Bandarlog


	The Great Lisbon Earthquake Debate Rehash I would never write something like this, because I want to, you know, build a bridge to Red State America and stuff, but it's still true. [Doug: 1/11/05 17:09]


	Election I think the most sensible view is that in the actual voting on election day, it is not certain that Chavez only won by fraud, but that there were certainly enough irregularities that the Carter Center should not have certified the vote that very day, without further investigation. In point of fact, the OAS observer mission refrained from making a judgment. Regardless, the election process was not "free and fair." Chavez harassed opposition parties, mucked around with voter rolls, ordered state-owned companies to retaliate against employees who signed the recall petition that led to the election, and siphoned off something like $3bio from PDVSA (the state oil company) to pay for electioneering and vote-buying thinly disguised as "social programs." Among the reasons to believe that the actual voting suffered from tampering: - the election marked the first use of Venezuela's electronic voting system, the software for which was written by a little-known company partly owned by the government. - there were no "hot audits" allowed to compare paper printouts of the voting machines with official tallies of the voting stations. - ex-post audits were limited and conducted under conditions susceptible to tampering. - several polling stations generated identical vote counts for Chavez, a statistical improbability which many Venezuelans point to as evidence of "hacking" of the electronic system. - in several polling stations the number of votes against Chavez fell well short of the number of signatures on the recall referendum. Given the highly restricted signature gathering process (you had to sign at a designated station) and the fact that signatures were public while votes were (theoretically) secret, this seems highly suspicious. It is also worth noting that well before the election the Venezuelan opposition (Coordinadora Democratica) very openly expressed its dissatisfaction with the competence and impartiality of the Carter Center. In addition, I got the same nessage (and more strident vituperation -- particularly with the Carter Center's point person, Jennifer McCoy) from opposition members in private meetings. [Ben H.: 1/10/05 19:14]


	Ben H, what is the consensus view on Chavez's reelection: fraud or legit? Is Carter bumbling and naive, or just naive? p.s. My mother refers to Carter almost exclusively as "Jimmy 'I believe conflict resolution is a SCI-UNCE' Carter." I am so proud of my family. [Ben A.: 1/10/05 19:04]


	What Jimmy Carter Hath Wrought Just because you aren't reading about Hugo Chavez in the news doesn't mean he isn't hard at work destroying what's left of Venezuela's political and economic institutions. Let's take a quick look at some of this friend of Jimmuh's latest achievements: - Starting "a new phase of the revolution." Several state governments, egged on by Chavez, have begun expropriating privately owned land. Landowners challenged by the government will have to prove clean titled back to the 1840s (!) and that the land is being used "productively." The first ranch to face appropriation, however, is actually an efficient operation owned by UK's Vestey Group. Well, we EM traders used to joke that Venezuela may be in South America but it has African-quality policymakers. I guess Chavez has taken that to heart: he's modeling his policies on Mugabe's. - Harboring terrorists. The Colombian government captured FARC poobah Rodrigo Granda on the Venezuelan border. Granda was carrying a Venezuela cedula and was apparently even registered to vote (! hey, Jimmuh, how 'bout that?) in Venezuela. Rather than apologizing, Chavez's government is charging the Colombians with having kidnapped Granda from Venezuelan territory. Chavez has long taken a rather hostile attitude toward Colombia and President Uribe in particular; this move represents an escalation. - Quashing Free Speech. The Chavez-controlled National Assembly passed a bill making it a crime to "insult" the president. This comes on top of the Media Law, which puts all media outlets under threat of arbitrary penalties levied by a government-controlled "media committee." Bonus fun-fact: Chavez gave an interview last month to Al-Jazeera in which he called the U.S. invasion of Iraq "terrorism." He noted that, "we in Venezuela recognize that Al-Jazeera is a symbol of courage, principles and dignity and always tells the truth." But, hey, Jimmy Carter says he was freely elected, so why worry? [Ben H.: 1/10/05 13:35]


	Dodge-ball Redux Why is it i have a feeling that the people who participate in this league are the very people who either never got picked for a dodgeball team or avoided the game altogether as kids? [Ben H.: 1/7/05 13:21]


	Speaking of Regression ... This just landed in my work-email inbox: [The Company] has generously agreed to sponsor a dodgeball team. Let me know ASAP if you are interested in playing. We need at least 10 players. Here are the details: When: Monday nights for the next 8 weeks (starting next Monday - January 10th) Time: 7 - 8:30pm or 8:30 - 10pm, alternating depending on the team slot Where: Manhattan High School, 52nd St. @ 8th Ave Players: 10 people per team, 6 play at a time Games: Last 1 - 3 minutes each, teams typically play 20 games in one evening on a b-ball size court [Doug: 1/7/05 12:59]


	Blast From Past Meets Fish In Barrel The "Huh" site that Ben H just linked to has been around for a while; I'd guess it's roughly coeval with FuckedCompany. It's an accurate and concise parody of the dot-com boom. Dao's round of holiday e-mails has yielded some news from ex-crete people (former employees of concretemedia.com (not of the manufactured-housing company that now seems to own that domain!)). The most surprising was from Dao's old boss, who was basically the head project-overseer. After the bust, he bought a sailboat, rechristened it (it had been the "Entitled", which I'd thought unimprovable), and sailed through the Caribbean, throught the Panama Canal, and up to San Francisco. Then he went to Vietnam, and got into outdoor-adventure filmmaking. Now, however, we hear that he's going back to work at Bolt, the tiny fragment of the Concrete empire that still exists. For me, that would be exactly like that nightmare where you find yourself back in high school. "Wait, I could have sworn I finished all my classes! What am I doing back here? I don't remember signing up for this class!" Except that back in the day, there was this atmosphere of global revolution and imminent riches. To return to that stage minus this exciting atmosphere would be unspeakably depressing. This particular guy is a college friend of the company's president, though, and will presumably start near the top, so maybe for him it won't be so bad. [Doug: 1/7/05 09:38]


	Isn't that Doug's old company? [Ben A.: 1/7/05 08:34]


	How Did I Miss These Guys When I Was Doing Recruiting? A company with a vision! [Ben H.: 1/7/05 08:03]


