Bandarlog


	Love To Say I Told You So The subprime mortgage market here in the US has been blowing up for several weeks now, to the point that even the sleepy NYT has waddled in with a story. THe Times notes that Wall Street has repacked trillions of dollars of mortages into tranches mortgage-backed securities, the value of which is likely to evaporate as the underlying loans go bad. So who is left holding the bag? In large part, foreigners, who with the fruit of their large trade surpluses with the US have spent their greenbacks on those same mortgage-backed securities. Europeans and Asian institutional and retail clients have gobbled up opaque MBS because they offered a spread pick-up to other bonds with similar ratings. As I have said many, many times before, the way the US will satisfy the build-up of net foreign liabilities is via the infliction of capital losses. [Ben H.: 3/10/07 15:27]


	Age of Apocalypse These guys, wow. [Ben A.: 3/8/07 11:49]


	Bayrou I can't read the Times article on Bayrou because I once again changed my host file so that nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, and slate.com fail to resolve. In any case I'm sure I wouldn't be able to say much beyond confirming that, yes, he has been shooting up in the polls. But another poll came out today saying that about half the electorate hasn't made up its mind firmly. To answer your specific question, what would happen to the PS if Sego lost in the first round, I guess I share (what seems to be) your suspicion that the PS couldn't survive in its current form. You would probably see some realignment with the centrists breaking off to join Bayrou in some kind of new party (which Bayrou is on record as advocating). The leftist rump might then to tempted to draw in some of the famously factionalized far-left parties and bill it as a return to the party's socialist roots. I guess what really needs to kept in mind is that the outcome of this election won't really affect anything in France; there are so many social, economic, psychological, and cultural reasons for "l'immobilisme" of France that just changing the guy at the top won't change much. (Last year one might have thought that Sarkozy would run on a platform of radical change, but what he's offering now is just more Chirac, as you can tell from his recent statements that the French government must prop up Airbus.) [Doug: 3/8/07 10:11]


	Troisieme Voie NYT has a big article today on Francois Bayrou. Doug, can you handicap for us his change of knocking off Sego and making it to the second round? What would it mean for Socialism in France to fail to get to the second round in a second consecutive presidential election? [Ben H.: 3/8/07 09:10]


	It's almost touching the moral perfectionism on display that leads a contrite Obama to pay off 15-year old parking tickets. Only the entirely pure may sit in the Oval Office. You can bet that if he bothered with the parking tickets he probably doesn't have any major league scandals in his past... [Ben H.: 3/8/07 09:03]


	More Reason to Support Obama I feel your pain, lantsman! [Ben A.: 3/8/07 07:21]


	Keep Lagos clean? Interesting choice of words ... [Doug: 3/7/07 18:22]


	If You Have To Tell People, The Battle Is Already Lost A sign on the Falomo Bridge in Lagos. And yes, I did see roadside defecation, though not on the bridge. Photo Credit: PV [Ben H.: 3/5/07 12:13]


	You have the exact spot, Doug. With all the attention, the place has become something of a tourist attraction, ogler peering into the glass hoping for a glance of frolicking rats. I'm not sure KFC is entirely to blame. The restaurant stands above the verminiferous W4th Street subway stop, while just down the street, Sammy's Asian Noodle Restaurant recently closed, leaving a big, empty, untended restaurant space as an assembly point for the rodents. You note correctly also that NYC has been suffering a bedbug resurgence. So, too, have the public health authorities managed to let the rat population get out of control. Both have to do, I think, with New York's Calcutta-style sanitation, which leaves trash out on the street several days a week. The rat re-infestation has been blamed on the mandated switch from noisy metal garbage cans to plastic ones, while bedbug contamination spreads via the dumping of infested mattresses and furniture on the street. And all this can be yours for the low, low price of $1mio for an average apartment!! [Ben H.: 3/5/07 09:17]


	Know Your Micro-Neighborhoods Ben A, from what I've heard on the rat-infested KFC-Taco Bell ("Sixth Avenue", "Greenwich Village"), I'm supposing that it's the one on the west side of Sixth, at West 3rd Street. There is a corridor of seediness that runs up Sixth from about this spot to, say, 16th street, where it runs into the edge of Chelsea. (A side-corridor of seediness also runs east from Sixth Ave along Eighth Street, to Broadway -- although the eastern half of this stretch is being NYU-ified.) Anyway, the point is that this location has long been a pit of filth and I would have been surprised at an absence of rats there. (Especially given that rats had the run of Washington Square Park after dark, last time I lived in NYC, i.e. through 2005. Perhaps the eviction of the drug dealers upset the delicate ecological balance.) If you want a more representative case of worsening NYC filth, I would suggest bedbugs. [Doug: 3/5/07 03:06]


