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Metadata
| Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
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Teaching the Adult Novice
I've recently started learning to play squash. At the recommendation of my principal (amateur, generously volunteer) tutor, I took a lesson from a club pro. His demeanor crystallized for me what exactly it is about a paid tutor that I so dislike. This pro confused my inexperience and incompetence at hitting a squash ball with mental retardation. It's true that my swing mechanics are flawed, as one would expect from someone who has a sum-total of about 10 hours of playing experience. That does not, however, mean, that I require everything to be explained to me in the slow voice, accompanied by the broad gestures and wide-eyed expressions one would use in speaking to a six-year-old!
[Ben H.: 9/2/08 11:35] |
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If I Had to Do the Same Again, I Would My Friend
This election is starting to resemble a Christopher Buckley novel. My limited political sense: the selection of soon-to-be-grandmother Sarah Palin remains something of a masterstroke, although a calculated risk. This will be my last political comment for wa while, in the interest of preserving Doug's equanimity.
Addendum: Poor Bristol Palin's pregnancy made the news via an interesting path. It seems her pregnancy was an open secret in Alaska, but it was never raised directly, and given the shield to candidates' children, likely could not have been. Fortuitously, a rumor emerged on left wing sites that Sarah Palin falsely claimed Trig Palin to be her child, when in fact it was Bristol's. This rumor, created a unacceptable risk that legitimate news gathering (a cover up like that would be news) would focus on Bristol's medical history. This, in turn, forced the McCain camp to released the real story. Now, conspiracy theories are always suspect, and coincidence more common than we think; But *if* I were trying to get the story of Bristol Palin's pregnancy into the news, I would have employed a similar approach.
[Ben A.: 9/1/08 18:50] |
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Final Fanfare For The Common-Law Man
The unfitness of the current crop of American voters for self-governance is now clear enough that no more election-related comment is warranted; I will stop making it. George W. Bush's reelection was probably proof enough of their unfitness that I should have made this vow four years ago. Electorates change, though, and one can always hope they'll change for the better. What convinces me that this hasn't happened is not, in fact, last week's vice-presidential pick. It is what I learned after realizing that I didn't have an inkling about the Republican health-care policy. I mean in particular the sequence of words that the McCain campaign has put under the heading "Straight Talk On Health Care Reform". A people that knows its health care system is wrecked, and that does not immediately stop taking seriously a man who would put his name to those words, is a people that, as I said, is not fit for self-governance.
This is not to say that I hold all of America in contempt. The states we'd consider moving back to are not so bad and we feel right at home there. And the other states might always, to repeat, improve.
So here's to the common-law man -- may your instincts prove wise, may your power to look into others' souls and see goodness prove trustworthy, may blessings follow you to the end of your days.
[Doug: 9/1/08 03:33] |
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Idiocracy: QED
Sawdust drifting into his salt-and-pepper beard, [some Alaskan acquaintance of future VP] added: "She seems like she cares about the common-law man. I feel like she cares about me."
In two short sentences this man has captured everything that posterity needs to know about the present election. (From the WaPo.)
[Doug: 8/31/08 00:45] |
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More qualified than John Edwards, as qualified a Ferraro. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
[Ben A.: 8/30/08 07:47] |
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I assume he will pick a woman to grab the Hillary die-hards. My prediction that McCain wins in any case remains in force. Obama says America is a better country than this, but I've seen little proof of that.
[Doug: 8/29/08 10:37] |
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Sign #14 That You Have A Drinking Problem
The semicolon.
One 21-year-old man from Essex, for instance, said that his consumption the night before had been five beers; six specialty drinks combined with Baileys, tequila, absinthe, ouzo, vodka, gin and orange juice; five vodka and lime drinks; and then five cans of Stella Artois, all of which, he said, emboldened him to pick up a woman to spend the night with.
From a wonderful Times story about British tourists. But shouldn't the comma after "Artois" really be another semicolon? Otherwise the scope of the last clause seems wrong ... however, I did learn something new about punctuation here, namely that there is no apostrophe in Baileys ...
[Doug: 8/24/08 13:21] |
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Thought For The Day
Despite the rainy dreary weather that has settled in here, I am ultimately happier to be beset by Parisian languors than by Sumatran langurs.
[Doug: 8/22/08 16:41] |
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Why Lie?
Two other differences between "our" lies and "their" lies strike me. First, the objective of the lies. The "lies" (I put it in quotes because some of the statements you note, Doug, I would classify as having some probability of being mistakes rather than lies) of the US administration you cite are largely instrumental. The administration misleads in order to sell a policy to the public or to exculpate itself of behavior for which it would otherwise face legal or electoral consequences. Chinese lies (and for a great survey of these, I recommend to you the new book of our Harvard coeval Phil Pan) have very little instrumental purpose, but rather serve to preserve or protect the prestige of the regime and country. A great example of this (from Pan's book) is the Chinese government effort to cover up the SARS epidemic.
