The opponents of the "ground zero mosque" are making a serious mistake. If you really fear rising Islamic influence in New York, there's no better way to stymie it than to let its supporters break themselves on the rocks of New York building regulations. Charles Martel's "Wall of Ice" has got nothing on Amanda Burden's "Forest of Red Tape".
[Ben H.: 8/26/10 17:10]
It's interesting that the cabbie-slasher had been volunteering for a pro-diversity organization. I guess even the cultural left has its Ted Haggards!
[Ben H.: 8/26/10 17:05]
Also, you can tell that the scientist quoted at the end of the article has been at U.C. Santa Cruz too long: If one particular word can describe planetary systems today, it’s ‘diverse,’ “ said Douglas N. C. Lin, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/26/10 14:06]
If a politician's rise is measured not by how much he deserves to represent Americans, but by how much Americans deserve to be represented by him, then this man will be soon be president.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/25/10 21:45]
On a related note, I've moved my dress pants from Century 21 into heavier wardrobe rotation, now that I know they're sacred vestments. If only I had a Burlington Coat Factory jacket to match them.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/25/10 21:00]
Kid Anecdote
I've told you already that Iris prefers talking to stuffed animals, and other inanimate objects, to talking to actual people. This preference manifests itself in commands of the form "X talk with Iris." For instance, she says "Bear talk with Iris!" and you have to pretend to make the bear talk in a high-pitched voice. Over the last few months the class of things she wants to talk with has grown. "Shirt talk with Iris!" Or, one of my favorites, "What's in your cup?" Coffee. "Coffee talk with Iris!" Today she found her old passport photo taken when she was about two months old. When I told her who it was, she said, "Iris talk with Iris!"
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/24/10 21:51]
Ben A's Foreign Policy Grid
My cloudy recollection of what Bosnia was about -- did I ever really understand it? -- leaves me unqualified to deepen the discussion that your grid introduced. I think the grid is a brilliantly succinct way to lay out the foreign policy schools that have dominated the last twenty or more years. I would hesitate to use it as evidence that those schools give you most of the tools you'd need to understand why we actually overthrew Saddam. On the other hand I agree that ferreting out a "neocon ideology" is not very helpful in understanding this either.
I will take this grid as evidence that we are on the threshold of a new era of political science, in which new info-graphic techniques will be used to show changes over time. (Example: instead of the usual graphs showing how many people identify as Rep., Dem., Ind. over time, new graphic techniques, possibly involving animation, will show the flows of people from each of these bins to the others over time, information that's not captured in the other format.) Your grid is a sub-type of these techniques that I will call diachronic pigeonholing. You do me an injustice if you say that I'm a conventional liberal. But if you say that I'm someone who once embraced Republicanism out of adolescent contrariness, and then embraced libertarianism as a clean, bracing, meritocracy-justifying (and thereby, incidentally, my-own-bourgeois-comfort-justifying) philosophy, and then went out into the world and realized how much more important mutual-back-scratching is to our society than devotion to Hayekian orthodoxy, and for that reason ended up as a conventional liberal, well, you've nailed me. (Thanks to Carl V for teaching me a few years ago what "diachronic" means.)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/24/10 21:42]
Northeast Corridor Travel, 1839 Style
From Harrisburg to Philadelphia there was a railroad, the first I had ever seen, except the one on which I had just crossed the summit of the Alleghany Mountains, and over which canal boats were transported. In travelling by the road from Harrisburg, I thought the perfection of rapid transit had been reached. We travelled at least eighteen miles an hour, when at full speed, and made the whole distance averaging probably as much as twelve miles an hour. This seemed like annihilating space.
Maybe I should count my blessings. (A snippet from Grant's memoirs that I know I've already mentioned to you guys. I suspect that Grant himself is being kind of ironic, writing almost fifty years after his voyage; maybe some scholar of rail transportation can weigh in.)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/23/10 23:14]
"The War Office had banned pipers from leading soldiers into battle after losses in the Great War had proved too great. “Ah, but that’s the English War Office,” Lovat told Millin. “You and I are both Scottish and that doesn’t apply.” On D-Day, Millin was the only piper."
Doug, you're right on. There is the general problem of the 200 mile trip, which, since the institution of airport security theater, represents a distance that cannot be covered at a mean speed consistent with what we have come to regard as modern technical capabilities. Such a journey will take at least 4 hours door-to-door, no matter what mode of transportation one chooses. But the Northeast Corridor presents its own special challenges that quite often turn 4 hours into 6 and make each of those hours seem very long indeed. In fact, the variability of the Northeast Corridor trip -- that it can as easily be 4 hours as 7 hours, for reasons unnecessary, unpredictable and infuriating -- loads the duration with a disproportionate amount of stress.
From what I can tell of Texas, the 200 mile trip is still going to be 4 hours no matter how you slice it, but it doesn't present the maddening infrastructure failures and associated volatility-of-duration that you get back in the Northeast. I haven't had any really horrendous highway traffic incidents (we did hit a patch of late-night construction on the way back from San Antonio, but it was a simple matter to route around it). The roads are smooth, well-maintained, and hence more accident-free than in NY. The airport here is very easy to get to (by public transportation, car or cab) and has tremendous excess capacity. I've never had a delay of more than a few minutes.
Why? The absence of public-sector unions, I suspect, allows the infrastructure dollar to go a heck of a lot further here than up North. But I don't think one can entirely blame the unions. Citizens bear responsibility, too. Think about how hard it is to get any infrastructure improvement approved in NY. You want to add a runway at JFK? The neighbors will tie it in knots. Widen a road? Change anything in the slightest? Austin's highway system suffered from an east-west chokepoint north of town. The state built a premium-priced toll road to deal with it. By the mid-90s, the airport here proved inadequate. Within a few years, an awesome new one was built a short distance south of town. Part of this is just the greater abundance of open space outside the Northeast. But only part. People think about public spiritedness differently here versus the Northeast. In Texas, people seem to understand that stuff needs to get built. But ask a Texan to sacrifice by paying taxes? Your request will not get an obliging response. The Northeast is the reverse. New Yorkers believe they have a property interest in all manner of stuff -- "light and air", the "historic character of the block", etc, and they will defend this property interest to the last ounce of their strength. But a property interest in their earnings? It would be churlish to deny the state its share! It's strange and I'm not sure how to explain it...
