Pragmatism Refreshed

Free Will

2012-02-11T00:12:00.001-05:00

The admirable philosophical blog "Rationally Speaking" has taken on the issue of free will.

Jerry Coyne's recent op-ed piece for USA Today was the catalyst. Coyne said that although there is "no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances," he considers the claim that we can, very dubious. Further, there is "not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will."

Massimo Pigliucci argues, in "Rationally Speaking," that Coyne is confused. He is working fromn a definition of free will (the possibility of inconsistent choices given identical circumstances) that by his own admission -- see the quote above -- can never be tested. Since (Pigliucci tells us) science is "about empirically testable hypotheses," science can not be about free will in the sense Coyne is discussing. So Coyne isn't entitled to draw upon arguments from neurobiology to try to make his case. That case is metaphysical, not neurological.

Pigliucci's column on the subject has in turn draw abundant comment from readers. One reader, Tom, cites a paper called, "The Pointsman: Maxwell's Demon, Victorian Free Will, and the Boundaries of Science" from the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Pigliucci's reply to his readers is largely concerned with those readers who have accused him of being a "crypto-dualist." The impression amongst much of the consuming public for philosophical arguments is that free will only makes sense if we first believe in a sort of Cartesian ghost in the machine.

To this Pigliucci replies, "that line of argument is somewhat question-begging: we are trying to find out how chunks of matter can behave in such drastically different ways from other chunks of matter, so to point out the obvious (that they are all chunks of matter) hardly helps move the debate forward."

Super Bowl

2012-02-10T01:12:00.005-05:00

Aaaaarrrrgh.

(Amazing that it took me only five days to formulate my reaction with that much precision and concision.)

The Patriots seemed snake-bit from the start. They went down by two points early because of a penalty of a sort that is almost never called, but was called here to stick them with the safety.

Later, but still in the first quarter, they missed a chance to get a turnover because they had an extra man on the field -- a basic communication problem that should have been settled back in the training-camp days of summer.

And so it went, literally down to the game's last seconds.

Bah.

Iterations

2012-02-09T03:58:00.003-05:00

Continuing my research in steam punk as a literary genre.

I've discovered that the chapters of The Difference Engine, apparently a critical work in establishing this genre, are called Iterations. As in "the first iteration," "the second iteration" and so forth. Why?

Iteration, which literally understood is just a fancy way of saying "repetition," is a term of art among computer programmers. It refers to the looping of a program. Typically, each trip around the loop, each iteration, is at least subtly different from the one before. For example, a "Monte Carlo" program -- one that incorporates an element of chance -- might call for an operation to be repeated 999 times, with some averaging at the end of that sequence. The 453d iteration is subtly different from the 452s -- not only will the calculation likely have a different result that time due to the stochastic element, but we are one step closer to the desired averaging.

Of much greater historical significance are the iterations of the Newton-Raphson method of solving general nonlinear equations. The gist of this is that you start your efforts at solution with a best guess. If the guess is right, the equation works, and you're done. If your guess is wrong, as is a lot more likely, but certain conditions apply, all is still good: trying to work through the problem will tell you how far wrong you are, and what your next guess should be. Then you work through that second iteration, etc.

Iterations in this sense were crucial in Babbage's work, which in turn inspired the novel and much of steampunk.

Santayana and The Inflexibility of Age

2012-02-05T10:05:00.000-05:00

Last week I discussed the passage in Santayana's writing whence we get the cliche about those of "cannot remember the past" or (as it is often misquoted) "cannot learn from history."

In the context of that discussion, I also quoted the philosopher saying this (about the human life cycle): "Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because impractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation."

A friend emailed me a question: must it be thus? Did Santayana think he was describing an inevitable result of age here, or a statistical likelihood, or something else?

Good question. I don't think Santayana's text gives us a definitive answer to that. But we might remember his own stress on individuality in this whole passage. "Human nature," he wrote, "in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundation of all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is no general or abstract essence, the average of all men's characters, nor even the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechy of the living individual, be he typical or singular."

In that context, I think we can take the somewhat later reference to the exhaustion of retentiveness and its terrible consequences as a statement of what is "typical," not an exclusion of the possibility of "singular" individuals who will escape that fate.

Indeed: Santayana was such a singular individual, one who maintained his flexibility to the end. I've been quoting from The Life of Reason, an ambitious multi-volume work he wrote while he was teaching at Harvard, in the early years of the 20th century. Years later, when another man might have settled into the role of defending and elaborating the system expounded there, Santayana essentially started from scratch, in an equally ambitious project, The Realms of Being. The four volumes of this work came out between 1927 and 1940. Thereafter, Santayana undertook the considerable editorial task of creating a one-volume version of The Realms of Being, which was published in 1942, when he was in his late 70s.

So if he believed he was saying something invariant when he wrote that "repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity, [for the elderly]" he later learned better.

Final Quote From Isaacson's Bio of Jobs

2012-02-04T00:53:00.002-05:00

I've noted in this blog before that biography is a complicated art form. How to even begin telling a life?

With the subject's birth? Or is there some crucial context to set first? or should you, rather, start by talking about what makes this subject worth a biography? how to start doing that?

Isaacson begins with a discussion of "how this book came to be," wherein he discusses Jobs' solicitation of his services a biographer. Jobs began looking for someone to write his life's story only after Jobs became aware that his cancer was terminal. This allows Isaacson both to begin and to end the book with the consciousness of death.

Here is the ending:

He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds [on a God] out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. "I like to think that something survives after you die," he said. "It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and then it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures."

He fell silent for a very long time. "But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch," he said. "Click! And you're gone."

Then he paused again and smiled slightly. "Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices."

English Channel Widens

2012-02-03T06:06:00.002-05:00

The President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, this week announced plans for a 0.1% levy on financial transactions, to be implemented in that country through its exchanges in August regardless of whether any other European countries do likewise.

According to the BBC News, details of Sarkozy's plan remain sketchy, but it is to be implemented in August, and will be especially oriented toward taxing equity transactions.

Of course the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has been outspokenly against any sort of transactions tax that would impact London, and indeed Cameron said on Jan. 26 that any EU provision to that effect would be "madness."

This is not especially a marker of Cameron's Tory loyalties. I don't see how any British PM could take a different stance. London is not only Europe's great financial center, it is one of the handful of leading centers in the world.

Back at home ... Sarkozy faces an election campaign in the coming months. His rival there, Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, has also promised a tax on financial transactions, so Sarkozy may be engaged in a thunder-stealing gambit here, one of those Nixon-goes-to-China things.

One final point: none of this has much to do with the currency-oriented transactions tax once advocated by James Tobin, although the phrase "Tobin tax" is used quite promiscuously these days.

Steamroller Repair

2012-02-02T01:58:00.002-05:00

Mitt Romney proved this week that he has repaired his steamroller, the one that suffered a minor break-down in South Carolina.

I now see no likelihood of anyone other than Romney getting the Republican nomination, though Newt can keep it entertaining in the meantime.

That still doesn't tell us how the end of this political year is going to go.

On another, but not an unrelated point, I was talking recently with bright finance-industry people in east Asia. They said two things. First (my paraphrase), some of them say: buy Samsung. The year 2012 is shaping up as a good one for Korean industry in general and for that company in particular. (By the way, if you actually are stupid enough to buy Samsung based on hearsay in this or any a blog ... just please don't. Stick with broad-based indexes, some of which can get you exposure to east Asia in general.)

The second thing I've taken away from these recent conversations is more intriguing, and more worth passing on to you, dear reader. Some of them believe that there has been too much emphasis on the part of certain analysts, in London and New York, about how China is going down for a "hard landing." My sources believe there will be some contraction in the PRC, but it will be rather soft, as landings go.

I don't know whether that's true. Surely the PRC seems to be due for some sort of landing, and indeed a contraction is underway. If my friends were kidding themselves, wacky optimists as they may be, and it really is a hard landing, a bursting of a Sino-bubble on the way, then this could have macro global implications.

Which brings us back to the politics of this campaign. We could be hearing an awful lot about China before November.

Annual Dilbert Post

2012-01-29T01:20:00.009-05:00

Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, likes to say that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written.

Every once in awhile I like to check the newspaper with his list in mind, to see if he is right. I'll start with his wording unmodified by examples.

1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE

2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE

3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL

4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX

5. EXPERTS WARN OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY

6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY

7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING

8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS

9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL

Does that break-down hold up for the news of the past week or so?

1. Extreme weather? Check.

2. I'm sure somebody's idiocy (or worse) will be found at the center of the fire that killed students at Marist College, my alma mater, this week.

3. A politician (specifically, a state legislator) is on trial in Harrisburg, PA for insisting that his egislative employees work on his campaigns on their taxpayer-paid time.

4. Primate attempts inappropriate sex? Perhaps such monkey business explains the need for newer tests for simian HIV, herpes, etc., chronicled here.

5. Experts warn of financial calamity. South Africa considers a carbon tax as its contribution to limiting global warming. Industries there ... warn of calamity.

6. Big Company Buys Another Big Company. Apache and Cordillera Energy Partners.

7. Famous Person, i.e. assassination-attempt survivor Gabrielle Giffords, does something interesting, i.e. she resigns her seat in the US House, in a moving video message.

8. The scientific discovery that might be useful in ten years? Sediments found at bottom of ocean near Straits of Gibraltar could help guide "future oil and gas exploration, the researchers believe."

9. Government fails to achieve a goal. Too easy, but let's go there. There have been recent reports that the various recipients of the US space program's moon rocks, mostly museums and labs with good connections, have been losing them. Can't governments even achieve the goal of storing rocks properly?

Yes, I think Scott Adams has a point. We're in a loop!

Contango: 2012 Edition

2012-01-28T01:37:00.004-05:00

Regular readers may remember that every year at this time I do some basic arithmetic regarding contango.

As a refresher, contango is the discount you can get on a non-perishable commodity by virtue of your willingness to accept delivery at once, or (stated inversely) the extra payment you make if you want the seller to hold it for you for some interim.

One would naturally expect this discount to be closely related to the costs of storage space. After all, if I buy crude today and tell you to deliver it six months from now, you have to keep it somewhere during the interval, and pay the maintenance on the storage facilities. If I take delivery now but I don't use it over the six months, then the cost of storage falls on me.

So: a year ago I simply measured the per-barrel price for March (2011) delivery (which was $89.58) against that for August delivery ($94.49) and extrapolated that into an annual rate. The five month delay in delivery cost the buyer $4.91 at that time, which extrapolated into an annual figure would have been $11.82, which is roughly 12.5% the price of a barrel.

Checking the figures a year later ... the price of a barrel was $98.33 for March 2012 delivery last time last weekend. Never mind the question of why that has gone up. I'm focusing on just one piece of the puzzle now. The price for August delivery was $99.62. That's a difference of only $1.29 for storage for five months. This annualizes to $3.10, which is roughly 3.25 % the price of a barrel.

So contango has taken a sharp fall over the last year. Why is contango on the increase? Don't know. Three theories come to mind initially. First, this could be a reflection of a stronger dollar. Crude oil is priced in dollars, the dollar has picked up value against other currencies as the 'cleanest shirt left in a pile of dirty laundry' of late. A year ago, for example, a dollar could buy you .625 GBP. These days, it can buy you .642 GBP. Perhaps, then, there's a deflationary effect built into contango.

Second, this could be the response to an increase in storage capacity. After all, back when contango was 12.5% of the price of a barrel, there was a great incentive to bring on line new facilities to hold the stuff.

Third, this could be a reaction by speculators to a presumed coming decline in the value of oil -- the long-feared second dip in a double-dip recession.

Those Who Cannot Remember the Past

2012-01-27T01:32:00.001-05:00

I suggested on January 15 that I would return to the issue of what Santayana meant by the sentence of his that is so ubiquitously quoted and misquoted.

I have returned.

The line I've invoked in the title of this entry is usually quoted in order to urge people to study history, especially some particular historical event that the person doing the quoting thinks is pertinent to whatever case he is making. If you are urging a price-stabilization treaty for coffee, and you think the coffee-industry travails of, say, the early 1960s are germane to the case you're making, you may well trot out Santayana to justify the connection. This doesn't actually strengthen your argument, any more than the echo of MacArthur just before this paragraph strengthens the significance of what I'm saying now. But it is (in either case) a way of invoking the name of one or another august historic figure -- men who were already august when the members of what we now call the "greatest generation" were young -- and of stealing for myself a bit of their presumed authority.

Today's point, though, is that Santayana was not urging us to study history texts, or to listen to our elders when they talk about the good old days, or anything of the sort. He had in mind personal memory, not collective institutional memory.

The line appears on p. 284 of Reason in Common Sense, in a chapter called "Flux and Constancy in Human Nature." The line of thought involved begins on p. 280, where Santayana tells us: "Human nature, in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundation of all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is no general or abstract essence, the average of all men's characters, nor even the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechy of the living individual, be he typical or singular." This is a startlingly individualist sentiment. Entelechy means, roughly, the actualization-of-the-possible. Reason isn't to be seen in broad terms, but as a functional unity "in each man."

So that the reason that our author discusses in the following paragraphs is that unity, that "entelechy," in any one living individual, and remembering the past is a prerequisite thereof.

As a child grows, he learns things like how his arms and legs work. He finds crawling tiresome and tests the ability of the two legs to support his weight without help from the arms. By some movements he discovers he throws himself off balance and falls. Other movements help him maintain equilibrium and remain standing. He repeats the latter movements and ceases his experiments with the former,and thus as we say "learns to walk."

That is my example of Santayana's meaning here, not his. In fact, the passage is rather dry and sans examples, but Santayana says things like: "Repetition marks some progress on mere continuity, since it preserves form and disregards time and matter," (p. 284).

Soon thereafter comes the passage that has motivated this exegesis:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity."

We are talking, then, in that famous quote, about the "first stage of life" of an individual -- hence my 'first steps' example. So long as an infant cannot remember the past, he cannot learn new skills. When he can remember, when he becomes "plastic to new habits and suggestions," he starts to avoid unpleasant repetitions like falling down or bumping into hard objects, and the advance to "the plane of manhood" begins in earnest.

Santayana is working here at the intersection of philosophy with what we would call cognitive psychology. It's the sort of thing that his mentor, William James, was getting at with his famous comments about how the "blooming buzzing confusion" of infancy becomes the ordered experience of the growing child. It is the central concern of latter psychologists like Jean Piaget and Antonio Damasio. It is not "learning from history" in the bookish sense usually invoked, but remembering (consciously or simply in one's bones) the past, one's own individual past.

Those who cannot remember this sentence and its meaning are, nonetheless, condemned to keep quoting it.

Apple and Power Sources

2012-01-26T01:41:00.004-05:00

I have twice already quoted passages from the recent Steve Jobs biography in this blog. Here is a third instance. Isaacson writes that when he was researching the book, he took a tour through Apple's product-design studio, guided by 'Jony' Ive, Jobs' right-hand man on design issues.

On the day of Isaacson's visit, "Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted for inspection. Some would find it odd that the head of design would fret over something like this, but Jobs got involved as well. Ever since he had a special power supply made for the Apple II, Jobs has cared about not only the engineering but also the design of such parts."

So this passage echoes back to the previous passage I quoted on that Apple II innovation. Still, it is quite different. The switching power supply innovation was functional. It was about controlling heat and the risk a build-up in heat poses to the inner workings of a machine. In the above passage, we are privy to aesthetic evaluations of foam models for electrical plugs.

Sounds odd to me, but then ... I'm not a genius and a multi-billionaire entrepreneur. I'm just a humble scribe.

This point in the book was where I decided it really ought to be reviewed by someone treating it as a novel. I'm still refining that idea.

Thinking

2012-01-22T01:39:00.002-05:00

Okay, there's a problem with the Romney steamroller. The Republican race has taken a very strange turn, and further increases my perplexity about this political year in general. But let's ignore that for today, because something else occurs to me that may be of more interest.

Imagine if, in 1944, the government of Japan had learned what Fermi and Oppenheimer and other scientists working in the US were up to: the creation of a new bomb that could wipe out an entire city in a single puff of radioactive smoke.

Would it have been wrong, would it have been a war crime, for Japanese agents to seek to kill some of the key scientists?

Frankly, I don't think so. Abstracting for a moment from the fact that the Japanese were the aggressors in the war in thr Asia-Pacific region (and I'm not thinking specifically of December 7, 1941 -- they had been engaged in rapacious behavior for years before that) ... abstracting from that, as "laws of war" do, the use of a hit squad to target key figures in the Manhattan Project would not have been shocking or criminal at all. It would simply have been ... war.

Fast forward. It may well be that Israel's Mossad has agents killing Iranian nuclear scientists. It may well be, also, that the US CIA is providing assistance. I don't know. (If I knew, those two respective secret agencies would be far less competent than their reputations suggest.) My suspicion is that Mossad could and probably did pull this off without extraneous assistance.

Is that different in any principled way from the case imagined above? The head of state in Iran speaks not just of prevailing against Israel, not just of forcing an "unconditional surrender" (a term the Roosevelt administration was using vis-a-vis Germany and Japan in 1944) but of wiping Israel off the map. There is every reason to believe that the nuclear program is designed exactly for that purpose.

So: where is the shock value here? Just wonderin'

An Old Joke

2012-01-21T01:43:00.001-05:00

But I can't help myself.

An atom walks into a bar.

Another atom, which had been in there for awhile, shouted, "hey! that's the guy who stole my electron!"

Bartender says, "Are you sure?"

The aggrieved atom said, "I'm not just sure, I'm positive!"

(You may have to remember your junior-high-school science for that.)

That Kyocera Ad

2012-01-20T04:49:00.000-05:00

A distinguished-looking man with cropped hair and professorial glasses walks across a screen and starts talking about costs and ownership periods. We feel at first that we've stumbled into a lecture hall, but this turns out to be a pitch for Kyocera, a Kyoto-based company that makes printers and other office equipment.

The professorial man in the ad is in fact a professor: Peter Morici of the R.H.Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. But he is hardly a household name, and when I first saw the ad I had the feeling he was supposed to remind me of someone else. But who?

I've decided that Morici was chosen less for his economist credentials than for his resemblance to the Ur-expert in economics, the late Paul Samuelson.

The above is a photo of Samuelson. Do the comparison yourself to Morici as he appears in the above YouTube video. Same glasses, same hair, same suit, quite similar face.

