Bandarlog


	They Keep Coming, These Restaurants Dealer took me out to the strangely named "David Burke & Donatella" last night, a restaurant that takes the New York dining cult of ginned-up exoticism almost to a level of self-parody (example: a certain dish was described as being served on a "bed of Himalayan salt."; this turned out not to be a few grains of the stuff, but a plate-sized 2-inch thick slab). That said, the food was delicious. Halfway through our meal, the table next to us filled up. In the seat adjacent to mine: the Reverend Al Sharpton, looking almost svelte (I should have asked him who his personal trainer is). But then I thought to myself, where does the money come from? I mean, didn't he file for bankruptcy when Steve Pagones won his dafamation suit against the Rev? This scene was much more "livin' the dream" than "I have a dream"... [Ben H.: 3/11/05 07:28]


	Imagine if Bush and Gore decided to share the presidency in 2000 ... "See, we're gonna take your social security and put it in a lockbox. Then, we're gonna put the lockbox on a rocket and send it to Mars. Now that's security!" [Doug: 3/10/05 08:05]


	Craptastic Voyage I'm back from a less-than-thrilling twelve-day trip to Paris. The best thing was seeing a bunch of friends. The worst thing was the weather. I thought coffee would be a good replacement for meditation as a catalyst for my math work. Not true, it turns out. So it's partially my fault -- if I had kept to my meditation schedule I would probably be less frustrated with my lack of math progress there. At least I got back before the strike. Paris is shutting down tomorrow and people are taking to the streets. On what grounds? Who knows. "Solidarité" presumably. Sometimes you just get despondent and think the French will never get their shit together. On my cynical days I think I understand their erstwhile support for the idea that some peoples (i.e. the Arabs) just aren't suited for self-governance -- they know whereof they speak. [Doug: 3/9/05 18:59]


	The China Bubble 46 million bureaucrats is just the beginning. The economy may digest them a lot more quickly than the millions of new apartments going up in China's booming coastal cities. The Chinese real estate bubble makes New York property look like a sober investment... [Ben H.: 3/8/05 18:44]


	Grand Strategy Minute Is China a paper tiger? Poetic Necessity I don't know anything about the details of the Boeing scandal. Unless my extensive reading of genre fiction has led me astray, however, "Stonecipher" is not a name one can trust. It simply reeks of supervillany. Witness: "You're mad Stonecipher!" "Jenkins ... you must stop him... My God, the agony ... Stonecipher!" "The Stonecipher project! I thought that evil dream died in Hitler's bunker" Boeing -- and the world -- can breath easier now that Doctor Stonecipher's schemes have been foiled.... but for how long? [Ben A.: 3/8/05 17:52]


	Boeing Boner Just seeing headlines come across the tape: Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher has been "terminated". The reason: "relationship with female executive." And no, I don't think they mean a mentoring relationship. Now, what's interesting here is that the Boeing board's statement admits that 1) the relationship was consensual; 2) the female executive did not report directly to Stonecipher; 3) there is no indication that it affected business decisions; 4) there is no indication that it affected the female executive's compensation. Yet, the board decided to fire him because the facts "reflected poorly on Stonecipher's judgment." Huh? I thought we have illustrious precedent that when it comes to important leadership positions, sex is an entirely personal matter. Maybe Lanny Davis will volunteer to take to the airwaves in defense of Stonecipher? When Bill Clinton got caught, what bothered me was that it was the legislative and judicial initiative of his own allies that had rendered such conduct legally dangerous. As such, it was asserted that if a CEO should behave in a similar fashion, he would certainly lose his job. And Clinton's defenders tried to make mincing distinctions: that the relationship was consensual, that there was not a direct reporting relationship, that it didn't relate to policy. Well, Harry Stonecipher can make the same claims. He'll just have to do it from his retirement home... UPDATE: It is also notable that Stonecipher admitted to the affair immediately when confronted. No indignant finger-wagging denials, no smear campaigns against his fuck-buddy. The guy really should have asked Clinton for some tips on how to handle this kind of situation. [Ben H.: 3/7/05 08:25]


	Frigwad. I would be posting more from Paris if I could hook my laptop up to the internet. But I seem to have a busted network card and am confined to writing from an internet cafe. The weather here is just as bad as I expected -- at first too cold to walk outside, now too clogged with damp snow -- so I've been sitting around studying math that's giving my brain a first-class ass-kicking. I fear I have to push my coffee consumption up to the red zone if I'm ever going to understand this stuff. Very little else happening. Read "La peau de chagrin" which turns out not to be as good as "Le pere Goriot". Saw two documentary movies -- actually, I may post about these later. "Mondovino" and "Darwin's Nightmare". [Doug: 3/3/05 14:53]


	Buy Me a House! These tales of boiler rooms and handy men agitate and distress soon-to-be homeowners like me (we start looking once Deb’s residency match comes in with). Could you please, Ben H, conform to the new rules of discourse and stop mentioning facts that upset me? When You’re Right, You’re Right Posner on what the Summers affair tells us about University management : Apart from the misalignment of faculty and university interests, faculty at research universities, like intellectuals generally, tend not to be responsible participants in collective action, such as university governance. Stephen Metcalf on why Summers offends: ….academia has devolved into a series of now highly routinized acts of flattery, so carefully attended to that one out-of-place word is enough to fracture dozens of egos. Flattery is the appropriate mode of address from a blushing acolyte to a name-brand professor. Flattery is also the principal mode of address from an advertiser to a consumer, and by the time they reach college age, students have become well-accustomed to it.” [Ben A.: 3/1/05 18:09]


	Word Bank = Wolf Bank The World Bank is a strange institution, but none of its known idiosyncracies can explain their strong lupine onamastics preference when it comes to selecting a leader. The Financial Times reports that Paul Wolfowitz is the favored candidate for the presidency of the institution, currently held by James Wolfensohn. This must come as a great disappointment to the other contenders: Wolf Blitzer, Scott (Party of Five) Wolf, and the Wolfman Jack. [Ben H.: 3/1/05 14:20]


