Metadata

Ben A.

Ben H.

Doug

Gaffe Judo Obama needs to get himself caught on tape mispronouncing "arugula". [Doug: 8/21/08 13:30]

"Free" Gift! It's good to see that American higher education hasn't lost its talent for generating bad ideas. The latest: several universities plan to give incoming students "free" iPods and/or iPhones. Yes, indeed, you read correctly. The university encourages students to have a small, WiFi enabled device, filled with distractions, one that can be more easily carried to class than a laptop. Because the biggest problem university students face today is the scarcity of entertainment. That and excessive focus. At least it helps financially strapped students, though. iPods are expensive. Here's your "free" iPod. Now, uh, I regret to have to inform you that tuition for this semester has increased 8% over last semester. Thanks for choosing LuxU! And be sure to check out the new climbing wall at the Student FunZone! Another example of the bundling fallacy! These same students will a few years hence thrill that their health insurance covers chiropractors, birth control, and, heck, possibly even toothpaste, and a few minutes later bemoan the cost of premiums. This raises a broader question: when is bundling appropriate? A few situations that jump to mind. Externalities If foregoing an unbundled good/service imposes a negative externality on everyone consuming the main good/service, or if those who forego the unbundled service get a positive externality when everybody else consumes it, then there is a case for bundling. For example, if airlines start charging for the use of the air conditioning nozzle above your seat, there would be a strong temptation to free ride. Likewise, those who try to save 5 bucks by foregoing air might start emanating an unpleasant odor that bothers everybody else. Transaction Costs It makes sense to bundle when transaction costs are high for unbundled services relative to their value. It would be a pain in the ass to try to charge and collect from every Club Med guest each time they make a run at the buffet. Cross-subsidy: If you didn't have to pay for an entire classical music concert program (as opposed to having the option of paying by piece), modern composers would go hungry. The programming establishment has decided that modern pieces are worth of support, and so cross-subsidizes them at the expense of warhorses. Without bundling, the cross-subsidies wouldn't work. Of course, this sort of bundling is a kind of assault on customer preferences. [Ben H.: 8/21/08 08:41]

I fancy rather some spotted dick in Spittalfields. [Ben H.: 8/20/08 06:07]

Ripping. As for Ben H, I'm sure he fancies a spot of toad in the hole on Frognal road. No? [Doug: 8/20/08 01:44]

I am to blame here -- and am scheduling only now. My suspicion is that we will be in Blighty sometime between 9/13 and 9/30. [Ben A.: 8/18/08 17:00]

The Great 2008 Frognal Road Bandarlog Reunion Guys, where are we on this? [Doug: 8/18/08 15:00]

McCain And ABBA The hardened warrior/soft disco contrast is amusing. What would be truly surprising is a politician who avowed musical tastes outside the popular/junk category entirely. How quickly that became impossible! "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." Addendum: As for the new Mamma Mia! movie, I'm sure it sucks. Anthony Lane hated it and I have limitless trust in any critic who was annoyed enough by The Hours that, six years after the fact, he still goes out of his way to say things like (and this is on the second page of the article just linked to, in his review of "Journey to the Center of the Earth") "I can’t help thinking of other films that would have been improved by a blast of 3-D; I might not have nodded off during “The Hours,” for example, if regularly prodded awake by the giant schnozzle of Virginia Woolf." [Doug: 8/17/08 16:50]

Beams are gonna blind me, but I won't feel blue “Now look, everybody says, ‘I hate ABBA. Oh ABBA, how terrible! Blah blah blah,’” he said. “How come everybody goes to ‘Mamma Mia?’ Huh? I mean really, seriously, huh? ‘I hate ABBA, they’re no good, you know.’ Well, everybody goes. They’ve been selling out for years.” source The Harvard Spam Box It's more like "come to the mahogany paneled room, discuss matters of import with the Good and Great, stand among your peers in might and consequence: entry fee, $5,000." Or to put it another way "extend your manhood." [Ben A.: 8/17/08 13:04]

I've decided there must be an email box out there -- one that I used for some brief period some years ago, maybe the one attached to the crossword website I maintained for a while, or a Yahoo one I abandoned when it sank with spam -- into which have gone all the messages that are my right as a no-longer-recent Harvard graduate: senators' requests for advice, job offers from august mahogany-panelled institutions, invitations to brainstorming sessions on Mediterranean islands and to burgundy tastings at novelists' lower-Fifth-avenue apartments. Really, it's the only explanation. Now where did I put the %$@#*! password!? [Doug: 8/15/08 16:17]

South Ossa-what, now? If Ben H can't figure this one out, you can imagine where I stand. The MSM pundits seemed lost, too, as if they'd scrambled to call as many phonebook numbers as possible with names ending in "vili", and then tried to stitch some coherent narrative out of what they heard. At least Abkhazia is safe with all those Dementors to protect it. [Doug: 8/14/08 11:15]

Apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed... ...the Russian air force problems over Georgia. [Ben H.: 8/14/08 10:05]

Ossetia Footnote The Russians have lost anywhere between four (their own admission) and nineteen (Georgia's claim) aircraft so far. This, in a conflict against a country which has grounded its own meagre airforce. From what I've seen in the press, the Russiana air force has been running something like 50 sorties a day for the past 3 days. Even if the Russians have lost only 4 aircraft: 4 losses for 150 sorties? That's pathetic... [Ben H.: 8/11/08 10:39]