I'm reasonably certain that the ad agency recognized the resemblance, and chose their spokesman on this basis. After all, generations learned the basics of economics from the many editions of Samuelson's textbook, so a visage like that is natural for this role.

None of which would be worth mentioning except that Ben Stein has made it a cause of controversy and even litigation. Here is the complaint. Stein was apparently considered for this role in Kyocera's ads, and then rejected, apparently on the ground that his expressed views about the unreality of global warming were at odds with Kyocera's own eco-friendly branding.

Stein has filed a lawsuit, claiming that Kyocera breached a contract with him. That claim seems certain to go nowhere. If you read the complaint, above, you will see no allegation of specific facts to the effect that there was what lawyers call a "meeting of the minds." There doesn't seem to have been any contract to breach before Kyocera backed out of the arrangement they had been considering. Considering something doesn't bind you to it.

Ben Stein is the son of a fanous economist, Nixon advisor Herb Stein. Ben Stein also played a teacher of economics (at the high school level) in a movie. The point of the movie, as it happens, was that the protagonist wasn't in that day when Ben Stein's character was droning on about the Hawley-Smoot tariff. This movie role is cited without irony in the complaint, apparently in hopes of persuading the court that there must have been a contract to hire such an obvious choice for their commercial as he.

But the more risible aspect of the litigation is Stein's contention that he is the victim of religious discrimination. "A host of federal laws protects Americans from being discriminated against on the basis of religious beliefs." This could be intended to render the unwinnable issue of whether Stein was ever actually a party to a contract irrelevant. It is just as illegal to refrain from hiring Stein because he is a Jew as it would be to fire him for that.

Ben Stein isn't really saying, though, that he was fired for a religious adherence to Judaism. He is saying that he was fired for a religious adherence to Global-Warming-Isn't-ManMadeism.

The complaint says: "BEN STEIN said [he] was by no means certain that global warming was man-made ... [he] also told Hurwitz to inform defendants that as a matter of religious belief, he believed that God, and not man, controlled the weather."

Felix Salmon has some fun with this in his Reuters blog.

More on Steve Jobs

2012-01-19T01:36:00.001-05:00

Again, as I did on January 13, I'll bend your ear with a quote from the Steve Jobs biography. This concerns the contribution of a nowadays unheralded engineer named Ron Holt to the development of the Apple II, the pre-macintosh breakthrough computer that went on sale in 1977. The simple version of the story of Apple II is that Steve Wozniak did the basic engineering work, and that Steve Jobs sold it to the world. Here's the wikipedia version of events.

But there is more to it, and Ron Holt is a big part of that more. Wozniak, whose passion was the circuitry, didn't concern himself with the issue of heat. But bringing into a PC the power necessary to keep all those circuits functioning can make for a lot of heat, and that can require a fan, a low-tech contraption in itself, to disperse said heat. Jobs thought fans an inelegant solution, and looked for someone who could come up with a better one.

"Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt built one like those used in oscilloscopes. It switched the power on and off not sixty times per second, but thousands of times; this allowed it to store the power for far less time, and thus throw off less heat. 'That switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was,' Jobs later said. 'Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books, but he should. Every computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod's design.' For all of Wozniak's brilliance, this was not something he could have done. 'I only knew vaguely what a switching power supply was,' Woz admitted."

That Santayana Meme

2012-01-15T02:34:00.003-05:00

I recently received a review copy of The Derivatives Revolution , by Raffaele Scalcione (2011).
Here are a couple of quick observations that won't make it into my eventual book review.

The ms would have benefitted from more thorough copy editing. This is not, after all, a blog entry. It is a bound volume, published by Wolters Kluwer, and details are important. Arbitrary example: there is a footnote on p. 194 concerning the sale of the remnants of Barings to the Dutch bank, ING, through the mediation of the Bank of England, in 2005. At the end of the footnote appears an orphaned sentence fragment: "Casebook international finance 1010 pages." I imagine Scalcione learned something about the Bank of England's role in this deal from a casebook on international finance, perhaps one with 1,010 pages -- but the usual approach would have been to provide author's name and title!

I'll cut the author some slack, but somebody at Wolters Kluwer presumably receives a salary for catching things like this and red-lining them. That person was napping on the job.

But another lapse here catches my attention too, and this is something close to the core of what an author is for, so it is harder to give Scalcione a pass. He begins a chapter with a cliche, attributing to George Santayana the sentence, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." The simple fact that it is a cliche isn't the worst of it.

More important: that isn't quite what Santayana said. He said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The italicized difference in wording is important to understanding Santayana's philosophy, but I understand that this isn't especially the priority of most of those who use (some version of) this quote.

Still more important there is the matter of sourcing. Scalcione sources the Santayana quotation with a footnote to the website wikiquote. I have no doubt he found it on wikiquote, or that you can find it on lots of other sources, in the accurate or in any of lots of other inaccurate variations, through a google search. But if he had been doing his job as the author of a treatise on a scholarly subject he would have found the real source for the line. It comes from Reason in Common Sense, the first volume in Santayana's series on The Life of Reason.

Thanks to the miracle known as GoogleBooks, the whole of The Life of Reason is now available and searchable online. The real source and wording aren't hard to find. Indeed, allow me to demonstrate. Click here.

I'd like to talk here someday about what that line actually means, and how the mis-remembered form of it is so often abused, but for now I'm venting about Scalcione's book, so I'll just say that mistakes like this are annoying.

Another example: the city where Enron is headquartered is Houston. It isn't spelled "Huston." Except in this book.

Those are not isolated example. The book is rife with them.

On the plus side, it includes an article of mine in the bibliography. And -- as my mother has kindly pointed out -- Scalcione spelled my name right.

Romney Steamroller

2012-01-14T10:02:00.003-05:00

My best guess at present is that the Romney steamroller, working at full power since its victory in New Hampshire, will likely end the nomination fight fairly soon. Any kind of win in South Carolina on Tuesday ends the matter.

We will then have to see whether there is any sizeable number of anti-Romneyites who are willing to leave the party rather than get behind him. I have participated in on-line message boards in which some fervent anti-Romney types are threatening such a bolt. (Yes, it is shocking how I fritter time away.) I've seen enough of it to raise a question in my mind. If Santorum or someone of equal or greater prominence lets such a 3d party use him as its figurehead -- things look good for Obama.

That means, in terms of my "long-cycle versus short cycle" dilemma, explained here, that the "long cycle" has trumped the short. If Obama gets a second term, things will change in a very big way in coming years, whatever happens to the composition of Congress. We will be a very different country four years from now than we have been before.

If (1) the Romney steamroller works its way in terms of the nominating fight, and (2) there doesn't emerge any significant intra-party split as a result ... I will be left in uncertainty. A one-on-one Romney/Obama contest may well be decided by factors we don't know anything about yet, by events that will take place between now and November. But if it is decided by such contingencies, that would mean -- heaven forbid -- that we'd have to do without the whole idea of long-term predictive cycles.

Steve Jobs

2012-01-13T05:39:00.001-05:00

I've been reading the new biography of Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

I'll just cite this one passage about Jobs' brief experience with communal living, for its obvious social-philosophy message.

"Alrthough the commune was supposed to be a refuge from materialism, [charismatic central figure Robert] Friedland began operating it more as a business; his followers were told to chop and sell firewood, make apple presses and wood stoves, and engage in other commercial endeavors for which they were not paid. One night Jobs slept under the table in the kitchen and was amused to notice that people kept coming in and stealing each other's food from the refrigerator. Communal economics were not for him. "it started to get very materialistic,' Jobs recalled. 'Everybody got the idea they were working very hard for Robert's farm, and one by one they started to leave. I got pretty sick of it.'"

Denver Broncos

2012-01-12T05:29:00.001-05:00

I'm going to be watching the Patriots play the Broncos this Saturday evening.

For those of you not in the know: the Patriots won their division, the East, in the American Football Conference, and earned a "bye," -- that is, they could take a break during the first weekend of playoffs, the weekend of January 7-8.

Meanwhile, the Denver Broncos had a very mixed season. Despote Tebow's talents (and highly publicized prayers) they didn't do better than a W-L record of 8-8. Fortunately, they were playing in a terrible division, the AFC west, where a .500 record was sufficient to end up the winner. It wasn't sufficient to earn a bye, though. They had to play the Pittsburgh Steelers, a wild card team, this past Sunday.

Indeed, the Steelers, who ended the season 12 and 4, were prohibitive favorites to win that game as they flew into Denver. They had a heck of a surprise waiting for them. The Broncos were all over the Steelers in the first half. Steelers had to stage a rousing comeback to end the regulation time at a tie, forcing the first play-off game overtime since new rules came into play for such events.

The new rules say that the first team to have possession in an OT period in a play-off game cannot win by a field goal. If they get a field goal in that possession, the other team has the right to an OT possession of its own. Teams are getting too good in getting 3-pointers from mid-field. It wasn't sporting to have the game ride on a coin toss that way.

That didn't matter, though, because in a very exciting finish, the Broncos scored a touchdown on their first play from scrimmage of their first possession, ending the game in classic sudden death style.

I'll be cheering on the Patriots, anyway, this weekend. But it was good to see Denver pull that off, and congrats to my Colorado relatives.

A January 1988 Flashback

2012-01-08T01:46:00.000-05:00

Back in January 1988, a presidential task force headed by Nicholas Brady announced its conclusions about the stock market crash of the previous October. The Brady Commission blamed automated computer trading.

The report seems almost quaint at a distance of 24 years as does the trading technology then on the cutting edge.
But it was part of Brady's own journey. He became Treasury Secretary before the year was out. The elder Bush, who of course became President about a year after publication of this report, kept him on in that job, and he stayed until 1993, in the process helping defuse the great sovereign-debt crisis of his day with the creation of "Brady Bonds."

Okay, this was a random trip down memory lane. Now return to your regularly scheduled activities.

Unintended Consequences

2012-01-07T03:08:00.000-05:00

A working paper produced by an economist within the IMF recently warned about possible unintended consequences of regulations "aimed at financial stability" that focus on "building equity and reducing leverage at large banks/dealers."

Here is an abstract to the work, by Manmohan Singh.

As you'll see if you visit that page, those of us who allude to the existence of this paper are sternly warned that it "should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF." It represents the views of Mr Singh alone.

Coincidentally, Mr Singh has the same name, first and last, as the current prime minister of India. This has fueled conspiracy theories about the prime minister as a "world bank/IMF agent".

The name, though, is the only connection. The IMF economist didn't leave that employment to become PM of India! He is still there, and this paper bears a quite recent release date as if to illustrate the point.

At any rate, the paper appears to me to be sound work and I hope it draws a wide audience.

Gary Weiss versus us Crackpots

2012-01-06T00:01:00.000-05:00

I admire Gary Weiss and I have indicated as much on this blog. I've even been the target of criticism because his critics think I'm a crony of his. I'm proud to have taken a little heat for so good a reason.
Anyway, I do think Weiss has written insightfully about a wide range of issues and I have learnt a lot from his efforts.

I say all that as preface to this: Gary has unfortunately decided to stigmatize the Ron Paul campaign for president as a uniquely "crackpot" effort. I have to publicly take issue with him there. It is just about the least cracked thing happening within either of the two major parties at the national level just now. Like the US dollar among the other major currencies of our time -- the Paul campaign is the cleanest shirt in a pile of dirty laundry.

I wrote Weiss via the comment section of his blog about these views. I'll reproduce that comment here, with minor cosmetic changes, below:

"I have to tell you Gary, Ron Paul is the only candidate (including the incumbent) who makes any sense to me these days at all.

"I won't defend everything that's appeared in his newsletters, etc. But he is bringing into the mainstream issues, like the dysfunctional nature of fiat money and central banking, and the uncounted costs of foreign adventurism, that we desperately need to have brought into said mainstream.

"As to the civil rights statutes, I agree with Paul that the use of the 'interstate commerce' clause in this sense was an almost absurd stretch of the reasonably plain meaning of the founding document. To say that the Supreme Court approved of this stretch, so it must be constitutional, is inadequate as a matter of logic. For decades the Supreme Court had approved of the notion of 'separate but equal' too. Sometimes the Supreme Court errs and its errors require resistance.

"Personally, in this case, though I object to the use of the commerce language as a blank check for Congressional power, I would be inclined to recognize a defense of necessity. The various branches of the govt of the US had to do something more to check the inertial force of our long history of racial separation and white domination than the formal declaration by the US Supreme Court in May 1954 of the end of Plessy could have accomplished. A recognition of this necessity need not and should not make us uncritical of the doctrinal particulars of such decisions as Heart of Atlanta, though. Here, too, Paul is serving a valuable purpose by his (relatively) straight thinking.

"The one change in federal policy now that could do the most for the improvement of race relations in America would be an end to the absurdities of the war on drugs. Guess who is the only candidate calling for that?"

I wrote those words prior to this Tuesday's developments in Iowa, and I ended by saying that I would be "delighted" by a Paul win there. As indeed I would have been. In the first hour of Tuesday night's count, there was a neck-to-neck-to-neck three way tie. Only gradually did Paul fade a bit, becoming a backgrounded third to the true neck-to-neck drama of Romney versus Santorum. That is unfortunately, because it means this teaching moment, our opportunity to throw libertarian memes about in the mainstream, may already have ended.

I guess that's why they call them "moments"!

My three calenders

2012-01-05T01:32:00.000-05:00

For my week-by-week desk calender through 2012, I will rely on an unflashy but serviceable volume from American Express. As with last year's calender, there are factual tidbits on each page about various destinations where I can presumably enjoy a debt-financed vacation with my Amex card. One of the early pages tells me, for example, with reference to Kauai, Hawaii, that a native of Kauai was "the only royal-born person ever elected to the U.S. Congress." Prince Jonah Huhio Kalanianaole served as a delegate to Congress from the then-Territory of Hawaii from 1903 to 1922.

This year's Amex calender doesn't have the "30 years ago this week" feature that last year's did. I wonder why they axed it? I would imagine that 1982 was at least as interesting a year, week-to-week, that 1981 was.

Maybe they simply realized that I can always check out 30-years events at websites like this: CED Magic.

Separately, my month-by-month calender for the coming year, from Universe Publishing, provides me with classic illustrations from the career of Tintin, now the protagonist of a Spielberg movie. The movie has been in the works for a long time, apparently since soon after the death of Tintin's creator, Hergé, in 1983. At one time it was to be a Universal/Paramount partnership, but Universal pulled out, and the movie now in theatres comes to us from Paramout and Sony. Personally, I hope it proves to be a long and successful franchise. It seems to give Spielberg a good excuse to revert to his Indiana-Jones phase.

Finally, for the day-to-day or "box" calender on the top of my dresser, I am done with "non sequitur" and have propped up a box consisting of one witticism a day from Johnny Carson, in the glory days of the Tonight Show.

Out with the old, in with the new!

Resolutions

2012-01-01T01:19:00.009-05:00

Last year my New Year's Resolutions were straightforward. I have achieved four out of five of them.

1. I promised to take good care of my car. Well, I did, although the "car" involved in that resolution changed through no fault of my own! An idiot ran a red light in February and ruined my old Toyota. But it was in great shape right up to that moment, and I've done a fine job thus far with its replacement.

2. Keep up with the insurance on car. Done.

3. Venture outside of the borders of the U.S. Oops. Never got that done in 2011. I did get as far as Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, though.

4. Make progress toward the publication of another book. This, I've accomplished. I've accepted the fact that the publication of this book will have to be self-financed, but that is more of an observation on the state of the commercial publishing world today than on the merits of my book. At any rate, I've come to a point where the wording of the corresponding resolution for next year will be unconditional.

5. Keep track of Nassar Saber. Done. He is still writing about how he is working on his next book. Maybe 2012 will be the year it actually comes out. But I've decided not to include such tracking on my next list.

This year....

1. Get my car ("Doug") through December 2012 in good working order

2. Make an entrepreneurial investment. Shouldn't just talk a good game on the anarcho-cap stuff.

3. Regarding technology: enter the 21st century. For example, get audio back for my computer. Get Skype capacity for it. Learn how to use -- heck, become comfortable using -- my scanner.

4. Publish GWBCs and sell at least 1,000 copies.

5. Venture outside the borders of the U.S.

Cycles of American Politics

2011-12-30T01:23:00.016-05:00

The presidential election circus upon which we are well launched strikes me -- solipsistically -- as a contest not among individuals, not between parties, but between two theories I've long carried about in my head about how US politics works.

I've written of these theories before. Here is one example. What I think of as the "short cycle" theory postulates cycles that are roughly 30 years long -- so either 32 or 28 years, since 30 itself is not divisible by 4. Obama's election in 2008 can be compared to the election of other relatively obscure figures who carried on the impetus of a reform movement past its prime. A haberdasher in 1948 elected as a last hurrah for the New Deal. Four years later he bowed out, letting Adlai Stevenson take the fall for Eisenhower's victory. Twenty-eight years after 1948 brings us to 1976, when a peanut farner was elected as a final upsurge of New Frontier/Great Society sentiment. Four years later he was mugged by a Kennedy on the way to a re-nomination that proved worthless.

But there is also a "long cycle" theory. According to this, there have been three great periods of constitutional equilibria in US history, separated by chaotic periods of tumult. (There were also two distinct imperial periods in American colonial history, separated by a period of tumult in the 1680s.)

It certainly appears as if the Third Republic ran aground in 2007-08 in much the same way that the Second Republic ran aground in 1929. If that is so, then we are in the midst of a period of turmoil or chaos, and when the dust settles we shall find ourselves with a new equilibrium, a Fourth Republic. If this cyclical theory is right, then Obama is a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Roosevelt, and 2012 is not 1952 or 1980 all over again. It is 1936.

I enjoy the contemplation of both theories, and I have carried them both around in my head. Now I find that they are in stark conflict, and that one of them seems about to receive its falsification. My only regret is that I have but two theories to give for my country.

The Mereological Fallacy

2011-12-29T04:45:00.004-05:00

Philosopher Anderson Brown contends that much of our confusion about the mind-body problem is a "mereological fallacy," a confusion about parts and wholes.

The stomach doesn't "have lunch." The stomach digests, which is part of the process, but we don't accordingly say that the stomach has lunch, and we don't think of the activity of having lunch as internal. It is a fact about our behavior.

