Bandarlog


	A Bit More On Webb Webb is a fascinating political figure. As anyone who has read his novels knows, he is not a progressive. At all. Indeed, the contempt in which he holds progressives, intellectuals, members of the press, and symbol-manipulating upper-class types simply radiates off the page. This makes him a very interesting Democrat. Andrew Ferguson has a good introduction to him here. Grid Wars Only a slower processor could explain why I am lasting longer than you, Doug. Your Armor Alley mastery always dwarfed mine... [Ben A.: 10/29/06 00:10]


	Politicians As Novelists Ben A asked recently whether we could think of any prominent politicians who had written novels. He mentioned the Virginia candidate for Senator, James Webb. Recent critical attention to Webb's oeuvre helps explain why there are so few author-politicians. The fact that an American politician thinks there is any chance of boosting his own numbers with the accusation, "My opponent is so perverted that he goes on record as believing that people have sex!", reinforces my interpretation of George W. Bush's elections: that a majority of Americans are outright dolts. I would have more respect for our politicians if their literary attack ads were of the form, "How can we entrust a seat in our highest legislative chamber to a man whose novels are filthy with malapropisms, clichés, stilted dialogue, and derivative plots?" Unfortunately we would then be France. [Doug: 10/28/06 02:21]


	10 Days And Counting For "Libération" I joked to Ben H when I was in New York that he might get some investors to bail out "Libération", France's third most important "general" newspaper, which is losing 13 million euros a year and near bankruptcy. Ben, you now have ten days to contact Lazard. Of course, this "investment" would be worse than flushing your money down a toilet; a toilet will not spit on you out of resentment once it has swallowed your funds. This is essentially what the paper's journalistis did to its last financial savior/sucker, Edouard de Rothschild. He put in 20 million euros a year or two ago to get a 39% stake. Having blown through all that money, the journalists now act as if it's Rothschild's responsibility to both pony up another 10 or 20 million and to muzzle himself regarding changes to the paper. When Rothschild dares to ask for significant cost-cutting (layoffs) and a say in changing the company's direction in exchange for the dough, the journalists make public statements basically accusing him of assaulting the freedom of the press, if not the Rights of Man and Citizen. Ben H asked why Rothschild doesn't just give these jerks the finger; I really don't know. Maybe he has a vanity press / limousine liberal thing going on. The "limousine liberal" aspect brings me to the serious point: it could be that Libération is finished, and that would be, if not a decisive cultural shift, at least a positive one. Libération is the main vector of unreflective socialist sentiment in the French press. You can accuse Le Monde of leaning too far to the left at certain times on certain issues, but it's nothing like what goes on at Libération. Namely sanctimonious demagogy. Immigration was recently a hot topic here; Libération would run daily weepy stories about illegal immigrant kids with puppy-dog eyes that the evil Sarkozy threatened to send back to the salt mines of Burkina Faso, or whatever. They didn't even bother with a pro forma "Of course, France cannot regularize all its illegal immigrants, but ...". It strikes me that if Libération disappears from the kiosks, it might make a dent in the French propensity for unreflective socialism. The analogy I have in mind is a party where everyone is drunk and making inane conversation; if the music suddenly stops and everyone else happens to stop speaking, and you keep jabbering on, suddenly audible to everyone, you may stop self-consciously and think "What the hell was I going on about"? Even if this happened to a small extent here it would be socially healthy. [Doug: 10/27/06 17:08]


	Saved By Incompetence It's a blessing that I'm so bad at Grid Wars, or else I seriously would be having a tendinitis relapse. On easy mode I can get to the point where the black holes start popping up, but then things quickly get out of hand for me. Green squares? The things that always get me are those fast horseshoe-shaped deflector-shielded aliens. It's true that in the presence of black holes, the whole game seems to slow down. Is this a feature or are there so many calculations going on that the CPU starts choking? Either way, it's not slow enough for me. I find that my mindset remains exactly the one the reviewer attributed to other, less elegant games: "How do I stay alive for the next three seconds?" I just don't see how you are supposed to emerge into this meditative black-hole-management phase of the game when more and more aliens are hurling themselves at you. (Nor do I really want to know, for medical reasons.) [Doug: 10/27/06 16:07]