	Get Me A Rental Unit! I arrived back from London yesterday afternoon, to discover that much (but, strangely, not all) of my house was without power. Unfortunately, one of the areas left in the dark was the boiler room, so the heat was off, too. After a certain amount of frantic dialing, I found an electrician to come out to take a look. Apparently, it is a Con Ed issue; but the electrician made a temporary patch. While power is mostly restored (anything that runs on 220V won't work) for the moment, Con Ed will have to come to remove the patch once they've fixed the fault at the junction box out on the street. That means I need to stay home one day to let them in to do it. I have pretty much had it with owning my own home... Obligatory Strange Britishism I feel like I need to identify on each London visit one Britishism that has an amusingly different connotation in American English. On a sign at the security checkpoint at Heathrow: "...we care for and take action against assaults on our staff." You care for the assaults? I knew the English were kinky, but open advertisements of masochism at the airport?? [Ben H.: 2/27/05 10:38]


	But They Do Get Lung Cancer [Ben H.: 2/25/05 11:47]


	French Women Don't Get Fat Yeah, it takes a lot of calories to maintain all those neuroses. Real enviable. [Doug: 2/25/05 10:11]


	If And Only If You Haven't Seen This Before, It's Awesome ... Because once a given technical advance becomes familiar, the thrill wears off. But my friend Jason got Keyhole and for the moment it's in-frigging-credible. I could see the dormer windows of the room I grew up in. No shit. [Doug: 2/25/05 00:17]


	I Love the Net Here is a fascinating inside account of the EEOC v. Sears lawsuit, told by a historian retained by the defense. Here's a sample: The Sears defense not only had a historian on staff (me) and presented expert testimony from a women's historian (my ex-wife, Rosalind Rosenberg, of Barnard College) but to the great consternation of many historians it actually incorporated a strong feminist perspective in its argument. The workforce at Sears in the years at issue, we argued, had grown up in an America where sex roles, for better or worse, were real. Thus the "underrepresentation" (compared to what?) of women in such jobs as installing home heating systems was not necessarily the result of discrimination by Sears. To argue that one would expect an equal number of women and men to be interested in and available for all types of jobs, as the EEOC did implicitly and sometimes explicitly, was to deny the reality of sex roles, and thus undermine the justification of affirmative action for women. (Sears' voluntary affirmative action plan, incidentally, was so strong that the Nixon administration had regarded it as a quota system.) The percentage of women in various positions at Sears (selling hardware, clothes, appliances, air conditioners, etc.) closely tracked the percentage of women among sole proprietorships in those areas. Did women discriminate against themselves in choosing what businesses to run? Commission sales, in addition to requiring a certain amount of personal aggressiveness, required long hours and, often, access to a car. Was it necessarily Sears's fault that fewer women than men were interested in the risks and stress of selling on commission, that many more women than men chose to work part-time, and that a far smaller percentage of women had drivers' licenses and access to a car? The significance of these social facts would have been greatly attenuated if the EEOC lawyers had found and presented qualified women applicants who had been turned down, but they did not. The idea of feminist history being used to defend a large corporation accused of sex discrimination simply sent many historians around the bend, or off the deep end. Thus perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Sears -- in any event, what is most relevant here -- is that it ignited a fierce debate inside the history profession, and even outside, on the propriety of historians serving as expert witnesses on behalf of clients accused (let me repeat that: accused) of behavior most historians regarded with disgust. In fact, the behavior wasn't even necessarily central; most historians regarded corporations with disgust, and more than a few told me that even if Sears was innocent of the specific charges it, as a large employer, wasn't "really" innocent. It was hard to find a historian, especially anyone in women's history, who did not regard testifying for a corporation accused of sex discrimination the same way Richard Nixon, had he only been in private practice, would have regarded being asked to defend Alger Hiss. [Ben A.: 2/24/05 15:08]


	How Can I Construe This Positively? “Boys, they’re like the Monday crossword puzzle.” --My wife [Ben A.: 2/24/05 13:34]


	Public Service If the past discussion has interested you, this is the site to visit. [Ben A.: 2/24/05 13:18]


	Biscuit Conditional Seems to me like a combination of either suppressed apodosis or anacolouthon. Ben's account i think would be suppressed apodosis. If you are hungry, [then you will appreciate what i am about to tell you, namely that] there is a biscuit on the counter. Or you could look at it as anacolouthon (i.e. grammatical interruption / lack of sequence]: "If you are hungry-- [no wait, let me recast the sentence]. There is a biscuit on the counter." [Ben H.: 2/24/05 11:53]


	If You Like Austen, Then There's Bourbon in the Liquor Cabinet Could the answer be simple transitivity? Consider: (1) If you are hungry, then you should be looking for food (2) If you are looking for food, then there’s a biscuit on the counter (3) If you are hungry, then there’s a biscuit on the counter The concept of a statement’s “illocutionary point” – or translated from Austen-ese, the speaker’s purpose -- seems like a useful tool for the occasion. One who utters a biscuit conditional conveys information in the “then clause” that is only valuable/interesting in the event that his audience possesses the motivations referenced in the “if clause.” [Ben A.: 2/24/05 10:54]


	Karacas Krazies Comandante Chavez has been on a roll lately. You probably haven't heard about it, though, since the US media tend not to pay much attention to Venezuela. Chavez often talks about an "alternative model" for Latin America. Ever the big thinker, he appears to have moved on to a whole "alternative reality." Here he ties together capitalism and astronomy: Capitalism makes democracy impossible. Capitalism makes social justice impossible. If we don't change this system, the world is going to end. THe eternal existence of our planet is not guaranteed. Look at other planets. In Mars, there was water. It's possible they will soon find remains of living beings. Who knows how many years ago there was life on Mars? Mars is very similar to Earth... It's very likely there was life on Mars. It's possible the Martians couldn't keep life going on their planet. If only there had been a little, green Kyoto protocol, there would still be little green men. [Ben H.: 2/24/05 08:39]