Likewise, the brain doesn't think. Brown doesn't give a name to exactly what the brain does -- what is the equivalent of digestion here? "impulse processing"? -- but it isn't "thinking," anyway. A person thinks and, as with lunch, there is nothing internal about it.

I'll reproduce here in italics the comment I made on his site, except that I'll clean it up a bit for this blog. I was a more-than-usually sloppy typist in the comment section of his.

I'm reminded of one aspect of Julian Jaynes' theories, in his book on the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

I don't have the book with me so I'll work from memory, and more than usually subject to correction. But Jaynes said that the "bicameral mind" was not "conscious" in the way in which we are, NOT just for reasons of neurology, but because certain metaphors hadn't come into use yet. The idea of a sort of theatre "inside" the human body -- chest or head, depending on who is writing -- started as a highly literary metaphor, and gradually became an essential part of how people saw themselves. THAT was the "breakdown" of Jaynes' title, when the metaphor became generally accepted as a literal fact. Thus, "consciousness" pulled itself into existence by imagining itself, if you will.

This seems akin to your point, except for chronology.

Yet implicit in Jaynes' account is the point that we don't really have a choice. Going back to the bicameral mind is not an option. Or, in your terminology, thinking of thought as a fact about behavior, like lunch, isn't really an option either. The notion of an inner space where we deliberate is something more than a useful fiction, it is a constitutive fiction.

Perhaps rather like the fiction that the elite group of white men that gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had any business speaking for "We, the people" of the United States.

From JM's Nativity Ode

2011-12-25T01:05:00.000-05:00

This blog has its seasonal traditions. Enjoy!

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And spekl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron'd in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And Heav'n as at some festival,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

John Milton, Nativity Ode (1629)
[lines 135-148].

Read the whole here.

And Merry Christmas.

The Rabbit books

2011-12-24T01:14:00.028-05:00

Reading one of Updike's Rabbit books. So that it will be listed once in this blog, here is the publishing chronology:

Rabbit, Run (1960)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
Rabbit is Rich (1981)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
And a short story, portraying the lives of some of the series' characters after Harry Angstrom's death, Rabbit Remembered (2001)

I've often said (in this blog and elsewhere) that the Rabbit series does not contain Updike's best work. The Updike I admire writes novels of ideas, where vivid characters debate theology or other weighty matters in terms often academically informed but never dry.

Roger's Version fits that description, as does Memories of the Ford Administration, the Bech series, and In the Beauty of the Lilies.

The Rabbit series, though, is the story of an uninteresting ex-jock growing up and growing old, having what we are to take as paradigmatic crises -- paradigmatic for working-class white American men of the second half of the 20th century. Not my cup of tea, though not without some of the characteristic Updike flair.

And today is a lazy Christmas eve day, so I won't try to think of something clever to write about instead. .

SPOILER ALERT: I'm not shy about giving away plot twists in what follows.

Angstrom got the nickname "Rabbit," a reference to his small nose, and to his leaping agility, during his basketball-star days in high school, in the late 1940s. When we first meet him in Rabbit Run, those days are already a memory -- it is the mid 1950s and Rabbit is selling kitchen gadgets. He is married, has a two year old son, and his wife (Janice) is heavily pregnant with their second. In the course of that novel, the baby is born, and later dies, drowned in the bathtub in a way that implicates both Harry and Janice, though they escape from legal consequences.

Rabbit Redux begins in 1969: indeed, it begins on the day that Apollo 11 takes off for the moon. The town where these novels are set, Brewer, PA., is an old-line industrial sort of place, and one of its businesses made one of the electronic components crucial to the success of Neil Armstrong et al. The local paper runs a story beginning:

"When Brewerites this Sunday gaze up at the moon, it may look a little bit different to them.
"Why?
"Because there's going to be a little bit of Brewer on it."

Angstrom is the one to set those words in type, because he is employed at a print shop, while Janice works at an auto dealership her father owns.

Janice and Harry go their separate ways in the course of this novel. Janice saves her lover while he is suffering a heart attack and Harry lives for a time with a young woman named Jill, who is closer in age to his and Janice's son (Nelson) than to Harry. The plot eventually kills off Jill in a house fire -- Harry and Janice reconcile.

By the time we reach Rabbit is Rich, the year is 1979. Janice's father is deceased, and the Angstroms have inherited the above mentioned dealership (selling Toyotas). As the title of the novel indicates, that vastly improves their material circumstances, though they still live in Brewer,which by this point represents the decline of US industrial might -- no more bits of Brewer are heading to the moon, because America has closed down the Apollo program.

In Rabbit at Rest, Harry is in retirement in Florida the late 1980s, and the news is full of the destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Nelson Angstrom now runs the Toyota dealership -- and is running it either incompetently or crookedly. During a sunfishing expedition, Rabbit rescues his visiting granddaughter, Rebecca, (Nelson's girl) from drowning. This gives him a sense of redemption from his guilt over the death of his daughter all those decades before, yet the exertion weakens his heart contributing to his own demise.

The Melodrama of the Rupee

2011-12-23T01:30:00.000-05:00

In Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," Miss Prism tells Cecily, "you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side."

Wilde's humorous intentions notwithstanding, the rupee is now providing the world with some melodrama. As Shubha Ganesh of The Economic Times wrote last weekend, rupee depreciation has become a pressing concern of the government there "as a weak currency is expected to impact the domestic treasury as India meets 80 percent of its energy needs with imports."

Private companies in India, notably Reliance Communications (RCOM) a huge telecomm concern, have a lot of bonds reaching maturity in 2012, many of them foreign currency convertible. As another story this week in The Economic Times noted, "the timing could hardly look any worse."

A company that has issued, say, $1 billion in FCCBs is committed to pay the rupee equivalent of $1 billion US dollars when the bonds reach maturity. That is surely a key reason why the bondholders bought that sort of bond, why they've proven so easily marketable, after all: FCCBs let the buyers hedge themselves against any melodramatic fall of the rupee at the expense of the issuer.

If a major Indian company could find itself incapable of meeting those obligations -- well, we are all familiar with the ways of corporate metaphorical dominoes these days.

Yes, Cecily, this could get a bit too sensational.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-22T04:24:00.003-05:00

Hitchens died a week ago. Here's an obit, as it appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
A quick search shows that this blog has made reference to Hitchens' work three times.

The first time was after my Bloomsday trip to Dublin in June 2007, and I reported that I had met him in an elevator in that city:

http://cfaille.blogspot.com/2007/06/christopher-hitchens.html

A year later, I made a rather snide remark about Hitchens and his "village atheist" pose at the end of a post about Scholem:

http://cfaille.blogspot.com/2008/05/mysticism-and-scholarship.html

Again this spring I invoked Hitchens as a token of that type:

http://cfaille.blogspot.com/2011/04/from-yahooanswers.html

Aside from his proselytizing for atheism, though, the other fact about Hitchens worth noting is that his political journeying replicated that of the neoconserativces of an earlier time. I use the word "neocon" in what I take to be the faily narrow and correct sense, not as a loose term of abuse as it is often used these days.

A neocon in the relevant sense is generally a secular intellectual who adopts conservative views on what he takes to be practical grounds, often after a leftwing youth. Historically, many neocons happen to come from a Jewish ethnic background: Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol, etc.

The original neocons (the first two of those three among them) adopted conservatism after a disillusionment about communism, and they became identified with the view that the stronger the US in the world, the weaker international communism, the better for humanity.

On October 21, 2002, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece by Hitchens entitled "So Long, Fellow Travelers." It was precisely the sort of piece that could have been written by one of the original neocons in the 1970s. But with an update for the era. The new threat to all Hitchens held dear was Islamofascism (his coinage, I believe), and his disagreement with his former colleagues on the left was that they are soft on it, and he would no longer be.

His journeying is now over, his friends will remember him fondly, and the readers he infuriated might benefit as they recollect that passion in tranquility.

Caring only about your work

2011-12-18T01:37:00.011-05:00

The philosopher Nel Noddings once (in 1984) wrote: "Most of us commonly take as pejorative, 'He cares only about money'; but we have mixed feelings when we hear, 'He cares only about mathematics' or 'She cares only about music.' In part, we react this way because we feel that a person who cares only about money is likely to hurt others in pursuit of it, while one who cares only about mathematics is a harmless and, perhaps, admirable person who is denying himself the pleasures of life in his devotion to an esoteric object."

I do think this is a fair general statement of the usual connotations of such sentences. In the spirit of expanding Noddings' comment, we might observe: Someone who cares only about mathematics may be a harmless drudge, or may end up discovering a mathematical anomaly in radio waves that in turn improves worldwide communications for the good of us all. Someone who cares only about money may obtain it by violence or fraud, doing active harm to others.

More generally, we often extend respect, even if it is a grudging respect, to anyone who is "married to" his occupation, especially if it is an occupation which may derive some of its appeal from the intellectually challenging nature of the work. "He cares only about his work" said of a lawyer or an engineer, is no bad thing.

Still, I think Noddings goes a bit too far when she writes about how such a person is "denying himself" pleasures of life outside the job: suggesting that this is a praise-worthy sacrifice. If our mathematician prefers the blackboard and the computer lab to the pleasures of, say, sexual relations, child-rearing, neighborly comaraderie, adopting the former over all of the latter is no sacrifice.

OTOH, if a mathematician believes that he has a duty to stay at the blackboard hour after hour, because the human race needs better exploitation of radio frequencies, then I can imagine that his doing so would be a praise-worthy sacrifice. But in such a case, we would not in any case express the situation by saying that he "cares only for" the mathematics.

William James Quote of the Day

2011-12-17T03:29:00.002-05:00

"[A]lmost all the retinal shapes that objects throw are perspective 'distortions.' Square table-tops constantly present two acute and two obtuse angles; circles drawn on our wallpapers, our carpets, or on sheets of paper, usually show like ellipses; parallels approach as they recede; human bodies are foreshortened; and the transitions from one to another of these altering forms are infinite and continual. Out of the flux, however, one phase always stands prominent., It is the form the object has when we see it easiest and best: and that is when our eyes and the object both are in what may be called the normal position. "

Principles of Psychology, Chapter 20, "The Perception of Space."

This Day in Cosmological History

2011-12-16T01:49:00.003-05:00

December 16, 1915 was the publication date for Albert Einstein's GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY.

He had published the "special theory" of relativity (SR) ten years before. It is SR that incorporates the principle that the speed of light is the same for all observers, and this led in turn to the intriuguing idea of time dilation. This is sometimes explained in terms of a thought experiment. Imagine you are travelling at the speed of light -- riding on a photon, so to speak. You are getting farther and farther away from a clock which, in your 'inertial framework,' is stationary. You won't see any movement of the hands of that clock because no new information from that clock can reach you -- you're going as fast as the fastest speed at which information can travel, by hypothesis. So the clock is frozen.

If there are any particles that can travel faster than protons, as scientists at CERN now seem to be saying, then Einstein's view on time dilation needs revision. For if so, then (to revert to our thought experiment) you might be able to receive information about subsequent movements of the clock's hands while riding on a photon -- if the new information is conveyed by a stream of neutrinos rather than by other photons.

Anyway: ten years later, on this date, Einstein published a follow up work, on general relativity, which explained gravity as a consequence of the curvature of space-time. This GR centers on the following equation:

R_uv - (1/2) g_uv R = (8 Pi G/c⁴) T_uv .

I won't pretend to 'get it,' but I'm told that if R_uvis taken as equaling 0 you have flat space-time, roughly the sort of thing you learned about in high school geometry. The T_uvrepresents the distribution of matter and energy, so the equation as a whole shows the relationship between matter-energy on the one hand and space-time on the other. A theory can't get much more "general" than that!

Frivolous Walk-Out: Classy Response

2011-12-15T08:54:00.001-05:00

Early this month, Harvard students staged a walk-out in a class taught by professor Greg Mankiw. You can read their explanation here.

It takes a lot of scrolling down through the comments to get to what I had to say about that, so I'll save you the work, dear blog reader.

They’re students at Harvard, yet they can’t express themselves better than this? I’m dismayed. Here’s a simple stylistic point: “basic” and “fundamental,” in the sense in which those terms are both used in the final sentence of the third graph, are synonyms. To use both with a disjunctive, “more fundamental or basic,” is just bizaare or eerie. [See what I did there?]

Far more important, there IS of course a reason why Adam Smith’s work should be taken as more “fundamental or basic” than Keynes’. It is in point of historical fact more basic. Keynes, whether you agree with him or not, was building on a century and a half of prior work. Keynes and Smith are not competitors any more than Einstein and Newton are competitors. In each pairing, the work of the former would simply have been inconceivable without the prior contributions of the latter.

If you think you have mastered Newton, then you can go on to the study Einstein, and perhaps some day to have an intelligent opinion about Higgs’ boson. Otherwise, you’re likely to end up confusing a boson with a North American bison.

Indeed, this is what Mankiw himself has said about the situation. I confess I hadn't checked out his response before writing the above, but I've seen it now, and he has sensibly risen above the rancor directed his way. He has posted on his blog a video of a recent half-hour talk on 'heterodox' economics, and he has suggested in a single well-wrought paragraph that his main disagreement with the "Occupy Harvard" group is pedagogical.

Line of Best Fit

2011-12-11T03:01:00.004-05:00

Some thoughts about philosophy and the special sciences. I put these thoughts together recently in an email to a friend, and liked the result so much I will reproduce it here.

In the task of building an over-all view of the world (which we might call, using the word loosely, the task of philosophy) one is perhaps drawing a line of best fit through points represented by all the fields of special study, including those of the sciences.

The expression "line of best fit" comes from statistics. Think of just two variables, to make things easy to plot on a piece of paper. Say, the relationship between grams of fat and total calories in an item of fast food. You could make fat grams the X axis and total calories the Y axis. Then represent each examined sort of fast food as a point on that graph defined by the two axes. a hamburger, a cheeseburger, a box of french fries, an ice cream cone without sprinkles, an ice cream cone with sprinkles, etc. Each gets just one point, defined by specialists.

Odds are good your graph won't result in any neat line. This is a "scattershot graph." But there will likely be a general common trend, that the points move diagonally upward and ouward -- i.e. fat correlates roughly with calories. So you produce a straight line summing up the data as best you can, keeping the variance between your line and the data points as small as possible.

That is the relation between philosophy and special studies of all sorts I have in mind. Of courtse, the results of the special sciences keep changing, as you may have noticed in terms of the news from CERN for example. So we might think of subatomic physics as it exists circa 2011 as one of the data points in our scattershot graph. If my philosophy is sound, over time the dots that are furthest out from my line of best fit will move toward it, not away. I need not pretend that all known points fit perfectly along my line -- if I make that claim, I'm surely delusional.

This idea of a line of best fit, though, captures well what Jacques Barzun is doing in Darwin, Marx, Wagner, when he argues with Darwin, and with contemporary biology insofar as it continues to reflect those aspects of Darwinism that stray furthest from the line he draws.

His own special science, the field where Barzun first made his initial scholarly reputation, is the history of music in the 19th century.

In the book I've mentioned, that reputation is of course of value. Barzun starts with the observation that three important events, in three distinct fields, took place in 1859. Darwin completed the ms of The Origin if Species, Marx published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (something of an early sketch of the as yet unpublished On Capital) and Wagner completed work on Tristan und Isolde.

I would be loath to argue with Barzun about Wagnerian music and its historic significance. He owns that particular point on the graph. As for the other two -- he is doing the best he can to make a line that fits the points, as we all are in our own ways.

His view, in a few words, is that 1859 was a disaster. Wagner moved music away from the wonderful avenues of exploration Beethoven had opened up and that such romantics as Berlioz had further explored. Marx mis-directed social reform into a materialistic/mechanistic direction, subverting the work of Saint-Simon, Proudhon, etc.

And Charles Darwin? Barzun prefers the insights of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. As it happens, Erasmus even wrote about the evolutionary significance of the opposable thumb, though he chose to do it in verse:

The hand, first gift of heaven! to man belongs;

Untipt with claws the circling fingers close,

With rival points the bending thunbs oppose...."

Waters v. Maloney

2011-12-10T03:44:00.001-05:00

Fascinating stuff. I'll just link to it.

Maloney

I can tell you that from the point of view of an understanding of essential financial realities, Carolyn Maloney is vastly to be preferred to Maxine Waters.

Indeed, I'm personally delighted that some of the interest groups pressing for more regulation of the financial world (such as New York's Working Families Party) have blasted Maloney for "siding with Wall Street lobbyists and Tea Party conservatives by co-sponsoring a bill that undermines transparency.”

Transparency sounds like a good thing, but enforced transparency, like the enforced version of anything else, has its own costs. It is well that Maloney understands that, and certain that Waters does not.

A Simile

2011-12-09T08:28:00.002-05:00

Leon Gettler, one of my FB friends, noted on his wall recently that he is compiling a list of his favorite similes. He gave as examples these:

"I lit a cigarette that tasted like a plumber's handkerchef." -- Raymond Chandler

"Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherizefd upon a table." -- T.S. Eliot.

I suggest that the following belongs on any such list: "in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings."

That is F. Scott Fitzgerald writing about Gatsby's parties. He doesn't write, "like moths to a flame," as any hack might. He expects his readers to throw in the flame, and he substitutes the whisperings for it, mingling one simile intimately with one metaphor.

Nanotechnology

2011-12-08T02:49:00.001-05:00

SUNY at Albany hosts the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, a center, perhaps the center, of nano tech research in the US today. It has collaborative arrangements with 250 companies at work in the field, including IBM, Toshiba, Samsung, Novellus Systems, TI, and DuPont, just for starters.

The October 2011 issue of ENTREPRENEUR MAGAZINE credits Alain Kaloyeras, whose many titles include that of Chief Executive of aforesaid College. The magazine portrays him as the academic entrepreneur who built this program, and tells us a bit about how he has done it, a story that beings in 1988, when he was a "newly minted Ph.D. in condensed matter physics," and had to decide wherther to take a jub with SUNY, at that time not an impressive physics-and-engineering place.

(Jason Daley gets the byline on the story, part of a broader feature called Gurus & Grads. )

Here is Kaloyeras' page, at www.albany.edu

Although I'm hopelessly out of my depth in matters of high science, this has never stopped me from expressing opinions,as you can see here, for example, or here, or here, where I linked nanotechnology to my own personal "cosmological heresy."

