¶ “The most pronounced development in banking today is that executives have become bolder as their business has gotten worse.” That’s howJesse Eisinger, a ProPublica financial reporter appearing in the Times’s DealBook, begins a politely indignant essay on the federal government’s mollycoddling of big bankers. What the bankers have become bolder about, however, is guaranteeing their infantile behavior, by demanding further protection from downsides and insulation from litigation and freedom from regulation. They want their cake and they want to eat it and then they want another cake! We wish that Mr Eisinger had put it like that, because there is, otherwise, nothing remotely bold about what bankers are up to these days. ¶ But if you really want cheering up, don’t miss Azam Ahmed’s story about Armageddon investing, which involves losing millions every day so that you’ll have gazillions when the markets go to hell, after attack by black swans with fat tails. The worst of it is that something constructive might be done with these assets. We’re only sorry that excitably pusillanimous investors aren’t going to be the only ones who get what they’re paying for.

¶ Don’t get us wrong: we agree that Bernard Madoff’s sustained defrauding of investors was very, very bad. But “extraordinarily evil“? That’s what Judge Denny Chin called it in his decision to sentence Mr Madoff to 150 years in prison. (We’re not sure why this is news two years later, but let that pass.) Quite aside from our discomfort with the idea of “evil” — especially as attached to a person (in the form of an onerous sentence), and especially in connection with a nonviolent crime against property — we have a big problem with the fact that Mr Madoff’s loser-take-all condition. The complete story remains to be told, but from the start it was clear that the Ponzi scheme was hugely enabled by complaisant counterparties at “feeder” funds and at banks — not to mention sophisticated investors who really ought to have known better; not to mention the wilfully stymied enforcers at the SEC. This was a case, moreover, in which it was the emperor himself who made the announcement about his invisible assets. We’re not saying that Bernie Madoff’s sentence ought to be reduced. We’re just saying that, standing alone as it does, it’s unconscionable.

¶ An inevitable problem has finally arrived: new drugs that extend the lives of prostate cancer patients by months — by two years at most — are going to be very expensive. As a preliminary pushback, Medicare and insurers alike are expected to underwrite the drugs’ expense only if they are used according to the instructions on the label. This restriction will narrow the field of eligible patients. The larger question of affordability is not, for the moment, being addressed. But the issue that will lead to discussion of triage and rationing is squarely in front of us. How much are “marginal” extenstions of life worth — in a world where an one more day of life is “marginal” only for other people? Also unaddressed is the drugs’ actual costs to pharmaceutical companies, an accounting jungle if ever there was one.

¶ We are, of course, thrilled that same-sex marriages will be permitted in our home state, but we remain sobered by the thought that the victory, like too much political action these days, was to some extent purchased, in this case by wealthy Republican donors who happen to be progressive on this issue. Michael Barbaro’s compelling behind-the-scenes report in yesterday’s Times details, among other things, the persuasion of Rochester senator James Alesi.

¶ The effects of what cognitive scientists call time discounting can be felt in  a side-by-side comparison of this morning’s two big crime stories, the capture of Whitey Bulger in Santa Monica and the denial of bail for David Laffer in Central Islip. In a horrific drugstore robbery, Mr Laffer killed four people in cold blood last Sunday in Medford, Long Island. That’s what’s horrific about it: it happened last Sunday. ¶ Whitey Bulger killed quite a few more people that David Laffer, but that was long ago, and the old Boston gang leader has been living quietly in Santa Monica for over fifteen years. Another thing that makes Bulger’s crimes less horrific is what we might call intimacy discounting: Bulger knew some of his victims before he killed them. Laffer’s victims were all strangers — random strangers in two cases.

¶ We were wondering when the Times would get round to mentioning the little problem that Mahmound Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s two presidents, is having with his “divine” counterpart, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and the clerical class that actually runs things in Iran. Today must be the day: Neil MacFarquhar writes from Cario. The nub of the problem, as might have been expected, is that Mr Ahmadinejad is trying to build up a power base of his own. Unlike his scholarly predecessors, the secular president is very popular among the large class of poor Iranians. But he is also given to bold, somewhat swashbuckling gestures that don’t always come off as well in political life as they do in the movies.

¶ The common-law meaning of the term “waste” has nothing to do with garbage, and everything to do with the failure of stewardship that has allowed politicians to yield to public unions’ pension demands throughout the decades of postwar prosperity. Charles Duhigg examines the situation on the ground in Costa Mesa, California, where a conservative real-estate developer, Jim Righeimer, has been attacked for his fight for fiscal responsibility. There are no heroes in this battle, which, ultimately, pits self-interests against the common weal. ¶ It’s nice to know, though, that California’s legislators won’t be paid until they do their job, and present a balanced budget to Governor Jerry Brown.

¶ In his column this morning, Joe Nocera writes about capital requirements for banks (the subject of an international convention that will be known as “Basel III”) and how unpopular they are with bankers. “Banks always want capital requirements to be as low as possible, because the less capital they have, the more risk they can take and thus the more money they can make (and the bigger the executives’ bonuses).” Underline that parenthesis — well-compensated executives everywhere identify with their paladin-rentier class far more than they do with any employer/institution — and ask yourself, as we do, if greater risk-taking by (not very bright) bankers leads to an increase in freaked-out panic, as we saw in the credit crunch of 2008. Meanwhile, note that the Rentier Party (a/k/a “Republican”) is obstructing the legislative imposition of higher capital requirements, taking the view, shared by no one who is not a rentier or a rentier’s tool, that capital requirements are unnecessary.