	Laura Kipnis and the Misconstrual of Feminism I do not have much to say about body image, the main topic of this essay by Laura Kipnis. Along the way, however, Kipnis makes a common, and important, error in contrasting femininity with feminism. Kipnis presents femininity and feminism as a struggle between weakness and strength. Femininity, according to Kipnis, is about exploiting female sexual attraction to soliciting protection from men, and for this reason “depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself.” Feminism, by contrast: …is dedicated to abolishing the myth of female inadequacy. It strives to smash beauty norms, it demands female equality in all spheres, it rejects sexual market value as the measure of female worth. Or that was the plan. Yet for all feminism's social achievements, what it never managed to accomplish was the eradication of the heterosexual beauty culture… Kipnis manufactures an opposition by confuting feminism with androgyny -- shifting the goal of equality into parity, or similarity. If feminism is a doctrine of female empowerment, then the poles of the anti-feminist/Feminist continuum are weak and dependent vs. strong and autonomous. An advocate of femininity by contrast, typically believes that gender roles are a) real, and b) advisable. A feminist, then, should be free to endorse or reject feminity insofar as it aids or impairs the prospects of woman. As it happens, many feminists do believe that aspects of traditional gender roles are oppressive. If adhering to certain gender norms empowers a woman, however, (perhaps by making her happy), there should be no principled feminist complaint. Kipnis’ error was adopted (and perhaps more important – perceived as adopted) by a significant proportion of movement feminists. And this mistake has been consequential. I remember being stunned at how few of my smart, accomplished, and ambitious female friends identified themselves as feminists.* This was not because they rejected female access to political power, economic opportunity, or personal autonomy. Rather, it was because feminism as a movement had become associated in their minds with quixotic quests like “eradication of the heterosexual beauty culture,” and with dogmatic prescriptions about how woman must conceive themselves. The almost total intellectual victory of female-empowerment feminism is the signal social development (and I would say, moral achievement) of the past century. In Western nations, only the lunatic fringe speaks of denying woman access to the voting booth or the marketplace. The majority, however, think complementarity of the sexes is a permanent element of human experience, and that men and woman often find value in different things. And most recognize that while sexual market value should not be the measure of female worth, surely it’s a measure of worth for woman, just as it is for men. Rarely does anyone date or marry a person they find unattractive, boring, or stupid. It’s unfortunate that feminism as a movement got gunked up with 70s egalitarianism of the crudest kind, and it is wonderful that this error has done relatively little damage to the progress of female empowerment. At one dinner in college, I turned out to be the only self-professed feminist at the table. Another Kipnis Gem* Women here may pant, "I'm doing it for myself" while strapped to their treadmills, but the fact is that the beauty culture is a heterosexual institution, and to the extent that women participate in its rituals, they, too, are propping up a heterosexual society and its norms. The problem for a feminist is that historically speaking such norms have worked out far less advantageously for women than for men. This is, I think, is a very common view. And it abets the error Kipnis makes above. If gender roles are just identical to an oppressive scheme, than androgyny will be the only path to female liberation. And no doubt, gender roles have oppressed woman. Case in point: The Middle East. Even in the recent past, being a woman was no picnic. Consider the Victorian woman, lacking the franchise, barred from most productive activity, trussed in a corset, and misdiagnosed with brain fever. What could be worse? Well, here’s one candidate: fighting in Crimea. Here’s another: participating in Pickett’s charge. Masculinity hasn’t always been a walk in the park. Quantifying who got screwed worse by through history by gender norms seems like great project for some ideology-driven nutcase, but let me predict in advance that death from sepsis secondary to sucking chest wound [subset: crossbow bolt] probably correlates pretty well with testicle ownership. “Historically speaking” there was misery enough for all. Nice Quip Evolutionary biology is described as “The Church of Latter Day Phrenology” by commentator “isonomist” (Ben H, you have an ally!) in the Slate comment section to Kipnis’ piece. [Ben A.: 1/6/05 17:52]


	The Elusive Anthony Daniels I love the stuff he writes as Theodore Dalrymple in the Spectator and the Telegraph. Since my firm is a creditor of Liberia, I figured it would not merely be a source of idle amusement for me to read Daniel's book about the country, Monrovia, Mon Amour. Unfortunately, it had fallen out of print, and the few quotes on the web for used editions carried ludicrous prices. A few months ago, though, I came across on offering for the bargain price of like $20 bucks, which offer I swiftly lifted. In between my ordering and the scheduled arrival of the book, our offices moved to a new floor. The book order was mailed to the old address, and somehow the book never materialized. It now seems I am destined to search for this book in vain, much like I am destined to wait in vain for Liberia herself to repay me. [Ben H.: 1/6/05 16:10]


	Great Quote Until quite late in life, I felt I owed it to myself as an independent, autonomous person to cheek my teachers, albeit subtly, and raise sophistical objections to all their teachings --Anthony Daniels [Ben A.: 1/6/05 15:06]


	Yet More Internalizing of Externalities Quite a lot of moral pressure was brought to bear against the tobacco industry, but it is instructive that the most effective arguments marshalled in support of regulation related to externalities. Politicians ultimately pushed through restrictions on smoking in public places based on (possibly bogus) studies on the hazards of second-hand smoke. And I would guess that many citizens cheered on these restrictions because they personally find second-hand smoke unpleasant and bothersome. The state AGs' suits against the tobacco companies proceeded on the theory that tobacco use imposes huge healthcare costs on the state via Medicare and Medicaid. Yet, morally, ethically, and practically speaking, the best* argument for attacking tobacco use was, as Ben A. notes, that it is bad for the people who use it. That regulation's proponents grounded it on externalities tells me that even in nanny-ish state America, people dislike the idea of restricting a citizen's behavior for his own good. I share that discomfort. For that reason, I choose to make a case against cultural pollution on the basis of negative externalities. It is indeed sad that people will construct their version of the good life based on the adventures of Paris Hilton and thus consign themselves to spiritual and intellectual emptiness. The damage wrought thereby surely exceeds that caused to me by the visual assault ugly billboards or the taxes I pay to deal with illegitimacy, violence, and the like. However, I feel much more justified calling for taxes and regulation on the latter basis than on the former. *see my earlier post: there's a fundamental tension between risk-collectivizing government schemes and personal autonomy [Ben H.: 1/5/05 19:15]


	Internalizing Externalities Ben H’s reference to pollution is an apt one. My preference would be to make the internalization literal by force-feeding Howard Stern and his ilk Calvin Klein billboards, Christina Aguilera videos, and 4th grader-sized thongs. While I endorse the negative externality analogy, I think the comparison that is most interesting is to a vice without a major external cost component:cigarettes. The costs of smoking are almost entirely internalized, yet society has banished tobacco. You won’t see smoking on MTV, you won’t hear it mentioned much in pop music, you won’t see smoking in mainstream movies. If a musician accorded tobacco anything like the religious reverence inspired by pot, he would be ostracized. Moral pressure was brought to bear on an immense scale (and abetted by direct government coercion in the form of the tobacco lawsuits), and this is thought appropriate because, simply, cigarettes are unhealthy. And true enough -- lung cancer and emphysema have nothing to recommend them. Yet while smoking can shorten life and disable old age, what it will not do is ruin your life. Allegiance to Joe Camel does not preclude devotion to Truth, Justice, and the American way, and citizens of Flavor Country often prove good spouses, warm parents, and skilled artists. What if instead of smoking, a peron internalizes a juvenile sexuality, approaches gender relations in the manner suggested by current pop music, and views the life of a rich, club-hopping sybarite as the acme of human aspiration? That mindset would destroy the prospect of a flourishing life. Aren’t the producer of Temptation Island more dangerous, and more culpable than those dreaded tobacco execs? [Ben A.: 1/5/05 18:11]


	Oil Ticks With Big Hearts The Saudis step-up. Wow, $30mio. I'm so impressed. That means that princes of 1/16th blood will have to give up their Russian whore subsidies for a whole month! [Ben H.: 1/5/05 07:08]


	Hayek's Utopia I more or less agree with more of your (Ben H's) thoughts on vulgarity; my quibbles would include (1) that pornography is probably more mainstream than you think; (2) that pornography could actually reduce out-of-wedlock births and venerial disease by increasing the percent of sexual activity that involves exactly one participant (although it surely has offsetting corrosive effects); (3) in Hayek's Utopia the airwaves would not be allocated freely by the government, but nor would they be auctioned off -- stations would simply stake claims to frequencies by erecting gigawatt towers to drown out competitors' signals. You would have to coat yourself in tinfoil to avoid being cooked by this broadcast arms race. On an unrelated note, this is fucked up. [Doug: 1/4/05 15:38]


