I believe the government should provide homeopathic remedies to everyone. Beyond that, folks, you are on your own.
[Ben H.: 10/17/07 14:06]
Health Care Policy
A topic about which no one cares! Except for me, I guess. Good agenda-setting discussion here from Tyler Cowen. I think all his microfacts are essentially accurate (although the Canada one I wouldn't bet on: very early data). Do we all grant his points here? Even if so, might we not want government programs to a) expand Medicaid to cover more of the working poor, and b) baseline catastrophic coverage of those screwed by the genetic lottery?
p.s. Doug I owe you both: a return of your call and a response to your Austen-as-religious thinker comments. When my life slows down later this week....
[Ben A.: 10/16/07 23:09]
What Color Ribbon For This Cause?
CDC report claims that MRSA infections will cause more death this year than AIDS. So when can I expect to start seeing the Broadway plays, TV movies-of-the-week, ballets, and Whitney exhibits accusing the government for not having instantly found a cure? When are the activists going to start ACTing up, blocking bridges and inflicting street theater on a complacent nation? Silence = Death? How about Not Washing Your Friggin Hands = Death? Another example of the danger of allowing the media-celebrity complex to set public health priorities...
[Ben H.: 10/16/07 17:11]
Ruining America's Standing Abroad To Solidify Power Base At Home?
The American people have been fantastically supportive of Bush/Cheney's use of this technique. It was only a matter of time before the Democrats tried it out, albeit in a weak, localized way.
[Doug: 10/11/07 11:28]
Retarded Grandstanding or a Deeper Scheme
What the hell is Nancy Pelosi thinking advancing a bill to condemn Turkey for the Armenian Genocide? Is it mere pandering to California's Armenian-American community? Few people outside this ethnic circle give a damn about the bill; but I can tell you that in Turkey, it is front-page news. Turkish attitudes toward the U.S. already sit at a low ebb. The PKK's cross-border atrocities don't help matters. To choose to castigate Turkey now of all times for a crime of nearly a century ago seems just loony. The US relies on Turkey for air-basing rights and transit of materiel to Iraq. Northern Iraq itself relies on Turkey for electric power and pipeline connections to the Mediterranean. Ought we be antagonizing* the Turks?
Or, is that exactly the point? The conspiracy theorist in the back of my brain whispers that Pelosi wishes -- if not in her heart of hearts, then in her political calculus -- for the U.S. intervention in Iraq to go as sour as possible. Would not pushing the Turks to restrict our use of Incirlik and close the Harbur gate to military traffic not help accomplish this goal?
*It is, of course, a fair question to ask why the Turks feel antagonized. The expulsion of Armenians was carried out by the Ottoman regime, against which the modern milliyet of Turkey defines itself. And, to boot, the perpetrators and victims are all for the most part long dead. I've asked my Turkish friends on many occasions: why not learn a trick from Bill Clinton? Apologies cost nothing! Let the interahamwe kill half a million Rwandans without lifting a finger; so long as a few years later, you show up, bite your lip, and say how very sorry you are, you can still beplume yourself as true humanitarian, to the plaudits of the bien-pensant world media.
UPDATE:
A reader suggests the Turkish National Assembly might consider passing a Native American Genocide Resolution. Seriously, where does this stuff end? What did Voltaire say about history? That it is merely a record of crimes and misfortunes? There are plenty of historical crimes to go around. At the same time, real live criminals prey on the innocent around the world. How about passing a bill to send to Darfur the, oh, I don't know, one brigade it would take to wipe out the camel-jockey primitives of the janjaweed before they complete their ongoing genocide campaign?
[Ben H.: 10/11/07 08:36]
Wasn't the Ethical Culture Movement also a famous attempt to de-theify ethics? It's still around, but has petered out over time and is not more than a fringe organization at this point...
[Ben H.: 10/11/07 08:26]
Thoughts On Religion Inspired By Mansfield Park
I chose the title of this post carefully. Part of me wants to start with a general appraisal of Mansfield Park, and then stay more or less focused on it, but I can't come up with much entertaining to say about it. In the end it was Austen's agreeable cadence that got me through to the last page. The plot plods at a Jamesian pace. Even her gift for bringing characters to life could not by itself have convinced me to finish the book -- what she's brought to life here is a bunch of dullards. (Except Mary Crawford, okay.) What Mansfield Park does well is "open up a lot of interesting issues", as we used to say in discussion sections. The one I want to talk about is, not accidentally, the one that Ben A initially brought up -- Austen as a Christian author.