Second, it the degree to which complicity in the lie is demanded of ordinary citizens. Pan writes quite a bit about the regime's attitude toward its own history. It has erased great parts of it, and invented others out of whole cloth. The regime goes to great lengths to harrass and punish any of its citizens who questions the lie and even goes as far as demanding participation in it (the distinction between deterring dissent and enforcing participation was one that I recall Daniel Goldhagen argued was a convenient way to distinguish authoritarianism from totalitarianism).
[Ben H.: 8/22/08 11:36] |
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Quite Right
I didn't mean to suggest that, because the Chinese government's mendacity can be compared with our own government's, its overall merit can be compared likewise.
[Doug: 8/22/08 10:45] |
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2.9 Times More Likely to Lie; 10^2000 More Times Likely to Control All Newspapers
I generally endorse attempts to explain differences of kind as differences of degree. We think too often in terms of yes/no and too little in terms of how often and how probable.
This is not one of these times. If I were to distinguish the government of say, France, from that of China I would note the lack of: a) state control of all mass media, b)persecution of political dissidents, c) government-directed internet firewalls, d) the other machinery of an authoritarian propaganda state. The objection is not that China's government misleads -- which, as you point out all governments do to some degree -- but that it participates the same habits of systematic information control as all closed regimes. Seriously, the Chinese government blocked access to the iTunes store because it had a "Songs for Tibet" LP. I agree -- this isn't Soviet, but it's surely more closed than open.
[Ben A.: 8/22/08 09:04] |
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If We've Learned Anything in the 20th Century
It's that closed societies and autocracies just lie, lie, and lie some more. I hope at least some watchers take that message away from Olympic games. Rock on Rick Reilly.
[Ben A.: 8/21/08 22:28] |
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"Free" Gift!
It's good to see that American higher education hasn't lost its talent for generating bad ideas. The latest: several universities plan to give incoming students "free" iPods and/or iPhones. Yes, indeed, you read correctly. The university encourages students to have a small, WiFi enabled device, filled with distractions, one that can be more easily carried to class than a laptop. Because the biggest problem university students face today is the scarcity of entertainment. That and excessive focus.
At least it helps financially strapped students, though. iPods are expensive. Here's your "free" iPod. Now, uh, I regret to have to inform you that tuition for this semester has increased 8% over last semester. Thanks for choosing LuxU! And be sure to check out the new climbing wall at the Student FunZone!
Another example of the bundling fallacy! These same students will a few years hence thrill that their health insurance covers chiropractors, birth control, and, heck, possibly even toothpaste, and a few minutes later bemoan the cost of premiums. This raises a broader question: when is bundling appropriate? A few situations that jump to mind.
Externalities If foregoing an unbundled good/service imposes a negative externality on everyone consuming the main good/service, or if those who forego the unbundled service get a positive externality when everybody else consumes it, then there is a case for bundling. For example, if airlines start charging for the use of the air conditioning nozzle above your seat, there would be a strong temptation to free ride. Likewise, those who try to save 5 bucks by foregoing air might start emanating an unpleasant odor that bothers everybody else.
Transaction Costs It makes sense to bundle when transaction costs are high for unbundled services relative to their value. It would be a pain in the ass to try to charge and collect from every Club Med guest each time they make a run at the buffet.
Cross-subsidy: If you didn't have to pay for an entire classical music concert program (as opposed to having the option of paying by piece), modern composers would go hungry. The programming establishment has decided that modern pieces are worth of support, and so cross-subsidizes them at the expense of warhorses. Without bundling, the cross-subsidies wouldn't work. Of course, this sort of bundling is a kind of assault on customer preferences.
[Ben H.: 8/21/08 08:41] |
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Ripping. As for Ben H, I'm sure he fancies a spot of toad in the hole on Frognal road. No?
[Doug: 8/20/08 01:44] |
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I am to blame here -- and am scheduling only now. My suspicion is that we will be in Blighty sometime between 9/13 and 9/30.
[Ben A.: 8/18/08 17:00] |
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McCain And ABBA
The hardened warrior/soft disco contrast is amusing. What would be truly surprising is a politician who avowed musical tastes outside the popular/junk category entirely. How quickly that became impossible! "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture."
Addendum: As for the new Mamma Mia! movie, I'm sure it sucks. Anthony Lane hated it and I have limitless trust in any critic who was annoyed enough by The Hours that, six years after the fact, he still goes out of his way to say things like (and this is on the second page of the article just linked to, in his review of "Journey to the Center of the Earth") "I can’t help thinking of other films that would have been improved by a blast of 3-D; I might not have nodded off during “The Hours,” for example, if regularly prodded awake by the giant schnozzle of Virginia Woolf."
[Doug: 8/17/08 16:50] |
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Beams are gonna blind me, but I won't feel blue
“Now look, everybody says, ‘I hate ABBA. Oh ABBA, how terrible! Blah blah blah,’” he said. “How come everybody goes to ‘Mamma Mia?’ Huh? I mean really, seriously, huh? ‘I hate ABBA, they’re no good, you know.’ Well, everybody goes. They’ve been selling out for years.”
source
The Harvard Spam Box
It's more like "come to the mahogany paneled room, discuss matters of import with the Good and Great, stand among your peers in might and consequence: entry fee, $5,000." Or to put it another way "extend your manhood."