	What's For Sale On Craig's List Paris? I am currently selling the domain name "Beirutresorts.com" this domain name will be very valuable in the near future with the coming back of the Lebanese tourism industry very soon after its recent war. The current pricing of the domain is 35,000 American Dollars, if you have any offer below this I will be pleased to entertain, Merci! Will you throw in "TheSpaAtChernobyl.com" for an extra ten grand? [Doug: 3/4/07 17:28]


	Start Spreading the News! I want to be a part of it, New York, New York. [Ben A.: 3/4/07 00:14]


	Adventures in Branding The biggest cellular operator in the Baltics is called Bite. It's pronounced with two syllables, for what it's worth. But "Bite" is not the company's worst branding offense. Check out their prepaid Latvian service. Toxic, indeed! [Ben H.: 2/28/07 11:35]


	Lagos is a shithole But, then, you probably knew that. In my travels, I've come across places that in absolute terms are poorer and more primitive. Yet Lagos gives a uniquely intense impression of underdevelopment. It has all the forms of a city -- airport, expressways, tall buildings, yet not a living city. It feels like nothing more than the ruins of a city, built sometime in the 70s and then quickly abandoned, into which a shoeless rabble has moved. Street lights line the main boulevards and highways, but everything third one has been knocked over and stripped of wiring and none every seem to be illuminated. Heaps of trash line the roads and occasionally burn and smoulder. A car stopped in traffic is swarmed by vendors and beggars, many of whom trade on hideous deformities. One block off the main road, the paving stops and gives way to rutted dirt. I'll have some pictures to share in the near future, which capture the Mad Max aspect of the place... [Ben H.: 2/28/07 10:10]


	I've certainly tasted calamari rings that have the consistency of tractor tyres... [Ben H.: 2/23/07 14:45]


	calamari rings made from it would be like tractor tyres That is a vivid image. I can't get enough colossal squid news. [Ben A.: 2/22/07 22:36]


	Squid No self-respecting blog can leave this story un-linked-to. [Doug: 2/22/07 13:34]


	Political Tidbit Saw a play (of sorts) the other night, invited by our friend J-S: a re-enactment of two TV debates between Mitterand and Giscard-D'Estaing, one from 1974 and one from 1981. It was actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. For one thing, it brought to life the fact that political discourse here has advanced precisely one step in thirty-three years. Back then, the Socialist line was that business owners and managers were the enemy whose profits needed to be intercepted and distributed to the workers. Now, Segolene says that they are potential "innovators" and engines of growth and that France should be "reconciled with its businesses". Her actual project, of course, is for more state control and more worker protections. French political discourse has advanced one step; political reality has hardly advanced at all. [Doug: 2/22/07 05:15]


	What I Learned At Harvard I arrived at my room in the hotel in Lagos to find the television switched on and muted. Playing was an early 90s episode of Melrose Place. Needless to say, I recognized it immediately as such, and discovered that I remembered the name of each character to appear on screen. Now, ask me how to conjugate the verb "to be" in Greek... [Ben H.: 2/18/07 06:05]


	OK, Now I'm Buying an iPod "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy." --Steve Jobs My friend and roommate J spent two years after college teaching Boston high school students in a low-income area. The stories he told about some of his colleagues were, to adopt a phrase, 'off-the charts crazy.' Abuse of sick leave, reading the newspaper in class, even explicit racism, nothing brought disciplinary action. One teacher would only assign the task of sweeping the class to black students, and the job of watching her (Gucci) handbag to asian kids. No rebuke, nothing. If I recall correctly, had he worked one day of his third year, he would have been essentially unfireable. Now he's at Google. Brussels? Am I identifying the right beautiful old city square in the picture below? You and Dao are looking well... [Ben A.: 2/17/07 22:09]


	Belgium Visited some friends a couple weeks ago ... (Notice the odd couple of bystanders in the last one: the kid on the left looks like he's having the best day of his life; the woman on the right, the worst.) [Doug: 2/16/07 14:10]