First, let me say that this article in the journal "First Things" is better informed and probably more interesting that what I have to say, so consider starting there. I myself will do so:
Mansfield Park, frequently despised as Austen’s worst novel, is in fact her greatest and most important, though admittedly far from the most entertaining. Moreover, the novel presents one of the most searching and provocative accounts of modern individualism to be found in fiction. It is a thick description of the kinds of habits of speech and personal conduct, motivations and intentions, political and social views that emerge from uncontrolled individualism. And it traces this insidious individualism precisely to the marginalization of the Church in the life of England, the failure of clergy to be the makers of English manners, and the consequent intrusion of other forces as the makers of manners.
Without entering into any of the details (of this article, or of the Mary Crawford/Edmund Bertram exchanges in the chapel or elsewhere) let me state my opinion that the lack of communal spiritual/religious practice is a bad thing, wherever there is such a lack. I base this opinion partly on my cumulative observations of others, and partly on my own dabbling with Buddhism. Meditating and deepening my understanding of Buddhism's truths was far easier when I got together weekly, in New York, with a couple other people who had met at a retreat. In Paris I've found no such group and I basically don't meditate at all. This has had some bearing on the fact that I'm less happy here than there. In fact, I think you really have to live in a European city like Paris to measure how serious the loss of communal religious practice is. I won't relate any particular anecdotes, but you quickly sense the absence of fellow-feeling here (even relative to New York), the readiness most people have to tell others off with a sneer, the replacement of plain decency by this pale concept they call "solidarité". You can (and should) write whole books analyzing the causal effect of the Church's decline on the assholification of Parisian society; my point here is that there has been such an effect.
All of this to say that I believe Austen (or her character Edmund) when she (he) describes the problems caused by the decline of the Anglican church in England. Well then, shall we all renovate the chapels and sign up for ordination? Maybe the author of the "First Things" article would answer "yes", but for me, there are immediate problems with an affirmative answer. And here I will relate an anecdote. (It happened about three years ago; I don't recall ever getting around to putting on this blog.)
I've just boarded a plane in Lansing, Michigan, bound for some hub city and thence to New York. The man and the women in the seats behind me, who aren't acquainted, strike up a conversation. They have noticeable Midwest accents. This instantly activates certain stereotypes in my brain, which you'll be familiar with if you've read The Corrections (and of course you have). The activation is reinforced when one of them makes passing reference to "the Lord" or "blessings" or some such thing. For example, I am primed to hear them start talking about the great success their kids are having in Michigan State University's pre-dental school program, and much less primed to hear them start talking about definitions of success and failure in various African and Asian countries, or cross-cultural psychological mechanisms of happiness. But it's the latter subjects that they, and especially the man, start talking about. There is a real critical intelligence in the man's voice, and also a deep knowledge of the countries he's talking about; there is plenty of pre-takeoff time on flights to establish whether someone is a bullshitter, and this guy is not. Nor is the guy just a wonk or a geek. There's warmth in his voice, he's involved in some kind of NGO work, and he does some motivational/leadership training stuff too.
The usual cabin hum is making a lot of their conversation indistinct now, but its warm tone keeps coming through, reinforcing the following thought in my head. The New York Times crowd, and to an even greater extent the French, are smug about their righteous worldview and the superior intelligence with which they assume it's linked, but their righteousness is abstract, rarely going further in practice than voting Democratic; they lack the deep, organic, rooted, practical devotion to community that you get in the Midwest at its best. Two New Yorkers sitting next to each other on a plane may sound each other out until they find a common interest, but they generally won't appear to an observer to feel genuine brotherhood with each another, as the people on my flight did. At this point I'm thinking of the people in my parent's neighborhood who tend, happily and expertly, the gardens in the little traffic islands, and of the novel The Chess Garden, which gives a nice idealized picture of this Midwest. Even if the churches that stand at the center of this life make you read some highly dubious myths and doctrines, they're benign, and don't detract from advantages of this idyllic existence.
