For the first hour of the debate, I watched the debate. During the second hour of the debate, I drank beer. I very much preferred the second hour of the debate and consider myself the winner overall.
"McCain, I think has the best chance because he's the only one who has a loyal constituency. He is the only one who can survive a reverse."
--My Dad, 18 months ago
Riffing off of this, I know lots of people who don't get along with their parents, and many more who regard their parents with affectionate bemusement. In my immediate circle of friends, I believe I am the only one who both adores his parents and feels himself their moral and intellectual inferior. And I have healthy self-regard. How far does this experience with benign authority explain my conservative instincts?
[Ben A.: 1/11/08 17:50]
When Have They Gotten It Right?
The alleged political "experts" of the commentariat know nothing. Such a mismatch of predictive ability and esteem has not existed since the days of the Roman augurs. When will they shut the hell up? Never, I reckon. Then we ought to ask a different question: when will the rest of us stop listening?
A Bridge Back to the 20th Century
Lord High Executioner Spitzer advances a new gambit in his effort to present a softer image. He proposes to rename (Robert Moses') Triborough Bridge the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Now, to name a landmark after a pugnacious and self-righteous attorney-general does not strike me as the best way for a pugnacious and self-righteous former attorney-general to distract from his pugnacity and self-righteousness. But let's leave that aside. Given Kennedy family history, won't naming an automobile bridge after a member of the family provoke a few snickers? Let me answer my own question, by snickering that the Kennedy Bridge ought to have high guardrails and an adequate supply of life-preservers at hand. Perhaps when the NYPD sets up a sobriety check at the tollbooths, they can name it the Teddy Kennedy RFK Bridge Sobriety Checkpoint? Finally, on a more serious note, shouldn't we be about finished with bestowing nameplates in honor of Camelot characters? I mean, RFK already has a ridiculous amount of stuff named after him, for a guy who served briefly as AG and Senator, not to mention scads of books, movies, TV miniseries... and he died 40 years ago! Enough already!
[Ben H.: 1/9/08 14:46]
We Need More Christians in Politics
Apology from Huckabee staffer who merely mentioned the existence of a potential Romney scandal:
Earlier this week I made reference to a rumor going around about Mitt Romney. Several readers--including a few men who I respect greatly--gently chastised me for making the remark. As my friend Steve Camp wrote in a comment, "You dishonor the FRC and the body of Christ by joining in on this type of negative pandering.
My initial reaction upon hearing such criticism was to become defensive and offer rationalizations for my action. I wanted to justify my behavior by pointing to my pure motives and good intentions. I wanted to say that they were wrong and I was innocent.
But they are right; I am guilty of behaving shamefully.
Policy is for suckers. Below are my visceral reactions to the presidential candidates. Nothing to do with the issues, who would be a good president, or any of that fruity stuff, just how they rub off on me as public presences.*
Romney: Calculating. No convictions other than in his own competence and the corresponding justness of his ambition.
Huckabee: Likable, funny. Seems like he should be a dentist or something.
Thompson: The type of boss who would be good to work for, but would substitute geniality for any chance of getting a share of equity in the company. If you stayed on those terms, he would (secretly) think of you as a beta male.
McCain: Would be an awesome old uncle at the family reunion: genuinely funny, gets very mad very quickly, but then cools down and is embarrassed.
Giuliani: All my responses are colored by what I know. In terms of public presentation, seems the most neutral of all the candidates.
Edwards: Phony. Someone wit remarked that all he needs is a white suit and he’d be the best ever salesman of miracle tonic.
Clinton: Bossy, student council type, but ultimately competent and well meaning. The only really negative gut response is that I don’t want her to be the first female president. That’s a history-making event. It shouldn’t be someone a former first lady, much less one who helped cover up her husband’s history of sexual harassment. The whole thing feels very Southern hemisphere.
Obama: I feel the magic. He just comes off as such a decent guy. I will gladly nationalize the steel industry on his orders.
*Note: all such perceptions have a high possibility of being inaccurate/responses to elaborated constructed deceptions.
[Ben A.: 1/4/08 17:34]
Holiday Photos
Possibly our favorite present: the eggplant hat that Aunt Clare knit.
With Aunt Clare and Grandma
Four ex-Concrete Media employees and their kids. Apparently there is one other baby in existence with a pure Concrete Media bloodline, but we haven't met him or her yet.
We had a lot of snow around New Years and made an eight-foot snowman. It took three of us several tries to lift the head and thorax.
[Doug: 1/4/08 11:41]
O'Rourke Reviews Schlessinger: Meaner than Expected!
The Institute of Smegmology -- Another Casualty of Subprime!