It is possible that sentient beings play a part in the big picture of the cosmos. Consider these points:

1) the great advantage of the Big Bang theory over any effort to revive the Steady State theory is that the former seems directly consistent with the 2d law of thermodynamics. Everything has to be running down to a heat death, and the Big Bang and consequent expansion gives us a vivid mechanism for this.

2) Maxwell, in his thought experimemt of a little demon that redirects molecules, was hypothesizing a way to beat the Second Law.

3) Nanotechnology sounds a lot like the creation of Maxwellian demons as a reality.

Roger's Version

2011-12-04T09:00:00.002-05:00

If you have on your personal bucket list the thought that you should read one novel by John Updike before you die, what one should that be?

The Rabbit series is over-rated.

The best single Updike, in my opinion, is Roger's Version.

Amazon's "most helpful" review, by someone calling himself "Outside Looking In," captures a nice moment from the book. The protagonist, Roger Lambert, is thinking about ancient Jews and contemporary Protestants.

"How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death."

In essence, Lambert is a Barthian. His "rascally pet" as he says at one point, is the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). What he most admires in Barth is the utter Otherness of Barth's God, the rejection of even an "analogic" relationship between God's Being and our own being. God is essentially a hidden God.

Updike pits this Barthianism against the seemingly more naive views of a younger man, Dale, who believes that contemporary physics is making God visible, and who believes he can complete that uncovering of God through computer science.

Lambert helps Dale get the grant for his project, but in subtler ways undermines both that project and Dale's faith.

As to the reviewers, David Wisehart thinks the book "both fascinating and frustrating."

David Lodge, writing in The New York Times, speaks of its "richness and viruosity," and says he finished it with "renewed respect for one of the most intelligent and resourceful of contemporary novelists."

Mark Athitakis, writing for Critical Mass, admires the way Updike "smoothly embeds dense scientific discussion into his narrative, anticipating the controversy over Intelligent Design more than a decade before it became a mainstream issue."

Not everyone liked it, though. In The New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews spoke of "the growth of a belligerent, almost hysterical callousness" in Updike's career generally, which he sees as epitomized here.

I don't see what Crews thinks he sees.

Jacques Barzun

2011-12-03T07:15:00.003-05:00

A belated happy birthday to Jacques Barzun. He came into this world on November 30, 1907, so on Wednesday of this week he reached the distinguished age of 104.

I was honored to attend his centennial celebrations four years ago, and was never before or since in a room with such distinguished company.

Rafe Champion has written a fitting brief celebration of Barzun's work, here.

I enjoyed especially Champion's quoting from an interview Barzun gave to a reporter from the Austin Chronicle. The reporter remarked that Barzun had been in close working academic relationships with a lot of Marxists during the 1930s, but had never shown any enthusiasm for Marxism himself, nor had he ever taken up arms against it, identifying himself as an anti-Marxist. The exchange runs thus:

Barzun: I had no Marxist colouring, such as they had ... I stood aloof, although not hostile, and I take it they weren’t hostile to me. They deplored my blindness.

AC: You started writing about Romanticism when that was not very popular. It’s funny, you were aloof from Marxism, but also from the reaction to it, which was influenced so much by T.S. Eliot.

Barzun: Yes, I was always against the current. Eliot of course got it from Babbitt, who got it from the French eminences of anti-Romanticism. What I read about Romanticism didn’t agree with what was said about it. Everything in the books was contrary to fact and legitimate conclusions of fact. Including all sorts of fabrications, simply lies that had gotten into the critical stream and were reproduced over and over again without being checked.

AC: You seem temperamentally more comfortable being at the limit of the Zeitgeist than being in the center of things.

Barzun: Well, I would call that the historian’s detachment.

My own sense of Barzun's politics is that he has a fondness for various pre-Marxist sorts of socialism (what Marxists call the "utopian" sorts) and that he blames Marxism and its materialistic emphasis for having cut short that promising line of thought. Likewise with contemporary biology. He identifies with pre-Darwinian notions of evolution and, here too, sees Darwinian notions as too mechanistic and a threat to more vital conceptions of life.

Anyway, if I'm right to think of Barzun as a sort of Proudhonist politically, it explains how he has admirers of both right and left. When his writings touch on politics, there is the air of an emigrant's nostalgia that appeals to the right, but the Proudhonist idealism comes through and appeals more to the left.

Acknowledgements

2011-12-02T01:50:00.002-05:00

I'm getting close to the publication of my book, Gambling with Borrowed Chips.

I recently composed an acknowledgements page. Since that also makes for sort of a neat little bio, I'll include it here.

----------------------------------

Acknowledgements

I’ve dedicated this book to Hans Schroeder, because it was through my involvement with his baby, The Pragmatist, that I first became part of the discussion of the great public issues of most concern to me. That magazine, the result of collaboration between Schroeder and estimable Jorge Amador, was dedicated to the proposition that liberty works, in concrete and demonstrable ways, and that coercion fails. The way to advance the cause of liberty, then, is to explain how and why it works. That simple insight has carried me forward ever since.

I’d like to thank Lee Miringoff, of Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York, who gave me some practical experience polling, back in the late 1970s, at the start of what has since become the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.

I thank Myrna Gans, Steve Leo, and Susan Glass. I retain my memories of their comradeship in a suite of law offices in Bridgeport, CT in the 1980s as among my few pleasant memories of what was, for me, an unhappy experiment.

I thank Robert Katz, also a friend in that place and time, for doing his best to turn me into a practical politician, hopeless though that cause proved to be.

I thank Associate Justice Clarence Thomas for citing an article of mine in his concurring opinion in 44 Liquormart v. Rhode Island (1996). It was a signal honor and, as a result, I have since flattered myself that I played a small role expanding the scope of first amendment protections. I also thank whatever clerk drew that article to Justice Thomas’ attention.

I thank Henry Cohen, who encouraged and advised me in the course of writing that article and many others over many years.

I’d also like to acknowledge Kristin Fox, Johann Wong, and everybody who did the heavy lifting to bring HedgeWorld into existence as the Clinton years came to an end. Because of their efforts, I had the opportunity to cover and learn about the issues that I discuss in this book in greater depth than would have been possible by any other route – and to do so while pulling down a salary and calling my discoveries work.

Thanks are due to the great figures of the econoblogosphere, the loners sitting at their keyboards in their pajamas who have created a cyberspatial haven for intense debate over how markets work. I have in mind especially the late Greg Newton, of “Naked Shorts,” who was able to scan a 280 page court filing on the demise of the Plus Funds and find the one newsy nugget.

Gary Weiss, Roddy Boyd, Tracy Coenen, have all made their marks on my understanding of these issues and on this book, as has that discreditable felon, Sam Antar.

I thank Christopher Holt for founding AllAboutAlpha, and Kristin Fox – yes, the same one thanked above! – for carrying on as the AlphaFemale there.

I thank Rosalie Schultz for a long and stimulating correspondence. I am sorry that I let it lapse, and hope she forgives me that.

I thank Cicily for much, but in particular for suffering with me through Oliver Stone’s second “Wall Street” movie, a crucial moment of inspiration.

Other debts will become obvious within the body of the text. Still others probably won’t. But all those to whom I owe debts know who they are, and to all: Thank you.

Oh, and if it isn’t obvious: No one mentioned above should be held responsible in any way for the opinions or the blatant mistakes of what follows.

Bradycardia

2011-12-01T02:14:00.002-05:00

In a recent episode of House, a patient was diagnosed with bradycardia. If you're like me, you suspect that bradycardia is that disease that was first diagnosed in either Marcia or Greg, the older sister and brother respectively of the Brady Bunch.

Apparently, though, bradycardia and the Bradys are unrelated. The medical term refers simply to a too-slow heart rate.

Okay, I just wanted to throw that dumb pun out there. Other than that, I got nuttin'.

Google News: Blast from the past

2011-11-27T02:26:00.002-05:00

On October 2, 1941, the Montreal Gazette ran a story with the headline, "Religion Guarantees Worthless in Soviet Constitution, Foes Say."

Hitler had only recently attacked his erstwhile eastern allies, and now the western powers, including the whole of the British Commonwealth, and thus of course including Canada, were trying to make the mental adjustment required to think of Soviet Russia as an ally. That headline, I submit, reflects the struggles of that moment.

Here's the lead: "WASHINGTON, October 1. -- President Roosevelt's action in calling attention to the Russian Constitution's guarantee of freedom of religion brought replies today that the guarantee meant nothing."

That's why old newspapers are cool. They strip away our own hindsight, and help put us into the world of, say, October 1941.

click

"With Held" is two words now?

2011-11-26T00:36:00.001-05:00

From my email inbox.

Dear Friend,

I know that this short memo would certainly come to you as a surprise due to the fact that we haven’t had any previous correspondence with each other. In spite of this, I will appreciate it if you will permit me to inform you of my desire to execute a business with you which will certainly be of a mutual benefit to both of us.

I am Dr Mathew Bertin, accountant by profession. I work as an external auditor with my Bank and i discovered an Account that had been dormant for the past seven years.The account belong to a single holder (NAME WITH HELD).I am seeking your assistance at your willing so that we can do this financial transaction together so that you can claim this Funds through your foreign account. You have the absolute right to claim the fund hence you are a foreigner. If you know that you can handle such transaction, get back to me with your ideas alongside with your Direct Contact Phone Number for urgent and more discussion.

Best Regards.
Mathew Bertin

---------------------------
Um. No thanks Matt. And "withheld" should be one word.

The Democratic Party's Nominating Convention: 1896

2011-11-25T02:10:00.000-05:00

Once in awhile I give you, dear reader, the dubious benefit of a brief random quotation from my recent reading. That will be the case today.

I take this from THE TRAGEDY OF WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN, by Gerard N. Magliocca.

The leading obstacle to Bryan's nomination came from 'Gold Democrats,' who backed President Cleveland's policies, but they soon realized that they were outnumbered. The president opposed Bryan's candidacy and told his supporters that 'a cause worth fighting for is worth fighting for to the end.' Neverthelss, by 1896, Cleveland did not have much influence with the party faithful. A Gold Democrat describing the scene in Chicago said that for 'the first time, I can undersand the scenes of the French Revolution.' The conservative senator David Hill of New York, in a desperate plea to the delegates, said: 'I am a Democrat, but not a revolutionist. My mission here today is to unite, not to divide -- to build up, not to destroy.'

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T01:16:00.009-05:00

With all due respect to the Pilgrims, to the traditional sentiments of harvest time, and to expressions of gratitude, both cosmic and local, Thanksgiving Day for some of us constitutes chiefly the center of the football season -- its culmination for high schools, and a good time for the college games that serve as the natural lead-in to the wonders of the bowl-game season. Have you ever noticed, after all, how much a turkey looks like a football?

Last year at this time (and the year before) I was expressing my own gratitude to the fates for bringing Coach Edsall to the helm of the football program of the University of Connecticut. This year, that might not seem apt, since Edsall is no longer there. Just after the end of last year's (glorious!) season, which brought the Huskies to the Fiesta Bowl, he left for what he called his "dream job," coaching the Maryland Terrapins. I don't begrudge him upward mobility, but the I have to say I thought the manner of the announcement unnecessarily harsh.

Also, alas, UConn isn't haven't the kind of outstanding season to which I was reacting last year.

Still, think good thoughts! Though the Huskies lost last weekend to the Louisville Cardinals, 34 to 20, QB Johnny McEntee threw for 253 yards and redshirt freshman Lyle McCombs (of Staten Island, New York) became only the second UConn freshman ever to pass the 1,000 yard mark rushing in a season.

So: good effort guys. And, by the way, Edsall isn't exactly going gangbusters at his new job. Wake Forest just administered a shellacking to them. Edsall's old team has a better record than his new team for the season. Good luck to Coach Paul Pasqualoni, and may he and this team prosper in years to come.

This coming Saturday, UConn plays the Rutgers Scarlett Knights. The Knights' roster includes their sophomore phenom Jawan Jamison and junior wide receiver Mohamed Sanu. Tough opposition, and it would be a worthy notch on the bedpost for UConn to pull out a W there.

The kickoff is set for noon at Rentschler Field, and the game may be covered by ESPN2. If it is, I'll be grateful.

Who Is Ellen Brown?

2011-11-20T00:11:00.035-05:00

Ellen Brown is the author of "Web of Debt," a book about the U.S. monetary system, published in March 2010.

She has only come to my attention quite recently, though. Apparently, she has both a following within the Tea Party movement and powerful detractors therein. This is intriguing: we need more people who break through the old predictable lines, both where they are right and where they are wrong.

Gary North, of the Specific Answers blog, is clearly among her detractors.

If I understand the polemical situation rightly, it is this: the Tea Party rank and file is ticked off about the Federal Reserve. They largely (and rightly IMHO) see it as responsible for our screwed-up banking system and, by extension, for our screwed-up economy.

Both Brown and North agree with that. The problem is this: Brown seems to believe that the big problem with the Federal Reserve is that it is unaccountable, i.e. anti-democratic. A centrally controlled monetary system that was accountable to the democratic process would be a vast improvement.

North, on the other hand, contends that the problem with the Federal Reserve is simply that it is a central bank. It should not exist because central banks should not exist. The particulars of how it is run don't matter to him and, in his view, should not matter to the grass roots of any populist movement worth supporting.

Accordingly, Brown favorably cited a German researcher who said that interest now composes 40 percent odf the cost of everything one buys at a store. "If the government owned the banks, it could keep the interest and get these projects at half price."

I'll be keeping my eye on Ellen and on the disputes she seems to excite.

La Quinta

2011-11-19T01:40:00.000-05:00

I spent two nights at La Quinta hotel in Stamford, CT last week: Thursday into Friday, and Friday into Saturday.

I use La Quinta fairly often for my NYC jaunts -- its easier than trying to make the trip down from north of Hartford, take care of your business, and come back all in one day. This time, I stretched that much action out over three days and two nights making a mini-vacation of it.

One thing I like about La Quinta is that each room has a real honest-to-goodness wardrobe, instead of a built-in closet. A real porthole-to-Narnia wardrobe. Haven't found my way through the back yet, though.

One thing that annoys me is that they haven't figured out that I'm a repeat customer. I'm supposed to get some sort of discount for being a repeat customer, but there must be some period of time, after the passage of which, my earlier visit drops out of their system. I must not be sufficiently frequent in my trips there.

Ah well. In the middle of this life we're bound upon....

Jonestown

2011-11-18T01:40:00.002-05:00

This is the 33th anniversary of the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, of the People's Temple cult.

Give the victims of that masacre a few moments of your thoughts today.

The massacre gave the world the expression, "Don't drink the Kool-Aid."

As it happens, it wasn't really poison-laced Kool-Aid that they were drinking. It was poison laced Flavor-Aid, described here as a knock-off product.

I'm sure this has been driving the real Kool-Aid's marketing folk to distraction for decades now.

Fracking: Some Links

2011-11-17T04:48:00.005-05:00

I'm just going to link farm today. Subject, fracking, the propagation of fractures in layers of rock in order to draw through the rock the buried petroleum, natural gas, or other valuable stuff.

According to Schlumberger's oilfield glossary, "engineered fluids are pumped at high pressure and rate into the reservoir interval to be treated, causing a vertical fracture to open." Who is Schlumberger? The "leading oil field services provider," according to the company webpage.

Some residents in Oklahoma reportedly suspect that recent seismic activity there owes something to the practice, but this article in The Christian Science Monitor takes a skeptical view.

Fracking is a more likely culprit for small earthquakes near Blackpool in England recently though.

Earthquakes aside, the usual complaint against fracking involves the potential for water pollution.

The Oil and Gas Accountability Project says bluntly that "our drinking water [is] at risk" due to the practice.

The OGAP cites a white paper prepared by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory which described "produced water," i.e. the waste products. "The many chemical constituents found in produced water, when present either individually or collectively in high concentrations, can present a threat to aquatic life when they are discharged or to crops when the water is used for irrigation."

Joseph Nocera is among those who defends the practice of fracking. He said America "needs the Marcellus Shale," which has 500 trillion cubic feet of reserves, so that we ought to "accept the inconvenience that the drilling will bring" and insist that the drilling be done in ways that address the environmental issues.

There is a spirited discussion in the comments under this post in The Volokh Conspiracy.

Novelization of the Lodz Ghetto II

2011-11-13T01:51:00.000-05:00

This will continue and complete the observations I made on October 30, concerning the novel EMPEROR OF LIES by Sem-Sandburg.

There's a nice touch near the end, as the novelist wants to inform us that the Russian front is getting closer to Lodz. He writes, "Rosa Smolenska could feel the detonations of distantly falling bombs, dull tremors through the walls of the house and up through her own body."

I like that because it seems to be paradoxical, and because in its paradoxical way it states the precise nature of these detonbations as felt by the ghetto inhabitants. They are still "distant" and "dull," yet not so distant nor so dull that they fail to pass as a tremor through one's whole body.

Just a bit later, we get what some might call unnecessary detail about the sort of war related manufacture still taking place in the ghetto. "Debora worked right at the end of the cold, crowded shed, where she and some other girls stood packing the finished fuses in little square boxes made of card." "Card" sounds like an awkward translation that might better have been "cardboard," but the detail work continues in the next sentence. "Twelve plugs to a box, and then the flaps and the top and bottom of the boxes had rto be tucked into the little diagonal slots on their sides."

Ron Paul Got This Exactly Right

2011-11-12T00:12:00.004-05:00

click

Two key paragraphs:

The Fed fails to grasp that an interest rate is a price—the price of time—and that attempting to manipulate that price is as destructive as any other government price control. It fails to see that the price of housing was artificially inflated through the Fed's monetary pumping during the early 2000s, and that the only way to restore soundness to the housing sector is to allow prices to return to sustainable market levels. Instead, the Fed's actions have had one aim—to keep prices elevated at bubble levels—thus ensuring that bad debt remains on the books and failing firms remain in business, albatrosses around the market's neck.

The Fed's quantitative easing programs increased the national debt by trillions of dollars. The debt is now so large that if the central bank begins to move away from its zero interest-rate policy, the rise in interest rates will result in the U.S. government having to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in additional interest on the national debt each year. Thus there is significant political pressure being placed on the Fed to keep interest rates low. The Fed has painted itself so far into a corner now that even if it wanted to raise interest rates, as a practical matter it might not be able to do so. But it will do something, we know, because the pressure to "just do something" often outweighs all other considerations.