... Then a noticeable change in the conversation's tone breaks my reverie. We're airborne now and I can make out even fewer of the exchanges, but you can recognize a shift from conviviality to reserve in any conversation, be it in Farsi or Tagalog. In the woman's voice especially I can hear barriers going up and feel the temperature dropping. What caused this? I shift my head to pick up more of their words. In the middle of one of the man's sentences I make out "Latter Day Saints" and "returned again to preach" ... something like that. And I remember some polite but firm statement of disagreement from the woman. I think the conversation stopped totally within a few minutes.
I mean this anecdote to be a roundabout way of drawing our attention to the elephant in the room that houses all discussions of "Christian ethics", including those of Jane Austen as a Christian ethicist -- the elephant of Christian doctrines in all their glorious absurdity. Without thereby implying any allegiance to the opposing school of Ayer and Carnap and Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, I must admit that the foundational idea of Christianity -- that Jesus is God's son and saved some of us from eternal damnation by getting himself nailed to a cross -- is, to me, absurd. And that's to say nothing of the Trinity, the walking on the water, the resurrection of Lazarus, etc. etc.
This leads me to the great cry of frustration I always want to make about my shortcomings as a student of human psychology: for the life of me I just can't understand what the hell all this miracle-whip mumbo-jumbo has to do with treating people well -- with ethics. Jane Austen is clearly concerned with ethics; does she really give enough of a rat's ass about church dogma to qualify as a "public theologian", as the "First Things" article's title says? But let's leave Austen aside. The fact is that, in practice, in the minds of an overwhelming majority of my fellow humans, the miracle-whip mumbo-jumbo does seem inextricably linked to ethics. Every time someone tries to build a spiritual/religious community stripped of the signs and wonders, it fizzles for lack of enthusiasm. Don't think I haven't considered building such a community, as an alternative to writing more Java code or teaching myself elementary finance! At times it seems like an obvious thing to do: All people have a spiritual yearning, many think Christian dogma is a crock, hence many will flock to my new philosophical-Buddhism sect. The thing is that people have tried this, and it doesn't work. One of the most fascinating and under-discussed movements in American history is Unitarianism. Wikipedia has good stuff on it. Basically, it's Protestantism carried to its logical conclusion, monotheism minus all the miracle-whip. It seems to have had some popularity in the 19th century. They've still got churches ready and waiting for people in the target market I just defined; why don't they flock there? And why does Emerson say (quoting William James here) that Luther "would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism"?
Probably I need to go back and read The Varieties of Religious Experience again. But I read it once and I don't recall the scales falling from my eyes with respect to these issues. So if I had to suggest any questions for further discussion on this topic, I'd choose "Why can't people seem to build communal spiritual-ethical practices without absurd myths?", and second, "Why call Jane Austen a specifically Christian author rather than author concerned with ethics?"
[Doug: 10/10/07 20:06]
Second Golden Age of Pharma Advertising?
If Ben A's Thorazine ad below actually made it into print, then it was indeed a golden age! Such directness and lack of euphemism are a breath of fresh air to those of us who have sat through a hundred Viagra and Cialis ads, with their prudish nudge-nudge insinuation, and their actors who look about as much like senior citizens as Luke Perry looked like a high school senior. This is what I want from a Viagra ad:
A heartening admission from Fred Thompson in the GOP debate yesterday: our current government is "spending money of future generations and those yet to be born".
Even more heartening, the creative solution to this problem offered by Mormon candidate Mitt Romney: a special rite allowing the taxation of past generations and those who have already died.
[Doug: 10/10/07 04:09]
The New York Press (mostly overlooked free weekly) takes on this blog's bete noire, New York Times Questioner-Twat Deborah Solomon. Enjoy![Ben H.: 10/8/07 15:07]
Pharma Advertising: The Golden Age
I am drunk with the power of picture embedding, and promise to stop soon...
I can only hope this is a put-up job. Our plan to send out fake birth announcements with the name "Chardonnay" (if it's a girl) or Ziggurat (if it's a boy).
[Ben A.: 10/7/07 01:44]
News From The World Of Baby Names
Some friends who moved to L.A. and who are in other respects quite lovely recently named their twins "". Correct if I'm wrong, but shouldn't this have triggered the long-feared "Big One", dumping all of southern California into the ocean?
[Doug: 10/6/07 15:04]
Principles
Doug, when you're right, you're right. Hatreds of classes and types, be they hipsters, gold-diggers, Yankees fans, is an expression of my baser nature. The default state is loneliness, misery, and lack of purpose -- and if people stave that off by finding something to structure their lives around, good for them.