[Ben H.: 8/19/10 11:39]
Thanks. As usual, the main conclusion to be drawn is that I am an incompetent...
[Ben A.: 8/18/10 17:18]
(Ben A, I took the liberty of removing the linebreaks from your foreign policy post, the content of which I need to think about. You will have gathered that the issue is not so much HTML as the low-tech input system I made for this blog. As always, moving to a standard blog platform is on the table ...)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/18/10 12:35]
Some People Have Missed the Shift in the Credit Culture
Like the periodic minor sequelae of some major illness now overcome, minor annoyances continue to beset me well after my residence in New York City has come to an end. Just last week, I received a bill from Con Ed that showed my electric service account still active. I called the company and after many minutes of stupid menus and stupider customer service agents, I reached the special department (who knew?) that handles homes with solar PV systems. I explained to the agent that I had sold my house and moved weeks ago and that I had alerted Con Ed to this fact beforehand. She acknowledged this, but claimed that she could not close out the account because she didn't have a meter reading. Well, I replied, it's not really in my power to rectify that situation because I no longer have access to the house; and I worried that getting a reading from the new owners could be difficult, because they don't live there, as they are waiting on a renovation. The agent got quite huffy and complained, somewhat irrelevantly, that Con Ed had not been able to get a meter reading for some months. That set me off. You haven't been able to get a reading? I spent practically seven days a week at home from January to March and from May to the beginning of July. If Con Ed couldn't get a reading, that's the fault of its own meter readers, who must have been too lazy or union-coddled to climb up the stoop and ring my doorbell.
At this point, I told the agent, look, I'm just alerting you to all this as a courtesy. I'm not paying another dime; but you probably want to sort this with the new owners so you don't wind up fighting a complaint from them about their first bill. I don't live in NYC anyone and I hope I never will again, so I really don't care about Con Ed. I'm out of state and good luck chasing me. The woman then tells me, well, even if we can't find you, a non-payment will go on your credit report. That was it. My credit report? Lady, what planet are you living on? One in ten mortgages in the US is delinquent. People are strategically defaulting on home loans left and right. And you think you can scare me with the prospect of a $50 unpaid Con Ed bill showing up on my credit report? Wake up and look around!
[Ben H.: 8/18/10 11:40]
At the risk of straining the capability of HTML and maybe overstretching foreign policy school nomenclature, you need to add a column for Afghanistan.
I'd also note that the Yes-No-No camp that you label "Classic Realist" could also contain what I'd call the "Westphalian Legalists." The Chinese and Russians have often taken this tack -- Gulf War I was justified because Saddam sought to abrogate a recognized international border and take over a sovereign neighbor. That's a acknowledged no-no under international law. Milosevic's crimes took place within his borders and therefore fell outside the scope of international law (excluding the human rights addenda to that law that the Westphalian Legalists view as dangerous innovations). The second time around Saddam, these guys would argue, did not violate the rules, at least as adjudicated by the competent authority.
[Ben H.: 8/18/10 11:24]
I have been toying with this analysis and thought I would share it for discussion. I think it brings one submerged point to the surface: the Iraq War fits classical interventionist and realist paradigms. The Iraq War, it could be argued, does not stem from some uniquely nefarious neocon ideology (nor were its primary architects -- Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney -- neoconservatives); rather, it resulted from prudential judgments from actors situated *within* the realist and interventionist camps. But that's enough out of me. What do you all think?
Addendum: Blogfriend somecallmetim notes that "Kinda Weird" can also be described as "Electoral Realists." I would add that in the same spirit that the same fact pattern that yields "aggressive realist" can also read as "partisan republican"
[Ben A.: 8/17/10 19:07]
Ben H, on the subject of the French word con, my time over there left me with the impression that it's usually about 65% idiot (stupid) and and 35% jerk (malicious), but different contexts can make it vary from 95/5 to 40/60. But more forceful and vulgar than either "idiot" or "jerk" (since it still shares the meaning of its English near-cognate). It might be useful to compare "ass", which can combine the maliciousness of an "asshole" with the stupidity of a donkey.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/16/10 00:05]
Decline
I'm still on the fence about whether America is on the decline. One thing that makes me think it is declining is our East-coast transportation infrastructure. Getting between NYC and Boston has become such a drag that a weekend getaway is now strictly for masochists (like us -- we just got back). You used to be able to take a quick cab ride to LaGuardia and catch a shuttle flight. But population density has grown so much faster than road capacity that the cab ride can take forever, and Homeland Security makes your time at the airport longer and more uncomfortable. Train? It's gotten very slightly faster, thanks to the Acela, but much more expensive. I think it would have been in the range of $600 for the three of us. There are the $30-ish Chinatown buses and its imitators, which we used last time. The traffic was so bad the one time we tried this (about a year ago) that I was livid by the time we got to Boston, close to six hours later. So this time I decided to rent a car, which would also allow us to visit some friends north of Boston. Going up was fine. Coming back, accidents and heavy rain -- not to mention the endless superfluous millions of people ... where do they all come from? -- made the trip once again take about six hours. I was in full Pole Position mode on the rain-slicked FDR trying to get back by 10 p.m. when the midtown rent-a-car office closed. We just made it, but my hands were shaking on the wheel. To echo Ben Quayle, what happened to America?
(Since efficient intercity travel is inexorably becoming a luxury, I think a modern-day Pullman car company would be an excellent investment. Is somebody working on that? Can we get in on the ground floor?)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/15/10 23:54]
Le calembour est la fiente de l'esprit qui vole - Victor Hugo
Forgive me if you get spattered. I was in San Antonio yesterday to see a friend and former counterparty who also recently moved to Texas. After visiting the tourist sites -- Riverwalk and the Alamo principally -- we went to dinner. I was happy to see pie and ice cream on the menu and hoped somebody would order them together. Luckily, my friend obliged: pecan pie with vanilla ice cream -- which allowed me to admonish the waiter: pecan pie with ice cream. Remember the a la mode!.