	Pipped Again You guys might recall my post from a year-and-a-half ago, Fidelity (Investments) Is The Most Powerful COntraceptive, which argued that dropping fertility in the developed world could be explained by a combination of generous social insurance and financial deepening. One just needed to modify one's economic model to consider childbearing as form of savings. Well, some genuine economists have worked out this idea with more precision and depth and reached the same conclusion. Sadly, a colleague and I were just discussing making a paper out of this ourselves. Double drat! View an abstract here. NCLB The law strikes me as poorly designed in many respects, but I don't feel particularly qualified to comment on the strictly pedagogical ones. In outline, though, NCLB looks to me like an example of a "simulated market." The law calls for money to move around based on performance. But rather than let consumer preference define performance, government functionaries do. As we saw in Russia, perestroika, though in some ways closer to a market than what preceded it, led to a worse result. It could only be considered progress insofar as it served as a way station to true markets. The same can be said, I think, of NCLB. Unfortunately, NCLB looks more like the end of the road than an intermediate point, given the polical economy of education reform. And Full Circle Back to the Public Infrastructure of Care So let me try to tie this all together. Designing a "public infrastructure of care", having in mind a paramount goal like equalizing male and female labor-force participation, runs into the same problems as simulating a market. You substitute brute statistical measures for revealed preference. You build in no feedback mechanisms for unintended consequences. The developed world has developed a limited public infrastructure of care for the elderly. And look what's happened: the government may have disrupted the social mechanics of reproduction, and done so to an extent that renders the very infrastructure of care (Medicare and Social Security both being built atop demographic pyramids) untenable. [Ben H.: 2/24/05 05:56]


	NCLB Another thing Susan S. has extensive knowledge of is the "No Child Left Behind" act. She works part-time as a librarian in a Jersey City school. Over New Year's weekend she gave me a thorough description of what a disaster NCLB is. I'd be lying if I said I remembered the details of it, but apparently the "underperforming" schools like hers underperform mostly because so many of the neighborhood kids come from families that simply don't support learning; some kids will be bused at great expense to other schools, more will be left behind in a school whose funding is cut as punishment, where they will learn absolutely nothing. Like I said I don't really remember the details but a bipartisan panel just concluded a year of research with the bipartisan-panelese equivalent of "NCLB is a frigging disaster". [Doug: 2/23/05 23:32]


	Biscuit Conditional Congratulations Ben, you've just used what linguists call a "biscuit conditional", after the canonical example "If you're hungry, I left some biscuits on the table." (Your prize is a tin of McVitie's Oat Wads.) "If" statements like this drive linguists and logicians nuts, because they're not causal (my not having seen the Kinsley/Estrich flamewar does not cause it to be awesome) and they're not "material conditionals" (you are not asserting that at least one of "you have seen the flamewar" and "the flamewar is awesome" is true, since you clearly think the latter is true and there'd be no reason to mention the former). So why do we use "if" to express this sort of thing? My friend Susan S. is an apprentice linguist and doing groundbreaking research into this question. I'd be happy to put you in touch with her if you'd like the answer. Also "Biscuit Conditional" would be a great band name (I can write this because Dave Barry is retiring). [Doug: 2/23/05 23:17]


	Kinsely vs. Estrich If you haven't seen it, it's *awesome!* [Ben A.: 2/22/05 19:15]


	Goodbye, Ben Got called away on short notice to London, for the rest of the week. Not the best time of year for a London visit... [Ben H.: 2/22/05 19:10]


	Welcome Back, Ben! Arthur Kleinman's posse may well succeed in getting Summers dumped by shifting the gravamen of the faculty's complaints, and to lose Summers would indeed be a pity. But the seriousness of the loss has something to do with the grounds on which he gets ousted. If we force the faculty to fight Summers on grounds other than the fact that he broached the uncomfortable topic of inter-group difference, we win qualified victory for academic freedom. Deborah Solomon's Failed TimesSwarm It seems like Deborah was trying to provoke a good old-fashioned "TimesSwarm" against Sam Huntington. You know the drill, make a charge, the charge itself becomes news, the Times reports on the news it has created elsewhere in the paper, making it all bigger news. Kind of what Sara Rimer is trying to do to Larry Summers. But they aren't going to turn Sam Huntington or Larry Summers into Hootie Johnson. The swarm has lost its sting, namely its credibility as some sort of neutral arbiter of "what's news." Howell Raines may be a despicable man, but I am deeply appreciative of how he managed to defang the Times. Who Will Pay the Bills of Socialism Your argument, Ben, is, as you mentioned, an oldie-but-goodie. I have been trying to find a linkable text of E.L. Godkin's "Who Will Pay the Bills of Socialism." Over a hundred years ago, Godkin was making your point. Somebody pays for the generosity of the government. The greater the generosity, the more precisely it is its very objects who pay for it. I want to make a slightly different point about this "infrastructure of care" meme. The way its proponents refer to it, it sounds like something that was recently disassembled, or something which exists everywhere but here. For 99% of human history, there was no such concept as "public infrastructure of care." That legislative action designed to fundamentally alter the shape of human relations -- all to make it easier for some women to commodify their labor -- will proceed without scary unintended consequence is a breathtaking presumption. What sort of arrogance does it take to believe that your own clever design for an "infrastructure of care" will do better than organic social institutions like the nuclear family? [Ben H.: 2/21/05 21:26]


	I Want My Kids Writing Me Letters Like This Gaddis on the grand strategy of John Adams: And this was very much Adams`s aspiration for the United States within the North American continent, that we would not welcome the creation of a balance of power on the North American continent of the kind that had dominated Europe for so long because that led to wars and catastrophe, and so on. So Adams had very much the view that the United States must be the dominant power on the North American continent. And being an Adams, he lays this out most clearly in a letter to his mom, Abigail, in 1811, where he -- Dear Mother, the United States must dominate the North American continent. And yes, returning to -5 EST has given me insomnia, thank you for asking. [Ben A.: 2/21/05 05:08]