Nature Itself Revolts
Another Yankees World Series? Even the least of God's creatures has its part to play in averting this travesty!
[Ben A.: 10/6/07 11:56]
Principles
That exchange has made the rounds of trading desks over the past couple of days and believe me, guys, you aren't the first to accuse me of having written it. I'm offended! Haven't I made it clear than I'm a romantic?
In point of fact the "guy" who responded is no guy. The writer, I have it on good authority, is a female Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer. Quite impressive example of authorial voice!
[Ben H.: 10/5/07 18:12]
Principles
Hilarious link. I think the man responding sounds a bit more like Ben H's mentor Ken than like Ben himself, though.
People like the frustrated young author of that plea for advice are, maybe surprisingly, not among the groups I'm inclined to scorn on this blog or elsewhere. Why not construct your life around the quest for more money, if you have reason to think it will make you happier? Ben H may remember a guy named Jay who was in our house at college. I always had a soft spot for him because he was so guileless and direct about what he wanted after graduation: lots and lots of money. Of course, I didn't stay in touch with him; you can't easily form friendships with people like that. But he was funny and I found him agreeable company.
Both he and the would-be gold digger Ben A linked to make me think about my own life: is it organized around any better principle? Or is it just a jumble -- greed here, vanity there, a little generosity in a far corner? There happens to be one organizing principle that some part of me, call it my better nature, wants to adopt, namely the sort of Buddhism lived and recommended by people like Thich Nhat Hanh. Only, there are lots of other factors that keep me from doing so, like greed, vanity, and (above all) laziness.
Brooklyn hipster-intellectuals form another group that I'm happy to tolerate in small doses. Maybe in Cambridge one gets such large doses of (a downmarket, upstate version of) them that one runs out of patience and has to write screeds like the one cited below. But when I lived in Manhattan, my visits to Ben H's borough (and its annexes like Film Forum and the Strand) were spaced out enough that I could positively smile on these people and their earnest good intentions. And again, my own life just doesn't seem like something I could plausibly present as a beacon to them. Would they be better people if they listened to classical music rather than indy bands, studied mathematics rather than esoteric humanities topics, cultivated an interest in French wine rather than Belgian beer, earned money by writing Java rather than English?
P.S. The Corrections is a perfectly decent book so long as you don't hold its author's anti-Oprah preening or its F-train ubiquity against it. I mean, did you read the salmon scene? Frigging hilarious. And it paints the heartland-vs.-NYC divide in American culture more vividly than anything else I've ever read.
P.P.S. The most perfect F-train book I ever saw was being read, appropriately, by the ticket girl at Anthology Film Archive on Second Ave. (Anthology : Film Forum :: Film Forum : your local multiplex.) It was Nikola Tesla: Collected Works.
[Doug: 10/5/07 17:10]
Via the always interesting Aaron Haspel, we have a useful new concept, the ideal reader. As defined by Haspel, the ideal reader is not necessarily as person who agrees with the author, but a kindred spirit, someone who looks at the world in the same way, shares the same visceral reactions, the same temperament.
Who am I the ideal reader of? Most likely Kipling, but maybe Conan Doyle. There is a darkness in me that might, if I indulged it, make me an ideal reader of Naipaul.
Haspel does not mention the reverse case, the perfect reader/author mismatch. Probably it's Roth for me.
[Ben A.: 9/30/07 20:00]
I guess I should cross you off my invitation list for next year's Brooklyn Book Festival. Melvin should relax. Thanks to people like me, pretty soon the novelists will be priced out of Brooklyn, too, and he'll be able to pick on Philly (the Sixth Borough, don't you know!).
[Ben H.: 9/30/07 17:42]
Hate Can Be Fun!
About a week back I pledged myself positivity. More gratitude for the glory of creation, less reveling in the thwarting of my foes. Given that the Colts play Denver, that resolution is likely shot for today. So why not take advantage?
First, Reihan Salaam:
I recently told a friend that I'd sooner have my eyes scooped out with spoons than be caught reading a book commonly consumed on either the F or L trains in New York, which, as she helpfully pointed out, is kind of idiotic. To this day I haven't read The Corrections, and I don't think I ever will. Indeed, when someone tells me that, "Oh man, it's actually a really great book," I immediately think to myself, "when we're living in a post-apocalyptic 'time of troubles,' this person is not, for the good of humanity, sharing my bunker or my canned peas.