	Tsunami Tstinginess The incipient criticism of the US for supposed stinginess toward tsunami victims has gone quiet in the face of an outpouring of public and private assistance. But since the topic of stinginess has been raised, why don't you take a guess which set of countries, with much stronger substantive ties -- religious, economic, personal -- to the worst-affected region, has given approximately diddly-squat? The Arabian Gulf countries! What a shocker! Didn't anyone tell the oil ticks that Alms-giving (Zakah) is one of the five pillars of Islam? [Ben H.: 1/4/05 11:44]


	Bush Takes a Step Toward Fiscal Responsibility Wapo reporting that Bush will propose changing the Social Security benefits formula such that benefits are adjusted according to inflation and not wages. Of course, Wapo screams about "benefit cuts of up to 1/3rd" as though today's retirees are going to see their checks sliced immediately, which is complete baloney. Interestingly, several emerging markets countries have or are to attempting to de-link dangerously underfunded pension schemes from wages and to inflation. You can't "grow your way out of the problem" if the very engine of growth also drives benefits increases! Of course, Murphy's Law tells you that as soon as this change gets made, the U.S. will face a long stretch of falling real wages! For that reason, I'd go further than Bush and linked benefits to the lesser of wages and inflation. [Ben H.: 1/4/05 07:16]


	Internalizing Externalities I think you read the phrase properly, Doug. I mean levying taxes on culturally polluting products to offset the costs imposed by those products: bastardy, venereal disease, crime, etc.* Raising money this way would allow other taxes, taxes which in general are levied on productive activity (payroll tax, income tax) to be lowered. You're right, though, that making such proposals concrete invites a lot of mischief. Who decides which cultural products are culturally polluting and which aren't? Could the government one day raise these taxes so high as to constitute outright censorship? Doug, you know that my particular utopian fantasy (probably even more utopian than a world that lavishly funds linguistics departments) is that of Hayekian libertarianism. However, given that right now the government takes about half my earnings, tells me in minute detail what I can and can't do with my house and land, interposes itself in practically every business decision I make, etc, I don't think the fact that a proposal means government entanglement in every day life is the basis for a really forceful objection. If the government is going to be all over civil society anyway, ought not I be forgiven for wishing that once in a while it levies its resources on those who impose costs on the rest of us; that it smites my enemies instead of me? In point of fact, it already does so, by levying large, externality-internalizing taxes on alcohol and tobacco. It gets back to another point both you and Ben A. have probably heard me make over and over. If we lived in a libertarian society where one had no legal responsibility to pay for other people's bastardy, promiscuity, failed family formation, etc, then I agree that taxing pornography or television** would be an unacceptable assault on civil society. However, I think people who really embrace left-wing government-mediated risk collectivization willfully ignore how that sort of risk collectivization is incompatible with a maximalist vision of personal behavioral autonomy. If the government forces the citizenry to pay for some citizen's bastardy, then one can easily argue that the government has a role to play in curbing it. Yet, I recognize it is a tough call. Is expanding the ambit of government a cure that's worse than the disease? Is talking about externalities of cultural product succumbing to a behavioral model corrosive of the idea of free will and hence the argument for free expression that rests on it? A decade ago, I thought I the answer to these questions was a clear yes. Now I'm not so sure. But, look, let's start with something much more modest than imposing taxes. Let's stop subsidizing cultural polluters. I can see no reason why the government should give free broadcast frequency bandwith to television stations! The Moral Equivalent of War You're right also, that we are not talking about a real war. "Culture war" is purely metaphorical. Maybe "culture debate" is a more apt term. * Doug, you made the distinction between crap that is unavoidable and crap that people need to choose to access. I am thinking about the latter here, though it seems to me it is more a continuum [i know you're fond of these!] than discrete categories. Stuff at the unavoidable end of the continuum is not, in my view, the proper object merely of externality-internalizing taxes, but more explicit regulation, prohibition, or (and this is probably fairest where possible) banishment from the public sphere. ** As an aside, I don't see out and out pornography as the problem, at least insofar as it is recognized as such and therefore understood to be marginal and not reflective of real-life standards of behavior. Much worse, I believe, is smutty mainstream television and music. It is these that "define deviancy down" and really generate serious externalities. [Ben H.: 1/4/05 07:01]


	I'd say that propaganda by itself, divorced from actual bloodletting, cannot constitute warfare. At most it counts as psychological or metaphorical warfare if it invades your "personal space" against your will. For example, there's that enormous Calvin Klein billboard on Lafayette Street that depicted a woman crawling from the primordial ooze and licking a guy's butt; I grant you that that was a salvo in a culture war. (Do not click on that link if you do not wish to see a woman crawling from the primordial ooze and licking a guy's butt.) I unambiguously support laws that would criminalize such ads on city streets. When it comes to vulgar stuff that requires some personal initiative to access, though, I don't have the same feeling of being assaulted. I don't support criminalizing pornography, for example. Leaving out the question of how to protect children, which is a serious one, I'm not sure I feel comfortable forcing pornographers to "internalize the externalities they create". A surtax on pornography, designed to reduce the amount produced and hence the psychological damage it does to its adult consumers, would not sit well with me. An anti-vulgarity counterattack ought to come (etymological irony notwithstanding) from the people, and not from the government. Let me recount an interesting conversation I had over the weekend, roughly analogous to this one, and in which you (Ben H) would take my side. You know Susan S., with whom you had that huge fight over the Cuban government. She is one of my favorite people in the whole world, but a sort of academic utopianism, which I don't share, is integral to her personality. On New Year's Eve she was telling me about her father's wonderful and not-too-difficult career as a social science professor at a Big Ten school. She talked of how college-town life brought her into contact with lots of interesting people from faraway places, and how it left her with the impression that a life of innocent curiosity (I'm paraphrasing) is best. Susan herself is currently in a linguistics PhD program. But she laments the enormous difficulty she'll face in getting an academic job. Times, she acknowledges, have changed. Students now see themselves as education-consumers, entitled by their buyer's role to good grades and career-boosting advantages. Universities have adapted to their new attitude and have let economically marginal disciplines (like linguistics) wither in favor of cash cows (like business schools). Susan realizes she may only have adjunct-professor gigs available, putting her in the same earning class as immigrant janitors. She is fatalistic rather than angry about this. I imagine she would support tax hikes to increase funding for humanities and social-science professorships, though. This is where my sympathy would start to diminish. Taking people's money in order to fund activities that is of no use or interest to any of them (more or less) is wrong. This is especially true when the fundees, far from following their genii on a wonderful innocent spiritual quest for knowledge, end up writing papers about "queering the kkkanon", or spending the bulk of their time conspiring to get all the cute undergrad girls into their classes, as in Lucky Jim. I guess my point is that people should be noble and good, should demand good and ennobling cultural products, and in that way reverse the vulgarization of the last forty years. But people who demand or supply bad and debasing cultural products should not be viewed as enemy combatants to be fought by government intervention. (Incidentally, Ben H, what did you have in mind when you said "internalizing the externalities"?) [Doug: 1/3/05 20:42]


