hard heads soft hearts

2012-01-27T09:29:00.000-08:00

Sasha Said - Help! Facing Homelessness with 4 Dogs

Arthur Silber - Helping Each Other

Susie Madrak - Fun with fundraising

Digby - Help out a pal

(William) Burton's back, baby.

Oliver Willis - C.K.: November 22, 1999 – January 7, 2012

I sort of agree with conservatives that the range of human problems that can be solved with "more money" is quite narrow. But to me this just makes it more imperative to see what problems are so trivially easy to solve with more money and. . .solve them.

[3F22] Summer of 4 Ft. 2

Lisa: In the beginning of the school year, each of you received a colored ticket. I hope everyone still has theirs.
Crowd: Not me. Uh uh. I don't have it...
Nelson: Who died and made you boss?
Lisa: Mr. Estes, the publications advisor. I edited the whole thing.
Nelson: If you hadn't done it, some other loser would have. So quit milking it!

Fed statement is a positive step, 2 questions: 1) On what basis was the 2% target chosen? 2) (Quoting Atrios) What is the unemployment target?

I guess to me the fundamental principle of macroeconomics is that people should not have to make drastic negative changes in their lives, unless those changes increase productivity, or welfare, or both. UPDATE: It seems to me that the fundamental fact of a recession is that people are forced to make major negative changes in their lives, and the changes they are forced to make neither improve productivity, nor welfare.

Juan Cole - Petition against the Murder of Iranian Scientists

If Israel is asking for active policy not only to keep Israel, strong, smart & rich, but for active policy to keep Israel's neighbors poor, weak & stupid, then Israel is asking for too (damn) much. Frankly, poor, weak & stupid is something all too easy for countries to achieve, even without Israeli murders of Iranian scientists.

next post: Feb. 3rd.

2012-01-19T17:30:00.000-08:00

Arthur Silber - Ordinary Evil

David Plotz - The Bulldozer rolls on.

. . .The tough-Jews philosophy was coupled with scorn for Arabs. In his autobiography, Warrior, Sharon depicts Arabs as infantile, timorous, and untrustworthy. As one former U.S. official who knows him puts it, Sharon has the same condescending disregard for Arabs that Southern plantation-owners had for blacks. . .

. . .Some old soldiers want to fade away: Sharon would rather spend his dotage stifling the intifada that he helped create. He believes there has never been a normal day in Israel. And if he has his way, there will never be one.

The only update to Plotz's piece is that there's no longer any "if". After these recent murders of Iranian scientists, Israel has plumbed new depths, doing things the Americans & Russians chose not to do the Nazi scientists, the Americans & Russians, the Indians & Chinese, the South & North Koreans, the Pakistanis & Indians, chose not to do to each other, no matter how much they may have hated and feared one another. If India had tried to murder Pakistani scientists, it would not have stopped Pakistan, obviously, from pursuing their nuclear program, and these murders of Iranian scientists are not going to stop Iran, also obviously.

And if the logic of these murders is accepted and endorsed, there are many, many, more murders coming on the way. There are thousands of Iranian teenagers with the talent and desire to improve their country's military capability. Is Israel going to murder all of them too?

If the logic behind these murders is accepted, the Israeli vision of the future is of a white-skinned boot stomping on a brown-skinned face, forever.

I believe redemption is possible for everyone and everything, even these recent murders. But not unless you want it.

next blog post: Jan. 27

2012-01-07T13:13:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) - Today In Syria: Another Bombing

ADAM NOSSITER (NYT) - For Congo Children, Food Today Means None Tomorrow

Arthur Silber - Still Here, Very Sick

I'm in very bad shape at the moment. Kind of scary times here. I'm sorry to say that's about all I'm capable of saying right now. The articles I'm working on and want to publish next are complicated. When I run through the arguments my subjects require, I heave a deep sigh and think: "Dear lord, I can't possibly explain all that when I feel this terrible.". . .

. . .So I'm stuck in this remarkably unfriendly and barren territory. I hope a path out of here will reveal itself soon. For the duration, I ask for your understanding and indulgence.

UPDATE: Lots of talk about Iran these days. A reader reminded me of this article of mine, from almost five years ago: "So Iran Gets Nukes. So What?" Change just a few specifics, and it could have been written this morning. As for what is likely to happen in the wake of an attack on Iran, and concerning the meaning and significance of such a monstrous act, see: "Morality, Humanity and Civilization: 'Nothing remains ... but memories.'"

Those articles are good. . .

It is important to remember that we've been told for well over 5 years that Iran's nuclear program was, not "undesirable", or "scary", but "unacceptable", "inconceivable", "unimaginable", red-alert urgent urgent urgent, requiring large amounts of war and near-war ASAP. I wonder if those whose claims on Iran's nuclear program have turned out to be false are willing to go back and examine why?

Violet Socks - Life

Gary Farber - Tenth Blogiversary

Susie Madrak - ADD nightmare

Seriously, how frustrating (and silly) is this, that the DEA is keeping people from getting needed medication?
GARDINER HARRIS (NYT):
Medicines to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are in such short supply that hundreds of patients complain daily to the Food and Drug Administration that they are unable to find a pharmacy with enough pills to fill their prescriptions.

The shortages are a result of a troubled partnership between drug manufacturers and the Drug Enforcement Administration . . .

letsgetitdone (corrente) - The Job Guarantee and the MMT Core: Part Three, A Reply to John Carney

Why leaks are essential, and why too much secrecy and reverence for top-secret, classified information can damage national security:
ADAM ENTOUS and JULIAN E. BARNES in Washington and MARGARET COKER in Abu Dhabi (WSJ) - U.S. Doubts Intelligence That Led to Yemen Strike

Top U.S. military leaders who oversaw missile strikes last year against al Qaeda targets in Yemen suspect they were fed misleading intelligence by the country's government and were duped into killing a local political leader whose relationship with the president's family had soured. . .

making a similar point, a very good Bill James article in Slate, published in 2010, which I just read:
Bill James - Life, Liberty, and Breaking the Rules: In defense of Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, jaywalkers, and all the other scofflaws that make America great.

There is no real difference between sending Babe Ruth to jail and sending Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens to jail. The only relevant difference is the difference between America in 2010 and America in 1940 . . .

. . .The answer is. . .tolerance and vigilance, and it is a sense of perspective. The people who sent Martha Stewart to jail were the people who were supposed to be watching Wall Street. They went after Martha Stewart because she was an easy target. . .

. . .So now it is Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds in the cross hairs of the prosecutors, and the question I would urge you to think about is not only "Are these people guilty?" It is also, "Is this prosecution necessary and appropriate?"

Who is it that these people are not watching? We know now, in retrospect, who the people who sent Martha to jail should have been watching. In 10 years, we will know who is robbing the candy store while the feds are chasing Roger. . .

Question: What do Saez and other public finance economists think of wealth taxes versus income taxes, and treatment of capital income versus wage income?

Julian Pecquet (The Hill) - Health care execs top list of highest-paid CEOs

. . .John Hammergen, CEO of the pharmaceutical distributor and technology firm McKesson, made $145 million, according to GMI. Joel Gemunder, CEO of Omnicare — the nation's leading provider of medicines for seniors — made a reported $98 million. . .

Nasty, low, suspicious mind that I have, can't help wondering whether the hospitals being so extraordinarily generous to Hammergen & Gemunder are being bribed to be so.

Markets work very well for long, repeated games, not so much for one-shot and limited shot games. And the higher executive pay becomes, the more the CEO's relationship with their company, and with the broader economy, becomes one-shot or limited-shot, instead of repeated. i.e. "make your pile by hook or crook, and then after that they can't touch you". A nation dreaming of accumulating their fuck-you money, instead of defeating the desire to say fuck-you.

Water-Cooler Wisdom: "These CEOs man, they have no sense of ownership, no sense of loyalty, they swoop in, make drastic changes, swoop out with a big severance, leave a big mess to clean up. I think they take their inspiration from George W. Bush".

Dean Baker - Hiding Upward Redistribution Policies as Market Outcomes

Congrats to Romney. The first Mormon 2-party nominee is a milestone worth celebrating. But did Santorum win Iowa?

Next blog post: Jan. 20

2012-01-02T15:35:00.000-08:00

Arthur Silber - ONCE UPON A TIME...

Gary Farber - TENTH BLOGIVERSARY

Susie Madrak - Happy new year!

Juan Cole - Top 5 Foreign Policy Challenges for US, 2012

Martin Gascoigne - Syria, the Invisible Massacre

Andrew Sullivan - Today In Syria: Assad's Terrible New Year

Glenn Greenwald - Good Chris Hayes segment, with Spencer @Attackerman, on Obama's secret drone wars: http://is.gd/kWvoT0

Charlie Rose - Ali Soufan on "The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda" (12/23/2011)

Yes, Minister - The Whiskey Priest

Jim Hacker: "Remember Churchill, the wilderness years. He found out about our military inadequacy and Hitler's war machine from army officers. So all the time he was in the wilderness, he was able to leak stories to the press and embarrass the government. I could do that."
Annie Hacker: "But you're in the government."
Jim Hacker: "Oh, yes..."

Question for Bradley Manning prosecution: Was Winston Churchill guilty of "aiding the enemy" when he leaked top-secret information of British military inadequacy to the Germans (and the British public)?

Obsidian Wings (russell) - what about huntsman?

I asked a conservative friend about Huntsman, his answer: "Why not Huntsman? Because he's NOT a conservative! . . . .He is NOT A CONSERVATIVE!".

So I guess Huntsman, if he still has hopes, should sink money into 2 ads: 1. Jon Huntsman - I'm A Conservative! 2. Jon Huntsman - I'M A CONSERVATIVE!!

possibly followed by 3. JON HUNTSMAN - HE'S A CONSERVATIVE!!!

Kevin Drum - America's 20-Year Investment Drought

Matthew Yglesias - America's Infrastructure Failure

Michael Mandel - My chart of the year: The investment drought continues

Matt Stoller - Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going AND Put You in Debtor’s Prison? (June 2011)

Rortybomb (Mike Konczal) - Please Consider Supporting the Roosevelt Institute

Josh Marshall - What’s the Deal with Romney’s Taxes?

Paul Krugman - when economists stop being polite

[John Cochrane] defines Ricardian equivalence as
the theorem that stimulus does not work in a well-functioning economy

But how do you determine when an economy is well-functioning?

Daniel Dennett blurb to Douglas Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language" (1997)

"What Douglas Hofstadter is, quite simply, is a phenomenologist, a practicing phenomenologist, and he does it better than anyone else. Ever. For years he has been studying the processes of his own consciousness, relentlessly, unflinchingly, imaginatively, but undeludedly — he watches his own mind work the way a stage magician watches another stage magician's show, not in slack-jawed awe at the 'magic' of it all, but full of intense and informed curiosity about how on earth the effects might be achieved." - Daniel Dennett

Probably unfair, but "slack-jawed awe at the 'magic' of it all" describes my reaction to certain overly worshipful attitudes to capitalism, the free market, and the invisible hand. One example I have in mind is Milton Friedman's pencil story, which is a great story, but ignores the fact that they had pencils in the USSR, and the fact that pencil-making was invented, copied and improved under a wide variety of regimes, none of them completely laissez-faire.

David Atkins - The "No True Libertarianism" fallacy

. . .The modern welfare state didn't arise by accident or conspiracy: it evolved as a means of avoiding the failures of other models. . .

Karl Smith - John Taylor and ARRA (July 2011)

. . .I actually think Taylor is making an important substantive point here. It’s that in practice fiscal stimulus doesn’t raise GDP because in practice fiscal stimulus amounts to giving money to people, who then save it – just as Lucas, Sargent etc, said they would. . .

comments:
rjs:
Bill Gross, CEO of the worlds largest bond fund PIMCO, seems to have had an epiphany about proper counter cyclical fiscal policy last week; in his monthly letter to investors, he said concern about deficits can wait for a stronger economy, and called for a new stimulus program similar the FDR’s WPA…quoting economist Hyman Minsky, he opined that “government should become the “employer of last resort” in a crisis, offering a job to anyone who wants one – for health care, street cleaning, or slum renovation” and repeated David Rosenberg’s “I’d have a shovel in the hands of the long-term unemployed from 8am to noon, and from 1pm to 5pm I’d have them studying algebra, physics, and geometry.”

roublen:
Rational expectations is not crazy for saying that that if you give people money they might save it rather than spend it. It’s crazy for saying that people will save based on estimating their increased future tax liabilities because of the increased new spending (as if any self-respecting conservative would not be dreaming up clever schemes of tax avoidance instead of meekly estimating their future taxes!). The Chinese save a large fraction of their income, not because of future tax liabilities, but because they don’t have health insurance. With high unemployment, and the most unpredictable medical costs of any rich nation, it’s not hard to explain why people are saving as much as they possibly can.

Karl Smith - Health Care: Unfixable on the Demand Side (Sep. 2011)

. . .This slips under my definition of Liberalization Failure. You can point to all the things that are wrong with government controlled health care but when you leave cost control to the private markets the populist backlash is so severe that governments can’t help but make the problem even worse.

Thus you end up with the most costly health care system on the planet.

comments:

roublen
I think you’re overlooking the consolidation and recovery of pricing power on the part of providers, which seems to me a more important political force than a consumer backlash. (How politically effective have consumer backlashes against banking and higher education been?)

All the softie hospitals which would give away charity care without charging the uninsured usurious rates or going after them with bill collectors have been bought out/ shut down, leaving private hospitals administered by a bunch of hard-boiled eggs willing to be ruthless in treating uninsured/emergency patients as an opportunity to rack up billable hours, and then aggressively pursuing those claims through collection agencies.

wlm:
I agree with roublen about the power of providers relative to consumers.

I also think that incentives for providers are often perverse in health care. For many severe conditions (cancer, COPD, kidney failure, etc) treatment is expensive, but failure to treat is cheaper, both in the short and long term.

I don’t think we will come up with an HMO model that will address this market failure.

I forgot to mention that, in theory, the right organization structure for private health insurance seems to be of a mutual insurer, so that successfully holding down costs leads to premium refunds. Does not deal with the problem of adverse selection, or bad relationships with providers, though.

To elaborate on my earlier assertion that that there was a gold "bubble", here's what I meant by that: By 2020, the price of gold will be closer to its 2005 price than its 2010 price. i.e. by 2020, the nominal price of gold will be less than a thousand dollars an ounce. Also, it will have turned out that during the bubble years, one or more of the major gold brokers will have done something unsavory/unethical/fraudulent. My guess is that they will have subcontracted with someone who claimed to have gold they did not actually have, or that they will interpret contracts in a way that gives investors rights to less gold than they thought they were buying.

Matt Phillips (WSJ) - Charlie Munger on gold (Jan. 2011)

Wikimedia foundation - Thank you from Executive Director Sue Gardner

Brad Delong - AN UNREALISTIC, IMPRACTICAL, UTOPIAN PLAN FOR DEALING WITH THE HEALTH CARE OPPORTUNITY (2007)

Ezra Klein - Presenting the first-annual Wonky awards

. . .Central bank dissenter of the year: Charles Evans. While some on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors are worried that the central bank is doing too much and risking inflation, Evans has argued that the Fed isn’t doing enough to boost the economy. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Evans is one of the few bankers who seems to recognize that 9 percent unemployment should, as he put it, set policymakers’ hair on fire as much as a slight uptick in inflation usually does. . .

2011-12-26T18:12:00.000-08:00

Arthur Silber - ONCE UPON A TIME...

. . .Besides, I'm very sick right now. My major concern is trying to avoid having to call 911. For the third time. I don't want to do that. . .

Susie Madrak - Syria

There are 2 questions re: Manning. One, did he do a good or bad thing? On this, reasonable people can disagree. Second, if it was bad, how bad was it? This is the question on which the US government has lost its mind, its bearings, its morality. It has whipped itself into a hysteria, and allowed itself to become evil. Ali Soufan's recent interview with Charlie Rose exemplifies what good national security work looks like, as opposed to the chilling control-freak excesses of the Manning (and Aaron Swartz) prosecutions.

Glenn Greenwald - must-read piece comparing Manning and Ellsberg

KEVIN GOSZTOLA - Manning is charged with aiding terrorists

[Fein] Manning “knowingly gave intelligence through WikiLeaks to the enemy.” He “wantonly caused the release of this information.” It was “not just good for declared enemies” but also accessible to “all other enemies with Internet access.” . .

. . .Now, it is clear: the effect of Manning’s prosecution has the potential to criminalize national security journalism. . .

If you accept the prosecution's argument, is there any difference between "informing the enemy" and "informing the American people"?

Kevin Jon Heller - Did Bradley Manning “Aid the Enemy”? Did The New York Times? (Updated)

Paul Krugman - Springtime for Toxics

. . .mercury is nasty stuff. It’s a potent neurotoxicant: the expression “mad as a hatter” emerged in the 19th century because hat makers of the time treated fur with mercury compounds, and often suffered nerve and mental damage as a result.

. . .a lot of mercury gets into the atmosphere from old coal-burning power plants that lack modern pollution controls. From there it gets into the water, where microbes turn it into methylmercury, which builds up in fish. And what happens then? The E.P.A. explains: “Methylmercury exposure is a particular concern for women of childbearing age, unborn babies and young children, because studies have linked high levels of methylmercury to damage to the developing nervous system, which can impair children’s ability to think and learn.”

The new rules would also have the effect of reducing fine particle pollution, which is a known source of many health problems, from asthma to heart attacks. In fact, the benefits of reduced fine particle pollution account for most of the quantifiable gains from the new rules. The key word here is “quantifiable”: E.P.A.’s cost-benefit analysis only considers one benefit of mercury regulation, the reduced loss in future wages for children whose I.Q.’s are damaged by eating fish caught by freshwater anglers. There are without doubt many other benefits to cutting mercury emissions, but at this point the agency doesn’t know how to put a dollar figure on those benefits.

Even so, the payoff to the new rules is huge: up to $90 billion a year in benefits compared with around $10 billion a year of costs in the form of slightly higher electricity prices. This is, as David Roberts of Grist says, a very big deal. . .

Diane - A Sign Of Hope

(Via Hannah Mae) I.A.R. Wylie - "The Little Woman" (November 1945)

THOMAS B. EDSALL - The Anti-Entitlement Strategy

THOMAS B. EDSALL - The Trouble With That Revolving Door

I think it was Michael Barone who called Edsall a "gloomy Irishman", a political pessimist who, because he was liberal, kept writing articles about the problems with or obstacles to liberalism. Anyway, a very good political journalist.

Matthew Yglesias - Central Banking & Humility

Scott Sumner - Central Banking & Ego

Modeled Behavior (Karl Smith) - Why Not Plutocracy: Apathy Runs Deep Edition

. . twitter was ablaze a few weeks back over the fact that Jamie Dimon objected to his taxes being raised, but thought that he was already paying what Obama proposed raising his tax rate to.

This makes perfect sense if you note that Jamie doesn’t care about his tax rate. He cares about his taxes being raised. . .

. . .Here at the state level I can safely say that virtually no one has any idea what they are doing. That is, for the most part the lobbyist do not know and indeed are not particularly interested in what is in the best interest of their clients.

Further, this seems to stem from the fact that the clients are not particularly interested in what is in their best interests.

What they are very interested in is whether legislation is pro them or anti them. However, if you begin to talk about the economy as a complex system full of unintended consequences where anti legislation could be in their best interests their eyes glaze over. . .

One example my Dad gives is when a regulated monopoly was forced to lower their rates, to their surprise, profits increased. You would have assumed they would already be maximizing profits, but you would have assumed wrong.

Noahpinion - The liberty of local bullies

2011-12-19T18:04:00.000-08:00

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

Paul Krugman - But I do know one and one is two. . .

Bill Keller (NYT) - The Pakistanis Have a Point

[Malik]: “If you are not able to close the Mexican border, when you have the technology at your call, when there is no war,” he said, “how can you expect us to close our border, especially if you are not locking the doors on your side?”

IAN AYRES and AARON S. EDLIN (NYT) - Don’t Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself.

There may be better schemes, but Ayres & Edlin's proposal would be an improvement over the status quo.

TAMAR LEWIN (NYT) - M.I.T. Expands Its Free Online Courses

russell (Obsidian Wings) - will the last person to leave please turn out the lights....

Susie Madrak - Distress signal

Diane at Cabdrollery is in trouble, hanging by a financial thread. If you can spare even $10, go help.

DIANE - Will Blog For Food

Literally.

The hammer fell again, this time harder than usual. The landlord has given me a 3 day notice, and I barely have enough money to get to the local DPSS office to see if I can get a Department 8 grant for this month and next month to offset some of the balance I now owe.

As some of you know, I've not been working for the past 6 weeks at all, which leaves only my Social Security, which would have been fine if I hadn't had a serious pulmonary problem develop, which even with Medicare has tapped me out with all the co-pays for the specialists, tests, and medications. I also have state bar dues to pay if I want/am able to work next year. The main problem is that I only have enough money for that visit to Pasadena tomorrow. The cat has food. I have very little.

What I need is a bunch of small donations from a lot of people. I know it's the wrong time of the year to be asking for this kind of help (as if there's a right time), but I need it and I need it quickly. Please help if you can.

This time I'm really scared.

Susie Madrak - Ash Wednesday

James Herriot - The best of James Herriot: favourite memories of a country vet

. . .The card dangled above the old lady's bed. It read `God is Near'. . .

. . .There wasn't much more Miss Stubbs could see; perhaps a few feet of privet hedge through the frayed curtains but mainly it was just the cluttered little room which had been her world for so many years. . .

. . .I had been visiting regularly for over a year and the pattern never changed; the furious barking, then Mrs Broadwith who looked after Miss Stubbs would push all the animals but my patient into the back kitchen and open the door and would go in and see Miss Stubbs in the corner in her bed with the card hanging over it.

She had been there for a long time and would never get up again. But she never mentioned her illness and pain to me; all her concern was for her three dogs and two cats. . .

. . .It was the usual scenario for the many cups of tea I had drunk with Miss Stubbs under the little card which dangled above her bed.

`How are you today?' I asked.

`Oh, much better,' she replied and immediately, as always, changed the subject. . .

. . .The things I had heard in the village came back to me; about the prosperous father and family who lived in the big house many years ago. Then the foreign investments which crashed and the sudden change in circumstances. `When t'owd feller died he was about skint,' one old man had said. `There's not much brass there now.'

Probably just enough brass to keep Miss Stubbs and her animals alive and to pay Mrs Broadwith. Not enough to keep the garden dug or the house painted or for any of the normal little luxuries. . .

. . .`Well, it was quick, Miss Stubbs, I'm sure the old chap didn't suffer at all.' My words sounded lame and ineffectual. . .

`You know, Mr. Herriot,' she said casually, `It will be my turn next.'. . .

. . .`I'm not afraid,' she said. `I know there's something better waiting for me. I've never had any doubts.' There was silence between us as she lay calmly looking up at the card on the gas bracket.

Then the head on the pillow turned to me again. `I have only one fear.' Her expression changed with startling suddenness as if a mask had dropped. The brave face was almost unrecognisable. A kind of terror flickered in her eyes and she quickly grasped my hand.

`It's my dogs and cats, Mr. Heriot. I'm afraid I might never see them when I'm gone and it worries me so. You see, I know I'll be reunited with my parents and my brothers but. . .but. . .'

`Well, why not with your animals?'

`That's just it.' She rocked her head on the pillow and for the first time I saw tears on her cheeks. `The say animals have no souls.'

`Who says?'

`Oh, I've read it and I know a lot of religious people believe it.'

`Well I don't believe it.' I patted the hand which still grasped mine. `If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans. . .

. . .The tension left her face and she laughed with a return of her old spirit. `I'm sorry to bore you with this and I'm not going to talk about it again. But before you go, I want you to be absolutely honest with me. I don't want reassurance from you - just the truth. I know you are very young but please tell me - what are your beliefs? Will my animals go with me?'

She stared intently into my eyes. I shifted in my chair and swallowed once or twice.

`Miss Stubbs, I'm afraid I'm a bit foggy about all this,' I said. `But I'm absolutely certain of one thing. Wherever you are going, they are going too.'

She still stared at me but her face was calm again. `Thank you, Mr. Herriot, I know you are being honest with me. That is what you really believe, isn't it?'

`I do believe it,' I said. `With all my heart I believe it.'. . .

MIT Shakespeare homepage - Hamlet

. . .MARCELLUS
It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

HORATIO
So have I heard and do in part believe it.
But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill:
Break we our watch up; and by my advice,
Let us impart what we have seen to-night
Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life,
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.
Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it,
As needful in our loves, fitting our duty?

MARCELLUS
Let's do't, I pray; and I this morning know
Where we shall find him most conveniently.

Exeunt

2011-12-13T09:44:00.000-08:00

Arthur Silber - Power of Narrative

. . .But I still have to pay an electric bill, my Internet provider, and ... well, food and stuff. After I've paid for that, I'll be close to totally broke. I mean, except for about a hundred dollars, I'll be totally broke. . .

. . .Have a listen to Leontyne Price singing "O Holy Night." That comes from one of the most beautiful Christmas albums I've ever heard: treat yourself to it. And Cyrano imploringly says: "Keep the Friskies away!" (C'mon, don't sue us. It's just his opinion. Besides, we're judgment-proof.). . .

Violet Socks - Fundraiser to keep my health insurance from being cancelled

I have been scrambling like mad to earn money this fall, but work is the slowest it’s ever been in my entire life. I’ve taken on every kind of job I can, tried to sell stuff, etc., etc., but there is just nothing moving out there.

The main thing I have to pay is my health insurance, which is crappy and has gigantic coinsurance but is better than nothing. And so here’s the deal: at this point I’m exactly $652.23 short of what I need to cover the premium and keep things going into January.

That’s the amount I need to raise somehow: $652.23. If any of you happen to be flush this month and feel like throwing some Christmas cheer my way, I would be beyond grateful for any contribution you can make. . .

. . .I’ll post updates here on the status and let you know when (fingers crossed) the goal is reached. If I can raise this money I will be so overjoyed and relieved, you won’t be able to stand me. I will host a virtual Christmas blog party to celebrate!

John Wildermuth, Chronicle Staff Writer - Benioffs pitch in to help homeless S.F. families

Susie Madrak - Catch 22

So they can’t find the money that’s missing, they just know it isn’t mixed in with the money that’s left. . .

Tell me again why companies in bankruptcy are allowed to choose the people who oversee their bankruptcy?

Corrente (Lambert) - Excellent interview with David Graeber

Juan Cole - Top Ten Things Americans can be Thankful for 2011 (US troops out of Iraq)

Informed Comment - Support this Site! (annual fundraiser)

Glenn Greenwald - Blog news (annual fundraiser)

Elizabeth Goitein - Bradley Manning

David Goldstein (McClatchy) - As U.S. troops leave Iraq, what is the legacy of eight years of war?

Paul Krugman - Receding Inflation In Britain

If there's one good thing about the MF Global debacle, it's a timely reminder to be wary of listening to the ratings agencies:

AZAM AHMED, BEN PROTESS and SUSANNE CRAIG (NYT) - A Romance With Risk That Brought On a Panic

. . .Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s had applauded Mr. Corzine’s effort to overhaul the firm, a move that included ratcheting up risk.

“We consider the most recent strategic plan of the new C.E.O. Jon Corzine to be sound,” S.& P. said in 2010, while acknowledging the plan “will incrementally increase the firm’s risk profile.”

. . .A week later, Moody’s cut its rating on MF Global to a notch above junk, pointing to the European debt holdings.

The reversal angered some executives at MF Global, who felt it was disingenuous for the agency to change its mind so suddenly. . .

It's also a reminder that being clever, being rational, and even being right do not necessarily entitle you to great wealth through exploiting the perceived irrationality of others.

Andrew Tobias - The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need

p. 171:

. . .David Dreman, author of The New Contrarian Investment Strategy, writing in Barron's, made a good case against random walk. He pointed out that stock markets have always been irrational and concluded that a rational man could therefore outdo the herd. "Market histort gives cold comfort to the Random Walkers," he writes. "`Rational' investors in France, back in 1719, valued the Mississippi Company at 80 times all the gold and silver in the country - and, just a few months later, at only a pittance."

It is true, I think, that by keeping one's head and sticking to value one may do better than average. But it's not easy. Because the real question is not whether the market is rational but whether by being rational we can beat it. Had Dreman been alive in 1719, he might very reasonably have concluded that the Mississippi Company was absurdly overpriced at, say, three times all the gold and silver in France. And he might have shorted some. At six times all the gold and silver in France he might have shorted more. At twenty times all the gold and silver in France he might have been ever so rational - and thoroughly ruined. It would have been cold comfort to hear through the bars of debtors' prison that, some months later, rationality had at last prevailed. A driveling imbecile, on the other hand, caught up in the crowd's madness, might have ridden the stock from three times to eighty times all the gold and silver in France and, quite irrationally, struck it rich.

Fast-forward 281 years to the dot-com bubble. One very smart Wall street trader I know took a slam-dunk shot writing naked calls on Amazon.com, meaning that he pocketed $50,000 or so for taking on a minuscule risk for a week or two - the stock, already wildly overpriced, would have to rise more than 50 points in a week for him even to begin to feel any pain. He was completely right and Amazon stock soon fell precipitously - but not before a final for-the-record-books spurt that totally wiped out every penny he had worked his whole life to earn. He didn't jump - but he thought about it. . .

Question for debt-as-indulgence, prosperity-through-thrifty-idleness types: How is it possible for Japan to have a debt/GDP ratio of 200%, a deficit of 8% of GDP, interest rates of less than 2%, and inflation of less than 2%? Not suggesting that US follow a similar policy, but how could such a thing even be possible, if the deficit-hawk view of the world is correct?

2011-12-07T18:48:00.000-08:00

Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time. . .

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

. . .It’s being reported that this is the first time ever that a health secretary has overruled the FDA. It’s amazing, isn’t it?. . .

It really does look like the point of this Obama Plan B decision is simply to make liberals squeal, so moderate conservatives can conclude "if he's pissing off liberals, he must be doing something right". "I-Shot-A-Man-In-Reno" politics. Don't think it will be very successful, nor should it be.

Suburban Guerrilla (odd man out) - Banksters spooked by ‘Occupy Our Homes'

No reason to foreclose unless investors would get more money from a foreclosure than a principal modification/short sale. And given that investors have been bailed out so much, it's reasonable to have a rule that no foreclosures unless investors would get $20000 dollars more from a foreclosure than a principal modification / short sale.

Hannah Mae - The Shantoose of the Banjo Club

Krugman - British Debt History

(Via Wonkblog (Suzy Khimm)) - Haunting, candid photos of women on death row in China.

One of the condemned prisoners has a very simple, ingenuous face, and seems to be very happy and jolly in the first few slides. I think this was partly because she was genuinely happy, partly because she was trying to make the best of the time she had left, and partly, also, because in the back of her mind was the feeling that if she was very jolly and friendly, and people liked her, perhaps they would give her a reprieve / extend her term. The last is an emotion very familiar to temp workers / contractors anxious to get renewed. In one of the slides she breaks down, and is comforted by a prison guard, and recovers her composure somewhat. I don't know what crime she was condemned and executed for, nor the other prisoners, including one who looked somewhat stoic and resigned.