[Ben A.: 8/17/08 13:04] |
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I've decided there must be an email box out there -- one that I used for some brief period some years ago, maybe the one attached to the crossword website I maintained for a while, or a Yahoo one I abandoned when it sank with spam -- into which have gone all the messages that are my right as a no-longer-recent Harvard graduate: senators' requests for advice, job offers from august mahogany-panelled institutions, invitations to brainstorming sessions on Mediterranean islands and to burgundy tastings at novelists' lower-Fifth-avenue apartments. Really, it's the only explanation. Now where did I put the %$@#*! password!?
[Doug: 8/15/08 16:17] |
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South Ossa-what, now?
If Ben H can't figure this one out, you can imagine where I stand. The MSM pundits seemed lost, too, as if they'd scrambled to call as many phonebook numbers as possible with names ending in "vili", and then tried to stitch some coherent narrative out of what they heard. At least Abkhazia is safe with all those Dementors to protect it.
[Doug: 8/14/08 11:15] |
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Ossetia Footnote
The Russians have lost anywhere between four (their own admission) and nineteen (Georgia's claim) aircraft so far. This, in a conflict against a country which has grounded its own meagre airforce. From what I've seen in the press, the Russiana air force has been running something like 50 sorties a day for the past 3 days. Even if the Russians have lost only 4 aircraft: 4 losses for 150 sorties? That's pathetic...
[Ben H.: 8/11/08 10:39] |
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I have to admit, I'm a bit at a loss on this one. The PM of Georgia (who I know from his days at Bank of Georgia) was at our office a month ago. As you can imagine, I asked whether we should expect any sort of movement on South Ossetia or Abkhazia. He gave the same response as he has in the past, namely that the regions do not presently contribute economically to Georgia and that the status quo doesn't present a problem for Georgia. Imagine my surprise, then, when President Saaskashvili unleashed a full scale invasion of South Ossetia. I simply can't figure what he was thinking. South Ossetia is economically worthless. There certainly no urgency in taking it back from that perspective. Elections took place earlier this year, so the Georgian regime has no need of using a military adventure to rally support. It is true that the Ossetians had been sporadically shelling villages on the Georgian side of the border, but if Israel can suck up rocket attacks from Gaza without resorting to full-scale re-occupation, Georgia could have refrained from a retaliatory invasion. Did Saakashvili believe he had the support of the West against any potential Russian retaliation? I can't see that he would make such an elementary mistake. The US is tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush administration is pretty much a lame duck at this point. And the odds are for a successor administration with Carterite foreign-policy leanings. EU leadership at the moment rests in the hands of the French. Has Saakashvili heard the phrase pourquoi mourir pour Danzig? Did he think the Russians wouldn't dare a draconian response during the Olympics? I can't imagine that someone who grew up under the Soviet system would believe a silovik like Putin would allow himself to be constrained by sanctimonious humbug like "the Olympic truce". That leaves the possibility that Saakashvili is playing a deeper game. Perhaps he hopes Russia in some way will overreach, inviting an international effort to mediate? Maybe he'd actually like to be rid of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and the only political way to do so is to lose them valiantly? I don't know... What do you guys think?
For what it is worth, I don't entirely understand the Russians' thinking either. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are just as worthless to Russia as to Georgia. Getting a reputation for international villainy isn't without cost. For Russia, is this an opportunity to make a point to the West about Kosovo? Or is this more a question of the interests of specific Russians rather than the Russian national interest. Many insiders have made a mint out of the lawless spaces of post-Soviet frozen conflicts. Military action means rebuilding contracts, which means Kokoity and his Russian puppetmasters have even richer flows to steal...
[Ben H.: 8/11/08 10:00] |
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Ossetia
Ben H, we wait your more informed view. My default setting remains "never let the Russians see a sign of weakness." Let me know.
[Ben A.: 8/11/08 09:12] |
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Interesting Cyberwarfare Datapoint
I received an email today from the management of the largest bank in Georgia. One point they noted: the government has ordered the banks to shut down their internet banking portals. This does not appear to be based on a concern about a bank run -- branches and call centers remain open. Rather, I conclude that having seen what happened to Estonia last year during the "Red Army Memorial" controversy, the Georgian government worries about the potential for Russian cyberattacks.
[Ben H.: 8/11/08 06:10] |
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Late Reply To Kipling Thread
My thanks to Ben A for recommending Kim have already been conveyed. I second all the praise he gives it. I also second the doubts about Edward Said's take on it. I read the Said-edited Penguin version. The Foreward, which I read afterwards, was fixated on racism and colonialism to a degree that seemed, well, crazy, given the novel I'd just read. One might as pertinently have restricted the foreward to a discussion of serpent imagery in the novel. Then there were the bizarre textual notes -- I recall flipping to the end to be told something completely obvious to anyone not living in a cave, and then reading baffling Hindi words without notes, and having to look them up on the internet. Maybe Said figured that explicating the Hindi terms would be acquiescing to anglocentric hegemony or something. I recall that when Said died, the famous contrarian C. Hitchens wrote a glowing eulogy. That is almost sufficient, I think, to write Said off as a twat.