	Culture War You're right, Doug, about the motives of those who promote what Ben has trenchantly dubbed "adolescent sexuality." They do it to make money. Merely because the act out of mercenary motives, though, doesn't mean they're not engaged in a war. I think of it as a metaphorical war in the same way one might speak of a "war" between polluters and environmentalists; the analogy between smuttiness and pollution is an apt one, in that in both cases we are dealing with negative externalities associated with highly profitable activities. Film-makers, tv producers, etc haven't waged war on chastity as an abstract concept. They have waged war against anyone who advocates internalizing the externalities associated with eroding normative codes of behavior like chastity. They don't use guns or bombs, but they do use propaganda. The theme of the authentic individual /renegade / outsider waging a passionate struggle against stultifying convention runs is the thread out of which Hollywood weaves so much of its product that it seems pointless to enumerate individual examples. Hollywood could make plenty of money showing titillating images abstracted from any ideological stance. The theme I allude to is a weapon in the culture war, a war Hollywood fights so that it can continue the culturally pollution that is an inevitable byproduct of the way it makes money. And let's not forget that this money in turn serves as a weapon in the culture war. Do you not think that some of those voluminous contributions to the Dems (and to the most countercultural, leftist candidates in Dem primaries) aim to head off attempts to use the law to internalize these externalities? Secular Jews Now, I count myself a (thoroughly) secular Jew and at the same time on the other side of this putative cultur war from Hollywood. Does it bother me to hear secular Jews blamed for cultural pollution? Yes. But not the for the reason you might think. It is not the charge that upsets me but rather the truth of it. William Donohue is most likely anti-semitic to some degree or another, and institutionalized Catholicism has not been a great friend the Jews, secular or otherwise. However, I think the way secular Jews as a community have behaved toward "Jesusland" more broadly, and evangelical protestantism more specifically, is unwise and ungrateful. I'm with Samuel Huntington: America's culture is an Anglo-Protestant culture, and it so happens that this Anglo-Prot culture has as a core value an idea of freedom of conscience that renders our society very friendly to religious minorities. Secular Jews have not shown the same sort of toleration of the religious majority and its values. Instead of going berserk anytime a creche shows up near a courthouse in some little town or a preacher gives an invocation before a football game, we should try to show a little understanding that these things are important to a lot of people and not in any way harmful to us. Just as Stanley Crouch loudly calls to account thug rappers for contributing to the dysfunction of the black inner city and the attendent burden it imposes on the broader community, so should some secular Jews stand up to criticize those of our co-religionists responsible for spewing out cultural pollution. Crying anti-semitism on this score is just the same as when Jesse Jackson starts yakking about "another Selma." Jack Wertheimer has an interesting article making a similar point in the Dec '04 Commentary... can't find a free link, though. [Ben H.: 1/3/05 16:50]


	&-Lit Clue Example: "On a smaller strict proper subset of that ..."! (8) Starts with "p". An obscurish word, but not a mathematical term. Also, this clue is not an anagram, charade, or reversal. [Doug: 1/3/05 16:26]


	Public Relations Idea Re-reading that Pat Buchanan transcript got me thinking about how the Jewish community might improve its image in the American heartland. Where I grew up in Michigan there was a church with a sign that said "Christ died for our sins." Presumably this a good thing. Therefore I think the local synagogue could win a lot of friends with a sign of its own: "We killed Christ for your sins." [Doug: 1/3/05 15:17]


	Deprunification Did I say "best"? I meant that Anchorman was the most underappreciated. "Eternal Sunshine" was the best movie, I agree. As for "Goodbye Lenin", I stand by my comment: Just because a script can write itself, you shouldn't necessarily let it. Bowman's "culture war" quote still seems wrong under the interpretation you give it. If the war is between two abstracta called "sexual mores", one pro-monogamy, one pro-promiscuity, then the latter has clearly won decisively, as you say. But I don't see how an abstractum can wage war, and I don't believe that (except during an anomolous stretch of the 1960's) individual people have promoted promiscuity as such, as an ideology. People seduce other people who would otherwise remain celibate or monogamous, not in order to promote a set of mores, but in order to get laid. All those secular Jews show promiscuity on television not to corrupt Christendom, but to get rich because people like to watch sex. What's missing here is anything resembling force -- there is nothing remotely like "murder" or this unnamed-thing-worse-than-murder to which Bowman compares the counterculture's (or whatever's) actions. [Doug: 1/3/05 15:04]


	Culture War All I know is that in this war, I consider countertenors unlawful combatants! Yechhh! [Ben H.: 1/3/05 08:46]


	Prune Me! James Bowman is the irascible, polemical movie critic of The American Spectator. Like David Edelstein in Slate, Bowman's a guy who can't get past his politics (nothing else could explain ranking Team America over the South Park Movie). Unlike Edlestein, he has something to say. Bowman, for example, observed that vulgar Freudianism serves as the state religion of Hollywood. That's on point, and almost unargubale. The Bowman comment I cited comes from his review of "A Knight's Tale", and treats directly the massacre of history at Hollywood's hands. More broadly, I expect Bowman refers to the slaughter visited by popular culture on pre-1940s mores. Again, he's right. It rates Bush much too highly to believe his election, or current dominance of the Republican party will do anything to ease the stranglehold adolescent sexuality has on popular culture. The Top 40 just is the abattoir of values Bowman suggests. Also, prune I may be (I didn't see Anchorman), but can it possibly be better than Goodby Lenin or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? [Ben A.: 1/3/05 01:09]


	Best Movie of 2004 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy Moreover -- if you disagree, you are a benighted prune. [Doug: 1/2/05 23:22]


	Culture War Comment Pithy but wrong, if the "culture war" he's talking about is what usually goes by that name -- the traditionalist/conservative prig-hypocrites (Bill Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly) versus the libertarian-vulgarians (Maureen Dowd, Puff Daddy). Both sides are vicious; I seem to recall a bitterly fought election a few months ago whose sides roughly aligned with these. Or is he talking about something else, like the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the west? I'm confused. Also, I'm unable to guess where countertenor James Bowman comes down in this fight -- for the traditional virtues of classical music, or for social-fabric-rending transvestite preening? [Doug: 1/2/05 21:43]


	Pithy Not that I approve of it myself, but the metaphor of “culture war” would seem to imply two more or less evenly matched forces struggling with might and main to master and destroy or disperse each other. Yet much of what goes under that name is more like culture murder.Even that expression would be to dignify an act in which too often the aggressiveness and bloodthirstiness of the attack by cultural vandals encounters nothing like itself on the other side, but only the passivity, meekness and uncomprehending submission of an animal being led to the slaughter. --James Bowman [Ben A.: 1/2/05 03:02]


	Happy New Year Jörg managed to secure a whole cod, just line-caught and flown in from Maine, 15 pounds without head. It's a north-German tradition, apparently, to poach one of these in vegetable broth and serve it with a variety of sauces (mustard, horseradish, etc.) which is what we did. Walt and Susan brought two bottles of 1927 sherry. (It had a honey-like consistency; the answer to Ben A's brandy question may be to age the brandy for 77 years, or possibly to reduce it over the stove.) 2005 is off to a good start. Also, it's the 100th anniversary of Einstein's first relativity paper, and therefore a propitious year for my spacetime project. I don't feel like I'm within a year of solving my problem completely, but who knows. [Doug: 1/1/05 13:42]