	So Awesome I don't know when political magazines started offering cruises for subscribers, but this, from an email advertising the top ten reasons to take the Ms. Magazine cruise, justifies the entire practice: Reason #9: Receive 20 continuing education credits from the National Association of Social Workers. Demon Alcohol My high is 6 minutes on the "hard" setting. Fricking green squares. [Ben A.: 10/27/06 04:52]


	"Hard" setting? I'm getting my ass kicked on Easy. I doubted the necessity of a New-Yorker-length examination of the game (the one you linked to) until I tried playing it. [Doug: 10/26/06 08:39]


	Good! My first thought was of your relativistic game, Doug. And if you are going to lose the use of your hands, it might as well be be in the service of a game as lvoely and as fiendishly difficult as Grid Wars. The 'Hard' setting is demoniacal. [Ben A.: 10/25/06 18:36]


	Ben A: Thanks for the carpal tunnel relapse, you bastard. (On the plus side I should probably contact that guy about collaborating on the relativity game.) [Doug: 10/25/06 17:31]


	Setting the Year Zero The unspoken premise of a Year Zero argument is that the present and allegedly long-standing state of affairs is, more or less, a happy one. One would not argue that "we've always protected journalist privilege" to justify continuing the policy and simultaneously assert that journalistic privilege has been a disaster, for example. This suggests to me that certain viewpoints are less compatible with the use of Year Zero arguments than others. A radical progressive, whose worldview is grounded in the assumption that American society is irreedemably evil and corrupt, sinks into self-contradiction if he appeals to venerable American liberties. For a conservative, though, a Year Zero argument fits nearly into his conception of the world. [Ben H.: 10/25/06 17:10]


	French malaise is apparently contagious. [Ben H.: 10/25/06 07:07]


	Setting the Year Zero In the course of many generally acute musings on the church/state divide in the US, Ross Douthat comes up with a pearl of a line. There are, he writes, secularists who proceed analytically by “setting a year zero somewhere around 1970 and casting everything that’s happened since as a battle between progress and atavism, reason and fundamentalism, the Enlightenment and the medieval dark.” I cite this not because it is an apt description of one wrong-turning that secularism can take (although I do think this, secularist that I am), but rather because it is an apt description of one of my all time favorite bogus argumentative moves: setting one’s ideological biases as the baseline of normal history. If your politics demand policy X, then by gum policy X is the way things always have been. A while back, someone tried to set the year zero on me while discussing, of all things, Journalist Shield Laws. His position: the right of a journalist to protect his sources in the face of a subpoena has always been an essential keystone of our liberties. The non-existence of any such laws at the federal level, and the fact that such current state laws as we have largely date back to 1974 proved no obstacle to his certainty. Unsurprisingly, civil libertarians are frequent employers of the year zero move, as they are (often) dogmatic, unreflective, and possessed of a present bias. As a temporary concession to intellectual honesty, however, let me note that the political right tries this swap all the time, setting the year zero to, variously: 1776, and the crazy, literally out-of-this-world radicalism of the American founding (all men are created ... what!) 1800-1900, and a moralized notion of monogamous marriage, hailing directly from Victorian Christianity 1945, and American exceptionalism as a legitimate foreign policy doctrine. You pick the period – maybe 1990, maybe the Scottish Enlightenment, and the depiction of a liberal state combined with an essentially unregulated market economy as an obviously winning proposition Now, as it happens, I have sympathy for all of these notions; but I hope we can all admit that they are beliefs that an anthropological survey of human history would disclose them to be exceedingly uncommon. It is just not the case that many stable societies has held them, and it is just not the case that they are anything but unusual, recent doctrines. Addiction My friend D recently pointed me to a couple of harrowing accounts of video game addiction. One poor devil lost the girl of his dreams, gained thirty pounds, and was unemployed while living in his parent’s house for 11 months becoming a guild leader (?!) in World of Warcraft. That looks like a bad trade. This game, however, would be totally worth it. Robotron for the 21st century. And as an aside, is there any doubt that videogaming and slot-machine playing (and perhaps, blog reading) will ultimately be found to be about as physically addictive as narcotics? Pulsatile administration of neurotransmitters is a powerful thing. [Ben A.: 10/25/06 01:24]