[Doug: 8/6/08 23:52] |
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Newport Beach Anecdote
I've already blogged extensively about Mallhalla, a.k.a. Orange County. The main anecdote I want to share about the three weeks we just spent there concerns the tennis court of the home adjoining my in-laws'. Nobody had played on it during our previous stays. It simply lay there as a testament to its owners' wealth. This time something had changed: the net was removed, and at the geometric center of the court stood two adjoining giant beige tents. I wondered silently for a few days what purpose they served, until one of the kids claimed to have seen something entering or exiting the tents: "A car, but instead of the doors opening on the side, they opened up." At this point the tents gained an iconic aura for me. Centered within the rectilinear court markings, exactly ten cubits by eight, they seemed a Tabernacle of Pure Money, inside which some mystagog might reveal to the most assiduous seekers the Final Mysteries of consumerism.
I should say that my in-laws themselves remain miraculously untouched by the culture around them. Their pediatrician's office featured a flat-screen consumption-inducer and when Mylie Cyrus flared up on it I asked my six-year-old niece what she thought of Hannah Montana. She had never heard the name. As I say, miraculous.
[Doug: 8/6/08 23:32] |
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Apprentice?
If you guys would like an apprentice to do the simpler statistical analyses relevant to your baseball comments, you should talk to my eight-year-old nephew. He gets up every morning, seeks out the sports pages, and basically memorizes all the baseball scores and major headlines. He asked me my opinion on this big Red Sox-Yankees-et al. trade and I had to admit I had none, understanding none of it. He's also in the process of memorizing all the US presidents in order. That sort of mind seems to gravitate towards baseball as surely as baseballs gravitate back to earth when hit. Probably I would be happier if I had that sort of mind. How far this is from being the case is revealed by the consideration that, for me, everything between Jackson and Lincoln is basically one long John Taylor Harrison administration.
[Doug: 8/3/08 00:13] |
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Nomar II
Big, big trade for the Sox. Like the trade of Nomar, this is one that doesn't make much sense on paper but may perhaps spark the team. Jason Bay brings a wonderful reputation with him, but he's no Manny with the bat. Who is?
[Ben A.: 7/31/08 18:07] |
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The Exception to Kipling's Humanism
"One thing we must get into our thick heads is that wherever the German -- man or woman -- gets a suitable culture to thrive in he or she means death and loss to civilized people, precisely as germs of any disease suffered to multiply mean death or loss to mankind."
Hey, they don't call them Germans for nothing! (Thank you, thank you, I'll be appearing here at Grossinger's all week!)
[Ben H.: 7/31/08 14:37] |
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The Reason for My Non-Existent Posting...
I spent the last five days in Jackson, WY. The view of the Tetons from the hiking trails below was made, if anything, more picturesque by the light haze drifting over from the California wildfires.
[Ben H.: 7/31/08 14:29] |
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It's not unlike the Yankees of my youth to stretch to acquire overweight, over-the-hill future Hall-of-Famers in a desperate bid for a post-season berth. But let's face it -- Jose Molina is feeble and the Yankees needed to do something with Posada out for the season. At least in this case, the team has only committed to Pudge for a year, and gave up in exchange a guy also in his walk year. As for Farnsworth, I admit he's looked good in the last 2 months, but I remain suspicious. He has a long track record as a combustion artist and it would take more than a couple of good months to convince me that he's finally lived up to his potential. Watch this space for bullpen developments. I hope we see something more exciting than the promotion of Brian Bruney...
[Ben H.: 7/31/08 06:47] |
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Frum on Kim
David Frum comments on Kipling's masterpiece.
My thoughts:
1) As per usual, Frum exhibits excellent judgment on literature. More political commentators should read deeply in fiction. Frum and Hitchens are the only two who come to mind. An aside: If there is a commentator of the left who also excels at criticism, I should like to know him/her. Most of the young gun left-bloggers (Yglesias, Klein) appear completely unlettered. Chris Hayes of The Nation seems better. I imagine French lefties read books, although it's probably all Beckett novels...
2) That said, Frum gives too much credit to Said. There is little embarrassing in Kim. To the contrary, Kipling produced an astonishing document: perhaps the greatest appreciation of another culture in all of English letters. I cannot think of anything close. And there's a very clear moral: invariably, the worthiness of an Englishman in Kim correlates with deep affection for and knowledge of Indian culture.
3) Huree Babu may have absurd and comic elements in his character, but he is foremost a fricking hero -- a master spy possessed of tradescraft that awes Kim himself. And to underscore Kipling's belief that all great virtues are held by all races in all times*, he shows himself to be a natural gentleman, evincing a positively Oxbridgean willingness to endure danger and discomfort simply for the joy of utterly humiliating the (dastardly!) Russian spies. And they don't even know it. Indeed, they offer him a testimonial for what they perceive as his faithful, subservient behavior. This is just one instance of the theme, expressed throughout both explicitly and implicitly, that Westerners who underestimate the humanity and resource of Indians are fools and knaves.