[Ben H.: 8/15/10 17:37]
I'm the first to point out those ironic stories of preachers hit by lightning, or church buses tumbling down the side of a mountain. Thebandarlog does not impose its own version of the Fairness Doctrine, but in the spirit of objectivity I feel I ought to cite this news item from Argentina. The country recently legalized gay marriage. One of the grooms in Mar de Plata's first same-sex wedding dropped dead at the reception.
[Ben H.: 8/13/10 10:30]
Speaking of Cons
Ben Quayle is for real, and more than that he is a scion of that Quayle family.
Has it really come to the point in our country that politician has become a profession not unlike rat-catcher -- a distasteful pursuit that gets passed down the generations of families too deficient to achieve in other fields?
[Ben H.: 8/12/10 18:09]
I expressed scepticism about the cross-cultural transferability of Francis Veber's Le Diner des Cons. With a lot of free time on my hands, I decided in the end to check out the American remake, Dinner for Schmucks*. I stand by my original hunch, which is that the Veber could not be translated literally into an American film. Nor did it surprise me much to find that the American version was a heck of a lot funnier than the French one. "Gaumont" is something of a byword among cinephiles for "not-funny comedy." What did surprise me a little though was this: that Hollywood produced a film with greater depth of characterization and greater complexity that the French source material. Veber populated his film with utterly static, archtypical characters. No one learns, no one really changes. The final "twist" of the con character's behavior is totally ungrounded and unbelievable. Jay Roach -- no Orson Welles, to be sure -- actually knows how to make a few character arcs, to ascribe to his characters actions that are (to paraphrase E.M. Forster) at once surprising and believable. Sure, you could say that Hollywood would never release a mass-market film without a relatable protagonist, but it isn't just that Veber's characters are all repellent. It's that they are repellent and flat. In fact, the whole movie is kind of flat. It's like Veber believed that his concept alone contained enough comedy to sustain the movie. The action could unfold entirely mechanically from the seed of his premise. It's as if a composer believed he had a melody beautiful enough that it could stand alone. Jay Roach realized that the melody needs to be elaborated on, that it might sound nice played on the piano for the left hand, but it would be a heck of a lot better set for orchestra.
*Some reviewers have latched on the American title and whether it's merely meant as a direct translation of the French one or rather hints at the nature of the transformation Jay Roach aimed to achieve. Doug, you'd be more of the expert here, but my sense of the force of "con" is more "idiot" or "dope" than "schmuck" -- the latter to me implies a person who acts the way he does with a certain amount of malice. So more "bore" than "boor". In the American version, the con is more much less schmucky than in the French version -- more "dork" than "schmuck" or even con.
[Ben H.: 8/12/10 18:04]
The Coffee In This Office ... Is The Worst Coffee ... In History
Nothing has made me feel more strongly that our culture is sinking into a sluice of liquid crap than Pocahontas. (I know this is not exactly a timely post.)
I remember several months ago sitting in a cab that had ceased moving due to traffic in the low 50's near 10th avenue, and getting out and walking to my destination at roughly 80th street. A cop that I passed explained that Obama was in town.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/9/10 21:49]
The Circus Fails to Come To Town
I only realized that the President had come through town and given a big speech less than a mile from where I sit as he was scheduled to head out. And yet... the city did not grind to a halt. Come on, Austin, you need to learn from New York what it means to give a Presidential welcome! If you don't close half the streets, gin up square-miles of gridlock and involve the majority of your citizens in a transportation circus, you're not hailing to the Chief!
[Ben H.: 8/9/10 17:27]
Nearly-three-year-old daughter and I are on vacation with family in Michigan. On the way to dinner: by the way, we're stopping at the cemetery. And after a few minutes of explaining to daughter about all the memorial stones: "Where are the dead people?" Couldn't you have given me some time to prepare an answer for this?
To me the most compelling explanation for the global success of Christianity, pace Nietzsche, is that it takes away all the unpleasantness of this conversation. Design a religion that facilitates telling kids about death and sex and you will rule the next thousand years.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/9/10 16:54]
I'm Just the Messenger
Deb, describing the latest book assigned by her book club:
Me: What's the plot like?
Deb: Nothing happens. It's a book for women. There are characters. They change.
The same dynamic directs nearly all new-build housing construction in Manhattan to the luxury segment. Just getting plan approval costs a significant amount of money per square-foot -- add to that high land costs and there's no hope of actually completing a building at a per-square-foot cost that is compatible with low-end or even mid-range apartments. The government needs to step in with various "incentives" (which in fact amount to rebates of a certain portion of the fixed red-tape/graft cost) to get developers to produce for the non-luxury segment.