My preferred BCS plan:

1. Of the 4 BCS bowls, 2 act as semifinals for the BCS championship game, #1 against #4 and #2 against #3.

2. If a Pac-12 or Big-10 team is in the top 4, the Rose Bowl gets the semifinal game with the highest ranking Pac-12 or Big-10 team. Otherwise, it gets the traditional Pac-12 versus Big-10 game. This would lead to very nice rule, "The best Pac-12 & Big-10 team always plays in the Rose Bowl"

3. Perhaps there could be similar special rights for the Sugar Bowl. In the case of a conflict between Rose & Sugar, the the higher ranked team wins. This would lead to a somewhat less nice rule, "The best Pac-12 & Big-10 & SEC team always plays in either the Rose or Sugar Bowl"

4. The other semifinal games are distributed among the other BCS bowls.

5. The BCS bowl games are played up to either Jan 1. or Jan 2.

6. The BCS championship game is played on the second Saturday after the last BCS bowl game. i.e. For 2012 that would be Jan. 14, instead of the current date of Jan. 9. Though the championship game would be pushed back a few days, fans would also see the best teams in the country play on and around New Year's Day, instead of having to wait until Jan. 9.

7. I believe the best college football game of the year should be played on a Saturday afternoon. Play is for players, and fans, not television. But if the conflict with pro-football is too big a problem, the game could be played on the second Friday, or second Thursday, after the last BCS bowl game instead.

Under these rules, the current season would have a Sugar Bowl of LSU versus Stanford, an Orange or Fiesta Bowl of OSU versus Alabama, and a Rose Bowl of Oregon versus Wisconsin.

And if the seeds won out, you'd top it off a with a rematch of LSU versus Alabama: 4 great games with genuinely unpredictable outcomes, compared to the current system of 3 great games and a lingering disappointment that the Alabama / OSU debate was not settled properly.

2011-12-02T05:43:00.000-08:00

Violet Socks - Success!

Hilary - Update 3: The goal has been reached!

Paul Krugman - Debt History

Atrios - They Know Even Less Than What They Say

Suburban Guerrilla (odd man out) - Reich’s radical proposal — decent wages

Obsidian Wings (Doctor Science) - The The Labor of the Harvest

Corrente (Lambert) - It's live! (What happened....)

dsquareddigest talks about a culture of tax avoision in Greece, but it's revenue is not that low: 40% of GDP. It's spending is high but not outlandish: 50% of GDP, but a lot of that is debt servicing. What is eye-popping is the debt/GDP ratio: 140% of GDP. Has any country ever gotten out of a debt/GDP ratio that high without defaulting? How did they do it? Japan, I guess, but their solution is to have very, very, very low interest rates, an option that does not seem open to the Greeks.

Anyone have strong opinions on where on the 40-50 scale Greece should aim for? (i.e. assuming a balanced budget, aiming for 47% GDP means 3% spending cuts, 7% tax increases, 42% means 8% spending cuts, 2% tax increases, etc).

In any case, all other countries except Greece and Ireland are liquidity problems, not solvency problems. For Italy, the ECB can solve the problem in a day by announcing that it will not allow the Italian-German spread to rise above 2.5%, and it will not allow the Italian bond to rise above 5.5%. It should do so, and should implement similar policies for other countries. If the ECB won't do it, the Fed should. Just like Clinton's Treasury in 1994 for Mexico, the Fed should not hesitate to intervene in a foreign credit crunch, if it is in US interests.

To those opposed to a simple & easy solution to a not very difficult problem, it should perhaps be suggested that if the desired goal is to teach discipline, continence & sacrifice, coked-up bond traders are not the ideal vehicle for delivering that message. Also, that there are better, truly difficult problems for humanity to attack, rather than inventing, then dealing with, the artificial problem of how to handle a bank run without activist policy to prevent interest rates from getting out of control.

That leaves, Greece, which is (possibly) a solvency problem. 3 numbers the political system needs to find: 1) the maximum GDP number the Greeks can be expected to spend on debt servicing. (my guess: 6-8%) 2) the minimum amount the debt/GDP ratio needs to decrease annually (my guess: 2%) 3) the acceptable range of interest rates the market will demand/ECB will allow for Greek bonds (no idea)

Together, these 3 numbers determine the minimum amount of principle reduction Greece may need in order to make life in the Eurozone tolerable. The hit to principle should be absorbed partly by bondholders, partly by wealthy Greeks. If the ECB/political system wants to prevent bondholders taking losses, that's fine, possibly desirable.

An aside: the one fact about Greece that has captured the public imagination is the "retiring in their fifties" theme. Everyone seems to think that if the Greeks retired at 65, their problems would be solved. No idea if it's true.

An interesting Wikipedia page:

National debt by U.S. presidential terms

which in turn links to an interesting excel file:

White house 2012 budget - Table 7.1 — FEDERAL DEBT AT THE END OF YEAR: 1940–2016

2011-11-22T21:58:00.000-08:00

Arthur Silber - Rape, Harrassment, Horrible Bosses

Arthur Silber - "They Don't Represent America"? Not Quite, Mr. President. (2004)

Will Kane (SF Chronicle) - Scott Olsen, vet hurt at Occupy Oakland, discharged

(Via Atrios):

World O' Crap - If 'Are You Being Served?' is the Kind of Programming...

Sam Seder interview of Dean Baker

Dean Baker: " . . .So we had a huge fall-off in both construction & consumption, creating a shortfall in demand over a trillion dollars a year. The point is, how do you replace that demand? We have all these people in Washington saying `We want the private sector to do it'. Wonderful! I want the private sector to do it too, but it doesn't work that way, they don't increase their spending just because we have politicians who want them to. . ."

just saw the Inside Job, found it a little overwhelming, found the interview with Mishkin, who seemed a nice man (and whose textbook is indeed quite good), painful to watch. One of the baroque details I found interesting was the extraordinary lengths Richard Fuld of Lehmann went to shield himself from the details of what the Lehmann rank and file were doing (He had his own private elevator, and his driver called in to the doorman to clear the way once he had arrived, so that the journey from the car to the elevator, instead of talking 5-10 minutes, could instead be over in 30 seconds, with minimum human contact. Once in the elevator, safe from the rank and file, straight up to the privacy of the executive floor).

I perhaps have similar misanthropic tendencies, a similar occasional desire to be free from the accusing glance of others, a similar desire to be safe in a private sanctuary, but could not imagine indulging that desire to that extreme, no matter how much money I had.

In any case, 2 people in the film that I found impressive were Robert Gnaizda & Charles Morris, and wondered why they didn't seem that impressed with the Obama administration. Also wondered what Larry Summers would have had to say about his dealings with Brooksley Born.

Re: Europe, it almost defies belief, but a great and sophisticated continent is coming to grief because it has saddled itself with a central bank that does not understand central banking: namely, that every industrial economy since 1820 has needed a lender of last resort at a penalty rate, and the penalty rate should be nonzero but affordable. The alternative to the lender of last resort is 1) large amounts of capital wasted self-insuring against Knightian uncertainty 2) random, unavoidable crisis caused by self-fulfilling fears & panics. It's easy to blame the Germans, but I believe the real fault lies with elites in Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, who need to gather their courage and get out of the Euro, ASAP. When the UK & Sweden exited the ERM, the results were very beneficial, and I believe the same would be true of exiting the Euro.

One idea I think would be good for US economic policy: allow every fixed Treasury bond to be freely convertible to a TIPS bond, if the bondholder wants to convert. The result would be to allow a shift of inflation risk from individual investors to the government. Hopefully, that would make the system more tolerant of moderate amounts of inflation, and therefore better protected against liquidity traps.

2011-11-17T17:54:00.000-08:00

Arthur Silber - So, What Exactly Are We Talking About? Some Preliminary Observations

Arthur Silber - Railroaded Into Unnecessary War

Arthur Silber - AN ASSAULT ON A HUMAN BEING IS AN ASSAULT ON A HUMAN BEING. CHILDREN ARE HUMAN BEINGS. CHILDREN ARE NOT PROPERTY.

Arthur Silber - Sorrowful Silence

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

Am I the only person in the world who thinks 200 bucks is serious money? Okay, not exactly serious, but significant. It’s a chunk of change, you know?. . .a hundred-dollar piece of electronic gear is not a stocking stuffer. A stocking stuffer is a plastic pez dispenser with red and green M&Ms. . .

Gary Farber - Amygdala

russell (Obsidian Wings) - the 28th

Susie Madrak - Dorli Rainey

A must-read post by Digby:

Digby - The war at home

Digby - For thee but not for me

Paul Krugman - The Very Brave BOE

The BOE sensibly realizes that moderate inflation is far preferable to the alternative of a liquidity trap combined with a crushing debt burden. No one liked the Post-WWII double-digit inflation rates, but surely they were preferable to depression. Central bankers with a clue: Who let them into the building?

Talking about people who know what they're doing, I've always liked this Roger Mudd interview:

Roger Mudd - interviewed by Brian Lamb (1999)

Lamb: . . .if people were to go back and say, `Was there a Roger Mudd moment?' it would be the question to Ted Kennedy, `Why do you want to be president?'. . .

Mudd: . . .So when we sat down for the interview, I knew almost as much about him and Chappaquiddick as he did so it was not an adversarial interview so much as it was he knew that he couldn't get by with very much. And he'd have to answer the questions because, you know, I knew where to go. . .And I kept saying, `Well, I mean, how do you differ from President Carter? I mean, what would be different?' And the answers were not very articulate, and suddenly I said, `OK, so why do you want to be president?' And the answer was, `Well, because the sky is so blue and the grass is so green and the water's so cold,' is basically what he said, and the answer did not make sense.

And it suddenly occurred to people that maybe the senator didn't know why he wanted to be president or maybe he hadn't thought about it; maybe he hadn't gone to the mountain and figured out who he wanted to punish and who he wanted to reward and what elements of society he wanted to -and it was a difficult moment for him because an awful lot of writers, columnists, reporters used that interview to to dump on him. They had not been willing to do that before because I think they were taken by the Kennedy magic, and this revealed the senator as inarticulate in many ways.

I think he's a terrific senator, by the way. . .

LAMB: . . .You glad it's over? Or would you have liked to have stayed on?

Mr. MUDD: Well, no. Things have changed so much, Brian. Priorities are not the same. What you try to do is not the same. The audience you try to reach is different. The kind of stories that they use now are different. . .I've had a marvelous life with the networks, ups and downs, mostly ups, and was privileged to be a part of a--of, you know, a splendid news organization, CBS. You know, when you--when you went somewhere with CBS, you felt like you were the New York Yankees arriving because you--you knew there wasn't anybody any better.

And we were awfully good; I mean, had an awful lot of good people. And we knew what we were doing, and we knew what was news and what wasn't. And maybe we had too much hubris, I don't know. But, in any event, I think--I think it would be very difficult to go back. So to answer your question, no, I'm not sad about it.

Amid all news of cell phone patents/IP, I realized with a sense of shock that patents/IP are much more valuable for a company which doesn't make cellphones, who makes nothing, than a company which actually makes the damn phones. If you actually manufacture a phone, then you can sue other manufacturers for violating your patents, but they can sue you too for violating their patents, and it's mutually assured destruction. If you can sue for infringement of your "ambulatory communication device" patent, you can also be sued for your infringement of someone else's "device which ambulates while communicating" patent. But if you posses only the cell phone patents, without selling any actual phones, you can happily sue all the real manufacturers for violating your precious, oh-so-valuable IP, without a care in the world. (I take it for granted that 99.99% of patents are not actually valuable in the process of manufacturing a product)

Obviously, this is perverse and absurd. There are solutions, but the current crop of politicians have zero interest in finding them.

I don't think Steve Jobs bitter denunciation to Obama of unions/the left should be seen as Jobs just being a jerk. I think they should be seen as someone who wanted pretty badly to manufacture macs in the US, and was frustrated at his inability to do so. I think Jobs was well aware that if he had managed to make macs in the US, the love people had for him, already immense, would have reached stratospheric levels.

Cricinfo - Full coverage of Peter Roebuck's death

Rob Steen on Peter Roebuck - A sharp mind, a tormented soul

Sambit Bal - Remembering Roebuck

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that Roebuck, when he first came up, was a pupil and friend of Tom Cartwright, one of my favorite cricketers.

2011-11-09T22:25:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan - Assad's Victims Mount

Andrew Sullivan - Obama on Cannabis

Arthur Silber - Sorrowful Silence

Susie Madrak - Generational Warfare

Economist Dean Baker

Gary Farber - Amygdala

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

Fresh Air - (Jill Lepore) How Birth Control And Abortion Became Politicized

Are the kids in the PSA abuses getting all the help they need? What do they think is an appropriate punishment?

So how many jobs would Obama/Dems have created if the GOP hadn't blocked their bills? And why isn't this number a kajillian billion?

2011-11-03T17:48:00.000-07:00

Gary Farber (Obsidian Wings) - CPT Thomas J. Casey's Bronze Star

ROD NORDLAND (NYT) - 12 Americans Die as Blast Hits Bus in Afghanistan

Corrente Wire - Bernanke & Unemployment

I like Bernanke as a person. But the unemployed deserve to know that there are consequences to the nation's top economic policy-makers for failing to prevent high unemployment.

Violet Socks - The end of male primogeniture

Susie Madrak - Greece

Kevin Drum explains the latest banking mess.

I agree with Atrios that this is really not that difficult. This is just a form of bank run, and we know the way to deal with bank runs is some FDIC-like system.

Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time. . .

ROBERT D. McFADDEN (NYT) - Dorothy Rodham, Mother and Mentor of Hillary Clinton, Is Dead at 92

Thomas Macaulay Millar (Feministe) - Facts on rape

. . .rape is not the result of miscommunications, and since it’s not the result of miscommunications, sending “mixed signals” isn’t the problem. . .

Rapists aren't actually seeking consensual sex, they're seeking plausible deniability that non-consensual coercion cannot be proved to be non-consensual. They're not looking for the truth ("Is this rape?"), they're looking for a cover story ("Can I make it possible to argue that I couldn't be expected to know this was rape?").

Alan Rappeport (FT) - Obama orders FDA to tackle drugs shortage

. . .Last month, a US congressional committee requested documents from five “grey market” drug companies that buy and sell drugs in short supply to find out how they are acquiring the drugs and how much profit they are making from selling them to hospitals and pharmacies. The committee said that one company was selling a drug to treat leukaemia for nearly $1,000 per vial when the normal price was $12 per vial. . .

One key point that was not made in the FT article: Europe & Japan do not have these drug shortages.

If I were the Dems, I would make this story the centerpiece of the 2012 campaign. "We found evidence that rogue companies & health-care providers were trying to corner the market in cancer drugs so they could drive up the price and gouge hospitals. We immediately investigated and and used every tool in our power to put a stop to it. We are willing to take action to stop these abuses, no matter how loudly the rogue companies squeal. The Republicans aren't".

The Herman Cain case reminds me of how much I hate non-disclosure agreements (I also hated the non-disclosure aspect of the settlements the Catholic Church made in an attempt to cover up clergy abuse). "I did nothing wrong, but let's let it be our little secret, hmm'kay?" I think a good law Congress could pass is "Non-disclosure agreements shall not be enforceable in a court of law unless the enforcer of non-disclosure clause can demonstrate that said enforcement poses no serious risks to the general public."

2011-10-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

Henry K. Lee,Will Kane - War vet hurt in Occupy Oakland protest improving

Susie Madrak - Google

TOM FINN AND NOAH BROWNING / SANA'A - An American Teenager in Yemen: Paying for the Sins of His Father?

Melissa Mckewan - FYI

MASSIMO CALABRESI - Hillary Clinton and the Limits of Power: ". . .we polled her against Romney and Perry, and found that she does better, by far, than Obama, leading Romney by 17 points and Perry by 26*. Her closest aides strongly dismiss any 2012 ambitions and say 2016 is very unlikely: she’d be 69 the day of the vote that year. We don’t speculate on the source of her popularity. . ."

Juan Cole - Surprises of the Tunisian Election

Obsidian Wings - The future of Libya open thread

Donald Johnson - Libya & Self-righteousness

Nigel: "The incredibly rapid fall of Tripoli indicates (to me at least) that the vast majority of the population sided with the rebels. Western airpower did not and could not have achieved that on its own - as has been clearly demonstrated by all our other failed efforts. . . ."

Corrente Wire

Susie Madrak - Donate

Donations are much appreciated if you can spare them. Thanks!

2011-10-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

Susie Madrak - Sins of the father

Violet Socks - Rapture Watch

Corrente (okanogen's blog) - Sterling Newberry First Hand OWS Reporting

Obsidian Wings (Eric Martin) - Climate Change Skeptics

There is a non-crazy case for skepticism, not so much for global warming, but for policy responses to global warming. The case is that in the future we might have much cheaper ways of removing carbon from the atmosphere, therefore the best thing to do now is to pursue technofixes rather than trying to transition away from fossil fuels.

I don't agree with this view because 1) putting a price on carbon is itself an important way of encouraging R&D and technofixes 2) while there is a need for government to raise revenue, a carbon tax is one of the better ways of doing it.

Freddie deBoer - why Occupy Wall Street exists, reason #1,734

How many people are in US prisons? Of those people, how many 1) received sentences that are too harsh 2) received sentences that are too lenient 3) received sentences that are just?

Juan Cole - Qaddafi’s People’s Temple

Any news on the treatment of African immigrants in Libya?

Gary Farber - Amygdala

Arthur Silber - Once Upon A Time. . .

2011-10-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

(via Violet Socks & Susie Madrak) - Corrente Fund Drive - Help Lambert

anyone have strong opinions on where and in what proportion political funds should be allocated? I guess the organizations are OFA, DNC, PCCC, Blue America, DFA, think-tanks/media/non-profits, and what else?

I thought Feldstein's op-ed in the NYT was pretty good when I was reading it, but Dean Baker makes some sound criticisms.

2011-10-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

Good for Harry Reid. I think what Senate Democrats need to use this new power for, first of all, is to confirm political appointees, i.e. confirm people whose term may end in Jan 2013. For those people, there's no time to waste. And the problems the nation confronts are too important for Obama not to have a full team, or to have great people not confirmed because they rub one senator the wrong way.

Much better news on the jobs numbers. But important not to forget how poor the numbers are compared to the 90's.

Karl Smith - The Silver Lining

Karl Smith - On IS-LM

. . .there is a severe monetary contraction going on in their community. The answer to this story must involve banking, lending, debt, prices, import or export. It will not be solved by changes in real productivity alone. . .

. . .the more you listen to people talk about “economic problems” the more you realize that they are talking about monetary problems. Problems involving prices, money, debt and lending.

The economy of China is quite poor. The economy of Portugal is quite rich. Yet right now Portugal is experiencing a severe monetary contraction while China is trying to put the breaks on monetary expansion.

Thus it feels to just about everyone that the economy of China is doing well and the economy of Portugal is doing poorly. . .

Question: What is the probability the average citizen will be forced, by adverse economic setbacks to a) change their daily/weekly schedule b) change their location of residence/location of work/commute in China, versus in Portugal?

Is perhaps that what people mean by saying China's economy is doing better than Portugal? That the average Chinese has a lower probability, going forward, of being forced to change their lives due to adverse economic setbacks?

Question: How quickly did unemployment decline as the economy was going to full-employment in WWII? How quickly did it decline in 1983 recovery? How quickly could we reasonably expect it to decline now, if we had good economic policies?

Susie Madrak - The Light Dawns

Charlie Pierce: "The flip side of arrogance is opulent self-pity. . ."

(via Susie Madrak) Tim Shorrock - Michael Moore on “Here Comes Trouble,” the Left, the Wall Street protests – and Ralph Nader

Gary Farber - Said the Red Queen

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time...

a good (7pm - 8pm) hour of talk radio with (host) Peter. B Collins & (guest) William K. Black, on housing, HAMP, etc. (interview starts at 21:30, and a lot of the good stuff starts at: 39:30)

Jeff Pearlman's SI cover story on Walter Payton was astonishing to me, because I never would have guessed a man as great as Walter Payton - and there were/are few greater - would become (partially) unmoored after losing the rhythms and routines of a football season. I guess the lesson is if it can happen to Payton, it can happen to anyone. It reminded me of Kasparov's WSJ op-ed on Fischer: "People may believe that this is what happens when a genius plays chess -- instead of what happens when a fragile mind leaves his life's work behind." Walter Payton was not all that fragile, but leaving your life's work behind must be hard for anyone.

. . .If fans approached him with footballs to sign, Payton first insisted on a quick game of catch. If they wanted him to shake a child's hand, Payton knelt down and engaged the youngster in a conversation about school. While traveling to Orlando for a vacation in 1996, Payton, sitting in first class, was told that a 10-year-old boy named Billy Kohler, who needed liver and kidney transplants, was on the plane, heading to Disney World courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

"A stewardess comes up and says, 'There's someone who would like to meet you in first class,' " says Jim Kohler, Billy's father. "We go up front, and who's standing there—Walter Payton." He introduced himself and knelt down to Billy's level. "You've been facing a lot of adversity," Payton told the boy. "You will come through this. No matter what follows, you need to keep your head up, you need to keep fighting forward, and you need to believe. You've gone through more in your short life than most of us have in a lifetime."

Overcome by the moment, Billy began sobbing. Payton tickled him beneath the chin. "You're a hero," he said. "Just know that—you're a hero."

Billy Kohler, now 24, is a construction worker in Orlando. . .

John Madden's book One Knee Equals Two Feet has a very good chapter on Payton, "Why Payton is the Best".

NYT reader comments on Brooks's In Defense of Romney column:

Dan (CA): ". . .everyone knows that what private equity is most about is creating efficiencies, including cutting jobs, to squeeze out more profits for investors. There's nothing fundamentally wrong about that, but it's wrong to misrepresent the nature of private equity as Romney does. Private equity is not the same as venture capital. . ."

BH (MA): ". . .With all due respect to Prof. Hubbard and Prof. Mankiw (after all, they are the teachers and advisers of future economists who possess more brain power than most of us,) one should be mindful that they were the advisers of President George W Bush. While President Obama has not been able to fix the economy after pulling America out of the potential Great Depression II, these two powerhouse economists were the team getting us there. Not something we should cheer for. The premise is based on some simpleton math: 8 years versus 3 years, even if one is to discount the fact that fixing things is much harder than breaking things!. . ."

Three very good letters in the Financial Times:

Greg Beier - Polite conversation with a lawyer, two hippies and a nanny

Finn Jackson - Creating more hedge contracts increases the risk

William Thayer - HFT’s only ‘advantage’ is to the traders

2011-10-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

One of the weird unspoken assumptions of politics at the moment is that hurting/ causing pain to others is virtually certain to result in increased benefits to oneself. It's perhaps worth repeating that we can't cut our way out, we can't spend our way out, we can only work our way out. Prosperity is not green pieces of paper, or gold ingots, or even positive numbers on non-fraudulent balance sheets. Prosperity is work well done at work worth doing. If we want more real prosperity, it's not going to come from cutting, or spending, it's going to come from increasing the amount of work well done at work worth doing. If the price of increasing that real work, and that real prosperity, is an abstraction called a budget deficit, or an increased price level, that's unfortunate, but it's a second order issue, not a first order one. We can easily deal with second-order issues once the first-order issues have been addressed.

Susie Madrak - Alabama immigration

. . .hurt children and don’t even care. . .

Susie Madrak - All I really want for my birthday (support #occupy movement)

Susie Madrak - That darn Marcy

Always wanting the evidence and such. What a killjoy!

Why would anyone object to killing U.S. citizens without even a trial?

Susie Madrak - Why infrastructure spending saves money

Brad Delong
. . .In sum, on the benefits side of the equation: more jobs now, $500 billion of additional consumption of goods and services over the next two years, and then a $40 billion a year flow of higher incomes and production each year thereafter. So, what are the likely costs of an extra $500 billion in infrastructure spending over the next two years?

For starters, the $500 billion of extra government spending would likely be offset by $300 billion of increased tax collections from higher economic activity. So the net result would be a $200 billion increase in the national debt. American taxpayers would then have to pay $2 billion a year in real interest on that extra national debt over the next 30 years, and then pay off or roll over the entire $200 billion. . .

David Graeber - Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination

What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. . .Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses. . . money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. . .It seemed the time had come to rethink everything. . .

Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before.

. . .It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. . .

One simple point I think does not get made nearly enough. The US Government gave Goldman, via the AIG counterparty bailout, at least 12 billion, and probably more. This is more than Goldman's annual profits. And it was a free gift, no strings attached. Wall Street is a primitive "face" culture. By raiding the US Treasury to protect Goldman's profits, we allowed Blankfein to protect his "hayba" as a money-making businessman, instead of a money-losing one.

(Via Garrett Jones) Dean Baker - How It Could Have Been Different This Time

. . .If we had looked at the probability that newborns would live to age five, examining random 20-year intervals in different countries over the last six centuries, we would find that in most of these intervals, most newborns do not live to age five. If we therefore concluded that we should expect children born today to die before the age of five, we would be utterly crazy. The advances in health care, nutrition and sanitation over this period make it possible for the vast majority of children almost everywhere to survive to adulthood.

I would argue that the story with economics is similar. We do know more about the economy today than we did 500 years ago or even 100 years ago. We do know how to get out of severe downturn like the present one, the real question is whether we have the political will to make it different.

In this spirit, I was prompted by a question from Ezra Klein to lay out the case as to how exactly it could have been different. So, now that I have the reins of government fiscal policy and monetary policy, let me show exactly how we would have done it differently. . .

Is there any great mystery in what Obama could do to energize the base, and indeed even the entire electorate? Produce a plan for a full-employment economy, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.

MLK: "What's the use of having the right to sit at the counter, if you can't buy a meal?"

I remember reading a Michael May article on MAD where he said "only nuclear weapons and the logic of MAD transforms the great powers perceptions of peace, as something which is nice to have but not essential, into instead an essential strategic necessity. They do this at some risk of an unimaginable catastrophe. . ". I've been thinking the same thing about full-employment and WWII. It's striking how easy it was to achieve full-employment when the ruling class wanted it. There were real costs: a few years of very high inflation, etc. but on the whole full-employment policies were very beneficial.

Michael May - No matter what the evidence, U.S. was going to war in Iraq (2004)

. . .Kay was polite in his testimony and pointed only to an intelligence failure. It clearly was a lot more. Both in the United States and Britain, analysts who knew there was no evidence of any weapons capability could not get their message past the lowest levels of the intelligence bureaucracy. The administration, or the dominant players in it, were determined to let no alternative story surface, except the one that would justify war. Under those circumstances, the truth, which is generally a messy thing that doesn't fit well into any story, had no chance of getting a hearing. . .

Doctor Science - Raytheon's cold equations

. . .My mother/aunt, Renee Douceur, is the winter site manager at the South Pole Station run by Raytheon and the National Science Foundation. She suffered a stroke on August 27th and the on-site doctors requested for her immediate medical emergency evacuation to get her to proper medical care and prevent further injury to her, The decision makers are disregarding the on-site doctors’ request for Renee’s immediate need for emergency evacuation. Instead they are treating her stroke as a non-emergency, keeping her at the South Pole until late October or early November. Renee’s attorney has advised her to go public because he is being stonewalled by Raytheon and the NSF to get her out ASAP for proper medical diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation (if she survives the trip out) Let's get her home!. . .

Gary Farber - Papers, please

Gary Farber - Off With Their Heads!

Doctor Science - September 11, Iraq, and the nature of courage

. . .in retrospect, most people seem to be acknowledging that:

there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attackers

the rationale the Bush Administration put forth for the war was at best specious, at worst deliberately deceptive

the Administration's planning for the war and (especially) for the occupation were staggeringly incompetent

the consequences of the war for the US were bad (loss of life, limb, security, and money), and the Iraqi people catastrophic (death or injury for hundreds of thousands, millions of refugees).

The thing is, most of these points seemed patently obvious to me in February 2003 -- except for #3, the incompetence of the Bush Administration, which I *really* wasn't expecting. I thought they *cared* about war and would do a much better job at it than they did. . .

(Via Ross Douthat) The Skeptical Juror - The Yellow and White Case of Troy Anthony Davis: Part 1

Violet Socks - The Big Lie

. . .human beings are predisposed to believe what other human beings say. . .

"That popup says it's an anti-virus, so how can it be a virus?"

Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time...

Amanda Marcotte - Analogizing taxes to rape

I think describing taxes with rape analogies illustrates the extreme dangers of thinking of money as a real thing in its own right, instead of as a useful illusion: A handy, but ultimately fake, thing, which can occasionally enable you to do real things.

Swami Dayananda - The Value Of Values

. . .When I was a child of three years old, I once picked up a piece of paper. It was green, printed, very colourful. I began, as I did with every paper, to play with it. Mummy said: No! That is money." . .

. . .I saw lots of chocolates and jelly-beans. I stretched out my hand: "Give me jelly-beans." The fellow behind the counter raised his eyebrows and looked at Mummy. I wondered why he would not give me any candy when he had so many. Then Mummy opened her purse. . .

. . .One day when we were shopping, I wanted a balloon. Out came the money and the balloon was mine. Oh, ho! If you give money you can get jelly beans, chocolates, and even balloons. This is a great discovery for a small child. I had learnt that money buys things - all manner of things. Not many people understand the monetary system but everybody knows that money buys!

Later, as I grew up I came to learn how many things money buys: houses, cars, even gurus and gods. Nothing buys like money.

When I come to know how well money buys, how many things money buys, I come to have a well understood, well assimilated personal value for money. . .

. . .most of us have a well assimilated personal value for money; whereas, when it comes to speaking truth our value often is general and half assimilated. When this is the case, what happens if there is a conflict between the money-value and the truth-value? . . .Very likely, the assimilated value for money will be the victor. But, all the same, something goes on murmuring inside, "Speak truth, speak truth.". . .

Juan Cole - Informed Comment

Wikipedia - Works Progress Administration

. . .Critics ridiculed them, and the agency as a whole, as lazy — calling the initials "We Poke Along", "We Piddle Around", "We Putter Along", "Working Piss Ants", or the "Whistle, Piss and Argue gang". These were sarcastic references to WPA projects that sometimes slowed down deliberately because foremen had an incentive to keep going, rather than finish a project.[35]

Novelist John Steinbeck rejected a common charge against WPA workers in his essay, "Primer on the '30s": "It was the fixation of businessmen that the WPA did nothing but lean on shovels. I had an uncle who was particularly irritated at shovel-leaning. When he pooh-poohed my contention that shovel-leaning was necessary, I bet him five dollars, which I didn’t have, that he couldn’t shovel sand for fifteen timed minutes without stopping. He said a man should give a good day’s work and grabbed a shovel. At the end of three minutes his face was red, at six he was staggering and before eight minutes were up his wife stopped him to save him from apoplexy. And he never mentioned shovel-leaning again." . . .

. . .Unemployment ended with the beginning of war production for World War II, as millions of men joined the services, and cost-plus contracts made it attractive for companies to hire men and train them. . .

2011-09-24T01:23:00.000-07:00

I do not know whether Troy Davis's last words to Mark MacPhail's family were true. I do not know whether a possibly credible witness claiming Coles confessed to shooting MacPhail is speaking the truth. But neither does the criminal-justice system. Which is why this is such a travesty.

