¶ The “young people” of Spain — in their 30s, actually, but still living at home owing to anemic employment — may or may not have begun to shape an alternative government, with “protestors” occupying plazas all over the country, but we can see, in a story by Suzanne Daley, that they are establishing, in Europe, the alternative means of organizing that have already been seen in the Arab Spring. Their complaints, like those in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere, suggest both a generational bottleneck and an associated attrition of jobs. The status quo is clearly no kind of future for the world’s younger people. ¶ Meanwhile, in the United States, the operation of state parks is increasingly undertaken by retired volunteers, as budget cuts, as well as a lack of consensus about what parks are for, erode public funding.  William Yardley reports.

¶ There is nothing like “moral peril” to get Ross Douthat worked up — so worked up that his brain shuts down. His snarky eulogy-not of Dr Jack Kervorkian is a classic of slippery-slope shivers. While we would do anything to prevent rash and violent acts of self-destruction, we want to know what right anyone has to prevent the deliberate suicide of another.

¶ You have to wonder why and how a state-run facility for the mentally and physically disabled could take the name “O D Heck” — no matter how admirable Oswald Heck might have been as a person. Danny Hakim’s report on the sad state of affairs at the Heck Developmental Center, and elsewhere in New York State’s 23,000-staffed Office for People With Developmental Difficulties, makes for tough morning reading. Unfortunately, it fails to confront what it hints at: facilities of this kind do not attract anything like the required number of qualified workers, and probably never will. You have only to read about the demoralization of unqualified workers to see why. It is clear that officials at every level have salved their consciences by throwing money at insitutions like O D Heck, and then strenuously looking the other way. The viability of actual reform is anything but clear. ¶ The real story about the awful outbreak of E coli in Germany (22 dead; more than 600 in intensive care) exploded over the weekend with the profoundly unsurprising news that locally-grown sprouts, and not Spanish cucumbers, might have been the epidemic’s vector. What’s surprising, of course, is that this wasn’t surmised from the get-go, since sprouts are at the top of the epidemiologist’s checklist — and they’re rarely shipped long distances. Calls for Germany to indemnify Spanish farmers for the loss of ripe vegetables make a lot of sense, at least at this point in the story.

¶ Two years ago, we had never heard of Hans Keilson, the German writer who has died in Nederland at the age of 101. As it is, we have read only one of his books, the surprisingly droll Comedy in a Minor Key, but we recommend it to everybody. The gentle good humor of Keilson’s sense of absurdity quickens our optimism about the future of the species.

¶ The French press and the Parti Socialiste are being dragged into the Twentieth Century by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. Anne Mansouret, the mother of Tristane Bonet, the journalist who now describes DSK as having been a “chimpanzee in rut” when he tried to rape her during an interview, regrets counseling her daughter to keep silent about the offense. And now that Ms Mansouret is talking about it, she faces expulsion from the PS. For decades, an able but pathologically libidinous man has been not only protected but nurtured by a code of silence that has no place in the future of France.

¶ Front-page news: “Korean Grocers Are Dwindling.”. Few things could be more foreseeable, even if we hadn’t read Ben Ryder Howe’s My Korean Deli, in which a lawyer sets her mother up with a corner store so that she’ll have something to do. If that’s what running a Korean fruit stand has come to — but of course that’s exactly what they were supposed to come to. These operations, which required little background skill but endless attentiveness, were intended to serve as booster-stage engines that would rocket families out of poverty and into the American middle (or upper-middle!) class.

Instead of taking over the businesses when their parents retire, as some Italian- and Jewish-Americans did generations ago, the children of Koreans are finding work far from the checkout counter, in law firms, banks and hospitals. And parents insist on that, Mr. Lee said.

As success stories go, this one is slightly bittersweet; our beloved Green Village turned into a 7-11 years ago. Now, when is that goshdarned Fairway going to open up across the street?

¶ When we peer into China’s mid-term future, we’re usually pessimistic, and nothing augurs worse, in our view, than the current dynasty’s inability to address the size of Beijing, which really ought to be a very small city or, even better, an urban version of Colonial Williamsburg showcasing the Forbidden City. Like several other world cities — Los Angeles, Petersburg, and Mexico City (Denver also comes to mind) — Beijing is situated in an environment that cannot support large human populations. Problems of water supply and/or air pollution intractably ensue, and in Beijing’s case both are quite bad. Edward Wong’s story about plans to transfer very large amounts of water to the capital from elsewhere in China points ultimately to an official fecklessness that does not bode well for the future of the Chinese Communist Party. ¶ The Calhoun School, over on the other side of Central Park, has a history of embracing progressive ideas about education. The school year there is currently divided into five terms, and instead of 45-minute classes there are 2 hour 10 minute blocks. Quoth senior Robert Ronan: “There are some classes that lend themselves more easily to 2-hour-and-15-minute classes and teachers that can do that, but I sort of feel like a lot of the classes are the same, just stretched.”