I have to admit, I'm a bit at a loss on this one. The PM of Georgia (who I know from his days at Bank of Georgia) was at our office a month ago. As you can imagine, I asked whether we should expect any sort of movement on South Ossetia or Abkhazia. He gave the same response as he has in the past, namely that the regions do not presently contribute economically to Georgia and that the status quo doesn't present a problem for Georgia. Imagine my surprise, then, when President Saaskashvili unleashed a full scale invasion of South Ossetia. I simply can't figure what he was thinking. South Ossetia is economically worthless. There certainly no urgency in taking it back from that perspective. Elections took place earlier this year, so the Georgian regime has no need of using a military adventure to rally support. It is true that the Ossetians had been sporadically shelling villages on the Georgian side of the border, but if Israel can suck up rocket attacks from Gaza without resorting to full-scale re-occupation, Georgia could have refrained from a retaliatory invasion. Did Saakashvili believe he had the support of the West against any potential Russian retaliation? I can't see that he would make such an elementary mistake. The US is tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush administration is pretty much a lame duck at this point. And the odds are for a successor administration with Carterite foreign-policy leanings. EU leadership at the moment rests in the hands of the French. Has Saakashvili heard the phrase pourquoi mourir pour Danzig? Did he think the Russians wouldn't dare a draconian response during the Olympics? I can't imagine that someone who grew up under the Soviet system would believe a silovik like Putin would allow himself to be constrained by sanctimonious humbug like "the Olympic truce". That leaves the possibility that Saakashvili is playing a deeper game. Perhaps he hopes Russia in some way will overreach, inviting an international effort to mediate? Maybe he'd actually like to be rid of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and the only political way to do so is to lose them valiantly? I don't know... What do you guys think? For what it is worth, I don't entirely understand the Russians' thinking either. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are just as worthless to Russia as to Georgia. Getting a reputation for international villainy isn't without cost. For Russia, is this an opportunity to make a point to the West about Kosovo? Or is this more a question of the interests of specific Russians rather than the Russian national interest. Many insiders have made a mint out of the lawless spaces of post-Soviet frozen conflicts. Military action means rebuilding contracts, which means Kokoity and his Russian puppetmasters have even richer flows to steal... [Ben H.: 8/11/08 10:00]

Ossetia Ben H, we wait your more informed view. My default setting remains "never let the Russians see a sign of weakness." Let me know. [Ben A.: 8/11/08 09:12]

Interesting Cyberwarfare Datapoint I received an email today from the management of the largest bank in Georgia. One point they noted: the government has ordered the banks to shut down their internet banking portals. This does not appear to be based on a concern about a bank run -- branches and call centers remain open. Rather, I conclude that having seen what happened to Estonia last year during the "Red Army Memorial" controversy, the Georgian government worries about the potential for Russian cyberattacks. [Ben H.: 8/11/08 06:10]

Best Authoritarian PR Ever! [Ben A.: 8/8/08 23:46]

Late Reply To Kipling Thread My thanks to Ben A for recommending Kim have already been conveyed. I second all the praise he gives it. I also second the doubts about Edward Said's take on it. I read the Said-edited Penguin version. The Foreward, which I read afterwards, was fixated on racism and colonialism to a degree that seemed, well, crazy, given the novel I'd just read. One might as pertinently have restricted the foreward to a discussion of serpent imagery in the novel. Then there were the bizarre textual notes -- I recall flipping to the end to be told something completely obvious to anyone not living in a cave, and then reading baffling Hindi words without notes, and having to look them up on the internet. Maybe Said figured that explicating the Hindi terms would be acquiescing to anglocentric hegemony or something. I recall that when Said died, the famous contrarian C. Hitchens wrote a glowing eulogy. That is almost sufficient, I think, to write Said off as a twat. [Doug: 8/6/08 23:52]

Newport Beach Anecdote I've already blogged extensively about Mallhalla, a.k.a. Orange County. The main anecdote I want to share about the three weeks we just spent there concerns the tennis court of the home adjoining my in-laws'. Nobody had played on it during our previous stays. It simply lay there as a testament to its owners' wealth. This time something had changed: the net was removed, and at the geometric center of the court stood two adjoining giant beige tents. I wondered silently for a few days what purpose they served, until one of the kids claimed to have seen something entering or exiting the tents: "A car, but instead of the doors opening on the side, they opened up." At this point the tents gained an iconic aura for me. Centered within the rectilinear court markings, exactly ten cubits by eight, they seemed a Tabernacle of Pure Money, inside which some mystagog might reveal to the most assiduous seekers the Final Mysteries of consumerism. I should say that my in-laws themselves remain miraculously untouched by the culture around them. Their pediatrician's office featured a flat-screen consumption-inducer and when Mylie Cyrus flared up on it I asked my six-year-old niece what she thought of Hannah Montana. She had never heard the name. As I say, miraculous. [Doug: 8/6/08 23:32]

Garfield Minus Garfield Great idea [Ben A.: 8/5/08 20:18]

Apprentice? If you guys would like an apprentice to do the simpler statistical analyses relevant to your baseball comments, you should talk to my eight-year-old nephew. He gets up every morning, seeks out the sports pages, and basically memorizes all the baseball scores and major headlines. He asked me my opinion on this big Red Sox-Yankees-et al. trade and I had to admit I had none, understanding none of it. He's also in the process of memorizing all the US presidents in order. That sort of mind seems to gravitate towards baseball as surely as baseballs gravitate back to earth when hit. Probably I would be happier if I had that sort of mind. How far this is from being the case is revealed by the consideration that, for me, everything between Jackson and Lincoln is basically one long John Taylor Harrison administration. [Doug: 8/3/08 00:13]

Nomar II Big, big trade for the Sox. Like the trade of Nomar, this is one that doesn't make much sense on paper but may perhaps spark the team. Jason Bay brings a wonderful reputation with him, but he's no Manny with the bat. Who is? [Ben A.: 7/31/08 18:07]