[Ben H.: 8/3/10 18:51]
Another Theory Of Manhattan Real Estate
There are a lot of theories about why Manhattan real estate is all tricked-out luxury apartments. Probably all of them are true. Here's another that I've been discovering. If you want to renovate an apartment at all, the fixed costs / bribes required to do anything at all are so high, that the marginal cost of moving up from a Whirlpool appliance to a EuroScäm appliance is negligible. I mean, the prices of these appliances on paper might be $1000 and $3000 respectively, and might make a non-NYer say "are my ice cubes going to be three times colder??" but when you levy a $10,000 cover charge on either of them just to come in your front door, it changes the calculus.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/3/10 13:31]
Song Of The Year
The best piece of music I've come across in a year or two is this song (apologies to its creators/performers for purloining it, but those who like it can buy the whole CD by searching for "mes plus belles berceuses"). It has a wonderful syncopated bachelor-pad ice-and-swizzle-stick cool, like "The Girl From Ipanema." If I had stayed single and pursued an academic career and amused myself by having witty polymaths over for gin and tonics every afternoon, this song would have had a privileged place on my iPod playlist. And this, despite the fact that it's a French toddler song equivalent to "This Is The Way The Lady Rides." Enjoy! (Ben H will appreciate the shout out to Quimper!)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 7/29/10 20:37]
I finished reading a book. This would not be a big deal for, say, Ben H, who can read a novel in a trip to the bathroom (and I'm only talking about #1 here!) but for me, a slow reader without much free time, it is a big deal. The book was The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Compact and decently written. Yet I wasn't captivated by it. Not much was at stake; the spy agencies seemed to exist only to deduce each other's org charts. And it was a good example of what I call Othello literature. Not the Moor -- you remember that board game whose pieces where white on one side, black on the other, and you could flip a row of your opponent's pieces to your own color by surrounding them with two of your pieces? And towards the end of the game the advantage would swing wildly back and forth as moves flipped longer and longer rows? I felt like such moves were happening every fifteen pages or so at the end of this book. That branch of the East German service is really in London's employ? Flip them to white. No wait, the evidence against them was planted, flip them back to black. But hold on -- the evidence was planted in order that plant might be detected and the truth of their treason masked! White wins! See also: Severus Snape in Harry Potter.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 7/21/10 21:35]
A tip on toddler DVD's for Ben A, and, inshallah, Ben H -- "Peep And The Big Wide World" is a good animated series. Simple, understated, engaging, bright colors, etc. (Compare "Go Diego Go," where Literally! Every! Word! Is! Shouted! You! Won't! Believe! Your! Ears!) The only unsettling thing about Peep is the live-action interludes in between the animated episodes. The kids are regular multiethnic kids and they do regular science-y things like rolling things down hills and attaching things to helium balloons, but they do them against a bleak backdrop of post-industrial wasteland. It looks to me like Detroit in late winter, but I think it's Canadian, so I guess it's the wrong side of Windsor's tracks or something. Barren trees. Houses that are visibly falling apart. Back yards strewn with sad, decaying junk. I mean, who was filming this? What were they thinking? "The secret to Sesame Street's appeal is its pungent working-class neighborhood, so let's set up a frozen rust-belt analog!" I'm not exaggerating here, you see the kids and you want to say "Watch out, there's probably broken glass there in that crack-house yard you're playing in!"
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 7/18/10 20:18]
I was just telling Ben A the other day how surprised I am to find myself owning of a respectable apartment with a respectable view in a respectable building in a very respectable Manhattan neighborhood, and that my first thought upon finding myself thus was, hmmm, how can I use this ostentatious respectability to defraud people? Anyway I just came across a bit of local color to help you gauge the level of respectability I'm talking about.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 7/16/10 11:29]
I'm adjusting well to my new homeland, all things considered.* It's a commonplace to say that Texans are friendlier than New Yorkers. I see how people come to that conclusion, but I think they put the claim in imprecise terms. I am not sure if Texans are really that friendly or New Yorkers that unfriendly. True amiability doesn't always manifest on the surface. What is incontrovertibly true is that the threshhold for initiating non-abusive verbal interaction is much, much lower here in Texas than in New York. In the past week, four complete strangers have started conversations with me on the basis of a T-shirt I was wearing (different T-shirts each time). It felt really strange to me to have a conversation initiated by a stranger that did not relate to a grievance or a request.
*NY just refuses kindness at parting. My closing has slipped several times -- though should finally happen tomorrow; and the movers -- Long Island goombahs with an Allied franchise -- without much warning, explanation or apology told me that in spite of having given me a "guaranteed delivery window" of July 5 - July 13, they won't arrive until July 23rd, the eve of my wedding.
[Ben H.: 7/15/10 11:38]
George Steinbrenner has died of a massive heart attack. It must have come as a surprise, or you can be sure that Brian Cashman would have had time to acquire a new heart on the free agent market.
[Ben H.: 7/13/10 10:05]
To show how fully I "get it," i.e. am in tune with the spirit of my times, let me reaffirm my belief that our whole political and business elite should be thrown out on their butts, and replaced with vampires.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 7/12/10 18:14]
Notice Of Opinion Shift
With our recent purchase of an apartment in a desirable Manhattan neighborhood we have tied most of our net worth to the fate of real estate in such neighborhoods, and so, in large part, to the fate of the financial industry. Or I should say: to the stalwart soldiers of our investment banks, the valiant heroes in the vanguard of the American Dream, whose genius and toil bring more light to our lives than anyone since Edison, and the regulation of whom would be a crime against the human spirit equal in villainy to any of George IV's in that famous, recently commemorated litany of shame.
Henceforth my opinion on all public matters can be found here.
Yeah Ben I agree totally on the AMT. In the grand scheme of things paying it is not all that lamentable. I just feel the occasional need to demonstrate that I'm not holding myself aloof from the spirit of my age, that I too deem Things to have gone to Hell, and the Bums to have merited Throwing Out.
Really though. How did the germ of this AMT idea get planted? "Here's an idea, instead of having an inscrutably complex tax process that takes four days out of each citizen's life every year, why not have two distinct inscrutably complex tax processes, and here's the kicker, make it so you have to struggle through both of them every year since there's no a priori way to tell which one will apply to you!"
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 7/8/10 21:48]
You know, I saw Network a couple of years ago at Film Forum, and I have to say, it doesn't really hold up as a film. As sociology, though, it was prescient.
As for the AMT, I accept the injustice that is having to do your tax return under two different systems. That said, as someone who has never enjoyed any meanginful tax deductions, I can't help but feel some sympathy for the idea that everybody in the middle-class and above should pay a minimum rate of federal income tax (26% does seem rather steep, though). My guess is that something along the lines of an AMT on steroids is going to be part of way fiscal equilibrium will be restored. The numbers at the top of the income distribution are just too small for the rebalancing to occur via their tax rates alone. Spending cuts just ain't gonna happen.
[Ben H.: 7/7/10 23:31]
Maradona, a class act right to the end. Maybe he and Ron Artest can co-write a book on how to deal with opposing teams' fans.
[Ben H.: 7/3/10 23:33]
A Great Day In Soccer
I don't care that much about the World Cup, and for geostrategic reasons I can't support the idea of a strong U.S. performance. That I don't root for any particular team doesn't mean I find myself completely disinterested. I do feel one passion related to the World Cup: a desire to see Argentina lose, the more humiliatingly the better. The country is populated by arrogant meatballs and has found, in that bloated, obnoxious, cheating, has-been guttersnipe Diego Maradona a fitting standard-bearer. Maradona began his tenure as coach of the national team with several ugly losses, a dismal enough performance that even his hagiographers in the Argentine press began to -- lightly -- question whether he could fulfill the role of director tecnico. Maradona found these wisps of doubt enraging. When the Argentine team managed to quality for the World Cup -- by the skin of its teeth -- Maradona gave a bizarre, gloating press conference in which he invited his detractors to "suck it, and keep on sucking it."