Something nice this way comes. It begins with the awful — whether it’s as enormouous as the Holocaust or the World Trade Center or as intimate as family dysfunction or the death of a loved one — and then finds comfort. None of this Anna on the tracks, Emma in the dumps, or depressing Father Zosima’s corpse smells stuff; that’s sooo 19th century. .... Instead, let’s just book passage on a gentle, healing voyage. Sound trite? It is, but it’s apparently the literature of our time as exemplified by Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers, along with everything McSweeney’s, the magazine founded by Eggers. What this otherwise disparate group of fiction and nonfiction writers share are a special calming effect on the souls of their many readers and, most significantly, a locus in which their work has come to fruition: Brooklyn.
....
Brooklyn’s always been the overlooked sibling among the boroughs. Founded several years before New York, it was swiftly relegated to a role as Manhattan’s unglamorous adjunct. First farms and then factories provided its economic basis. Now back-office space does the same. Until recently, Brooklyn was strictly second choice for residence. Beatniks who couldn’t afford Greenwich Village crossed the river in the ’60s, and yuppies who couldn’t afford Soho moved to Park Slope in the ’80s. Now hipsters who can’t afford the East Village have filled every cranny between soon-to-be evicted bodegas and auto-repair shops with cafés sporting lava lamps on the tables and old record albums tacked to the walls. Inside, a horde of latte-swilling sensitives sit in mismatched chairs and tap at laptops and can’t imagine why they’d ever want to cross the river again. They interpret their migration born of economic necessity as a hegira of moral virtue. Self-righteous sour grapes define their attitude to Gotham
Perhaps some of you saw the story in the Times a few days ago reporting that a new statistical analysis reports a "gender gap" in self-reported happiness.
So read that article. Now I'd like you to imagine what the time-course data would look like. Remember, there's been this shift in gender distribution of happiness. What do we expect it would look like if we charted each gender's happiness over time? Happiness on the y axis, time on the x. Take a moment; visualize the data; draw the graph in your mind.
Now look* at this graph, friends! There's the underlying survey data. If you have clicked through you have see a male/female difference is completely invisible -- somewhere in the noise-to-irrelevant range.** After all the godawful science journalism I have read, I remain naive enough to be shocked. If you claimed a drug worked based on a difference that looked like that, you'd need to sell it at the carnival. What the hell?
*Hey, how do I embed pictures in our posts again?
**I understand the authors of the research found statistical significance here, and I am sure their methods are flawless. For a journalist to run with a "women miserable" headline, however, one would like to see a difference observable without a microscope.
[Ben A.: 9/29/07 22:01]
Report from Doug's Homeland
I spent last weekend in lovely Lithuania, where I attended the wedding of a Lithuanian colleague. It's astouding how in just a decade the physical traces of Sovietness have been thoroughly effaced. Vilnius thrums with economic activity, new cars choke its streets, the old town looks like it has been the object of meticulous presevation rather than a miraculous survivor of Stalin and his successors. The mental traces are perhaps rather more enduring. There is a particular pace and style of service that I have found only in the CIS -- that is the former is slow and the latter indifferent -- that is in evidence here.
The wedding itself was a blast, but a bit strange in this respect: typically an over-the-top wedding also means a large wedding; and conversely an understated wedding tends to mean a small wedding. This one was quite dramatically lavish, but only involved maybe fifty guests. The ceremony took place in Vilnius' restored cathedral. The festivities followed at an estate 50 kilometers outside the city, which a Lithuanian-American emigre restored to a high finish over several years at the cost of several tens of millions of EUR. In the first period of independence, it belonged to one of the richest families in the country and apparently it was a favorite retreat of their friend, the last president/dictator of Lithuania before Soviet annexation, Antanas Smetona.