The Exception to Kipling's Humanism "One thing we must get into our thick heads is that wherever the German -- man or woman -- gets a suitable culture to thrive in he or she means death and loss to civilized people, precisely as germs of any disease suffered to multiply mean death or loss to mankind." Hey, they don't call them Germans for nothing! (Thank you, thank you, I'll be appearing here at Grossinger's all week!) [Ben H.: 7/31/08 14:37]

The Reason for My Non-Existent Posting... I spent the last five days in Jackson, WY. The view of the Tetons from the hiking trails below was made, if anything, more picturesque by the light haze drifting over from the California wildfires. [Ben H.: 7/31/08 14:29]

It's not unlike the Yankees of my youth to stretch to acquire overweight, over-the-hill future Hall-of-Famers in a desperate bid for a post-season berth. But let's face it -- Jose Molina is feeble and the Yankees needed to do something with Posada out for the season. At least in this case, the team has only committed to Pudge for a year, and gave up in exchange a guy also in his walk year. As for Farnsworth, I admit he's looked good in the last 2 months, but I remain suspicious. He has a long track record as a combustion artist and it would take more than a couple of good months to convince me that he's finally lived up to his potential. Watch this space for bullpen developments. I hope we see something more exciting than the promotion of Brian Bruney... [Ben H.: 7/31/08 06:47]

Ivan Rodriquez to Yankees That seems gratuitous. Your thoughts, Ben H? [Ben A.: 7/30/08 22:29]

Frum on Kim David Frum comments on Kipling's masterpiece. My thoughts: 1) As per usual, Frum exhibits excellent judgment on literature. More political commentators should read deeply in fiction. Frum and Hitchens are the only two who come to mind. An aside: If there is a commentator of the left who also excels at criticism, I should like to know him/her. Most of the young gun left-bloggers (Yglesias, Klein) appear completely unlettered. Chris Hayes of The Nation seems better. I imagine French lefties read books, although it's probably all Beckett novels... 2) That said, Frum gives too much credit to Said. There is little embarrassing in Kim. To the contrary, Kipling produced an astonishing document: perhaps the greatest appreciation of another culture in all of English letters. I cannot think of anything close. And there's a very clear moral: invariably, the worthiness of an Englishman in Kim correlates with deep affection for and knowledge of Indian culture. 3) Huree Babu may have absurd and comic elements in his character, but he is foremost a fricking hero -- a master spy possessed of tradescraft that awes Kim himself. And to underscore Kipling's belief that all great virtues are held by all races in all times*, he shows himself to be a natural gentleman, evincing a positively Oxbridgean willingness to endure danger and discomfort simply for the joy of utterly humiliating the (dastardly!) Russian spies. And they don't even know it. Indeed, they offer him a testimonial for what they perceive as his faithful, subservient behavior. This is just one instance of the theme, expressed throughout both explicitly and implicitly, that Westerners who underestimate the humanity and resource of Indians are fools and knaves. 4)Frum writes that "Kim is a story written for boys that probably no boy will ever read again." Not if I have any say in it! *In Puck of Pook's Hill, e.g., there is a Roman family that behaves -- like a happy family. As far as I can gather, Kipling did not believe that all cutlures were equal, but did think all races and all times had access to every human virtue. Chesterton believed this universalist aspect of Kipling made him imperfectly English, by the way... [Ben A.: 7/30/08 00:59]

True [Ben A.: 7/23/08 21:54]

Venezuelan Arms Purchases Russian armaments, to a certain extent like French armaments, attract third world buying interest not so much because of their technical capabilities but rather because of the generous kick-backs that tend to accompany them. [Ben H.: 7/23/08 07:24]

The Karadzic Prescription Should it have been a tip-off for his patients when his remedy for nearly every complaint was kill two Croats and call me in the morning? [Ben H.: 7/23/08 07:18]

Karadzic This story would be long over if only we imprisoned all practitioners of alternative medicine. As I suggested years ago [Ben A.: 7/22/08 20:28]

Because Russian Arms Did Such a Great Job Securing the Iraqi Regime! Mr. Chávez, who was also expected to sign contracts to purchase more than $1 billion worth of Russian arms, called for the two nations to become “strategic partners” to defend against what he called an American threat to his country. “That will guarantee the sovereignty of Venezuela, which the United States is now threatening,” Mr. Chávez said Imagine it with a more jungle-y background! [Ben A.: 7/22/08 20:13]

The Economic Assumptions of My Life Long: The world economy The US economy Health care as a percentage of global spending Drugs as a percentage of health care (and thus implicitly: intellectual property) Cambridge real estate Victorian personal ethics. Short: 'Emerging' markets (exception: Columbia) Non-traditional family structures for heterosexuals Conclusion: I need to shift to a more market neutral posture. Also, I need to go long Rollos. Those things rock. [Ben A.: 7/20/08 23:29]

Fright The Orange County vacation has started, for me, on a frightening note. I keep reading newspaper stories here about housing woes and America's unbelievable debt levels. I perused a book called The Coming Economic Collapse, which I found on my in-laws' shelf; it makes lots of references to the Fall of Rome, and manages to make them seem opportune. Then today we went to Fry's Electronics. In some ways it's just the latest name for the same store that's been around since Crazy Eddie. But there's something more orgiastic about it -- the endless hectares of toys, the furlong of junk-food bins you're herded past as you seek to pay. Eat! Gorge! Nobody will stop you buying your Rolos at an electronics store! This in itself gives the store only a whiff of the End Times. What really spooked me is its interior design theme: a Roman ruin. The featureless box-store exterior gives no hint of it. When you walk inside, you see an enormous replica of an aquaduct arch, smashed at one point below which a pile of stones collects the falling water. The rest of the store continues the theme -- pillars clad in plastic Corinthian columns, cash registers beneath triglyphs with headless or armless statues. Sell, you fools! [Doug: 7/20/08 17:14]