Well, Diego, maybe I would take you up on that, but based on today's performance, it seems like you don't have anything to suck.
[Ben H.: 7/3/10 16:00]
Afghanistan
Excellent interview of Barnett Rubin on recent Afghan history. You will also enjoy how many of the Rubin's answers begin with him correcting the questioner.
As an aside, whenever a BBC reporter asks a question, the correct initial response is to scream: 'I REJECT THE PREMISE!
The movie isn't just an affront to homosexuals, it's an affront to stereotypes of homosexuals. If you're looking to see a movie where two gay men with infinite leisure time lounge fully dressed on someone else's bed and ooh and ahh while an ex-Chud tries on different unflattering outfits, then I suggest inpatient.
His comments on that dreadful Sandra Tsing Loh article about getting divorced are also worth your time. (If you like that kind of thing, which I do).
Yeah, I probably belong in the suburbs, I don't relish the thought of my daughter and I being trapped in an enclosed space with eight people yelling "We like to fuck!" and "You fucking drunk, nigga!" at the top of their lungs in our face.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/28/10 22:48]
Now leaving UWS for Ben H's place in Bklyn. Taxi prohibitively expensive. This means subway through the heart of the gay pride parade. On another subway ride today, around noon, I was already annoyed by a troupe of lumpenproletariat jerks going from car to car screaming obscenities. Wish us well.
*Not that there's anything wrong with that per se. (Added for Ben A's benefit, who called out similar statements I made about the Puerto Rican day parade.)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/27/10 17:02]
I remember when the firm did its first big office renovation. The line item for "expeditor" provoked a number of questions from the partners in Dallas. They had never heard of such a thing, and who knows but that they suspected that I was trying to defalcate a few tens of thousands of dollars for bogus "cromulence services." When they realized that expeditors really do exist -- and prove indispensable in NYC -- their suspicion turned to anger. It took some convincing of the more stiff-backed guys to go along, as they felt like we ought to refuse to submit to such institutionalized graft so meekly. Luckily, enough of the guys had spent time in NYC to realize the folly of bucking the system. The final renovation I was involved in took place at the same time as a big renovation in Dallas -- both the conversion of truly "white space" into a trading floor. The Dallas reno results looked infinitely fancier than the the end-product in the NY office. The costs per square foot: 2.5 times more expensive in NYC than in Dallas.
[Ben H.: 6/26/10 12:11]
Word em up. What recession? We have entered the abattoir chute known as "NYC apartment renovation." Today we got the estimate from the "expeditor": $1750 (plus some other potential fees). What does this person do? He or she "expedites" the trajectory of your permit application through the maze of the buildings department. Some kind of institutionalized bribery no doubt. (Your father-in-law is the assistant commissioner? What a coincidence!) God help you if you want to put in new cabinets without paying the bribe.
We are probably unusual among would-be renovators in not having amassed enough wealth during the bubble years to dismiss these things with a flip of the hand. In fact I recommend the following scheme to anyone in need of some extra cash. Walk around a tony Manhattan neighborhood and look for DOB permits taped to residential buildings (I think brownstones are best because they seem always to display the permits outside). Send an invoice to each address you find in the amount of $2700 for "cromulence verification services." I doubt anyone will give a second thought before they (have their secretary) sign the check.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/25/10 21:16]
Nuke York City
Doug, any NY real estate pro will tell you that in a co-op, it is the building's insurance that is supposed to take care of acts of nuclear war. The proprietor lessee is only responsible for damage due to conventional war.
Speaking of the annoying costs of moving, I just finished with the junk removers. File under "What Recession?" the following data point: Housing Works turned up its nose at about 70% of the furniture we tried to donate; it took three attempts on Craigslist to give away perfectly serviceable dining room chairs. I should have pushed harder on Craiglist -- it cost nearly $1000 to get the furniture we don't want anymore removed. Moving everything else to Texas and having it packed beforehand only will cost around $4000! I always had a viscerally negative reaction to the accumulation of schtuff, but now I know it was financially well-founded. The shit you own can literally be worth less than zero...
[Ben H.: 6/25/10 14:14]
House Insurance In NYC
One of the last things we need to close this apartment-purchase deal (knock on wood) is house insurance. My question is, do you think getting nuked counts as force majeure? I feel like I should make sure I get covered in that eventuality since in contemporary NYC it's about as likely as your bathtub overflowing. I know I probably won't be around to worry about reimbursement if it happens but we could be away on vacation or something.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/23/10 22:18]
I'm sorry, Ben A., if you feel heavy today. Just remember, it could be worse, you could be a Knicks fan. Speaking of which, how many years do I need to clock in Texas before I can transfer my allegiance to the Spurs (the closest team to Austin), the Mavs, or the Rockets? Do I get a special dispensation as a result of having been victimized by the Dolans?
[Ben H.: 6/18/10 09:35]
Irrational
A Celtics win tomorrow night will make me happier. As the clock counts down to zero, I will feel lighter, freer. This feeling will last for days, and in weeks to come, the recollection will invigorate me.
Big phase III clinical trials now almost always have catchy acronyms. The landmark study that demonstrated the magnificent effects of Herceptin in early-stage breast cancer had the moniker HERA (HERceptin Adjuvant). ALLHAT (antihypertensive and lipid-lowering treatment to prevent heart attack trial) compared multiple medications and found, famously, that cheap thiazide diuretics performed as well as newer drugs.
As you can see, study groups employ desperate gyrations to shoehorn their protocols into a catchy acronym. There was even a study assessing whether having a snappy acronyms led to increased citations, the "Acronym-Named Randomized Trials in Medicine" (or "ART in Medicine") study.
This is a pharma practice I entirely endorse. I don't know how Bristol Myers convinced anyone to dub their "Apixaban Versus Acetylsalicylic Acid to Prevent Strokes" study as AVERROES, but I am all admiration...
