RIP Christopher Hitchens

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.

R.I.P. Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit Mandelbrot, pioneer of fractal geometry -- indeed, the man who coined the term "fractal" -- died of pancreatic cancer on October 14, 2010.

My heart goes out to his friends and family. They may take some comfort in the fact that he changed the way much of our species sees the world, an impact in depth of a sort that few can boast. The ubiquity of images like the one above these words is just a piece of it, fascinating and beautiful as such "Mandelbrot set" images can be.

I had the honor of reviewing one of his final books The (mis)Behavior of Markets in 2006.

In that book, Mandelbrot explains the nature of fractals from the beginning, for those of his readers who hadn't caught on yet even in 2006. He quotes Jonathan Swift in service of this cause. Swift wrote:

So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller Fleas to bit 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Mandelbrot, at any rate, is now free of the world of fleas-biting-fleas. And he is no doubt explaining the geometry of clouds to Saint Peter.

You can find my review of Mandelbrot's 2006 work here.

Robert Novak, RIP

The WSJ carried its obituary of Robert Novak, the conservative opinionator who reveled in the nickname "Prince of Darkness," an obit penned by Stephen Miller, on p. A16 of the August 19th edition. It is illustrated with a fascinating old black-and-white photo of RN as a young man, cigarette hanging from lips in I'm-know-I'm-being-photographed style, at a bank of ancient looking telephones. It is an illustration reminescent of old Hollywood movie portrayals of reporters, I cover the waterfront!.

Anyway, the obit says: "Because naming a CIA agent can be a crime, questions soon arose [after a certain notorious RN column] about whether Ms Plame was in the CIA and who had told Mr Novak. in the resulting imbroglio, Mr Novak divulged his sources before a grand jury. A federal investigation ended with...." and so forth.

One page flip away, on A14, there's an editorial, "Prince of Light," honoring Novak. This says, of the same subject: "The Plame scoop was merely another case of Novak doing his job, and he protected his source ... and behaved honorably even as others in the press corps abandoned First Amendment principles to cheer on a special prosecutor willing to throw reporters in jail."

Question, then: What did Novak tell the grand jury exactly? The WSJ says on A16 that he "divulged his sources" while it says on A14 that he "protected his source". Which is it? Even setting aside the stark contrast between the verbs "protected" and "divulged" ... was there only one source or many? The obit uses the word "sources" while the editorial uses the word "source." Could he have "protected" one by divulging another, explaining the odd inconsistency as to quantity there?

Also, is the WSJ now taking the stance that it was wrong for the special prosecutor to put Miller in jail? My memory, for which I claim no infallibility here, is that the WSJ editorial board was among those who were doing the "cheering on" about how terrible was her refusal to disclose her source and how it was right to put her in jail -- a view they now seem to regard as dishonorable.

Generally speaking, conservative folks such as the ones who write for the WSJ editorial page have over the years resisted the idea that "First Amendment principles" have anything to do with the obligation to give grand jury testimony. Or do I have my partisan scorecard mixed up?

Greg Newton, Rest in Peace

Greg Newton has passed away. He was a witty and incisive contributor to the economoblogosphere.

Newton warned in September 12, 2005 that the Gaussian cupola, the basic mathematical trick used for pricing credit derivatives, was not entirely suited to the weight it was being made to bear. That blog entry ended with the words "tick, tick, tick."

In recent months, other analysts have returned to the issue of the Gaussian cupola and its over-use. They have had the benefit of hindsight -- but it was Greg who warned us that the timebomb was ticking before it went off.

Until the day I die I expect that I'll consider it a badge of honor that Greg gave me a "forelock tug" in August 2007. That was when a committee of the US Senate issued a report on the whistle-blowing controversy surrounding the SEC and former staff member Gary Aguirre. Greg was covering the story of what he called "L'Affaire Aguirre" closely. He ran an item on August 6 entitled "Empty suits and selective 'enforcement'" in which he expressed the hope that the chairman of that agency would soon "be greeted with a stack of resignation letters from several senior members of the division of enforcement, and the agency's inspector general."

When I read that I had just written a story on Aguirre myself for my former employer, HedgeWorld. As part of preparing that story, I had learned that the IG was no longer around. His office told me he had just retired. Quelle coincidence!

I hadn't made enough out of this at the time, but I did pass the information along to Greg.

On August 8, Greg wrote this, "One Down: Stachnik Out as SEC IG."

I'm the "Mr. F" referenced at the end of the piece. So my life hasn't been entirely in vain.

I took vastly more from Greg's blog than I was able to return to it. One of his most memorable calls came just one year and one week ago, involving the country of Angola, a country which (I'll keep this in mind if I'm ever in trouble) has no extradition treaty with the United States. Greg managed to find the most newsy nugget in a 280 page court filing involving the demise of the Plus Funds.

So here's to him. One last long forelock tug of my own.

Rest in Peace

Irvine R. Levine, who covered economics for NBC News for 24 years, passed away of prostate cancer yesterday: a member of what is nowadays called the "Greatest Generation," leaving us as mortality requires.

His career had its adventurous episodes. He was an officer in the Army Signal Corps in World War II, and after VJ Day he landed with the early occupation forces in Japan.

He was working as a freelance reporter during the Korean War, and began getting gigs from NBC in that context.

He was on their payroll by 1960, when he covered the uprising in the Belgian Congo.

But he really made his mark starting in 1971. That was the year Nixon brought an end to what remained of gold convertibility and introduced wage-price controls. NBC decided they needed a regular economics correspondent in their news department, so Levine got the job. He was the first correspondent for any of the network news departments with that particular responsibility, and he kept at it until 1995. His bow tie, the rather slow pace of his delivery, and even his insistence upon the "R" (no, I don't know what it stands for) became famous. Legend has it that an editor once suggested that he sign off as "Irvine Levine" to save a second of tape. He allegedly replied, "I could sign off as 'Irvine Levine of NC News' and save two seconds."

The middle initial stayed.

Rest in peace, Irving R. Levine. Go meet the Final Editor at the big Citydesk in the sky and submit your copy.