More Aesthetic News Hellboy 2: AVOID. The first lesson of film: get the plot right. Just run some old trope out there -- the sinner redeemed, crime doesn’t pay, love triumphs – and if you nail the details you have a classic. If you botch this, everything else fails. The second lesson of film: don’t have wide swings in emotional tone. A comedy should be a comedy. A film of depth should be a film of depth. But you can’t staple together a ludicrous jaunt and slow motion death scenes with all the strings playing. If red shirts are going to die horribly, you have to either care about them, or dispense with caring altogether. You can’t have the red shirts eaten alive by vermin in one scene without comment (or any sign that anyone cares), and then mope over the central character’s illness. That’s solipsistic and base. This seems to be a particularly European failing. McCain: The Aesthetic Ledger Pro: 1. Is a bit of a moralistic nutcase 2. Loves ABBA, not a fan of Phillip Roth 3. Refused early release from a POW camp because it would have been a propaganda victory for the enemy 4. Took a stripper to an officers' wives' party, where she proceeded to clean her fingernails with a switchblade 5. Doesn’t take earmarks 6. Instrumental in implementing a counter-insurgency strategy that avoided a humiliating American defeat and likely humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq 7. Hates Mitt Romney 8. Adopted a child 9. Looks vaguely ashamed when pandering to the Religious Right on gay rights 10. First wife still likes him Con: 1. Divorced first wife, likely cheated on her (“Adultery is a filthy habit, like using someone else’s toothbrush” -- A.T. Ellis) 2. Panders to the religious right on gay rights 3. Unironically uses the term ‘straight talk’ 4. Hangs out with Lieberman 5. Uses canned anecdotes 6. Second wife is botoxed and creepy-looking [Ben A.: 7/17/08 23:35]

Rival Sentence Of The Month "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." -- attributed to Pauline Kael. (National Post via ALDaily.) [Doug: 7/16/08 10:07]

Low Expectations Of Transcendence, Indeed Christians come together to pray for cheaper gas. The fun of linking to stories like this is somewhat shrunk by the bad conscience it brings on; the folks described are neither wholly representative of the religious American majority nor completely serious. It's kind of specious for religion-bashers like Richard Dawkins to draw attention to these stories. Lazy dyad alert! [Doug: 7/16/08 09:57]

Fannie and Freddie Plan, Pre-empted You guys have surely seen this on the web already, but last night the government came out with its (interim) solution for Fannie/Freddie. The Treasury will stand ready to buy equity in the entities (diluting existing shareholders if it comes to that) and the Fed will let them borrow from the discount window. In exchange the Fed will have a greater say in their regulation. Sadly, this means that my idea, for restructuring the two entities into a new Broad Restructured National Mortgage Acceptance Corporation (BernieMac) will not come to fruition. "C'mon now -- y'all shouldn'ta signed on the dotted line if you didn't know what you were signin'! The short-sightedness of our political class has robbed the mortgage market of this man's witty yet unimpeachable common sense. Not to mention that his industry experience -- he played a loan officer in the remake of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? -- exceeds that of the political hacks like Frank Raines Fannie and Freddie's upper management was stuffed with. You'll recall that in Guess Who, Bernie Mac's character turns down Ashton Kutcher's character's loan application. Make a loan to an unemployed guy?! Who cares if Mozilo would consider him bankable! Bernie Mac won't do it! [Ben H.: 7/14/08 06:04]

Sentence of the Month Traditionalism without religion is addiction -- Eve Tushnet Maybe it's the sentence of the year, in fact. It's hard to believe this line of Tushnet's doesn't refer at least in part to walking corpse that is the Jewish 'tradition' in many US communities (she's ethnically Jewish, converted to Catholicism). You fellows may recall the phrase "with this ring, we are married according to the laws of Moses and Israel." At many ceremonies, this is mistranslated as "according to the customs of Moses of Israel." I know we all love an ethnic wedding, at which, so the joke goes, more fun is had than in th typical WASP lifetime, but who wants custom and ethnicity to be the sanctioning body? Who wants to be married by the authority of bagels, academic excellence, and center-left politics? Only someone with low expectations of transcendence, I think. [As always, we can secularize the point: for religion, substitute 'justice.' This helps to explain why American traditionalism can remain a spark-spitting electric cord while other national spirits atrophy.] [Ben A.: 7/13/08 02:17]

Who's The Doofus? Colleague report that the AT&T Wireless store ran out of iPhones... whoops! Who's Really the Doofus On the other hand, the people who bought the iPhones in stock can't use them, because the activation server is down. [Ben H.: 7/11/08 13:14]

Speaking of Comic Books: Some of These Doofuses Would Probably Disagree with Doug Today marks the debut of the 3G iPhone. Here's the scene at 5:45am in front of the AT&T Wireless store near my office. Note that when the original iPhone came out, a few people had camped out in front of the store at a similar hour. On that day, iPhones were freely available later in the day and on the next day at that store, making fools of those who deprived themselves of sleep in fear of Apple scarcity. And yet the geek sidewalk squatters insist on suffering heedlessly and needlessly for their iPhone. Perhaps its rather a form of self-mortification in honor of St. Steven of Cupertino, their tutelary god? As retarded as these line-sitters seems, I witnessed some possibly bigger losers on hand. For isn't it somehow worse to pay attention to these iPhone loonies than to be one? Be sure to check out FoxNews's story on the iPhone phenomenon. You may catch them photoshopping the line into a mob! [Ben H.: 7/11/08 08:58]