The idea of a payroll tax cut/hiatus is exactly this. Keynesian stimulus via direct transfer to workers. (with the added bonus increasing the incentive to hire and to work). Of course, it likewise increases government debt.
[Ben A.: 6/9/10 00:10]
Well, Doug, it is not that some countries haven't tried something of that sort, although they have not described their credit extension programs so forthrightly. In general, it's wound up having pernicious fiscal consequences. In some sense, this is what Fannie/Freddie/FHA are doing -- the rate isn't 0%, but the tenor of the lending is also much, much longer than that of the credit extended to banks. But what you're proposing is a little different -- short-term consumer credit. To understand where this can go wrong, you should start by noting a major different in credit to banks vs consumer credit. The Fed's lending to banks is secured by collateral, usually of decent liquidity and quality (though less so during the crisis than ever before). TARP money (the CPP, which was the biggest part of it) was not a loan, but rather a purchase of preferred shares and warrants on common equity, so it is not a useful base for an analogous program for consumers. The loans that you are suggesting, to consumers, would be unsecured. As a result, the risk of nonpayment is much higher and the expected loss under nonpayment would be very large. In addition, the Fed has extraordinary powers to audit and stay on top of the banks to which it lends. It can mark its collateral to market and ask for margin. In the event of a default, it has the power to intervene and wipe out much of the capital structure. What will the government be able to do with millions of defaulting individuals?
The market would look upon these mass unsecured loans as incurring very large expected losses. Those losses would imply either fiscal deterioration down the road (when the Treasury would need to recapitalize the Fed); or the Fed would never wind up withdrawing the liquidity extended via the loan program, i.e. it would be massive quantitative easing. Since monetary policy works via the expectations channel, you would expect this program to push up long-term inflation expectations, fiscal deficit expectations and therefore bond yields. This would have an effect countervailing that of the impulse to demand of the loan program itself. In addition, you would have to expect that the marginal propensity to import would be very high (i.e. people spend the loans buying Chinese-made garbage), so the demand leakage would be very high and the effect on the US dollar sharply negative.
That said, if the choice is between lending everybody $20K and giving everybody $20K, I'd rather go with the former option. At least some people will pay it back. Well, absent a default, even the gifted $20K will be paid back, just by different people than the recipients of the gift! That is, the shrinking segment of the population that net pays income taxes.
The political effect of making everybody in the country a debtor is hard to predict, but very likely to tend toward politicizing and degrading the quality of monetary policy over time. In general, a citizenry of government creditors functions better than one of debtors (see the results in countries where natural resource revenue gives the government "independent means").
But really, probably the best short answer to your question is that lending unsecured will turn out, for some large fraction of the loans, to be just like giving away money.
[Ben H.: 6/8/10 17:57]
Speaking of ideas that seem reasonable at first, I want to run this one by you. I know it has to be wrong, but I'm incapable of saying exactly how. I think my understanding of macroeconomics would improve if you told me how. Here's the idea. Most of the industrial democracies are facing years of economic malaise because of government debts, and its various attendant problems (reduction in government budgets with knock-on effects, crowding out in the debt markets, etc.). People and businesses get scared and hoard money rather than spending and investing. Why can't the central banks (starting with the Fed in the US) just lend money to households (say 20K per household just to throw a number out) at the same rate it lends to banks (say 0%), pumping up spending and getting the economy moving, without increasing government debt? Of course this would be inflationary but right now we are too far on the recession side of the recession/inflation balance. Again, this idea is so weird that I'm sure it would knock over some central pillar of the economy and/or break some important law ... but which?
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/7/10 10:00]
Banking and 19th Century Novels AND 20/1st Century TV
I won't venture an opinion as to whether today's bankers create more value (or destroy more value!) than 19th Century supernumerary officials. It is undeniable, however, that bankers do need to work insanely hard (at whatever it is that they do) to succeed (at advancing up the ranks and making ever more money). I doubt the impecunious Russian aristocrats staffing the bureaucracy ever pulled double all-nighters (other than at the whist table, maybe!)
Speaking of the tropes of 19th Century novels, it's a feature of practically every one of them that characters fall into horrendous debt problems. It's like a Las Vegas subdivision. If these novels painted an accurate picture of their contemporary world, putting your name to a bill would have been a bigger source of mortality than cholera. But I realize that we moderns are not ones to make fun. If our world approximated prime-time television, our workforce would be made up of about 40% police officers, 25% lawyers (oh, wait -- that's not too far off), and 20% doctors (of which, 90% have somehow entirely avoided specialization, 30% are African-American, and... you get the point). The remaining few would be either criminals or trapped on desert islands.
[Ben H.: 6/4/10 09:30]
Banking And Nineteenth-Century Novels
One thing that has limited my otherwise ardent love for 19th C novels is my inability to really grasp the career situation of the male characters. The writers and readers of this blog live in what is to first-order approximation a meritocracy. Schmoozing and connections are still important but you generally succeed to the extent that you do a job well. Back then it seems like getting a well-paid job was all about connections, and once you got the job you didn't have to do a hell of a lot, shuffle some papers around, affix seals to them, whatever. In Russian novels my recollection is that some supplicant is always begging to be seen by an official who has the power to give him some post with emoluments of X rubles. Or guys will buy themselves captaincies, or whatever.
It now occurs to me that there is a kind of analog to this in the modern world -- banking. The obvious difference is that you need good school records to become a banker. In other important respects, though -- in the generation of no particular value to society, in the emoluments that dwarf those of people who aren't admitted -- it seems kind of like the 19th century. Not to mention the cufflinks.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/3/10 22:42]
The Supreme Court has just ruled that, in order to enjoy the right to remain silent that is now nearly universally accepted as a constitutional protection, one cannot ... remain silent! Perhaps someone who is simultaneously honored and humbled is the perfect choice for this court after all.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 6/1/10 21:34]
Who would have thought that Bill and Hillary's marriage would outlast Al and Tipper's? What's the lesson here? Maybe one that literature would have taught us if Shakespeare let a few of his couples live longer: MacBeth and Lady MacBeth feverishly scheming to late old age, Romeo and Juliet parting as good friends after their youngest, Tyler Capulet-Montague gets accepted to Wurtemburg.