Were it not for the now-fired galoot in charge of our ABS business, I would today be counting my gelt Scrooge McDuck-style, and feeling flush enough to endow not merely a chair in smegmology, but rather a whole loveseat! Alas, despite the excellent performance of my business this year, my comp is rather more modest. The institute will have to wait a bit...
[Ben H.: 1/3/08 10:33]
It seems like Chavez's free pass in the developed world media has, if not expired, gotten to the point where he's getting sent final notice for his renewal. His latest brainstorm, which has captured the attention of much of Latin America, was this week's attempt to superintend the release by FARC of three long-term hostages. The circus involved bringing the former president of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, and high Brazilian officials to a rural Colombian "safe zone" in order to witness the hand-over and guarantee the safety of the involved FARCistas. While ringmaster Chavez roused the audience, the FARC in the end neglected to send in the clowns. Kirchner went back to Argentina having accomplished nothing other than looking like a chump, and Chavez took another step on the path from Bolivarian hero to unspeakably villainous little monkey.
Someone wise has written that the only things that change you are the people you meet and the books you read. My resolutions this year are to spend more time with friends and to read more good books and less webbified trash (addicting as it may be.)
Books of the Year
According to my commonplace book, I read 56 books this year. Although 'read' must be construed generously so as to include skimming and throwing down the book in disgust after 50 pages. The fiction recommendation: Alice Thomas Ellis' The Inn at the End of the World. The genre fiction recommendation: Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair, and for connoisseurs of comic book super-villainy, Austin Grossman's Soon I Will be Invincible. Nonfiction: Pascal. But that's probably my non-fiction choice every year...
p.s. Deb's diagnosis: cryptosporidium. Or at least, that's what I think. I'll confirm tomorrow.
[Ben A.: 1/3/08 03:11]
For The Sake Of Completeness
For some reason this site has become a repository for links to ironic covers of aggressive rap songs by aggressively white bands. This one may not strictly count since the original song was by a white band whose irony level is a subject of much debate. It's a cover, in bad-lounge-singer style, of the Beastie Boys' "Fight for your right to party". The reason that this link makes the cut is that the singer's name is Richard Cheese. In fact he seems to have trademarked the name -- I guess we should have done so back in college when we were planning to found the Richard Cheese Institute of Smegmology. It occurred to me that Ben H once suggested offering a huge donation to Harvard, on the condition that they use some of the funds to endow the Richard Cheese Chair in Applied Smegmology. Ben, you are now in a position to make good on this threat, no?
Enjoy the frosty and Frostian landscape, Ben. As for my alleged "tapeworm", I'm waiting for a gold standard diagnosis. I figure that having had to collect my poop in little vials for a week, it must be the case that there is some question as to what exactly (if anything) dwells in my digestive tract. Perhaps Dr. Deb would care to join the diagnostic office pool that's running here?
[Ben H.: 12/28/07 08:33]
The Frozen West
Hey gentlemen. My household will be relocating to the frozen west of Massachusetts for a few days for a much needed spell of snowshoeing, reading, and sitting in font of the fire. (My current selection: Davies' Tempest Tossed and The Scarlet Pimpernel. My only regret is that we will be missing Doug and Dao's New York swing. I hope we can catch you guys in Paris in the New Year. Let's hope it's better than this last one.
Over the usual Christmas day Chinese dinner (best line of the night: "is there a doctor in the house!"), my family discussed the chances of the various presidential nominees. We talked about issues of presentation, perception, campaigning style. I wonder if any of that actually matters.[Ben A.: 12/26/07 12:48]
I'll cast my vote for egotism. We like being at the top of the food chain. We have, as Hegel pointed out, a visceral desire for mastery. That we should in the end find ourselves accountable to a higher power? That our reason should turn out simple and pale before a higher, divine reason? Intolerable!
[Ben H.: 12/22/07 12:26]
Upbeat Materialism, The Golden Compass, Pascal, etc.
I enjoyed the Phillip Pullman books. Like so much science fiction and fantasy, they declined as they went on: in the beginning, you have the romance of the unknown, and it is hard for any author to make the concrete as exciting as mysterious possibility. Still, the first book was an unalloyed delight; vivid, creepy, and exciting. It's too bad that Pullman the man seems to be a materialist of the most crashingly dull type. He thinks religion is scam. He thinks the main historical focus of Christianity has been the repression of sexuality. He simultaneously espouses thoroughgoing materialism and a hectoring moralism which counts sexism and racism as cardinal sins. Boooooring!
The only interesting thing about Pullman's beliefs, as far as I can tell, is that he participates in an increasingly common fusion of materialism and optimism. He thinks the truth of materialism is really swell information. Now, the laundry list of atheistic materialist conclusions is fairly well known: death brings nothing but oblivion, there is no soul, the guilty receive no ultimate punishment, the just no ultimate reward, all human efforts will be forgotten eventually under a dying sun. This all sounds pretty likely to me. What it emphatically is not, however, is Good News.
