presidency that is absolutely necessary – to go a good job and, basically, not to let the rest of the EU down. The Czechs could not do that, and so they should be condemned, not have excuses made for them. (And this does not even take into account the obstructive anti-EU snipings of Czech President Václav Klaus before, during, and after the de facto period of the Czech presidency.)

In essence, remember all that bad-mouthing by the French and all the rest, mentioned above, that the Czechs would not be able to handle the job? Well, they were all proved right, on March 24. And you can forget about “better luck next time,” because there probably will never be a next time: if the Lisbon Treaty is finally ratified, that will do away with the whole system of six-month national EU presidencies in favor of a one-person, elected EU President.

“But it’s easy to overlook that the Czechs are very friendly towards Europe,” Kirchgeßner writes towards the end, looking frantically for some silver lining. They punished the Social Democratic Party – widely seen as responsible for the Topolánek government’s fall – in the recent European elections; they also seem not to think much these days of their Eurosceptic president, either. OK, but what about the Slovaks or the Slovenes, whose friendliness towards the EU arguably goes much further than that of the Czechs, in that they have already taken the bitter economic medicine required to bring themselves within the eurozone? They will never have the chance to serve as EU president, nor will Poland, the most important country of that 2004 EU-entrance cohort of all. But the Czech Republic did get that chance – it’s all a function of the alphabetical-order of a country’s name, belive it or not – and messed it up royally.

                          

And then there are the vuvuzelas. Perhaps, you may ask, that’s the nickname of the team and/or the supporters of one participating nation? No, those are the cheap plastic trumpet-like things that many fans are using to set up an ear-splitting racket to accompany the game they are watching live – devices which “remind one of the wind instruments heralds used at tournaments in the Middle Ages,” according to an article on this vuvuzela problem in the Frankfurther Rundschau.

Yes, when blown they apparently emit a dreadfully loud noise, which the FR article describes as “deafening” and an “elephant sound.” They have already prompted some public complaints among players and even from Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, FIFA president, who admitted to the press “They do make a lot of noise. FIFA is quite concerned about the noise, that also can constantly be heard in the TV [broadcasts].” On the other hand, the fundamental fact remains that FIFA explicitly approved the vuvuzelas for this Confederations Cup, so the players and everyone else will just have to endure them (perhaps with the aid of earplugs?) throughout. But for next year? Despite the ringing in his ears, Blatter seems not inclined to change the policy for 2010, either: “When you go to Africa,” he observed, “it’s simply loud. I have always said: football is drumming, rhythm, dancing.”

And whether elephantine or not, that sound is music to the ears of German businessmen Frank Urbas and Gerd Kehrberg. They’re still back in Düsseldorf, but they gained the license to manufacture and sell these vuvuzelas to European fans headed for the World Cup next summer.

                          

Meanwhile, commentator Karl Grobe has some interesting points to make in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Culture war in Persian). One thing people tend to forget – which he reminds us of here – is that Musavi has quite a hard-line reputation himself, harking back to the years he served as prime minister back in the 1980s, under and with the the blessing of no less than Ayatollah Khomeini. (I also recall reading that he played a major and somewhat cold-blooded part in the 1979 revolution, but his Wikipedia page is not helping me out here; indeed, the entry is surprisingly short, and what there is features phrases like he “has a reputation for ‘being honest, humble and a supporter of the masses’” that remind me that the inner-Iranian political conflict can also spread to this particular precinct of cyber-space.) Back then, during the Iran-Iraq War, there was surely no scope for maverick “tribunes-of-the-people” to attain any positions of political power at all, much less that of the premiership, so you know that Musavi had to have been a radical-religious team-player. For that matter, the very fact of his being allowed to stand as a candidate for president this time also has to attest to the Iranian Establishment assuming that he is “safe.”