	Deborah Solomon: The Most Culpable Woman? From a Booknotes interview with Samuel Huntington: LAMB: As you know, people that watch you from afar -- journalists and others -- see mixed signals coming, including the interview that you did recently in "The New York Times" magazine. And I brought along it to read it so I could ask you about this. HUNTINGTON: OK. LAMB: This is from Debra Solomon (ph). HUNTINGTON: Yes. LAMB: "What political party do you belong to?" You answered, "I`m an old-fashioned Democrat. I was dead set against going into Iraq. HUNTINGTON: Right. LAMB: She asked, "Will you vote for Kerry, then?" HUNTINGTON: Yes. LAMB: "Oh, yes. I`ve met him several times. He lives a few blocks away from me on Beacon Hill." And she says, "How can you reconcile being a Democrat with your views on immigration and assimilation?" And you say, "Actually, both parties are divided on immigration, and as a scholar, I have a responsibility to study society and to try to call people`s attention to things they might not welcome looking at." HUNTINGTON: Right. Well, in that final answer, over my vigorous objections, they deleted my first sentence, which was, "I am in favor of immigration, but it has to be immigration with assimilation." LAMB: Why would "The New York Times" do that to you? HUNTINGTON: Well, you have to ask "The New York Times," but... LAMB: Did they let you see the interview before it ran? HUNTINGTON: Well, I -- no, I didn`t see it, but I insisted that I have a chance to look at -- to hear, at any rate. They wouldn`t -- said they couldn`t send it to me. And when that -- with that question, I said, Look, I want to make it clear I`m not opposed to immigration per se. I`m in favor of immigration. It`s been important. I say it`s more important earlier in the interview. But it has to be immigration with assimilation. And also, of course, as I point out, I`m married to the daughter of an immigrant, an Armenian immigrant. Unbelievable. Addendum: Don't miss the account of Huntington and his wife fending off a mugging. Addendum #2: This story has to be checked. I will email Solomon and the magazine tomorrow. [Ben A.: 2/21/05 04:32]


	Summers Squall Evidence suggests that Summers possesses an abrasive personality and a temperament unsuited for a figurehead role. The normal academic administrator exudes bland, sonorous verbiage like an octopus does ink. Had Summers the patience to cloak himself in this fashion he would have avoided the current, entirely unnecessary crisis. The more clever of his adversaries – like Anthro chair Arthur Kleinman -- are already shifting the debate from the substance of the speech, which only zealots find objectionable, to the proposition that a President who creates bad publicity is ipso facto incompetent. This angle has a great deal of traction, and Summers is in for a battle. Needless to say, you guys can count me in on any pro-Summers scheme. I do not care (much) about who rules Harvard, but it would disgraceful to see a president toppled for what amounts to candor. The Return of the Honor Student One of the great touches in Bonfire of the Vanities is how an initial false identification of the hit-and-run victim as an “honor student” becomes an inevitable part of every future media account of the case. The press loves this kind of thing. I bet 80% of the American public “knows” that John Ashcroft tried to cover up the breasts of a statue. Watch as Summer’s comments on inherent ability become another such touchstone. Here’s Judith Shulevitz’s in today’s NYT book review: I hate to think what America would be like should even the small number of women who could afford it decide just to hang it up. One imagines the halls of law firms, businesses, universities and newsrooms slowly thinning out of all but the youngest women, who, over time, would tend to be confined to jobs that don't lead anywhere, since no boss would want to see his investment in a fast-track employee rewarded by her leaving to have a baby. At the moment, more women than men get master's degrees and as many women as men get professional degrees, but that, too, could change, if a diminished idea of what women are capable of starts deflecting them from even beginning serious careers. (That a dearth of women in a particular field leads directly to doubt about their suitability for that field was made amply clear by the controversy last month over whether women lack the genetic capacity to succeed as professors of math and science. Maybe they do and maybe they don't, but you don't need genetics to explain why women might fail to rise to the top of a profession that requires an 80-hour workweek.) This was likely written before the release of the transcript, so we can’t fault Shulevitz too much (and either she, or some thoughtful editor, insured that these views are not directly attributed to Summers). Nonetheless, a more perfect travesty of Summers’ comments could hardly be imagined. You sure don’t need genetics to explain why woman might fail to rise to the top of a profession that requires an 80-hour workweek. Too bad evil Larry Summers never even considered that possibility! One More Thing On Shulevitz I do not mean to trash Shulevitz; she is fairly open minded, and the piece could be much, much worse. I do think, however, her thinking on the work/home tradeoff contains a classic flaw of progressive thinking: What Hochschild forces us to consider is that we're losing the ability to imagine a world in which we work less and at more reasonable hours, and therefore that we no longer bother to fight to bring that world into being. It is our own internalized workaholism that threatens to devour us and our children -- that, and the increasingly untenable absence of a public infrastructure of care. It’s all fine until we hit that last clause, “the public infrastructure of care.” This is an old familiar song, but I’ll sing it one more time. We need to recognize that government money comes from somewhere: that somewhere is us. Government sponsored daycare means taking money from some people and giving it to other people. In particular, it means taxing families where one parent stays home, and using that tax to support another family where both parents work. The result: we’ve just made it harder to have a mother stay home with her kids (because her husband’s salary is taxed more), and easier for her to enter the workforce. It’s not clear to me why this is so just. Ideas like “the public infrastructure of care” do not often recognize implied tradeoffs like these. Rather they are supported by a belief in the existence of the perfect tax, the one that has no other effect beyond transferring unneeded excess from the rich to the poor. We all – using the royal we of right thinking New York Times writers – know that social program X is more important than another yacht for Mr. Rich Guy (or a nicer house for Mr. Lawyer Guy and his wife Doctor Lady). Our perfect tax won’t depress growth, or force a parent who wants to stay home to enter the job market; it will just turn yachts into childcare for waitresses. That sounds like a good trade to me. The only difficulty is that after 70+ years of a welfare state, we are still looking for that perfect tax. [Ben A.: 2/20/05 20:24]