I should add (since I used the word "exactly" in this entry's headline), that I do have one small nit to pick with the way Paul expresses himself here. Not with the substance of his exposition, which is perfect, but with the jots and tittles.

He defines interest rates briefly as "the price of time." They aren't the price of time. They are defined and measured by time, just as apartment rents are defined and measured by weeks, months, or years. But a rent isn't the price of time, it is the price of occupancy. Likewise, an interest rate is the price of credit, or of the use of the principal, for a specified period of time.

What Paul means is clear enough, and his brief use of the phrase "the price of time" probably does no harm, except ... that in the days of Savonarola and in the glare of Scholasticism one of the most common objections to the charging of interest, one of the reasons given for considering all interest as the sin of usury, was this notion that it is selling time and that time is of God. I would rather not have free-market advocates play into those bad old superstitions, or we'll end up throwing our vanities into a bonfire.

Still, Paul is making sound points. The Fed isn't wrong because of this chairman or that chairman. It isn't wrong in ways that new appointments or some tweaking of the mandating statutes could fix. It is wrong because it is a central bank, and what central banks do is in essence wrong. They are central planners, just as those who would run the auto industry from Washington (and who, these days, essentially do) are central planners.

The point should be not to improve the Fed but to close it down.

In this, perhaps, tea partiers and OWS types can come together.

Howrey Collapse

2011-11-11T03:16:00.003-05:00

Howrey LLP, a once very prominent global law firm that has been around since July 1956, declared bankruptcy earlier this year after the collapse of merger talks with Winston & Strawn, and is still in the process of dissolution.

It is good to see that in the field of the law at least, even the biggest firms are still considered small enough to fail.

It isn't difficult to imagine a situation in which high government offiucials run around wringing their hands about what a disaster the failure of such a multi-national well connected form will be, and asking each other what can be done to save it.

Anyway, for those interested in a proper RIP: the firm is named after Jack Howrey, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission in the early Eisenhower years. His first partners were Bill Simon, Hal Baker, and Dave Murchison, and the firm's first focus was on antitrust law. Early on it became associated with the cereal industry, which has long had to fight antitrust battles.

As it grew, though, it developed other areas of focus, especially in intellectual-property law. The leading light of the firm's Amsterdam office, Willem Hoyng, is the author of a highly regarded textbook on Dutch IP law.

So they pass into history with a hardy "Cheers!" from me, and best wishes to all the displaced partners (who seem to have long since written lucrative tickets for themselves elsewhere) and the bankruptcy law trustee who has to sort it all out.

Cuban Perestroika?

2011-11-10T02:34:00.002-05:00

Well ... baby steps.

Relenting on car sales

Looking Inside

2011-11-06T11:52:00.000-05:00

Anderson Brown has a fascinating post on the "mereological fallacy" and its significance for the philosophy of mind.

I'll just link to it and allow you to find my further comment on it there.

"Points of light"

2011-11-05T08:06:00.000-04:00

I've just been skimming, for no especially good reason, through a conspiratorialist book written in the late 1980s.

You may remember the late 1980s. The elder Bush in the White House.

Conspiracy theorists of course typically seize on whatever is in the headlines and spin it into a freemason plot or whatever. When those things drop out of the headlines, these writings can become dated quickly.

Thus, the conspiracy book in qustion diud what it could with the expression "a thousand points of light" used by George H.W. Bush in his campaign in 1988. Aha! similar expressions were used by Masons and Illuminati and so forth. It's all part of the "New Age New World Order"!

Yes, except, a "point of light" is a quite common expression, likely to have occurred to anyone who has ever looked at the night sky. Not evidence of any link except that we all do live under the night sky.

Phony pointless expressions of erudition don't make for understanding. Oops, I just used the word "point" as a metaphor didn't I? I guess the jig is up.

Nor'eastern

2011-11-04T01:36:00.007-04:00

Now THAT was nasty!

I don't remember a power outage in leafy suburban Enfield lasting as long as did the one initiated by the freak pre-Halloween wintry storm this year.

Don't really want to see another one.

Indeed, the situation reminds me of the famous poem about a purple cow.

Clint Eastwood on Gay Marriage

2011-11-03T01:34:00.001-04:00

These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage? I don't give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else. We're making a big deal out of things we shouldn't be making a big deal out of. They go on and on with all this bullshit about "sanctity." Don't give me that sanctity crap! Just give everybody the chance to have the life they want.

click

Thanks Clint. The next time somebody tries to stop gay people from marrying, ask them whether they think you've still got a bullet in your gun.

"In all this excitement, I've lost track myself...."

Novelization of the Lodz Ghetto

2011-10-30T01:23:00.007-04:00

I've been reading THE EMPEROR OF LIES, Sem-Sandberg's novelization of the Lodz ghetto, and Rumkowski's tenure there as the Nazi-approved "Eldest of the Jews." Here's a review of the book from The Guardian.

It is, as you might expect, a depressing read. Yet in its way compelling.

I wonder about the following passage. Does the character "Zawadzki the smuggler" represent anybody historic?

"When the Germans heard that the Jews had caught Zawadzki themselves, they rang for a car from the centre of Litzmannstadt. The Jewish officers realised this was the end for Zawadzki and asked him if he had a final request. He replied that he wished to go to the toilet. Two policemen escorted Zawadzki to the latrines out in the yard. They handcuffed Zawadzki to the latrine door and then stood guard outside, keeping a careful watch on the shoes clearly visible beneath the locked door. The policemen stood staring at Zawadzki's shoes for a good hour. Then one of them plucked up the courage to break down the door. The shoes were still there, and the handcuffs, but no Zawadzki."

Hominid Hunting

2011-10-29T04:18:00.000-04:00

This looks like a great new site, although new and still evolving.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/

All the Devils: Two Points

2011-10-28T03:55:00.004-04:00

I have written before in this blog about the McLean/Nocera book, ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE.

It is a fine book, and I continue to re-read bits of it and discover new points.

Two quick ones today.

1) In their chapter 13, "The Wrap," the authors discuss AIG-FP, the financial products division of the vast insurance company AIG, and its contribution to the crisis. They introduce us to a fellow named Al Frost, who marketed credit default swaps (CDS) for AIG-FP.

After making this introduction, they mention that various CDS' held by AIG-FP included collateral triggers, i.e. contract clauses that allowed "counterparties to demand that AIG put up ... cold, hard cash -- if certain events took place."

Then there is this masterpiece of concision, in which Frost is allowed to hang himself.

"It is hard to know for sure if these triggers were there from the start. Frost ran his department like a little fiefdom; he tended to impart information on a need-to-know basis. (Through his attorney, Frost denies that he didn't talk freely about what was going on in his business.)"

Am I the only one who has chuckled at that?

2) Also in chapter 13, the authors briefly mention Gary Gorton, a Yale economist hired by AIG-FP to develop their risk models. His models obligingly told the division what everyone there wanted to hear, that the triggers weren't at all risky.

Gorton is mentioned again, much later, in chapter 16, about Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. "Yale economist Gary Gorton -- the game man who did risk modeling for AIG-FP -- explains the repo market this way...."

That wasn't a typo. Or at least it wasn't my typo. They don't write that this is the "same man" mentioned earlier. He is the "game man." I imagine him telling his AIG-FP acquaintances: "Yes, I'll create a model that suits your desired conclusions. I'm game!"

I suspect this isn't their typo either, that it is a deliberate play on the two words. But hey, what do I know? I'm just the game man who keeps reading their book.

Nazerali v. Deep Capture

2011-10-27T00:46:00.015-04:00

A Canadian stock promotor, Altaf Nazerali, has filed a notice of claim against the website Deepcapture.com and its operators, contending that the site has falsely characterized him as a con artist.

You can access the notice of claim on Scribd: here.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia has issued a court order shutting the site down, which is why you get a blank screen if you try to go here: www.deepcapture.com

Stockwatch quotes the complaint quoting the website saying that Nazerali is affiliated with "an impressive number of securities traders who are also narco-traffickers (such as Paul Combs, until Combs was whacked by Nazerali's mobster friend Egor Chernov)" and that he has "working relationships with ... members of Al Qaeda's Golden Chain, the regime in Iran, Pakistan's ISI, the chief of Saudi intelligence, the ruler of Dubai, the royals of Abu Dhabi, La Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafia, and others in the Milken network."

I first learned of this from Gary Weiss' blog. Weiss is especially interested in the (intimate) relationship between Deep Capture and Overstock,com, nowadays also known as O.co, and Overstock boss Patrick Byrne.

Regular readers of Pragmatism Refreshed might recall that to Byrne the phrase "the Milken network" in the above quotation has a special resonance. Ex-con Michael Milken, is one-half of the collective Sith Lord (the other half is Steven Cohen). This Sith Lord -- a term of course taken from the Star Wars movies -- is at the center of a vast worldwide web of corruption -- perhaps the web of corruption, since there hardly seems to be anything wrong with the world in recent decades that doesn't get introduced into Deep Capture's theories.

Anyway, Deep Capture has apparently assigned Nazerali a key role in this same awesome/awful network linking (as Weiss puts it) "every crime since Jack the Ripper."

Nazerali has named as defendants not only Deep Capture LLC and Byrne, but High Plains Investments LLC, GoDaddy Inc., (the site's registrar), NoZone Inc. (its host), Google Inc., Google's Canadian subsidiary, and Illinois resident Mark Mitchell.

Let's pause on Mitchell, described in the court filing as the principal author of the defamatory articles. This is the first time I've mentioned him on Pragmatism Refreshed. He was once the assistant managing editor of CJR Daily, a web outlet of the Columbia Journalism Review. During his tenure, the CJR was often accused of ... well ... just missing the point when it touched upon finance journalism. Missing various points. Among those making that case was Joseph Weisenthal of The Stalwart.

Under his watch, too, Gal Beckerman penned an incomprehensible complaint about a perfectly routine WSJ story about nervousness among some Berkshire Hathaway stockholders, and Mitchell came riding to the defense of that complaint, without in the process making it any more comprehensible.

By the end of Mitchell's time there the CJR Daily had essentially given up on tracking finance journalism. Yet he had the name and reputation that came from his time there and he was, excuse the expression, a big capture for Deep Capture, when he started writing for them, apparently some time in 2008.

I'm just trying to keep all the players straight here.

Meanwhile, a commenter on Weiss' blog suggests that "Mr. Nazerali took umbrage with journalists in the past (NY Post and some Canadian paper). 2 reporters named Christopher Byron and Lee Webb did a story on a firm Mr. Nazerali was associated with over 10 years ago," and Deep Capture has just recycled this.

It will be fascinating watching how this plays out in the courts of the Great White North.

The Abacus and the Cross

2011-10-23T08:09:00.002-04:00

I've recently received via a book club membership, "The Abacus and the Cross," a book about the life of Pope Sylvester II. He held that august title from 999 until his death in 1003: he was Pope, in other words, when the odometer of the Anno Domino calender first flipped over, back before anyone worried about a "Y1k" bug that would ruin the network of abacuses.

Before 999, the future Pope was known as Gerbert of Aurillac, and the author of this book, Nancy Marie Brown, makes a case for Gerbert as a note-worthy scholar and (to use an anachronistic term) a scientist.

Brown has built her own reputation as a popularizer of science. Her best known book before this one was "Mendel in the Kitchen," a discussion of genetically modified foods, which she co-authored with geneticist Nina Fedoroff.

Here she seems to have an apologetic intent. She wants to be sure we know that the 10th century Europeans did not believe in a flat earth, were not terrified of the arrival of the year 1000, didn't argue over angels dancing on the heads of pins, and were quite interested in the advance of science. Indeed, among the achievements of Gerbert she chronicles is this: he became curious about how organ pipes behave acoustically, so he built and tested models and devised an equation to match the results. In a word, he experimented.

But sometimes her apologetic designs get in the way of her story. She tells of us one debate between Gerbert and an ecclesiastical rival over whether physics should be taught in universities as a subdivision of mathematics, or as a separate field. She doesn't want us to think that this is a silly subject, since "Professors today hold the same debates: Twenty-first century academics are at odds over whether archeology is a type of history or should be taught as a science."

Well, yes, but it is rather silly when it happens in the 21st century too. Those debates are mostly about turf. The history department is larger if the archeologists are included therein than if it isn't, and the head of the history department of that university will surely want to include them. The rest of us should be uninterested in their turf wars except, perhaps, as a matter of ... well ... a specialized sort of anthropology.

As to Gerbert's debate with a fellow named Otric, it doesn't appear to have amounted to much pragmatically except amusement for some privileged observers. You can of course treat physics under the heading of math if you want (Gerbert's experiments with organ pipes were aimed at finding the right equation, after all). You can treat them as separate though of course closely related disciplines if you want. Putting too much emphasis on which is the 'right' categorization is inane.

Not as inane as belief in a flat earth, but still inane.

Still Thinking About the Enron Anniversary

2011-10-22T01:48:00.001-04:00

But for today I'll just offer you a link.

Kinder.

Oh, and the obvious pun: Will history be kind to Kinder?

Enron: Ten Years Ago

2011-10-21T02:16:00.003-04:00

The drama of the Enron scandal was playing out in the day-to-day headlines of a decade ago this month.

It was on October 16, 2001, in particular, that Enron issued a dramatic series of announcements. It had a 3d quarter loss of $618 million. It took a $1.2 billion hit against shareholder equity related to the unwinding of a partnership that its Chief Financial Officer, Andrew Fastow, had been running on the side (LJM2). And it acknowledged an after-tax charge against earnings of $544 million ... again, related to LJM2.

On October 17th, the SEC sent Enron a letter. Actually, three letters and three question marks: "WTF???"

On October 22, the existence of an SEC investigation became public knowledge and the price of shares of Enron fell 20 percent.

On October 24, the board finally fired Fastow, replacing him with Jeffrey McMahon, who himself had been deeply involved with many of the very Fastowian transactions that were doing in the company.

By October 29th it was obvious that Moodys was going to downgrade the company's credit status. Ken Lay talked on the phone on that day with President Bush's Commerce Secretary, Donald Evans. Nobody in the administration lifted a finger for Enron -- and I am nobody's idea of a Bushie, but I have to say this was to their credit.

Anyway, all of that provided excitement to the October of 2001. In this October we deal with different crises and the characters as they unfold have different names. Yet "the more things change...."

Worst Reasoning ... Ever

2011-10-20T05:15:00.010-04:00

The following has been circulating at Facebook.

"In the 1950s and 1960s when the top tax rate was 70 - 90%, we laid the interstate system, built the internet, put a man on the moon, defeated Communism, our education system was the envy of the world, our middle class was thriving, our economy unparalleled.

"You want that back?
"Raise taxes on the rich."

------------

That might just be the most lame argument I've ever encountered.

Begin at the beginning: were the rich actually paying 70% or more during that period, or were they availing themselves of various loopholes and paying a good deal less? My guess (subject to correction) would be that they probably weren't actually paying much more than they are now.
This matters because the general 'point' is that good things happened at time X, and Y was true through the time X, so Y must be the cause of the good things in X. That is either valid for EVERY pertinent Y, given the EXACT Y involved, or it is not valid at all.

Thus, as to taxes, every loophole that existed for the avoidance of taxes by the wealthy during the period in question must be scrupulously preserved or restored in order for us to get back to the wonderful postulated good old days. For the loopholes are all part of the Y, right?

And there are other candidate Ys that had nothing to do with the tax system. Those were the years of the Bretton Woods accords, after all, which lasted from 1944 until 1971. These accords created a gold standard with regard to international financing. So maybe it was the gold that was behind all those good things! (Indeed, personally I take this quite seriously, although I acknowledge that just daydreaming about good old days would not make up an argument for it.)

The 1950s and 1960s were also a period when neither the US nor the UN recognized the People's Republic of China. In both contexts, only the government in Taipai was China. So ... withdraw recognition from Beijing! and go back to spelling it Peking! You want those good things "back," right?

But ... look at the list of "good things" again. The US "defeated Communism" in the 1950s and 1960s? Assuming that the word "Communism" in that sentence refers to the bloc of nations led by the old Soviet Union: didn't its "defeat" come after the reduction of the highest marginal taxes? In the late '80s and early '90s?

What the US did in the 1950s and 1960s was "contain" Communism. By, for example, making a point of committing to the defense of Quemoy and Matsu, the forward posts of the regime in Taipai that we continued to recognize as the only legitimate China. So why should this lead us to the conclusion that we should replicate the tax system of the period without also replicating its diplomacy? Rescind the recognition of Beijing! (Or, recognize reality and don't do that -- but drop silly arguments.)

The US created the interstate system during the period. Yes: but should we pay no attention now to the possibility that that is one of the causes of subsequent troubles? After all, it made the rapid consumption of gasoline a lot more easy and a lot more tempting. That in time became a geostrategic imperative: we have to keep importing the crude oil that makes that possible in ever-increasing quantaties. In the good old days, the best way to get to California was to take route 66. It made for a nice TV show but unwieldy travel. You want those good old days back? Tear up the interstates!

Does that sound silly? Well, consider again where I got the idea for such an absurd conclusion!

Hosni Mubarak

2011-10-16T01:01:00.000-04:00

Thirty years ago this week, Hosni Mubarak became the president of Egypt. Specifically, he assumed the office on October 14, 1981, after the assassination of Anwar el Sadat.

Of course, Mubarak didn't quite make it this year to his 30th anniversary in office. He is on trial on charges of the murder of peaceful protestors during the "Arab spring."

Further, the new government of Egypt is looking into an accusation that Mubarak was complicit in Sadat's death. I don't know what to think about that accusation. It might be akin to the various horrible crimes that were attributed to Richard III during the Tudor era. The worse Richard III came to look, hump-backed and all, the better were the Tudors for having delivered England from such a misfigured tyrant.

Nobel Prize in Economics

2011-10-15T01:36:00.001-04:00

The Nobel Prize in Economics this year went to Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims "for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy."

A representative from "Nobel Media" spoke to each man soon after they learned of their award, and recorded the interview. I'll just quote a snippet of each here.

The rep said to Sargent, "It's quite a time to be chosen to be a Novel Laureate, with so much of the world's attention focused on the economy," and then asked, "Do you find it a daunting prospect to be the subject of so much media attention?"

Sargent replied: "Well, I ... sorry, I don't know what's involved in that. You know, we're just ... yeah, we're just bookish types that look at numbers and try to figure out what's going on. So, I don't know what to say to that!"