	Magensium Memories I just had my own brush with that cartoon, Ben A. Back in Michigan, my parents asked me for the fifth time to please remove some of my old schtuff that had been encumbering their house -- mostly books, notebooks, and papers. They have every right to ask this; at age thirty-two, one should either have a large enough home to store one's old crap, or enough money to put it in storage, or enough sense to just throw it away. I have only the third, so I flipped through about thirty pounds of old, mostly school-related printed material, saving little. One thing I came across was a handout for a core-curriculum class that I think Ben A and I took together, "The Development of the Modern State". It featured a xerox of the cartoon, possibly with the word "magnesium" replaced with "pike square", an infantry arrangement that was crucial to the Swiss victory over the Burgundians (or the French over the Savoyards or something) in some fifteenth-century battle. It was the professor's contention that the advent of the pike square required a more administratively sophisticated military, and this sparked centralization and bureaucracy and ultimately the modern state. (Just last night we were talking about successful books of the magnesium-explains-everything genre. Nobody's actually done magnesium, that I know of, but you do have Salt and Cod. ) Oddly, upon returning to New York I got an e-mail from my friend Dave from grad school, who was moving and, needing to pare down his library, asked how he could reconcile himself to parting with books. The straight answer, of course, is that you have to cultivate non-attachment. You have to see books as a cycle rather than a one-way flow; books come in, books go out. But for me there's a second answer. I imagine my own magnesium-theory (the idea that the creation of new mathematical possibilities explains spacetime) panning out; I imagine my own name completing the sequence "Newton, Einstein, ____" rather than the sequence "Lamarck, Pons, ____"; and then I imagine annoying junior scholars from obscure colleges rummaging through my nachlass in order to write long dull unreadable books about me, and it warms my heart to think that by throwing out all my old papers I am thwarting them. [Doug: 1/1/05 13:27]


	Murphy Rings Out the Old and Rings In the New Having spent several New Year's Eves frantically trying to close the books for the fund's year-end, facing an anxious choice between leaving some financial loose end untied or bolloxing up New Year's social plans, I decided this year I would drop the pretense that I can party away the year's waning minutes like everyone else. I left my evening entirely free. Predictably, then, this is the year that I perfected the art of marking for year-end. I wrapped it up before 5pm. That's not to say that the process was without frustration. Having the fiscal year align with the calendar year means one has to pry valuations out of counterparties on literally the worst business day of the year for the task. 252nd out of 252, without a doubt. Nearly everyone is gone; those who are not (justifiably) want to leave as early as possible. This week would be the one all year during which I would feel comfortable taking a vacation out of computer-range, for trading comes to a complete halt. Yet, I need to man the desk in order to make sure the year-end marking process goes smoothly. No matter how many minatory emails I send out, no matter how many calls I make following up on those emails, several valuations inevitably fail to materialize. The frantic calls that take up all December 31st seem moreover calculated to emphasize by contrast the drudgery to which I've been relegated. To wit, the excuses of the people I can raise on phone rely on describing the exotic holidays of the people who were supposed to provide valuations. "Gee, I'm not sure what to tell you... the trader's off glacier skiing in Greenland, and his backup's on Barbados.. or maybe Barbuda, I can't remember. Either way, I can't reach him." "You see, mate, the thing is Borislav trades that name, and he's visiting his family in Magadan." "I reached Gerhard on the slopes at Gstaad, and I think he said 90bps, but we got cut off." I am denied even the satisfaction of yelling at someone, for the employees left behind are either in the same pitiful situation as I (and therefore deserving of condolence rather than abuse) or so junior as to be entirely remote from responsibility and incapable, regardless of the pressure I bring to bear, of remedying their colleagues' negligence. Every year, I get one person (typically very junior) who will hear my plaintive requests for some forgotten mark and come back to me with an obliviously cheerful offer to get it for me after the holiday. In this case, a girl who told me not to worry as she was sure her team could get a mark for me on MOnday. "Oh, great, Monday, then," I said. "Wait a sec." I half-cupped the mouthpiece. "Donald, can you look at the calendar? What year is Monday? 2005?! And we're in what year now, 2004?" I addressed myself to the girl again: "Yeah, i am looking at the calendar here, and it seems that Monday is NEXT YEAR. That would sort of defeat the purpose of YEAR END marks, wouldn't it now..." And my reputation as a prick solidifies just a bit more... [Ben H.: 1/1/05 03:10]


	Flunking Noir 101 The old man didn't move or speak, or even nod. He just looked at me lifelessly. The butler pushed a damp wicker chair against the backs of my legs and I sat down. He took my hat with a deft scoop. Then the old man dragged his voice up from the bottom of a well and said: "Brandy, Norris. How do you like your brandy, sir?" "Any way at all," I said. The butler went away among the abominable plants. The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings. "I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a third of a glass of brandy beneath it. You may take your coat off, sir. It's too hot in here for a man with blood in his veins." --Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep We don't often have champagne in the house, so I thought I'd try it. So help me, I cannot get it to work. I am tilting the glass; I am pouring over the back of a spoon; I am using all my sister's bartending tricks. These liquors will not layer. As far as I can tell champagne is denser than brandy. Was Chandler, as per usual, bluffing his way through life, or am I the tool of all tools? Responses welcome. And a happy, happy New Year to you all! Tsunami Politics You may recall Ralph Nader's post 9/11 bleat that he had been advocating stronger cockpit doors for years. Jerry Falwell, famously, suggested the Lord of Hosts might be dropping America's deflector shields as punishment for our tolerance of sodomy (and Ralph Neas). Well, we know the world is filled with variants of Matt Groenig's monomanic professor ("the counry that controls magnesium controls the universe!).* It does require an admirably purity of hackery, however, to see cataclysm and slaughter and immediately fit it into the same talking points you've been using for the past ten years. Now we see hacks everywhere putting the tsunami to similar use. It's no consolation to any of the victims, but this catastrophe is providing another opportunity for irredemable hacks to reveal themselves. Addendum: You all saw, I imagine, that John and Belle had plans for a family holday in phuket last week. These fell through, thank heavens. * This way off topic, but to me fascinating. I was going to use Groenig's Monomaniac Professor line -- The Nation that Controls Magnesium Controls the Universe! -- as a prelude to a partial affirmation and partial mocking of Steve Sailer's piece on the 10th anniversary "The Bell Curve." The points were going to be the following. First, we should all be at peace with the basic premises of "The Bell Curve" -- something like a "g" factor exists, it is heritable, and this has profound social consequence. Second, "The Bell Curve" evoked a paranoid response from the commentariat. Third, nonetheless, a smart guy like Sailer goes heavy into the Magnesium, representing the teapot-temptest generated by Murray and Herenstein into a Dreyfuss Affair-Scopes Trial-Copernican Revolution all in one, as witnessed by section headings like: "The neocons' slow distancing of themselves from The Bell Curve marked the death of neoconservatism as a serious intellectual movement." What was the point of all this? Even when you are very smart (as Sailer is), and basically on target, there's a danger of being so ensorcelled by ones own pet issues and heuristics that one becomes that guy at the bus stop every one backs away from. So anyway, I google "the nation that controls magnesium" to find the orignial comic, and the #1 rated item is an article by Steve Sailer using this exact quote to mock someone else. All desire to write about Steve Sailer's monomanian passed away, and instead I find myself wondering what is the unperceived magnesium underling all of my beliefs. [Ben A.: 1/1/05 02:16]


	Tsunami No joke, I know a few finance people based in HK who have bought beachfront property in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. So far as I know, none was around when the tsunami hit. As for the poor and the littorals, if your beachfront is far from any airport, unendowed with good infrastructure, let alone an outpost of Jet or Bungalow 8, it just isn't worth that much. Civil war doesn't help, either (for example, in Aceh). Doug, you're right that it is kind of dispiriting to see people take a completely random geological event and try to convert it to political use. For example, some in the MSM attempting to spin the story as Bush's lack of ostentatious condolence. Dudes, this is about 100K dead at the other side of the world; it has nothing to do with gum-flapping of American politicians. In a weird way, this argument exhibits the nationalistic self-centeredness that many of its exponents attribute to their political antagonists. To more practical matters: our Arg agriculture company is donating something like 30 tons of bagged, milled rice. Maersk, the Danish shipping company, is providing the freight, having teamed up with a Danish relief agency. [Ben H.: 12/29/04 20:41]