4)Frum writes that "Kim is a story written for boys that probably no boy will ever read again." Not if I have any say in it!
*In Puck of Pook's Hill, e.g., there is a Roman family that behaves -- like a happy family. As far as I can gather, Kipling did not believe that all cutlures were equal, but did think all races and all times had access to every human virtue. Chesterton believed this universalist aspect of Kipling made him imperfectly English, by the way...
[Ben A.: 7/30/08 00:59] |
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Venezuelan Arms Purchases
Russian armaments, to a certain extent like French armaments, attract third world buying interest not so much because of their technical capabilities but rather because of the generous kick-backs that tend to accompany them.
[Ben H.: 7/23/08 07:24] |
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The Karadzic Prescription
Should it have been a tip-off for his patients when his remedy for nearly every complaint was kill two Croats and call me in the morning?
[Ben H.: 7/23/08 07:18] |
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Karadzic
This story would be long over if only we imprisoned all practitioners of alternative medicine. As I suggested years ago
 
[Ben A.: 7/22/08 20:28] |
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Because Russian Arms Did Such a Great Job Securing the Iraqi Regime!
Mr. Chávez, who was also expected to sign contracts to purchase more than $1 billion worth of Russian arms, called for the two nations to become “strategic partners” to defend against what he called an American threat to his country.
“That will guarantee the sovereignty of Venezuela, which the United States is now threatening,” Mr. Chávez said
Imagine it with a more jungle-y background!
[Ben A.: 7/22/08 20:13] |
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The Economic Assumptions of My Life
Long:
The world economy
The US economy
Health care as a percentage of global spending
Drugs as a percentage of health care (and thus implicitly: intellectual property)
Cambridge real estate
Victorian personal ethics.
Short:
'Emerging' markets (exception: Columbia)
Non-traditional family structures for heterosexuals
Conclusion: I need to shift to a more market neutral posture. Also, I need to go long Rollos. Those things rock.
[Ben A.: 7/20/08 23:29] |
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Fright
The Orange County vacation has started, for me, on a frightening note. I keep reading newspaper stories here about housing woes and America's unbelievable debt levels. I perused a book called The Coming Economic Collapse, which I found on my in-laws' shelf; it makes lots of references to the Fall of Rome, and manages to make them seem opportune. Then today we went to Fry's Electronics. In some ways it's just the latest name for the same store that's been around since Crazy Eddie. But there's something more orgiastic about it -- the endless hectares of toys, the furlong of junk-food bins you're herded past as you seek to pay. Eat! Gorge! Nobody will stop you buying your Rolos at an electronics store! This in itself gives the store only a whiff of the End Times. What really spooked me is its interior design theme: a Roman ruin. The featureless box-store exterior gives no hint of it. When you walk inside, you see an enormous replica of an aquaduct arch, smashed at one point below which a pile of stones collects the falling water. The rest of the store continues the theme -- pillars clad in plastic Corinthian columns, cash registers beneath triglyphs with headless or armless statues. Sell, you fools!
[Doug: 7/20/08 17:14] |
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More Aesthetic News
Hellboy 2: AVOID.
The first lesson of film: get the plot right. Just run some old trope out there -- the sinner redeemed, crime doesn’t pay, love triumphs – and if you nail the details you have a classic. If you botch this, everything else fails.
The second lesson of film: don’t have wide swings in emotional tone. A comedy should be a comedy. A film of depth should be a film of depth. But you can’t staple together a ludicrous jaunt and slow motion death scenes with all the strings playing. If red shirts are going to die horribly, you have to either care about them, or dispense with caring altogether. You can’t have the red shirts eaten alive by vermin in one scene without comment (or any sign that anyone cares), and then mope over the central character’s illness. That’s solipsistic and base. This seems to be a particularly European failing.
McCain: The Aesthetic Ledger
Pro:
1. Is a bit of a moralistic nutcase
2. Loves ABBA, not a fan of Phillip Roth
3. Refused early release from a POW camp because it would have been a propaganda victory for the enemy
4. Took a stripper to an officers' wives' party, where she proceeded to clean her fingernails with a switchblade
5. Doesn’t take earmarks
6. Instrumental in implementing a counter-insurgency strategy that avoided a humiliating American defeat and likely humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq
7. Hates Mitt Romney
8. Adopted a child
9. Looks vaguely ashamed when pandering to the Religious Right on gay rights
10. First wife still likes him
Con:
1. Divorced first wife, likely cheated on her (“Adultery is a filthy habit, like using someone else’s toothbrush” -- A.T. Ellis)
2. Panders to the religious right on gay rights
3. Unironically uses the term ‘straight talk’
4. Hangs out with Lieberman
5. Uses canned anecdotes
6. Second wife is botoxed and creepy-looking
[Ben A.: 7/17/08 23:35] |
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Rival Sentence Of The Month
"When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." -- attributed to Pauline Kael. (National Post via ALDaily.)