In the interview with Sims, the rep asked about the difference between the two new laureates and their approaches to getting at macroeconomic causality.

Sims said that Sargent's aproach "is to start with a model economy for the most part ... and then [he] tries to fit it to data and run his experients in it. I usually start with a statistical model of the data and then add economic assumptions sparingly until I can begin to get answers."

Carcium -- The Conflict Begins

2011-10-14T01:21:00.000-04:00

The above headline is the title of a new book by Donald Calvanese, of Agawam Massachusetts.

For those of you who enjoy fantasy -- this book is, as its title hints -- designed as the first volume of a projected trilogy.

From the publisher;'s press release:

"Carcium - The Conflict Begins” begins with the story about Nina, a young naive ruler, who was one of the last to fall into the darkness. She was put to the test of worthiness by the mystical elves and had failed. Her kingdom and its people were enslaved. Now, all of the kingdoms of Phygeria are on the brink of destruction and have succumbed to evil - except for Carcium. For years, a great king ruled the Kingdom of Carcium in the land of Phygeria. Brave and just, the king protected Carcium from the evils of the outside world and within the kingdom. But when the brave king falls, the days of peace in Carcium fall with him. The king’s young son, Prince Troy, assumes the throne and the evil that has threatened Carcium for so long moves ever closer to the kingdom’s walls. Prince Troy must face the test of the elves which many rulers in the past have failed. He must also find the mystical sword - the only weapon that can destroy Duras Carcer, a demon who draws his life force from overthrown rulers and fallen kingdoms. As a force – will Troy, Brutus and Nina have the strength to save the Kingdom of Carcium? Do they have the wisdom and abilities to restore Carcium to its former glory and overcome the evil ways of Duras Carcer?

A shout-out and congrats to Mr. Calvanese.

Dorothy Sayers, Conclusion

2011-10-13T02:52:00.001-04:00

Two weeks ago I quoted a passage from Dorothy Sayer's introduction to her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Click here to refresh your recollection. She listed some of the references drawn largely from British history of the late 19th and early 20th century that a British poet in the middle of the 20th century might use in creating an analog. Her point was that these references will become obscure over time, just as the various references of medival Italy now seem quite obscure to us.

The passage of time has proven her right in this. In last week's entries, though, I found something to say about eachof the allusions -- except for those below. Today we conclude our self-appointed task as annoator for Sayer's hypoithetical poem.

"the Officer in the Tower" -- Norman Baillie-Stewart (1909-1966), a Subaltern in the Seaforth Highlanders, who was court martialled in 1933 for selling military secrets to Germany. The two countries were not yet at war, so he was not in danger of execution for treason, but he did become the last British citizen ever imprisoned in the Tower of London, and earned the italicized nickname.

Peter the Painter -- the pseudonym of a Latvian Communist revolutionary, who was involved in street fighting in London (the "siege of Sydney Street") in 1910-11. His "real identity" is still a matter of some dispute, but it may well have been Yakov Peters (1886 - 1938).

Jenkins 'of the Ear', -- Robert Jenkins -- the birth and death dates are uncertain. He was captain of a commercial brig sailing the West Indies in 1731. His vessel was stopped and boarded by a Spanish ship, and his ear was severed. The incident became the professed cause of a war between England and Spain.

Dick Sheppard (1880 - 1937), the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral from 1929 until illness forced him to retire two years later. Sheppard was was of the outstanding clerical pacifists of the inter-war period.

Jack Sheppard (1702-1724), a thief was was repeatedly arrested by, and who repeatedly escaped from, the authorities in 18th century London, making him a Robin-Hood type figure in the eyes of some.

'the Widow at Windsor' -- A phrase popularized by Rudyard Kipling for Queen Victoria (1819-1901). It refers of course to the period of her rule after the death of Prince Albert in 1861.

The writer of this hypothetical poem also "holds strong views on" the following issues, on each of which I'll say a very few words:

Trade Unionism -- nowadays we would probably speak of "labor unions," and "collective bargaining." The phrase "trade unions" with or without an "ism" seems antique.

the constitution of the UNO -- of course the United Nations' constitution was and continues to be a target of objection both by nationalists who believe it constrains the sovereignty of member nations and by full-blooded internationalists who complain that it doesn't.

the 'theology of crisis' -- a phrase associated especially with Karl Barth (1886-1968), emphasizing the utter Otherness of God, and thus His unknowability. Reliance on scripture doesn't remove this unknowability, for: "The Bible is God's Word so far as God lets it be His Word," Barth wrote.

Freudian psychology -- Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) hardly needs comment from me, except to say that his influence was at something of a peak in the post-war British context of Sayers' hypothetical poet.

Einsteinian astronomy -- refers of course to Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) and the profound changes he introduced into how we think about Space, Time, Matter, and Energy.

and the art of Mr. Jacob Epstein (1880 - 1959), an influential sculptor, whose art includes for example "St. Michael's Victory Over the Devil," a work affixed to the wall of Coventry Cathedral.

A Guide to Dorothy Sayers IV

2011-10-09T01:13:00.001-04:00

I've been conducting a review of the allusions that Dorothy Sayer introduced in her plan for a hypothetical poem. These are references drawn largely, though not entirely, from British history of the late 19th and early 20th century. I'm not going to finish this up this week, but let's see how far we can get.

the Tolpuddle Martyrs, a group of farm workers who were convicted in 1834 for swearing an oath of solidarity to one another. The prosecution was part of the broader anti-union backlash of the day, and the convicts were transported to Australia.

Brown and Kennedy, Both of these names are of course quite common, and it isn't obvious who Sayers meant. My first suspicion was an American one -- she was linking the two men who separately defeated Richard Nixon's political aspirations in the early 1960s! But Says seems to have completed this introduction by 1949. My present suspicion, since this item comes right after the Tolpuddle Martyrs, is that the reference is to James Brown (1862-1939), the head of the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers from 1917 to1936. Perhaps Sayers is coupling Brown with an American counterpart, Thomas Kennedy (1887- 1963), an important figure in the United Mine Workers (in the US) from at least 1925 until his death. If anybody has a better idea for what this pairing means in this context, please let me know.

the Dean of St Patrick's, this is an allusion to Anglo-Irish novelist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). The St Patrick's in question is the Cathedral in Dublin.

the Dean of St Paul's, John Donne (1572 - 1631), the paradigmatic figure of what is nowadays called "metaphysical poetry." The author of the famous Meditation XVII, "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

Dean Farrar, Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903), an advocate of "Christian universalism," the idea that all human souls will in the fullness of time be reconciled with God -- i.e. that there is no everlasting damnation of the sort Dante vividly imagined.

Fred Archer, Frederic Archer (1838-1901) An organist and composer whose career began in England but continued after 1880 in the United States, where he became conductor of the Orotorio Society in Boston, Mass.

Mrs Dyer, Louise Berta Mosson Hanson-Dyer (1884 - 1962) -- Sayers helpfully groups two of her musical referents together here. Mrs Dyer was an Australian born woman, who founded a music publishing operation, Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, in 1932.

Lord George Sanger (1825-1911), an English analog to P.T. Barnum. Sanger ran a variety of shows and circuses and founded an association to lobby for the intrerests of such businesses, the Van Dwellers Protection Association.

Lord George Gordon, (1751-1793), a Scottish nobleman who converted to Judaism in 1787, at 36 years of age. Charles Dickens makes a favorable allusion to George Gordon in the novel Barnaby Rudge.

General Gordon, Major-General Charles George Gordon (1833-1885), best known for his determined defense of the Imperial position at Khartoum, in the face of the Mahdi rebellion, (Islamism, one might say) and his death in that defense in January 1885.

Ouida, The pen name of the novelist Maria Louise Ramé (1839-1908). Her works, considered racy at the time, were quite successful, but she did not manager her money wisely and died in poverty. Jack London cited her as an important influence on his own writing.

William Joyce, (1906-1946), known as Lord Haw-Haw, he was born in New York, but his family returned to his parents' home country, Ireland, while he was a child. They were Unionists in the Irish context, and they moved to England soon after Ireland received its independence. Joyce would found the British Union of Fascists and would broadcast radio propaganda for Hitler during the war. Hence his execution for treason in January 1946.

James Joyce, (1882-1941), one of the defining figures of literary modernism, perhaps best known fo Ulysses (1922).

A Guide to Dorothy Sayers III

2011-10-08T01:24:00.004-04:00

I've been conducting a review of the allusions that Dorothy Sayer introduced in her plan for a hypothetical poem. These are references drawn largely, though not entirely, from British history of the late 19th and early 20th century. Let us continue:

the Lady with the Lamp, this is clearly a reference to Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), the founder of nursing as a profession.

the Lady-with-the-Lampshade-made-of-Human-Skin, The story arose out of Buchenwald originally, that the medical personnel were making human souvenirs for themselves and taking them home, and that among these were lampshades made out of human skin. The specifics can't be substantiated, but the "lampshade" story made it into a documentary re: Buchenwald made by director Billy Wilder. Presumably the "lady" Sayers has in mind here was a hausfrau of one of those medical death-camp types.

Titus Oates (1649-1705) -- an Anglican priest who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1677, and thereafter told various tales about a supposed "popish plot" to assassinate King Charles II to which he had become privy. His accusations led to at least 15 executions. Eventually the government decided that Oates had been a perjurer, that the whole plot had been his invention, and he was imprisoned.

Captain Oates (1880 - 1912) -- An antarctic explorer. He decided during a disastrous expedition that there weren't enough supplies for the group of four -- and he sacrified himself -- walking out of the tent into a blizzard and certain death.

Quisling -- a reference to Vidkun Quisling (1887-1945) a Norwegian politican who assisted Nazi Germany in the take-over of his country, and who was executed by firing squad soon after the fall of the collaborationist regime.

the Owner of 'Hermit', -- Hermit, a race horse, won the 1867 Epsom Derby, a race held in a snowstorm. His owner was Henry Chaplin (1840 - 1923), a Tory politician known for his advocacy of protectionist trade policies regarding agriculture.

the French Bluebeard -- Henri Désiré Landru (1869-1922), a serial killer convicted of and executed for the murder of ten women between 1915 and 1919.

Bacon -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626) -- English lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, known for his description of induction, which is still sometimes called the "Baconian method."

Roger Bacon (1214-1294) -- Franciscan friar, author of a work on the place of philosophy within theology, which he sent to Pope Clement in 1265. This Opus Majus also includes a notable discussion of the science of optics.

Roger Fry (1866 - 1934), an art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury group, stressed the formal properties of works of art at the expense of the "associated ideas."

the Claimant -- this may be a reference to Lambert Simnel (c. 1477 - c. 1525) who as the dust was finally setling after the War of Roses claimed to be the Earl of Warwick, a claim that threatened to ignite the war again.

the Bishop of Zanzibar, Frank Weston (1871 - 1924) the Anglican Bishop of Zanzibar (1908 - 1924) became involved in an intense dispute over whether Anglican clerics should administer sacraments to members of non-conforming Christian congregations such as Methodists, Presbyterians, etc. Weston accused of heresy those who did want to admit the non-conformists.

Clarence Hatry, (1888-1965) a stock speculator who, to support a failing position in 1929, forged a series of municipal bonds. He was sentenced to 14 years in jail in 1930.

I hope to finish this up tomorrow.

A Guide to Dorothy Sayers II

2011-10-07T03:39:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I began a review of the allusions that Dorothy Sayer introduced in her plan for a hypothetical poem. These are references drawn largely from British history of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Her point was that these references will become obscure over time, just as the various references of medival Italy now seem quite obscure to us.

The passage of time has proven her right in this. I've decided to see if I can say something about every one of her references, just as if these were for the annotations of a real poem.

Continuing then:

Spencer – presumably Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the systematic philosopher who coined the expression “survival of the fittest,” and whose work inspired others to coin the expression “Social Darwinism.”

Spenser – probably Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) a Tudor-era poet, and an advocate of a scorched-earth policy toward the Irish.

Lord Castlereagh – (1769 – 1822), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1812 until his suicide in 1822. As one might expect, he acquired a lot of enemies during that period. The poet Shelley wrote, in “The Masque of Anarchy”: “I met Murder on the way/ He had a face like Castlereagh….”

Lord Castlerosse – Probably refers to the courtesy title of Valentine Browne (1891 – 1943) the first member of the British aristocracy ever to write a newspaper gossip column.

Lawrence [of Arabia] -- T.E. Lawrence (1888 – 1935), British officer who served as liaison to anti-Ottoman Arab forces, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany and Austrio-Hungary.

[D.H.] Lawrence – (1885 – 1930) – novelist and poet. No less an authority than E.M. Forster called this Lawrence “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”

“Butcher” Heydrich (1904-1942)—head of Hitler’s Gestapo early on in the Second World War, killed by Czechoslovak resistance fighters in May 1942.

W.G. Grace (1848 – 1915), a physician and cricketer. A legend in the world of cricket, he is said to have made more money there than in the practice of medicine, an astonishing fact in those innocent pre-TV years.

Grace Darling (1815-1842), the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, she earned renown for her efforts at saving 13 of the victims of the wreck of the SS Forfarshire in 1838. This was a paddle-wheel driven steamship..

Captain of the Jarvis Bay – Sayers seems to have gotten the spelling of the ship’s name wrong, but Fogarty Fegen (1891-1940) was the captain of an armed merchantman Jervis Bay, sunk by a German battleship in 1940. A memorable poem was made out of the incident, “The Jervis Bay Goes Down.”

The Sisters of Haworth -- an allusive phrase for the Bronte sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Ann, who lived at Haworth parsonage.

The Woodcutter of Hawarden – William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) – Hawarden was Gladstone’s estate – he was prime minister four separate times, essentially alternating with Benjamin Disraeli through the second half of the 19^th century.

The Ladies of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler (1739 – 1829) and Miss Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1832) founders of a literary circle in Wales in the late 18^th century.

A Guide to Dorothy Sayers I

2011-10-06T01:05:00.001-04:00

You may remember that last week I quoted a passage from Dorothy Sayer's introduction to her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Click here to refresh your recollection. She listed some of the references drawn largely from British history of the late 19th and early 20th century that a British poet in the middle of the 20th century might use in creating an analog. Her point was that these references will become obscure over time, just as the various references of medival Italy now seem quite obscure to us.

The passage of time has proven her right in this. I've decided to see if I can say something about every one of her references, just as if these were for the annotations of a real poet.

Let's begin:

Chamberlain (him of the orchid) – Joseph Chamberlain (1836 – 1914), who wore an orchid as a personal signature, was a prominent political figure of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and though never prime minister his name was associated with a hawkish policy against the Boers in South Africa. He was also the father of the next figure on our list.

Chamberlain (him of the umbrella) – Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940, prime minister 1937-1940) -- widely reviled in the post war years including the period in which Sayers was writing – he has found some scholarly defenders since. He often carried an umbrella in public, was always portrayed with one in cartoons, and is remembered for his part in the Munich Accords, conceding Germany’s sovereignty over the Sudetenland in what had been Czechoslovakia.

[Stewart Houston] Chamberlain (1855-1927), a British-born author of books on race, he became a German citizen in 1916 and produced anti-Brit propaganda for the remainder of that war. It doesn’t appear that there was any relation to the above Chamberlains.

“Brides-in-the-Bath” Smith – George Joseph Smith (1872 – 1915), a serial killer convicted in the Old Bailey in 1915 of drowning each of his three wives.

“Galloper” Smith – F.E. Smith, who became known as “Galloper” when that term was used in much the way we use the term “gofer.” A Galloper was someone who did errands for someone more famous. F.E. Smith was an associate/galloper of Sir Edward Carson in support of giving Ireland Home Rule. Later, he became Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain.

Horatio Bottomsley (1860-1933) – the publisher of a patriotic journal of opinion, John Bull, during the first world war. Argued for the confiscation of the property of German nationals living in Britain, and a requirement that they be required to wear distinctive clothing. I hope Dorothy Sayers was thinking of him as a plausible occupant of one of the rings of hell.

Horatio Lord Nelson (1758-1805) this one requires no explanation. Victor at Trafalgar.

Fox [Charles or George] . George Fox (1624-1691) was the founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers).

Charles Fox (1749-1806) was the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs for about three months in 1782, as the Brits sought to cut their losses in America. That was just an incident within a long parliamentary career, in which he was perhaps the most prominent advocate of the abolition of slavery within the Empire.

Man who picked up the bomb in Jermyn Street – this apparently refers to Al Bowlly (1898-1941), a jazz crooner who made a thousand recordings in the late 1920s and through the 1930s, in both the UK and US, and whose life was brought to an end during the Blitz in London in the manner to which this phrase makes reference.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) this one doesn’t yet require explanation.

Oscar Slater (1872 – 1948), the victim of a once-notorious case of mistaken identity in the murder of Marion Gilchrist in 1908. The case has often been cited as showing the imperfect nature of witness identifications/line-ups etc. The identification evidence in this case was the result of coaching of the witnesses and more subtle means of slanting their decision.

Oscar Browning (1837-1923), a figure of some repute at Cambridge University in the late 19^th century. Mentioned quite unfavorably by Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own” in connection with his prejudice against the education of women.

That's a good start. More tomorrow.

Freud's Wizard

2011-10-02T02:44:00.002-04:00

I recently received, unbidden, a catalog from Daedalus Books. A couple of the books they are selling (both described on p. 23, in their "Self & Society" section) look at the origins of psychoanalysis. One is called A DREAM OF UNDYING FAME.

Here's the ad copy for that one: "In 1877, a young Sigmund Freud met an established physician named Josef Breuer and they began a collaboration that would lead to the publication of the classic work Studies on Hysteria. Freud subsequently minimized Breuer's contributions, betraying his former mentor and benefactor. Psychologist Louis Breger reveals the story behind the creation of Studies as well as the case of Anna O., which helped contribute to Freud's definition of 'neurosis,' showing how Freud's own self-mythologizing and history not only affected everything he did in life, but also helped shape his emerging beliefs about psychoanalysis."

The second of these books is called FREUD's WIZARD. Here is the ad copy.

"The saturation of the English-speaking world with psychoanalytical concepts was instigated by one British analyst, Ernest Jones. As Freud's disciple, collague, and biographer -- and the man who literally rescued Freud and his cabal from the Nazis in 1938 -- Jones led the international psychoanalytic movement, shifting its vortex from Vienna to London and spreading its influence to Toronto, New York, and Boston. Brenda Maddox's biography reveals a brilliant and flawed analyst who both venerated and challenged his mentor, and who well understood and used his own abilities to attract women in a string of liaisons."