	France Politics Update It's only for the sake of consistency that I maintain my prediction of Socialist candidate Segolene Royal's election. People have started writing her off. A combination of minor gaffes and her decision to conduct a Hilary-esque "listening tour" before announcing her platform were weighing on her campaign; a hugely hyped speech in which she announced her 100-point program was going to catapult her back to popularity. The speech was last Sunday and it surprised: rather than veering toward the center, which is normally what one does after one wins one's party primary, she veered back toward the left, with a program full of new entitlements. Obviously the program, if implemented, would cost more billions than even Carl Sagan could grasp. When people pointed this out, the Socialists came up with some ridiculously low cost estimate for it (35 billion euros, as it happens). Now, a winning party, like our Republicans, can announce lies and fantasies and maintain them so ardently that one starts feeling they could be true (or at least that the party in question has enough drive and coherence to get things done). But the budget director of Segolene's campaign quit yesterday, giving rise to fears that the guy was too honorable to put his name to bogus numbers, and to rats-abandoning-the-ship comments. Now, socialism and fecklessness go hand-in-hand, so normally I wouldn't be that surprised at this party's stumbling, at their impending wake-up-call-to-get-their-shit-together. What's surprising is that they got such a call five years ago, when Jospin got trashed so thoroughly that he didn't even make it to the election's second round. Ever since that date ("le 21 avril" is spoken of here as solemnly as "le 11 septembre") people on the left have said -- look, people, we can't go on like this, disorganized, with our head in the clouds, we have to become more pragmatic and modern. What they needed was a Sister Souljah moment to kick off "les archéo-marxistes". Well, here they are, five years later, and they're still losers. Maybe the third time will be the charm, in 2012 -- just as it might be for the Democrats, in 2008. (Don't think, however, that a Sarkozy victory will bring about Thatcher-like changes. He has veered toward the center and is not proposing any solutions to the fundamental problems of France's economy.) [Doug: 2/15/07 10:03]


	Ditch George Washington Dollar Coins! I am indifferent to size and metallic content, but I propose the following face for the coin: It's just a question of being "customer-focused." The guy with a trillion dollars -- and counting -- should get special treatment. The U.S. Mint has an predilection for releasing series of coins as opposed to mere one-offs. Instead of a series of one-dollar coins featuring early presidents, perhaps they can mint a run showcasing the various foreign central bank chairmen who have been so kind as to accumulate without apparent end dollars backed by nothing more than our implicit promise not to let inflation get out of hand. On the reverse of each coin, a representation of the product the country has given us in exchange for fiat dollars. China Obverse: Zhao Xiaochuan Reverse: DVD player Saudi Arabia Obverse: Hamad Saud al-Sayari Reverse: Oil barrel Russia Obverse: Sergei Ignatiev Reverse: Generic slavic sex worker Japan Obverse: Toshihiko Fukui Reverse: Honda Civic [Ben H.: 2/15/07 09:14]


	Ah, the saucer-sized Eisenhower dollar. That's what a coin should be. Where's the American Eagle? On the moon! Stick that in your samovar, Ivan! (although on the fine points, the Kennedy half-dollar eagle deliberately choosing the olive branch while nonetheless holding the arrows is better. JFK's guys always got the symbolism right.) [Ben A.: 2/15/07 08:59]


	Eternal Re-currency The U.S. is rolling out a dollar coin ... again? Let's hope it fails again, since millions of feminists might be distraught by the implication that money needs a man's face on it to be taken seriously ... Actually I'm a big fan of the giant old silver dollars. Bring those back, I say. [Doug: 2/15/07 06:01]


	From the Choice of Pseudonymn, She Gets an A+ in Self-Awareness DEAR ABBY: Please help me. My lover and I have been disagreeing lately and are considering couples counseling. However, he keeps insisting that we see the marriage counselor he and his wife are currently seeing. I want to make this relationship work, but I think it's inappropriate to receive counseling from the same one that they are currently seeing. What do you think? -- NEEDS THERAPY IN TEXAS Yes, this is real. [Ben A.: 2/14/07 23:28]