	Christmas Roundup Dao and I spent about four days in Michigan and about four hours trying to deal with our cancelled flights. Enjoyed seeing family and friends. Everybody was in good spirits but not necessarily in perfect health. (Every other person seemed to have chronic back pain, like me. It's a pandemic.) We drove to Kalamazoo to see Joel Ee. and his family; he's writing a computer wargame that sounds great, but I fear that progress will be slow given his full-time job -- Ben A once said that the only way to complete major projects while working full time is simply not to sleep. Saw John G, his wife Tomoko (who hopefully is feeling better now, his parents, and his two sons. Dao got an authentic Midwest experience including near-zero temperatures and a Christmas Eve meal whose main course was casserole topped with crumbled potato chips. New Years promises to be great -- we're going up to HK and Thor's family place, same as last year, when that album cover shot was taken. This year Jörg wants to prepare a traditional German new year's cod, which involves wrestling it live onto the dining table and chopping it with a machete or something. We'll see. [Doug: 12/29/04 18:53]


	Tsunami It's terrible. I'm unsure what else to say. The default reaction for a blog would be to segue from the horrible deaths into its particular idée fixe, e.g. those darned liberals in the case of Lileks. I'm not above this; being a New Yorker, my own thoughts turn to real estate. I would have expected to see a littoral littered with BMW's, yacht fragments, and drowned millionaires. I mean, imagine a tsunami off Malibu or the north shore of Long Island. What is it about Sri Lanka and Indonesia that the desperately poor are the ones who end up with ocean frontage? (I don't believe the answer is "the threat of tsunamis".) Ben H, this may be an opportunity for your fund ... P.S. on "UN out of NY", I agree completely. The U.S. seems to have a clunky "carrot and stick" approach to the U.N. -- reward them (e.g. by rejoining UNESCO) when they act sanely, punish them (e.g. by withholding funds) when, as is more often the case, they don't. I say we streamline this to a "carrot stick" approach, minus the sour-cream dip: what we give the U.N. will keep it alive, barely, but will be bland and aesthetically unappealing. I'm thinking Detroit for the new headquarters. [Doug: 12/29/04 17:58]


	UN Out of NY New Yorkers will have to bear yet additional burdens for the privilege of hosting the U.N. The New York Sun reports on a deal that I think I've discussed with you, Doug, but about which I have not posted on thebandarlog. The U.N.'s main headquarters buildings have fallen into a state of physical decay that rivals the organization's moral decrepitude. The U.N. wants to build a new office tower to house its army of bureaucrats while their main hive, the energy-gobbling, asbesdos-ridden Secreteriat building, undergoes renovation. Although the UN has plenty of unused land on its East Side campus, the organization proposed to build a 35-story tower on an adjacent lot, one of the few city parks in the neighborhood. That the UN might use its own parkland (not publicly accessible) at the north end of its campus was briefly considered and quickly rejected. Heaven forfend that the panjandrums lose their "light and air." The supine sinecure seekers at that notorious patronage dumping-ground, United Nations Development Corp, not surprisingly signed on. The neighborhood has been promised some sort of East River promenade as compensation, but these plans are of course hazier, longer-term and of infinitely less interest to the UN and UNDC. "So what, Ben?" you may ask. "I don't live in dull, old Turtle Bay!" Alas, it is not merely the fogeys of Turtle Bay, nor even just New Yorkers who will face a burden. All U.S. taxpayers will get plucked. The project's outlays will be funded by the Federal Government and the UNDC. The former will make an interest-free loan to the UN for somewhere north of $1bio, while the later will float tax-exempt bonds for something like $600mio. The U.N. will provide the operating cash flow to service this debt. The NPV cost to the U.S. inherent in this financing approach runs to approximately $800mio, according to a GAO study. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Get the UN out of NY. That I think the UN is disgusting slough of corruption that serves these days mainly to legitimize vile despotisms makes its presence all the more offensive to me, but is in no way essential the argument that the institution should be located elsewhere. New York city is an riot of activity; its smooth functioning makes unusual demands of its residents, who face as a result a profusion of rules and restrictions governing their behavior. Does it make sense, then, to throw in 20 or 30 thousand people whose status renders them immune to all these rules? New York traffic barely circulates at the best of times. Ought we host a fleet of vehicles permitted to park wherever they please? Every time the General Assembly plenary rolls into town, streets get blocked off, motorcades zip hither and thither snarling traffic and, despite all these precautions, the world leaders in town can hardly be considered secure in such a densely packed environment. Midtown Manhattan is one of the most economically productive spots on the planet. Is it logical to site the U.N. such that this neighborhood grinds to a halt several times a year? For the very same reason, Midtown Manhattan is one of the most expensive locales on earth. Poor countries need to shell out big bucks for UN Missions and pay comparatively fat salaries to their diplomats here. Is that the best use of their scarce resources? Of course not. It is another sign of the U.N.'s moral bankruptcy that the diplomats prefer to stay here. After all, if you only care about yourself, why protest an expenses-paid posting to fun, lively New York. Move the U.N. to a more sensible location -- someplace isolated, cheap, and without much economic activity to disrupt -- and the world's kleptocrats will have one less cushy patronage job to hand out. [Ben H.: 12/29/04 09:50]


	French Humor I'll have to check some of my contacts on the ground for this one; my familiarity with French literature is probably a lot shallower than you'd imagine. That caveat being said, my impression is that French satire peaks quickly with Molière, comes back up to a lower peak with Voltaire (the various non-Candide snippets I've read did little for me), and it's all en aval from there. (Balzac would be another peak though.) Novels in France today all seem deadly serious; satire seems more confined to journalism, e.g. the Canard Enchaîné. Amélie Nothomb's "Stupeur et tremblements" was a funny (possibly libelous) account of the Japanese; I'm told that the movie, now showing up in art houses in NYC, was not so good. [Doug: 12/28/04 23:14]


	Academic Satire While we're on the topic, let me recommend Richard Russo's Straight Man as a delightful example of the genre (set in an English Department, rather than among historians). Though he doesn't cite it, the whole book springs from the old saw: in academia the fights are so bitter because the stakes are so low. Doug, what would you point to as a good example of a genuinely amusing French satiric novel? Is there such a thing? Honestly, I've never really derived much enjoyment at all from the French sense of humor. Yet, I consider myself pretty open to other cultures' notion of funny. My undergrad thesis dealt with humor in classical Latin literature. For supposed avatars of sophistication, the French rely to a startling degree on slapstick and madcappery. THat was my impression, at least. [Ben H.: 12/28/04 19:02]


	Lucky John Bull One noteworthy comparative-literature point about Lucky Jim is that there's nothing in French literature to compare it to (that I'm aware of). And France desperately needs something of the sort: the sententious puffery that Amis ridicules is everywhere in France, so much so that to mock it is to appear anti-French. (Sententious intellectual snobs are to France what jingoistic knuckleheads are to America; they have managed to conflate themselves with their respective nations' identities so thoroughly as to make criticism impossible.) The ape scene I quoted is a wonderful example of the Brits' ability to laugh at themselves and their own history. If you can laugh at your history, you can keep it from paralyzing you, elect forward-thinking people like Thatcher, and generally become a vibrant nation. If not, you get stuck in a situation where dynamism, entrepreneurship, and reform can be blocked instantly by any solemn-faced twat who cares to invoke magic words like solidarité or l'exception française. I would happy to write the novel that pops France's balloon, but I fear it has to be written by someone on the inside to have much effect. [Doug: 12/28/04 16:25]