[Doug: 7/16/08 10:07] |
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Low Expectations Of Transcendence, Indeed
Christians come together to pray for cheaper gas.
The fun of linking to stories like this is somewhat shrunk by the bad conscience it brings on; the folks described are neither wholly representative of the religious American majority nor completely serious. It's kind of specious for religion-bashers like Richard Dawkins to draw attention to these stories. Lazy dyad alert!
[Doug: 7/16/08 09:57] |
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Fannie and Freddie Plan, Pre-empted
You guys have surely seen this on the web already, but last night the government came out with its (interim) solution for Fannie/Freddie. The Treasury will stand ready to buy equity in the entities (diluting existing shareholders if it comes to that) and the Fed will let them borrow from the discount window. In exchange the Fed will have a greater say in their regulation. Sadly, this means that my idea, for restructuring the two entities into a new Broad Restructured National Mortgage Acceptance Corporation (BernieMac) will not come to fruition.
"C'mon now -- y'all shouldn'ta signed on the dotted line if you didn't know what you were signin'!
The short-sightedness of our political class has robbed the mortgage market of this man's witty yet unimpeachable common sense. Not to mention that his industry experience -- he played a loan officer in the remake of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? -- exceeds that of the political hacks like Frank Raines Fannie and Freddie's upper management was stuffed with. You'll recall that in Guess Who, Bernie Mac's character turns down Ashton Kutcher's character's loan application. Make a loan to an unemployed guy?! Who cares if Mozilo would consider him bankable! Bernie Mac won't do it!
[Ben H.: 7/14/08 06:04] |
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Sentence of the Month
Traditionalism without religion is addiction
-- Eve Tushnet
Maybe it's the sentence of the year, in fact.
It's hard to believe this line of Tushnet's doesn't refer at least in part to walking corpse that is the Jewish 'tradition' in many US communities (she's ethnically Jewish, converted to Catholicism). You fellows may recall the phrase "with this ring, we are married according to the laws of Moses and Israel." At many ceremonies, this is mistranslated as "according to the customs of Moses of Israel." I know we all love an ethnic wedding, at which, so the joke goes, more fun is had than in th typical WASP lifetime, but who wants custom and ethnicity to be the sanctioning body? Who wants to be married by the authority of bagels, academic excellence, and center-left politics? Only someone with low expectations of transcendence, I think.
[As always, we can secularize the point: for religion, substitute 'justice.' This helps to explain why American traditionalism can remain a spark-spitting electric cord while other national spirits atrophy.]
[Ben A.: 7/13/08 02:17] |
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Who's The Doofus?
Colleague report that the AT&T Wireless store ran out of iPhones... whoops!
Who's Really the Doofus
On the other hand, the people who bought the iPhones in stock can't use them, because the activation server is down.
[Ben H.: 7/11/08 13:14] |
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Speaking of Comic Books: Some of These Doofuses Would Probably Disagree with Doug
Today marks the debut of the 3G iPhone. Here's the scene at 5:45am in front of the AT&T Wireless store near my office. Note that when the original iPhone came out, a few people had camped out in front of the store at a similar hour. On that day, iPhones were freely available later in the day and on the next day at that store, making fools of those who deprived themselves of sleep in fear of Apple scarcity. And yet the geek sidewalk squatters insist on suffering heedlessly and needlessly for their iPhone. Perhaps its rather a form of self-mortification in honor of St. Steven of Cupertino, their tutelary god?
As retarded as these line-sitters seems, I witnessed some possibly bigger losers on hand. For isn't it somehow worse to pay attention to these iPhone loonies than to be one?
Be sure to check out FoxNews's story on the iPhone phenomenon. You may catch them photoshopping the line into a mob!
[Ben H.: 7/11/08 08:58] |
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Several members of Congress have caught flak for having received mortgages at concessional rates from lenders who might benefit from having friends in high places. If you thought you could avoid the taint of corruption by vowing to vote only for renters, this story will disappoint you.
[Ben H.: 7/11/08 08:40] |
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Impotent Scream Into The Void
I don't like comic books. I don't like comic book movies. I don't like anything related to comic books.
[Doug: 7/11/08 06:12] |
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On A Somewhat More Serious Note
The Pentagon Airborne-Refueling Contract story is turning out to be a real zeitgeist-definer, even if any story involving government contracts is intrinsically too boring to follow closely. As I understand it, the Pentagon wants to spend some unfathomable amount of money to buy airborne tankers; bids were taken; the lords of war over at Boeing who usually get a rubber stamp from their military-industrial-complex buddies in the government did such a half-assed job on their proposal that the Pentagon actually tapped a mostly-European consortium; complaints by Boeing's lobbyists led to a decision that "mistakes were made" in the bid-selection process -- presumably, there was really only one mistake, that Boeing was not chosen. This mistake is now being rectified: the granting of the contract to EADS etc. was retracted, and we can expect it to go to Boeing by the end of the year.
The odd thing here is that, while I of course want to paint all Republicans as hypocrites who preach "free trade" while in fact getting rich off of no-bid, no-accountability government contracts, John McCain seems to have been instrumental in making the original, fairly transparent process possible. We'll see where he comes down if he's forced to take a position on it now.