[Ben H.: 6/1/10 20:53]
Dr. President
The thread on Rand Paul's and Bashar Assad's common training as opthalmologists made me recall that Sun-yat Sen was also an eye doctor in his early professional life.
How unusual is it for physicians to rise to head of state? Can you guys come up with other examples?
Michelle Bachelet (ex-pres Chile) is a pediatrician.
Tabare Vazquez (ex-pres Uruguay) is a cardiologist.
Mahathir Muhammed (ex-pres Malaysia) worked as a GP.
Not sure you can consider Che Guevara as head of state, but he studied medicine before practicing terror.
Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov (Turkmenistan) is a dentist. He was actually Turkmenbashi's dentist, and it was another of his many eccentricities to make a confidante of his dentist, of all people!
The hoaxer pretty seriously overegged the pudding of his resume. He almost got away with his imposture, too. He made it through two years of Harvard before getting busted when he tried to fake his way to a Rhodes scholarship. I mean, dude, it wasn't enough for you to quietly steal a Harvard A.B., you needed a Rhodes scholarship?
That he got away with it for so long makes one wonder whether many more fakers, unburdened by megalomania, manage to get away with it...
[Ben H.: 5/23/10 13:14]
Also, Ben H, it's not surprising that Mr. Grayson refrained from contacting you -- our alumni association has more effective means of tracking us down. Think that 20 billion drop in the endowment was due to "capital losses"? Well, I think it went somewhere else!
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/23/10 09:05]
Just to get back to the Harvard hoax story, what's frightening is that the admissions officers did not immediately laugh into the trash can a claim by a 22-year-old (or thereabouts) to have multiple book manuscripts in the queue to be published by major scholarly presses. For all I know, our nation's achievement-bots now perform so efficiently that some of them have actually achieved this.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/22/10 17:31]
Waiting for Ed
I hope Don Henley gave Ed Begley Jr. sufficient advance notice so that he could make it all the way from LA in his zero-emissions glider.
[Ben H.: 5/22/10 13:17]
No Ayn, No Peace
Huge, huge disappointment on the origins of 'Rand.' Per Doug's observation below, I christen him "Bashar" Paul until further notice.
[Ben A.: 5/21/10 23:47]
Yes, I Went to This School
Concord Academy Commencement Update
The illness of a member of The Eagles has changed Don Henley's touring schedule, and he will be unable to speak at Concord Academy's Commencement. He has graciously arranged for another speaker—actor, environmental activist, and fellow Walden Woods Project board member Ed Begley, Jr.
I thought I read somewhere that he is named after Ayn Rand. As for Grayson, I will say this for him. He took on the job of admin of our class's listserv. A typically reprehensible politician would have done so in order that fifteen years later, when his life master plan called for running for Senate, he could use the email addresses for fundraising purposes. Grayson never sent me an email solicitation or a donor appeal of any kind. That's worth something, surely?
[Ben H.: 5/19/10 16:27]
Wither, America?
The internet tells me that tea-party upstart Rand Paul has won the Republican primary in Kentucky, beating out our classmate Trey Grayson. I guess I don't really have anything to say about this. Did either of you know the latter candidate? I was passingly acquainted with enough politically-oriented people in our class to say that they are by and large reprehensible; Grayson could very well be the exception. I just don't know. I have read that Rand Paul is an ophthalmologist -- just like Bashar al-Assad! My hope that he be named after the Atlas Shrugged author seems doomed to disappointment though.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/18/10 20:13]
The irony of PlanetHan is that the Chinese who might or might not bury us are applying their all-conquering energy to... learning English! The statistic has often been cited that there are more Chinese studying English than there are English-speakers in America. I, therefore, go with the "PlanEthan" interpretation: Mandarin for kids is just another in the line of pointless adaptations to the Red Queen problem of college admissions.
Incidentally, I often feel resentful about all the time I spent learning foreign languages. Surely I would have gotten more out of studying Econometrics or just practicing mental rotation of objects than memorizing French conjugation.
[Ben H.: 5/16/10 12:25]
I love it how business commentators always ascribe intentionality to the roulette ball of the market averages. "The Dow's 200 point gain showed its faith in the new housing numbers ... ." Or: "The markets rebuked the Fed's decision by dropping more than 2%." I'm waiting to hear someone on the radio say, "The Nasdaq is off fifty points on its realization that the pursuit of happiness through material goods is vain and futile."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/16/10 12:14]
I For One Welcome Our New Oriental Masters
On the West side of Central Park a guy was drumming up clients for a new small business: Mandarin Chinese classes for little kids. And I know of one other such business on the Upper West Side. So we've already surpassed the Times's criteria for a "trend." Does anyone know whether the height of the "Rising Sun" panic (what was that, 1987?) saw a similar appearance of Japanese schools? And if not, what should we attribute today's Chinese schools to -- growth in NYC parental competitiveness, or true likelihood that the orientals are going to bury us this time around?
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/15/10 14:11]
To hear those words really makes me so livid that I'm almost moved to do something with my life, just so that I might then maneuver myself before a podium in a position to say: "I am so honored to be here, which is to say elevated above the common run of humanity, including all of you listening to me now."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/14/10 19:52]
The Bandarlog has from time to time advocated the revival of old words or phrases that have fallen into desuetude (viz. "twat"). Perhaps we could stem the overuse of the oxy -- no, plain moronic -- "honored and humbled" formula by promoting an elegant 18th and 19th century idiom for accepting an compliment or sign of confidence: "I am sensible of the honor" or sometimes more fully "I am sensible of the honor you do me." And henceforth nominees could satisfy their itch to use the words "honor" and "humble" in close proximity, without at the same time making poor Doug's head explode. For example:
President Obama: It is my great pleasure to announce the nomination of Professor Kagan to the Supreme Court, where she will be the first hermaphrodite to grace that august bench.
Kagan: I am sensible of the honor you do me, Mr. President, and, at the same time, I am humbled by the difficulty and importance of the task before me.