	The Link Forthcometh As Doug alluded to: check out Alums For Summers. Pass the word! [Ben H.: 2/20/05 13:21]


	The Good Old Days Ben H and I were sketching out a "save Larry Summers" website last night (link forthcoming) and got to reminiscing about the kabuki dance of politically correct "outrage" that was already a hollow ritual when we were in college. I've added a verse to the chorus we used to accompany the dance back then. To the tune of the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": Well since I put it down I've been goin' out of my head Read your piece last night and too indignant to get out of bed Well, your words went over the line (over the line) And you know it wouldn't take much time For those old hate speech rules To help me kick you out of this school Shocked and outraged, Shocked, shocked, and outraged, Shocked and outraged, Shocked, shocked, and outraged, Shocked and outraged, Shocked, shocked, and outraged, Shocked and outraged, Shocked, shocked, and outraged, Shocked and outraged, Shocked, shocked, and outraged, Shocked and outraged, Shocked, shocked, and outraged, Shock and outrage, yeah, Kick you out of this school! [Doug: 2/19/05 15:21]


	Lit Link Terrence M. has a very short funny story online. I'd wonder if it was a veiled message to Laura L. had she not left the consulting world last year. [Doug: 2/19/05 14:59]


	Lock The Doors! The Self-Entitled Soccer Moms Are Coming! A strange dream this morning, and retrospectively a hilarious one, but you be the judge. I'm walking in a tony suburban neighborhood (much like the Californian one we just visited). Late afternoon. Spring 2005. A group of children approaches on the sidewalk, led by a mother bearing a large flag. The flag is not of a political or military entity, but is one of those colorful seasonal "happy" flags that bedeck porches in such neighborhoods (and, to a greater degree, porches in less tony neighborhoods, but this sociological nuance is irrelevant to the dream). The flag is of a light-orange pumpkin on a solid sage background. After a second it dawns on me that she is taking them trick-or-treating. And she expects her grand and surpassingly tasteful flag to be argument enough to get the neighbors' compliance, and their candy. [Doug: 2/19/05 14:42]


	Follow That Bug Apparently Dao gave all of our nephews/nieces (cute pictures a few screens below) that brutal cold that I gave her. I apologize to them and to their parents. It's a drag, but they should remember what Nietzsche said: Whatever does not kill me, makes me Zukunftsweltführer! [Doug: 2/19/05 14:26]


	Blogosphere Justice NYT article this morning describes sex-harassment charges against UN bigwig Ruud Lubbers. I submit to you: can any man be innocent whose name is a spoonerism of "Lewd Rubbers"? Hang 'im high, boys! [Doug: 2/19/05 14:22]


	Obligatory Gates Pictures Dao did a great job though. I won't share my own reaction to it. I'm not really a visual-art sort of guy. [Doug: 2/18/05 22:24]


	Vodka Ripped From The Headlines It's too late to explain exactly how I came by a bottle of this, but thanks, Gui. I have to say it's classier than the AK-47-shaped vodka bottle that one of Ben H's Russian mob associates got him a few years ago. [Doug: 2/18/05 01:21]


	Legends of Ping-Pong I forgot to mention that ping-pong birthday party for David L. (too bad you couldn't make it, Ben H.). Although I didn't stick around long enough to have my turn to be humiliated by him, Marty "The Needle" Reisman did show up -- former world champion and subject of this New Yorker article. David is roughly at my level in ping-pong. Marty spotted David 18 points in a game to 21 and won handily. It was amazing to see, especially because he's such a character -- must be in his 60's at least, in a fedora (the NY'er calls it a panama hat, okay), carrying a case with his custom ping-pong equipment, he looks like something out of a Gotham-noir comic book. [Doug: 2/18/05 01:11]


	Larry Summers vs. Ward Churchill Undoubtedly you're right, Ben. I never thought I'd link to a National Review article, but this one points out (not so brilliantly that it's worth clicking on, maybe) the difference between the two recent academic scandals: Summers saying there may be difference between the sexes in standard deviation (not average!) of abstract reasoning ability, and this Ward Churchill clown comparing 9/11 victims to architects of the holocaust. For the academic left, Summers' offense is apparently far worse. Mr. Churchill is a great example of the absolute frauds who inhabit our humanities departments, and might have been a useful point of reference for that long and more-or-less pointless debate Ben A and I were participating in on John & Belle's blog. But then again the other side in that debate would just have written him off as "anomalous". The fact that there's no upper limit to the number of times you can trot out the "anomaly" defense goes a long way toward explaining why debates like that one will always be pointless. [Doug: 2/17/05 16:58]


	Summers Clearly Railroaded Larry Summers took a few moments out of his ritual self-abasement to release the transcript of the session that has landed him in such hot water. His remarks hardly justify the contumely piled on him in the last couple of weeks. Read it and judge for yourself. It is also quite interesting to look at the questions that followed his address. Hardly howls of outrage. Perhaps that's because the transcript leaves out "Q: (Nancy Hopkins) Oh... {faints from fit of the vapours}." What this tell me is that the faculty has a longstanding grudge against President Summers and is taking advantage of this kerfuffle to try to topple him. We are not witnessing an emotional lashing-out; rather, an ambush. [Ben H.: 2/17/05 16:18]


	Avalanche of Avals And as I recall the page feeder on a Xerox machine is called an "avaleuse." [Ben H.: 2/17/05 13:50]


	You Can Avalize It, But I'm Not Swallowing That! Cette affaire va en aval malgré l'aval du ministre! ... Two puns occasioned by your use of the frenchie word "avalize", which has an interesting etymology. (I'm getting info from Le Robert historique here.) "Aval" has been used since at least 1673 to mean "commitment to pay" (in case someone else fails to), as in co-signing a loan. It continues to have this sense but can also mean "security deposit" or, more broadly, "imprimatur", as in "I'm giving my imprimatur to this new policy initiative." The verb form "avaler" (1690) was dropped in favor of "avaliser" (1875) because of the homonym "avaler" = to swallow. The etymology of this "aval" is surprisingly unclear, but Alain Rey is pretty sure it's unrelated to the other aval, as in "en aval" = downhill. (Aval = to the valley; amont (uphill) = to the mountain.) This is the source of "avaler" (to swallow): "Une seule acception est restée dans l'usage courant, rendant les autres valeurs marginales, c'est "faire descendre par le gosier" (fin XII. s.), que sa fréquence a détach´e de son origine dans la conscience des locuteurs, lui permettant de produire des sens figurés où l'idée concrète de "descente" est éliminée. [Doug: 2/17/05 13:02]