	He Who Knows Where The Bodies Are Buried Ends Up A Buried Body I may have mentioned to you guys some of the monkey business I got wind of this year (via my job) related to the Ukraine election. One scheme that the Kuchma government brought off was taking on "quickie" loans, very cheap to publicly traded paper, in the name of various mininstries rather than in the name of the sovereign. Circumstantial evidence suggested that some large portion of the proceeds of these loans were directed not to the projects referenced but instead to the Yanukovych campaign. The Transport Ministry was the borrower on several tranches. Today, the Transport Minister turned up dead of gunshot wounds. If you're going to cheat, you'd better make sure you're on the winning side. Terry McAuliffe, be grateful you live in America and not Ukraine! [Ben H.: 12/28/04 12:12]


	Top Two Medieval-Historian Novels of Last 51 Years I'm going with John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Kingsley Amis's 1953 Lucky Jim, which I just finished, and which I recommend to anyone well-disposed to British humor (in its linguistic or its slapstick funny-faced Mr. Bean versions) or ill-disposed to academia. The books have a lot in common. They both have hilariously-drawn characters, medievalist heros, transcendent farce, plots that build to a comic mini-apocalypse. The big differences are in tone -- Dunces' humor is bawdier, more physical, more American, than Lucky Jim's -- and in main parodic target. While both authors smash the sententious/monastic pose of academia against the all-too-human lives of its inhabitants to generate comedic energy, Toole does his smashing within one person (the gross, gluttonous failure Ignatius Reilly), Amis does it with all his academic characters, not just the failures. So Amis's humor is broader in its target, if not in its style: he shows that academia has a natural tendency to intolerable sententious posturing. Here is my favorite passage, in which Jim Dixon is unwillingly preparing the public speech on "Merrie England" that the history department is making him give. "What, finally, is the practical application of all this? Can anything be done to halt, or even to hinder, the process I have described? I say to you that something can be done by each one of us here tonight. Each of us can resolve to do something, every day, to resist the application of manufactured standards, to protest against ugly articles of furniture and table-ware, to speak out against sham architecture, to resist the importation into more and more public places of loudspeakers relaying the Light Programme, to say one word against the Yellow Press, against the best-seller, against the theater-organ, to say one word for the instinctive culture of the integrated village-type community. In that way we shall be saying a word, however small in its individual effect, for our native tradition, for our common heritage, in short, for what we once had and may, some day, have again -- Merrie England." With a long, jabbering belch, Dixon got up from the chair where he'd been writing this and did his ape imitation all round the room. With one arm bent at the elbow so that the fingers brushed the armpit, the other crooked in the air so that the inside of the forearm lay across the top of his head, he wove with bent knees and hunched, rocking shoulders across to the bed, upon which he jumped up and down a few times, gibbering to himself. What's remarkable is that the style Dixon hates himself for aping is not the utter gibberish of contemporary humanities that the three of us are always decrying; nor is it even dry technical 1960's social-science-ese. In fact it is almost the clear, direct, what-does-this-mean-for-me-personally style that is sometimes offered (e.g. by me) as the solution to the malaise of the humanities. So Amis could be showing us something important that we don't want to hear: that the humanities' tendency toward self-destruction is not a mere matter of style or emphasis. (Near the end of the book, around the climactic send-up of historical puffery, Dixon looks out his window and sees construction work being done on a physics laboratory. I think you can read this detail as Amis's comment on the future of academia.) [Doug: 12/27/04 12:38]


	~~Happy Holidays~~ Merry Christmas I'd like to wish everyone, but especially my two collaborators on this site, Merry Christmas. Dao and I are going to East Lansing for a few days. Posting may be spotty; maybe not. The cold I've had has drained my energy for weblog posting and everything else. I expect things to pick up in a few days. [Doug: 12/23/04 14:23]


	Wednesday Night At the Opera Countertenors are creepy. On the other hand, maybe it's just me. [Ben H.: 12/23/04 09:38]


	Mark Your Calendars In Red This is a special day: the day I link to an item from the New York Times for reasons other than denunciation or mockery. I think Elliot Spitzer is a genuinely scary and dangerous figure. This view has not gotten much traction among those I propound it to, not even my fellow Malefactors of Great Wealth here at the office. (Actually, from a purely money-maximizing standpoint, Spitzer is possibly a good thing for us. We have a hyper-vigilant compliance effort, so we are much less likely to attract his destructive attentions than most of our competitors). Leonard Orland makes basically the same case more clearly than I have been able to. [Ben H.: 12/22/04 17:19]


	Standing For Hallelujah There are some great (possible apocryphal) stories about this tradition. The leading explanation is that when King George first heard it at Convent Garden, he was so moved that he stood up from his seat. And when the King stands, everybody stands. The other (almost certainly apocryphal) story is that Haydn was in the audience, and moved to tears, stood and exclaimed "he is master of us all." I love the relationship to art these storise: reverential and sincere as opposed to niggling and ironical. We need more of this. [Ben A.: 12/22/04 13:10]


	More Handel Traditions For the Hallelujah chorus, which comes about 70% of the way through Messiah, everybody in the audience stood up. Maybe this behavior has a liturgical origin; it now seems to server as a welcome seventh-inning stretch. You might want to extend this tradition to the opera tomorrow night, Ben. [Doug: 12/21/04 16:05]


	'Tis The Season For Long Handel I'm going to see Rodelinda at the Met tomorrow night. The lyrics will not provide me with nearly as much amusement as in the case of Messiah, since they are in Italian (I think). [Ben H.: 12/21/04 14:41]


	Drinks are on you, then! I must report, sadly, that bonuses in the crackpot-theoretical-physicist sector were nil as usual. Seriously, I love the poem, and it renews my conviction that we need to versify more here. Maybe some new year's resolutions are in order for the site. What do you guys think about a monthly cryptic crossword, for example? Last night we went to Carnegie Hall to see the Messiah (the oratorio, not the person, although to judge by the standing ovation He may have been on stage somewhere). Once again Min comped us; Dao is almost done with her quartet's site at daedalusquartet.com, but the rollover imagemap on the homepage is proving difficult -- right now if you move your mouse over Min and her brother Kyu they seem to be the same person. They are not. Despite lacking the unique selling point of having Siamese twins on the violins, the quartet were chosen, as I just learned from clicking around the site, to perform with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Nice. As for the Messiah, I was able to focus on and enjoy the music for first hour, alternately focus and meditate for the second, and only daydream for the third, sometimes amusing myself by trying to make out the lyrics without referring to the program. At one point I could have sworn they were chanting "Breakfast! Breakfast! Breakfast!" The complete version of the Messiah does let you hear some good stuff that doesn't usually make the "highlights" cut, like the "Death where is thy sting" duet which has some nice counterpoint, and "All we like sheep", which has to one of the most ridiculous lyrics in history. Still, it's a long long piece, and I'm even more inclined than usual to think that the audience's standing ovation was primarily for itself. [Doug: 12/21/04 11:21]


	Vioxx: Worse Than We Thought? You may recall that Merck once claimed that the higher cardiac adverse events in observde in an early Vioxx study stemmed from a comparison to the putatively cardioprotecive NSAID naproxen. That's looking less plausible. [Ben A.: 12/21/04 11:05]