	Diplomat Apologizes For Saying U.S. "Stupid", "Arrogant" in Iraq Yet I wonder how sincere his apology is, given that its full text was "We ain't been stupid nohow, and as for arrogance, no American suffers from this or any other character flaw." [Doug: 10/23/06 13:16]


	Panama Canal Upgrade Wins in Referendum Recall that a few weeks ago, the Newspaper of Record spoke gravely of gathering doubts among Panamanians over the expansion proposal. At the time, I noted that polls showed the approval rate climbing and hovering at above 50% against around 20% against. Well, the referendum took place this weekend. The results? 78% in favor. [Ben H.: 10/23/06 06:28]


	You Won´t See This on Good Morning America Iceland recently courted considerable controversy with its decision to resume commercial whaling. I woke up this morning in Reykjavik and switched on the TV in my hotel room. What seemed to be the Icelandic morning news was running a segment on the first fruit of this policy. A huge whale sat on the quayside, while guys in booties clambered over it, sawing away at the creature´s blubber with tools that looked like a cross between a pike staff and a pruning hook. They cleaved the blubber cleanly from the muscle beneathæ but when they sawed away blubber from the part of the whale in contact with the ground, they unleashed enormous torrents of whale blood. Nasty. [Ben H.: 10/22/06 12:21]


	The Bandarlog Presents: "Equally Plausible Alternative Constellations" During the early winter months in North America, you will recognize, in the eastern sky a few hours before dawn, the unmistakable visage of Bo Schembechler. [Doug: 10/22/06 07:47]


	Gopnik on Darwin Darwin was humble and modest in exactly the way that Inspector Columbo is. He knows from the beginning who the guilty party is, and what the truth is, and would rather let the bad guys hang themselves out of arrogance and overconfidence, while he walks around in his raincoat, scratching his head and saying, "Oh, yeah -- just one more thing about that six-thousand-year-old Earth, Reverend Snodgrass ..." From a very good article (which I couldn't find online) in this week's New Yorker. [Doug: 10/22/06 07:15]


	*With A Name Like Cracker* Barrel, What Did She Expect**? [Ben H.: 10/18/06 06:04]


	The Patient Has a Pulse! Tony Blair and Romano Prodi speak up about niqab. [Ben H.: 10/17/06 17:49]


	Crap Constellations I did the Saturday NY Times puzzle for the first time in a while, or rather, tried to do it. It seems like their difficulty, having slacked off in the summer (Dao and I did one in 14 minutes, I think, when we were in the US in July), ramped up in the fall. I only got like 1/3 through this one; the long clues totally escaped me. It was quite frustrating and after I threw out the paper I looked up the only question I remembered on Google: "Capella's Constellation". The answer is "Auriga". What the hell is Auriga? I never heard of it, and yes I did go through the obligatory-for-nerds star-map phase. My sister took me out to dinner tonight and claims it's common knowledge, though. Maybe so; maybe somehow it failed, alone among the major constellations, to sink into my brain when I was a kid. Be that as it may -- the Internet proves conclusively that it deserves to be kicked into the dustbin of astrology. Just look at it! Who the hell came up with this? I mean, I don't expect those bronze-age shamans to have calculated the Hubble constant, but at least give me some recognizable features! Have the stars correspond to extremeties like heads, hands, and feet, so that you can fill in stick-figure lines! What is the point of demarcating this guy's fifth rib and a mole on his bicep?? And what the frig is "Alnath" doing down there?? Auriga, the Charioteer [Doug: 10/15/06 23:58]


	Hip-Hop 213: Topics in Advanced Rhyming Final Exam: Write a verse that ends with "Bo Schembechler". [Doug: 10/13/06 01:24]


	Pulling A Munson CNN reports that the doofus who flew his small plane into the side of a Manhattan condo building this afternoon is none other than Yankee pitcher (and certifiable doofus) Cory Lidle. Now, had the Yankees managed to overcome the Tigers, Lidle wouldn't have been flying his plane today and would not now be a charcoal briquet in some poor mortgage-holders million-dollar 40th-floor living room. Ergo: Kenny Rogers is a murderer!! [Ben H.: 10/11/06 18:02]