Several members of Congress have caught flak for having received mortgages at concessional rates from lenders who might benefit from having friends in high places. If you thought you could avoid the taint of corruption by vowing to vote only for renters, this story will disappoint you. [Ben H.: 7/11/08 08:40]

Impotent Scream Into The Void I don't like comic books. I don't like comic book movies. I don't like anything related to comic books. [Doug: 7/11/08 06:12]

On A Somewhat More Serious Note The Pentagon Airborne-Refueling Contract story is turning out to be a real zeitgeist-definer, even if any story involving government contracts is intrinsically too boring to follow closely. As I understand it, the Pentagon wants to spend some unfathomable amount of money to buy airborne tankers; bids were taken; the lords of war over at Boeing who usually get a rubber stamp from their military-industrial-complex buddies in the government did such a half-assed job on their proposal that the Pentagon actually tapped a mostly-European consortium; complaints by Boeing's lobbyists led to a decision that "mistakes were made" in the bid-selection process -- presumably, there was really only one mistake, that Boeing was not chosen. This mistake is now being rectified: the granting of the contract to EADS etc. was retracted, and we can expect it to go to Boeing by the end of the year. The odd thing here is that, while I of course want to paint all Republicans as hypocrites who preach "free trade" while in fact getting rich off of no-bid, no-accountability government contracts, John McCain seems to have been instrumental in making the original, fairly transparent process possible. We'll see where he comes down if he's forced to take a position on it now. [P.S. Thanks to John G for links with more background on this story, including convictions on corruption charges at an early stage, when Boeing was bribing Pentagon functionaries with promises of six-figure sinecures.] [Doug: 7/9/08 13:56]

Bandarlog Predicts Next Big Thing Reverse sex tourism. Nearly 600 Google hits for that phrase prevent me from copyrighting it, but they seem all to refer to white women going to non-white places to get laid. No, I'm thinking of the tens of millions of Chinese men who will not have corresponding Chinese women in 2020. This imbalance is seen by sociologists as a big problem. I submit that these sociologists need to consider global economics in order to realize a solution will be at hand. By 2020 China will produce everything, and be rich; the U.S. will produce nothing, and be destitute. Connect the dots people! [Doug: 7/9/08 11:41]

Obama Plane Flap: Frequent Flyer Perspective Obama's campaign plane had to make an emergency landing due to pitch control issues. Apparently, the rear escape slide deployed in flight. Web commentators have talked about this as an extremely unusual event. I can't speak to its statistical frequency, but I can say that I very nearly witnessed the same phenomenon. In 1996, I was flying weekly from LAX to Lambert St. Louis (coicidentally, where Obama's crippled plane landed). Shortly after the inbound aircraft for our 1:10am flight arrived, there was an announcement that the outbound flight was delayed due to mechanical problems. Since I took the same flight every week, I had gotten to know the ground staff. I asked about the problem. The answer: an escape slide had deployed in flight. The equipment was an MD-80, as in Obama's case. [Ben H.: 7/9/08 08:31]

McCain Pledges Balanced Budget By End Of First Term Also colonization of exoplanet Gliese 581 d. [Doug: 7/7/08 15:15]

Attention Virtuous GOP Christians: Beetle-Browed Jewish Liberals Have Your Number! Some wonderful photo retouching over at Fox News. [Doug: 7/7/08 14:11]

Baseball is Like Politics "They love me everywhere, what can I tell you?" --Manny Ramirez [Ben A.: 7/6/08 21:55]

Presidential Campaigns Are Like Baseball The million expressions of this idea which have presumably been made won't stop me from giving my own. Nor will they compel me first to read the canonical ones, which presumably have been written by people like George Will. So: Whether on a baseball team or a presidential campaign, you perform only three movements, hopefully to perfection, on roughly 162 roughly consecutive days. Hitting, catching, throwing; declaiming, equivocating, dunning. New ideas and creative solutions are beside the point. Thus the daily highlights we see on the news are just the best executions of the three motions. We're shown the clip of candidate X declaiming very loudly, equivocating very cannily, and reaping huge sums. Or the clip of player Y hitting especially far, catching with an especially outstretched arm, throwing especially fast. Except that there is occasionally something a bit more interesting to show -- the errors. Candidate X goes off message, lets himself be pinned down, runs out of money. Most of the news cycle these days is dedicated to such errors. Let's go to the videotape -- Obama now implies he cannot predict the the next ten years of Iraqi history to the nearest millimeter -- whoa, Nelly! Mark that error on the box score! (Sorry to mix sportscasters' catch phrases.) And at the end of the season the winner is, of course, the franchise owner with the biggest TV demographic. And that's something you could have calculated on opening day. Our country would be healthier if somehow politics were more like football or basketball. Here there actually are new ideas and strategies, offenses and defenses; here success depends on people working together in new ways to face new challenges. But I have no idea how politics could evolve like this in a country where it is plausible that the voters will soon be walking around with feed bags on their faces. [Doug: 7/6/08 03:41]

The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things Speaking of Monty Python -- Still, at [new-age retreat center] Kripalu and elsewhere, there is always room for something new. At the end of August, Kripalu will offer, for the first time, a three-day seminar in rock balancing, the contemplative practice of stacking stones into precarious-looking formations. The presenter, Lila Higgins, an environmental artist based in California, said she was emboldened by an image from the Kripalu catalog itself. “I saw a Kripalu magazine,” she said, “and on the cover I saw a stack of rocks. And I thought, ‘Hey, I need to propose a class for this.’ ” -- from "It's Not Easy Picking A Path To Enlightenment" in the NYT [Doug: 7/4/08 06:57]