	Placement Says More Than Content The New York Times, through its tone and story selection, more reliably reports on the mindset of the coastal elite that makes up its staff and its readership than on the topics it purports to cover in its stories. In the last week, the Times has run two articles on Portugal's referendum on abortion. The paper typically considers Portugal of a level of importance that has not landed it anywhere near the front page for at least a year. The victory of the Socialists in Portugal's 2005 election made it to Page A6. But now that we're talking about abortion, well it's straight to A1, two days running, for the previously ignorable Iberian backwater. Now, look, it's not that I necessarily disagree with Times-liberal consensus on the issue, but even I find it weird and distasteful how obsessed the Times demographic is with abortion. I mean, how relevant is it really to your lives, people? So relevant that state of Portuguese public opinion is worthy of your attention? I can just imagine the headline if the Islamists one day manage to take over, say, the Netherlands. SHARIA LAW PROCLAIMED IN NETHERLANDS Abortion Rights at Risk [Ben H.: 2/12/07 10:50]


	Genuine Crazy I've often heard people abjure the theory that an erratic dictator is truly insane on the grounds that it takes a certain amount of rational calculation to make to the top of the heap. Having recently taken in The Last King of Scotland, a film which argues the case for Idi Amin as obvious loony, I noticed that the American Museum of the Moving Image had included Barbet Schroeder's General Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait in its documentaries series. Schroeder's loose, underproduced film -- it consists almost entirely of unadorned recording of Amin monologues -- leaves little doubt as to Amin's evident derangement. Forest Whitaker's outstanding portrayal Last King of Scotland if anything underplays* his craziness. Amin's discourses, weird to begin with, veer off into inscrutable non-sequiturs. He breaks out into belly-shaking laughter at the most inappropriate times. And yet, it is true, the guy did climb the greasy pole from lowly orderly in the King's African Rifles to head of state of Uganda. Man perhaps is still animal enough that leadership has much in common with alpha-male status. Amin's imposing physicality, toothy smile, and bluff charm may have had the same effect on his fellows as a buck's outsize rack has on his. Whatever explains his ascent, Amin's path should put paid to the notion that an arrant psycho can't get himself a country. Chavez's apologists should take note. Amin's ramblings remind me of nothing so much as Chavez's Alo Presidente performances... *oddly, the film is available on GoogleVideo: here. Worth checking out if you have an idle 90 minutes. Schroeder is best known to American audiences for Single White Female. I suggest that he ought to re-release the Idi Amin documentary under the title Polygamous Black Dictator. [Ben H.: 2/11/07 22:33]


	The more lawless a country is, the more numerous and punctilious its rules and regulations. Many of the crap countries I deal in -- beset by kidnappings and robberies, governed by embezzlers, populated by tax-evaders -- make an absolute fetish of the officialization of signatures. For example, most every document of any importance in Latin America needs to be signed before an escribano, a sort of notary. The escribano charges unconscienable fees for this nugatory service. The office of escribano, as you might expect, is nearly impossible to attain unless papa held the same august post. Of course, here in America, we have no escribanos. These countries do not accept the certification of our closest equivalent, a notary, that office being open to anyone willing to take a class, undergo a background check, and assume liability. When I have to sign an official document as part of Latam business, I start with notarization. Next, I need to prove the validity of the notary, usually by apostille. Only the secretary of state of your home state or the Secretary of State of the U.S. can provide an apostille, a process which involves affixing a particular kind of ribbon to the document. In certain cases, the apostille isn't enough. After all, perhaps instead of taking your document to the secretary of state, you got someone not entitled in your home jurisdictionto dole out the holy ribbons to do it for you? Who in Republica Bananania knows which office in New York is so empowered? Why, Bananania's consular officers in New York keep track of this sort of stuff. Therefore, as a final step, I need to take the document over to be consularized. No ribbons are involved, but feed and waiting around do come into play. Recently, I got hit with a couple of even more peculiar requirements. In order to join the board of an aviation company in Brazil, I had to provide a bunch of documents notarized, apostilled, and consularized, as I might have expected. In addition, the aviation regulator demanded to see my birth certificate. Now, I had not the faintest idea of where my birth certificate is. I asked my parents; their best guess was that it was in a bank vault in Westchester. Unfortunately, my parents were out of town for several weeks. My resourceful assistant, therefore, called to Albany to see if the state records office could send a copy. A few days later, I received an impressive-looking certificate from Albany stating the facts on my birth certificate (my name, parents' names, date of birth, etc) and certifying that these data matched the original certificate. I sent the document to the Brazilians, but heard back that it would not do. The document would need to contain not just the names of my mother and father, but their signatures. Wonderful. Just one problem: NYS birth certificates don't necessarily contain the parents' signatures. In the end, we had to send a high-powered lawyer to the BRazilian FAA to explain to them the impossibility of their request. The matter is, after two months, still pending. At the same time, I am attempting to get a visa for an upcoming trip to Nigeria. That an American should have to seek a visa to go to Nigeria demonstrates the degree to which immigration requirements of crap countries arise out of a mixture of spite and pride. No American will slip into Nigeria to take advantage of its welfare state or to mow its lawns, but so long as the U.S. demands visas of Nigerias, so too will Nigeria demand visas of Americans. After the submission of the usual paperwork, the visa service contacted me to let me know I would need also to submit a copy of my bank statement. Savor that for a second. I would have to voluntarily turn over a full copy (no blacking-out account numbers allowed) of the very document that myriad Nigerian 419 scammers go to great lengths to inveigle from me to the Nigeria consulate. Can you imagine a more obvious way to invite disastrous identity-theft? Luckily, our main Africa consultant knows the wife of the ambassador and therefore I can be vouched a low risk of resorting to the public weal in Nigeria without proving my solvency by documentary means... [Ben H.: 2/10/07 17:17]