	Why Some Emerging Markets Will Never Emerge As an emerging markets investor, I often receive investmnet proposals out of the left field. Last week, left field was the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. You may recall my earlier post on my limited and unsatisfying interactions with the political elite of Equatorial Guinea, and if you do, you will not be surprised that I regarded any proposal coming from that quarter with some scepticism. A promoter offered to sell us EUR75mio of promissory notes due over the next couple of years issued by the Ministry of Health and avalized by the Finance Ministry. The stated purpose of these prom notes was to pay for the construction (by a Spanish company) of an EUR65mio hospital in Malabo. The Spanish company wanted to blow out of their exposure, or so it was claimed, and would sell at a level below EUR65mio. I wondered how fat a profit margin had been built into their contract that they would be willing to do so. As such, I asked for the specs of the original contract. Well, it turned out "hospital" was too exalted a term. The facility was an outpatient dialysis center with a grand total of 35 stations. It called also for building a small adjacent facility for examinations. The proper price for such a project falls an order of magnitude short of EUR75mio. It is highly likely that the vast majority of the money from this deal would be going straight into the pocket of some Malabo grandee. EUR75mio is actually a non-trivial fraction of the country's GDP, even given its soaring oil production. So where is the Jubilee 2000 protest carnival now? They are happy to vilify western governments for asking to be paid back for all the cheap loans they have disbursed to these crap countries. But heaven forfend they challenge a sainted dark-skinned political leader for taking on that debt to line his pockets with boodle. this is my new technical term for emerging countries. The world is divided: real countries ("the developed world") and crap countries ("the emerging world"). [Ben H.: 2/17/05 12:24]


	Some Concepts Were Just Meant to Be Expressed in German Some of my colleagues went to a meeting the other day about a "Global Leaders of the Future" project. (Hey, we're a management consulting company, what do you want.) "Ich bin der Zukunfstweltführer!!!" has naturally become my catchphrase this week. [Doug: 2/17/05 11:59]


	Does Your Barber Have His Own Web Page? Mine does. [Doug: 2/15/05 20:18]


	Surreal Tongue-Twister She sells nacreous knockwurst by the seashore. [Doug: 2/15/05 20:17]


	What I Love About Winter You don't need to put a sheet of "Bounce" in the dryer because all the used kleenex you left in your jeans pockets give you the same fabric-softening effect for free. [Doug: 2/14/05 14:06]


	Speaking of Obscenity ... A little Valentine's day humor, whose obscenity is not, alas, merely expletive. Also it contains an execrable pun. If either characteristic would offend you, you are warned to read no further. I post this as part of my quest to rehabilitate my favorite curse word. Dwayne and Blaine walk into a whorehouse. Two girls meet them: a beautiful one who says "one hundred dollars", and a kind of bagged-out, sickly one who says "twenty dollars". Blaine takes the latter's hand, saying "I'm short on money." Dwayne shrugs and takes the other. Afterwards Dwayne asks Blaine, "How was she?" "Not so good", Blaine replies, "and actually I'm getting kind of red and itchy down there." "Someday you'll learn," Dwayne says, shaking his head, "you get twat you pay for." [Doug: 2/14/05 13:27]


	Harry Frankfurt I think I read a paper of his once about "second-order volitions"... something about "the willing addict" versus "the unwilling addict." It made cow pie seem positively succulent. I think about half the article could be considered expletive in the latinate sense. [Ben H.: 2/14/05 11:50]


	On Bullshit ... is the catchy title of a new (or newly published) book by an emeritus philosophy professor from Princeton. One assumes that he takes an interesting subject (what exactly is bullshit and why is our culture rife with it?), reasons about it carefully, and sprinkles a few good insights through a book that is otherwise as dry as a two-week old cow pie. (I think I've earned my right, at least with respect to academic philosophy books, to judge them without even seeing their covers.) The Times won't print the word "bullshit"; the Bandarlog, not being a family weblog, will. I think the Times' decorum is fine. I just wish they wouldn't call "bullshit" an "expletive". "Expletivus" in Latin means "serving to fill out", whence the English definition "A word or phrase that does not contribute any meaning but is added only to fill out a sentence or a metrical line," and the more precise linguistics one "A word or other grammatical element that has no meaning but is needed to fill a syntactic position, such as the words it and there in the sentences It's raining and There are many books on the table." (Source: Dictionary.com. There's also the infamous "ne explétif" in French.) So you can see how "expletive" first got used humorously to describe "damned", say, as in the iambified "It's too damned hot in here." It doesn't really change the meaning of the sentence. But when you say "That's bullshit", the word "bullshit" is a noun, and carries just about the entire meaning of the sentence. You can't (or shouldn't) call it an expletive. It would be more accurate to say "obscenity deleted", if you're deleting something because it's obscene. And the humor value of saying "expletive deleted" is now lost, because so many people take it to be a mere synonym of "obscenity". [Doug: 2/14/05 10:03]


	Interesting -- I've never been high enough in any organization to know how reporting relationships among whole departments are spoken of. The usage seems akin to the mathematical usage for functions. A function f maps an individual to another individual; if f takes every member of a set S to a member in a set T, it is said to map S into T. If, furthermore, f maps at least one S-member to every member of T, it is said to map S onto T. I interpret Ben's explanation the following way. Let f be the function that maps a drone to his manager. Let f(x) = { f(x), f(f(x)), f(f(f(x))) ... }. Then a set of drones S "reports into" T if and only if, for every x in S, there is a y in T that is also in f(x). [Doug: 2/12/05 10:59]