¶ While things are going well for Turkey at the moment — a booming economy (and Turkey had a lot of room to boom in) has eased many of the nation’s chronic social tensions — a clamor for war is getting louder  in Azerbaijan. The difference, you might say, is that Azerbaijan, whose population is primarily Turkic, still has an Armenian problem, while Turkey has only the memory of one. A look at most maps (although not those in Wikipedia’s entry) will show why: the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, autonomous since a 1994 cease-fire agreement, displaced tens of thousands of Azerbaijani refugees, many of them still awaiting the restoration of something like their old lives (while many others are children who have grown up on venom). If it were just a question of Azerbaijan versus Armenia, the enclave would be reclaimed by Azerbaijan in a trice. But Russia would certainly come to Armenia’s aid. It does make one rather wish that the Ottoman Empire were still with us, except that the sultans were far better at conquering than they were at governing — and Azerbaijan wasn’t part of the empire, anyway.

¶ We don’t know what made the Blank-Simkin case newsworthy enough for coverage in this morning’s Times; the case, which seeks to reopen a divorce agreement on grounds of “mutual mistake,” is currently between appeals, and the next decision isn’t expected until later this year. But Peter Lattman’s report leaves us wondering why there’s a case at all. Like Laura Blank, we can’t see why her ex-husband, Paul Weiss partner Steven Simkin, should be allowed to reappropriate a portion of her settlement because he (subsequently) discovered that his account with Bernard Madoff was worthless. Comparing that account to a counterfeit Stradivarius is such a bogus analogy that we can attribute only to latent judicial sexism. ¶ Don’t miss Lawrence Altman’s summary of thirty years of AIDS reporting. “A common attitude was that all diseases were known…”

¶ One of the victims of Daren Palmer’s Ponzi scheme seems to want it known that she was ripped off by a nicer sort of thief: Bernard Madoff was probably not the sort of man to get down on his knees and clean sanctuary floors. Her point goes to the heart of affinity fraud; Mr Madoff’s victims would have had a number of unflattering names for such a guy, and “neighborly” would not be among them. ¶ Call us cynics, but we’re not nearly as interested in right and wrong as we are in political viability (the alternative to which is the wrongest wrong of them all, social or political breakdown), so we’ll be watching to see whether Michael Bloomberg’s emphatic endorsement of same-sex marriage achieves its intended effect, which will have more to do with the mayor’s personal patronage — he is a generous political contributor, after all — than with his bully pulpit in City Hall. If this mayor’s efforts fail to bring about marriage equality in New York State, our conviction that political progressives don’t know what they’re doing will plumb new depths. ¶ From our deep reading in the history of the so-called Dark Ages we have found few barbarities to compare with the American treatment of recreational drugs and drug addiction. In the evitable museum that will be erected to remind us of our benightedness, we hope that prominent display will be made available for the children’s coloring books into which solutions of the addiction-treatment drug Suboxone have been painted. We’d be sorry to see them cluttering a museum of American ingenuity.

¶ We think that Agnes Treuren, of the Dutch Consulate here (and a resident of the Upper East Side), must be mistaken: she claims never to have been on the “Fon Weig” Expressway. (That’s ‘Weig’ as in ‘leg,’ according to Ms Treuren.) It is impossible to avoid the Van Wyck when arriving or departing from New York City via Kennedy Airport, without going perversely out of your way. Wouldn’t you know: Bronson Van Wyck, descendent of the first mayor of Greater New York whose name Robert Moses slapped on the highway (and a genuine Knickerbocker), is an affable party planner who calls himself “Van Wike.” ¶ A new statue of John Paul II in Rome, outside the railroad terminal, is exciting all the disgust of a future masterpiece. The sculptor, Oliviero Rainaldi, says he usually gets more compliments on his work, which is sweet. Rainaldi’s inpiration was a photograph of the late pope enfolding a child in his robes. In the statue, the child has been replaced by a cavity. Hmmm… ¶ We think that Ashton Kutcher is loaded with geniality, but is a shrewd venture capitalist? Read Jenna Wortham’s breathlessly admiring story as many times as you like. We think that the actor’s value lies rather in the company he keeps, and his willingness to share what he hears. Which is plenty good enough!

¶ We thought that Huguette Clark was already dead, but, no, we had only known that she was probably not long for this world. A few months ago (?), the Times ran a story about the New Canaan estate that Ms Clark’s representatives had put on the market (for $24 million). That was the first that we’d heard of the reclusive heiress, who took her collection of dolls and dollhouses and checked into the hospital right down the street from us about a quarter of a century ago. (The hospital is no longer with us, either.) There is something so idle and unformed about the life that has come to an end after 104 years that one feels both protectively relieved that Ms Clark never heard the sound of tumbrils at her door — and also a tad disappointed.