Both books, as you can see, focus on the mentor-protege relationship, and together they give us Freud at each side of it.

LSE to Acquire LCH.Clearnet

2011-10-01T03:26:00.015-04:00

The London Stock Exchange has won a bidding war with Markit, a data firm, over control of LCH.Clearnet, a clearinghouse.

A clearinghouse [or "clearing house" -- both forms are in common use] is the entity within an exchange mediated transaction that ensures each party against the default of the other. Joe buys asset X through an exchange, while Jane sells an equal quantity of asset X through that exchange. There is always a risk that the deal will not "settle," that (to put it crudely) Joe's check will bounce.

But it doesn't matter to Jane if Joe's check bounces. She'll never know, She has sold asset X through the exchange, and the exchange, through its contract with the clearinghouse, will see to it that she is paid the agreed-upon amount.

The clearing house requires that market participants make a sort of deposit, known as a performance bond or margin. A margin amount might be, say, 5 percent of a contract's underlying value. By requiring margins, or contractually requiring that the exchange require margins, the clearing house ensures that only financially solvent parties participate in the exchange activities, thus limiting its own risk.

This is a critical difference between exchanges on the one hand and over-the-counter markets on the other. OTC markets have no central clearing. If you enter such a market, you take upon yourself the "counter-party risk" that you'll make a deal that won't settle.

Anyway, there has been a good deal of debate over the years as to whether clearing operations should be internal to an exchange, or whether they should be independent entities, at arm's length from the exchange. Over time, though, independent clearinghouses have been captured by one or the other of the great exchanges, or at least they now have the same holding corporations that one or more of the exchanges they service has. Thus, it is a matter of some significance, it is a landmark, that a rare still-independent clearinghouse has now fallen captive.

Cheers, then, to LCH, and its now-vanishing days as an independent body.

The Sea, The Sea

2011-09-30T03:13:00.003-04:00

I've begun reading "The Sea, The Sea," by Iris Murdoch.

Murdoch has been known to me chiefly as the author of works on philosophy, generally devoted to the rejuvenation of Platonism. They are intelligently written, despite their failure to cause any veering in my own empirical/pragmatic course.

But "The Sea. The Sea" is a novel, written in the form of a journal kept by one Charles Arrowby, apparently a successful theatrical producer who has retired to a village by the sea.

The title, "The Sea, The Sea," was presumably inspired by the ending of Anabasis, Xenophon's book on the adventure of 10,000 Greeks who had to escape from behind enemy lines in Persia. They knew they were safe when they reached the sea -- they were a seafaring people and could get home from there. Hence that glad shout. In ancient Greek, that's Thalatta! Thalatta!

So I suppose the title is meant to convey the idea that Arrowby sees his own retirement as a sort of haven or sanctuary after a rough time inland, amongst the warring theatrical tribes.

There is also a platonism connection in the title, although I'll leave that be for now.

Anyway, early on in this novel, Arrowby is describing his new home for us, and the nearby village of Narrowdean.

"The old form of the name was Nerodene, and a handsome milestone upon the coast road retains this selling." That's a nice detail. Folk etymology has changed many words. People here a name, infer that it must mean something that sounds similar, and soon that similar-sounding word takes over the first one. That's how a large knife of the sort once known as a coutelas became a cutlass. It cuts after all, so that must be what was meant!

Soon, our protagonist is describing the Narrowdean cemetary. "One stone in particular attracts me. It bears a beautiful 'foul anchor' and the simple inscription: Dummy 1879 - 1918. This puzzled me until I realized that 'Dummy' must have been a deaf and dumb sailor who never managed to achieve any other identity."

That is the sort of insignia known as a "foul anchor." It would certainly tell us of Dummy's occupation. I don't know whether that gravestone will play any part in the rest of the story, but it is at least a fine observation, part of the stage setting.

Dorothy Sayers

2011-09-29T00:28:00.010-04:00

Dorothy Sayers is well-known for several accomplishments, among them a distinctive translation of the first two canticles of The Divine Comedy (Inferno and Purgatorio) into English. She did not, alas, live long enough to complete her translation, but Barbara Reynolds carried on, completing work on the Paradiso, and their joint effort become the Penguin Classics' Dante.

In her introduction to Inferno, Sayers addresses the question of why contemporary (by which she meant mid 20th century) readers needed as much apparatus as she had attached -- Notes, Commentaries, Glossary, Appendices. She answered with this example:

"Let us suppose that an Englishman were to write a contemporary Divine Comedy on Dante's model, and that in it, mixed up with a number of scriptural and mythological characters, we were to find, assigned to various circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise... the following assortment of people -- some referred to by their full names, some by Christian name or surname alone, and some indicated only by a witty or allusive phrase: Chamberlain ("him of the orchid"), Chamberlain ("him of the umbrella", [Stewart Houston] Chamerlain, "Brides-in-the-Bath" Smith, "Galloper" Smith, Horatio Bottomsley, Horatio [Lord Nelson], Fox [Charles or George to be inferred from the context], the Man who picked up the Bomb in Jermyn Street, Oscar Wilde, Oscar Slater, Oscar Browning, Spencer, Spenser, Lord Castlereagh, Lord Castlerosse, Lawrence [of Arabia], [D.H.] Lawrence, "Butcher" Heydrich, W.G. Grace, Grace Darling, the Captain of the Jarvis Bay, the Sisters of Haworth, the Woodcutter of Hawarden, the Ladies of Llangollen, the Lady with the Lamp, the Lady-with-the-Lampshade-made-of-Human-Skin, Titus Oakes, Captain Oates, Quisling, the Owner of 'Hermit', the French Bluebeard, Bacon, Roger Bacon, Roger Fry, the Claimant, the Bishop of Zanzibar, Clarence Hatry, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Brown and Kennedy, the Dean of St Patrick's, the Dean of St Paul's, Dean Farrar, Fred Archer, Mrs Dyer, Lord George Sanger, Lord George Gordon, General Gordon, Ouida, William Joyce, James Joyce, "the Officer in the Tower", Peter the Painter, Jenkins 'of the Ear', Dick Sheppard, Jack Sheppard, and 'the Widow at Windsor'. Let us further suppose the writer holds strong views on Trade Unionism, the constitution of the UNO, the 'theology of crisis', Freudian psychology, Einsteinian astronomy, and the art of Mr Jacob Epstein. Let us then suppose that the book is to be read, six hundred years hence, by an intelligeng Portuguese with no particular knowledge of English social history. Would he not require a few notes...?"

You'll see that I used ellipses to shorten the explanatory mater before and after the list, but I used no ellipses in the list of allusions itself, because I wanted you to get the full over-the-top nature of the example.

I suspect I am intelligent by most metrics for such things. I am also a raving Anglophile, whose knowledge of "English social history" is probably superior to that of most early 21st century Americans. I first read the above passage in the 1970s, a lot closer to the date of its construction than our hypothetical Portuguese reader would be. And yet ... and yet ... I would definitely need notes to understand that hypothetical book. So she made her poiint, but she also posed me a challenge.

I get the significance of the initials "UNO," even though the "O" has been dropped off over time. I get the "theology of crisis," i.e. the theology of Karl Barth and others of that ilk. I recognize the names of the two Fox'.

But some of these allusions are confusing, and it isn't even very clear now, with the creation of this wonderful internet thing, how one would go about searching. What did Sayers have in mind by "the Claimant"? And "Peter the Painter"? Surely she isn't referring to the Ian Dury song, wouldn't that have required psychic powers on Sayers' part?

Soap Suds Again

2011-09-25T03:01:00.001-04:00

I wrote a blog entry here some time ago about the "metaphysics of soap suds."

For those of you who don't want to follow links around, here is the story in brief. A fellow asked a question in Yahoo!Answers about whether some famous philosopher had copmpared huiman thoughts to soap bubles in the wash basin of nothingness.

I tried to help him, and found a similar quote, but it was actually describing certain intellectual hypotheses as soap bubbles, it wasn't speaking generally of human life.

More recent, I have heard, via my facebook page, from Dave Natas, who informed me that he is the guy who originally asked about that quote, and that now he has found his answer.

He had been thinking about a quote in a book by Henry Thomas, and Thomas was describing not his own views, but his understanding of the views of David Hume.

"Subtract all the forms and colours of our so called 'certain' beliefs, and what remains? A heap of empty, random sensations whirling around endlessly like unsubstantial soap bubbles in the washbowl of nothingness."

A birthday

2011-09-24T02:39:00.001-04:00

Today, September 24, was the birthday -- in 1896 -- of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In his memory then, I'll simply reproduce here the opening of The Great Gatsby.

-----------------

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Another Rogue Trader

2011-09-23T01:14:00.002-04:00

In the tradition of Jerome Kerviel, Nick Leeson, and Yasuo Hamanaka, here comes the latest rogue trader to force us to contemplate what the heck the "risk managers" at large banks actually do for a living: world, meet Kweku Adoboli. Mr Adoboli, meet world. Oh, you two are already acquainted?

Let me backtrack and explain those other names, then. Nick Leeson was the Singapore-based derivatives broker whose trading losses of $1.4 billion caused the demise of a centuries-old bank, Barings, in 1995. Leeson is my personal favorite member of the group, for reasons I won't try to explain.

Hamanaka was a Japanese copper trader who at one time controlled 5% of the world's copper supply. In June 1996, though, Sumitomo Corporation had to admit to a loss of $1.8 billion on Hamanaka's trades. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, served seven.

Jerome Kerviel, the biggest loser of the bunch, in the employ of giant French bank Société Générale, lost 4.9 billion euros, or roughly $7 billion in what Americans call money, in January 2008. It was an early sign that this was going to be a very rough year.

Now we come back to Kweku Adoboli. He lost the equivalent of $2.3 billion dollars working for UBS in their London office. But he makes an odd addition to this already-odd-enough pantheon. First, he was an ETF specialist. ETFs are boring. They're supposed to be boring, that is their charm.

Second, he seems to be the first rogue trader of the "social media" era. He kept a Facebook page, and as things turned against him, at a moment when he must have understood his UBS superiors were closing in, he updated his FB status to read, "I need a miracle."

Third, his life story is, up until now, the stuff of inspirational movies. To read of his family and his life and only then to consider his crimes is like -- well, it's a little like watching :"The Miracle Worker" in a special edition with a new tacked-on ending where Anne Sullivan embezzles money from the Keller family.

Fourth, though, it's good to see that the London law firm of Kingsley Napley is still with us. They represented Nick Leeson. He went to the recognized experts in rogue trader defense for counsel.

Emmy, Alec, and Rupert

2011-09-22T01:54:00.000-04:00

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave out its Emmy awards last weekend. I don't especially care, what is interesting is that the show aired on Fox (the entertainment-oriented Fox network, not Fox News) and that this helped lead to a minor dust-up over a joke.

If you, dear reader, share my interest, you can follow this link. I'm afraid I have no value to add today.

http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/09/18/alec-baldwin-emmys-fox-joke/

That Jamesian Expression

2011-09-18T04:11:00.001-04:00

I often quote William James as saying “to think is the only moral act.” I’d like to try to explain what it meant to James, and abstract for now from the additional question of the resonance it has for me. The fuller context is: “to sustain a representation, to think, in short, is the only moral act, for the impulsive and the obstructed, for sane and lunatics alike.”

What does it mean to sustain a representation? It means to remain attentive to some specific fact or possibility, to refuse to allow myself to be diverted therefrom. If I have a boring project due at work, I must nonetheless continue to focus on it in order to get it done -- or, I could just let my attention drift and wind up writing on a blog.

Of course that is my example, not one of his.

This matter of sustaining representation (the key form of thought in this sentence, and in James' psychology of the will generally) plays into the dichotomy, also present in the above quotation, between the "impulsive" and the "obstructed." The impulsive fellow acts too quickly, plucking the tempting apple without wondering whose tree this is and what might be the consequences. There are various representations that he might be well advised to keep in his mind -- of arrest for trespassing, of an angry orchard-owner chasing him with a shotgun, of the extra pounds he may add to his waist by such impulsive eating. The obstructed fellow on the other hand can only see the reasons that block action, and cannot keep his attention on those that require it.

Thus, to think, by which we mean here to focus one's attention, to choose among the consequences of an act the key ones and to keep one's focus there, is the moral act. "The whole drama is a mental drama."

The apple orchard example is mine, too. Let's consider a couple of James at last. One involves an exhausted sailor on a ship, working the pumps to get the water safely off the ship and keep her afloat. The physiology of exhaustion weighs down upon the sailor and obstructs him in his work. What keeps him going? Thought! -- alertness, enforced perhaps by the image of the “hungry sea engulfing him.” Thus, thought overcomes the obstruction in his activity.

Another of James’ examples here is of a man or woman lying in bed. Perhaps it is a freezing morning, and the comfort of one’s position under the covers, combined with the thought of the aggravation that will be involved in getting up, gathering wood (this the late 19^th century) starting the fire, etc. – all this keeps us in bed. Until perhaps a “fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs,” you stop thinking of the warmth of the blanket etc. and your mind turns instead to something important that must be done or is expected that day. At some “lucky instant” the idea of getting up and getting on with the day will “awaken no contradictory or paralyzing suggesting,” and will produce automatically the “appropriate motor effects.”

In the case of the alertness of the sailor, and the arising of the lazy-bones, we see the connection between thought and morality. Thought is that which makes us moral agents at all, both when through focused attention we stick to a task and when through a different sort of focus we change the course of our (in)activity.

"The idea to be consented to must be kept from flickering and going out."

Dividends and Stock Prices

2011-09-17T09:00:00.001-04:00

I've been writing about finance on a regular basis since 2000, yet it took me until this week to get clear in my own mind the significance of the questions: do stock prices fall in value in response to a forthcoming dividend payment? and its related question: if so, why? There is a lot of material about which I am still very naive, I concede.

If I had been asked, I might have remembered some long-distant lesson about two guys whose names each begin with the letter "M," and the notion that dividend policy, in an efficient market, is neutral as to the value of a stock. So I would have denied that any move at all could be predicted with any degree of confidence.

That may still be the "right answer," but I now believe I understand that there is a controversy here, and why. Figuring it out involved wrestling with vocabulary and chronology. My understanding is that the usual process is this: a company will say that it will pay dividends this quarter, and it will set a "record date" in the near future, and a "payment date" about a week after that. The payments will go out to everyone who owns the company's stock -- who is a "holder of record," as of the record date. Hence the term.

But to make things more complicated, two days before the record date comes what is called the ex-dividend date. This exists because it can take a couple of days for a stock transaction to settle: for the necessary paperwork to get done between the time somebody shouts "sold" on a trading floor on your behalf and the time you are in deed a owner of record. Thus, before the ex-dividend date the stock was trading "with the dividend," -- part of what you were purchasing in buying it was the expectationof that dividend. On and after that date, the stock is trading "ex" the dividend.

Intuitively, then, one would expect stocks to increase in value at the time of the announcement and drop in value again on the ex-dividend date. As of the announcement, the stock carries with it the promise of a near-immediate cash rebate, whereas after the ex-dividend day, the stock no longer carries the expectation of a cash payment that it had carried the day before. Why, then, wouldn't it be worth a bit more after the one development and a but less after the other?

But the money doesn't come out of nowhere. The market at the time of the announcement understands that by these cash payments the company will be depriving itself of that amount of cash, and losing the opportunity to re-invest it in something productive. Further (and this was the key to the Miller-Modigliani argument to which I alluded above) the market is indifferent between an increase in the value of the stock by one dollar on the one hand and the pay-off of $1 as a dividend on the other. So these announcements don't seem to produce any increase in value.

There is an arbitrage argument for the irrelevance of the ex-dividend date, too. After the declaration date, everyone in the market knows when the dividend will be paid, and when the ex-dividend date arrives. If this situation were sufficient to create a price drop, then a lot of speculators would rush in a short sell the stock in the days leading up to the ex-dividend day, betting on that price drop. Their short sales would cause the price to fall earlier than that date, perhaps as soon as the day after the announcement. The date itself, then, would be an irrelevance.

The situation is complicated by the issue of taxation. Dividends are taxed more than are capital gains, a fact that may make some investors and traders less willing to buy a stock that has announced a dividend in that run-up to the ex-dividend day than they would otherwise be, and might thus reduce the extent of the drop, if any, on that day.

Theories notwithstanding, there is evidence that there is a decline ceteris paribus on or around the ex-dividend date.

Is the decline equal to the full value of the dividend to be paid, perhaps with some modification for tax considerations? That is another question, and not one I yet want to try to tackle.

Hill Street Blues

2011-09-16T01:01:00.001-04:00

Thirty years ago this week, the rookie television drama Hill Street Blues won eight Emmy awards. This was at the time a debut-season record, although West Wing has since topped it.
HSB was great television. It was respectful of policemen and -women, yet it was not worshipful in the manner of Dragnet, it treated them all as fallible and foible-filled human beings.
In some respects it was analogous to Barney Miller, although with the humor/drama balance shifted toward the latter.
The visual style was very different from Barney Miller, though. It was quasi-documentary long before that had become a cliche -- hand-held cameras and unexpected points-of-view, with crucial bits of dialog spoken outside the visual frame. It was also crowded. People everywhere. That was addictive -- your mind, watching, became accustomed to making some sense out of this surface chaos.

There's a website put together by a British fan, here.

From Gerard Manley Hopkins

2011-09-15T01:35:00.000-04:00

Inspired by fellow blogger cicerionianus, I have been thinking lately about Gerard Manley Hopkins.

My entry today, then, is simply the poemn to which Ciceronianus' blog entry alludes, take from it as you list:

--------------------------------------------------------------

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-----------------

I love that unexpected ending. The "ah!" makes it work.

10th anniversary thoughts

2011-09-11T02:42:00.011-04:00

Seeing Patterns That Aren't There: A Lesson from 9/11

The hours just after the attacks on New York and Washington saw an impressive gearing-up of the machinery of collective delusion. I don’t mean to discuss the “Truthers,” – they came later — though I frankly hope to do them some harm by indirection in what follows. The delusions that sprouted first, though, were those of people who simply sought some meaning in the rubble, and who found it in the (imaginary) quatrains of Nostradamus, or for that matter in the wingdings font.