Bubble Analysis Ben H's analysis is convincing. You're right that Greenspan shouldn't be forgotten. I would add that, in my dim distorted memory, Newt Gingrich seems almost as good a mascot for the internet bubble as Clinton. I don't remember what Newt's main policy positions were, and I suppose he was complicit in degrading the nation's politics to the sad level of the last eight years, but what sticks out in my mind is his goofily grinning faith in technology and progress. I would also stress the argument for making Bush the mascot for the bubble he oversaw (without unstressing the importance of low interest rates). It's something I've mentioned before: that no skill or effort was necessary to profit from this bubble, only some seed money with which to start flipping condos. And that's Bush's own story -- no skill, no effort, just wealthy, connected parents. [Doug: 7/4/08 06:47]

Why Does Romantic Fiction Often Involve Prima Facie Incompatible Couples? I could provide many hypotheses, but none so deep as James Bowman's: In a way, therefore, the more unsuited or otherwise unlikely a couple show themselves to be, the more random and therefore fated seems their meeting. * * * In other words, what we delight in when we delight in "love triumphant" (once again to cite the newspaper headline from It Happened One Night) is our own individuality and having a story to tell like no other. All of life is a battle against generality, the generic and the genetic, and for particularity and individuality: that is, for the chance to have a story of our own that makes us different from everyone else. That fate should have taken an interest in matching our surrogates up with each other in spite of all that mere circumstance, or mere compatibility considerations, could do to keep them apart is a reassurance that what would otherwise be sordid or practical or generic actually has a transcendent and perhaps even divine element in it. [Ben A.: 7/3/08 23:40]

Wainscoting ... Wainscoting ... Wainscoting ... sounds like a little Dorset village, doesn't it? Wainscoting. (Cut to the village of Wains Cotting. A woman rushes out of a house.) Woman: We've been mentioned on telly! [Ben H.: 7/3/08 14:18]

Britain To Build 65,000-Ton Aircraft Carrier "HMS Prince Of Wales" But the BBC version fails to mention the architectural requirements demanded by its namesake. The Edwardian wainscoting will truly strike fear in the hearts of the enemy! [Doug: 7/3/08 12:50]

Relative Bubbles We do a lot of amateur comparative bubble analysis here. If you need to make one distinction between the bubbles, it is this: the tech bubble (to a certain extent like the English railway bubble of the early 19th century) was founded in overoptimistic assessments of the returns on investment in a new type of capital good. The legacy of the bubble was that infrastructure that rational Bayesians would not have built did in reality end up getting built with the capital of speculators. The speculators bore the losses and society got the benefit of the infrastructure. The property bubble was based on the pushing of excessively easy money into the most quickly "expandable" asset class, namely residential mortgage paper. The result is that houses that rational Bayesians would not have built did in reality get built. Financial institutions in the first instance are bearing the losses, which, given their indispensable functional role in the economy, means that the losses need to go through a long and destructive process of allocation and partial socialization. Society ends up with some of the losses and tons of completely inappropriate houses built in senseless locations. You can guess which bubble will cause more lasting harm. Perhaps in some sense, Bush serves as an apposite mascot of this boom in a way that Clinton serves as a symbol of his. But I don't see how either has much to do with his respective economic cycle. The "Clinton" boom arose from a real positive shock to intellectual capital (the development -- by the private sector -- of new information technologies). The "Bush" boom arose from the efforts of global central banks to deal with the deflation of the Clinton boom and the deflationary impact of September 11th. I submit that Greenspan is both a better mascot and a better culprit for both of the booms. Both relied on an excessive trust in eggheads by the rest of us -- in the first case, the internet gurus (to disaster for a few speculators and cool gadgets for the rest of us), and in the second case, Wall Street financial engineers (to disaster for all). Greenspan bears real responsibility for the consequences of an excessively loose monetary policy both during the internet boom and in its aftermath. [Ben H.: 7/3/08 09:21]

You Cannot Understand Modern America Without Watching This Video I keep thinking The Onion cannot get any better and keep getting proved wrong. [Doug: 7/3/08 08:08]

Retrospectives The combination of a slow news season, a cliff-diving economy, and an upcoming election mean that we'll be seeing a lot of retrospectives of the Bush Era. I may write one myself. The best one I've seen so far is Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency, over at The Onion. Highly recommended. Of course, nobody really thinks that one man (or two) brought our republic to its current abject state. But neither can anyone deny that Bush was terribly emblematic of his era. And it's a difficult question that still bugs me, to what extent such "being emblematic" really catalyzes the trends of a president's era. Did seeing a grinning jackass on the news every night make millions of closet jackasses come out, stop pretending to any decency beyond mere phariseeism, give in to their feeling that prosperity was a birthright which planning for the future could only muck up? Or, inversely, had all our country's jackasses come to feel, over the course of the year 2000, that their moment was arriving, that they had to elect one of their own? The second answer gets a boost in credibility from the reflection that Bush's predecessor was, in his own way, in a certain light, a jackass. But this reflection brings the same question back again. How much did Clinton influence his era? I think one key to understanding how the two presidencies differed is the economic bubbles they oversaw. The Clinton era's was based on a belief that hard work and technological smarts would open an entirely new and sunny chapter in human history. Bush's bubble was based on a belief somewhat harder to phrase -- something like, "USA! USA! Boo-ya, bitch!" There is a link with the two men's personalities here. Clinton was a wonk and indefatigable; Bush cannot spell indefatigable. The relative painfulness of the bubbles' aftermaths remains to be calculated. I am not hopeful. [Doug: 7/3/08 06:48]

