Blogs Worth a Click

 
This is going to be a short post, since I've been reduced to the necessity of borrowing a computer from my son. My new box, cobbled together from mooched, used, obsolete, and cheap parts, is apparently too technically advanced for Win95 (attempting a hard drive transplant). No smoke yet, but I'm still trying. Later.

 
See previous post below. The more I think about it, the madder I get. This racist crap has got to stop.

Besides the flimsy "states rights" cover used by the segregationists, there is the question of how to remember those who fought the Confederacy. We have heard the arguments that they merely honor the bravery of those fighting, or the heritage of the South, not the cause they fought for. I don't buy it. In Richmond VA, they built monuments in the early 20th century (the height of kukluxery) to 3 Confederate generals and one Confederate commodore. They were all sons of Virginia, my birth state. In 1996, they added a monument to Arthur Ashe, the tennis champion. Leaving tennis aside, if they were truly interested in honoring the courage of Virginians in the Civil War, then there were some significant omissions:

• Admiral David Glasgow Farragut USN, who uttered the immortal order "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" at the attack on Mobile. Running under the battery at Vicksburg, he and Grant cut the Confederacy in two. His family adhered to the Confederacy; he remained loyal to his shipmates and his country. He left behind everything but the clothes he wore and never returned.
  
• General Winfield Scott USA was the leader of the American forces against Mexico in 1846, his conduct so exemplary that the defeated Mexicans offered him their presidency. He was well past his prime when the Civil War broke out, and unequal to the exertions of command. He remained, however, a superb strategian. His "anaconda strategy" of blockading the southern ports was the ultimate downfall of the South.
  
• General George H. Thomas earned the epithet "The Rock of Chickamauga" for his stubborn rearguard defense of the retreating Union forces at that battle, his troops resorting to bashing with splintered rifle butts when their ammunition was exhausted. At Chattanooga, his utter destruction of Hood's Confederate forces in the west laid the South open to invasion on that front. He later served as Sherman's second in command in the march to the sea, often forcing his enemies to withdraw by catching or forcing them out of position, and demonstrating his tactical mastery as often as the situation required.

Curious omissions, wouldn't you say?

 
Back to the political stuff.

Trent Lott must step aside. If he won't move without being pushed, Bush should give him a shove. Speaking as a former Democrat and current Republican, the Republican party is really a coalition party. I could never have voted for Strom Thurmond for president. For one thing, my African-American, Asian-American, and mixed-race relatives would never forgive me, besides its being flat wrong. I voted for McGovern over Nixon, whom I considered to be crooked enough to hide behind a spiral staircase (and don't get me started on Clinton). I voted for Reagan over the feckless Carter, and never looked back. Call me a Reagan Democrat, but never call me a Dixiecrat. The current Republican party is a coalition of classical liberals (me, for one) tending toward libertarianism and, on the other hand, traditionalists. I can sort of appreciate the traditionalist argument, which is that if something has been shown to work, let's consider it workable unless proven otherwise. It's like a political expression of the scientific method -- try it, see if it works, try something else if it doesn't.

The Republican party has, I think, transformed itself from what it was when I was a baby (these things take time -- I'm an old man). Anti-semitism was at one time a characteristic of the Right. Now, positions are reversed to the extent that the Left can't do more than clear their throats and scuff their feet when a Palestinian kills himself and a dozen Jewish children in a pizza parlor at lunch time. Another part of the ancient Right was racism. If they can't put that behind them, they are going to lose the classical liberals. The whole "states' rights" bit really was a cover for the majority to oppress the minority. This is always the danger of democracy, but it is really a specific instance of the State asserting its predominance over the individual. The Republicans must renounce this, now and forever, or lose those whe truly trace their politics back to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. A substantial part of the Republican party is anti-statist, and in favor of individual rights. If Lott really thinks that treating people impartially is a cause of "all these problems," whatever they might be, then he is going to split the Republican party, and I'll race you to the door.

 
Well, it seems to be an occupational hazard for bloggers, but I got laid off yesterday. No, I wasn't goofing off or working on my blog instead of what the company paid me for. My former employer had rarely laid people off, and this came as a bit of a surprise to everyone. That's the bad news. So after sanding and staining some bookcases this morning, I finished putting my resume together while waiting for the stain to dry and posted it to Dice.com, a techie job board. That was at about 1:30. The phone rang at about 4:15, and it was a recruiter who had worked with me at another place in another line of work. I don't want to go into it, but I used this instance to drill a lesson into my daughter -- be good to people who can't do you a bit of good. If it results in something good happening to you, that's just a bonus. The real payment is what you are gradually making of yourself by "exercising" your character (and yes, I am consciously paraphrasing C. S. Lewis).