	Sanctimonious Rock Star Update II You may have read that Bono has taken some flak for his band's decision to move its publishing company from Ireland to Netherlands, in order to avoid taxes associated with the expiry of a favorable artists' provision in the Irish tax code. As it happens, I see no incompatibility between aggressive tax planning and charitable giving. In fact, much charitable giving arises as a consequence of tax planning. However, that doesn't let Bono off the hook. For Bono's "crusade" to help poor Africans revolves not around personal giving on his part, but rather lobbying for increased foreign aid on the part of Northern governments to African countries. The financing for such aid, obviously, comes from taxes. My verdict on Bono: poseur. [Ben H.: 2/7/07 15:57]


	Sanctimonious Rock Star Update From John Derbyshire: "Ah, the Irish ... At a U2 concert in Dublin, Bono asks the audience for some quiet. Then in the silence, he starts to slowly clap his hands. Holding the audience in total silence, he says into the microphone: 'Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.' A voice from the crowd pierces the silence: '[Expletive] stop doing it then!'" [Hat tip: Carl C.] [Doug: 2/7/07 13:20]


	The Absurdity Of French Politics On display at this site, the second recommended to his fellow math students by Stéphane, whose taste in forwarded humor links is, it must be said, impeccable. The videos are all in French, but as I said recently, politicians here have this exaggerated enunciation that makes them appear to be giving lessons in spoken French. [Doug: 2/7/07 12:57]


	Children of America, Heed Me! Lesson one: Never touch marijuana Lesson two: our government employs retards. [Ben A.: 2/5/07 02:28]


	Clive James: Hero of Culture This from the Australian Suicide Bomber's Heavenly Reward: Do you know, I was scared I might never make it? All suited up in my dynamite new waistcoat, I was listening to our spiritual leader — Radiant his beard, elegant his uplifted finger — As he enthrallingly outlined, not for the first time, The blessings that awaited us upon the successful completion Of our mission to obliterate the infidel. He should never have said he was sorry He wasn't going with us. Somehow I found myself pushing the button early. I remember his look of surprise In the flash of light before everything went sideways, And I thought I might have incurred Allah's displeasure. But Allah, the Greatest, truly as great as they say — Great in his glory, glorious in his greatness, you name it — Was actually waiting for me at the front door of this place With a few words of his own. "You did the right thing. Those were exactly the people to lower the boom on. (Newcomers to James should wait on that link, however, and start with "the book of my enemy has been remaindered [Ben A.: 2/3/07 23:21]


	Phrase of the Day "I'm pimpin' like Gavin Newsome" hat tip to the mighty MC Reihan Salam Barak Obama as an Author A really remarkable piece by Andrew Ferguson contrasting Obama's two books. [Ben A.: 2/3/07 16:55]


	Now James Brown Is Really Getting Funky But you can bet the Times has a duller headline for the story. (Incidentally, I wonder if my inhibitions about making obvious pop-culture-related jokes are lower because I'm an expatriate, far away from the talk-show hosts who are professionally obliged to make these jokes before civilians do.) [Doug: 2/2/07 06:44]


	My Revenge on Don DeLillo I used the tag from a Calvin Klein dress shirt as a bookmark for Mao II/ It's not much, but it's what I had. [Ben A.: 2/1/07 20:48]