[Ben H.: 5/14/10 10:59]
I would feel bad making fun of people's appearance but when you declare yourself "honored and humbled" by your nomination, no blow is too low. Can you imagine the sort of rulings this brilliant mind might generate? "The defendant is clearly guilty, and also innocent." "The Constitution's third article allows, and also prohibits this activity."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 5/14/10 09:08]
We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
I mentioned your separated-at-birth to the editor of Above the Law, and he mentioned that his site's commenters leaned toward identifying Kagan as a character played by Kevin James.
On Kagan, an uncharacteristically harsh word from Professor M. She says she's not surprised at the denials of Kagan's homosexuality. What it would it even mean to be "gay" in the case of a hermaphrodite?
[Ben H.: 5/13/10 14:01]
To fake his death from overdose, hide out reading law books and forging degrees, and emerge decades later in drag to join the Supreme Court ... if John Belushi pulls this off, it will be the comic coup of the century.
I just saw the above film here in Austin. It purports to be a Korean "remake" of the Sergio Leone classic, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. The Korean remake was an entertaining 90 minutes, visually stylish, with a number of set-piece fights that inflect Western shoot-em-up with Asian wire-fighting. But really, what I took away from the movie was a sense of how much deeper a work the original TG,TB, and TU is than people give it credit for. It took watching Ji-Woon Kim miss the point completely to make me realize it.
Kim has transposed the action from the U.S. Civil War to late 1930s Korea and Manchuria. In his movie, the military conflict is both a plot point and a motivating factor for the characters. For Leone, setting the action amid the Civil War served to emphasize the mythic status of his three main characters (The Man With No Name [Clint Eastwood], the "Good" of the title; Angel Eyes, "the Bad", and Tuco, "the Ugly"). Their run-ins with soldiers and armies help drive the plot, but have nothing to do with their motivations. The war is just an impediment -- a distraction, an annoyance. These characters are moral types that are older and more enduring than any particular war. They exist in a recognizable moral world -- the laws and outlaws of the frontier, the discipline of the army and rules of war -- but are strangely untouched by it. The explicit backgrounding of a world-historical event like the war (in one scene, Tuco struggles to come up with the name of General Lee) neatly establishes that his characters exist outside of a particular time and place.
Ji-Woon Kim's title characters are a clownish killer, a psychotic killer, and a violent cipher (who we are supposed to fancy "Good" because he mentions his dismay at Korea's occupied status a few times). The world of the film is one of concomitantly cartoonish violence, of other bandits and rogues chasing them for the same treasure they are all out to grab. The three main characters dwell in the same moral world as everybody else.
For Leone, Tuco is Chaos. He's clownish, for sure, but also despicable. He knows no rules, limits, or principles. He revels in destruction and violence. Angel Eyes is Evil. He is plotting and methodical. He doesn't hesitate to do violence and inflict pain, but for him violence is a tool he regards as dispassionately as someone else might see a hammer. He has rules and principles, but they are rules of practicality. They happen to help him achieve his goals and are utterly indifferent to question of right or wrong. Eastwood's character is Divine Justice of the Old Testament variety -- inscrutible, vengeful, ineluctible, but also capable of surprising acts of mercy when he chooses.
TG, TB, and TU is a Western, but also in a larger sense western. Perhaps it too much to ask a non-western film-maker to re-interpret it. The ending of TG, TB, and TU is -- and I don't want to give too much away, in case you haven't seen it -- really fantastic. Leone puts his three characters alone in a vast graveyard full of recent war dead (which again emphasizes how these are archtypes, outside of time, for whom the epic death of the war that surrounds them is just a historical contigency), in a tense and deadly standoff. How that standoff resolves itself is at once a delightful plot twist and a thematically appropriate commentary on the archtypes these characters represent. In the very last seconds of the movie The Man With No Name (and before I forget, I mean, The Man With No Name? The Unnameable? Is the symbolism clear enough? Not to Ji-Woon Kim, apparently) enacts a godlike judgment and pardoning. Kim also ends with a stand-off, but the point of it is to provide a silly revelation of back-story, and the motivation is the pride of each of the characters to prove himself the baddest-ass gunfighter. At that point, I kind of wanted to yell at the screen, "go back and watch the original, you dummy!"
Cross-cultural remakes are tricky (ironically, Leone's rip-off of Kurosawa's Japano-western Yojimbo, as A Fistful of Dollars is an exception, and one that made the East-West transition in a sense not once, but twice). Not that I would consider it an artistic travesty to distort the work of Francois Veber, but I think I may give Dinner for Schmucks a miss.
[Ben H.: 5/8/10 00:26]
Remember That Guy Who Ran FEMA During Hurricane Katrina? The Guy Who Everybody Thought Was An Incompetent?
I can almost guarantee your opinion of him is not low enough.
From the linked article (by a GOP insider, by the way):
As some of you might remember, I was in Baton Rouge with your guy Brownie right after the hurricane hit.
Even then, it was all about Mike Brown.
A bunch of other folks who came down to help and I were sleeping on buses. Brown was staying at a hotel but it was not a hotel which was a member of the chain in which he was collecting frequent stayer points. One of Brown's staffers spent his time and the taxpayers' money making frequent calls to the preferred hotel to try and get him in there.
The FEMA command trailer was in Baton Rouge which was largely untouched by the hurricane being about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans. It was suggested that the trailer be "moved forward," that is, closer to the action. The suggestion was rejected because Brown didn't want to have to drive back to Baton Rouge every night for dinner.
Prior to Katrina, Brown was making plans to leave FEMA and return to private life. The morning after a network ran an unflattering portrait of Brown he was terribly upset, but the staff was focused on the recovery effort. Someone said, "We have to get our arms around this thing," which Brown took to mean repairing the damage done to his reputation, not repairing the damage done to New Orleans.
"I know it," he said, completely missing the point. "I have three offers on the table and they're all going to be withdrawn if we don't fix this."
The staff in the trailer didn't risk looking at one other. Eyes were glued to computer screens, and fingers began typing at speeds which Mavis Beacon would never have believed possible [Ben A.: 5/7/10 16:24]