	For The Sake Of Syllabic Parsimony ... I suggest the use of "incongruist" in lieu of "conceptual artist". Doesn't that word capture exactly what they do? [Doug: 10/8/06 15:20]


	Mauled by a Tiger I Can Still Root for the Mets! Willie Randolph being my childhood favorite... [Ben H.: 10/8/06 10:22]


	Gloating is Wrong [Ben A.: 10/7/06 20:35]


	Eternal Recurrence I always wonder, when I read stories (and now watch videos) like this one from Columbia University, to what extent the actors realize that they are precisely that, instantiators of roles that vary depressingly little from decade to decade. When we were at Harvard, conservatives being ridden out of town on a rail* by the PC police was already an old story. I believe my uncle Richard, now a Republican lawyer/lobbyist, was already stirring up trouble at Michigan State University in the 50's with his invited political speakers. Although if I remember the story right, his choice of invitee was hardly predictable: a Communist Party spokesman or something. *No, I have no idea what image this expression is supposed to conjure. [Doug: 10/7/06 15:59]


	I Believe That Children Are Our Future ...Which is why I am working on getting a foreign passport. An excellent showing from the flower of our youth at Columbia. [Ben H.: 10/7/06 11:29]


	Deficit Undershoots OMB put out its October budget review, which reveals preliminary estimates of the FY2006 federal fiscal accounts. The budget deficit is set to fall to $250bio dollars (at the beginning of the year, the CBO estimated $430bio), which no doubt represents a voluminous pile of money by most standards. Compared, however, to GDP -- the standard way to look at the fiscal position -- it isn't quite so horrifying, representing only 1.9% of economic output. Put another way, the U.S. meets the most troublesome of the Maastricht criteria, a feat that most of the core EMU countries have found impossible. It's all the more impressive considering the cost of the war in Iraq and the unanticipated costs of Katrina (the latter around 0.4% of GDP). The primary balance came out roughly flat. With real GDP growth outpacing real interest rates by a good margin, this means the U.S. D/GDP is on a "sustainable path". Of course, simple debt sustainability analysis doesn't consider the tsunami of entitled baby boomers about to retire... Headline budget numbers suffer from the distortion of counting Social Security trust fund deposits as current revenue. It is worth noting that EU countries pull the same trick: Eurostat allows partial revenue credit for first-pillar pension contributions. How much bigger would the U.S. deficit come if we leave out trust fund additions? Best I can tell -- and the CBO report does not provide a lot of help on this score, so I use the SSA's estimated numbers -- the impact runs to $170bio, or 1.3% of GDP. The trust-fund-adjusted deficit then amounts to 3.1% of GDP: not great, especially during a robust period of the economic cycle, but not to shabby either, considering the prosecution of an expensive war and the remediation of damage from a major hurricane. Bottom line: don't worry about the ordinary budget. Concern about the fiscal position should address one thing and one thing only, namely long-term entitlement reform. What's behind the relatively benign deficit result? Almost entirely, it's revenue growth. Nominal revenues grew by 11% yoy. The revenue overshoot phenomenon has not restricted itself to the U.S.. I've observed among the EM countries I follow a pattern of unexpectedly high government revenue growth. My colleagues and I have bandied about a number of theories. Of course, most countries would have you believe they have cracked the nut of rampant tax evasion. Color me sceptical. The one I am partial to is that of "understated inflation." Revenue is a nominal variable. If nominal GDP increases faster than expected, so will revenue, therefore higher inflation equals higher revenue. If inflation statistics understate price increases, then real revenue as a percentage of real GDP will look artificially high. At the same time, many government spending increases -- for example, social security payments, civil servant wages, etc -- are set explicitly or implicitly off the official CPI number. Underreported inflation drives revenues higher and contains spending growth, improving the fiscal outturn. [Ben H.: 10/7/06 11:02]


	Politics is Ennobling: UK Edition Rising Tory star and all-around mensch Jesse Norman recently published a policy memo that cites Michael Oakeshott and Thomas Hobbes in an illuminating and unforced fashion. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts we get this. [Ben A.: 10/7/06 04:09]