	Prepositional Reporting Your poet friend has made an error of nuance. In my experience, a drone reports "to" another more elevated drone. However when one talks about more structural reporting relationships, without a specific manager in mind, one can use "into." For example: "we've reorganized trading, so now global fx reports into fixed income." The idea here is that it is not the case that everyone in the global fx group reports to everyone in fixed income or to one particular person in fixed income. But rather the one group bears a subordinate or dependent relationship to the other, such that if you trace the reporting relationship of a given drone in global fx, it will flow "into" someone (ultimately) in fixed income. Of course, as you say, the choice of preposition is arbitrary. I note the nuance descriptively rather than prescriptively. For I think that one should say, "global fx is now fixed income's biy-otch." [Ben H.: 2/11/05 21:12]


	Christo Does Central Park A wonderful thing about Christo's monumental art installation in Central Park is that he's paying for the whole thing ($21 million, reportedly) himself. No taxpayer money is being spent. The Christo phenomenon is remarkable, although I don't have the time now to explain why I think so. [Doug: 2/11/05 19:36]


	Southland Slideshow The starting point: view from our East Village fire escape In Orange County: table set for anniversary of Dao's grandfather's death Me reading a story to the older kids of Dao's sister. They are adorable and I now see how John and Belle have an inexhaustible supply of funny conversations with their kids. Although they also do things like wedge your wedding ring so firmly into a plastic pop-up toy that you have to disassemble it with a screwdriver. Dao finally got that cold that wiped me out a week or two ago. And she got it just as bad. Complaining of a "cold chest", she went around with a stuffed hippo tied to her. The new kid. The old kids. (Compare w/ John and Belle's at link above.) There is exactly one person in each of these cars. I went back to UCSD to visit an old professor of mine. The campus still has that feeling of eery star-trek socially-engineered perfection. Note personal hovercraft transport at left. Another UCSD vista. I regret not getting one with the ocean in the background. We're back in NYC now, where it's still freezing. [Doug: 2/11/05 12:31]


	Business Prepositions: Thinking Aslant The Box I got another mass email this morning, from a very important businessman, that signals a new business preposition usage: A worker now reports into, rather than just to, his boss. "Into" thus joins the now-classic business preposition "around", as in "We need to get some dates around this project." It also helps explain why "around" was so successful: it stresses the physicality, the movement, of the situation to which you're assimilating the abstract case at hand. You can almost see the whiteboard drawing: here's the project, and here, in green marker, are the deadlines dancing around it. Whereas "We need some dates for this project" sounds tired. In fact you could argue that it's a tired metaphor, since, I submit, prepositions in abstract contexts are metaphors. Think about it (or around it): "I go to the store" shows a root meaning of "to", and "I know how to get to the solution" uses this meaning metaphorically. "I kept her from singing" uses "from" in a way far removed from its physical "I'm coming from the forest" roots, and illustrates the truth (which I believe is a truism among linguists) that when your sentence gets far enough removed from the concrete, the preposition that a given language will prescribe is nearly random. Hence the need for the booklet my mom had in college, "Est-ce 'à' ou 'de'?", a list of hundreds of French verbs with their correct prepositions. You could, in short, argue that prepositions in many business settings are metaphors, and as metaphors become tired you should replace them. (The businessman who introduced me into "report into" is in fact a sometime poet, and probably believes this, implicitly or explicitly.) The best contrary argument is that look, there's nothing unclear about "I report to Mary", or "We need ideas for this project", so why go confusing things with new prepositions? It may be pure convention that we use certain prepositions, but the conventions exist and they facilitate our interactions. (We don't start driving on the left side of the road just to think outside the box.) Also, people who use prepositions "creatively" are often just trying to draw attention to themselves and their own creativity. This goes equally for poets and consultants. It's often vain posturing. Being basically conservative, I side with this counter-argument and have begun systematically correcting people who say "around" to me in its business usage. "That word is incorrect," I tell them. "You should say that we need more thinking athwart this project." [Doug: 2/11/05 11:40]


	Gem "I want to leverage my current staffing situation to develop internal thought leadership on the challenges of cross-functional teaming." (Example of a personal statement in firmwide HR email at a company that shall remain nameless). [Doug: 2/11/05 10:48]


	Wolfe At the Door Of course, Doug, you can borrow it, but not on Thursday; I am heading out of town for a conference. I return on Sunday. I think one measure of a good novel is the degree to which one finds oneself thinking about it and its themes long after having put it down. I Am Charlotte Simmons passes that test with flying colors. The book has the heft of a door stop, but it's only because it contains a lot. At the reportorial level, the contradictions of the modern university, it's careerist deans, aging radical faculty, corrupt big athletics program; and at the philosophical level, charges at some of the Big Questions: the effects of a hypersexualized culture on human behavior, compatibility of science and free-will-based morality, and (as they say in Ginsu Knife commercials) much, much more! [Ben H.: 2/10/05 07:15]


	Times Acknowledges Anti-Tom Wolfe Hackery (But Not Its Own) A Book Review piece on Sunday admits that many reviewers' attacks were ignorant: "Come on, college students aren't as debauched and lost as all that, are they? Or are they?" Elaine Showalter is mentioned by name, but not the house lit-priestess Michiko Kakutani. I'm more interested in reading the book now ... Ben H, may I borrow it after I get back to NYC (Thursday night)? The fact that this piece got published, but with Kakutani exonerated by omission, may be evidence for this thesis: the Times' collective consciousness has started to realize that the "duh, I'm socially liberal but fiscally conservative" mantra may not be a complete utopian formula ... but only just started. The magazine's cover story on Sunday was about a father's struggle to get his young-adult son off of crystal meth. The father admits briefly that he was an overbearing parent, and talks about how his bitter divorce affected his son. Hmmmm ... could there be a flaw in the lifestyle that sacrifices everything to the vanity of wealth-display and career-advancement (one's own and one kids') and sees relationships as disposable whenever they put a crimp in one's short-term hedonic score? Nah, that's crazy-talk. Let's flip to the "style" section ... [Doug: 2/9/05 15:30]