¶ Our view of the Central Country as an unstable giant is painfully confirmed by Keith Bradsher’s report about the problems bedevilling China’s electric power supply. The environmental side-effects are undoubtedly the worst of it — China is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse emissions, spewing ever-larger quantities of unwanted gases into the atmosphere — but trouble in the near teerm lurks in the disingenuous relations among the powers that be. When the grid operators defy Beijing’s demands for supply, only to watch their profits eaten up by trhe demands of environmental regulators, it would be healthy if they could squabble more openly, but instead, in the Chinese manner, they must smile unanimously for the camera — until one of them pulls the rug out from under the others and all hell breaks lose. Well, maybe this time, it will be different. ¶ We thank the Supreme Court and its rulings on campaign finance for turning Congress into a pack of dogs: “Mr. Netanyahu received so many standing ovations that at times it appeared that the lawmakers were listening to his speech standing up,” writes Helene Cooper. Just like dogs, they wagged their tails at the prospect of handouts from AIPAC and other lobbying groups — and that is the only policy that they understand.

¶ We’re not sure that Dwight Garner intended his review of Chester Brown’s Paying For It to be a rave, but we’ve lost no time ordering a copy. We feel a compare-and-contrast with Alison Bechdel coming up!  ¶ Playwright Yasmina Reza has a sound approach to interviews: “I try to structure interviews in such a way that I say nothing. It’s better for me to be mysterious.” Which is fine, because — and we really don’t mean to be snarky — her very entertaining plays are not.

¶ Manchester footballer Ryan Giggs’s “superinjunction” problem looks, from our Olympian perch, like a made-to-order generational culture clash. Is the doddering British judiciary going ga-ga over reputations? Or does an infantile Twitter need an intervention? What made us laugh was the technico-legalooneyness that allowed the British press to circumvent the inunction and mention Mr Giggs’s alleged affair with a Big Brother contestant (a lady!) once the matter was bruited in House of Commons discussion. We were reminded, in any case, that it has been months and months and months since we last checked our Twitter account. But nothing ever happens on Olympus; that’s the point. ¶ Jean-Claude Trichet storms out of a meeting rather than discuss the restructuring of the the European Central Bank’s Greek bond holdings, and Landon Thomas concludes his account of the mess by quoting Edward Hugh, the genius behind A Fistful of Dollars. Meanwhile, the Spaniards and the Italians are inveighing against the prospect of Greek backsliding. Too bad about that Rapture thing on Saturday.

¶ The weather here in New York is so grimly unseasonable that the sad story of Joseph Brooks, composer of the song “You Light Up My Life,” seems like the only story worth telling. Joseph Goldstein’s news item does not appear to be an obituary. What pathos! ¶ David Carr considers electrocuting Nancy Grace. Not really! He is cheered to note that her falling ratings may induce a fate worse than death. If we took a dimmer view of human nature, we would not be surprised that standing up for the victims of crimes could involve so much unattactive behavior.

¶ Floyd Norris writes sardonically about what may prove to be the dooming flaw of late-stage capitalism: the strange political power of big-time losers (ie banks) to compel governments to bail tham out. ¶ It’s not clear why now, but “China Admits Problems With Three Gorges Dam.” Opposition within China to this monumentally disruptive state project has never been quieted. Orville Schell applauds; we wonder what Henry Kissinger is thinking. ¶ We’ll believe that Peter Thiel is a genuine innovator when we learn that he is experimenting with different business models, especially as regards rentier investment. Until then, we’re still happy to applaud his $100,000 grants to whizbang students willing to drop out of college to write their own educations.

¶ We’re taking the day off, but we wouldn’t want you to miss the great write-up of Christine Lagarde, the formidable Frenchwoman who may fill out Daniel Strauss-Kahn’s term at the IMF. ¶ Department of Duh: privatizing prisons does not save taxpayers’ dollars. Don’t expect conservative ideologues, who insist on the right to be as brain dead for as long as their Soviet counterparts were in the last century, to pay much attention to the findings.

¶ If we learned nothing else from William Doyle’s magisterial history of the French Revolution, we did grasp this: the Roman Catholic Church (as a pernicious secular organization) will die only from within. Efforts to kill it will only make it stronger. So we’re very pleased that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has fallen for the “Woodstock defense” as an explanation for priestly predations on pubertals. This amounts to blaming two sets of victims. Bravo!

¶ Our eyebrows cocked at the mention of an understandably surreptitious luxury private club in the Jian Fu Palace Garden of the Imperial Palace in Beijing. We hope to hear more about this operation, which appears to be the backwash of a preservation project designed by Pei Partnership Architects and funded by Hong Kong jillionaires. Forbidden fun in the Forbidden City! Doesn’t get any better. All they need is DSK. ¶ Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the goose from the golden eggs — which is the one that will work better in your portfolio? Silicon Valley’s ground assault walkers (Google, Facebook, &c) have been buying up start-ups not in order to own the latest gizmos but to shut them down and “acqhire” the engineers who designed them. It will be interesting to see if the fizz kills the whiz. ¶ Now it can be told: Elaine Kaufman’s eponymous eatery, long a watering hole for literary lions, wasn’t doing so well even before she died. Not six months later, her heir, Diane Becker, is closing the joing. “The nature of a business is to make a profit.” Hemingway himself couldn’t have put it more concisely.