I sure hope that urethane dries fast, or I may not get a chance to finish the bookcases.

 
This stuff is hitting a little too close to home (again).

Problem

Solution

 
Oh. My. God. I just read this article by Oriana Fallaci. I'm in awe. If you want to see ranting done right, here it is. Perhaps the best response to the barbarity of the jihadist murderers is just rage. What seems most to infuriate her is the slimy moral posturing of their European apologists. She sees it as a betrayal by the Left of their basic principals, but I would remind her that the European Left developed this amazing ethical flexibility while justifying Stalin's rule, long after the US Left had given up in disgust.

 
From The Wall Street Ledger:
The consolidation in the cults and loonies industry continues as the Unification Church (ticker symbol UCCO) announced after yesterday’s market close that it will acquire the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). ISKCON is best known for its bald nut cases chanting “Hare Krishna” at airports and bus stations. Spokesman Pie Moon described the merger as “a strategic move into an area where we see tremendous growth opportunities. While there is some overlap in the airport terminal business, we will be able to broaden our range of products. ISKCON is the industry leader in peacock feathers, carnations, and the larger religious tracts.” Lal Admi, CEO of ISKCON, said “There is tremendous synergy between these two leaders in the field of brainwashing and exploitation of vulnerable individuals.”

Industry analysts characterized the deal as not unexpected. Wetherly Merino of E. F. Mutton said ”We told a few of our very best clients this summer that ISKCON was in play, and we upgraded the stock from ‘Whatever’ to ‘Sort of OK’ as early as yesterday afternoon.” Both UCCO and ISKCON have seen their once lucrative airport terminal pest business diminish in the tight security measures implemented following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. “No one wants to see a pack of glassy-eyed zombies hanging around the concourse any more. With the extended waiting we now see at major airports, you would think this would be an ideal environment for rote begging spiels delivered in a rapid monotone. And it would be, except the cops and the National Guard have been kicking them out. Really kicking them, and hard, too.” The college campus and bus station segments of the market remain strong, according to Merino, and the merged cult will be poised to take advantage of any recovery in the national stupidity and gullibility rates.

This merger follows the acquisition of Lyndon LaRouche Associates by the Church of Scientology in June of this year. LaRouche’s paranoia line had attracted interest from cults looking for an entrée into this traditionally steady and cash-rich business. LaRouche had earlier turned back a hostile takeover attempt by Oliver Stone. As a result of the merger with the Church of Scientology, the LaRouche tinfoil hat line was combined with the Scientology tin can product line, and LaRouche’s robotic corgi transceiver subsidiary in the UK was sold to One World Government, Inc. As a result, approximately 1,000 cultists were deprogrammed.

 
If you're in financial services, take a look at More Than Zero, which has a great write-up about the unintended secondary effects of regulation in the brokerage industry. There is a requirement that brokers consider the suitability of an investment for each particular client. In theory, this should mean looking at the client's risk tolerance, tax situation, investment goals (besides making more money), need for current income or capital appreciation, and all the stuff you see in the money magazines. Instead, it meant that there were lists of approved investments at the brokerage houses and investors were funnelled into a narrow set of choices, thereby increasing their risk.

There are a few other things, though, that should be considered. The crash happened after several years of do-it-yourself portfolio building that drained investment dollars from both full-service brokerage houses and mutual funds, which had earlier been the immediate winners from the IRA and 401(k) inflow of investments. In other words, there was comparatively less money available to channel into this small set of approved investments. I should have mentioned this in my previous thumb-sucker on 11/10, because this was driven largely by the dramatic reduction of transaction costs for direct, unaided investment through Internet and other discount brokerages. This frothy investment climate in the late 1990's was what I refer to as a brother-in-law's market, where any damned fool can and does make money and can't stop bragging about it. I'd love to see his COMPLETE set of trade tickets now.

With transaction costs so far down, people were opening and closing positions quickly, with day trading being only an extreme of what was going on everywhere else. Institutions did the same thing. This was no more than momentum investing, which should really be called speculation. Investors, both individual and institutional, were buying things just because they were going up, then hoping to get out before anyone else if things went bad. If they were focused on a small set of equities, I would have said it was voluntary. We all know the names: Henry Blodget, Mary Meeker, Abby Joseph Cohen ... The analysts became stars because they told us what we wanted to hear. No one made us buy JDS Uniphase, CMGI,or Pets.com.

I don't doubt that brokerage lists had something to do with the screwed-up market, but the effect would have been too small to do anything but add to the downhill acceleration.