The need for good news is very great. Somewhere on earth, at this very moment, a just man is being murdered, dying in fear, humiliation and pain. And at this same instant some sin-soaked villain, some absolute monster, is dying peacefully in his sleep. The history of man has been a horrifying litany of torture, rapine, and cruelty, injustice rewarded and virtue desolated; and I dare say the future holds much of the same. In the traditional theistic view, this is not the end of the story. In the materialist view, it is. These are not equally cheering visions. One must take a really out-sized interest in the repression of blowjobs by the Catholic church to think that the substitution of a Christian cosmology by a materialistic one presents cause for celebration. Materialism may be true, but it's a hard, depressing truth.*
So what gives with these upbeat materialists? Why are they so delighted to proclaim the futility of all of man's fondest hopes? One explanation: they hate religion because it is false, and are so disgusted by lies that even the most depressing truth seems good by comparison. This was for a long time my assumption, and it seemed to me a fair enough visceral response. The other day, however, I came upon another hypothesis, courtesy of Blaise Pascal:
Men despise religion. They hate it and fear it may be true
I felt instantly the truth of this observation: many of these unaccountably upbeat materialists hate religion and think it false. But if it were true, they would hate it more. Rather than conclude with any observation, I'll simply ask: does this ring true to you fellows as well? If it does, what could account for it?
*This recalls Doug's hilarious rant (see here) about philosophers of mind who deny free will, describe the human mind as a big Turing machine, and thinks all this is really exciting news because neuroscience is so interesting and complicated. It's the same weird inference.
[Ben A.: 12/22/07 01:56]
The Definition of Irony
Kenneth Hendricks went from high-school drop out and apprentice roofer to billionaire owner of roofing company ABC Supply. Then he fell through a roof and died. He who lives by the roof dies by the roof.
[Ben H.: 12/21/07 18:05]
Big Mistake (1 of 2)
The big reveal at the end of Veronica Mars, Season 2. What were they thinking?!
Big Mistake (2 of 2)
Going to this website and playing this game. Unless you have will power.
Pettite
As I've said before, it's hard to believe you need HGH to throw 86 mph.
[Ben A.: 12/19/07 00:23]
Pettite Work The Outside Corner
Andy Pettite tries to excuse his HGH use in part relying on the distinction between using substances to heal versus using them for performance-enhancement.
[Ben H.: 12/15/07 20:32]
Mitchell Report
I have not read the report, and thus don't know what to make of the player-by-player accusations. My instinct, however, would weight use of HGH for injury recovery far differently from habitual steroid use. Whether that will end up as a mitigating factor for any player named seems uncertain. Indeed, as you point out, a lot remains uncertain at this point: how strong the evidence really is. which of the players named will fight back hard, and which will simply change the subject.
[Ben A.: 12/14/07 23:16]
'Roid Madness!
Ben, what do you make of the Mitchell report? The list contains pretty much all the usual suspects and a few surprises. The first question, of course, is whether the report's allegations are true. Ought we consider Brian McNamee a credible source, for example. A less obvious but still, to my mind, important question: is all pre-2003 steroid use equally culpable? Take, for example, the accusations levelled against Clemens. The report charges that Clemens took HGH to help recover from an injury in 2002. Steroids are indeed part of the armentarium, aren't they? Isn't it different to treat an injury, up to the point it is healed, with steroid or HGH than to take them on an ongoing basis to enhance performance?
[Ben H.: 12/14/07 07:40]
Maybe Ben A Is On To Something
From the current New Yorker:
[At a Clemson University appearance by John McCain] a professor had asked about a piece of Internet-crime legislation that he argued would group terrorism researchers with actual terrorists. "Am I a terrorist?" the professor asked, his querulous tone suggesting that McCain hadn't answered the original question. The questioner was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, a pink polo shirt, and a gray blazer, and McCain looked at him carefully. "With those sneakers, you're not a snappy dresser," McCain replied after a pause, as audience members gasped and laughed. "That doesn't mean you're a terrorist. Though you terrorize the senses."[Doug: 12/12/07 17:14]
A Comment on the New Spate of Atheism Books
Today's atheism rejects this serene attitude [that of stoic or epicurean classical atheism] and goes on the attack. In its criticisms of God it claims to be more moral than religion. But it cannot do this without becoming just as heated, thus just as susceptible to fanaticism, as religion. … It is not religion that makes men fanatics; it is the power of the human desire for justice, so often partisan and perverted.
--Harvey Mansfield
So what do we make of this? I am inclined to agree: religion is just a sub-class of the larger set {ideas people will die/kill for}.