Susie Madrak - The quality of mercy

Violet Socks - Elizabeth Warren for Senate

Gary Farber - Amygdala

Arthur Silber - Power of Narrative

Amanda Marcotte - The death penalty and our corrupted justice system

Lindsay Beyerstein - Troy Davis and Arguments Against the Death Penalty

Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Utterly Relevant NAACP

Jelani Cobb - The Night They Killed Troy Davis

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Death Penalty Activism

Obama UN address

Wonkblog (Sarah Kliff) - Medicaid quietly dodges deficit-reduction battle

Matthew Yglesias - Today Is A Good Day To Guarantee Loans

Matthew Yglesias - Fantasy Central Banker Draft

Matthew Yglesias - No Stop Till (Full-Employment In) Brooklyn

Andrew Tobias - Israel

GOLD

George E.: “On TV and radio I run across a good number of commercials by companies wanting to help protect me from the coming economic collapse by offering to sell gold (or silver, or other precious metals) in exchange for my soon-to-be worthless money. However, if these companies truly believe that an economic Armageddon is about to occur, why are they so eager to sell their gold at this time?”

I do think that one opporutunity for progressives to make up some ground on the tea party will come from the collapse of the gold bubble.

HP's ousted CEO will take home $25 million

Coming To America:

King Jaffe Joffer: Semmi, you have disgraced yourself, and you must be punished. Confine yourself to our royal suite at the Waldorf-Astoria.
[to Oha]
King Jaffe Joffer: And see that he puts on some decent attire.
[to the rose bearers]
King Jaffe Joffer: And I want you to bathe him thoroughly.

2011-09-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

NAACP - Significant Doubts about Troy Davis guilt: A Case for Clemency

NAACP - Too Much Doubt

Troy has been on Death Row for the past 20 years for the murder of Savannah, GA police officer Mark MacPhail. Despite serious doubts to his guilt, Davis’ execution is scheduled for September 21, 2011. There is simply too much doubt to let this happen. Read more about Troy's case here.

We can save Troy, but it’s something we can only accomplish together, with your help. Here are four things you can do to help save Troy Davis from execution.
Write a letter to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, asking them to grant Troy clemency.

Tell Chatham County District Attorney Larry Chisolm to petition for withdrawal of the death warrant for Troy Davis.

Participate in our #TooMuchDoubt social media campaign by making Troy your profile pic on Twitter/Facebook, and tweeting from the hashtag #TooMuchDoubt.

Text TROY to 62227 (NAACP) for updates regarding the Troy Davis case.

Letter to Georgia Parole Board, Georgia Parole Board:

Subject: Do not execute Troy Davis, if there is a chance that Officer Mark MacPhail was shot by Sylvester Coles

It is not certain that Troy Davis shot Officer Mark MacPhail. It might have been Sylvester Coles, Given this uncertainty, Georgia must not take the chance of executing a man who did not commit the crime he was convicted of. 4 jurors on the original jury now say that if they knew then what they know, they would not have voted for the death penalty.

Always in a criminal-justice system, rules & procedures have never been enough. Always it has required officers of the law to act and intervene with good judgement, common-sense, alertness to new facts, and courage, in order to make the system work better.

I humbly implore you to use your best judgement in the Troy Davis case, and if your conscience tells you there is a chance that Sylvester Coles shot Officer Mark MacPhail, and not Troy Davis, then to not kill Troy Davis when there is a chance that he did not kill Officer Mark MacPhail.

Thank you.

2011-09-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

(Via Yglesias) JEFFREY GETTLEMAN (NYT) - Famine Ravages Somalia in a World Less Less Likely to Intervene

NYT - How to Help Victims of the East Africa Famine

Matthew Yglesias - Be The Change You Want To See In The World

NYT: Portraits of Grief

Wikipedia - Troy Davis Case

(Via Gary Farber) Lena Groeger (Wired) - The Dead, the Dollars, the Drones: 9/11 Era by the Numbers

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

here’s an excerpt from Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, describing the conversations happening in the White House on September 12, 2001:

. . .Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. “I thought I was missing something here,” I vented. “Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.”

Powell shook his head. “It’s not over yet.”

Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. . .

I note with amusement that former Secretary Rumsfeld cancelled his subscription to the Times this morning in protest against Krugman’s column.

Susie Madrak - CBS/NYT Polling

. . .The poll found that nearly three-quarters of Republicans said they thought Social Security and Medicare were worth their costs.

Some pretty big clues there, Mr. President.

Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time. . .

Shorter Netanyahu: We're a good people, so it's not possible for us to do anything bad.
Siegbert Tarrasch: "It is not enough to be a good player: One must also play well."

tweets from dsquared & co:

DD "simple" plan for financial regulation: loan growth > deposit growth = visit from regulators

This is the fundamental fact. For the system, loans can't grow faster than deposits. So if a bank grows loans > dep, it ought to be a focus

Been telling people this for years. UK had a lending boom. It didn't have a simultaneous deposit boom. Hence, problems.

chrismealy Chris Mealy
@dsquareddigest just curious, are there deposit booms?

@chrismealy can't think of one ever happening, but it might possibly have happened sometime somewhere.

@chrismealy Of course, since every loan is a deposit, every lending boom is a deposit boom, somewhere, but somehow it never evens out

Re: Brooks column on limits of government responsibility for the economy, I think he's conflating productivity and employment. The three main fundamentals of an economy are productivity, distribution & employment. Government cannot magically increase productivity, can partially affect distribution (at least, it can make sure everyone has access to affordable basic education and health care), and not only can, it must be held accountable for achieving full-employment.

I actually think the productivity numbers would be more accurate and meaningful, and a better guide for policy, if they included the unemployed/discouraged workers in the calculations.

re: "let him die", I guess my fantasy "grand bargain" is that conservatives give up on the idea of lightening their load by chucking people off the bus, liberals give up on the idea of lightening their load by putting it all on the backs of the rich.

Conversation I had with someone:
"Obama can't do anything about jobs. No politician can. It's being driven by deep forces, outsourcing, globalization. Jobs will come back in this country only when wages equalize with India & China".

Me: What about Germany? Same first world wages, but they've been good at reducing unemployment.

"Oh, but their politics is completely different. . ."

Obviously, the world did not fall at Obama's feet after his jobs speech, but I still think his current strategy of proposing something that might work but might not pass is better than strategy of proposing something that might pass but won't work, or the strategy of proposing nothing because prosperity is just around the corner.

One other possible strategy: Congress, 1) here's your budget. 2) here's the number of jobs you must create 3) how you do it is up to you.

2011-09-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

Gary Farber - Amygdala

Susie Madrak - The Campaign (American Hospital Association lobbying to raise the eligibility age for Medicare)

Arthur Silber - Once Upon A Time. . .

Ezra Klein- Charles Evans dual mandate speech

I understand the fears of the Fed, of inflation picking up and facing the ignominy of being responsible for stagflation. But the fact is that inflation below 5% has very minor, basically unquantifiable costs, while 9% unemployment and a trillion dollar output gap are disasters, and you have to base policy on the facts, not fears.

Matthew Yglesias - The American Jobs Act

Matthew Yglesias - Ben Bernanke Hints At Further Easing

Brad Delong (quoting David Beckworth) - How To Undertake Credible Expansionary Monetary Policy

Matthew Yglesias (quoting Beckworth) - good monetary policy by Swiss, Swedish, Australian, Israeli central banks

But really, what do the Swiss know about banking?

Juan Cole - Israel, Egypt, Turkey; Afghanistan & Iraq; Libya

Karl Smith - Wealth vs Employment, donut seller from hell

Rortybomb (Mike Konczal) - retrospective, analysis of Obama's jobs proposals

2011-09-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

Gary Farber - Amygdala

Susie Madrak - A Florida sheriff saves his county $1M by de-privatizing jail. . .

Arthur Silber - ONCE UPON A TIME...

re: cancer drug shortages, a good example I think of business media's tendency to be very coddly of business/contemptuous of government: hardly anyone is asking, Why aren't other countries, with much stronger government regulation of drug companies, having these drug shortages?

What Kling & Cowen don't explain is what happened to PSST and LMP in 2005/2006. I guess the explanation is that firms were willing to carry more workers when they were fat and happy, but not anymore, but that doesn't explain why firms were fat and happy in 2005, and not now.

Paul Krugman - The Return of Depression Economics (1999)

. . .The right perspective is to realise how very much good free markets and globalisation have done; the point is to preserve those gains. One cannot defend globalisation merely by repeating free-market mantras as economy after economy crashes. If we want to see more nations making the transition from abject poverty to the hope of a decent life, we had better find answers to the problems of depression economics.

Even now, there are still many pundits who do not accept that the recent string of crises demonstrates a problem with the system. Instead, they point to the weaknesses of the individual countries. Japan's banks were too careless, Indonesia's ruler too corrupt, Brazil's budget deficits too large. Follow the right policies, and you will do just fine. There is no question that each country hit by the crisis turns out on closer examination to have had serious flaws. But one needs to be careful about what inferences to draw.

Imagine a highway that has recently been the scene of an unusual number of accidents. Investigators look into the causes of each accident and find some precipitating factor: the driver had too much to drink, his tyres were bald, and so on. Their conclusion is that there is nothing wrong with the road; the problem lies with the drivers. But this conclusion is doubly biased. First, almost every driver or car will, if scrutinised closely enough, turn out to be flawed in some way. Second, even if they are unusually bad drivers, this does not absolve the road: good roads do not demand perfection of their users.

Similarly, a good economic system should not require perfect policies of its denizens. It is striking how many of the nations that have suffered most in recent years, from Japan to Korea, were placed on pedestals not long ago. . .

what should Obama say in his jobs speech?

1) Obv. I don't know, due modesty, etc. etc.

1.5) An infrastructure fund where businesses can apply for grants for fixing accessibility problems

2) One idea: Weak dollar = strong manufacturing. "I'd rather have a stronger manufacturing sector than a stronger dollar."

3) Proposal to change the composition of the Federal Reserve board. Right now 5 of the seats go to bankers. Replace 4 of the bankers with 1 labor, 1 consumer, 1 manufacturing, 1 health care/education/services

4) A proposal to require all the Fed governors and the Fed chairman to resign, and for the President to appoint a new team, if the unemployment rate exceeds 7%, or the core inflation rate exceeds 7%, for 18 months. This might be unfair to some good people on the Fed board, but it it seems to me that the value of having unemployed people know that the Fed is not indifferent to their plight exceeds the value of possibly treating good people somewhat unfairly.

5) A proposal of a wealth tax with the rate directly linked to the rate of unemployment, with the money raised from that to pay for 1) a tax cut for all firms that expand payroll 2) unemployment benefits . The idea is not to raise money, it is again to send a signal to the unemployed that the nation's wealthy have a strong incentive to avoid mass unemployment.

6) Investment can be motivated by hope and fear. Hope for new sales, fear of losing old sales. Both the hope and the fear seem to have diminished in the current environment, possibly because of firm consolidation/ tacit collusion/ barriers to entry. This lack of hope & fear is possibly leading to stockpiling cash instead of real investment.

C.S. Lewis - The world's last night

. . .Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear. But so do several other things—ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity. It is very desirable that we should all advance to that perfection of love in which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable, until we have reached that stage, that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear. . .

7) What is the role of a government in a recession? Possibly, to provide Knightian insurance/services at non-Knightian prices. But what kind of services, and at what prices?

8) Who should Obama consult about jobs? My list: economists: Dean Baker, Tykromulongerlofa, Baublishillitzvolk, Glenn Loury. business: buffet, munger, bogle, bill gross & PIMCO, james sineghal, immelt, the team at Southwest. I guess I prefer business leaders who appreciate the difference between an open and closed system, and who have shown a strong preference for making their numbers by creating value rather cutting costs. Labor: Trumka, Serwer, Angelides. Politicians: Lula, Sweden's team, the people in Germany who have done such a good job holding down unemployment, Clinton.

Deep Thought: There really is no shortage of reasons to feel contemptuous of yourself, and other humans, is there?

C.S. Lewis - Two Ways With the Self

. . .[Self-hatred] begins by accepting the special value of the particular self called me; then, wounded in its pride to find that such a darling object should be so disappointing, it seeks revenge, first upon that self, then on all. Deeply egoistic, but now with an inverted egoism, it uses the revealing argument, "I don't spare myself" with the implication "then a fortiori I need not spare others" and becomes like the centurion in Tacitus, "immitior quia toleraverat." ("More relentless because he had endured (it himself)")

The wrong asceticism torments the self: the right kind Kills the selfness. We must die daily: but it is better to love the self than to love nothing, and to pity the self than to pity no one.

Dean Baker - Beat the Press

There are two simple remedies to the plunge in employment in manufacturing. One would be to open the professional services to international competition. . .

. . .Increased imports of professional services will also put downward pressure on the value of the dollar, which gets us to the the other simple remedy: get the dollar down. The dollar is the main determinant of the relative price of foreign and domestically produced goods. If we want to generate more jobs in sectors that compete internationally then the key is to make our goods relatively less expensive. . .

Paul Krugman - Iceland's recovery

. . .Iceland still has high unemployment and is a long way from a full recovery; but it’s no longer in crisis, it has regained access to international capital markets, and has done all that with its society intact.

And it has done all that with very heterodox policies — debt repudiation, capital controls, and currency depreciation. It was as close as you can get to the polar opposite of the gold standard. And it has worked.

Mark Thoma - Discussion: Is it important for taxes to be progressive? Or is progressivity in the net benefits the only important consideration?

acerimusdux:
I think one way to get to a system that is both fair and balanced would be to include a flat tax not only on sales, but also one on either wealth or assets. A flat rate of three-quarters of a percent on financial assets could replace all income and estate taxes, for instance.

That can't be true. Can it?

Deathtongue (Daily Kos) - Toothache Kills Unemployed (24 year-old) Man With No Insurance

Link

Kyle Willis' wisdom tooth started hurting two weeks ago. When dentists told him it needed to be pulled, he decided to forgo the procedure, because he was unemployed and had no health insurance.

When his face started swelling and his head began to ache, Willis went to the emergency room, where he received prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medications. Willis couldn't afford both, so he chose the pain medications.

The tooth infection spread, causing his brain to swell. He died Tuesday.

I just can't express how angry this makes me. . .how much could some pain killers and antibiotics cost? $15? And now he's dead and his family will have to live without him.

Maybe he made some bad decisions, I don't know. But he should have never had to make any decisions about this. We should live in a society where someone can get their tooth pulled for FREE if it's going to KILL THEM.

And the beat goes on. It's amazing to me how much this country has decided that it can't do. We can't help the unemployed. We can't rebuild our infrastructure. We can't invest in clean energy. We can't invest in our future. We can't make sure everybody gets good basic health care, even if it only costs a few bucks. . .

Digby - "It’s not you. This is what the country is going through"

Hullabaloo - The Wrong Problem by David Atkins ("thereisnospoon")

. . .there's an endless string of [people] waiting to tell us that the banking sector crisis is the fault of social security, labor unions, universal healthcare, strange swarthy Greeks, individual deadbeat homeowners, welfare queens driving Cadillacs, the Environmental Protection Agency, and anyone and anything else they care to dream up. Anyone, of course, but the banks. . .

Atrios - Eschaton

. . .The point is that, for example, maybe a massive writing down of all Fannie and Freddie owned mortgages isn't an optimal policy if we were in a first best world. But we aren't and we aren't going to be. So it might be a second best optimal policy. . .

. . .ThinkProgress: Thousands of unmarried couples who are living together in Florida may be surprised to learn that they are actually breaking the law. Under outdated and rarely enforced state laws that have been on the books since the late 1800s, “cohabitation” is actually a second-degree misdemeanor, punishable by $500 or up to 60 days in jail. The same penalty applies to adultery – which one Florida woman tried to have enforced for her cheating husband in 2006. . .

I wonder what the law&order hardliners: e.g. "We are a nation of LAWS. The LAW is the LAW and they're BREAKING THE LAW. END OF STORY." think of these Florida laws? Even if the law is changed now, should it be enforced against past lawbreakers? Or is hardline law-enforcement only important when it's used against people other than yourself?

A very important article, which shows that everyone understands the importance and necessity of prosecutorial discretion, prosecutorial common-sense, and prosecutorial leniency when it comes to laws it's possible for them to break.

Atrios - Libya

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Rebel forces and armed civilians are rounding up thousands of black Libyans and migrants from sub-Sahara Africa, accusing them of fighting for ousted strongman Moammar Gadhafi and holding them in makeshift jails across the capital. . .

Juan Cole - Informed Comment

. . .The African Union said it was reassured by the remarks in Paris of TNC leader Moustapha Abdul Jalil, in which he pledged to order the protection of foreign workers in Libya, and that it might go forward with recognizing the new government. . .

What the UN Can and Cannot do for Libya

Cheryl Contee (Jill Tubman) - Jack and Jill Go To Cameroon with UNITAID: Roll Deep, Go Hard, Get Out (PHOTOS)

lightgetsin - Data

I gave myself 7 days. Every time during that 7 days I ran into a particular kind of inaccessibility, I wrote to the owner/relevant authority and asked them to fix it. I aimed for short, factual, informative request letters. . .

. . .Hi,

I recently attempted to use your website to read your menu before coming in. I was disappointed to discover your menu is a .jpg image embedded in the website, making it inaccessible to blind and low vision users. Screenreaders cannot read the contents of images out loud. I found this very inconvenient, and wish you would take steps to make your website accessible to all your potential customers. The contents of the menu should be placed on the website as text with regular html markup. You can also post a pdf file of your menu, but pdf’s have their own accessibility pitfalls, and this is a much less preferred option.

For more information on website accessibility in general and this issue in particular, try http://www.webaim.org . . .

. . .I only asked for accessibility fixes to websites and iPhone apps. And I further limited it by only asking for things that were broken. Not just irritating. . .

Who I wrote to: [among others] Facebook . . .Google (for the search engine) – Google Instant crashes Jaws, and the current “solution” is to have a link to turn Instant off. Except it only works for a single pageview at a time, ARRRRGH). . .Youtube. . .Google+. . .

Tavis Smiley (Interview with Booknotes/Brian Lamb)

. . .Now CompUSA was different. CompUSA we went after them, which we really did do. We went after them. They put their head in the sand. And for 10 weeks--every day on the radio for 10 weeks, I was riding CompUSA every day. . .CompUSA, for some reason--I learned later on, as I said, in the case study--Jim Halperin, the chairman of the company, told me it was--it was fear. They did not know exactly what to do. They were frozen. They said, `We obviously got to do something about this.' But they originally thought, `If we don't acknowledge this campaign by this little black kid on the radio, this thing will eventually go away. It'll eventually dry up.' And that didn't happen. . .And they got on those phones and those faxes and those e-mails. They shut down ABC's phone system that day in New York. They shut down CompUSA's phone system that day in Dallas, and that day was the moment of truth. CompUSA and ABC heard an earful--and not to mention, as I said, they couldn't get any business done because their phone systems were jammed. And that day was the moment of truth.

And so it was really ABC, with this threat, that got CompUSA to say, `We give up.' CompUSA called, said, `Let's sit down and have a meeting,' and the next week--in the 10th week--we sat down and the rest, as they say, is history. . .

Seeing the Euro mess really makes me appreciate politicians like Gordon Brown, politicians who, at least occasionally, have the ability to reject fashionable proposals which do not make any sense. Can only imagine the problems the UK would have had if Tony Blair had got his way and joined the Euro. Too bad Brown didn't show similar judgement for the Iraq war.

Patrick Appel (Daily Dish) - Picking Someone Out Of A Lineup, Ctd

2011-08-27T01:27:00.000-07:00

Arthur Silber - Once Upon A Time. . .

Briefly: after I pay the September rent next week, I'll be close to completely broke. Some other bills need to be paid.

Also, I'm spending most of my time right now taking care of Wendy, who's dying. We're in the roller coaster of the final phase: every second or third day, I think that perhaps she's rallying, and the situation will mercifully level off for a short while. Yesterday, she ate very well, for the first time in three or four days. Today, she's back to not being interested in food at all. Her face is still very beautiful; otherwise, she's a bag of bones. I spend hours with her on the bed, gently stroking her, talking to her, singing to her. I make up little songs, about how much I love her, how much joy and fun she's brought into our lives. She raises her head and tilts it toward me, asking for her ears to be massaged and scratched. She purrs a lot.

I don't know if I'm doing her any favors by letting this go on. She doesn't seem to be in pain ... but how do I know? And she still eats, sometimes. She's still able to get on and off the bed without difficulty. And she seems to enjoy the company. How can I have her killed? I can't, not yet.

Chances are I'll need some more money to pay for a few things in these last days for her. I don't have any.

Despite this, I think I've managed to do some good writing recently. Nothing mysterious about that: it's a distraction from the awful pain of watching Wendy die, and sometimes I'm grateful for it. There's more I want to say about the London riots, about Libya, about tribalism and its many manifestations and complicated dynamics. . .

. . .Anyway, I need some money. If you have some you can spare, I'd be very grateful. . .

Wendy is dying, and she remains a great source of joy and love. . .he capacity and willingness of humans affirmatively to choose unnecessary suffering, when there's so much suffering in life that we can't avoid, try as we will, never ceases to astonish and horrify me.

I'm going to spend some more time with Wendy now. . .

Susie Madrak - Richard Trumka's message to Obama

Susie Madrak - God’s waiting room

John Amato - Update on Susie Madrak's Condition

Juan Cole - How to Avoid Bush’s Iraq Mistakes in Libya

BBC - Horror scenes at Tripoli hospital (via Atrios)

Question for economists: If the cause if this recession is the wealth effect, how much did the various forms of wealth fall during the slump, and how big was the wealth effect across various kinds of asset classes? Dean Baker frequently refers to a "8 trillion dollar housing bubble". where does this 8 trillion figure come from, and how solid is it? In general, I see a lot of discussion of income accounting, and the velocity of money, but not a lot of discussion of wealth accounting, and the velocity of wealth.

Question for politicos: What do the American people answer when asked "What is your greatest hope of what might happen with the Republicans/Democrats in power? What is your greatest fear of what night happen?" I'd guess that for most Americans, their hopes and fears are not dependent on which specific party is in power. But I have no idea what the actual hopes and fears, themselves, would be.

Krugman - Bernanke

. . .in 2000 an economist named Ben Bernanke offered a number of proposals for policy at the “zero lower bound.” True, the paper was focused on policy in Japan, not the United States. But America is now very much in a Japan-type economic trap, only more acute. So we learn a lot by asking why Ben Bernanke 2011 isn’t taking the advice of Ben Bernanke 2000. . .

Brad Delong - Some Things that Could Have Been Done--and That Could Still Be Done (quoting Mike Konczal)

A quick thought on recent blog posts on the unemployed's suboptimal job-searching skills: 1) same population, same crappy job-search skills in 2005 as in 2011, yet different levels of unemployment. 2) Those kids really suck at musical chairs. If they all showed a bit more pep & hustle, surely everyone could get a chair.

Zack Beauchamp (Daily Dish) - Keep Talking About Willingham (quoting Steve Benen)

Where is the evidence that Rick Perry is God-fearing? He executed an innocent man, then covered up the evidence of his innocence. Some claim that Perry would not have had the power to stop the execution, even if he had tried. I don't believe this (parole boards are very receptive to the opinion of the Governor on specific cases), but the fact is that he didn't try.

2011-08-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

Deep Thought (in no way related to events of last night): By not supporting cheap late-night transit, conservatives are trying to impose Sharia law on me The American People: sip some tea, pray for all the boozers who you, generous soul, have personally informed and assured that you will pray for, then drive home.

(via Google): Save The Children's Somalia food crisis appeal

Jibril Mohamed - Famine in Somalia: Was it always like this?

The current famine and the previous one in 1992 are the result of a meaningless war that began in 1991 when the last effective government of Somalia was ousted from power by aimless warlords who mobilized their clansmen to create chaos. Somalia was in better shape than the grim situation that has become the norm for the past two decades, and I have hope that the future is much brighter than this.

Somalia joined the league of world nations in 1960. In the first 30 years of its existence, the country proved itself as a leader in democracy, diplomacy and development. In the 1970s, Somalia had undertaken ambitious development and diplomatic initiatives. The Somali language was written and literacy levels jumped from a meager 5% to more than 60%. . .

. . .In 1991, when civil war broke out, the simple life I loved was no more. I walked eleven days and eleven nights to find safety in Kenya. I found refuge at the Dadaab Refugee camps where my education was supported by the generous people of the United States. I started teaching mathematics and business studies at a tender age and I will always remember the malnourished faces of my 320 students who sat under the scorching sun of Dadaab for six hours every day to get an education from a youthful teacher who was considered a wealthy man by the standards of the camp despite making $30 a month. . .

Arthur Silber - Power of Narrative

. . .Did these two young men actually riot or loot? Did they themselves participate in the events they wrote about? Did they mean the Facebook posts seriously -- or just as some kind of joke?

But you see, the government isn't interested in any of those questions. And they didn't charge the two young men with actual rioting or looting. They charged them for the Facebook entries. For what they wrote. That's it. . .

Reclusive Leftist - Dr. Socks says hi

Hey everybody. I’m doing well; healing up nicely. I feel better every day. Thank you all for your kind wishes and support. I think I must have the nicest commentariat in the world. . .

. . . when you’re one of the people who actually needs Social Security and Medicare. . .

. . .For the rest of us, it’s no game.

I was wondering the other night about FDR. What motivated the man? He was rich, he was upper class, he was set for life. Why did he fight so hard for the working folks? Whatever it was, we need to bottle it and spike the drinks of everyone in Washington. . .

Susie Madrak - These kids today

This is pretty amazing!
. . .On a bleak winter hiking trip to the Catskill Mountains, the 7th-grader from New York noticed a pattern among tree branches, and determined (as naturalist Charles Bonnet did in 1754) that the pattern represented the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. Aidan wondered why, and figured it had something to do with photosynthesis.

In a pretty innovative experiment, this intrepid young scientist set about duplicating an oak tree, comparing its sunlight-capturing abilities to a traditional rooftop solar panel array. Guess what he found?. . .

(Via Shakesville): Towleroad - New Immigration Rules Could Help Same-Sex Couples

The Obama administration announced yesterday that immigration officials, guided by the Department of Homeland Security, can now use "prosecutorial discretion" to stop deportation for illegal immigrants who pose no threat to the nation.

While the move will largely benefit people who illegally entered the United States as children, Metro Weekly reports that the new policy will also help same-sex binational couples. . .

I think the Obama team has been taking some heat from some conservatives for this decision. But I think the principle of prosecutorial discretion is very, very important, something we all understand when it comes to laws it's possible for us to break, at the very least traffic laws. If the Obama adminstration sticks with this in the face of criticism, they'll deserve a lot of credit.

Yglesias

". . .I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington.”
— Charles G. Koch, Chairman and CEO, Koch Industries, Inc.

I think what this misses is that government programs, as inefficient and mediocre and expensive as they may be, are willing to take line responsibility for things the private sector either can not, or will not. Social Security does take line responsibility for the incomes of most retirees. Medicare does take line responsibility for medical care for most retirees. Unless and until the private sector and the non-profit sector is willing to take line responsibility for these important jobs in the same way government currently does, government programs are worth taxing for, and worth paying taxes for.

Yglesias: . . .Hiking mass transit fares while cutting services is not some kind of close substitute to dealing with the projected increases in the cost of health care. It’s not just small relative to the scale of the real fiscal issue, it’s completely irrelevant. A form of short-term pain that has no benefit over the long-term.

Matthew Yglesias - Business Opposition To Economic Recovery

. . .My point is just that during the Great Depression insistence on monetary orthodoxy was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. The leading lights of the business community were perfectly sincerely in their belief that financial orthodoxy was good for America, and they were also completely wrong. Not just wrong about what was good for America, but about what was wrong for their own businesses. . .

. . .We could spend the next 80 years trying to understand the psychological, ideological, and class biases behind these views. The fact of the matter, however, is that the Chamber of Commerce was mistaken. . .[business leaders], even if they’re very smart about the businesses they run, don’t have particular insight into macro-stability issues.

Matthew Yglesias - To Save The Economy, You Sometimes Need To Ignore Business

Many on the right and center indicate that in order to restore the economy, President Obama needs to do more to cater to the whims of rich businessmen. Many on the left feel that this is exactly wrong and that in order to restore the economy, President Obama needs to do more to stick it to the rich and dispossess them. History suggests that both are wrong. Economic recovery would be good for business, but businessmen who may be good at running businesses are extremely bad judges of macroeconomic policy . . .

. . .The Depression was not good for big business. Nor was it good for banks and large financial institutions. Ending the Depression required stepping on some toes, but fundamentally the Depression was a negative-sum experience and everyone was better off when growth returned. But here’s a couple New York Times articles from June of 1933 — “Plea” from June 2, “Return to Gold” from June 4 — showing the business community’s intense hostility to the expansionary monetary policy that eventually saved all their skins. . .

. . .running an economy is not the same as running a nationwide network of big box retailers, or a diversified conglomerate, or a large bank, or an innovative electronics company, or any other successful business. People generally understand this in reverse. Nobody ever said “Bill Clinton was a good president, so he’d be a great replacement for Bill Gates when he steps down at Microsoft.” But it’s true the other way ’round as well. . .

Jessica Valenti - Learning to love my baby

After a life-threatening pregnancy and a premature birth I was scared to hold my newborn daughter – or to get too attached . . .

. . .Even today, with Layla pudgy and happy and starting to say words such as "kitty" and "baby", I worry about her health constantly and, at times, can feel myself starting to drift away from her. It takes work, more than I'd like to admit. If we really value parenting, if we value mothers and children, then we'll lose the notion that there's a proper way to love a baby. Believe me, mums will thank you.

Digby - And now for some good news...

. . .From about 7:00 every morning to 10:00 (or later) every night, activists from 18 states stood out in 100-degree heat, intense pouring rain and everything in between to stand with Dr. Carhart, his excellent staff and the women they serve with dignity, compassion and respect. At many points during those nine days we outnumbered the antis. Members of the community kept stopping by with doughnuts, drinks and thank yous for our service. There was no violence, the clinic stayed open, and we did a great job representing the pro-choice majority in this country . . .

2011-08-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

LORI MOORE and ROGENE FISHER JACQUETTE (NYT) - Photos of Military Personnel Lost in Afghan Helicopter Attack

Robert Paarlberg - Famine in Somalia: What Can the World Do About It?

Shakesville (Melissa McEwan) - Somalia food insecurity

Anderson Cooper (Aug. 9) - Somalia Food Crisis (interview with Iman)

Iman op-ed on Somalia crisis

DipNote - President Obama Announces Additional Funds for Horn of Africa Famine

Arthur Silber - Once Upon A Time. . .

Carolyn Lochhead - SF Chronicle (8/11/2011):
Citing the Defense of Marriage Act, the Obama administration denied immigration benefits to a married gay couple from San Francisco and ordered the expulsion of a man who is the primary caregiver to his AIDS-afflicted spouse.