The reception was more a variety show of Lithuanian celebreties. One of country’s biggest Soviet-era pop singers performed, followed by the prima dona of the opera, and lastly, an a capella group that had recently won a sort of Lithuanian “American Idol” type TV program. Now, when I heard the first boops and beat-boxing approaching from outside the dining room, as a Harvard alum I felt, as you might imagine, a twinge of pain, and exchanged anxious glances with my other Harvard-alum colleague named Ben. As it turned out, though, the group consisted mostly of tall, svelte, beautiful Lithuanian girls. Had the Harvard groups looked like this, I would have attended more jams, though admittedly, probably still with earplugs. It is a testament, though, to cultural diffusion that Krokodilo-style a cappella singing has spread as far as Lithuania, without losing any of distinctive features or even minor tics. The group sang one American song that I could swear has a place as a Veritones standard (Doug can vouch for my involuntary knowledge of the Veritones songbook, thanks to our freshman-year roommate Amir). The finale took place on the estate grounds, where a rock group made up of heavy-metal musicians from a couple of different Soviet-era Lithuanian metal bands had set up to play a hair-music version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, accompanied by a Grucci-level fireworks show. Ah, capitalism!!
[Ben H.: 9/29/07 10:05]
Pocket Change
I think that was the name of the event, which provoked a lot of derisive laughter in the NY trading community when it took place. I would have expected a lot more young mini-ballers and fewer old geezers. Punk-ass junior traders paying to meet gold-diggers = amusing douchebaggery; 75-year old lawyers doing the same = creepy and sad.
[Ben H.: 9/28/07 14:39]
A Brief Relief From Family Values, or I Love New York
Radar Magazine asks "What kind of schmuck would pay $500 to meet a bunch of gold diggers?"
They send a repoter/"Bollywood reporter"/"cumin-baron" to find out. Crucial new information: it is possible to have a T-Mobile Sidekick customized with Swarovski crystals.
Fair enough, but let me just point out that I know guys in my industry with investments in Nigeria deep into the 9 figures, who insist on pronouncing the name of the country's commercial capital as LAH-goes.
To say nothing of the great anchorman debate of the 1980s: Yur-AN-us or UR-an-us?
[Ben H.: 9/27/07 06:21]
Our PREZ-uh-DENT Is Hooked On Phonics
Many people believe that the parade of evidence of our president's idiocy is too long to keep citing -- that citing it fell out of fashion months or even years ago. Others pride themselves on their blasé attitude toward the parade, saying "Of course we hoodwinked the masses for our own benefit", with an emphasis on "we". I'm not in either group so here's the latest float in the parade.
[Doug: 9/26/07 09:54]
"Edith" at 48 hours
We did a New York Times puzzle while Dao was in labor. (I think it was a Thursday one; certain clues jointly spelled out the quip "Said the Zen Buddhist to the hotdog vendor, Make me one with everything".) One of the puzzle's answers was "Edith". I thought it might be a sign. I guess not, since we officially put in the paperwork for one of the other names. But maybe for blog purposes we can call her "Edith", since the dozens of bloggers I've read who give pseudonyms to their kids must have good reasons.
This blog may seem an odd place to share personal news, but I bet its readership-plus-writership is small enough to form an even more intimate circle than the recipients of the e-mail we'll send out soon. So if you're reading it here, you may justifiably consider this a personal communication. The news is that Dao delivered our little girl yesterday, and both came out okay, if tired and sore. We're still working on the name. We're happy and relieved.
Let me allay the worry that my portion of this blog will become a record of every developmental milestone. Well, maybe I'll share the milestones, but not the furlongstones, yardstones, or inchstones, like others have been known to do.
[Doug: 9/24/07 17:30]
News From The Economy
Our niece Sophie, 6 years old, sent a beautiful hand-made card to us care of her grandmother, who arrived here today (in the role of person not totally clueless about what to do with a newborn). Here is the inside of the card:
Here is the back of the card:
In related news, the dollar has fallen to 1.40 per euro and to parity with the Canadian dollar.
Long story short: the hard drive on our server became corrupt; the hosting provider moved us onto a new server and restored from a backup of our site; some files still seem to be corrupt so I am having them restore to an older backup. Once that's done (and I'll be furious if it's not done soon) things should be back to normal, modulo the file permissions thing I mentioned.
[Doug: 9/20/07 14:27]
Sorry about the technical trouble on the site. The server apparently melted down; our hosting provider managed to revert to a backup of the site but the file permissions are all out of whack. I'm trying to fix them.
[Doug: 9/20/07 13:42]
York Harding
What a great reference! When young and flip I used to tell people he advised my thesis.
[Ben A.: 9/17/07 23:05]
Forget Petraeus, York Harding Is Here To Save The Day!