I'm A Uniter, Not A Divider In the division-transcending spirit of Independence Day and of the Obama campaign, I'd like to reach out to Red State Republicans on an isuse we all need to work together on: global warming. In particular I have some advice on how you can lend a hand with "carbon capture and storage" without giving up your enormous Canyonero SUV's. Just take an ordinary garden hose, affix one end to the exhaust pipe of your SUV, pull the other end through the driver-side window until taut, and then keep that end in your mouth as you drive around. This will "fix" the carbon emitted from your engine before it can escape into the atmosphere. [Doug: 7/2/08 15:57]

Just hearing a rumor that one-time Colombian presidential candidate and possibly former Chirac mistress (and French cause celebre) Ingrid Betancourt has been rescued by the Colombian military from her long capitivity at the hands of the FARC. If the story pans out, Betancourt will probably run for president in the 2010 election. Should both Betancourt and McCain win their respective presidencies, summit meetings between the two could be quite interesting. "I was chained to a tree for 3 years, Mr. President!" "Hey, at least you got some fresh air! I was strung up in cage!" [Ben H.: 7/2/08 15:17]

Ben, you need to make an exception to your policy of giving weight to consensus when it comes to media consensus. Or, at least, you should switch the sign on the weight. Journalists' stock-in-trade is the assertion. Admitting error devalues the inventory of the whole industry. You wouldn't see Tyson pressuring Perdue to admit its chickens carry salmonella. That would destroy the market for poultry! With respect to the al-Dura affair, Commentary several years ago had an excellent article about the hoax. I'm afraid it's as bad as you think. [Ben H.: 7/2/08 06:35]

The Establishment Story In general, I hold with the establishment story. If 75% of people believe X, then, in all probability, X. Yet I worry at times that the opinions of the great 75% percent rely entirely on a small group of incompetents, that my entire world of facts has been assembled by four or five lazy, credulous, dopes. This can’t be true, can it? Le Mot Juste Doug! Doug! Doug! [Ben A.: 7/2/08 00:24]

Your judicious addition, Doug, demonstrates your subtle ear! [Ben H.: 6/30/08 07:52]

I Have Added One Word To This Passage Of Strunk And White. Guess Which. The question of ear is vital. Only the writer whose ear is reliable is in a position to use bad grammar deliberately; this writer knows for sure when a colloquialism is better than formal phrasing and is able to sustain the work at a level of good taste. So cock your ear, cocksucker. [Doug: 6/27/08 15:50]

Department Of Strunk And White Yesterday I took a random book off our shelf and it turned out to be a copy of Strunk And White that Dao seems to have stolen from her high school library. Believe it or not, I'd never perused Strunk And White before, although of course I'd heard of it. My reaction to most of the recommendations was "Well duh." But enough of them seemed right and non-obvious that reading the whole book could well be useful. And the experience made me reflect that most of the prose coming out of university humanities departments these days make me say not "Well duh" but "That's a bunch of turbid nonsense, you cocksucker." From this it was a short hop to the thought that all such departments should be replaced with a single Department of Strunk And White. If you are accepted into the department your only class is Memorization Of Strunk and White, in which you rock back and forth with closed eyes like a madrassa student, reciting its passages. Your dissertation is obligatorily broken into two halves. The first half is a copy of Strunk And White which you have written from memory in some verifiable way. The second half is a rewriting of some substantial text, say a translation of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, according to Strunk And White's recommendations. And that is all. Enjoy your PhD, cocksucker. [Doug: 6/27/08 14:55]

Musa, Mihi Causas Memora I could remember 14 spells unaided. No wonder I have no useful skills. [Ben A.: 6/25/08 18:10]

That and some BADIALMA!* *This is the one Wizardry spell name I could recall without cheating. Having cheated, I now realize I should better have said TILTOWAIT. At least I did not go with my second choice FLOKATI, which I now realize I had memorized as a near-eastern carpet type useful as a Scrabble bingo. [Doug: 6/25/08 14:29]

Arm Yourself With Clairvoyance Awesome. It seems like you'd need that to beat Werdna. [Ben A.: 6/24/08 17:05]

On The Sublime Satie is not the go-to guy if you need more sublimity in your life. Miniature piano sketches is what he does. The beauty of his piano pieces can be fleeting or meditative, mystical or mock-mystical. But never -- to put it in cinematic terms -- the kind of beauty you'd use on a soundtrack to accompany the ultimate triumph of love over hatred or good over evil. (That would be Mahler.) Satie's pieces are often ironic, which explains why I was such a fan of his in college. In fact my bombastic praise below for the embryons desséchées is meant to echo the ironic bombast with which the first and third of those pieces end. There is more debate about Satie's rank as a composer than there is about, say, Ravel's or Debussy's. He's so quirky that many write him off as a prankster or a faux mystic (his scores are well known for instructions to the performer that go well beyond "cresc." or "ritard." -- I remember reading "Arm yourself with clairvoyance" at a certain point of one of his pieces). While not as enamored of him as I was in college, I think such a judgment is much too harsh. He will never hang with the Teutonic B-Boys but he does make the cut as a top-tier artist. I will try to put some of my favorite pieces of his online. [Doug: 6/24/08 15:10]

Of Igloos And Desert Tents Certainly there is much to criticize in the architecture, and more generally in the cultures, of the Arctic and of the Arabian Peninsula. What redeems these cultures forever is their contribution to the Scrabble dictionary of words where Q is not followed by U. UMIAQ, SUQ, QAT, QIVIUT, the list goes on. Doug's First Law of Linguistics: "Extreme temperature leads to extreme orthography." [Doug: 6/24/08 03:33]