Bradford Wells, a U.S. citizen, and Anthony John Makk, a citizen of Australia, were married seven years ago in Massachusetts. They have lived together 19 years, mostly in an apartment in the Castro district. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied Makk's application to be considered for permanent residency as a spouse of an American citizen, citing the 1996 law that denies all federal benefits to same-sex couples.

The decision was issued July 26. Immigration Equality, a gay-rights group that is working with the couple, received the notice Friday and made it public Monday. Makk was ordered to depart the United States by Aug. 25. Makk is the sole caregiver for Wells, who has severe health problems.

...

"We are appealing to the Obama administration to begin to put into action what they've said repeatedly they can do," said Immigration Equality spokesman Steve Ralls. "The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have said again and again that they can exercise discretion in individual cases, but they have not done so for a single gay or lesbian couple yet."

One thing I'd like to see change is the idea that "rules are rules, and have to enforced, no matter what the consequences". In reality, no rule is so perfect that it does not require judgement, discretion, common sense. You need to give people the power to use their discretion, and then trust them, and in some cases hold them accountable, for using it properly. A bureacracy that lacks discretion is not a protector of the rule of law, it's just another monstrous, unpredictable, unaccountable menace that people have to be scared of. It's important to note that a "rules are rules" mentality leads not just to harshness, but also to unpredictability, because there are thousands of laws, all of which contain ambigous wording, which can be twisted into novel and creative (and terrifying) interpretations, many of which contradict each other. Bastards though we might be, we have no choice but to put our trust in the discretion and common sense of human beings, not the satisfying pseudo-certainty of an infallible rulebook.

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

Susie Madrak - (MLK) The Other America

(Via Susie Madrak) Kathy Kelly - More Lost by the Second in Afghanistan

. . .No matter which side of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border you are on, suffocating hot temperatures prevail day and night during these hot months. It’s normal for people to sleep in their courtyards. How could anyone living in the region not know this? Yet the U.S. JSO forces that came in the middle of the night to the home of a 12-year-old girl, Nilofer, who had been asleep on her cot in the courtyard, began their raid by throwing a grenade into the courtyard, landing at Nilofer’s head. She died instantly. Nilofer’s uncle raced into the courtyard. He worked with the Afghan Local Police, and they had told him not to join that night’s patrol because he didn’t know much about the village they would go to, so he had instead gone to his brother’s home. When he heard the grenade explode, he may well have presumed the Taliban were attacking the home. U.S. troops killed him as soon as they saw him. Later, NATO issued an apology. . .

. . .“The raids occur ‘every night. We are very much miserable,’ said Roshanak Wardak, a doctor and a former member of the national Parliament.” I am reading a McClatchy news report, dated August 8th of this year. “Residents of the Tangi Valley area, in eastern Wardak Province, about 60 miles southwest of Kabul, issued similar complaints about the night raids in their vicinity, charging that they have killed civilians, disrupted their lives and fueled popular support for the Taliban.”

Imagine it. People in an Afghan village pass sleepless nights, anxious that their home might be targeted by a U.S.-led night raid. Villagers are enraged when they hear stories of elders and imams being roughed up and detained, of wives and children being killed, of belongings stolen and property destroyed. . .

. . .In Helmand province, in Nad Ali, the district governor told a New York Times reporter one incident in the spiral of violence: a NATO foot patrol came under fire from a family home on August 5, 2011, killing one soldier and wounding an Afghan interpreter. The NATO troops called in an airstrike. NATO is now investigating a report that the airstrike killed eight civilians, seven of them children. “The home belonged to Mullah Abdul Hadi, 50, a local imam who Afghan officials say was helping the Taliban,” said Mr. Shamlani. “He was killed along with one of his two wives and his seven children, all younger than 7 years old.”. . .

Josh Marshall - Was It Worth It? (Wisconsin)

. . .It would be a mistake to see this as a distraction, a big mistake.

Susie Madrak - Shhh, it’s a secret

Blue Gal (of Blue Gal and Crooks and Liars) is getting married this Friday to the very funny Driftglass. . .

. . .But I just wondered how many more Blue Gal fans there are out there, and how many people might want to go hit the tip jar on her page to give this lovely couple a little extra money as a wedding present.

She’s one of the nicest, smartest, funniest people — and so’s Drifty. If you want to send a gift to the happy couple, click here.

Driftglass - Deny, Deny, Deny (2005)

In the flick Matthau asks Morse what to do if his wife nails him with another woman. . .

. . .“Deny, deny, deny.”

. . .“But what if…?”
Deny.
“But suppose she walks right in and finds…?”
Deny.
“Right there. In her bed. Right in front of her…?”
Deny.

Deny everything. As your wife stands over your marriage bed, deny that the woman she is staring at even exists. When your wife demanded to know who this woman is as she (and you) get hurriedly dressed two feet away, just repeat “What? What are you talking about? What woman?”

What made me think of that:

Bob Herbert made me think of that.

Bob Herbert, one of the few reasons I might consider holding a bake sale to pay Charon to get me across the river Styx to the Times’ OpEd page once NYT closes the free pedway.

Herbet talks; You listen.

The Rumsfeld Stain

By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 23, 2005

How does Donald Rumsfeld survive as defense secretary? . . .

Juan Cole - Iraq & Syria

In contrast to the Iraqi executive, the parliament has recently strongly deplored the government’s use of violence against protesters. Two major blocs in parliament, the Kurdistan Alliance and the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya Party, are not Shiite and have ties to protesters in Syria, whether Kurds or Sunni Arabs. The Speaker of parliament is a Sunni Arab from Mosul who has strongly condemned the Baath government’s repression. . .

Iraq calls Syria to stop bloodshed

2011-08-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

Susie Madrak - 30 years ago today

Michael Moore:
. . .They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated.

Young people have heard of this mythical time -- but it was no myth, it was real. . .

Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time. . .

NYT, August 3, 2011:
Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary and dean of President Obama’s economic team, is expected to stay through the president’s term after intense White House pressure, according to officials familiar with the discussions. . .

words not in the NYT story: unemployment, HAMP
words in the NYT story: "cashing in"

Gary Farber's twitter feed: Every huge evil has a small beginning: Katharine Q. Seelye (NYT) - A Wall to Remember an Era’s First Exiles

Gary Farber's twitter feed:If you're Bay Area, HIV-negative, want to help in a safe way, & earn $50/$75 several times, you can participate in this: SFisReady - About HIV Vaccine Studies

Gary Farber - Amygdala

Dan Hurley (NYT magazine) - A Father's Search for a Drug for Down Syndrome

“All I could think is, She’s my baby, she’s a lovely girl and what can I do to help her?. . .

. . .With no experience in the study of Down syndrome, Costa took a short walk the next day to a library affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine, where he worked as a research associate in neuroscience. Reading the latest studies, he learned that the prognosis was not nearly as dire as it was once considered. . .He soon made a decision: he would devote himself to the study of Down syndrome. . .

. . .“It was an epiphany, that, oh, this is a field where I can apply a lot that I’ve learned,” Costa says. “Science is usually unforgiving with people who try to change career paths, but it was a risk I was willing to take.” Having earned his Ph.D. studying the electrical and chemical basis of communication between brain cells, “I figured, O.K., if there is something that can be done in this field, it’s going to be done at that level of neuronal electrophysiology.” After months of reading the latest studies, Costa knew he needed Davisson’s mice.

“He twisted my arm till I took him into my lab,” Davisson says with a laugh. “I didn’t have funding. He wrote a grant to get the funding. He is very enthusiastic.” She also found out that he was a “perfectionist, and not very tolerant of people who aren’t perfectionists. He doesn’t do experiments without being sure he’s doing them right. When he makes a finding, you know that it’s real.”. . .

. . .Even Costa has struggled to secure financing. He lives with Tyche and Daisy in a rented apartment, having never felt he had enough job security to buy a home. At his laboratory, some of his most expensive and sophisticated equipment for studying Down syndrome remains in storage, literally gathering dust for want of financing to use it. One source of his research money has been the Anna and John J. Sie Foundation, based nearby in Denver, and run by Michelle Sie Whitten, whose 8-year-old daughter has Down syndrome. Three years ago, the foundation established a research institute at the University of Colorado in Denver, where Costa works.

Plainly, though, he didn’t get into Down-syndrome research for the money. “There’s a reason why I’m doing what I’m doing,” he told me, nodding toward Tyche. . .

If raising taxes would increase NIH/NSF funding enough to allow one of the nation's leading Down syndrome researchers to buy a home, I for one would be cool with that.

Juan Cole - Informed Comment

Blake Hounshell - Syria

Al-Assad's regime is proving to be its own worst enemy. Its Ramadan assault has utterly failed to cow the protesters and has riveted the world's attention on the slaughter. . .

Turkish President Abdullah Gul said the killings were "unacceptable" in the strongest comments yet by a Turkish official. . .

Miriam (Feministing) - Famine in Somalia hits women and children hardest

Lori (Feministing) - Media overlooks lesbian heroes in Norway shooting

Talking Points Memo

. . .Really makes me wonder what the President's plan is for the economy. And that's not a dig. I'm really curious.

Daniel Davies

. . .The basic issue, and the one which ought to have people running around like their hair is on fire, is the unemployment rate. That, combined with the interest rate, shows you that deficit reduction is the stupidest possible policy at the current time. This is a very important issue, and the current President of the USA is on the wrong side of it. . .

. . .I am still irked by this "family budget analogy" that is out there doing so much damage in the world. Here's another go. . .

Another way to look at it: Inflation is not always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It is caused by too much money chasing too few goods. So you get inflation in two ways 1) producing too much money 2) producing too few goods. So by not supporting full-employment policies, "inflation hawks" are possibly causing 1) a lack of real investment in the present 2) a lack of real production capacity in the future 3) Recession now, and inflation in the future.

Paul Krugman - Clinton's trip recalls his finest moment (1997)

. . .In early 1995, only months after the crushing GOP congressional victory, a handful of officials persuaded Clinton to support a daring and extremely unpopular policy initiative: the rescue, with a huge loan, of Mexico's collapsing economy. Had that initiative failed, it might well have doomed Clinton's presidency. But it succeeded, and history may record the decision to go ahead with the plan as Clinton's finest hour. . .

. . .And so one day Rubin and Summers marched into the Oval Office with their plan -- and, incredibly, Clinton agreed. Mexico's economy, after plunging 10% in the first year after the crisis, has recovered most of the lost ground. Private investors are returning, and the Mexican government, years ahead of schedule, has repaid that emergency loan.

So what are the morals of the story? One is that sometimes it pays to listen to experts like Larry Summers -- and Clinton did. The other is that sometimes it actually pays to do the unpopular thing. If Clinton had listened to the polls that winter day, Mexico probably would be a basket case -- and Bob Dole probably would be president.

***

Time, Money & Politics
People:
1. Political professionals (including political writers & reporters, I think)
2) Activist leaders
3) Activist rank and file
4) citizens/voters
5) non-citizens affected by US policies

I'd imagine the line between professional & activist leader is somewhat blurry, and I'm not sure how to draw that line. In any case, doesn't really concern me, as I am neither.

For activist rank & file:
Time:
Doable amount of political & non-political volunteering: 1 Saturday every 2 weeks + 1 weeknight a week = 350 hours. A 100/250 split, i.e. 100 hours a year for political volunteering, 250 for non-political volunteering

Money:
Doable amount of political and non-political money: 12% income, 1% to official candidates/parties, 1% to political entities outside any official party structure, 10% for non-political giving.

Religious worship/volunteering/donations: A portion of Sunday + another 10% tithing for religious organizations/charities. Alternatively, you could, as my English teacher used to say, worship at St. Kubiak's First Church of the Polish Hedonist. You wake up early Sunday and say "Thank you, St. Kubiak", then roll over and go back to sleep.

***

I actually think a common ground position on taxpayer subsidies for health insurance is that conservatives would agree that taxpayer credits to buy health insurance does not constitute taxpayer funding for abortion, and liberals would agree that school vouchers for religious schools do not constitute violation of separation of church and state. Instead, unfortunately, we have gone from the default position of freedom and live and let live to the default position of "I pay the money, so I get to control you."

George Orwell - The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)

. . .What it does link up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official - the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability. . .

***

A million dollars isn't cool! You know what's cool? ~~A billion dollars!~~ Things that are cool.

2011-07-30T01:30:00.000-07:00

Obama: East Africa famine needs world to respond

Roofer hailed a hero after Norway island rescue

Gary Farber - Amygdala

UPDATE, July 19th, 2011: my friend is still looking for any work, including any Bay Area general office/admin, or retail work; write me at gary underscore farber at yahoo dot com with any info re possible work locally or freelance by mail. And, yes, new or renewed subscriptions, and donations, would be wonderful: thanks to any who can help!

Susie Madrak - What Dave Said

It’s not a “crisis” when it’s completely manufactured.

Dean Baker - Ron Paul’s Lucid Solution to the Debt Ceiling Impasse

Dean Baker - Beat the Press

As a practical matter, the financial markets completely ignored the downgrading of Japan's debt in 2002. It can still pay less than 1.5 percent interest on its 10-year bonds. . .

Paul Krugman - The Fatalist Temptation

. . .the truth about our slump — that we know how to fix it, that we could fix it in a year if we had the political will, but that bad ideas and worse politicians are standing in the way — makes people uncomfortable. They want to believe that we have a deep problem, and that’s why we’re in such a mess. . .

Question 1) What does Krugman mean by "fix it"?

Question 2) 435 House, 100 Senate, P & VP. How many of them agree with Krugman?

Question 3) How many of the American people agree with Krugman?

Note that this is not an ideological question. The assertion is "We know how to fix our slump, and we could fix it in a year if we had the political will." You don't have to be a liberal to agree with that assertion, or a conservative to disagree with it. Ricardo Caballero is I think an example of a non-leftist who would agree with Krugman's assertion.

2011-07-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

Susie Madrak - Suburban Guerrilla

Guardian - Norway Attacks

I'm open to believing that some reforms/cuts in Medicare might be necessary, though Dean Baker argues that it's not. Cutting Social Security seems to me to be unwise and unnecessary. In fact, there's a good case to be made for taking a portion of any cuts to Medicare and applying it to increased Social Security benefits. The cuts to Medicaid seem bad, don't know how bad the damage will be.

Overheard a conversation between two conservative women talking deficit, recurrent theme was "we have stop the borrowing, it's out of control, out of control, out of control. . ." One possible way to deal with these debt-slavery worries might be Dale Carnegie's: 1) Imagine the worst. 2) Accept it. 3) Seek to improve upon it.

Obsidian Wings - My rational fear of inflation (by Doctor Science)

Paul Krugman - John Hicks and his ~~Hot Licks~~ accurate predictions

Brad Delong - Our Economic Problems: Larry Summers Is on Message

Daniel Davies - The world's second lowest productivity industry

Tony Judt - Ill Fares the Land (2010)

"In October 2009 I delivered a lecture in New York. . .the first question came from a twelve year old schoolboy. . .The question came directly to the point: "Ok, so on a daily basis if you're having a conversation or even a debate about some of these issues and the world of socialism is mentioned, sometimes it is as though a brick has fallen on the conversation and there's no way to return it to it's form. What would you recommend as a way to restore the conversation?". . .

. . .there is a significant distinction between `socialism' and `social democracy'. Socialism was about transformative change: the displacement of capitalism with a successor regime based on an entirely different system of production and ownership. Social democracy, in contrast, was`a compromise: it implied the acceptance of capitalism - and parliamentary democracy - as the framework within which the hitherto neglected interests of large sections of the population would now be addressed. . .

. . .Thus, when `social democracy' rather than socialism is introduced into a conversation. . .bricks do not fall. Instead, the discussion is likely to take an intensely practical and technical turn: can we still afford universal pension schemes, unemployment compensation, subsidized arts, inexpensive higher education, etc. or are these benefits and services now too costly to sustain? If so, how should they be rendered affordable? Which of them, if any - is indispensable?. . .

. . .Is a system of `cradle-to-grave' protections and guarantees more `useful' than a market-driven society in which the role of the state is kept to the minimum?. . .

. . .As I hope I have shown in this book, the question of `usefulness' needs to be recast. If we confine ourselves to issues of economic efficiency and productivity, ignoring ethical considerations and all reference to broader social goals, we cannot hope to engage it. . .

. . .In writing this book, I hope I have offered some guidance to those - the young especially - trying to articulate their objections to our way of life. However, this is not enough. As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is`wrong, we must act upon that knowledge. Philosophers, it was famously observed, have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

2011-07-16T01:16:00.000-07:00

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time...

Susie Madrak - Winning the future

. . .If I could be so rude as to point this out, we have all the money in the world for wars and banker bailouts. What we don’t have is political will to do anything that doesn’t help rich people. . .

Glenn Greenwald - Iraq War veteran on Manning, the media and the military

. . .there is another response that I hope as many people as possible read; with permission, I'm publishing it in its entirety below. It's by former Army Specialist Ethan McCord. . .
. . .I vividly remember the moment in 2007, when our Battalion Commander walked into the room and announced our new rules of engagement:

"Listen up, new battalion SOP (standing operating procedure) from now on: Anytime your convoy gets hit by an IED, I want 360 degree rotational fire. You kill every [expletive] in the street!"

We weren't trained extensively to recognize an unlawful order, or how to report one. But many of us could not believe what we had just been told to do. Those of us who knew it was morally wrong struggled to figure out a way to avoid shooting innocent civilians, while also dodging repercussions from the non-commissioned officers who enforced the policy. In such situations, we determined to fire our weapons, but into rooftops or abandoned vehicles, giving the impression that we were following procedure. . .

. . .I was part of the unit that was responsible for this atrocity. In the video, I can be seen attempting to carry wounded children to safety in the aftermath.

The video released by WikiLeaks belongs in the public record. . .

. . .If PFC Bradley Manning did what he is accused of doing, then it is clear -- from chat logs that have been attributed to him -- that his decision was motivated by conscience and political agency. These chat logs allegedly describe how PFC Manning hopes these revelations will result in "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.". . .

Juan Cole - Today’s Top 5 Crises in the 2011 Arab Revolutions

2. Syrian Vice-President Farouk al-Sharaa chaired a nationally televised debate at Damascus University between regime supporters and a few dissidents over the future of the country. (Most in the opposition boycotted the meeting, but a few joined in.) Dissidents called for a pull-back of troops from protesting cities and the release of prisoners of conscience. As regime officials have done before, Sharaa spoke of the country moving to a pluralistic, multi-party democracy. . .It is easy to move to pluralistic democracy. You announce the date for elections, and let other parties freely contest them. Talking about it as a far-future ideal in the absence of practical steps will only enrage your citizens. And having a debate in which those who speak on the opposing side are likely to go to jail and be tortured is a farce.

ECHIDNE of the snakes - Today's Recommended Reading on the Economy

Is this article by James Galbraith. . .

WSJ Staff - Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record. (Jan 9, 2009)

President: jobs created; Truman: 8.4 million; Ike: 3.5 million; Kennedy: 3.6 million; Johnson: 11.9 million; Nixon: 9.4 million; Ford: 1.8 million; Carter: 10.5 million; Reagan: 16.0 million; Bush: 2.5 million; Clinton: 23.1 million; Bush: 3.0 million; Obama: ?;

To give old Ev psych its due, it did inspire Antony Jay's book, Corporation Man, parts of which have stuck in my head for years.

Antony Jay - Corporation Man (1971)

Preface:

Anyone who tries to force a crystal to yield up the innermost secrets of its structure encounters an intriguing problem: the only available method is x-ray diffraction, but this provides two-dimensional photographs, whereas the atoms are arranged three-dimensionally in the crystal. From one single picture you cannot possibly tell how the individual atoms are arranged, you have to take more and more, until finally you are able to deduce the shape of reality from the shadowy images. Eight atoms arranged in a simple cube may surrender their secret after three of four diffraction photographs; the double helix of the DNA molecule took years of work by some of the world's leading scientists.

I use this parallel because this book is an attempt to explain the central reality of the modern corporation, and yet I always mistrust those writers who claim to have done so. Each seems to come up with a new complete explanation. The corporation is an economic unit. The corporation is a complex of personal relationships. The corporation is an organization chart. The corporation is a concept, a pyramid, a state, a monster, a game, a jungle, a battlefield, a way of life. How can all these truths be true, and what is the point of my adding another unsubstantiated assertion to a list that is too long already?

That is why I started with crystallography. The point is that none of these generalizations can be the whole truth because the complexity of the corporation, as of the crystal, is three-dimensional: but any or all of them can be valuable two-dimensional diffraction photographs which help us to build up more and more understanding of the elements that compose the complex three-dimensional whole and of their relationship to each other. Some of these photographs are so close in angle to previous ones that they tell us hardly anything we did not know already. Others, by taking an unfamiliar or unexpected angle, can be a revelation. . .

I. The Evolution of Corporation Man

. . .Even while I was a member of the BBC I wondered if this attitude to time and money was unique or unusual among corporations. After leaving, I worked with with quite a number of of big organizations, and realized in fact that the BBC was rather good. . .

. . .I found horrifying schemes for reporting on staff that tried to turn every manager into a cross between God and a consulting psychiatrist. I found people treated with an indulgent softness that in ordinary life no one would show to a plumber or car mechanic who had fallen down on the job a quarter as badly, or with an inhuman callousness that the same people would privately not inflict on a stray dog. . .

II. The Picture on the Box

. . .The accepted stereotype of the creative artist is as a solitary - the painter alone in his studio, the composer alone at his piano, the poet alone in his garret. When working on Tonight I came to believe that this was a lot of romantic nonsense: the act of creating a work of art has to be solitary, but the artist does not have to be solitary. . .

. . .many ideas are only half an idea - with the single producer they stay half, with a team someone is likely to produce the other half. . .a single producer's ideas would only be for programs he could carry put on his own, they were limited by the skill experience, judgement, and inclinations of one man; but a production team could initiate ideas that used a far wider range - a good example was That Was the Week, which united musicians, singers, actors, political comment, studio audiences, comedy writers, news film, documentary film, studio cameras, bench work, and other ingredients which demanded a range of techniques and expertise which no single producer could possibly command. . .

. . .It did not occur to me at this stage that I had stumbled onto something with a relevance beyond television. All I knew then was that the production team worked in a way in which neither the solitary producer outside it nor the cumbersome structure above it could ever work. It had formed itself naturally, spontaneously, and almost in spite of the existing formal structure, and it was carrying BBC television. . .

I also met Doug Hughes.

Doug is a production engineer with International Computers. . .He felt about the engineering industry much as I felt about the BBC, though at first this was the only connection I could see. However, as he led me me further and further into the dark recesses of the average engineering factory, lightening my path with dazzling flashes of sarcasm fueled by his rich sense of the absurd, it all began to look unbelievably familiar.

To Doug, the average engineering factory was chaos. Metal came into it in a few basic shapes - casting and sheet, billet and strip and bar - and then went through thirty or forty processes before the finished machined part went to assembly: heat treatment, milling, drilling, grinding, reaming, then more of the same, with each process under a different manager's control. Away in one building were designers stipulating tolerances that could not be achieved, and in another were estimators playing happy games with fairy-tale figures that bore no relation to the nasty realities of the factory. If any part had to be scrapped, it was never anyone's fault - the milling foreman and drilling foreman each blamed the other and the factory manager's office turned into a law court. The system worked by a sort of selective panic called "expediting," which meant that urgent parts were rushed through at the expense of logic, order, economy, and efficiency. Machine operators alternated between waiting for parts and being submerged in a flood. . .The BBC, in retrospect, started to look like a model of smooth management.

Doug had been in engineering factories all his life, but he hadn't been able to change anything until one day he was given the design of a card punch so complex that he knew it could not be manufactured by the normal methods. There was only one way, and with a remorseless logic which I now recognize, a production team took place. A small group of men were put together in a separate shop with the necessary machines, and took the card punch through from raw metal to finished machine. The production volume, the degree of precision and the delivery date were all met.

That could have been that. But Doug realized that in a situation almost totally wrong, he had stumbled on something right. And he began to see an engineering factory exactly as I had begun to see the BBC - as a collection of independent workshops with a boss in charge of each who was responsible not for a process but for a complete part or a complete product. . .

2011-07-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

Arthur Silber - Once Upon A Time. . .

Violet Socks - Reclusive Leftist

Susie Madrak - Moral Hazard

A good fortune cookie this week: "Despair is criminal".

Dean Baker - Ron Paul’s Lucid Solution to the Debt Ceiling Impasse

I suppose my belief is that fake problems should have fake solutions.

Neil Irwin (WaPo) - Five economic lessons from Sweden, the rock star of the recovery

Parts of this Charlie Rose interview with Steve Wynn will be slightly grating to anyone who has an anti-elitist or anti-hedonist bone in their body, but it's still well worth watching, because Steve Wynn's description of doing good work is so plausible and interesting. I also think of the interview as an elegant refutation of "We're broke, We're bankrupt, We're in decline, We `just don't' have the money'"-style fatalism and despair.

Steve Wynn interviewed by Charlie Rose (2005)

. . .I have walked with my colleagues, on paper and in modeling & simulation, every POV, every spot that you can stand in this building - and if I've missed one I'll be sorely disappointed - but I've stood in every spot that a human being can wiggle their way into in this place, and I've asked myself: How high is the ceiling? What's the foreground? What's the mid ground? What's the background? What are the layers of visual experience? How will this feel as I move through this promenade, this esplanade, this hallway and when I walk off the elevator? I've stood in your shoes as best a man and his friends can do it, over and over and over again, until I thought I understood what you would see before you saw it. . .

. . .I've loved every minute of doing it. Anyone who would do the things you just said [build the best], first of all, would have to love the process. You don't do this just because you're in a hurry to get some cash flow out of a gambling joint. No, this is about process. Loving process is`something that is an absolute requirement. I mean I've loved each and every step of it. The 2 & 1/2 years of design before the 2 & 1/2 years of construction seemed like 4 months to me. Nobody saw me or heard from me. I was alone with a felt-tip pen and a few other people, working 6 days a week in total ecstasy. . .

. . .what I'm afraid of with the word "dreamer", it connotes Walter Mitty. . .[The Bellagio, Golden Nugget, every Wynn hotel] are real, they exist. . .and they're a vindication of the truth that if you build a wonderment the world will come to it. . .

. . .there's a very fine line between what the press calls a visionary, or an inspired creative idea, or a dreamer, or a conceited rich guy, who's a Judas goat, who's taking everybody, including his investors, over the cliff. And if you live with that responsibility, and the agony and the discomfort of that possibility, you forge ahead and you check your work . . .

. . .you measure your risk, you review your notes, and you say onward and upward, Excelsior! let's go. . .

. . .one thing is for sure, I'm not going to feel sorry for myself, and I'm going to do the best I can.

Readers Digest India interview of Devi Prasad Shetty

Q. So, you’re a happy man?
DS. See, all of us want to be happy. But the ultimate joy is not in having what you want in life, but seeing people around you also having what they want. Just suppose you love ice cream and you’re enjoying your favourite flavour. Then, suddenly, a hundred hungry children surround you. Would you enjoy it as much? Now imagine every child getting an ice cream and they are all very happy. Then your ice cream would have never tasted as good.

Q. But there’s the perception that doctors have become materialistic.
DS. You have to blame the medical education system for that, not the individuals. Under our program, called Udayer Pathey, we’re trying to help children from Bengal’s villages become doctors. Today, most children from poor families, irrespective of how bright or how passionate they are, can never get into medicine. But the world over, some of the brightest doctors, who radically transformed health care, came from deprived backgrounds—they are the ones who have the fire in their belly and can work twenty hours a day. You cannot expect a person who’s paid Rs1 crore [$250,000] to get an MD seat to be passionate about caring for the poor

Q. What is the one medical reform you are rooting for?
DS. Medical education should be made inclusive. Any young doctor who wants to become a heart surgeon or neurosurgeon should be able to become one. What he makes of it is left to him. If we create the infrastructure, we can train ten thousand heart surgeons a year. Why put an artificial barrier? It is exactly like a licence raj, when we only had Ambassador cars. Once we liberalized, we got the world’s best cars. Why not do the same with medical education?

Wikipedia on the License Raj

Reuters article on same

The system for patents & IP is arguably showing some of the same pathologies of the License-Raj. Still, a lot of people's jobs depend on the current patent and IP regime, so I'm not sure dramatic changes would produce the best outcome, instead of ad-hoc adjustments on a case-by-case basis.

Dean Baker on making health care more affordable (2009)

2011-07-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

Arthur Silber - Assistance for Our Better Angels

And by "better angels," I mean, of course, the ladies. First, I encourage you to help a human lady if you can. Dr. Socks has some medical bills which are undoubtedly overwhelming. I have no means of even trying to pay any of my own medical bills. I haven't looked at the bills from my latest hospital stay, although I've kept the envelopes (just in case curiosity overcomes me in an odd moment). It's impossible for me to pay even a small fraction of them (no money, can't pay! simple how that works), so there's no point in contemplating the numbers. But based on the bills from my first hospital stay two years ago, I assume the total to date is well north of $60,000. Note that I didn't have surgery either time; the most complex procedures, which aren't complex at all, were blood transfusions and an endoscopy. Mind-boggling shit is what that is. Anyway, I hope you can help Violet. . .

Violet Socks - Emergency Medical Blegging

Note: Please ignore this post if you are poor, cash-strapped, or otherwise struggling. This is only for those who can afford to help.

Longtime readers have probably figured out by now that I have a couple of medical conditions that rule my life (and my pocketbook). I’ve known for awhile that one of those conditions was eventually going to require treatment, and I’ve been trying my hardest to save up for it. Unfortunately, saving-up time is over. Things have suddenly deteriorated in a major way, and I need surgery. And no, I don’t begin to have enough money to cover it. So if you are one of those people who likes the blog and appreciates whatever it is that I do here, this would be an excellent time to pitch in a few bucks. It would mean the world to me.

I am so grateful for your wonderful friendship and kindness. I love you all.

Arthur Silber - Assistance for Our Better Angels

. . .Next week, Sasha goes in for surgery. After consultation with the vet, I conclude that's the safest and surest way to make certain everything is taken care of properly. (Blood tests are often inconclusive, so aren't necessarily helpful at all.) Even if she was spayed, it's not uncommon for some ovarian tissue to be left behind. The surgery itself will cost $350.00; add in incidentals (and let's assume, please Goddess, there are no complications at all), and we're talking in the neighborhood of $400.00.

And then there is the incredibly sweet Wendy. . .It's possible that the cortisone will have a tremendously revivifying effect, which would certainly change the prognosis for the better. Let's keep our fingers crossed for that. Otherwise...

Wendy's trip to the vet tomorrow will cost around $100.00, perhaps more if the vet decides she needs to be hydrated (a distinct possibility) or requires additional procedures. I've just paid the July rent. With the other monthly bills requiring payment (the bare minimum, as has been the case for years now), I'm looking at rapidly dwindling financial resources. Dwindling toward the point of the big zero.

So once again, I must extend the begging cup. I do have a number of articles lined up for the near future. Once I'm able to focus a bit more on them (I hope this weekend), I'll start preparing them for publication. But I am deeply saddened by Wendy's situation. I've readied myself as much as I can for what may come, but that's not being ready at all. She's so, so sweet, and such a wonderful presence in our lives. Oh, damn. Now I'm crying. God damn it all to hell.