In a heartening twist on the usual story out of Iraq, a bicycle bomb was used in the latest slaughter. Maybe the White House has finally opted for the "Third Force" strategy that used bikes this way in The Quiet American. It seems far-fetched, but hey, it turns out Bush cited The Quiet American in that recent jaw-dropper Vietnam-analogy speech. Maybe there's a global lesson here. Those who come out on top in life -- and Bush certainly has -- are those who can take the wisest observer's pithiest expression of their abjection and embrace it. A Williamsburg luxury condo project recently rolled out ads with the tag line "Radically Chic, Chicly Radical". To pay the requisite hundreds of thousands (millions?) to get into this building is thus to say to the world, I am exactly the kind of trust-fund fucktard that Tom Wolfe excoriated in "Radical Chic" for playing at bohemianism. Who doubts that they will find their buyers?
[Doug: 9/16/07 17:09]
OUISTITI
I remarked this summer on my pride in playing this word in Scrabble. I never thought I would hear it spoken outside of Scrabble discussions, and maybe zoos, but it turns out to be a French analog of "cheese!", spoken as the photographer takes a picture.
[Doug: 9/14/07 10:36]
Electrolytes: What Plants Crave
Great Idiocracy clip. As to the thought that the increasing rabble of trampy illiterates might buoy the fortunes of political conservatives, I can only respond: I wish! Alas, a brief review of thedemographics (look under "are you married" and "are you employed full time") make me less confident that Cleon's progeny will carry my favored policies to victory.
[Ben A.: 9/12/07 17:25]
The website whose construction has kept Dao (and, to a lesser extent, me) on minimal sleep for months is finally online: behold LePost.fr. In my opinion, ÇA DÉCHIRE, i.e. it kicks ass. It's the source of the tetris video below, if that gives you any idea of its content angle.
[Doug: 9/11/07 06:46]
Bizarro-world Treasury Secretary Robin Hanson argues at length that most health care provides minimal benefit, and that the US should cut spending by 50%.
I look forward to reading the discussion. My initial responses:
1. It is plausible that HC spending is highly inefficient. No one has ever been asked to show cost-effectiveness, and barriers to natural market mechanisms of efficiency exist via third-party payment, the complexity of evaluation, and the moral/emotional claims of health care.
2. That said, we should be more inclined to believe studies specifically designed to test a point, than broad population-based correlations. For drugs, and for many medical procedures, we have randomized, double-blind studies supporting efficacy. This seems a result in need of explanation. Are these studies are systematically misleading (publication bias?), or are positive effects are swamped by worthless or negative interventions?
3. When health care innovation hits, it provides enormous benefits. Anti-infectives, anesthesia, the suite of cardiovascular drugs, anti-schizophrenic agents, chemotherapy for childhood cancers -- these are just tremendous, indisputable health care wins. Any system of cutting needs to preserve the process and incentives created these technologies.
Defending the Pope
I think the majority of environmental problems we care about derive from problems of poorly defined property rights/tragedies of the commons. Certainly, we can't point to the environmental problems caused by China's rise and blame Catholic moral scruples.
[Ben A.: 9/10/07 10:47]
Environmentalism And The Catholic Church
Have you guys heard any discussion about the Church's recent emphasis on environmentalism? The headlines here keep talking about the Pope advocating this, encouraging that, but I have yet to hear anyone voice any exasperation about these headlines. This puzzles me because the Church is one of main enablers of the ultimate source of all our environmental problems, namely that there are too many fucking people. For the Pope to call himself an environmentalist because he budgeted some forest in Slovakia is like Bush legislating aerodynamic side-mirrors for cars and calling himself a post-petroleum visionary.
[Doug: 9/9/07 15:33]
Video Game Masters
Clearly that Japanese dude must have gone through years of grad school.
Last week, I saw a great documentary that follows a man trying to break the Donkey Kong world record score, and the current world-record holder, who has literally made a 25-year career out of coin-op mastery. Check out The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Much of the actionr revolves around an organization called Twin Galaxies, a bunch of obsessive geek volunteers who referee competitive gaming and keep the "official" list of video game and pinball world records.
Incidentally, as impressive as the mystery Japanese Tetris master looked, the world record is held by Steve Krogman of Boca Raton, FL.
[Ben H.: 9/9/07 10:02]
This Man Should Be Locked Up
I believe it was James Lileks who said "The entire point of Japanese culture is to provide the rest of the world with endurance tests."
[Doug: 9/9/07 06:46]