[P.S. Thanks to John G for links with more background on this story, including convictions on corruption charges at an early stage, when Boeing was bribing Pentagon functionaries with promises of six-figure sinecures.]
[Doug: 7/9/08 13:56] |
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Bandarlog Predicts Next Big Thing
Reverse sex tourism. Nearly 600 Google hits for that phrase prevent me from copyrighting it, but they seem all to refer to white women going to non-white places to get laid. No, I'm thinking of the tens of millions of Chinese men who will not have corresponding Chinese women in 2020. This imbalance is seen by sociologists as a big problem. I submit that these sociologists need to consider global economics in order to realize a solution will be at hand. By 2020 China will produce everything, and be rich; the U.S. will produce nothing, and be destitute. Connect the dots people!
[Doug: 7/9/08 11:41] |
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Obama Plane Flap: Frequent Flyer Perspective
Obama's campaign plane had to make an emergency landing due to pitch control issues. Apparently, the rear escape slide deployed in flight. Web commentators have talked about this as an extremely unusual event. I can't speak to its statistical frequency, but I can say that I very nearly witnessed the same phenomenon. In 1996, I was flying weekly from LAX to Lambert St. Louis (coicidentally, where Obama's crippled plane landed). Shortly after the inbound aircraft for our 1:10am flight arrived, there was an announcement that the outbound flight was delayed due to mechanical problems. Since I took the same flight every week, I had gotten to know the ground staff. I asked about the problem. The answer: an escape slide had deployed in flight. The equipment was an MD-80, as in Obama's case.
[Ben H.: 7/9/08 08:31] |
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McCain Pledges Balanced Budget By End Of First Term
Also colonization of exoplanet Gliese 581 d.
[Doug: 7/7/08 15:15] |
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Baseball is Like Politics
"They love me everywhere, what can I tell you?"
--Manny Ramirez
[Ben A.: 7/6/08 21:55] |
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Presidential Campaigns Are Like Baseball
The million expressions of this idea which have presumably been made won't stop me from giving my own. Nor will they compel me first to read the canonical ones, which presumably have been written by people like George Will. So:
Whether on a baseball team or a presidential campaign, you perform only three movements, hopefully to perfection, on roughly 162 roughly consecutive days. Hitting, catching, throwing; declaiming, equivocating, dunning. New ideas and creative solutions are beside the point. Thus the daily highlights we see on the news are just the best executions of the three motions. We're shown the clip of candidate X declaiming very loudly, equivocating very cannily, and reaping huge sums. Or the clip of player Y hitting especially far, catching with an especially outstretched arm, throwing especially fast. Except that there is occasionally something a bit more interesting to show -- the errors. Candidate X goes off message, lets himself be pinned down, runs out of money. Most of the news cycle these days is dedicated to such errors. Let's go to the videotape -- Obama now implies he cannot predict the the next ten years of Iraqi history to the nearest millimeter -- whoa, Nelly! Mark that error on the box score! (Sorry to mix sportscasters' catch phrases.) And at the end of the season the winner is, of course, the franchise owner with the biggest TV demographic. And that's something you could have calculated on opening day.
Our country would be healthier if somehow politics were more like football or basketball. Here there actually are new ideas and strategies, offenses and defenses; here success depends on people working together in new ways to face new challenges. But I have no idea how politics could evolve like this in a country where it is plausible that the voters will soon be walking around with feed bags on their faces.
[Doug: 7/6/08 03:41] |
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The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things
Speaking of Monty Python --
Still, at [new-age retreat center] Kripalu and elsewhere, there is always room for something new. At the end of August, Kripalu will offer, for the first time, a three-day seminar in rock balancing, the contemplative practice of stacking stones into precarious-looking formations. The presenter, Lila Higgins, an environmental artist based in California, said she was emboldened by an image from the Kripalu catalog itself.
“I saw a Kripalu magazine,” she said, “and on the cover I saw a stack of rocks. And I thought, ‘Hey, I need to propose a class for this.’ ”
-- from "It's Not Easy Picking A Path To Enlightenment" in the NYT
[Doug: 7/4/08 06:57] |
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Bubble Analysis
Ben H's analysis is convincing. You're right that Greenspan shouldn't be forgotten. I would add that, in my dim distorted memory, Newt Gingrich seems almost as good a mascot for the internet bubble as Clinton. I don't remember what Newt's main policy positions were, and I suppose he was complicit in degrading the nation's politics to the sad level of the last eight years, but what sticks out in my mind is his goofily grinning faith in technology and progress.
I would also stress the argument for making Bush the mascot for the bubble he oversaw (without unstressing the importance of low interest rates). It's something I've mentioned before: that no skill or effort was necessary to profit from this bubble, only some seed money with which to start flipping condos. And that's Bush's own story -- no skill, no effort, just wealthy, connected parents.
[Doug: 7/4/08 06:47] |
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Why Does Romantic Fiction Often Involve Prima Facie Incompatible Couples?