All right, I'll have to leave this for now. Bless you for listening, and bless you if you can help. I'm more grateful than I can say.

ECHIDNE of the snakes - My Annual Fund Drive

This will last the whole week. It's time to pay the piper, my sweet and erudite readers. Or rather, to help me with my computer and chocolate rations. . .

Don't give if you have no money to give or if you already gave. Read and click instead. My sincerest thanks to all of you.

Daniel Davies - Go Dean!

Vintage Dean Baker, on the general subject of annoying opinion writers who, at this late stage and at least two years and five books after there was any excuse, still don't understand what happened in the housing bubble . . .

comments:
John Emerson said...
"Baker also is willing to say the same thing 100 times if the same thing happens 100 time. That lacks entertainment value, but repeatedly pointing out that things are still fucked up the same way they always were really is necessary.

Bruschettaboy said...
this is the other thing I was meaning to say about Dean - it is this characteristic, more than any other (even the characteristic of being usually right, which is also valuable), which would have made him absurdly suitable to a well-paying job on Wall Street if he had wanted one.

walt said...
I think part of Baker's success is that his mental model of the economy is laughably simple. For example, his explanation of the recession is the wealth effect: people feel poorer because their total wealth has plunged (because of falling house prices), so there's a big recession. A sophisticated economist at this point would start sputtering about expectations or technology shocks or something. Unfortunately for the sophisticated economist, things happen in the economy for crude reasons, not because of the delicate dance of expectations and optimal planning.

Krugman's most recent blog post is an example, where he quotes Woodford approvingly saying that fiscal policy works through some round-about expectations mechanism, when in fact fiscal policy works through giving money so that they spend it.

Digby - GOP Jobs Program

. . .truthfully, it wouldn't be that hard to just say that this level of unemployment is way too high and that the government is going to put people to work if nobody else will so that they can feed their families. You don't have to give a seminar in macroeconomics.

Matthew Yglesias - Cory Maye To Be Freed

Radley Balko - The Case of Cory Maye (2006)

A cop is dead, an innocent man may be on death row, and drug warriors keep knocking down doors.

2011-06-25T01:06:00.000-07:00

Gary Farber - A Good Copy Editing job, And A Big Favor To Me

A very important to me friend of mine -- not me -- with solid copy editing experience is looking for immediate freelance or permanent or temporary copy editing or proofreading work of any sort, either by mail/shipping, or locally in the Bay Area. CV upon request.

She's also available at present for any sort of office work in the Bay Area. . .

Benedict Carey (NYT) - Expert on Mental Illness Reveals Her Own Fight (via Gary Farber)

“So many people have begged me to come forward, and I just thought — well, I have to do this. I owe it to them. I cannot die a coward,” said Marsha M. Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington. . .

. . .“My whole experience of these episodes was that someone else was doing it; it was like ‘I know this is coming, I’m out of control, somebody help me; where are you, God?’ ” she said. “I felt totally empty, like the Tin Man; I had no way to communicate what was going on, no way to understand it.” . . .

. . .Radical Acceptance

She sensed the power of another principle while praying in a small chapel in Chicago.

It was 1967, several years after she left the institute as a desperate 20-year-old whom doctors gave little chance of surviving outside the hospital. Survive she did, barely: there was at least one suicide attempt in Tulsa, when she first arrived home; and another episode after she moved to a Y.M.C.A. in Chicago to start over.

She was hospitalized again and emerged confused, lonely and more committed than ever to her Catholic faith. She moved into another Y, found a job as a clerk in an insurance company, started taking night classes at Loyola University — and prayed, often, at a chapel in the Cenacle Retreat Center.

“One night I was kneeling in there, looking up at the cross, and the whole place became gold — and suddenly I felt something coming toward me,” she said. “It was this shimmering experience, and I just ran back to my room and said, ‘I love myself.’ It was the first time I remember talking to myself in the first person. I felt transformed.”

The high lasted about a year, before the feelings of devastation returned in the wake of a romance that ended. But something was different. She could now weather her emotional storms without cutting or harming herself.

What had changed?. . .

Arthur Silber - And For Their Next Number...

Here's a treat for you: the Ride of the Valkyries, arranged for eight pianos. The pianists are Evgeny Kissin, Lang Lang, Emanuel Ax, Leif Ove Andsnes, Claude Frank, Mikhail Pletnev, Staffan Scheja and James Levine, performing at the Verbier Festival & Academy 10th Anniversary Piano Extravaganza. I was hooked and had to watch it because of a comment made on my opera email list: "I have never before seen so many world-class musicians counting furiously to themselves. . .

. . .the opera list occasionally offers rare gems of commentary, as mentioned in the second of those pieces -- and here as well, in an article about John McGlinn.

The McGlinn article excerpts a wonderful post from Albert Innaurato to the opera list. I'd forgotten most of the details from that piece, but I think my concluding words there are the best way to conclude this entry:
The world may barely note John McGlinn's passing, and it may place far too little value on the extraordinary work he did and what he accomplished against tremendous odds.

We should not be so unmindful, or so uncaring. We should do our utmost to follow McGlinn's own advice, and to be among those people who are "willing to dream" of a better world, just as he did. And in his life and work, McGlinn made that better world real.

That should be, that must be, our aspiration and our dedication, too.

Jeffrey Goldberg - Thomas S. Vander Woude

Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Haunting of Rick Perry

Paul Krugman - Discussion of Sterling's "Holy Fire" (1997)

. . .We have come to take it for granted that in advanced nations almost everyone can at least afford the essentials of life. Ordinary people may not dine in three-star restaurants, but they have enough to eat; they may not wear Bruno Maglis, but they do not go barefoot; they may not live in Malibu, but they have a roof over their head. . .

Economist's View - Paul Krugman: Capitalism's Mysterious Triumph

. . .the collapse of Communism and the triumph of capitalism need more of an explanation than the stories we usually hear. It is not enough to explain all the reasons why a market economy is more efficient than a centrally planned one. Those explanations are basically right - but the question is why a system that functioned well enough to compete with capitalism in the 1940s and 50s fell apart in the 1980s. . .

. . .The market does not require people to believe in it; but the centrally planned economies that live inside a market economy, known as corporations, do. Everybody knows that financial incentives alone are not enough to make a company succeed; it must also build morale, a sense of mission, which makes people work at least somewhat for the good of the company rather than think only of what is good for them. Luckily, under capitalism an individual company can fail without taking the whole society down with it - or it can be reformed without a bloody revolution. . .

. . .In the end, then, capitalism triumphed because it is a system that is robust to cynicism . . .

Being robust to cynicism is an important virtue, but I think there is a still a limit to how much cynicism any system can take.

Paul Krugman - Is Capitalism Too Productive? (1996)

The rise of the current doctrine of global glut can be tied to three main developments. First, mass unemployment has reemerged in Western Europe, though not in the United States. . .

. . .Most readers of Foreign Affairs surely know people who have annual incomes of $300,000 or more. Indeed, a fair number of readers probably meet that description themselves. In reality, how hard is it to find ways to spend that money? A really nice home, a second home or nice vacations, private colleges for the children, two good cars ... Yet even if median family income in the United States grows at 2 percent per year, it will take a century before that median family has an income equivalent to $300,000 in today's prices. . .

. . .t is hard to imagine what a much more productive world economy will look like. The important thing to recognize is that the deficiency is in our imaginations, not in the real economy, which will have no trouble at all using that capacity. . .

. . .Suppose that you had approached an economist in, say, 1840 - a time when most Americans were farmers, and textiles dominated the still-small manufacturing sector - and informed him that 150 years later some 2 percent of the labor force could grow all of the food, and less than 1 percent produce all the cloth. And suppose you had demanded that he explain what everyone else would do for a living. He could not have given a very good answer; but he could with justice have argued that on general principles the economy would find something useful for them to do. . .

. . .None of the preceding should be taken as a declaration that all is right with the world economy. There are severe real problems: inequality in the United States. . .unemployment in Europe. . .a Japanese economy struggling to overcome the consequences of a burst financial bubble, a number of newly industrializing countries facing potential crises due to financial excesses and lax banking regulation, and so on. On the whole, the condition of humanity - as measured by such raw, crude, but crucial indicators as life expectancy and child malnutrition - is far better now than it was 20 years ago, largely because of economic growth in the Third World; but there are many shadows in the picture. One problem capitalism does not suffer from, however, is being too productive for its own good.

Imagining problems that do not really exist has real costs. To speak to European advocates of the global glut theory is to be struck by their fatalism: they really seem to have given up on the idea of actually making the European economy grow. . .

. . .It is a bit funny, but also quite sad: Those who preach the doctrine of global glut are tilting at windmills, when there are some real monsters out there that need slaying.

Noahpinion - The Architect of Modern Macroeconomics speaks!

. . .just because a statement is grumpy and conservative doesn't necessarily mean it bears even the slightest resemblance to actual observable reality. . .

Orange Crate Art - Richard Feynman on honors

Geek Heads -The Education System

While reading "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman, I came across a chapter on his experiences in Brazil education system. While you read this, you would realize that this is the ditto situation we have in India. He has presented it very well.

. . .After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”! . . .

. . .I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It’s something that people don’t usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.

After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn’t understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.

So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn’t do it!

One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.” It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what’s going on, and they’d put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it’s not confusing at all, telling him that he’s wasting their time.

I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn’t do that either, because they would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating “education” which is meaningless, utterly meaningless!. . .

Lindsay Beyerstein - The Twisted Logic of the John Edwards Prosecution

. . .He is not accused of spending campaign funds on her. Nor is he accused of accepting any money himself. According to the government, Edwards broke campaign finance laws because the payments to his mistress were really excess campaign contributions that were not reported to the FEC. If these payments were not campaign contributions, the government’s case falls apart. The government’s definition of campaign contributions is ridiculously broad, much broader than the FEC’s own definition. . .

. . .This decision to define campaign expenses relatively narrowly makes sense, given the FEC’s desire to prevent candidates from converting campaign funds for private use. . .

. . .If any spending intended to enhance or preserve a candidate’s image counted as campaign spending, virtually any personal expense could be construed as a campaign expense, and campaign coffers would degenerate into slush funds.

. . .The bizarre implication is that candidates cannot support their own families while they run for office. Either they’re breaking the law by spending out-of-pocket and not allowing the campaign to reimburse them, or they’re breaking the law by converting campaign funds for personal use. . .

Princess Bride - Mawwiage (1987)

2011-06-18T01:32:00.000-07:00

Arthur Silber - A Post I'm Crazy About: "Real, Full Members of the Human Race"

This one, from Violet Socks.

Susie Madrak - Fund Drive

Just like with public television and radio, you need to put your money where your interest is. If you can afford to help, please do so! If you can’t, don’t worry about it. . .

June 16:
. . .I’m in the ER of the Hennepin County medical center. . . and I just had to pay them $240. If you can spare a contribution, I would really appreciate it. . .

comments:
pragmatic realist: "Tell me that you didn’t come out on the losing end of a blogger fight."
Susie: "Nah, I’m okay now."

Andrew Sullivan - The Verdict On Romneycare? Ctd

Despite [drawbacks], it's important to note that most Massachusetts residents wouldn't want to go back. . .

. . .Why the lack of complaint? Let me give you one reason. In October 2008 my daughter, then 10, was hit by a bone infection in her hip. Despite surgery and a lengthy round of antibiotics her hip was damaged to the point where a total hip replacement became necessary. Her hip replacement will wear out in 25-30 years even if nothing goes wrong. If she lives a normal lifespan, that is, she will have to replace it twice - two very expensive operations. Under the status quo, she would not be able to get insurance for these procedures - she has a huge preexisting condition, right?

But we live in Massachusetts. Indeed, throughout my daughter's ordeal we were repeatedly told by physicians, nurses and friends that our daughter would, as a practical matter, have to live in Massachusetts for the rest of her life, because if she moved elsewhere in the country as an adult and her hip went out she would face potentially crippling costs. "But at least she can live here," they said. "It's not like the rest of the country, where you're simply fucked."

Stories like this are why people like Romneycare, even if they complain about it. As Obamacare becomes law and situations like this become known, it is difficult for me to imagine a groundswell for throwing children like my daughter into the fire.

Brad Delong - Macroeconomics: Safety, Savings, and Sovereigns

. . .we have three options:

1) Tough it out, in the belief that austere virtue will in some way be good for us.

2) While most organizations cannot expand and produce at a profit, some can--notably the governments of France, Germany, Britain, the U.S., and Japan. Since they can borrow money extraordinarily cheaply and make things, they should do so--and thus restore full employment of factors of production.

3) The price of safety right now is at outlandish levels because financial markets do a lousy job of mobilizing the global risk-bearing capacity of the world. Central banks and the governments that back them can, however, mobilize that risk-bearing capacity. They should buy up risky assets, distribute the risks across the globe's taxpayers, and issue safe assets until supply and demand have once again pushed the price of safety down to a level at which ordinary companies can make a profit when they jointly produce commodities on the one hand and the quality of savings vehicles that they can issue on the other. This last is quantitative easing--what Raghu calls "easy money", and says the economy does not need. . .

I think there is one other option, which has dangers, but has the possible (questionable) virtue of not printing money or increasing public sector debt: What Ricardo Caballero calls "Trimming tail risk", i.e. having the government become the insurer or reinsurer of last resort for the first 20-40% of the principal of certain classes of risky, private-sector assets. This may be equivalent to quantitative easing, but I'm not sure that it is.

To clarify the point: Why are investors so overwhelmingly flocking to sovereign debt? Because sovereign debt does not have the same risk of complete principal wipe-out that risky private debt has. You may lose 5 or 10% of the principal, but you won't lose 100%. By the government being a reinsurer of last resort, guaranteeing the first 20-40% of the principal for certain classes of risky, private sector assets, government could make investors more willing to hold risky private assets, and therefore induce more private investment.

One idea for the U.S. Post Office to make some additional money: rent to other organizations the right to put fliers, DVDs, etc, in PO Boxes, instead of having to hang them on doorknobs, stick them under the door, or other second-best solutions.

Atul Gawande - A Townie Speaks (via Ezra Klein)

Nicholas Kristof - Military Health Care & Education

Dana Goldstein - Should All Kids Go to College?

C.S. Lewis - A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)

VIII. Defence Of This Style

By a Stock Response Dr. I.A. Richards means a deliberately organized attitude which is substituted for the `direct free play of experience.'. . .

. . .All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perseverance - all solid virtue and stable pleasure - depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux (or `direct free play') of mere immediate experience. This Dr. Richards would not perhaps deny. But his school puts the emphasis the other way. They talk as if improvement of our responses were always required in the direction of finer discrimination and greater particularity; never as if men needed responses more normal and more traditional than they now have. To me, on the other hand, it seems that most people's responses are not `stock' enough, and that the play of experience is too free and too direct in most of us for safety or happiness or human dignity. . .

. . .Normal sexuality, far from being a datum, is achieved by a long and delicate process of suggestion and adjustment, which proves too difficult for some individuals and, at times, for whole societies. The Stock response to Pride, which Milton reckoned on when he delineated his Satan, has been decaying ever since the Romantic Movement began - that is one of the reasons why I am composing these lectures. The Stock response to treachery has become uncertain; only the other day I heard a respectable working man defend Lord Haw-Haw by remarking coolly (and with no hint of anger or of irony), `You've got to remember that's how he earns his pay.' The Stock response to death has become uncertain. I have heard a man say that the only `amusing' thing that happened while he was in hospital was the death of a patient in the same ward. . .Even the Stock response to pleasure cannot be depended on; I have heard a man (and a young man, too) condemn Donne's more erotic poetry because `sex', as he called it, always `made him think of lysol and rubber goods'. . .

. . .poetry was formerly one of the chief means whereby each new generation learned, not to copy, but by copying to make^*, the good Stock responses. . .(* -"We learn how to do things by doing the things we are learning how to do,' as Aristotle observes (Ethics, II, i)).

XI. Hierarchy

. . .Discipline, while the world is yet unfallen, exists for the sake of what seems its very opposite - for freedom, almost for extravagance. . .The heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune; the rules of courtesy make perfect ease and freedom possible between those who obey them. . .The whole man is kindled by his vision of the `shape of virtue'. Unless we bear this in mind we shall not understand either Comus or Paradise Lost, either the Faerie Queene or the Arcadia, or the Divine Comedy itself. We shall be in constant danger of supposing that the poet was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamoured of a perfection.

XII. The Theology of Paradise Lost

. . .The best of Milton is in his epic: why should we labour to drag back into that noble building all the rubble which the laws of its structure, the limitations of its purpose, and the perhaps half-conscious prudence of the author, have so happily excluded from it? Must Noah always figure in our minds drunk and naked, never building the Ark? . . .

XIII. Satan

. . .The blindness here displayed reminds one of Napoleon's utterances after his fall, `I wonder what Wellington will do now? - he will never be content to become a private citizen again.' Just as Napoleon was incapable of conceiving, I do not say the virtues, but even the temptations, of an ordinarily honest man in a tolerably stable commonwealth, so Satan in this speech shows complete inability to conceive any state of mind but the infernal. . .

. . .It remains, of course, true that Satan is the best drawn of Milton's characters. The reason is not hard to find. Of the major characters whom Milton attempted he is incomparably the easiest to draw. Set a hundred poets to tell the same story and in ninety of the resulting poems Satan will be the best character. In all but a few writers the `good' characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make the humblest story ought to know why. . .It is in their `good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations. Heaven understands Hell and Hell does not understand Heaven, and all of us, in our measure, share the Satanic, or at least the Napoleonic, blindness. . .

. . .Yet even the `good' characters Paradise Lost are not so unsuccessful that a man who takes the poem seriously will doubt whether, in real life, Adam or Satan would be the better company. Observe their conversation. Adam talks about God, the Forbidden Tree, sleep, the difference between beast and man, his plans for the morrow, the stars, and the angels. He discusses dreams and clouds, the sun, the moon, and the planets, the winds, and the birds. He relates his own creation and celebrates the beauty and majesty of Eve. Now listen to Satan: in Book I at line 83 he starts to address Beelzebub; by line 94 he is stating his own position and telling Beelzebub about his `fixt mind' and `injured merit'. At line 241 he starts off again, this time to give his impressions of Hell: by line 252 he is stating his own position and assuring us (untruly) that he is `still the same.' At line 622 he begins to harangue his followers; by line 635 he is drawing attention to the excellence of his public conduct. Book II opens with his speech from the throne; before we have had eight lines he is lecturing the assembly on his right to leadership. He meets Sin - and states his position. He sees the Sun; it makes him think of his own position. He spies on the human lovers; and states his position. In Book IX he journeys round the whole earth; it reminds him of his own position. The point need not be laboured. Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace `all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.' Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan. It may be said that Adam's situation made it easier for him, than for Satan, to let his mind roam. But that is just the point. Satan's monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament. Certainly, he has no choice. He has chosen to have no choice. He has wished to `be himself', and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted. The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom. Satan, like Miss Bates, is interesting to read about; but Milton makes plain the blank uninterestingness of being Satan.

. . .Yet the choice is possible. Hardly a day passes without some slight movement towards it in each one of us. That is what makes Paradise Lost so serious a poem. The thing is possible, and the exposure of it is resented. . .We have all skirted the Satanic island closely enough to have motives for wishing to evade the full impact of the poem. . .

Jethro Tull - Cup of Wonder (1977)

2011-06-11T03:36:00.000-07:00

Arthur Silber - Wonderful Cats, and Awful, Awful Men

First, a report on what's up with me. I almost called this a "progress" report, but, eh. You be the judge.

I continue to be in pretty terrible shape. Since I can't access the traditional medical care my crappy heart and related problems require, I've begun exploring some "alternative" remedies, or what purport to be remedies. One of them is helping a little bit! I feel somewhat better, but, you say (as I might have said, too, especially in bygone days), that's all in my head. To which I suppose one might reply, with some justification: So what? If you feel better, you feel better. This is a problem? But more than that: a few of the symptoms I've had for years have almost gone away entirely. I'm talking about quantifiable shit, here. Hey, that looks like progress!

I still don't feel "good" precisely. But better than I did a month ago. So, "good," with an explanatory footnote.

The cats. With a multitude of thanks still another time for the extraordinary generosity of readers, the cats and I have shelled out close to $500 to our friendly vet. Something is still going on with Wendy, but she, too, seems to be getting better. . .

. . .But we'll almost certainly need to go back to the vet at least once more (for a followup at a minimum), and maybe more than that. So, with profuse apologies for using Wendy as a begging cup, if you have any spare change jangling noisily in your pocket, we could use it! I have very little money left for vet bills. . .

. . .I understand all the objections that might be made to my making a home for Sasha with Cyrano, Wendy and me. Given my health, it might seem terribly irresponsible. (And I myself have made the argument that it's very irresponsible for me even to keep Cyrano and Wendy given my own problems.) But since I'm feeling a bit better, I'm beginning to believe that I just might not die in the near future. And as I noted, Sasha can easily go back to the neighbor if circumstances change. But I think that Sasha joining our little group will be a lovely vote of confidence in the months, and hopefully years (a few of them, at least), to come. . .

. . .Does that mean you should despair and give up? It means that only if you think of what is most important in life -- in your particular life, that is -- as involving politics in a significant way. Why would you do that? See "Passing on the Sense of Wonder" and "Cultivate Your Sense of Wonder -- and Live Ecstatically" for more on this.

I'll explain more of what's been on my mind next time.

Reihan Salam - Garett Jones and Lane Kenworthy on Taxes, Scandinavian Exceptionalism, and Much Else

comment:

Anders Chan-Tidemann: ". . . I think one reason why Danes and Swedes are fairly productive, despite high taxes, is simply because they don't have to live in fear of having no health care, and in the know that their children can get a great education whether they are rich or poor. That somehow frees the mind a bit I would say. I bet it would work for Americans as well. . .not all social programs increase productivity, and Scandinavia have certainly not always had the right balance (sometimes erring on the side of too much Government control), and there are many things Scandinavia could learn from the US - not least when it comes to immigration. But those 2 great pillars - health care & education - really does seem to be 2 social programs that nearly every Western democracy seems to agree is necessary in a modern society. And that is not just true in the West - or in democracies. Look at Singapore. It's not a democracy, it's not Western, but they also have universal health care. . ."

C.S. Lewis - The Problem of Pain (1940)

. . .the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. . .

. . .God may be more than moral goodness: He is not less. . .

. . .If the world is indeed a "vale of soul making" it seems on the whole to be doing its work. . .

An analogy which seems to me true, between "God" and "moral goodness" in the Lewis quote, and "entrepreneurship/innovation" and "line responsibility". i.e. "Entrepreneurship and innovation may involve more than line responsibility. They do not involve less."

Or putting it another way, I think "What am I able and willing to take line responsibility for?" is often a better question to ask yourself than "How can I be an entrepreneurial change-agent of innovation?".

Or putting it yet another way, based on this Lewis quote:

"In the author's mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have have the author's impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to get out. He longs to see that bubbling stuff pouring into that Form as the housewife longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It's like being in love."

The bubbling ferment of desires to do something can peter out unless the desires find the Form of a line responsibility.

C.S. Lewis - A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)

Dedication To Charles Williams

To Williams. . .

. . .it is a reasonable hope that of those who heard you in Oxford many will understand henceforward that when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted. . .

I. Epic Poetry

. . .Every poem can be considered in two ways - as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. . .

. . .It is easy to forget that the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamoured of a woman, but also to be enamoured of the Sonnet. . .

. . .The matter inside the poem wants the Form: in submitting to the Form it becomes really original, really the origin of great work. The attempt to be oneself often brings out only the more conscious and superficial parts of a man's mind; working to produce a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him, and much of what he himself had no suspicion. . .

II. Is Criticism Possible?

. . .As regards a skill, such as medicine or engineering, we must distinguish. Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result. It is for cooks to say whether a given dish proves skill in the cook; but whether the product on which this skill has been lavished is worth eating or no is a question on which a cook's opinion is of no particular value. . .

III. Primary Epic

. . .in an age where when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea. . .that pomp, on the proper occasions, has`any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. . .The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual. . .

V. The Subject of Primary Epic

. . .[in Homer] No one event is really very much more important than another. No achievement can be permanent: today we kill and feast, tomorrow we are killed. . .We are in a different world here from Virgil's mens immota manet. There the suffering has a meaning, and is the price of a high resolve. Here there is just the suffering. . .Only the style - the unwearying, unmoved, angelic, speech of Homer - makes it endurable. Without that the Iliad would be a poem beside which the grimmest modern realism is child's play. . .

VI. Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic

. . .In Homer. . .You were unhappy, or you were happy, and that was all. Aeneas lives in a different world; he is compelled to see something more important than happiness. . .To follow the vocation does not mean happiness; but once it has been heard, there is no happiness for those who do not follow. . .

VIII. Defence of this Style

. . .I do not think (and no great civilization has ever thought) that the art of the rhetorician is necessarily vile. It is in itself noble, though of course, like most arts, it can be wickedly used. . .It is honestly practiced when the orator honestly believes that the thing which he calls the passions to support is reason, and usefully practised when this belief of his is in fact correct. It is mischievously practised when that which he summons the passions to aid is, in fact, unreason, and dishonestly practised when he himself knows that it is unreason. The proper use is lawful and necessary because, as Aristotle points out, intellect of itself 'moves nothing': the transition from thinking to doing, in nearly all men at nearly all moments, needs to be assisted by appropriate states of feeling. Because the end of rhetoric is in the world of action, the objects it deals with appear fore-shortened and much of their reality is omitted. Thus the ambitions of Philip are shown only in so far as they are wicked and dangerous, because indignation and moderate fear are emotional channels through which men pass from thinking to doing. . .

. . .By a Stock Response Dr. I.A. Richards means a deliberately organized attitude which is substituted for the `direct free play of experience.' In my opinion such deliberate organization is one of the first necessities of human life. . .A number of causes may be assigned for the opposite belief. . .3) A confusion (arising from the fact that both are voluntary) between the organization of a response and the pretence of a response. Von Hugel says somewhere, `I kiss my son not only because I love him, but in order that I may love him.' That is organization, and good. But you may also kiss children in order to make it appear that you love them. That is pretence, and bad. The distinction must not be overlooked. Sensitive critics are so tired of seeing good Stock responses aped by bad writers that when at last they meet the reality they mistake it for one more instance of posturing. They are rather like a man I knew who had seen so many bad pictures of moonlight on water that he criticized a real weir under a real moon as `conventional'. . .

2011-06-04T03:22:00.000-07:00

Remarks by the President at a Memorial Service in Joplin, Missouri

. . .There was a young man named Christopher Lucas who was 26 years old. Father of two daughters; third daughter on the way. Just like any other night, Christopher was doing his job as manager on duty at Pizza Hut. And then he heard the storm coming.

It was then when this former sailor quickly ushered everybody into the walk-in freezer. The only problem was, the freezer door wouldn’t stay closed from the inside. So as the tornado bore down on this small storefront on Range Line Road, Christopher left the freezer to find a rope or a cord or anything to hold the door shut. He made it back just in time, tying a piece of bungee cord to the handle outside, wrapping the other end around his arm, holding the door closed with all his might.

And Christopher held it as long as he could, until he was pulled away by the incredible force of the storm. He died saving more than a dozen people in that freezer. (Applause.)

You see, there are heroes all around us, all the time. . .

Andrew J. Bacevich - How America Screws Its Soldiers

. . .The relationship between American people and their military—we love you; do whatever you want—seems to work for everyone. Everyone, that is, except soldiers themselves. They face the prospect of war without foreseeable end.

Americans once believed war to be a great evil. Whenever possible, war was to be avoided. When circumstances made war unavoidable, Americans wanted peace swiftly restored.

Present-day Americans, few of them directly affected by events in Iraq or Afghanistan, find war tolerable. They accept it. Since 9/11, war has become normalcy. Peace has become an entirely theoretical construct. A report of G.I.s getting shot at, maimed, or killed is no longer something the average American gets exercised about. . .we the people allow our leaders to evade this basic responsibility to articulate a plan for peace . . .

Josh Marshall - Memorial Day

Pat Tillman: "Really, the hard part is actually setting your mind to it. Actually accomplishing it usually is kind of secondary. I mean when you really think about it, it's just deciding you're going to spend your energy going in that direction. After that, it's not really that big of a deal."

Andrew Sullivan - The Evil In Damascus

Nicholas D. Kristof - She’s 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel

. . .Now at age 10, M. is running out of time. Her parents have pulled her out of her school in Kolkata and are sending her back to their native village hundreds of miles to the west. . .

. . .This leaves Basu and me with an extremely bad feeling, fearing that once she is back in the village and away from her protectors at the New Light shelter, her grandfather could sell her to a trafficker for transfer to a red-light district anywhere in India.

When we ask M. what she thinks, she looks down and says in a small voice that she worries as well. But she says she will never give up: “I will not stop my studies,” she told me firmly. . .

. . .I don’t know how this will end up. Ferrera said she will be writing letters to M. in hopes that this may make her family nervous about a sale. And Basu is counseling M. on what to do if she is sold to a trafficker. We just don’t know what else to do. . .

Paul Krugman - Against Learned Helplessness

Jared Bernstein - Interesting “Coulds” Coming In

Brad Delong - The Marx-Mellon-Schumpeter-Hoover-Hayek Axis Is Back!

. . .Modeling 140 million workers, 10 million firms, and 20 million commodities is really complex--that's why we don't do it, and don't have a big computer centrally-planning our economy. That is why we use the market system.

But when it comes to business-cycles--to recessions and depressions and downturns--we don't need to model 140 million workers, 10 million firms, and 20 million commodities: we only need to model two: (OK, four): currently-produced goods and services on the one hand, and (perhaps three types of) financial assets on the other. . .

Deirdre McCloskey - Economical Writing (1999)

Good style is what good writers do. . .In matters of taste - and everything from the standard of proof in number theory to the standard of usage in split infinitives is a matter of taste - the only standard is the practice of recognizably excellent practitioners. . .The test of rules is excellent practice, and the test of practice is the sovereign reader. . .Now start writing. Here I must become less helpful, not because I have been instructed to hold back the secrets of the guild but because creativity is ineluctably scarce. Where exactly the next sentence comes from is not obvious. If it were obvious then novels and economics papers could be written by machine. If you cannot think of anything to say then perhaps your mind is poorly stocked with ideas, or perhaps you have been reading too much machine-made prose. The solution is straightforward: spend a lifetime reading the best our civilization has to offer, starting tonight with elementary Greek. . .Like any sort of thinking, writing sometimes flares and sometimes fizzles, like a fire. When on a burn, though, do not break off. . .Be selfish for a while about the little candle of creation you are tending, however poor it may seem beside the conflagrations of the giants. . .

Rich Karlgaard - interview of Vint Cerf

. . .Did the owners of proprietary networks see you as a friend or foe? "Oh, they hated us. I heard from a reliable authority that Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corp., once asked in a meeting: 'How do we kill TCP/IP?'". . .

I do think it's possible that if the Internet had taken off during a GOP administration, it would have wound up being owned and controlled to a much greater extent by the people who owned the pipes. And many people would have defended this as a just and appropriate outcome.