It doesn’t seem that way anymore; what happened? Either Musavi really put the wool over the eyes of that Establishment – or, as Grobe thinks is more likely, he remains fundamentally a “safe” candidate, in his heart-of-hearts, but one whose candidacy and political role has been expanded by circumstances far beyond the man himself and whatever personal political and religious views he may have. Similarly, much analysis of the current power-struggle in Iran posits Musavi as some sort of tool for former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to regain a leading position of power within the regime. Many reports describe Rafsanjani as a “reformer”; Grobe, however, characterizes him as “kleptokratic,” i.e. mainly interested in being government in order to gain power and riches for himself. (It is known that he is involved in many Iranian businesses, and, for what it’s worth, his own Wikipedia article does state that “[m]any believe Rafsanjani to be the richest man in Iran.”) But the larger point is that the analytical framework in play here to analyze the current political unrest is merely that of an internal power-struggle within the Iranian ruling elite, whereby those who were once “in” but are now “out” try again to get “in.”

But it’s doubtful that those masses of hundreds of thousands, of millions evening, demonstrating out there in Tehran’s streets (and other major Iranian cities as well) are much interested in that framework, either. What this means is that Iran is simply in uncharted territory when it comes to how its government will look like – if the demonstrators (the “Musavi” side, so to speak) prevail. We can only be sure of the following: according to Grobe, the new Opposition

. . . is mainly a Culture Revolution in the Western sense. It struggles for freedom for literature and songs, it desires freedom and equal rights for women, it also wants to have music, film, and TV in the capitalistic Western style; but it doesn’t want to become westernized like a clone. It is Islamic; [but] it rejects the dogmatic Islam of the powerful under the Ayatollahs, indeed it abhors that.

In Grobe’s view, though, the guns that the Government can wield – especially the notorious Basij forces, the lynchpin of President Ahmadi-nejad’s power – are just biding their time to intervene and make the desires and ideological make-up of the street-protestors again irrelevant. His point is that this is an all-or-nothing contest; victory by the “Musavi” forces is sure to bring unpredictable, massive changes to the Iranian government (which, indeed, may not ultimately even involve Mir Hussein Musavi), while defeat will restore a sullen status quo. Sooner or later we will all witness which outcome it is to be.

                          

Given that such pronouncements were apparently the main output coming out of the otherwise disappointing special EU summit last Sunday over the economic crisis, we probably need to include under that “hypocrite” rubric President Sarkozy of France. Chancellor Merkel of Germany potentially belongs there, too, depending on what she decides to do about Opel in particular, and decision time is coming very soon now that GM has indicated that that division will run out of money in a month. It probably would also include the leaders of some other EU members who themselves have more recently built up a thriving auto sector – like the Czech Republic and Slovakia – except that those governments simply don’t have the money to spend on any such thing. And sad to say, it could also include Barack Obama – again, depending on what he decides to do about the new requests for mega-money from GM and Chrysler.

They don’t like being hypocrites, of course, but from Obama on down the political impulse to supply some assistance to your national auto manufacturers is usually pretty overwhelming. So let’s follow along with Müller why that’s really not the thing to do. As he points out, blatant and ham-handed instruments of protection, like tariffs assessed at the incoming port or airport, while still prevalent, are no longer so much in vogue. Instead, governments (yes, even those within the EU, where it is supposed to be a completely open market) pursue their protectionism in more subtle ways, such as giving native companies certain tax breaks, or awarding subsidies – which is precisely the aid that the auto-makers from the US to France to Germany are asking for. Quite simply, this provides native firms with an unnatural advantage, enabling them to sell their wares for less and/or to gain a greater profit by doing so even though they probably are not the most-efficient producer. Meanwhile, of course, it’s the taxpayer who is paying for this dubious privilege of shifting production to a less-efficient producer.

Again, all of this will likely butter no parsnips when it comes to the political decisions whether to accede to the auto firms’ calls for help, as economically-distorting as such subsidies can be shown to be. It’s at least refreshing to be able to get such a public reminder of the point in the (on-line) pages of a major newspaper in a country whose economy is dominated by the auto industry to an even greater extent than it is in the US.