	Zarathustra critiques Bush's Inaugural Address "Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?" (I. 17) [Doug: 2/7/05 19:48]


	Inaugural Bloviation: Truth Stranger Than Fiction Doug alluded to the Simpson's Treehouse of Horror parody of Clinton, who proclaimed that "we must move forward not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling toward freedom." Very nice. But note that last week Tony Blair unveiled his election slogan: "Foward Not Back." No word about any possible twirling tie-ins. [Ben H.: 2/7/05 12:03]


	Chào likewise means goodbye My posting may also be spotty since I'm visiting Dao's family in southern California for Tet. Tet happens to be just a few days after Dao's grandfather's rô (i.e. the anniversary of his death -- don't ask how to pronouce the word (which is missing its tilde-like diacritical mark anyway)). This entails another big family feast, which was yesterday -- i'll post a photo of it if I can. Apparently bÃ¡nh chung, the classic Tet treat, is harder to come by this year because of a Dept. of Health crackdown. It's an odd sort of meat-and-glutinous-rice cake (no, I'm not terribly fond of it). The sort of thing you might expect to breed bacteria if you kept it out for weeks. In any case the health dept. expects this and has forced local shops to either sell them immediately or refrigerate them. The latter simply isn't done. So you end up in a sort of West-coast analog of the Zabar's wink-wink camembert-au-lait-cru situation with the shopkeepers. This actually isn't such a new situation though. Local butchers slaughter pigs at dawn the old-school way, and stay off the inspectors' radars. If this is the price you have to pay for great food here, I say stick it to the man. Dao's family's cooking is uniformly amazing (except for the desserts, of course, but there's only so much you can do with mung beans and tapioca). [Doug: 2/6/05 13:49]


	Reinvigorating Manhood, Take One Deb points our attention to thi masterpiece of photojournalism. [Ben A.: 2/4/05 19:45]


	Aloha Means Goodbye I have been a dreadful blogger of late, and as I decamp Sunday for the South Seas my comments will be even thinnner for a few weeks. If I find an internet cafe offering rum-filled coconuts, you may hear from me. [Ben A.: 2/4/05 17:53]


	Ahmed Chalabi Promised Us Organs! And we won't even have stricken gang members to harvest kidneys from! It's a replacement organ fiasco, why did we have no plan for the organ gap that the Adminstrations own State Department experts predicted? [Ben A.: 2/3/05 18:29]


	Happy Days You know, if we can't grow humans for body parts, and defedants in capital cases start getting off with the help of their specially trained counsel, how does the president expect the sickly and decrepit like me to get replacement organs? I'll be forced into buying offshore organs, and -- poof! -- another industry disappears overseas! We'll be getting our replacement livers from non-union cloned fetuses and from convicts executed in environmentally irresponsible prisons. How did I vote for this guy?!! [Ben H.: 2/3/05 16:52]


	Happy Days Are Here Again: The Laundry List We get a nest egg. We get agressive and ethical medical research. We get an iron-clad guarantee that humans wil never be grown for body parts. We get special training to defend those on trial for their lives. We get Laura Bush promulgating a positive definition of manhood in America's cities. Ben H, meet me behind the 7-11 with a six-pack of Schlitz, and I'll bring some Ace of Base and my boomin' system. [Ben A.: 2/3/05 13:21]


	Fifth Avenue Photos Maybe you recognize Guillermo with us there, another ex-Concrete Media guy. It's his camera balanced on the mailbox. [Doug: 2/3/05 01:13]


	The Shipwreck of Modernism In art, as in all things, ideas matter. [Ben A.: 2/2/05 21:58]


	Progress Report I decided to scrap the final speculative section of the paper I'm writing, and to call it a complete draft. "Spacetime's Causal Structure Can Determine Its Metric Structure, Even If It Is Locally Infinite" -- that's what it's called, and it's as technical as it sounds, so I don't at all recommend that you read it. I post it so that, if you're so inclined, you can click on it, scroll quickly to the end, and say "Gosh, that's a lot of symbols, Doug must be doing serious intellectual work rather than sitting around all day reading weblogs." The paper is the generalization to higher dimensions of the "real line with built-in metric structure" that I mentioned a while back. It is directly related to the conjectures of my "Platonic Bloom" manuscript. But it's not really even a partial proof of those conjectures; it's a confirmation that they don't fail in one particularly immediate way. [Doug: 2/1/05 14:55]


	More Fun At the Times Larry Rohter serves as the Times' man in Brazil. Last year, he touched off a controversy (as the cliche-ridden Times would say) with an article detailing rumors of President Lula's drinking problem. The government responded angrily, for a short time holding the threat of deportation over Mr. Rohter. After a few tense days, Rohter and the Times issued a hedged apology and the matter died away. Now Rohter has again drawn the ire of his hosts, this time across the political spectrum, on a topic much closer to the hearts of all Brazilians. The Times printed an article in January reporting on increasing obesity in Brazil. Brazilians take their physical appearance very seriously; despite its status as a developing country, Brazil has one of the world's highest rates of cosmetic surgery. To call them flabby -- well, those are fighting words. Rohter, though, as it turns out did not launch his attack from commanding ground. The photo accompanying the story -- of corpulent beachgoers -- captured not Brazilians, but European tourists! The Brazilian press found one of the women depicted: a 200lb Czech woman who says she identified herself as such to the reporting team. Just the sort of accuracy we've come to expect from the Grey Lady... [Ben H.: 2/1/05 10:54]


	Timesnesia My problem with the Sunday Times is that I can't ever remember anything about it. All I recall from this week is Freddie Mitchell (WR, Philadelphia) making a parody of himself with classic athelete quotes of the "I want to thank myself for being so terrific" variety. Now that I think about it... There was also that long profile of the SIEU chief. I expect to awake some day to find that the "Whither Labor?" magazine piece has gone the way of the Great Auk. [Ben A.: 2/1/05 01:38]