An analogy to clarify to myself why I found the Kanazawa post so annoying: Suppose someone had written an article, "I think Americans are warmongering imperialists". No one would care. Further suppose a piece "Lots of people consider Americans warmongering imperialists". Still, no one would care. Then consider a piece "Americans objectively proven to be warmongering imperialists. Scientifically!" I think a lot of people would be annoyed, and rightly so. i.e. It's using the word "objective" in a place it had no business being.

Charles Williams - The figure of Beatrice: a study in Dante (1943)

. . .Love besides proper direction needs proper speed . . .To avoid harm is not, in itself sufficient. . .Those err who think that all love is in itself worthy of praise, even though the object itself is good. The grand image of Beatrice does not by itself justify the kind of love offered her; the lover himself must see to that. This is his choice; it is `the faculty which holds the threshold of assent'. . .

. . .But if Sloth overtakes Love, Beatrice is lost in the Siren, the romantic Image in the pseudo-romantic mirage. She comes in mid-purgatory (but naturally only in a dream) as Geryon came in mid-hell. She has been called the image of Sensual Pleasure, but this (it would seem) need not be the whole significance. She is as much - let us say - Ideal Gratification; all the sighs that lament the imperfection of a man's actual mistress, the verses that sweetly moan over her failure to live up to his dreams (or the other way round), the self-condolences, the `disillusions' - all these are the Siren's song. She takes flesh and colour and music within the night-reveries of laziness; she is, then - what? what we want; and that is? we do not rightly know, but certainly a Siren and a song. . .

. . .Of the three sins that which remains the nearest in kind and in enjoyment to Sloth and the Siren is Avarice; it is most content with an inner satisfaction of dream. The two others, Intemperance and Lechery - and here we are following hell in reverse - need increasing attention to something objectively other. . .From the Siren to Beatrice the appearance of the real other becomes more defined. The Siren is wholly within; Avarice almost wholly - gold is inorganic; Gluttony and Drunkenness less - food and wine are, or were, organic; Lechery still less - a real externalness and a real distinction are necessary there; and then Beatrice is absolutely without. So that part of the purification is the real recovery of the exterior image. . .

2011-05-28T01:10:00.000-07:00

Doctor Science - Joplin

. . .[Jeff] Masters calls it "The most remarkable audio I've ever heard of people surviving a direct hit by a violent tornado". What's notable about it to my mind is how it's *not* like a movie. Yes, people are crying, screaming, praying. But they're also taking care of each other while they're all crammed together in the store's walk-in fridge, trying to make sure no-one is being crushed. Speaking of love.

Be careful out there.

Echidne of the Snakes - Med school admissions in milieu of reform (by Skylanda)

. . .As it stands today, medical students take four years of undergraduate courses (in any field, though including the core science courses), then complete two years of pre-clinical studies, two years of clinical rotations, and a minimum three-year residency. Of these minimum eleven years of study, you may be surprised to know that fully half (the undergraduate and pre-clinical years) are only tangentially related to what a medical student ends up doing with their life; the rest are an amalgam of requirements and hoops that largely defy any utility to the task of medicine. . .

. . .in my experience, it is often the burn of the residency years that fundamentally shapes many physicians’ attitudes toward work, burnout, reimbursement, and debt. You cannot repay what young physicians endure during residency; most take it back the only way they can – monetarily. . .

comments:

quixote:

"I come at this from the perspective of a bio teacher who gets those pre-meds in their first few years. And, yes, who's one of the "executioners" in the weed-out classes. I couldn't agree more with what you say here.

Time and again, I'd see bright, kindly students come in with "Doctor" written all over them. And then they'd get a "C" in O_Chem and be toast. O-Chem which, as you say, they are never going to use in their professional lives. Meanwhile, society has lost yet one more person who would have made a good doctor. . .The weed-out course work very well at weeding, but they're getting rid of the orchids . . ."

skylanda:

"I was lucky - I went through pre-med as a "post-bacc", that is, I already had a degree and just needed to fill in science classes, at a big state school. I went through with a cohort of like minded people - we were older, pragmatic, supportive, and went through it together...I cannot imagine going through that in a cut-throat environment as a 19 year-old. The competition is just so unnecessary, as I very well found out - not only philosophically unnecessary, but literally unnecessary: all of us who stuck it out did well at the admissions process, without torturing ourselves or each other along the way."

Catherine Rampell - Once Again: Is College Worth It?

. . .Lots of people (~48%) would have changed their major, or done an internship, or started looking for work sooner while enrolled. Did you notice what category of regrets got the lowest share of responses?

Wishing they hadn’t gone to college.

I wonder if that points to the possible desirability of something like a 30-100K all-you-can-learn-buffet, i.e. flat-fee pricing instead of billable units.

Reihan Salam - Garett Jones and Lane Kenworthy on Taxes, Scandinavian Exceptionalism, and Much Else

Garett writes

"Scandinavian-Americans are about 50% more productive than Scandinavians. That’s pretty close to the naive tax-based prediction of Prescott–his rule of thumb, mentioned in his Nobel speech, is [loosely] that a 1% rise in taxes causes a 3% decline in labor supply. I suspect Prescott is wrong about that 3% estimate—surely labor laws and generous unemployment benefits are part of the difference. . ."

. . .this suggests that Danes and Swedes *might* do better under a more work-friendly tax regime, with “do better” understood as “engage in more productive economy activity,” which is of course different from doing better in some spiritual sense. . .

This seems to me remarkably weak tea. Indian-Americans are more productive than Indians, but no one is suggesting that India's low taxes (~20% of GDP) compared to the US (~30%) has anything to do with that. . .except, perhaps, you could argue that an oligarchic, rentier-based economy, with light taxes on the rich, will do worse than a middle-class based economy, with moderate taxes on the rich.

It seems to me that a good political order is one where everyone has some amount of freedom/security, no matter how poor, and where everyone faces some level of discipline/accountability, no matter how rich. The flaw in laissez faire-royal libertarianism is that it leads to a system of insufficient freedom/security for the poor, and insufficient discipline/accountability for the rich. Socialism is worse, it leads to a state where no one has freedom/security, and where the mechanisms of discipline/accountability are arbitrary and unpredictable. Which is why both socialism and royal libertarianism do not work, while the mixed economy, depending on the specifics, can work.

comment to Reihan Salam's "Megan McArdle and Kevin Drum on the Impact of Marginal Tax Rates"

Kevin Drum has been reading a survey of the literature on the elasticity of taxable income. He draws conclusions that Karl Smith suggests are basically right. Megan McArdle draws different conclusions, which I endorse. . .

mulp:
"Given the record poor economic performance over the past decade with asset inflation bubbles and massive malinvestment and the worst decade of job growth in the nation's history, one must conclude from the above that taxes were hiked drastically soon after 2000, while in the early 1990s tax rates were slashed to produce a huge boom in extremely productive investment that led to record high employment."

Nick Kristof - Raiding a Brothel in India (and comments)

Rick Perlstein - Hubert Humphrey, America's Forgotten Liberal

. . .Segregationist Southerners threatened to walk out, a move that could have paralyzed the entire fragile Democratic coalition and handed the White House to the Republicans. The Democrats’ first presidential defeat in 20 years might have been laid at the feet of this ambitious 37-year-old. . .

. . .“To those who say this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights,” he thundered from the convention podium, “I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

The motion carried. The Southerners walked out and ran Strom Thurmond for president. When Harry S. Truman won nonetheless, Democrats were on their way to becoming the party of civil rights. . .

. . .Liberal policy, he said, must stress “common denominators — mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears.”

In 1976 he joined Representative Augustus Hawkins, a Democrat from the Watts section of Los Angeles, to introduce a bill requiring the government, especially the Federal Reserve, to keep unemployment below 3 percent — and if that failed, to provide emergency government jobs to the unemployed.

It sounds heretical now. But this newspaper endorsed it then, while 70 percent of Americans believed the government should offer jobs to everyone who wanted one. However, Jimmy Carter — a new kind of Democrat answering to a new upper-middle-class, suburban constituency, embarrassed by industrial unions and enamored with the alleged magic of the market — did not. . .

Felix Salmon - The Fed’s secret giveaway to European banks

One thing I find infuriating is the way the political system meekly accepted the premise in the AIG counterparty bailout that contracts are sacred, and must never ever be modified or disrespected in any way, or else the whole capitalist system breaks down, yet completely abandoned that principle of the sacredness of contract when it came to government and union worker pensions. My view is that if we can modify government and union pensions (and I think we should be able to, if the circumstances warrant), we should have been able to modify the contracts of AIG counterparties, and made the bailout selective and conditional, rather than an no-questions-asked open-ended raiding of the government till.

Atul Gawande - Cowboys and Pit Crews

. . .When I was in medical school, for instance, one of the last ways I’d have imagined spending time in my future surgical career would have been working on things like checklists. Robots and surgical techniques, sure. Information technology, maybe. But checklists?

They turn out, however, to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction—in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains. They emphasize group precision in execution. And making them in medicine has forced us to define our key aims for our patients and to say exactly what we will do to achieve them. . .

(via Ezra Klein)

Karl Smith - Corporate Governance and the Plutocracy

. . .Investors with an interest in actually allocating capital are a key part of this whole capitalism thing. That almost necessitates a concentration of wealth. . .

I guess my two questions for Karl Smith is that 1) Einhorn, the hedge fund manager in the piece, seems to favor shorting as a key money-making strategy. Shorting is a zero-sum activity that's not insurance, so how can it increase welfare? 2) The hedge fund model seems to depend on promising investors a 15-20% return, in exchange for exhorbitant fees. How can that be possible, for a scalably large number of people, using honest means, when the underlying economic growth does not justify those returns? And what are the potential dangers of a system that seems to be based on managers overpromising, attracting lots of capital based on those promises, then (inevitably) either under-delivering or rent-seeking?

Jared Bernstein - This Excess Capacity You Keep Talking About…What is It?

An interesting post by Bernstein, but doesn't seem to answer, at least in so many words, the question of how much money we are leaving on the table, i.e. What are the range of estimates of the gap between what is and what could be?

Karl Smith - You Can’t Overwork Yourself By Smoking Joints and Watching Too Many Episodes of Jersey Shore

. . .This is why it makes no sense to say that a recession is inevitable because we overconsumed. Because we bought too much it is now inevitable that we work less? Why does that make fundamental sense? Surely something is going wrong. Shouldn’t we be working more to pay for all the stuff we bought? . . .

. . .If we consumed too much then shouldn’t we need to work extra hard? Why is society working less? What about spending too much money implies that the natural reaction is that people should go home and sit on the couch?. . .

Tyler Cowen - Open entry schools, the university as forum

I’ve been reading the fascinating A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander et.al., a book which I recommend to all urbanists, all architecture fans, Jane Jacobs fans, and Hayekians. . .(The book is in large part about how the organization of space and construction shapes spontaneous orders.). . .

Ta-nehisi Coates - Evolutionary Psychology

Michael Dickerson:
". . .Our society has become OBSESSED with data, and in particular quantitative data, in a way that often leads to misleading conclusions. . ."

Neocortex:

One on my favorite essays on the theme of too much reverence for numbers is John Bogle's "Don’t Count On It! The Perils of Numeracy".

2011-05-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

Arthur Silber - Once Upon a Time...

I keep trying to do some writing; so far, I have to stop after a little while and go back to bed. And now one of the cats seems to have some ailment, too. Thanks to the generosity of readers, I can afford to get her some medical attention once I'm able to make the trip to the vet. I hope to do that in the next few days . . .

. . .Once again, I'm deeply grateful to those who made donations, especially since the cats are also beneficiaries of your kindness. Sadly, the medical attention I myself require will forever be far out of reach financially. (And if Wendy's situation should cost more than several hundred dollars, that could be a problem, too. For the moment, I'll assume it's a relatively simply problem. But we'll find out soon.)

I hope to be able to do some work in the near future. I'll be back as soon as possible. My enormous thanks for your generosity and patience still another time.

William Greider - Secrets of the Temple (1989)

. . .Conservative critics decried it as the advent of socialism, but the core of Keynesian politics was quite different. What Keynes proposed was not class conflict, but reconciliation. His economic prescriptions suggested the terms for peaceful resolution. . .

. . .Keynes (and Eccles and the others) provided the political community with a unifying principle for economic decisions: everyone rides in the same boat. Given the complex relationships of the modern economy, everyone will prosper together, or, ultimately, everyone will languish. Capital will not collect its rewards unless labor gets its due. Workers cannot be healthy if producers are sick. Savers cannot reap profit if no one is able to borrow their savings and use them productively.

Enlightened self-interest required cooperation, a negotiated sharing of rewards. . .Fierce political struggles between labor and management and other competing interests continued, of course, after Keynes, but his ideas were a moderating influence. . .

This generous political spirit - the truce implicit in Keynesian doctrine - closely resembled the practical principles by which Franklin Roosevelt governed. Despite the fractious politics and FDR's derisive attacks on Wall Street's "economic royalists", the true spirit of the New Deal was conciliatory and collaborative. He was remembered as labor's champion, but Roosevelt was also supported by important elements of Wall Street, including leading investment bankers. FDR's many reforms were, in a sense, a series of "new deals" worked out with various sectors of the economy, both the injured and the prosperous. His bargains did not, put an end to conflict, but they did lower the intensity. . .

Daniel Kuehn - Some Keynes links (via Yglesias)

-Giovanni Dosi talks about the confluence between Schumpeter and Keynes at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website. I think this is very important. Some people see Keynes as saying "saving is bad and spending is good". I think that's a strange way to look at it. I see Keynes as saying "investment is good and investment doesn't always match up with savings". The latter perspective, which stresses animal spirits, etc. - this sort of view of Keynes that is more common at the Institute for New Economic Thinking - is quite commensurate with a Schumpterian entrepreneurial view of the economy.

Amos Oz, Brigitta van Rheinberg - How to Cure a Fanatic (2006)

. . .Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute—one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. As he writes, "The seeds of fanaticism always lie in uncompromising righteousness, the plague of many centuries.". . .

Glenn Harlan Reynolds - Sunday Reflection: From 'just-in-time' to 'just-in-case?'

. . .A new subdiscipline called "resilience engineering" looks at how systems can be made more resistant to failure, and better able to recover when they do fail. That kind of thinking, it seems to me, is relevant to all of us, not just engineers. . .

Jim Toedtman - Budget Wisdom in the Classroom

As I have for years, I spent a week of teaching and listening at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla., this spring. I've assured my bosses that this was my continuing search for the Fountain of Youth, a popular undertaking in Florida and at AARP.

This year, I also found wisdom. . .

. . .Most made sizable defense cuts, others closed tax loopholes and added or raised taxes, including higher gasoline taxes and a new 5 percent sales tax, even when they were warned that it could drive the cost of a Big Mac sky-high. They didn't cut education, protected the environment and didn't touch Social Security.

Here's the bottom line: Faced with the same options that have paralyzed Washington, the students worked to find success. They weren't selfish. The new taxes, for example, would affect them disproportionately. But the cuts were across the board, evenhanded and sensible. The human consequence of budget balancing was very much on their minds. "I don't think we should throw grandmas out on the street or deny the elderly health care services," said Victoria Priester, a senior from Jacksonville. . .

. . .At the end of the day, there was a role reversal: The students had some lessons to teach.

Clive Crook - A Timely Proposal From Martin Feldstein

Megan Mcardle - Capping Tax Expenditures: The Right Solution for the Wrong Reasons

Kevin Drum - Chart of the Day: Where the Debt Comes From

. . .If you want to save America from a crushing future debt burden, you need to repeal the Bush tax cuts, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and stop pursuing austerity policies that will slow down economic recovery.

Once we've done that, then it's time to talk about Medicare. But the other stuff comes first. . .

Jane Mayer - Charges Against the N.S.A.’s Thomas Drake

. . .Steven Aftergood . . .believes that the trial may also test whether the nation’s expanding secret intelligence bureaucracy is beyond meaningful accountability. . .

. . .Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Bush Justice Department, laments the lack of consistency in leak prosecutions. He notes that no investigations have been launched into the sourcing of Bob Woodward’s four most recent books, even though “they are filled with classified information that he could only have received from the top of the government.” Gabriel Schoenfeld, of the Hudson Institute, says, “The selectivity of the prosecutions here is nightmarish. It’s a broken system.”

. . .Tamm questions why the Drake case is proceeding, given that Drake never revealed anything as sensitive as what appeared in the Times. “The program he talked to the Baltimore Sun about was a failure and wasted billions of dollars,” Tamm says. “It’s embarrassing to the N.S.A., but it’s not giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

Talat Masood - Patience, Not Punishment, for Pakistan

. . .To be sure, Pakistan’s India-centric policy is harmful and counterproductive. The present crisis provides an opportunity for the Pakistani military to give up this strategically misguided obsession. India should also use this window of opportunity to step forward and normalize relations with its neighbor, instead of gloating over Pakistan’s misfortunes.

The killing of Bin Laden proves once and for all that the Pakistani military cannot look the other way as Afghan Taliban gather in Pakistan. Failing to act with full force against Islamist extremists at home is no longer an option. However, the United States needs to show greater understanding and patience while Pakistan undertakes this necessary strategic shift. . .

Obama - Remarks by the President on the Middle East and North Africa

. . .Our support for these principles is not a secondary interest. Today I want to make it clear that it is a top priority that must be translated into concrete actions, and supported by all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal.

Let me be specific. . .

Matt Yglesias - Open Educational Resources

. . .the purpose of libraries is to make human knowledge as widely available as possible, something for which digital media are ideal. But we haven’t had the kind of deliberate public focus on this that our ancestors put into library building.

Kevin Carey reports, however, that this is quickly changing thanks to a little-noted Obama administration initiative:
. . .The open-resource movement has been under way since the 1990s, with free content distributed by institutions including Carnegie Mellon and Yale Universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But there has never been an effort to promulgate OER’s on a $2-billion scale. . .

Brad Delong - The Fourth Online-Learning Revolution (2010)

Brad Delong - Keeping the Fourth Online-Learning Revolution from Flaming Out into Disaster (2010)

Neal: ". . .People, and especially students, are weaselly creatures. I was a student, I know people who have students, and I am a father to students. They are weaselly creatures. The danger to the value of an on-line education is the pretending that the weaselly factor does not exist. The embedded nature of what was learned in the face-to-face accountability is replaced by what? I know how my children skitter and skate through the "inter-web net-tubey" thing and there is very little of value that remains after the interaction. Quick solutions seized from here and there, on-line boards and chats for the "smart" persons answer, "cut and paste", done, and on to another round of COD4."

But that's implicitly assuming an assignment which the student didn't care about, done merely as an offering to oblige the professor. What about an assignment that a student did care about?

Shani O. Hilton - Black Ladies, Just Like the Other Ladies

peenerbambina: "This kind of crap pisses me of in such a spectrum of ways. Of course, in the nasty racist arsehole way, but also because it is BAD SCIENCE and BAD SCIENCE can make GOOD SCIENCE look STUPID because it is all called SCIENCE. . ."

Katie Toms - Borat review (2006)

'Do you think that women should be educate?' . . .'But government scientist Dr Yamuka has proved women have brain of squirrel'. . .

Gershom Gorenberg - Political Memory in the Mideast

. . .the either-or argument about 1948 versus 1967 is deeply misleading. Both years are part of Israeli-Palestinian history. But history isn't made of rock. . .When Israel pursues a peace agreement based mainly on the 1967 issues of dividing territory, it has a better chance of resolving the 1948 issue of refugees. . .

. . .In those 20 years of talks, from the Madrid Conference through the Oslo Accord up to Abbas' negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, both the 1967 and the 1948 issues were on the table. The Palestinians sought a state next to Israel and a resolution of the refugee issue. . .

. . .At the time of the Abbas-Olmert talks, as Bernard Avishai has reported, the two sides were still dickering about the number of refugees going to Israel, but it was clear that they would be the "exceptional cases." . . .

. . .But once Netanyahu took office, unwilling to continue the talks where his predecessor left off. . .Abbas finally gave up on negotiating. He hopes the United Nations will impose a two-state solution. . .

. . .All this might please [Netanyahu's] ally in recalcitrance, Ismail Haniyeh. I can't figure out why [AIPAC] should be happy. . .

Daniel Levy - Obama Gets Real on Israel

. . .in addressing Hamas, the president got his emphasis wrong. He focused on Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, and while deeply regrettable, that position belongs in the context of a solution rather than as a precondition -- Israel, for instance, has not recognized the right to Palestinian statehood on the 1967 lines or any Palestinian fundamental rights for that matter. Obama would have been better advised to emphasize the need for all Palestinian factions, including Hamas, to adhere to international law, notably the inadmissibility of terror or attacks on civilians. . .

Josh Marshall - Fool on the Hill

Douglas Hofstadter - The Prisoner's Dilemma and the Evolution of Cooperation (from Metamagical Themas)

. . .strategies featuring massive retaliation were less successful than TIT FOR TAT with its more gentle policy of restrained retaliation. Forgiveness is the key here, for it helps to restore the proverbial "atmosphere of mutual cooperation" (to use the phrase of international diplomacy) after a small skirmish.

"Be nice and forgiving" was in essence the overall lesson of the first tournament. Apparently, though, many people just couldn't get themselves to to believe it, and were convinced that with cleverer trickery and scheming, they could win the day. It took the second tournament to prove them dead wrong. And out of the second tournament, a third key strategic concept emerged: that of provocability - the notion that one should "get mad" quickly at defectors, and retaliate. Thus a more general lesson is: "Be nice, provocable, and forgiving."

Strategies that do well in a wide variety of environments are called by Axelrod robust, and it seems that ones with "good personality traits" - that is, nice, provocable, and forgiving strategies - are sure to be robust. TIT FOR TAT is by no means the only possible strategy with these traits, but it is the canonical example of such a strategy, and it is astonishingly robust. . .

Some people add "straight-forward" to this enlightened self-interest Rule of thumb, i.e. "Be nice, provocable, forgiving and straightforward".

Dorothy L Sayers - Further Papers on Dante (1957) (via A matter of eternity: selections from the writings of Dorothy L. Sayers chosen and introduced by Rosamond Kent Sprague.)

. . .The thing that Liberal Humanism finds it most difficult to understand or cope with is the riddle of the evil mind, practising a purposeless malignity for its own sake. The love of evil is sub-rational, as the Divine charity is super-rational; and the golden mean of reason is as incapable of the one as the other.

2011-05-14T03:56:00.000-07:00

Harun Najafizada (BBC) - Pakistan suicide blasts: Carnage in Shabqadar town

The Taliban says it carried out the deadly attack on a paramilitary training academy in the small town of Shabqadar in north-western Pakistan, which left at least 80 dead. . .

. . .People found it hard to digest that this had actually happened to them. They said they are used to listening to the news from across Pakistan - but they never thought they would be in the firing line. . .

. . .There is a mosque close to the scene of the blast and the mullah began preaching before Friday prayers. His speech was broadcast across the town on loudspeakers. But not once did he mention the bombing that had taken place only hours earlier. . .

. . .even as a series of yellow coffins carrying the bodies of some of the young paramilitary recruits were brought out of the academy, he never once touched upon the suicide attack. . .

been a while since I'd read Charles Peter's Tilting At Windmills column, and I'd forgotten how good it was:

Charles Peters - Tilting At Windmills Jan/Feb 2011

Finally, an audience!

The members of the Foreign Service owe a great debt to Julian Assange. He got their cables read. . .

Several years ago, in testifying before the commission investigating 9/11, then CIA Director George Tenet was asked why nothing was done in response to a cable that reported one of the 9/11 terrorists had entered the United States. Tenet confidently replied, “I know that nobody read that cable.” And you can be sure when Hillary Clinton recently praised the quality of the leaked cables, she did so because she had just read many of them for the first time—and only because of WikiLeaks. . .

Charles Peters - Tilting At Windmills May/June 2001

Take a load off, Army

One of the problems with our educated elite’s failure to serve in the military is their ignorance of the problems of the average soldier, and their resulting inability to pressure the Pentagon to take remedial action. A study by a Navy research committee in 2007 found that Marines carried loads of ninety-seven pounds. In the Army, according to Hal Bernten of the Seattle Times, upon whose reporting I rely for this item, the load is seventy to eighty pounds. Yet the Army Science Board recommends that soldiers carry no more than fifty pounds.

The consequences are not surprising. Thirty-one percent of combat evacuations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been for musculoskeletal, connective tissue, or spinal injuries. Of these, about 80 percent do not return to combat duty. An example is Spc. Joseph Chroniger, who returned from Iraq “with bone spurs in the vertebrae in his neck caused by a degenerative arthritic condition.”

Chroniger is only twenty-five years old. “What’s it going to be like,” he asks, “when I’m fifty or sixty?” . . .

One important issue, on which I'm not sure what I think, is the appropriate mix in education of freedom and discipline/accountability. One thing I find interesting is that accountability in the form of more testing seems to be the trend in the US, while in India the trend seems to be in the other direction, with, for example, films like 3 Idiots, Munna Bhai M.B.B.S., novels like Five Point Someone, criticizing (appropriately, in my view) India's exam-heavy system.

Some essays excerpts, some on the `liberal' side of the issue, some on the `conservative' side:

Amy Chua (USAT)- Here's how to reshape U.S. education

. . .Our society's need to ignite "mommy wars" is especially odd because anyone can see that there are many ways of producing happy, healthy children — and clearly no one right formula. . .

. . .Interestingly, Asia is already looking West. Education in Asia is still too stifling, rote and high-pressured. In China, for example, kids often study from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., grades are publicly posted, and a child's future can depend on a single exam. . .

. . .Seeing these educational shifts in Asia, some Americans are taking a self-congratulatory stance. . .Such complacency is misguided. As every American knows, we have serious child-rearing problems in this country, and on the whole these are problems of too little structure, not too much. . .

This is a way to combine East and West: more structure when our children are little (and will still listen to us), followed by increasing self-direction in their teenage years. . .

Richard P. Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985)

. . .So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it’s amazing you don’t find many physicists in Brazil — why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it. . .

. . .They can recite, word for word, without realizing that those. . .words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand. . .

. . .I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ‘science’ here in Brazil.” (Big blast, right?)

Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. “There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have ‘errors’ in them — that is, if you look at them, you think you’re looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors — very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental ‘results’ is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results! . . .

. . .Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could he educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. “However,” I said, “I must be wrong. There were two students in my class who did very well, and one of the physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. . .

. . . Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the students got up and said, “I’m one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was educated in Germany, and I’ve just come to Brazil this year.”

The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, “I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system.”. . .

Monte Davis (OMNI Magazine) - Richard Feynman interview (1979)

. . .Feynman: Right. I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, "What one fool can do, another fool can." What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it.

There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it all deep and profound. . .

. . .Look at the equations for the atomic and molecular forces in water, and you can't see the way water behaves; you can't see turbulence.

OMNI: That leaves the people with questions about turbulence--the meteorologists and oceanographers and geologists and airplane designers--kind of up the creek, doesn't it?

Feynman: . . .With turbulence, it's not just a case of physical theory being able to handle only simple cases--we can't do any. We have no good fundamental theory at all.

OMNI: Maybe it's the way the textbooks are written, but few people outside science appear to know just how quickly real, complicated physical problems get out of hand as far as theory is concerned.

Feynman: That's very bad education. The lesson you learn as you grow older in physics is that what we can do is a very small fraction of what there is. Our theories are really very limited. . .

One thing I know nothing about is how much progress has been made in fields like turbulence over the past 30 years.

Ben Carson interviewed by Robert H. Schuller for the "Hour of Power" (2010)

. . .she prayed and she asked God to give her the wisdom to know what to do to help not only me, but my brother to achieve academically.

And God gave her the wisdom, at least in her opinion. My brother and I didn't think it was that wise, but it was to turn off the TV set. Let us watch only two or three TV programs during the week and with all that spare time, read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Library and submit to her written book reports. We didn't know that she couldn't read so, and she would take the reports and she would put little check marks on them and act like she was reading them, but interestingly enough and the real crux of the matter is, we had to do it. She was not a person who allowed us to have our own way. . .

. . . I initially started reading books about animals because I loved animals. After I exhausted all the animal books in the Detroit Public Libraries, I went to plants and then I went to rocks, because we lived in a dilapidated section of the city near the railroad tracks and of course, what is there along the railroad tracks ... rocks.

So I would collect rocks, bring them home, get my geology book out and study the rocks. Still in the 5th grade. . .

One interesting thing in terms of freedom/discipline is that they were compelled to read and write book reports, but had complete freedom in choosing what to read.

Siegfried and Therese Engelmann - Give Your Child A Superior Mind (1966)

. . .Recognize the Threat of the Learning Situation

Look at learning from the child's point of view. One day she identifies the letter K and you praise her. A few days later, she says “K” and you nod. A few days later she says “K” and you reply, “Yes, but what sound does it make?” What has happened? She said it just as well as she ever had, but now, for some reason, the answer wonʼt do. When you ask a child to learn, youʼre asking her to abandon responses that are known and experiment with ones that are unknown. You are asking her to change her world when she would rather dig her nails into it and hang on. The potential rewards for her sacrifice are praise and a strong sense of accomplishment.

The promise of rewards must overbalance the inevitable threat of the learning situation. Until it does, the child will not be an eager learner. She cannot appreciate the rewards of learning until she's experienced them. Therefore, you must push her. Only about one out of ten children would learn much if the decision to learn or not to learn rested with them. They would go along with the learning situation until they felt threatened. Then they would decide that learning was not for them after all. Despite the common-sense assumption offered by many educators, children are not good judges of what they can learn or when they are ready to learn it. . .

. . .5. Give the child plenty of free time. Weʼve stressed the point that the most active environment is the one that produces the greatest learning gains. Please don't interpret this to mean that you should ride herd on your child all day long. Mothers who do this aren't actually providing an environment with greater vistas of learning. They're sifting many dimensions out of a rich environment and funneling everything through an oversimplified, artificial medium — Mother. . .

Let the child work out rules for handling life, not simply the child-mother phase of it. . .Formal lessons should not consume more than one to one and a half hours of the child's day. In the remaining time, he should be free to think, to play, to be a child.

C.S. Lewis - The Parthenon and the Optative (1944)

. . .I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education. The one begins with hard, dry, things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry. The other begins in `Appreciation' and ends in gush. . .

. . .well-meaning educationalists are quite right in thinking that literary appreciation is a delicate thing. What they do not seem to see is that for this very reason elementary examinations on literary subjects ought to confine themselves to just those dry and factual questions which are so often ridiculed. The questions were never supposed to test appreciation; the idea was to find out whether the boy had read his books. It was the reading, not the being examined, which was expected to do him good. And this, so far from being a defect in such examinations is just what renders them useful or even tolerable. . .Tell the boy to `mug up' a book and then set questions to find out whether he has done so. At best, he may have learned (and, best of all, unconsciously) to enjoy a great poem. At second best he has done an honest piece of work and exercised his memory and reason. At worst, we have done him no harm: have not pawed and dabbled in his soul, have not taught him to be a prig or a hypocrite.

But an elementary examination which attempts to assess `the adventures of the soul among books' is a dangerous thing. What obsequious boys, if encouraged, will try to manufacture, and clever ones can ape, and shy ones will conceal, what dies at the touch of venality, is called to come forward and perform, to exhibit itself. . .meanwhile no one has found out whether the boys actually understand the words the author wrote, for that is only the `coarse fringe'. Yet that could have been tested with tolerable accuracy by any number of people and the boys would have been spared doing spiritual gymnastics under their examiners' eyes. The old kind of examination was better.. . .