I could provide many hypotheses, but none so deep as James Bowman's:
In a way, therefore, the more unsuited or otherwise unlikely a couple show themselves to be, the more random and therefore fated seems their meeting.
* * *
In other words, what we delight in when we delight in "love triumphant" (once again to cite the newspaper headline from It Happened One Night) is our own individuality and having a story to tell like no other. All of life is a battle against generality, the generic and the genetic, and for particularity and individuality: that is, for the chance to have a story of our own that makes us different from everyone else. That fate should have taken an interest in matching our surrogates up with each other in spite of all that mere circumstance, or mere compatibility considerations, could do to keep them apart is a reassurance that what would otherwise be sordid or practical or generic actually has a transcendent and perhaps even divine element in it.
[Ben A.: 7/3/08 23:40] |
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Wainscoting ... Wainscoting ... Wainscoting ... sounds like a little Dorset village, doesn't it? Wainscoting.
(Cut to the village of Wains Cotting. A woman rushes out of a house.)
Woman: We've been mentioned on telly!
[Ben H.: 7/3/08 14:18] |
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Britain To Build 65,000-Ton Aircraft Carrier "HMS Prince Of Wales"
But the BBC version fails to mention the architectural requirements demanded by its namesake. The Edwardian wainscoting will truly strike fear in the hearts of the enemy!
[Doug: 7/3/08 12:50] |
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Relative Bubbles
We do a lot of amateur comparative bubble analysis here. If you need to make one distinction between the bubbles, it is this: the tech bubble (to a certain extent like the English railway bubble of the early 19th century) was founded in overoptimistic assessments of the returns on investment in a new type of capital good. The legacy of the bubble was that infrastructure that rational Bayesians would not have built did in reality end up getting built with the capital of speculators. The speculators bore the losses and society got the benefit of the infrastructure. The property bubble was based on the pushing of excessively easy money into the most quickly "expandable" asset class, namely residential mortgage paper. The result is that houses that rational Bayesians would not have built did in reality get built. Financial institutions in the first instance are bearing the losses, which, given their indispensable functional role in the economy, means that the losses need to go through a long and destructive process of allocation and partial socialization. Society ends up with some of the losses and tons of completely inappropriate houses built in senseless locations. You can guess which bubble will cause more lasting harm.
Perhaps in some sense, Bush serves as an apposite mascot of this boom in a way that Clinton serves as a symbol of his. But I don't see how either has much to do with his respective economic cycle. The "Clinton" boom arose from a real positive shock to intellectual capital (the development -- by the private sector -- of new information technologies). The "Bush" boom arose from the efforts of global central banks to deal with the deflation of the Clinton boom and the deflationary impact of September 11th. I submit that Greenspan is both a better mascot and a better culprit for both of the booms. Both relied on an excessive trust in eggheads by the rest of us -- in the first case, the internet gurus (to disaster for a few speculators and cool gadgets for the rest of us), and in the second case, Wall Street financial engineers (to disaster for all). Greenspan bears real responsibility for the consequences of an excessively loose monetary policy both during the internet boom and in its aftermath.
[Ben H.: 7/3/08 09:21] |
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Retrospectives
The combination of a slow news season, a cliff-diving economy, and an upcoming election mean that we'll be seeing a lot of retrospectives of the Bush Era. I may write one myself. The best one I've seen so far is Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency, over at The Onion. Highly recommended. Of course, nobody really thinks that one man (or two) brought our republic to its current abject state. But neither can anyone deny that Bush was terribly emblematic of his era. And it's a difficult question that still bugs me, to what extent such "being emblematic" really catalyzes the trends of a president's era. Did seeing a grinning jackass on the news every night make millions of closet jackasses come out, stop pretending to any decency beyond mere phariseeism, give in to their feeling that prosperity was a birthright which planning for the future could only muck up? Or, inversely, had all our country's jackasses come to feel, over the course of the year 2000, that their moment was arriving, that they had to elect one of their own? The second answer gets a boost in credibility from the reflection that Bush's predecessor was, in his own way, in a certain light, a jackass. But this reflection brings the same question back again. How much did Clinton influence his era? I think one key to understanding how the two presidencies differed is the economic bubbles they oversaw. The Clinton era's was based on a belief that hard work and technological smarts would open an entirely new and sunny chapter in human history. Bush's bubble was based on a belief somewhat harder to phrase -- something like, "USA! USA! Boo-ya, bitch!" There is a link with the two men's personalities here. Clinton was a wonk and indefatigable; Bush cannot spell indefatigable. The relative painfulness of the bubbles' aftermaths remains to be calculated. I am not hopeful.
[Doug: 7/3/08 06:48] |
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I'm A Uniter, Not A Divider
In the division-transcending spirit of Independence Day and of the Obama campaign, I'd like to reach out to Red State Republicans on an isuse we all need to work together on: global warming. In particular I have some advice on how you can lend a hand with "carbon capture and storage" without giving up your enormous Canyonero SUV's. Just take an ordinary garden hose, affix one end to the exhaust pipe of your SUV, pull the other end through the driver-side window until taut, and then keep that end in your mouth as you d | |
