Via David Brooks, a tale of scandinavian toughness and community courage:

In 1943, [Jan] Baalsrud was a young instrument maker who was asked to sneak back into Norway to help the anti-Nazi resistance.
He was hunted by about 50 Germans and left a trail in the deep snow. He’d lost one boot and sock, and he was bleeding from where his big toe had been shot off. He scrambled across the island and swam successively across the icy sound to two other islands. On the second, he lay dying of cold and exhaustion on the beach.

Two girls found and led him to their home. And this is the core of the story. During the next months, dozens of Norwegians helped Baalsrud get across to Sweden. Flouting any sense of rational cost-benefit analysis, families and whole villages risked their lives to help one gravely ill man, who happened to drop into their midst.

Baalsrud was clothed and fed and rowed to another island. He showed up at other houses and was taken in. He began walking across the mountain ranges on that island in the general direction of the mainland, hikes of 24, 13 and 28 hours without break.

And it gets worse from there.

And from the London Times, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz

Denis Avey, even at the age of 91, cuts a formidable figure. More than 6ft tall, with a severe short back and sides and a piercing glare, he combines the pan-ache of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age. This is the former Desert Rat, who, in 1944, broke into — yes, into — Auschwitz, and he looks exactly as I expected. He removes his monocle for the camera, and one of his pupils slips sideways before realigning. It is a glass eye. I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in.

Avey was a troublesome prisoner. In the summer of 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, in Poland, and interned in a small PoW camp on the periphery of the IG Farben factory. The main Jewish camps were several miles to the west. “I’d lost my liberty, but none of my spirit,” he says. “I was still determined to give as good as I got.”

But he knew immediately that this was a different order of prison. “The Stripeys — that’s what we called the Jewish prisoners — were in a terrible state. Within months they were reduced to waifs and then they disappeared. The stench from the crematoria was appalling, civilians from as far away as Katowice were complaining. Everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew.”

Avey shaved his head and blackened his face. At the allocated time, he and the Dutch Jew sneaked into a disused shed. There they swapped uniforms and exchanged places. Avey affected a slouch and a cough, so that his English accent would be disguised should he be required to speak.

“I joined the Stripeys and marched into Monowitz, a predominantly Jewish camp. As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free] sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.”

They were herded through the camp, carrying the bodies of those who had died that day. “I saw the Frauenhaus — the Germans’ brothel of Jewish girls — and the infirmary, which sent its patients to the gas after two weeks. I committed everything to memory. We were lined up in the Appellplatz for a roll call, which lasted almost two hours. Then we were given some rotten cabbage soup and went to sleep in lice-infested bunks, three to a bed.”

The night was even worse than the daytime. “As it grew dark, the place was filled with howls and shrieks. Many people had lost their minds. It was a living hell. Everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.” Lobethall had bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes. “They gave me all the details,” he says, “the names of the SS, the gas chambers, the crematoria, everything. After that, they fell asleep. But I lay awake all night.”

A lot of people of a certain political straind have a tendency to those throw around labels like “evil” and “heroes” with abandon in relation to our current situation here in the United States and abroad. Stories like Baalsrud’s and Avey’s remind us of the true meaning of both of those words.

During the period of explosive growth in the Dot-Com era right through to today the one thing that makes the Internet special is its blind simplicity. At the end of the day, all it is is a network of very fast little virtual mail-room clerks shifting packets to and from their destinations. The network does not care at all what is inside that packet. It can be part of a credit card transaction, a video, a love letter, a chat text, a blog post, literally anything that can be reduced to digital bits can be moved over the Internet.

The Internet’s strength and its value as a tremendous generator of innovation, progress and freedom in the world is directly linked to its OPENNESS. The fact that it is a dumb network that just moves packets means that anyone who can think of an interesting thing to do by moving little chunks of information, can go right ahead and do it, EVEN IF ITS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. THEY DON’T NEED PERMISSION. IF IT FOLLOWS THE PROTOCOLS IT GETS ACCEPTED.

But come on! This is just gloating!

From his latest letter to Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders, Buffet lays down the smack on Wall Street, financial regulators and Congress:

It’s my job to keep Berkshire far away from such problems. Charlie and I believe that a CEO must not delegate risk control. It’s simply too important. At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books, with the exception of operations-related contracts at a few of our subsidiaries, such as MidAmerican, and the minor runoff contracts at General Re. If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of misjudgments made by a Risk Committee or Chief Risk Officer.