The Sublime That Satie moves to the top of my list, Doug. For all that I affect high culture, my interaction with really top tier art has been next to nil of late. For eighteen months I've been counter-punching and clinching my way through life. Experience of the real sublime -- art that can shake you and leave you different -- has been eclipse by booze, sun, and Boston sports dominance. Re-reading Mark Helprin's (flawed) masterpiece "Winters' Tale" over the past week reminded me that watching the Ray Allen torch the Lakers isn't the highest pleasure in life. [Ben A.: 6/23/08 21:05]

Midtown Architecture of Excess The structure pictured above popped up over the weekend on the plaza in front of the Seagram's building, near my office. I could not figure out what business anyone could have placing a mock igloo (or more precisely, igluvigaq, as someone more conversant with Inuit culture corrected me!) on Park Avenue; and moreover, why it should be surrounded by potted palm trees. I went down during business hours to have a closer look. And in one sense, my hunch was correct. There is no reason to have an igluvigaq here; the structure is not meant to be such. Nakheel, the booming Middle Eastern property developer, is apparently hosting some sort of event at the Four Seasons. The dome is meant to evoke a desert tent, hence the palms. Needless to say, tonight's post-work activity is to burn the motherfucker down. [Ben H.: 6/23/08 17:58]

Dude, I Am All About Xeroblasty I hereby announce the formation of the Xeroblast League, dedicated the proposition that all truth and beauty in our universe springs from Embryons Desséchés by Erik Satie, or else that, if this is not the case, then it is to our universe's discredit and not to Satie's. Membership is by invitation only. All readers of this blog are invited. The chief benefit of membership is authorization to use the word "xeroblast". [Doug: 6/20/08 17:24]

One Fell Swoop If you are exceptionally cultured you will know the etymology and provenance of this phrase. If you are like me you should look here. (It seems to me that Tolkien the philologist liked to use "fell" with this meaning.) [Doug: 6/20/08 14:55]

It sounds like you have fallen victim to poor IRS drafting skills. You can take a deduction not for war profits, but rather for any special tax levied on war profits. Such taxes are very rare, but can be quite extreme. Without a deduction, a US citizen might wind up with higher than 100% marginal tax on the affected income. While we are on the topic, I can't help but note the peculiarity of the US tax system in its approach to expatriates. Really no other civilized country even makes non-resident citizens pay tax on their overseas income. [Ben H.: 6/18/08 12:19]

More Good News For Republican Exiles-Of-Conscience While doing my taxes the other day (expats are given an automatic two month extension to file) I came across a provision that offers very explicit protection to the Republican cronies who will flee to France if Obama wins. In the instructions to Form 1116 (Foreign Tax Credit): "You can take a credit for income, war profits, and excess profits taxes paid or accrued during your tax year to any foreign country ... ." As far as I know, all of Ben H's deals involve socially useful things like soybeans, but the Halliburton crowd would do well to memorize this passage. Snarking aside: I would like to see the transcript of the deliberations that yielded this passage! [Doug: 6/18/08 10:16]

I was supposed to have lunch today with the couple whose apartment we rented while looking to buy a place here, back in 2006. They're just about the nicest people you could hope to meet. We don't see them often because they spend most of their time in California. Unfortunately the female half of the couple was feeling poorly and couldn't make it, but I did have lunch with her husband and found out more about what he's been up to. I had known that he worked in theater/film/television -- but not that he was one of the main Cardassians in Star Trek Deep Space Nine! [Doug: 6/16/08 15:28]

There is indeed something both funny and sad about the notion that one might flee from the United States to France for tax relief. While Sarkozy may well lower French marginal income tax rates below those that would prevail in the United States of Hope and Change, France's steep VAT and its wealth tax probably would leave the advantage with United States, except for the most miserly in consumption and skilled in asset-sheltering. On the other hand, decamping to Russia makes eminent sense from a tax perspective! It is worth noting that at least a few people in Washington view the possibility of fiscal migration as a realistic threat. [Ben H.: 6/15/08 11:06]

"Companies Get OK to Annoy Polar Bears Headline writers have the best job. [Ben A.: 6/15/08 08:27]

Rumsfeld Nauseating. [Ben A.: 6/14/08 17:37]

Fleeing In Disgust Hey Ben H, I think you should start a trend for well-off Republicans: threatening to flee to the right-thinking land of France if Obama succeeds in establishing his tyranny in the U.S. Maybe we could do a house swap ... [Doug: 6/14/08 15:28]

Following Up On the tax issue, one of Sarkozy's most publicized reforms here in France has been lowering the "bouclier fiscal" or fiscal shield from 60% to 50%. Not having a snowball's chance in hell of ever being affected by this directly, I haven't paid attention to whether it was passed or not. The idea in any case is that nobody would be required to pay the government more that 60% (or 50%) of their revenue. I think Germany also has a 50% shield. My gut feeling is that the fraction 1/2 should be some kind of natural barrier to taxation. To what extent the U.S. tax code should spring from my gut feelings is a legitimate question though. On the dancing baby issue, I fear the brevity of the clip may make viewers doubt whether she's really dancing. I wish I had been filming her during "My Adidas"; this would have put such doubts to rest. Maybe I'll try putting that song on again for her soon. You've heard of the Mozart Effect©, and probably of the skepticism surrounding it. Well, I can tell you there is no doubt as to the power of the Jam-Master-Jay Effect to increase a child's well-being. [Doug: 6/14/08 07:20]