¶ Large American corporations claim that they’ll use “repatriated” profits — fund that they’ll shift to their United States balance sheets in the event of a tax holiday — to create jobs. As David Kocieniewski points out, “But that’s not how it worked last time,” in 2005, and there’s no reason to think that a replay would work out any differently. Those repatriated funds would almost certainly be shuttled into the arms of shareholders, and jobs be damned. ¶ David Carr tells a similar story in his unusual advance review of a book that’s going to come out next week, James O’Shea’s The Deal From Hell, a gruesome account of vicissitudes that the once-great Los Angeles Times has experienced since the Chandler family decided to sell it. Similar in that business considerations are grotesquely subordinated to short-term one-time gains.

¶ Amidst the developing, pending, and long-term stories that flood the pages of today’s Times, two columns stand out for offering something to think about. In his About New York space, Jim Dwyer questions the logic of reducing crime by arresting blacks and Latinos for possessing small amounts of marijuana (and then dismissing the charges), while affluent whites, among whom marijuana use is “rampant,” are spared the inconvenience. Dwyer assails, quite rightly in our view, the spurious notion that a correlation between pot and crime is any more meaningful than the correlation between pot and banking or academia that equal prosecution of white New Yorkers would undoubtedly reveal. ¶ Looking to history, Sara Lipton finds that, in at least one regard, the pop psychology of the Middle Ages was the opposite of our own: manly men “ruled themselves,” controlling their libidinous urges. Shameless sexual voracity was thought to be characteristic of women. Medieval men were expected to outgrow adolescence — reading about the hockey riot in Vancouver, by the way, lighted a light bulb in our little brain: sports is cosmetic surgery for men — and that was a good thing; the bad thing was that men ruled their households as well as themselves. The point isn’t that they understood things bettter in the so-called Age of Faith, but rather it’s a reminder that pop psychology is pop psychology: the reflection of shifting, unvoiced concerns about life.

¶ Our conviction that the Democratic Party is no more than the useless rump of a once-farseeing political organization has been unpleasantly strengthened by its now-successful pursuit of Anthony Weiner’s resignation from Congress. This ought to have been a “teaching opportunity” for Party leaders, given the utterly tendentious and/or hypocritical nature of the revelations in the case; but, no. There are no teachers among the Democrats (except maybe Barney Frank). That anyone would pay attention to discredited political hack Nancy Pelosi makes the whole business doubly depressing.

¶ The Chinese Navy is rattling sabers, or whatever it is that gunboats do, in the surrounding seas, irritating Japanese, Vietnamese, and Philippine neighbors. This quasi-belligerent activity is one thing that is truly new about China, which has not been much of a maritime presence since the Ming emperors scuttled Zheng He’s flotilla in the Fifteenth Century. With no traditions to guide the captains of its expanding, up-to-date fleet, this land of venerable traditions is bound to behave with adolescent rashness. ¶ Which isn’t to say that traditions are necessarily a good thing. China’s lead-poisoning nightmare couldn’t have a more familiar ring. Sharon LaFraniere writes,

Such scenes of heartbreak and anger have been repeated across China in recent months with the discovery of case after case of mass lead poisoning — together with instances in which local governments tried to cover them up.

¶ Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler have a story, certainly, but is “In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust” the best title? Nowhere do the reporters demonstrate that the response of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan to the Fukushima disaster was actually crippled by his decision to bypass a bureaucratic apparatus that he had good reason to mistrust. The closest argument for hampered effectiveness concerns the use of an Education Ministry weather-analysis system that would have advised civilians not to take refuge in an area covered by the reactors’ radioactive plume.

Mr. Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.

This makes us even more sympathetic to Mr Kan’s misgivings. The reporters seem to be under the impression that speed and “decisiveness” are invariably good things in a crisis. This leads them to step over the real story, which concerns plant manager Masao Yoshida’s heroic insubordination.

¶ Come, peer into our crystal ball for a glimpse — more than a glimpse — of the future of manufacturing. Chances are, if you’ve half a brain, what you see won’t surprise you. “Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers” — sorry, the crystal ball belongs to reporter Catherine Rampell — suggest that we ponder whether largely inevitable trends require tax incentives. Companies like Vista Technologies will do well no matter what. We need to give their accounting advantages to firms that rely on people, not machinery, to get the job done.

¶ When Sanjay Kaul jokes that the sprawling development south of New Delhi is like the United States, he means that there isn’t much in the way of res publica on offer. “You’re on your own.” It is hard to read about the political dysfunction that has prevented the construction of water supplies, sewage systems, and public transport in Gurgaon, a town that’s run directly by its state (or not), without any municipal government, without seeing the realization of a right-wing and libertarian dream for the American future.

¶ Jenny Anderson’s front-page article about parents who supplement their children’s already expensive private schooling with private tutoring has rocketed our temper into Fulmination Mode, but we shall try for self-restraint. What’s wrong with private tutoring? It’s an absolute insult to the private school. A child in need of remedial education is probably at the wrong school. A child honing marginal advantages over fellow-students is a sociopath. A private school charging fees of upwards of $50,000 per year ought to be expected to provide everything needed. It ought to expel students whose parents doubt its ability in this regard; and it ought to create an atmosphere in which mechanical overachievement is manifestly objectionable. Private tutoring in private schools is the sort of thing that leads a friend of ours to shrug off the brouhaha by dismissing the schools themselves: “I thought probably they were just breeding pens for the type of human who eventually goes to Yale on the suspect credentials that they provide.”

¶ 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.

¶ 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.

¶ 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.

¶ 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.”