	Society for Satiric Poetry Reunion The New York Times reported recently on this year's trend in Wall Street Bonuses. Once again, it looks like proprietary traders will pull down more than i-bankers. Prop traders, it seems, have been handed out much better deals, so good as to lead to poetic raptures. Shall I compare thee to a banker's pay? Thou art much larger and less taxeable. Big deals can ebb or swiflly flow away And Spitzer's team pursues, unmerciful. Sometimes too long the hours of banking run Unceasing toil that leaves life's ardor dimm'd; And every pitch is hell 'ere it's been won, As bank expense accounts once rich are trimm'd. But thy awarding shall owe naught to fate Nor lose posession of that size thou boast Nor shall Chance shrink the payout's rate While in eternal lines to time thou grow'st. So long as men know greed and there's a screen So long trade I, and ten percent's for me. [Ben H.: 12/20/04 11:16]


	Now Pitching For The Red Sox, #21, Clement The hot stove tide has turned! ~~The Johnson trade falls through~~ and the Sox pick up Clement. This is a solid signing. You heard it hear first: Clement wins 16+. Update: D'oh! The state of play as of 12-18 ....Evil..............Good ..Johnson.........Schilling ..Mussina.........Wells ..Pavano..........Clement ..Wright............Arroyo ..Brown(?)........Wakefield/Halama Bad medicine [Ben A.: 12/18/04 12:51]


	I Cannot Think of a Witty Title Commensurate with this Story You need to click [Ben A.: 12/17/04 19:03]


	PFE Down 14% on the open Pfizer stock getting reamed on the open, as Pfizer announces results of a study showing Celebrex correlated with higher rate of heart problems than placebo. The curse of COX-2 continues! [Ben H.: 12/17/04 10:30]


	Complete-Overhaul-of-Humanity's-Understanding-of-Universe Update Two notes -- first, a link to a little piece about Einstein and Gödel via Science and Politics Daily -- er, Arts and Literature Daily. It underlines the two guys' joint role in demoting time to a fourth dimension of space. This demotion is what Bergson considered the most serious mistake of modern thought. He was right; more on my quest to prove him right in a minute. As for this piece, I suspect the author overstates the intimacy of Einstein and Gödel; his whole project sounds like a classic case of let's-magnify-some-tiny-aspect-of-a-scholarly-subject -so-that-we-can-write-a-book-that-doesn't-just-rehash- the-existing-big-syntheses. He even writes of a "conspiracy of silence" to suppress knowledge of their collaboration. Sure, that's it; the Jesuits want to erase the record of Jesus's true parentage that Gödel encoded into his solution to the field equations, and you're going to heroically bring it to light for us. Sigh; academia. (Still the piece is short and worth reading.) As for my own spacetime theory, it's moving forward, now that I've quit my full-time job (Dao's being away in France has also allowed me to stay up preposterously late working on it). Last night I had what looks like my first big insight. I stayed up until 3 a.m. trying to generalize to N dimensions that theorem I posted about a line with a "built-in metric". I thought I was making progress and then suddenly saw a counterexample that conclusively blocked the proof I had sketched. Bummed and tired, I decided just to go to bed, but of course I couldn't stop thinking about it -- I wanted to figure out why this countexample existed here in 2 dimensions, when in one dimension it worked fine. After a few minutes I had figured out not only this, but also how to change the method of the proof so that there would be no counterexamples. (N.B. I still have to work out the details so this still could fail.) The amazing thing is that the extra condition apparently needed to make the proof work in multiple dimensions is that more and more real-numbered coordinates become available as time increases. And this is, in a way, the main point of my overall Bergson-inspired theory, that new possibilities emerge over time. I hadn't really grasped how the two unintuitive main parts of my theory -- that the earlier-than ordering of spacetime points is the inclusion relation on collections of pure sets, and that a single partial ordering can be responsible for the metric structure of spacetime -- were going to come together. Last night I figured out that a structure can have the second property only if it meets the first (in a sense). I didn't actually get to sleep until 5:15. [Doug: 12/17/04 01:32]


	Ataturk Clapping In Hell We're hearing that EU and Turkey have come to terms on an invitation for Turkey to start accession negotiations. Looks like there's an October 3, 2005 start date, without onerous preconditions. The European public is, I'm sure, still quite sceptical of the wisdom of letting Turkey in. But they will soon realize that barring an unexpected upwelling of fertility among Europeans, they will have no choice but to pad their labor force with Muslim immigrants. It's just a question of whether it will be angry, tribal amoralists from North Africa and the Arab Middle East, or modern, secular, democratic Turks. I know who I would pick! [Ben H.: 12/16/04 17:32]


	VHMET These jokers, or at least their argument, got an article in the Economist at some point. I am recalling something perhaps in a "great ideas of the next millenium" special edition (or maybe I'm just flashing on Attaturk* again) There's a lot to love on the website, including, but not limited to the photo captioned "Helping young minds explore the world and grow in awareness," the disclaimer "The Movement is opposed to bad stuff," and the logo with the human-shaped hole embracing a jubilant dodo and a mystery reptile. Greater yet in awesomeness, the mascot lizard for human extinction appears to be a stegosaurus. This is, simply, the biggest frame-up of all time.** I will admit that homo sapiens sapiens might be implicated in that Dodo unpleasantness. (Although, in all frankness, that bird was a goner. Eventually some spider was going to balloon over to Mauritius and take that flightless, gentle and delicious species out. If it wasn't us, it would have been a raft full of voles, or sloths, or Care Bears. That's all I'm saying.) The point being that the Dodo thing is a fair cop. Not so the dinosaurs. Mama Eve's boy ain't taking the rap for no comet. Just for the record, I had Attaturk's role in thegenocide in mind when I suggested that his virtues didn't merit comparison to Washington's. So to Doug's friend: no I do not endorse genocide! The Bandarlog is opposed to bad stuff. Literally. In the long, sordid history of fall guys and patsies (Thomas Moore, Sacco and Vanzetti, Boethius, Mumia) you will rarely find one separated from the crime by 100 million years. 12 Million Dollars for Hideki Irabu!* The man who carps at the decisions of the Boston Red Sox franchise in these sunlit days displays ingratitude comparable to Satan's. And surely, only a blasphemer doubts our Priest-King Theo, and Bill James, his sagacious vizier. I know this, I do. So let me merely suggest that defensive sabermetrics must have really, really improved to make the brass confident that Edgar Renteria and his .350 (and dropping!) lifetime on base percentage worth $10 million per. This point seems extra-specially salient when a unique, transcendent pitching talent just walked out the door over $13 million. As for the Wells deal: good move. That fat, gouty SOB can pitch. SDI Dude, it is so going to work. Why can't you be a team player on this? It's the extra three years of physics, isn't it? [Ben A.: 12/16/04 00:54]


	The Success of Bush's "Admit No Mistakes" Strategy Wins It New Converts Every couple years they try to test our missile defense system, hoping to demonstrate that if a dictator telegraphs us his rocket's flight plan and time of launch several months in advance, we'll be prepared. They usually fail; yesterday's 85 million dollar failure continues the tradition. But listen to the DOD's spokesman: Despite the disappointment, today's event was not a total failure, said Richard A. Lehner, an agency spokesman. He said "quite a bit" had been learned from the aborted test, which he called "a very good training exercise." He noted that the rocket that failed to rise can be used later. I think the lesson is clear. The missile defense budget must be doubled or tripled immediately, to save us future embarrassing failures. [Doug: 12/15/04 21:28]


	Those ZPG Guys Are Such Sell-Outs! Anyone who truly considers the question must come to the conclusion that Voluntary Human Extinction is the only answer. Apparently, though, Great Men like Ataturk have a stronger attraction to the Involuntary Human Extinction (partial) movement. [Ben H.: 12/15/04 18:26]