Indeed, one of my own memories from that awful day was that soon after hearing the news I received an email telling me that the call letters of one of the hijacked planes was Q33 NY. My correspondent attached great significance to this, saying that I should type Q33 NY in the “wingdings” font and see what resulted. He didn’t want to leave it up to me, though. He told me what I’d see: a picture of an airplane, two scissors, a death’s head, and finally the Star of David.

Q## NY

Whoa (or, in Wingdings, Whoa).

I was far from the only recipient. Almost immediately the wingdings code “went viral” (did we have that expression yet in September 2001?).

That must have seemed to many recipients like a bizarre summary of what had happened, anti-Zionists dealing death by using scissors — presumably itself a wingding substitute for box cutters — to take over airplanes. Or maybe the cosmos was trying to tell us through the presence of the six-pointed star in the form of the letter “Y” that the whole thing was a Zionist plot.

Ah, the mind staggers.

But after it staggers it has a duty to recover equilibrium. To think, as William James wrote, “is the only moral act.” First, wingding doesn’t use scissors for the number “3”. That scary pictograph only comes about if you hold down the “shift” button while typing the “33”. And you’d only do that if you thought the airplane was a Q## NY! If you use wingding for “Q33 NY” you get two rectangles where the scissors had been. They aren’t as scary as scissors. “Oooo, but they could stand for skyscrapers!”

you say. Yes, I suppose, though they look more like filing cabinets, or pieces of lined notepaper, or rectangular plots of farmland. And if you type in “Q33 NY” using Webding font, you’ll get a tree, two arrowheads, an eye and a heart. Riddle me the significance of that!

The only reasonable supposition here is that somebody surveyed the wackier fonts to see what combination of letters and numbers would create the scariest and most 9/11 specific ‘code,’ then wrote an email asserting that particular combination to have been the number of one of the airplanes. It wasn’t. Q33 NY is and was without aeronautical significance.

So … why do I bring it up? Because the people who circulated this meme wern’t themselves weirdos or professional conspiracy theorists. They were normal people, sometimes quite intelligent, who along with the rest of us had been smacked on the side of the head in a way defying settled categories and expectations. The mind can do funny things at such a moment, as it is stretching to include the new horrific datumn as part of its view of the world. The mind can even swallow, if only briefly, the notion that wingnuts (sorry, wingdings) are trying to tell it something.

This is one of the lessons we might take from 9/11, now that we have the perspective of a decade. The mind is a pattern-making machine. Yet sometimes it makes patterns that are arbitrary and dysfunctional. We make our own traps, and sometimes the results are a good deal more serious than a little time wasted playing with fonts and sending or deleting a lot of silly emails.

Sometimes you can have it all

2011-09-10T03:16:00.000-04:00

Today's having-it-all exhibit: Alexander Borodin.

Borodin was both a chemist and a muician, two fields that would seem to demand total concentration for excellence, yet he refused to choose between them.

The leading chemist of Czarist Russia, Nikolai Zinin, an early mentor of Borodin, is supposed to have told him: "I have placed all my hopes in you to be my successor one day. You waste too much time thinking about music. A man cannot serve two masters."

See the book "The Imperial Laboratory" by Galina Kichigina for more on their relationship, and for late-Czarist chemistry in general.

Borodin served both masters pretty well. As a scientist he became one of the co-discoverers of what are called "aldol reactions." I'm told (I am hardly qualified to judge such poiints) that aldol reactions are foundational to organic chemstry. As a musician, he attracted the favorable attention of such peers as Franz Liszt, Alexander Glazunov, and Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov.

Borodin composed durable chamber music, most famously his String Quartet 2 in D major, composed in 1881, featured more than seventy years later in a Broadway musical, and later in a Hollywood movie, Kismet.

So, yes: you can have it all. Ain't life grand?

Leon Gettler

2011-09-09T00:15:00.002-04:00

A word of praise today for one of my facebook friends, Leon Gettler.

Gettler, BTW, is a freelance writer who lines in Melbourne, Australia. Gettler's facebook profile includes the following quotation from Winston Churchill:

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public."

I've forgotten why I initially linked with Gettler, but we are both facebook friends with Sam Antar, and that is a story in itself. (For another day.)

Anyway, I'm writing this because of one bit of Gettlerian phrase-making that I particularly admired,. He wrote recently on FB of a conversation he had had with a management consultant who sells "benchmarking and best practice." But ... this was Gettler's point ... you don't help anyone achieve excellence that way. Steve Jobs didn't become Steve Jobs by learning to imitate Steve Jobs.

All you are doing, Gettler reports himself saying, is "creating karaoke corporations."

Karaoke corporations. I love it.

The Mirage Man

2011-09-08T05:48:00.016-04:00

David Willman has written "The Mirage Man," a book about the anthrax scare of 2001.

I don't know anything about the book more than that, and what publisher's copy (and one review, to which I'll link you shortly) says about it.

But I do know that Willman is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Here is the citation.

And the subject of his new book is fascinating. Here is something I wrote on the subject in this blog almost three years ago, during the insane autumn of 2008, one almost as wild in its ways as was the autumn of seven years before.

Here's a review of Willman's book that appeared this spring in the Los Angeles Times.

As the reviewer notes, the original "person of interest" was Steven Hatfill, a former Army weapons scientist. But as a district court judge eventually declared, there was "not a scintilla of evidence" that would have inculpated Hatfill, and the FBI eventually turned its feeble eye to Bruce Ivins. Ivins committed suicide as investigators were closing in.

Given only that bare statement, you might well suspect that the FBI had the wrong man a second time, but this wrong man was more susceptible to psychological pressure tha Hatfill, took himself out of the picture, leaving the prosecution case from the threat of falsification.

You might suspect that but Willman would think you wrong. He believes the case against Ivins is a strong one, and in lieu of any judicial forum for laying it out, he does so here.

I think I may actually have to read this book.

Schopenhauer on time

2011-09-04T01:33:00.004-04:00

"Past and future (apart from the consequences of their content) are as empty and unreal as any dream; but present is only the boundary between the two, having neither extension nor duration. In just the same way, we shall also recognize the same emptiness in all the other forms of the principle of sufficient reason and shall see that, like time, space also, and like this, everything that exists simultaneously in space and time ... is only through and for another like itself, i.e. only just as enduring."

I understand the reasoning here in broad terms. Indeed, William James' notion of the 'specious present' was developed largely as a riposte to such reasoning.

Mutter mutter mutter

2011-09-03T07:15:00.003-04:00

I've picked up a heck of a lot of crabapples in recent weeks. After Irene came by and knocked a lot of them off the tree at once, I went on a veritable jihad against grounded crabapples. They really create a nesting place for little flying things as well as becoming mussy and dangerously slippery underfoot if you aren't careful.

I've been using a neat little pooper scooper my father, may he rest in peace, designed in the '90s. So I rake them into big piles then 'scoop' them into the yardwaste bag. Unfortunately, I get too enthusiastic and end up with a bag that is overloaded, impossibly heavy. So I drag it along to where it is supposed to be for pickup.

The tree can be beautiful for a week or two in the spring, though. When it looks like this:

Quote from Vanderbilt

2011-09-02T02:14:00.008-04:00

"It is said that I am always in opposition, and that the same spirit of resistance which has often hitherto governed my action has influenced it now ....I have only to say, that this is the same spirit which founded this great Republic, and which is now drawing the commerce of the world to our shores. It was the same spirit which unchained the fetters which legislation ... once fastened upon the Hudson. Repress it if you dare....The share of prosperity which has fallen to my lot is the direct result of unfettered trade and unrestrained competition."

NEW YORK TRIBUNE, March 8, 1855.

Vanderbilt, as a young man, had played a supporting role in the facts that led to the great Supreme Court decision as to steamboats on the Hudson, and the burdening of interstate commerce, GIBBONS v. OGDEN (1824), and that is one of his allusions above.

Saving Your Dog

2011-09-01T01:06:00.004-04:00

In a libertarian website, I found the following description of a Dennis Prager column. I'm too lazy to check right now whether Dennis Prager actually wrote this, or who the heck he is anyway.

“For 30 years," Prager is supposed to have said, "I have asked high school seniors throughout America which they would save first, their dog or a stranger. In every instance (except some religious schools), one third have voted to save their dog, one third for the stranger, and one third just didn’t know.”

There are a couple of ways to take this story:

1. He might be trying to say that religious schools present superior religious/moral instruction.

2. He might be trying to say that religious schools drill their students to give the 'right' answer to such questions, whether they feel it or not, which would mean not necessarily superior instruction, but character-warping discipline.

One intriguing issue arises from the wording of the question: would the results be different if you asked who should you save first?

If I were running such a survey, anyway, I would want to allow for the possibility that some people would think that they should save the other human being, but they admit to themselves that they wouldn't live up to that Good-Samaritan standard, they would instead save the creature to which they had an existing sentimental attachment.

Just a thought.

Rothbard on Bryan

2011-08-28T03:11:00.001-04:00

Murray Rothbard on the rise of William Jennings Bryan and Bryanism in the Democratic Party.

"Poor Grover Cleveland, a hard-money laissez-faire Democrat, was blamed for the panic of 1893, and many leading Cleveland Democrats lost their gubernatorial and senatorial posts in the 1894 elections. The Cleveland Democrats were temporarily weak, and the Southern-Mountain coalition was ready to hand. Seeing this opportunity, William Jennings Bryan and his pietist coalition seized control of the Democratic Party at the momentous convention of 1896. The Democratic Party was never to be the same again."

That may require some explanation. The notion of a "pietist coalition" is key to Rothbard's understanding of US political history. The pietists were and are a certain subset of Protestant groups -- generally from those denominations that see themselves as most fiercely anti-papist, anti-hierarchal, etc. -- and they believe Christians must prepare the way for the coming of the Lord by creating just social conditions first, i.e. Jesus' return shall be "postmillennial." Thus, the state (as Rothbard conveys the pietists' view of it) must be controlled by pious folks and so organized as to hasten that glorious day.

The era of Andrew Jackson -- the President that Rothbard sees as most embodying his own laissez-faire ideas -- was also the era of the Second Great Awakening -- the revivalist movement that brought pietism in this form to the US in a big way. Pietists wanted to control both people's personal lives (through the prohibition of alcohol and Sunday closing laws for example) and the counrtry's economic life, through control of the money supply and tariffs on foreign trade. The great political divide was then, between the Democrats, who were laissez-faire on both personal and economic matters, and the Whigs or later Republicans, who were statist on both sets of matters.

Cleveland is the last figure in US political history to whom Rothbard extends any sympathy. The rise of Bryan meant the pietists had taken over both parties, and everything has been pretty steadily downhill ever since.

Liu Xiang

2011-08-27T03:01:00.000-04:00

Every August of the last three years I have written an entry about the Chinese track-and-field star Liu Xiang. Here are the earlier such entries:

2008
2009
2010

Here is a trip down memory lane from the China Herald, their thoughts back in 2008 about "what killed Liu Xiang's Olympic ambitions?"

There is some news about Liu. This year he is expected to be the PRC's star in the IAAF World Championships, to be held in Daegu, from August 28 to September 4. The IAAF, by the way, the the International Association of Athletics Federations, and Daegu is the fourth-largest city in the Republic of Korea.

Apparently, in the hurdles, Liu has adopted a new technique since his injury, approaching the first hurdle in seven strides instead of -- as in his earlier days -- in eight. Here is a discussion from China's Xinhua News Agency.

In that event Liu will face tough competition in the 110 meter hurdles from a US star, David Oliver, who has a season best in this event of 12.94 seconds. Liu's season best is 13 seconds flat.

Here's an Oliver biography.

Due respect to Oliver, but this blog has adopted Liu as its track-and-field fav, and we'll be cheering him on. Besides, it's a good bet he won't be suffering from jet lag the way Oliver might be at the Daegu competition!

And there's London next year, i.e. the 2012 Olympics. I'm psyched already.

Women's Suffrage

2011-08-26T04:18:00.005-04:00

Congratulations and happy anniversary to the enfranchised women of the United States.

It was on this day, August 26, ninety-two years ago, that the 19th amendment was ratified, after about 70 years of agitation.

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex and Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Ambiguity or Sloppy Grammar

2011-08-25T01:18:00.001-04:00

Back in the spring of this year, The New York Times ran an obituary of a certain infamous individual that began with these words: "Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan on Sunday, was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical violent campaign to re-create a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century."

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Now, they probably didn't mean to say that it is the Saudi elite in general whose radical violent campaign to recreate etc. has redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century.

This was, after all, an obit for Osama in particular, and they were saying that he is deserving of historic attention because of his own radical violent campaign, etc.

Or at least that's what they seem likely to have been trying to say! This is a classic instance (perhaps!) of the grammatical mistake known as a misplaced modifier. The phrase "son of the Saudi elite" is intended as a modifier for Osama bin Laden, but is misplaced so it looks like the "Saudi elite" is the subject on which the rest of the sentence is predicated.

They could have avoided the double-takes if they had written, say, "A son of the Saudi elite, Osama bin Laden, was killed in Pakistan on Sunday, ending his radical, violent campaign....which redefined...."

But my Machiavellian streak suggests that maybe this isn't carelessness, maybe they did mean to indict the whole Saudi elite, under the guise of an obit for an individual.

The New York Post

2011-08-21T07:06:00.000-04:00

Someone recently asked me -- not for any reason worth mentioning here -- about the politics of the New York Post. This someone was apparently under the impression I live closer to NYC than I do, or have some reason to follow its tabloids in particular.

I made to her the following observations:

I won't claim to know anything about the political complexion of the Post either. Maybe some New Yorker will (a) admit to reading it with some regularity and (b) clue us both in.

But since you brought it up ... further thoughts.

I do know that it is part of the Murdochian empire. News Corp. bought it in 1976, [the Post created the immortal headline "Headless Body in Topless Bar" in 1983], News Corp. sold it in 1988, acquired it again in 1993 (more on that in a sec), and has owned it since. I personally would not conclude that this makes the Post a "conservative" paper. After all, I don't believe Murdoch is ideologically driven. I think he is profit driven. (Which, I assure you, I also think of as a good trait.)

Fox News is, IMHO, rightward slanted, and in fact they more-or-less admit this, though they generally say that they are justifiably so given the contrary slant of their competitors. They see themselves more as a balancing factor than as in themselves balanced -- two different notions. Again -- no quarrel from me. I don't beleive in "balance" or in "objectivity" either except as widespread fictions. There is true, there is false. Within the realm of the truthful, all truth-telling is selective. Only God knows truth without partiality.

I am reminded of what a little girl wrote to the editor of another NY newspaper in the late 19th century. "Papa says, if you see it in the Sun it's so." Yes, Virginia, there is truth. There is that which simply "is so" as your father sensibly defines truth. But neither the Sun nor any other paper ever printed failed to select particular truths as more worthy of print than others for particular reasons. As indeed, their decision to put your letter on the front page one fateful day rather illustrates. Is there some sense in which that was an objective news-value-driven decision?

But I'll return to the 21st century now ... if I am right about Murdoch, we can't infer anything about the Post, the WSJ, etc., from Fox. All we know is that putting Roger Ailes in charge and letting him run Fox News has made Murdoch a lot of money, so Murdoch has left that goose alone to lay its golden eggs the way the goose thinks best. That doesn't imply any ideological passion in the head office of News Corp at all, and my guess is that the Post probably is largely autonomous in day-to-day terms too.

There is an interesting bit of history. As I mentioned, the first News Corp. era for the Post was 1976 - 1988. When they were putting together Fox News network, they wanted NYC's WNYW, but under cross-ownership rules then in place they couldn't have both WNYW and the Post. So they opted for the former, and sold the Post to Peter Kalikow.

Kalikow was wealthy from real estate wheelings and dealings, but knew zip abut the news business, and for several years the Post went steadily downhill. News Corp bought it again in 1993 -- at that time it was considered a rescue, so the cross-ownership rules were waived. Hmmm. Murdoch was given an either/or choice and ended up with both. A conspiracy theorist could go to town on that.

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Bottom line, If you see it in Pragmatism Refreshed -- it's so. Otherwise. you're taking your chances.

Pragmatism Refreshed

Free Will

Super Bowl

Iterations

Santayana and The Inflexibility of Age

Final Quote From Isaacson's Bio of Jobs

English Channel Widens

Steamroller Repair

Annual Dilbert Post

Contango: 2012 Edition

Those Who Cannot Remember the Past

Apple and Power Sources

Thinking

An Old Joke

That Kyocera Ad

More on Steve Jobs

That Santayana Meme

Romney Steamroller

Steve Jobs

Denver Broncos

A January 1988 Flashback

Unintended Consequences

Gary Weiss versus us Crackpots

My three calenders

Resolutions

Top Financial Stories 2011

Cycles of American Politics

The Mereological Fallacy

From JM's Nativity Ode

The Rabbit books

The Melodrama of the Rupee

RIP Christopher Hitchens

Caring only about your work

William James Quote of the Day

This Day in Cosmological History

Frivolous Walk-Out: Classy Response

Line of Best Fit

Waters v. Maloney

A Simile

Nanotechnology

Roger's Version

Jacques Barzun

Acknowledgements

Bradycardia

Google News: Blast from the past

"With Held" is two words now?

The Democratic Party's Nominating Convention: 1896

Thanksgiving

Who Is Ellen Brown?

La Quinta

Jonestown

Fracking: Some Links

Novelization of the Lodz Ghetto II

Ron Paul Got This Exactly Right

Howrey Collapse

Cuban Perestroika?

Looking Inside

"Points of light"

Nor'eastern

Clint Eastwood on Gay Marriage

Novelization of the Lodz Ghetto

Hominid Hunting

All the Devils: Two Points

Nazerali v. Deep Capture

The Abacus and the Cross

Still Thinking About the Enron Anniversary

Enron: Ten Years Ago

Worst Reasoning ... Ever

Hosni Mubarak

Nobel Prize in Economics

Carcium -- The Conflict Begins

Dorothy Sayers, Conclusion

A Guide to Dorothy Sayers IV

A Guide to Dorothy Sayers III

A Guide to Dorothy Sayers II

A Guide to Dorothy Sayers I

Freud's Wizard

LSE to Acquire LCH.Clearnet

The Sea, The Sea

Dorothy Sayers