Of course we meet many people who explain to us that they would by now have been great readers of poetry if it had not been `spoiled for them' at school by `doing' it for examinations of the old kind. . .It may be so: but why should we believe that it is. We have only their word for it; and how do they know?

C.S. Lewis - The Weight of Glory (1942)

. . .An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just in so far as he approaches the reward that be becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward. . .

. . .poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship. . .

. . .If he is an imaginative boy he will, quite probably, be revelling in the English poets and romances suitable to his age some time before he begins to suspect that Greek grammar is going to lead him to more and more enjoyments of this same sort. He may even be neglecting his Greek to read Shelley and Swinburne in secret. In other words, the desire which Greek is really going to gratify already exists in him and is attached to objects which seem to him quite unconnected with Xenophon and the verbs in mi. . .

C.S. Lewis Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)

. . .the curious thing was that despite all this cruelty we did surprisingly little work. This may have been partly because the cruelty was irrational and unpredictable, but it was partly because of the curious methods employed. Except at geometry (which he really liked) it might be said that Oldie did not teach at all. He called his class up and asked questions. When the replies were unsatisfactory he said in a low, calm voice, "Bring me my cane. I see I shall need it.". . ."Lessons" of this sort did not take very long; what was to be done with the boys for the rest of the time? Oldie has decided that they could, with least trouble to himself, be made to do arithmetic. Accordingly, when you entered school at nine o' clock you took your slate and began doing sums. Presently you were called up to "say a lesson". When that was finished you went back to your place and did more sums - and so forever. All the other arts and sciences thus appeared as islands (mostly rocky and dangerous islands)

Which like to rich and various gems inlaid
the unadorned bosom of the deep

-the deep being a shoreless ocean of arithmetic. At the end of the morning you had to say how many sums you had done; and it was not quite safe to lie. But supervision was slack and very little assistance was given. My brother - I told you he was already a man of the world - soon found the proper solution. He announced every morning with perfect truth that he had done five sums; he did not add that they were the same five every day. It would be interesting to know how many thousand times he did them. . ."

. . .in Mathematics, whatever could be done my mere reasoning (as in simple geometry) I did with delight; but the moment calculation came in I was helpless. I grasped the principles but my answers were always wrong. . .

. . .I still had to pass "Responsions", which involved elementary mathematics. To prepare for this I returned after Christmas for one last term with Kirk - a golden term, poignantly happy under the approaching shadow. At Easter I was handsomely plowed in Responsions, having been unable as usual to get my sums right. "Be more careful", was the advice everyone gave me, but I found it useless. The more care I took the more mistakes I made. . .

. . .That I never passed Responsions is certain, but I cannot remember whether I again sat for it and was again plowed. The question became unimportant after the war, for a benevolent decree exempted ex-servicemen from taking it, Otherwise, no doubt, I should have had to abandon the idea of going to Oxford. . .

R.K. Narayan - A Writer's Nightmare (1988)

Higher Mathematics

. . .My mind refuses to work when it encounters numbers. . .

. . .There was a fashion in the elementary school in which I read to prescribe a book in which the sums were all about English life. The characters in the problems were all John and Joan and Albert, and the calculations pertained to apples and the fares of hansom-cabs. In those days we saw apples only in coloured picture-books and we never understood what hansom-cabs meant. We were used to dealing in mangoes and jutkas and bullock-carts, and the payments were not in farthings or pence, but in rupees, annas and pies. While wrestling with the problems in this book I was always racked with the thought that perhaps I could solve the sums if they dealt with Indian life. Fortunately, in answer to this prayer, we soon had sums dealing with the interminable transactions of Rama and Krishna. But I soon found that this did not make things easier for me. . .

. . .Every time I did a sum I turned to the last section with trembling and prayer, but I always found there a different figure from what I had arrived at laboriously. The disappointment reduced me to tears. A sense of hopeless frustration seized me each time I referred to the answers in the printed book. I sometimes wished I had been born in another world where there would be no mathematics. The whole subject seemed to be devised to defeat and keep me in a perpetual anguish of trial and error. . .

. . .To this day I have no idea what it is all about. . .Anyway, one got out of high school with a feeling of escaping from a concentration camp, the greatest virtue of university education seeming to be that unless one chose one need not go near mathematics. . .

. . .I don't think years have improved my outlook or equipment in regard to mathematics, although as a grown-up I am not supposed to give out my real feelings in the matter. . .

`No School Today.'

. . .It is all nature's balance, the child's aversion to school and its elders' zeal for it. No one can object to it. But what I really find objectionable is the adult's horror at the thought that a child should hate its school. With devoted parents, school is an obsession. They are dismayed at the attitude they see in their child. I know a parent who started a separate establishment twenty miles away from his working place because he wanted to put his child in school. Four-year-old Ramu was to all appearances enthusiastic about the scheme. He liked the change and the new satchel and books bought for him. The first day Ramu went to the school he insisted upon standing all the time in the veranda and watching other children going through their drill and games in the quadrangle. Next day he was persuaded to enter an infant section but he insisted upon his father's coming up and taking his seat beside him in the classroom. They prodded and persuaded and made him go to school every day: each day it was a trial of wit, strength and patience between him and his parents. Thus he attended the school for a few weeks an suddenly one Monday morning announced his unshakable resolve, "I won't go to school." His father was nearly in tears when he reported to me, "I have taken a house on seventy-five rupees a month only for his sake, although it means driving back to my factory twenty miles every day. I wouldn't mind any trouble or expense if only Ramu could be made to like his school." They were very kind there: they even tried to tempt him with chocolates and toffee, but that didn't work. It seems Ramu told his teacher, "My father has ordered me not to eat sweets. They will do me harm." I told the father, "Why do you despair? This is probably a child's happiest stage, when every nook and corner at home looks rich. mysterious and soul-satisfying; no school-room, however well=organized. however psychological or well-behaved the teachers might be, could ever compare with the quality of the home. It's the best period of one's life to be home in." In this respect all schools are deficient. Until we adopt the view point of a child and reorganize our educational system, our schools will continue to repel children. They may overcome it, get use to it or resign themselves to it - but love the school, never.

My Educational Outlook

My educational outlook has always differed from those of my elders and well-wishers. . .I am not averse to enlightenment, but I feel convinced that the entire organization, system, outlook and aims of education are hopelessly wrong from beginning to end; from primary first year to Ph. D., it is just a continuation of an original mistake. . .

In my boyhood, the teacher never appeared in public without the cane in hand. . .a cane in his right hand while the left held a pinch of snuff between the thumb and forefinger. He took a deep inhalation before proceeding to flick the cane on whatever portion of myself was available for the purpose. I really had no idea what I was expected to do or not do to avoid it. I could never imagine that a simple error of calculation in addition, subtraction or multiplication (I never knew which) would drive anyone hysterical. . .

. . .I notice nowadays a little girl at home always playing the school-game in a corner of the veranda, but never without a flat wooden foot-rule in hand, which she flourishes menacingly at the pupils assembled in her phantasmagorical class-room. On investigation, I found that the cane, being discredited, has yielded place to the foot-rule, especially in `convent' schools. The foot-rule, has the advantage over the primitive birch of mauling without marking (which could count as an achievement in torturing technique) and it also possesses the innocent appearance of a non-violent pedagogic equipment. . .

. . .at higher levels of education, torments to a young soul are devised in subtler forms progressively; admissions, textbooks and examinations are the triple weapons in the hands of an educator today. In June every father and son go through a purgatory of waiting at the doors of every college. Provision of seats planned in a grand musical-chair-manner keeps every applicant running frantically about, unless, as in certain well-geared technical colleges, the parent could make a bid in the style of a competitor at a toddy auction of old times. . .Those who cannot afford it have to queue up in the corridors of colleges, hunt and gather recommendations, plead, appeal canvas and lose weight until they find (or do not find) their names in the list of admissions. At the next stage the student will once again queue up, beg, beat about, and appeal - for textbooks this time (especially if it happens to be a `Nationalized Textbook', which may not be available until the young man is ready to leave the college).

Finally the examination. In a civilized world the examination system should have no place. It is a culmination of all sadistic impulses. Learned commissions and conferences meet and speculate why young men are always on the verge of blasting street lamps and smashing furniture. It technical language it is known as `student indiscipline.' It has always amused one to note the concern the problem causes and how it always ends in woolly, banal resolutions such as: students should be given compulsory military training, asked to perform compulsory rural service, and compulsory what not. Students should keep out of politics (a great many others ought to keep out of politics too; in any case, it's too late to suggest this as students were inveigled into politics not so long ago in our history). The real wrecker of young nerves, however, is the examination system. It builds up a tension and an anxiety neurosis day by day all the year round, all through one's youth, right into middle age (for some). I remember the desperate nervousness that debilitated me from January to April every year. After four decades, I still jump off my bed from nightmares of examination. I feel convinced that the examination system was devised by a satanic mind. The anxiety and sleeplessness, the gamble over possible questions, the hush-hush and grimness of the examination hall, the invigilators (the very word has a Grand Inquisitorial sound) watching like wardens at the gallows, the awful ritual of breaking open the seal of the examination papers, the whole thing now appears ridiculously ritualistic and out of tune with a civilization in which man is capable of taking a stroll thousands of miles above the earth towards the moon.

If I became a Vice-Chancellor, my first act would be to abolish all secrecy that surrounds question papers. .. I would add a postscript to every question paper: `If you cannot answer any of the above questions, don't despair. Remember your examiners are not infallible and may not do better if placed in your predicament. Your inability to answer will in no way be a reflection on your intelligence. We apologize for the embarrassment. Also, remember if you expect a first class and do not secure even passing marks, don't rave against your examiner, he is also a human being subject to fluctuating moods caused by unexpected domestic quarrels or a bad digestion just when he is sitting down to correct your papers; also, not being an adding machine, occasionally he may slip and arrive at 7 while totalling 8 and 3. Please forgive him.'

At a certain university in America I met an advanced soul. He taught Political Science. One month before the annual examination, he cyclostyled (or `xeroxed') the questions and distributed them among his students, who thereafter spent nearly twelve hours a day in the library in the `assigned reading room.' I described to him our habits of hiding the questions till the last moment. He remarked `Why on earth keep the boys in the dark over questions that after all concern them?' I explained , `We believe in mugging up, on an average 200 pages per subject, and fifteen subjects in a year. One who can demonstrate that he can recollect three thousand pages in the examination hall will be considered a first-class student in our country, although he need not understand a word of what he reads, or remember a syllable of what he has read after the examination. The whole aim of our education is to strain the faculty of memory. . ."

`Your system must have been devised before Caxton, when there was no printed book, and handwritten books were chained and guarded. Memory is not so important today. Our need is for more libraries and multiple copies. The only condition I make for my boys is that they spend at least six hours a day in the library a month before the examinations, while writing their answers I permit them to refer to the books. My only condition is that they should write their answers within the given time.'

In my college days, I had a professor of history, who said, `It's a pity you have failed. If you didn't know the answer, you could have written any answer you knew; if you didn't know anything of the subject, you could have just copied the question paper. If you couldn't do even that, you could have told me and I would have given you marks.'

`I didn't know you were an examiner, sir.'

`What a pity, they ought not to keep it a secret. All our troubles are due to it. After all, you have listened to my lectures for a year and that's enough.

I had another professor from Scotland who taught us English; an enlightened soul, who marked a minimum of 35 per cent on all papers, and raised it on request. He was accessible, and amenable to reason and even to bargaining, He would ask, `What marks do you expect to get?'

`Sixty, sir'. He would pick up the answer paper, glance through it, shake his head ruefully. `I have given you the minimum, of course, but I'll raise it to 40.'

`Sir, please make it 52, I want at least a second class.'

`All right. I hope your interest in Literature is genuine'.

`Undoubtedly.'

Oh, but for this noble soul, I'd never have passed in English.

Here is an instance of memory without intelligence. A story of mine called `Attila' has found its way into Pre-University Prose in a certain university. I had a chance of learning how questions on the story were answered. A few answers were just line-by-line reproductions of the original, but nowhere could I see that they had realized the story was about a dog. . .

`R.K. Narayan was a romantic poetess who died in 1749.'

Long after getting his BA Degree, a person met his old teacher and confessed, `I am sorry, sir, I never till today that Lady Macbeth was a woman.' Another teacher was asked, an hour before the literature paper, ` Is King Lear a tragedy or comedy, sir?'

I mention these without comment. If our educational system is not to continue as a well-endowed, elaborately organized, deep-rooted farce, remedy must be found immediately. I dare not end this on a note suggesting crisis, as before the ink on this sentence dries, academic experts and ministers of education are likely to pack up and leave for New York, Rio de Janiero, or Toronto, in accordance with the almost superstitious believe among our leaders (in all fields) that when there is a crisis at home the thing to do is to buy a round-the-world air ticket and leave.

Dorothy L Sayers - The Lost Tools of Learning (1947)

That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant people are appointed to highly technical ministries; and plain, blunt men write to the papers to say that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw. Up to a certain point, and provided the the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, these activities are commendable. . .

. . .My views about child psychology are, I admit, neither orthodox nor enlightened. Looking back upon myself (since I am the child I know best and the only child I can pretend to know from inside) I recognize three states of development. These, in a rough-and- ready fashion, I will call the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic--the latter coinciding, approximately, with the onset of puberty. The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things. The Pert age, which follows upon this (and, naturally, overlaps it to some extent), is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to "catch people out" (especially one's elders); and by the propounding of conundrums. Its nuisance-value is extremely high. It usually sets in about the Fourth Form. The Poetic age is popularly known as the "difficult" age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others. Now it seems to me that the layout of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular appropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-Parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic age. . .

The Sayers essay is very popular with home-schoolers. I'd be interested in what education reformers think of it.

2011-05-07T04:08:00.000-07:00

Raffi Khatchadourian - Bin Laden: The Rules of Engagement

During the Second World War, an American infantryman could shoot an S.S. officer who was eating lunch in a French café without violating the Law of War, so long as he did not actively surrender. . .

. . .A status-based target can become a non-combatant (that is, illegal to kill) only if he is wounded to the point where he no longer poses a threat, or if he is in the process of surrendering. . .[Holder]: if bin Laden “had surrendered [or] attempted to surrender, I think we should obviously have accepted that, but there was no indication that he wanted to do that, and therefore his killing was appropriate.” In such a circumstance, the law suggests that the onus is on the target to immediately revoke his combatant status. Soldiers do not have to wait. . .

Kevin Drum - Afghanistan, Pakistan, OBL photos

There are specific reasons for keeping things classified, and the fact that something "could" incite violence or might be used in a way that makes life more difficult for the White House isn't one of them. That's little more than an all-purpose excuse that can be used for keeping anything classified. . .

. . .Embarrassment doesn't usually cause people to back down. . .

I believe the photos should be partially blacked out or blurred, then released. I believe the video of the funeral should be released.

The shifting accounts of the raid are absolutely fine with me, and it seems to be inevitable and unavoidable with any combat operation or terrorist incident or natural disaster. If you go back and listen to the press briefings in the week after 9/11, you will be struck by the government officials telling us things, with calm self-assured certainty, that we now know to be completely untrue. The good thing is that the mistakes were corrected in 1 or 2 days rather than 1 or 2 weeks. I think the WH made a mistake in clamming up and saying that they were no longer going to discuss details. Clean silence may appear more dignified than messy truth, but I believe that the appearance of dignity is highly overrated.

Perhaps the relevant maxim to remember this week is "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" Or d-squared's slightly sharper version.

The downward spiral in Pakistan, and what might arrest it

Sambit Bal - Can India match Pakistan's grace and hospitality? (2005)

During a casual conversation a couple of weeks ago, a senior member of the Indian team revealed his worst fears about Pakistan's oncoming tour of India. . ."I just hope," he said, "we, as a nation, are able to reciprocate in kind to the manner Indians were treated in Pakistan when they toured last year."

It's a fear palpably felt by every Indian who set his or her foot in Pakistan during those magical days. Like us, he had seen doors and hearts open, he had felt the warmth and goodwill which was too spontaneous to have been a put-on, he had seen the Indian flags flying proudly in the stands, seen pictures of Indian revellers on the streets of Lahore, and like us, he too is left wondering if India can match the grace and the hospitality. . .

. . .The red carpet from the state and the cricket administration was expected, but the surge of goodwill on the streets, in the shops, at homes, in taxis and restaurants wasn't part of a grand design. It just happened. One thing led to the other. A better explanation of this can be found in Malcolm Gladwell's acclaimed book Tipping Point, which explores the phenomenon of little things making a big difference.

It perhaps took small things - a boy painting himself in the national colours of India and Pakistan, someone stitching two flags together, the first few dispatches filed by Indian journalists - that got the emotions stirring and in no time a spirit of brotherhood had spread across on both sides of the border. It was special, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To expect a repeat might be a sure recipe for disappointment. But still, we have a right to expect, for what happened then was wonderful. . .

. . .Has India slipped even before it could get moving? That's a bleak view that does not take into account the power of the human heart. What happened in Pakistan last year wasn't expected. It wasn't planned. It wasn't powered by propaganda. What is needed is a few little lights to kindle a giant flame. Let's invest in hope. It's a better feeling than dread.

It seems to me that the Indian cricket tour of Pakistan in 2004 was one of high points, if not the high point, of the Musharraf era. Since then it seems to have a been a long, relatively slow, downward spiral in Pakistan. The middle class protests against Musharraf were am ambiguous moment, which could have had a better outcome if Musharraf had accepted the judicial rulings against him with restraint. Then came unalloyed disasters: the assassination of Bhutto, the attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team, 26/11, assassinations of moderate politicians.

What might start to reverse the trend? It's probably disingenuous for an Indian-American to offer "friendly" advice to Pakistan, but anyway, it seems to me the main issue is Kashmir, and the main task for Pakistani leaders seeking to lead their people somewhere other than the abyss is to affirm the legitimacy of the Kashmir issue, and affirm the legitimacy of Pakistanis fighting for Kashmiri rights, while at the same condemning, and opposing, with some firmness and resolve, terrorism & violence as a legitimate means of fighting for those rights.

I think the first step in achieving peace in Kashmir has to come from Pakistan, and it has to involve a comprehensive and sustained attempt to delegitimize terrorism and violence as a means of fighting for Kashmiri rights. This will be difficult, as the legitimacy of violence and terrorism in Kashmir has sunk deep roots in Pakistan since at least 1989, and probably since soon after the 1979 killing of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

After Pakistan has taken dramatic, irrefutable steps to delegitimize violence and terrorism in Kashmir, and it becomes crystal clear that Indian concessions on Kashmir do not represent a caving in to terrorism and violence, the burden of responsibility shifts to India. In terms of what a final deal should look like, I guess I agree with the ideas of Stephen P. Cohen, P.R. Chari & Hasan Askari Rizvi: The Kashmir Dispute: Making Borders Irrelevant

I suppose it's possible for India to make the first move on Kashmir, and if Manmohan Singh decides to do that, I for one will support him, but without a determined attempt by Pakistani leaders to fight terrorism and violence as an illegitimate means for pursuing Kashmiri rights, it's not clear that any overtures from India are going to accomplish anything in terms of stopping the madness, the denial, and the downward spiral, that seems, from an outsider's perspective, to be afflicting Pakistan today.

Matthew Yglesias - Safe Haven Myth Should Die With Bin Laden

. . .surely the fact that Osama bin Laden turns out to have been hiding out in a walled compound near a city thirty miles up the road from Islamabad featuring a professional cricket team, a field hockey stadium, and a medical school ought to prompt us to reconsider the obsession with the idea of “terrorist safe havens.” . . .On the one hand, no location on earth is actually safe from a United States military . . .On the other hand. . .Trying to physically conquer and occupy territory in order to prevent it from being used by terrorists is is extremely difficult, oftentimes counterproductive, unnecessary, and offers no guarantee of success.

I agree we shouldn't invade and occupy a country just to carry out counter-terrorism operations, but to me the raid shows the extreme importance of having a good working relationship with the police of any country where terrorists live. This was an operation where there was every incentive to get it right, yet it still came close to going wrong. This type of raid is appropriate for Bin Laden, and possibly Zawahiri, and no one else, it seems to me.

The next alternative to this type of raid is bombing. We now know, thanks to the courage of the SEALS who carried out this operation, what that would have meant: 1 HVT killed, one grown son of HVT killed. 2 courier/bodyguards killed, and 18 women and children non-combatants killed. One man as guilty as a man can be, a few more somewhat guilty men, and more than a dozen innocents. Suppose those women and children had been Americans. Would we consider that an acceptable outcome?

The rejoinder, is that if you are a terrorist combatant, trying to kill as many Americans as possible, by any means available, how dare you make the choice to surround yourselves with wife and children, instead of sending them somewhere safe? I think this has some validity, nevertheless, it's still our bombs that are killing these non-combatants.

So if raids and bombs are both, deeply, deeply, unsatisfactory, the final alternative, besides patience and watchful waiting, is to have a good working relationship with the Pakistani police force. This seems to me the only way to achieve the routine, frequent arrests of terrorists necessary to defeat a terrorist network.

Andrew Sullivan (quoting Daniel Larison) - In Defense Of Pakistan As An Ally, Ctd

A quote from a Pakistani, I can't remember where it came from: "We didn't know where OBL was. If we had known, we would have arrested him, like we did with KSM". I think this is true, nevertheless the inability of the Pakistani establishment to effectively investigate the location of OBL, along with their inability to effectively investigate the killing of Benazir Bhutto, along with their inability and flat unwillingness to investigate 26/11, suggests a deep reluctance of the Pakistani establishment to get to the bottom of any terrorist incident, for fear of what they might find.

Anthony Shadid (NYT) - Protests Across Syria Despite Military Presence

Obama administration officials say that while some figures in the Syrian leadership, Ms. Shaaban and Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa among them, seem to favor at least some reform, hard-liners in the leadership are ascendant. . .

. . .But officials say the ire of France and, in particular, Turkey, which had emerged as one of Syria’s closest allies, has worried the Syrian leadership. So has the threat of international action. On Friday, the European Union decided to impose a travel ban and a freeze of assets of 14 Syrian officials, though Mr. Assad was excluded. . .

This Stormy Dragon comment is untrue and possibly unkind, but also funny:

Doug Mataconis - Pakistan Claims It Did Its Part To Catch Bin Laden
Of course they did their part to catch him. Think how much harder the operation would have been if the ISI had built OBL’s mansion in a remote location instead of a conveniently accessible suburb!

David Coombs - A Typical Day For PFC Bradley Manning at Fort Leavenworth

Kevin Drum - Good & Evil Banks, Good & Bad Customers

This is yet another example of a fee that (a) most people don't really know much about, (b) most people don't think they'll ever incur, and (c) generally gets paid by people in some kind of distress. In the modern banking industry, that makes it a perfect target for a huge increase. . .Unfortunately, I don't really know what the answer to this is. I have a visceral aversion to doing business like this, but I also understand why they do it . . .

Matthew Yglesias - The Case For A Public Option For Small-Scale Savings

Would it make sense for one of the big tech companies, Google or even Microsoft or Yahoo, to get into the banking or credit card business, or specific areas of those businesses?

Update: Or Apple, I suppose. IBank? ICard?

Kevin Drum - Federalize Medicaid

Kevin Drum - Ed Reform Backlash

I used to be receptive to the idea of standardized tests, not so much on grounds of teacher accountability, as that they're, in theory, potentially democratizing i.e. It doesn't matter whether you go to an elite school, you can still take the same test as any elite student. I've since become more skeptical of them, because in reading biographies, you keep coming across instances of exams & tests being hindrances rather than helps, e.g. C.S. Lewis was a mathematical illiterate, and unable to pass even the simplest test in maths, something which would have prevented him from attending Oxford, save for a special last-minute test exemption for returning WWI veterans. And (as described in Leonard Mlodinow's Euclid's Window), Einstein, while obviously scoring high in math & physics, had a a consistently hard time in other subjects, such that at one point he became embittered and dropped out of high school for 6 months, until his father urged him to go back to (a different) school. If Albert frickin' Einstein - precisely the sort of genius standardized tests are supposed to help - found compulsory standardized tests more hindrance then help, what exactly are compulsory tests good for?

I guess the idea I find attractive in education is Minimally Invasive Education, i.e. "ask them what they want to do, and then advise them to do it". Standardized tests would have a role in such a system, not so much as a way to hold teachers accountable, but as an opportunity for students to demonstrate some competence in a field they wanted to pursue.

Karl Smith - Ham and Eggs in the Jobs Report

Found Smith's categorization of jobs interesting: traditional industrial heart (mining, utilities and manufacturing); sponge (retail and hospitality); golden children (education, health, professional services, business, finance, insurance and real estate); construction; and government.

Most of Noahpinion's "What I learned in econ grad school" (Part 1 & Part 2) went over my head. It did, however, remind me of John Quiggin's "What next for macroeconomics?" post, with 2 comments from d-squared:

d-squared:
"I dunno. . .I probably ought to write my own “whither macro” post, but I don’t think I agree with this one. It’s still very agent-centred rather than institutional. . .

. . .What we’ve got here are a bunch of institutions which write contracts with each other for fixed nominal values, and then interact with the real economy. I think it makes more sense to treat these as black boxes which do stuff (and then to try and understand the feedback system which operates within them) rather than to start with the psychology of the elves who work inside them. . .

. . .My practical example of this would be the real estate boom; if I were starting to explain this I would have as my building blocks the rental yield, the competitive equilibrium in the market for loans with competition on price and collateral, the need for certain kinds of institutions to earn a target level of nominal yield in order to maintain regulatory solvency, etc etc etc

. . .Basically as far as I can see, the problem with macroeconomics was too much abstraction . . .

. . .Up until 2006, the housing “boom” was simply a reflection of what had happened to interest rates and reflected a combination of downward-stickiness in rents, combined with quasi-arbitrage between the yield on bonds and the rental yield on property. After 2006, house prices kept rising to levels where the rental yield was well below the bond yield, and this marked the “Minsky moment” at which the boom became a bubble. In early 2007, the rental yield moved below the cost of mortgage financing, and we had the “second Minsky moment” at which the crash was inevitable . . .

. . . .the above paragraph, btw, is an example of how I think macroeconomics should be done. We know that rents are sticky in a downward direction, and the reasons why don’t have much to do with agent rationality – they’re a reflection of the way in which contracts are written and in which property investment is financed. We know that there is quasi-arbitrage between bond yields and property yields, and I would also argue that if you’re going to investigate this you are going to get further by getting a load of deep and detailed information about the real estate investment industry than by making stylised models of expectations.

The last Krugman post on the size of the output gap was on January 19. What are the updated figures (or more accurately, the updated range of estimates)? How much money are we leaving on the table, and since people like having more money, or so I've heard, how much support is there among the American people, and among American elites, for closing the output gap?

2011-05-01T00:46:00.000-07:00

Campbell Robertson and Kim Severson (NYT) - Storms’ Toll Rises as Scale of Damage Becomes Clear

The death toll, including those who were killed by storms earlier in the week in Arkansas, reached 333. On Friday evening, Alabama emergency officials announced that the state’s death toll had reached 232. . .

. . .echoing the volunteers who have come in such high numbers that they are being turned away in some areas, Mr. Obama turned the focus toward the work ahead.

“We can’t bring those who have been lost back,” he said. “But the property damage, which is obviously extensive, that’s something that we can do something about.”. . .

Juan Cole:

Protesters Brave Live Crackdowns in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia

Syrian Army Splits over Deraa Repression

NATO Strike on Command Center kills Qaddafi Son

Slobodan Lekic (AP) - NATO dismisses Gadhafi cease-fire proposal

NATO says it wants Moammar Gadhafi's forces to end their attacks on civilians before it considers the Libyan leader's cease-fire offer. . .

. . .hours before Gadhafi proposed the truce, his forces indiscriminately shelled the besieged port city of Misrata, Libya, killing several people.

"All this has to stop, and it has to stop now," the NATO official said, adding that a cease fire must be "credible and verifiable."

A Gay Girl in Damascus - My father, the hero (via Saheli Datta)

We had a visit from the security services. . .

. . ."What are your names?"

They tell him. He nods. "Your father," he says to the one who threatened to rape me, "does he know this is how you act? He was an officer, yes? And he served in ..." (he mentions exactly and then turns to the other) "and your mother? Wasn't she the daughter of ...?" They are both wide-eyed, yes, that is right,

"What would they think if they heard how you act? . . .

. . .time froze when he stopped speaking. Now, they would either smack him down and beat him, rape me, and take us both away ... or ...

the first one nodded, then the second one.
"Go back to sleep," he said, "we are sorry for troubling you."

And they left!. . .

Arthur Silber - Once Upon A Time. . .

. . .I'm deeply unhappy (which can frequently be read as: murderously angry) that I'll certainly die ten to fifteen years earlier than I might if I had regular medical care, but I'm pretty much resigned to that. If I manage to make it to the beginning of May, I'll be 63. . .

. . .But damn it, there are some things I want to write about. I have been able to make some notes about two new essays, and I'm hoping I can actually devote time to them in a day or two. . .

My great thanks to all of you once more. . .

Mike Konczal - Testimony Concerning Assembly Bill 935, the California Foreclosure Fee.

. . .There’s a well documented conflict between the interests of those managing foreclosures and actual investors. Mortgage servicers managing troubled debt get paid fees when properties go into foreclosure and make more money when loans go into foreclosure as opposed to when they are modified. . .

Mike Konczal - Huffington Post’s Amazing Article on the Interchange Battle

. . .[W]hat galls merchants about swipe fees is that they have no ability to negotiate over them as they do with other costs of business. . .

Scott Sumner - Comments on Brink Lindsey

In an earlier study I found that if one excluded size of government, the country with the world’s most market-friendly policies was actually Denmark. So if Brink is right, you’d expect tiny Denmark to be an entrepreneurial hotbed. . .

. . .So Denmark isn’t just the most free market economy, and the most egalitarian, and the most civic-minded, and the happiest. It’s also the most entrepreneurial. And is has the world’s best restaurant. Thank God the weather will always be awful. Oh wait. . .

Krugman - The Intimidated Fed

. . .the Fed has more or less explicitly indicated what it considers a Goldilocks outcome, neither too hot nor too cold: inflation at 2 percent or a bit lower, unemployment at 5 percent or a bit higher.

But Goldilocks has left the building, and shows no sign of returning soon. . .

Question for econ pros: How much consensus is there among economists about the theory/concept of the "Output Gap"? Do Baker/Galbraith agree with Kruglitz/Chin agree with Summers/Romer agree with Mankiw/Taylor agree with Lucas/Prescott agree with Fama/Cochrane about the size of the output gap? If not, by how much do they disagree?

If the Fed is refusing to close the output gap because of inflation fears, doesn't that mean that the US Treasury should be indicating a willingness to absorb a lot more of the inflation risk, rolling over nominal Treasury bonds with TIPS bonds? Recognizing that a lot of senior citizens are leery of finding good investments, might it even make sense to issue THIPS (Treasury Health-Care-Inflation Protected Securities)?