In my view a board of directors of a huge financial institution is derelict if it does not insist that its CEO bear full responsibility for risk control. If he’s incapable of handling that job, he should look for other employment. And if he fails at it – with the government thereupon required to step in with funds or guarantees – the financial consequences for him and his board should be severe.

It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country’s largest financial
institutions. Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been “bailed out” is to make a mockery of the term.

The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style. It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed: If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price – one not reimbursable by the companies they’ve damaged nor by insurance. CEOs and, in many cases, directors have long benefitted from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well.

We’ve got a web site up and running, google4clinton.org. There’s nothing there yet, but we’ll have some content up later today.

Yesterday afternoon we met with officials from the Clinton Regional Development Corporation, the Chamber of Commerce and City Aldermen and agreed that this is worth pursuing and divided up responsibilities for collecting the information required by the Government application.

We’re moving forward. Most of my efforts will be consumed by work and this initiative for a couple of weeks so do check back but don’t expect much posting here.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, start here.

Posting will be light while I add this to the to-do list.

Palestinian Children as Na'vi. Photo: Reuters

Palestinian residents hold weekly protests along the wall dividing Israeli settlements from Palestinian land. Back in September, Israeli border guards fired live ammo at an Al Jazeera correspondent and tear gassed protesters.

Despite the Obama administration’s fairly strong language towards Israel and the Palestinians in regards to moving forward to some sort of permanent settlement, attitudes on both sides have become more, not less accomodationist.

A couple of weeks ago, former Israeli prime minister and current defense minister, Ehud Barak finally said the unsayable at a conference in Israel:

If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic… If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don’t, it is an apartheid state.

Israel is in a deep quandry. Per the Economist’s Democracy in America Blog:

[Palestinian intellectual and activist Sari] Nusseibeh now believes the two-state solution has become virtually impossible. There are too many Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the Israeli political system is incapable of making the concessions that would be necessary even to halt further settlements, let alone to withdraw them and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. Mr Nusseibeh is a keen political thinker, a non-violent man who opposed the 2001 “second intifada” and has many close Israeli friends. His history of negotiations with Israeli authorities began with his secret talks with the right-wing government of Yitzhak Shamir in the 1980s. His assessment fits with the history of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue over the past 60-odd years: each side has rejected every plausible deal at every available opportunity, only to look back a decade or two later with bitter regret.

If the prospects for a two-state solution look ever less likely, the idea of annexation of the occupied territories is a complete non-starter. Non-Jews already account for 20% of the Israeli population and Arab-Israelis already deal with discrimination. Admission of the approximately 3.8 million Palestinians into Israel with 7.4 million people would call into question the entire idea of the Jewish state. Any single-state solution that does not grant full rights to non-Jews and citizens of the former occupied territories leads inevitably to some form or another of apartheid.

And you thought politics in the United States was fraught?

An Atlantic Monthly article by Megan McArdle questions whether health insurance coverage saves lives, drawing from a narrow slice of the literature to suggest the beneficial effects of insurance coverage on mortality might be negligible. While it is true these effects have been challenging for researchers to assess accurately, this question deserves more than a selective reading of the literature to inform the public and policymakers properly. Indeed, when reviewed comprehensively and with an understanding of key clinical and methodological nuances, the research to date provides consistent and compelling evidence that health insurance coverage significantly improves health outcomes, particularly for adults with treatable conditions (McWilliams 2009).

How many lives would universal coverage save each year? A rigorous body of research tells us the answer is many, probably thousands if not tens of thousands. Short of the perfect study, however, we will never know the exact number. In the meantime, we can let perfect be the enemy of good. Or we can recognize the evidence to date is sufficiently robust for policymakers to proceed confidently with health care reforms that promise substantial health and financial benefits for millions of uninsured Americans.

Invade A Hospital Image: The Daily Dish

The Democratic Party cannot go into the midterm elections with health care reform undone. If it comes down to it, they will go with the budget reconciliation process and let the chips fall. But they absolutely cannot let the best chance to get this done in 50 years slip through their fingers. The question the GOP has to ask themselves, when push comes to shove are they going to remain 100% in opposition when the most important social welfare legislation since Medicare gets done? The original Medicare bill got 17 Republican votes in the Senate and 70 in the House, by the way.