[Ben A.: 12/10/07 23:44]
You both have a future in political consulting. Brilliant!
Speaking of politics, I've continued working on my company's effort to get moderately more politically involved. After a couple of meetings with Democrats involved in finance issues, I and one of my parters converged on DC for some meetings with some of the Republicans on the banking committee. I headed down their with low expectations. Who would look forward to a day conversing with platitude-bots likely to fail the Turing test? But what I found was quite different. We spent an hour or so with each of Senators Kyl, Crapo, Ensign, and Cornyn. They were all personally engaging, which runs counter to the impression given by television, but isn't hugely surprising. After all, one owuld not expect guys who can raise oodles of money from an atomized support base to come off as personally repellent. More surprising: their very solid command of some very technical banking and taxation issues that we wanted to discuss. Most surprising: each of them steered most of the discussion toward asking questions of us. They very clearly wanted to figure out all the second and third-order ramifications of various regulatory and tax changes under consideration late in the congressional session. I came away with my faith in democracy slightly repaired. I also had to marvel at the way television flattens out their personalities and strips their views of any nuance or reflectiveness. Yet another reason to decry TV, as if we needed one...
I come back to your post, Ben, on McCain's handling of the depressed vet. I don't think his ability to respond in a recognizably human way really counts as so unique. It only seems that way, because the media (by virtue of deep structural features, not of intention) filters out most of the humanity.
Not even a vision of the Messiah himself will convince Republican primary voters to back the Mormon tin man, I think. The larger point holds, however, and I will work with team McCain on developing appropriate holography for the next New Hampshire town hall meeting.
What apparition, I wonder, would confer similar benefit on the Democratic side? Let me provide three suggestions:
1. A spectral child of color
2. Richard Dawkins, who assures democratic activists that even though they remain, 20 years later, poorer and worse dressed than the popular kids in high school, their support of John Edwards marks them as members of an intellectual elite
3. A health care policy that increases access, improves care, but costs less than our current system due to administrative efficiency. Magical!
[Ben A.: 12/8/07 13:17]
Free Advice To Republican Presidential Hopefuls
From the media accounts I read, the GOP primaries are going to be determined not (sorry Ben A) by displays of Menschlichkeit, but by the most convincing argument that a candidate is in direct contact with God, the real God, the God honored by the greatest number of the credulous sods who constitute the GOP base. Huckabee seems to have caught up in this race to Romney, whose God is famously suspect. Whether or not Romney's religion speech is an effective countermeasure, I think Huckabee can win this definitively with a bit of stagecraft. Why not get God to appear on stage as a free-floating apparition to say "I am God, and I approve this candidate"? The technology does exist:
"Karlheinz, You Are Beautiful And Angular ... And If You Were A Gas, You Would Be Inert"
My tribute to Stockhausen was to be a link to the Sprockets episode in which Mike Myers utters that famous line. It turns out to be easily available on YouTube. Unfortunately it turns out to suffer all the typical unfunniness of early 90's SNL: their comic timing is so off that the famous line itself generates no laughter. It's too painful to link to -- about as painful, in fact, as Stockhausen's noises.
[Doug: 12/7/07 17:47]
Definition Of An Elitist Newspaper
Subscribers to Le Monde's special web features can receive SMS messages when important news breaks -- earthquakes, coups d'etat, etc., or at least these are examples that come to my mind when I hear "important breaking news". Dao's phone beeped shortly before dinner: Karlheinz Stockhausen has died!
My supermarket now carries dish detergent in gold- and silver-colored plastic bottles, labeled "Limited Edition".
[Doug: 12/7/07 12:00]
Push Present
Yet another reason for Rent-a-Womb to take off. Dad doesn't need to furnish a push present when he's already sprung for Parenthood Without the Pushing (tm). Kidding aside, the invention of a gift-giving ritual around the delivery room illustrates the modern economic corrollary to the traditional economic axiom of "unlimited wants and limited resources": available resources oustrip socially acceptable consumption norms. A key area of modern innovation is the opening of new avenues of consumption -- whether by figuring out ways to make existing items more expensive (luxurification, which in some sense can be thought of as the opposite of commodification) or by creating new occasions for consumption.
[Ben H.: 12/7/07 11:55]
It's been several days since our last anti-NYT outburst so ...
Monty Python efficiently deflated Sam Peckinpah's whole oeuvre by referring to a film of his called Buckets of Blood Pouring out of People's Heads. If I were to do the same for the Times, I would refer to an article called "Buckets Of Money Pouring Out Of Women Who Nonetheless Whine That Life's Deck Is Stacked Against Their Gender". Today's most-emailed article is a fairly good example, although not a definitive one since the whining is muted.
[Doug: 12/7/07 09:14]