Karl Smith - Worse Than Inflation, Ctd

Brad Delong - An ~~Unrealistic, Impractical, Utopian~~ Bold, Courageous & Serious Plan for Dealing with the Health Care Opportunity (June 2007)

the mother of all Health Savings Account proposals. . .

. . .the mother of all public-health and subsidize-preventive-medicine proposals. . .

. . .single-payer above 20% of income . . .

Of the three parts of the plan, I think the most important is the single-payer above 20%. How much would it cost if the federal government paid every (justified) claim above 20% of income? What about 30%? 40%? 50%? 60%?

How about if you used wealth instead of income?

Brad Delong - Conceding the Principle

. . .for Reinhart and Rogoff it is always 1931 and we are always Austria--that fiscal policy is too dangerous to use for stabilization policy because government credibility is always shaky. . .

If this is the case shouldn't Reinhart & Rogoff be an advocate of very aggressive monetary policy, both because fiscal policy is ruled out and because of reduced real debt burdens?

Orwell - The Road To Wigan Pier (1937)

. . .Everyone who saw Greenwood's play Love on the Dole must remember that dreadful moment when the. . .working man beats on the table and cries out, 'O God, send me some work!' This was not dramatic exaggeration, it was a touch from life. That cry must have been uttered, in almost those words, in tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of English homes, during the past fifteen years. . .

Paul Krugman - Bionomics (1997)

Standard economic theory offers reasons to believe that markets are a good way to organize economic activity. But it does not deify the market system, and it even offers a number of fairly well-defined ways in which markets can fail, or at least could be helped with government intervention. And that, for some conservatives, is just not good enough. . .

. . .The economy is an ecosystem, like a tropical rain forest! And what could be worse than trying to control a tropical rain forest from the top down? You wouldn't try to control an ecosystem, wiping out species you didn't like and promoting ones you did, would you?

Well, actually, you probably would. I think it's called "agriculture.". . .

A Bit of Fry and Laurie - Creamy Olde England

2011-04-24T00:21:00.000-07:00

Gary Farber post on Afghanistan

Has any independent news/research organization done a poll of the Afghan / Pakistani people, as a whole and within each ethnic sub-group, and their views of the US presence, drone strikes, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban & terrorism & extremism?

Juan Cole on Syria and Libya

Sebastian Junger Remembers Tim Hetherington

Greg Campbell - Chris Hondros, RIP: How my best friend died in a combat zone

Glenn Greenwald - Manning's transfer, PJ Crowley & drone attacks in Pakistan

[Manning]: The point here is not to take any victory lap; none is warranted. . . But this episode should be a potent antidote to defeatism. . .P.J. Crowley: ". . .there were many, many people inside government and outside government who were working on this for some time. . ."

[Drone attacks in Pakistan] Can someone who defends these drone attacks please identify the purpose? . . . How many family members, friends, neighbors and villagers of the "five children and four women" we just killed are now consumed with new levels of anti-American hatred? . . .Isn't it obvious that the stated goal of all of this – to reduce the threat of Terrorism – is subverted rather than promoted by these actions? . . .

Nancy Goldstein - Getting Away with Murder on Long Island

Digby - Commander In Chief Politics

There was a good comment on the Ashlee Vance tech-bubble article pointing out that the ad-based business models are subsidizing the free Internet, which is important and beneficial. I guess my only problem with online ads is when they sell really dodgy and misleading mortgage and online education products. Felix Salmon said somewhere that when it comes to online education, the more you pay, the worse the quality, e.g. the Khan academy, used by, among others, Bill Gates's children, is free.

Krugman - OECD data on taxes as % of GDP

Doesn't the Trump birtherism sort of illustrate the dangers of too much reverence for markets? i.e. "There's a big market for Obama being a foreigner, so that's what he has to be".

A Bit Of Fry and Laurie - Bank Loan

Instapundit - Design Your Home With Google

Couple builds eco-friendly home like no other using free program. . .Using Google Sketchup, a 3D modeling program usually used by architects, engineers and other design professionals – not homeowners – the couple drew the plans for their home . . .

2 Knox news comments:

". . .thank you for bringing SketchUp to the attention of people. This is truly one of the Jewels of the Internet that remains hidden. AND IT'S FREE. Anyone with a computer should have this, especially if you have children. . .I do not work for or have any affiliation with Google. Other than, I love this software...."

"Is there a Google app for landscaping?"

Dorothy L Sayers - The Man Born to Be King (1941)

. . .It seems that wherever there is a suffering God, there is an end of tragic futility, and a trans valuation of all values. . .the disciples of Jesus, plunged into cowardice and despondency by the human tragedy of the Crucifixion, needed only to be convinced by the Resurrection that that which had suffered and died was in actual historical fact the true Being of all things, to recover their courage and spirits in a manner quite unparalleled, and to proclaim the Divine Comedy loudly and cheerfully, with the utmost disregard for their own safety. Why and how the suffering of God should have this exhilarating effect upon the human spirit is a question for Atonement theology; that it had this effect on those who believed in it is plain. . .

J.R.R. Tolkien - On Fairy Stories (1938)

. . .in God's kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.

2011-04-17T00:39:00.000-07:00

David E. Coombs - Brig Fails to Follow Its Own Rules

Over the past few weeks, the defense has been working to facilitate an official visit for Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Mr. Juan Mendez (the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture), and a representative from Amnesty International. Despite multiple inquires from the defense and the interested parties, the Quantico Brig and the Government have denied the requests for an "official visit." . . .

from a comment:

I am just shocked that the Army has the power to deny an elected representative. Congressman Kucinich, like Amnesty International and the UN just want a clearer picture of whats going on and by denying them [official] access, Quantico seems to have a lot to hide. . .

Glenn Greenwald - Manning, Obama and U.S. moral leadership

The Guardian reports:

"A senior United Nations representative on torture, Juan Mendez, issued a rare reprimand to the US government on Monday for failing to allow him to meet in private Bradley Manning, the American soldier held in a military prison accused of being the WikiLeaks source. It is the kind of censure that the UN normally reserves for authoritarian regimes around the world . . .

. . .Mendez pointed out that his mandate was to conduct unmonitored visits, and that had been the practice in at least 18 countries over the last six years.

Since December 2010, I have been engaging the US government on visiting Mr Manning, at the invitation of his counsel, to determine his condition," Mendez said. "Unfortunately, the US government has not been receptive to a confidential meeting with Mr Manning.". . .

Bob Park on Fukushima

1. NUCLEAR RADIATION: BEYOND THE LINEAR-NO-THRESHOLD MODEL.

On Tuesday Japan raised the severity rating of the Fukushima nuclear crisis to 7, putting it on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Although Japan is releasing few details, you can safely conclude that radiation is really bad; beyond that you're on your own. . .

The report relies on the linear-no-threshold model to estimate the risk from multiple exposures at much lower levels, such as airliner crews. This is not only wrong, they know it's wrong. A DNA repair process is constantly at work in human cells repairing DNA damage from sources of ionizing radiation, including UV light and cosmic radiation. There is not much choice but to ignore the repair process and assume a linear model which greatly overstates the risk from multiple exposures. . .

Is is still true that the radiation from Fukushima is less than from eating Brazil nuts, or is that no longer true?

Gary Farber & Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings have some anti-intervention posts on Libya worth reading, in addition to Juan Cole.

Leader’s Arrest in Ivory Coast Ends Standoff

The picture of Gbagbo reminded me of Orwell's Revenge is Sour essay

Ashlee Vance - This Tech Bubble Is Different

[Hammerbacher] "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks." . . ."If instead of pointing their incredible infrastructure at making people click on ads," he likes to ask, "they pointed it at great unsolved problems in science, how would the world be different today?"

Robert Root-Bernstein - The Art of Scientific and Technological Innovations (via Andrew Sullivan)

. . .In medicine, the stitches that permit a surgeon to correct an aneurysm or carry out a heart transplant were invented by American Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel, who took his knowledge of lace making into the operating room . . .

Rob Cunningham - A tragic accident at Yale

A young woman was killed yesterday at Yale University in a machine shop accident. She was a senior with only several weeks until graduation.

This hits me close to home in two ways.
First- My oldest son and my daughter are both college seniors. . .

. . .Secondly- I work in the machine shop of a local college. We support the five science departments. For the most part, my co-worker and I do all the work. There have been occasions where a student will show an interest in machining and we will work with them, always stressing safety. .

. . .My thought and prayers go out to the family, faculty and students.

msnbc article

. . .Dufault was from Scituate, Massachusetts, and was graduating in a month, said her grandfather Robert Dufault. She studied constantly and loved sports, he said.

"She was a living saint," the grandfather said. "She was a good, smart girl."

An uncle called her brilliant.

"She's a wonderful, wonderful kid and that should be celebrated. There's nothing but good things to say about her," said Frederick Dufault, of Holliston, Massachusetts.

Dufault intended to work in oceanography after graduating and played saxophone in the Yale Band, Levin said.

Felix Salmon - US taxation datapoints of the day

The dean of tax reporters, David Cay Johnston, has a fantastic cover story in the Willamette Week . . .

. . .•John Paulson has paid no taxes at all on the $9 billion of income that he made in 2008 and 2009.

•Frank and Jamie McCourt, the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers, have not paid any income taxes since at least 2004.

•Between 2000 and 2008, corporate profits rose by 12% while corporate income taxes fell by 8%. Without any change in the corporate income-tax rate. . .

Andrew Sullivan - Tax Brackets 101

. . .the top 400 taxpayers, with the highest adjusted gross income, paid an effective tax rate of 17% in 2008; the top 1% of all taxpayers paid an effective tax rate of 23% in 2008 (IRS figures from Bloomberg's Businessweek April 11-17, 2011 edition, page 45). . .

Our complicated tax system seems designed to make taxes seem high, while actually being very low. . .

I'm actually in favor of the bulk of revenue being raised with a flat payroll/income/VAT tax, with a small amount of revenue coming from a progressive wealth tax. It seems to me that flatness and even regressivity hurt the poor much less than programs which you can't rely on, because the rules keep changing.

And it's important IMO to tax wage and inflation-adjusted investment income at the same rate, because otherwise elites come up with all sorts of ways to reclassify their income as investment income, rather than wage income.

One of the first things the Bush administration did after taking office was to shut down investigations into Cayman Islands tax avoidance. Genuinely surprised me, that one did.

Brad Delong - Neoliberalism Agonistes

Mike Kimel: ". . .ever notice how countries that adopt policies favored by right wing or libertarian think-tanks tend to have a few very successful years (with much crowing by those think tanks) followed by disaster? Be it Japan, Argentina, Russia, much of Eastern Europe, Ireland, Iceland, etc., it does seem that there's a pattern. Heck, that pattern even applies to the US. I think even some of the promoters of those policies are starting to see that pattern. Its to the point where a lot of folks in those circles are trying to convince the public that Singapore, a country where the government's role in the economy is larger and more intrusive than in most other countries, is an example of a libertarian paradise. . ."

Question for economists: There's obviously no agreement among economists on fiscal and monetary stimulus. But is there agreement on what potential output is? Do conservatives agree with liberals that actual output is below potential output, and that therefore we are in some sense leaving money on the table? Or do conservatives believe that whatever is, is by definition potential output?

intend to read over the next few weeks:

William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan & Carl J. Schramm - Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (2007)

2011-04-09T22:26:00.000-07:00

Arthur Silber - Many, Many Thanks

. . .I'll be all right in terms of basic living expenses for the next several months. That is a very great relief indeed. Given my concerns about my "recovery" from the latest heart episode (and related problems), I'll see if I can get at least some small amount of medical care. I might be able to manage one visit to a doctor of my choosing (as opposed to a free medical clinic, which can't offer the kind of assistance I need at this point based on the inquiries I've made). But since I have no insurance, the cost of even basic tests is significant, so I'm not sure how much good that might do. I'll make some further calls, though, and see what's possible. . .

2 recent bits from Bob Park's weekly column:

[April 1, 2011]
2. FUKUSHIMA: HYDROGEN EXPLOSION IN THE REACTOR #4 SPENT-FUEL POOL.
. . .I have repeatedly urged that a tuft of "platinum wool" always be attached at the high points of nuclear containment buildings where hydrogen bubbles would be expected to collect. The platinum would catalyze the oxidation of hydrogen back to water before the mixture reaches an explosive level. The one-time cost would be trivial. . .

[March 18, 2011]

3. MAXWELL: THE SESQUICENTENNIAL OF MAXWELLS EQUATIONS.
Maxwells equations were published 150 years ago this month in Philosophical Magazine. This week they are honored in a Nature editorial as a "bold unifying leap." When first exposed to Maxwells equations as a student I considered giving up physics. Not because I couldn't understand Maxwells equations, but because I realized that I could never compete on that level. But I soon realized that there was only one Maxwell. . .

Juan Cole - Hundreds of Thousands of Arabs Protest their Governments

. . .In Libya, the see-saw fighting continued. The forces loyal to the Transitional National Council beat off an attack from the east on the western city of Misrata by forces loyal to dictator Muammar Qaddafi. NATO destroyed an arms depot under the control of the Tripoli government near the rebellious city of Zintan southwest of Tripoli. Aljazeera Arabic is reporting continued fighting at Brega and Ajdabiya. . .

Venance Konan - In Ivory Coast, Democrat to Dictator

. . .How did the man who was once seen as the father of Ivorian democracy turn to tyranny? Was it the corruption of power? The intoxication of going from having nothing to everything all at once? Only a year before he was elected president, in 1999, I remember him denouncing Slobodan Milosevic, saying: “What does Milosevic think he can do with the whole world against him? When everyone in the village sees a white loincloth, if you are the only person to see it as black, then you are the one who has a problem.” But in the space of 10 years, he became deluded by power, a leader whose only ambitions were to build palaces and drive luxurious cars. . .

. . .The fear of losing everything can make a dictator, even one who once was a champion of democracy, lose his mind. . .

2 old, but timely, cartoons from R.K. Laxman:

[Bold, serious & courageous politician instructing peon who's drawing a wall-chart showing success, prosperity, etc.]

"Further up. Up, a little to the right and up - that's it! - And now let us set about achieving it!"

[Politician dealing with hostage-takers]

"I refuse! The demands are unreasonable, illegal and unfair! We will not yield for another four or five days!"

Harold Pollack - An Infected Toe, and A Few Comments on Representative Ryan's Medicaid Cuts

. . .my wife's parents cared for Vincent in their family home for 38 years, literally to the day my mother-in-law died. If it weren't for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security's "disabled adult child" program, Vincent might well be languishing in the back ward of some forbidding public institution. . .

. . .Social insurance protects each of us against burdens that would crush any one of us, if we had to face this alone. That's the spirit that animated Social Security at its enactment. The same spirit animated the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid. . .

. . .we just don't need to do this. Painful Medicaid cuts might be justified if expenditures were going through the roof, but they aren’t. . . .Person-for-person, Medicaid is probably the leanest program in the American healthcare system. . .

When Paul Ryan said his top priority was making sure able-bodied people don't become complacent. . .How do you get from there to his actual budget, which cuts Medicaid in order to lower the inheritance tax?

I guess this has clarified for me that what GOP elites, and therefore GOP leaders, really, really care about, besides pissing off Atrios, is the inheritance tax. The rest of the Bush tax cuts were really just loss-leaders to make the estate tax repeal palatable, and the projected Medicare cuts starting from 2022 (which will never happen) are an attempt to justify the estate tax repeal in the coming decade as fiscally responsible.

Well, if our GOP (and non-GOP) elites really, really want the estate tax repeal, I don't have too much of a problem giving it to them, but they should have to give something real in return: a progressive wealth tax linked to the unemployment rate, and investment income, adjusted for inflation, and then taxed at the same rate as wage income.

Dean Baker and James Fallows, among many others, were good on the Ryan plan. Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman made the important point that the Ryan proposals, even with the Medicaid & Medicare cuts, increase the deficit.

Chris Hayes in his twitter feed noted that one of Boehner's cuts was to make sure that no new IRS agents were hired, confirming, once again, that this is not about the deficit. I wonder if there would be any bipartisan support for making violations of tax law only a civil, and not a criminal, offense? Liberals might like it because it might be part of a broader movement to prioritize violent over non-violent (i.e. drug) crime, conservatives might like it because they no longer have to worry about overly creative tax avoidance leading to loss of freedom, merely loss of money?

Christina D. Romer - Jobless Rate Is Not the New Normal

Felix Salmon - How the pros see the fixed-income market

. . .Dan Fuss coming up with a very interesting macroeconomic point. Right now, he said, about 56% of Americans over the age of 16 are gainfully employed. If that percentage were to rise to 64%, Fuss reckons, then the budget deficit disappears entirely. We’re not going to get there. But theoretically it’s possible, if the unemployment rate comes down and if people retire later, as is happening in Japan. And more generally it’s an important reminder that unemployment is a fiscal issue, and that anybody who wants to take the budget deficit seriously should put a lot of effort into increasing the number of Americans with jobs. . .

Brad Delong - Thoughts on Economics Education in America

I think the #1 thing that I should have learned in econ courses, but didn't, is that an open system is different than a closed system. I learned it only when I read Krugman's 1996 HBR piece, "A Country Is Not a Company":

College students who plan to go into business often major in economics, but few believe that they will end up using what they hear in the lecture hall. Those students understand a fundamental truth: What they learn in economics courses won't help them run a business.

The converse is also true . . .

. . .The fundamental difference between business strategy and economic analysis is this: Even the largest business is a very open system. Despite growing world trade, the U.S. economy is largely a closed system. Businesspeople are not used to thinking about closed systems. Economists are.

Let me offer some noneconomic examples to illustrate the difference between closed and open systems. . .

.. . .In the open-system world of business, feedbacks are often weak and almost always uncertain. In the closed-system world of economics, feedbacks are often very strong and very certain. But that is not the whole difference. The feedbacks in the business world are often positive; those in the world of economic policy are usually, though not always, negative. . .

. . .In a society that respects business success, political leaders will inevitably -- and rightly -- seek the advice of business leaders on many issues, particularly those that involve money. All we can ask is that both the advisers and the advisees have a proper sense of what business success does and does not teach about economic policy. . .

The example which struck me was the commuter garage. Any one commuter can assure themselves of a spot by foregoing the nightcap, tightening their belt, getting up very early, etc. But if a political leader sternly lectures his commuter-citizens that "We need to deal with this parking shortage by all tightening our belts & getting up an hour earlier", it's not going to work. Yet, amazingly, that's where American politics is at the moment.

One of Richard Feynman's letters, answering a question from a school physics teacher, hinges on this confusion between an open system and a closed system:

Richard P. Feynman to Armando Garcia J., December 11, 1985

One more letter from Feynman's collection:

V.A. Van Der Hyde to Richard P. Feynman, July 3, 1986

. . .First off, I have this 16 year old son, step-son really, that is fairly bright. No genius, you understand, but a lot smarter than I am in math and such. Like everybody else he is trying to figure out what life is all about. What he doesn't know yet is that nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and that it doesn't matter. What matters is getting on with living. . .

. . .Now, I don't want to be a pushy parent. Whatever he wants to do is fine with me. . .All I want is that he do whatever it is that he wants to do to the best of his ability. It's almost a matter of honor in a way. If you can do something well, you have some sort of obligation to yourself to do it the best you can. I'm afraid that's a concept not thought highly of in a lot of circles, now or ever, but how can an intelligent person live with themselves if they aren't doing something they love to the best of their ability?. . .

. . .Just knowing that somebody "out there" understands and cares a little can make a big difference sometimes. It helps keep the wings straight and the nose up. Thanks.

Sincerely,
Vincent A. Van Der Hyde

Richard P. Feynman to Vincent A. Van Der Hyde, July 21, 1986

Dear Mr. Van Der Hyde,

You ask me to write on what I think about life, etc. as if I had some wisdom. Maybe, by accident, I do - of course I don't know - all I know is I have opinions.

As I began to read your letter I said to myself - "here is a very wise man." Of course, it was because you expressed opinions just like my own. Such as "what he doesn't know yet is is that nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and that it doesn't matter." "Whatever he wants to do is fine with me" - provided "he does it to the best of his ability." (You go on to speak of some sort of obligation to yourself, etc., but I differ a little - I think it is simply the only way to get true deep happiness - not an obligation - "to do something you love to the best of your ability.")

. . .Even in my crazy book I didn't emphasize - but it is true - that I worked as hards as I could at drawing, at deciphering Mayan, at drumming, at cracking safes, etc. The real fun of life is this perpetual testing to realize how far out you can go with any potentialities. . .

. . .To answer your questions in your last paragraph more explicitly.

Q: What do you have to do to train yourself to be whatever it is you want to be?

A: There are many roads all different that have been taken by many different scientists. The road I took is the one your son takes - work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do best. Try to keep the other grades from going zero if you can. Don't think of what "you want to be" but what you "want to do". Luckily he knows that already, so let him do it. (But keep up some kind of minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.) . . .

. . .Stop worrying, Papa. Your kid is wonderful. Yours from another Papa of another wonderful kid.

Sincerely,
Richard P. Feynman

2011-04-02T23:18:00.001-07:00

Arthur Silber - Once Upon A Time. . .

rough week. Japan, Libya, The Ivory Coast. No idea what the appropriate response is, policy or otherwise, to the civil war in the Ivory Coast.

Ivory Coast

Johann Hari - The biggest lie in British politics (via Stephen Fry)

. . .Here’s the lie. We are in a debt crisis. Our national debt is dangerously and historically high. We are being threatened by the international bond markets. The way out is to eradicate our deficit rapidly. Only that will restore “confidence”, and therefore economic growth. Every step of this program is false, and endangers you.

Let’s start with a fact that should be on billboards across the land. As a proportion of GDP, Britain’s national debt has been higher than it is now for 200 of the past 250 years. Read that sentence again. Check it on any graph by any historian. Since 1750, there have only been two brief 30-year periods when our debt has been lower than it is now. So we can afford to run a deficit, if that has a positive effect – which we’ll get to in a minute. If we are “bust” today, as George Osborne has claimed, then we have almost always been bust. We were bust when we pioneered the Industrial Revolution. We were bust when we ruled a quarter of the world. We were bust when we beat the Nazis. We were bust when we built the NHS. . .

Our debt is not high by historical standards, and it is not high by international standards. For example, Japan’s national debt is three times bigger than ours, and they are still borrowing at good rates. . .

. . .Here’s what we learned during the Great Depression, when our view of economics was revolutionized by John Maynard Keynes. In a recession, private individuals like you and me, perfectly sensibly, cut back our spending. We go out less, we buy less, we save more. This causes a huge fall in private demand, and with it a huge fall in economic activity. If, at the very same time, the government cuts back, then overall demand collapses, and a recession becomes a depression. . .

. . .Look at the last Great Depression. The Great Crash of 1929 was followed by a US President, Herbert Hoover, who did everything Cameron demands. He cut spending and paid off the debt. The recession grew and grew. Then Franklin Roosevelt was elected and listened to Keynes. He ramped up spending – and unemployment fell, and the economy swelled. Then in 1936 he started listening to the Cameron debt-shriekers of his day. The result? The economy collapsed again. It was only the gigantic spending of the Second World War that finally ended it. . .

Glenn Harlan Reynolds - WSJ review of Michio Kaku's "Physics of the Future."

. . .Mr. Kaku recounts a lunchtime conversation with physicist Freeman Dyson at Princeton. Mr. Dyson described growing up in the late days of the British Empire and seeing that most of his smartest classmates were not—as prior generations had been—interested in developing new forms of electrical and chemical plants, but rather in massaging and managing other people's money. The result was a loss of England's science and engineering base.

Now, Mr. Dyson said, he was seeing the phenomenon for the second time in his life, in America. . ."

I think however it's important to guard against the view of math & science as something excessively noble and praiseworthy. While some math & science has practical applications, a lot of it doesn't: it's merely fun, done for the the pleasure of finding things out.

But don't tell this to Tiger-Mom, ere math & art & music be replaced by grim treatises on monetizing site-stickiness.

It's fine to peek into Gandhi's secrets & weirdness, but it's important not to forget his real importance. Can you imagine a political or religious or community leader, witnessing city-wide rioting and tribal warfare, go on an indefinite food & water strike until the rioting stopped, and the tribal leaders had agreed to try and make peace? And can you imagine it working (after 21 days and a near-death experience)?

The issue is not whether Gandhi was a ridiculous, foolish, contemptible little weirdo. Of course, he was, at least at certain times and on certain issues. The issue is how a fallible human being like Gandhi could have found the strength to do what he did?

G.K. Chesterton - The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922)

[Homer March] " . . .The Chancellor is in the pocket of the money lenders and has to do as he is told; otherwise he's bankrupt, and a bad sort of bankruptcy, too, with nothing but cards and actresses behind it. The Prime Minister was in the petrol-contract business; and deep in it, too. The Foreign Minister is a wreck of drink and drugs. . .

"I quite agree with you," said Fisher, calmly. "You are perfectly right."

"If you agree with us, why the devil don't you act with us?" demanded his friend.

" . . .I am enjoying an emotion that is entirely new to me; a happy sensation I never remember having had before."

"What the devil do you mean?"

"I am feeling proud of my family," said Horne Fisher. . ."I have the honor to remark, I am proud of my family at last."

"But why?" repeated March, rather feebly.

"I am proud of the Chancellor because he gambled and the Foreign Minister because he drank and the Prime Minister because he took a commission on a contract," said Fisher, firmly. "I am proud of them because they did these things, and can be denounced for them, and know they can be denounced for them, and are standing firm for all that. I take off my hat to them because they are defying blackmail, and refusing to smash their country to save themselves. . ."

2011-03-25T17:47:00.000-07:00

Arthur Silber - Sick, Broke and Scared

I'm still recovering from the ailments that landed me in the hospital again recently. . .

. . .It would be helpful to have access to semi-decent, ongoing medical care; since I have no money and no insurance, that's not an option for me. So I'm left to wonder about what exactly may be going on.

By the end of next week, I'll have to pay the April rent, electric and telephone bills, plus a few additional outstanding bills. And I'll need to get two prescriptions refilled. One of them costs $200. Yes: $200 per month (30 pills, one a day). Thanks to some very kind individuals who have sent in donations recently (a multitude of thanks, as always), I have a little less than half of the rent. That's all I have. . .

. . .Obviously, I could use some help. I still want/hope to complete some long-planned articles; if I get a little more strength back, I'll turn my attention to them. The few recent posts that have appeared here burst forth because of the outrage I was feeling about current events. The other articles awaiting completion are considerably more complicated and require that I hold a lot of information in my head. At the moment, I simply can't do it, try as I might.

I'm deeply grateful for any support you might be able to provide, especially in these increasingly uncertain times. . .

Many, many thanks for your consideration.

Japan

I guess the only opinion I have on Libya is that the concerns of Turkey and the Arab League should be treated with respect and taken seriously, and not ridiculed. Yglesias's post "in defense of half measures", Juan Coles' posts, Alan Grayson's suggestion for an oil embargo, have all been interesting.

Jay Ackroyd - Clarity

. . .[the voters] want jobs, retirement security and a health care system that doesn't threaten them with bankruptcy. No matter how frequently he and his fellow Beltway denizens characterize those voters as wanting the moon, these are not unreasonable demands. . .

Tony Judt - Ill Fares the Land

. . .We need to become confident once again in our own instincts: if a policy or an action seems somehow wrong, we must find the words to say so. . .

. . .. . .Social democrats are characteristically modest - a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologize a little less for past shortcomings and speak more assertively of achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. . .

. . .Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us today, it is better than anything else to hand. . .

Stephen Fry (podgram 2.1):

"In the end I like structures that are human-shaped, not idea-shaped and humans are great heaps of inconsistency, ambiguity and complexity."

I guess a running theme in my mind lately is the importance of preferring, in certain contexts, judgement & discretion & human beings to rigid rules.

Two examples which hit me when I read them in Ben Bradlee's memoir (which Gene Lyons always calls "disarmingly frank")

p. 45
"we had pretty much a permanent black jack game going. . .I forget the stakes except they that they were higher than I could afford. But I won - a few hundred dollars. In fact, everyone won, except Bill Haskell, who couldn't afford it either. And suddenly he owed everyone - a few thousand dollars. In varying degrees we began to feel sorry for him, but we had won it, and each felt sure we would have had to pay up had we lost it, or quit before our losses got too big. . .

. . .My father was as sore as he ever got. Quiet, but serious. First, he announced that I was no longer a creditor. Haskell owed me nothing, since I didn't have the money to pay him if I had lost that much, and he would not have bailed me out. He told Dick Cutler that he knew the stakes were too high for him, too. Potter and Tuckerman were better off than we were, but he let them have it, asking them if they enjoyed watching a friend squirm just because he wanted to be part of our crowd. We were all enormously relieved, truth to tell. Someone called Haskell with the news, and we adjourned to the living room for a big pitcher of Martinis - unaware of the importance of the moment in our lives. . ."

p. 65
"We used to gamble - for high stakes because there was no place to spend money - but that had pretty much been outlawed by our skipper, Tommy Ragan. . .All of a sudden "Tubes" owed me more than $4,000, which approximated a year's pay. When the captain heard about the debt, he ordered me to play double or nothing until I lost, and then quit playing for money. Took me three boards."

Don't you sort of wish Ben Bradlee's father or skipper had been in charge of HAMP the past few years?

2011-03-19T20:55:00.000-07:00

Japan

Libya

I believe in subscriber-funded journalism, and would like to have a paid digital subscription to the NYT, but they're charging too much. If I, living in the bay area, would like to give some dollar-votes to 1-2 international papers, 1-2 national papers, 1-2 regional papers, 1-2 county-level papers, + 1-2 periodicals, 1-2 radio stations & 1-2 TV stations, how can I justify $15 a month for the NYT, unless the NYT happens to be your first choice for international & national & regional & local news?

question: How does rugby compare to football concerning CTE? What about boxing with helmets?

An interesting post on the subject:

Scipio Tex - Is Football As We Know It About To End?

2011-03-18T20:30:00.000-07:00

Two comments in the Radley Balko comment thread on Bradley Manning.

Andre

Part of me views Manning as a Kevin Mitnick case of someone who did commit a crime and then was so severely fucked over so hard and so much that the original crime is really trivial in comparison. The question is, who has done the greater evil? . . .

. . .Lots of whistleblowers leak information because they have a grudge or are vindictive, and I don’t think that appreciably cheapens the value of the truth that eventually comes out. Holding governments accountable would be a lot harder if we only used information leaked by altruistic whistleblowers. . .

Nick

. . .I have not seen any credible information that would lead me to believe that Manning should not be considered a whistleblower. In fact, in the partial chat logs released (from the chat that led to his arrest), when Lamo asks Manning why he didn’t sell the information…

Manning: because it’s public data

Lamo: i mean, the cables

Manning: it belongs in the public domain – information should be free – it belongs in the public domain – because another state would just take advantage of the information… try and get some edge – if its out in the open… it should be a public good. . .

Manning may have been wrong, but in no way can he be considered a traitor, and the attempt on the part of the authorities to paint Manning as a worse criminal than Charles Graner (Abu Ghraib) or Andrew Warren (sexual abuse) is a serious, and totally avoidable and unnecessary, injustice.