                          

Isn’t that what so many of us are worrying about even as we witness, each in our own way, the inauguration delirium now playing out in America’s capital city? That Obama: as Widmann is glad to put it, “The United States has in him one of the most intelligent, alert, and communication-gifted presidents in its history.” I mean, just go read his books, and compare them to other politicians’ tired, ghost-written literary output!

But Wildmann, in his adopted role of public gadfly is happy to bring out explicitly that qualification that many of us harbor at the same time in the back of our minds: Success is not going to depend on character as much as it will on sheer circumstances. And for Barack Obama it is likely, in his view, that the “Change” that he will end up most remembered for is running for and winning the American presidency in the first place. Things are so bad, on so many fronts, that really radical change is required, yet by his very nature Obama is not the man to bring it. Rather, as Wildmann so aptly puts it, “[i]n democratic societies the difficult steps must be taken by those who came into power promising to protect us from them.”

I’d like to call this the “Nixon-in-China” syndrome, although Widmann for sure mentions neither “Nixon” nor “China” in his piece. The American rapprochement in the mid-1970s with that titanic Asian power with which it had been bitter enemies for more than twenty years was something as unthinkable then as it later turned out to seem (once the many benefits to both peoples, primarily economic in nature, began to flow) inevitable. But no one could have pulled that breakthrough off other than that ferocious, redoubtable Cold-Warrior, Richard Nixon: no one could have taken the political heat for that act and survived than someone whose anti-Red China credentials were impeccable, i.e. someone who had been the last politician you would have predicted would do such a thing. But you could also call this the De Gaulle-in-Algeria syndrome, as well: only someone so embodying France’s military glory as Charles De Gaulle – and therefore the very last politician any of the French could have imagined capitulating to the FLN Algerian insurgents, and thereby flouting the will of the French Army – could have gotten the French out of the bloody mess that was Algeria in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

Widmann, naturally, also fails to mention De Gaulle or Algeria. Instead, though, he has a couple of convincing home-brewed German examples, of rather recent vintage, to back up his extraordinary “only possible by those who promised to protect against” assertion. There are the Harz reforms of earlier this decade, a set of fundamental modifications to aspects of the German economy – e.g. unemployment insurance, worker protections against being fired – done in order to make it more competitive and job-creating. These were ultimately pushed through, against the inevitable heavy domestic opposition, by Gerhard Schröder and his SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), i.e. by the Labor Party on the left side of the German political spectrum whom people ordinarily would have expected to be the last organization to put through any such reform. Or, if that example is a bit obscure for you, consider the very fact that the Bundeswehr, the German Army, currently finds itself partly deployed outside of Germany proper. It happens to be in Afghanistan (serving NATO, of course), but just ponder that fact: the German Army, of WWI and WWII fame, let loose again in foreign lands. In fact, ever since 1945 it has been the Germans, especially those of the Left, who have refused to allow it ever to depart their borders again – yet, as Widmann points out, the fact that it is (way) outside of them now is mainly due to the agreement for the move secured from Germany’s Green Party – again, the last party you would think would give its permission – back when they were part of the governing coalition with Schröder’s SPD.

The Best Is Just About Past

Widmann’s point is that the situation that America (together with much of the rest of us) now faces is bad, really bad. Nothing less than a tearing-down of the old Establishment, both economically and politically, will do to put things right – but now the former Senator from Illinois has become even more a part of that very same Establishment. And so, he concludes, “today’s swearing-in will be, and will remain, Barack Obama’s greatest performance.”

You obviously have to hope that he is wrong, but I confess to seeing a certain logic in this “Nixon syndrome” argument. But then the question naturally arises, “All right, so what does a society have to do to get done the things that need to get done?” The train-of-thought here would seem to lead to the conclusion that, in fact, John McCain (the Maverick!) was a better bet to elect to the presidency to save America from its crises! Think about it: He’s the last one (if you remember his party platform) whom you would expect to bring about a system of national health insurance, for example, right? Or to nationalize the banks.