 

you have an ominosity quotient of seven. you are as ominous as the creators of this quiz. which terrifies us. find out your ominosity quotient

I sure hope my P.O. doesn't see this.

 
My bad -- Le Monde did have an article: Attaque meurtière dans un kibboutz, but it was difficult to find -- I only saw it when reading today's follow-up analysis. Today's analysis seems to wonder whether Arafat is willing or able to control his own Al Aqsa Martyrs assassins, let alone Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Gee, ya think?

 
Update -- maybe I was too harsh on Reuters. Le Monde didn't find the incident worth mentioning at all.

 
Let me see if I have got this straight. Someone breaks into a home, guns down a mother, slaughters two little boys hiding under the blankets, and Reuters describes the perpetrator as a "militant" and as a "gunman," but not a killer or a terrorist. Disgusting.

 
Bloviation alert -- this is one of those "What Does It All Mean?" pieces.

We have all had a chance to get used to the idea that the Nasdaq is going to take a long time, maybe a decade, to recover the 2/3's of its value it has lost. Earnest young consultants by the thousands have sold the Porsche and moved back in with Mom and Dad. Fiber optic demand is still far below capacity. Up until three years ago, the Internet was going to change everything. So what did actually change? Both more and less than we expected.

Item 1: People

Part of what I do for a living is hooking up a big database to a secure extranet for a custodian bank. That means that money managers using our application can click on us in MS Explorer and see what securities they have in which portfolio and lots of other useful things. This is information that used to be faxed to them, entered into a spreadsheet, printed, faxed again... This way is better. You get what you want, when you want it, and can change it to show just what you wanted to see. It is really amazing what has changed since I started in the financial services industry. So what didn't change? Mostly, people didn't change. One of the users of this application was pleased to see that he could get some information for the reporting he had to do just by clicking around. Yet he was still hand-typing other parts of the reports without noticing that this information was also on line,

. If you're an IT professional, you are probably chalking this up to typical "luser" behavior. Maybe it is. Yet one of the guys I work with (web applications are part of the job, remember) has never even ordered a book or a CD over the Internet. Nothing! It is going to take some time before the Internet gets truly integrated into our economy. It is just not part of people's habit sets yet.

Item 2: Markets

The ones making money off the Internet are the ones who reach their markets more efficiently through the Internet than by other means. Think about eBay. It is still primarily an auction site, but have you spent any time looking at the odd things for sale? I bought a handful of trilobites and other fossils for my kids through eBay. The fellow I bought them from tells me that the majority of his business in fossils and raw semi-precious stones comes to him the same way. One of my kids is a model train enthusiast, and when we went to Charles Ro Supply in Malden MA for more absolutely essential stuff, we were often amazed at the number of out-of-state license plates in the parking lot. They have had a mail-order catalog for a long time, but now they have another channel.

Of course, the biggest group of merchants making money in the Internet is the pornographers. This is another case of getting to your customer by changing the distribution method. Just as the VCR's success came at the expense of the local porno theater -- why not watch at home in privacy? -- the on- line porn entrepreneurs are taking some business from the video purveyors and expanding the total market. I'm not saying this is a good thing. At the very least, one does not meet interesting people that way.

The big losers in the early Internet rush were those who had no particular reason for putting their wares on the web. Anyone for a 50 lb. bag of dog food? We'll throw in a free sock puppet.

Item 3: Things We Never Though Of

You're seeing one of them here. Weblogs took off in the aftermath of Sept. 11, as ordinary people (and some extraordinary ones) looked for a way to express themselves, communicate with others, and get around the corporate news blockage. Weblog software meant you didn't have to learn HTML to get your opinions, musings, or free-floating anxiety on the Internet. They say that freedom of the press belongs to the one who owns the press. Well, we all just got the equivalent of a printing press, and pretty cheaply. Anyone for media bias? Forget it. Our local paper is the Boston Globe, which makes the Guardian look even-handed. I still read the paper's editorial pages -- Jeff Jacoby is there -- but in the world of weblogs, the biggest one is Instapundit, hardly a mush-from-the-wimp Globe editorialist.

So what else is out there, after weblogs? The point is that we can never know until they happen, no matter how much money you lavish on Bain, Sapient, [fill in your least favorite consultants] or what have you. Townsend's law of prognostication: The future will resemble the present in every way, except for certain important but unforeseeable differences.

 
Some people just can't help themselves. They just have to go just a little bit farther than the rest of us. Take this letter to a utility company, for example:

Hartford, February 12, 1891

Dear Sirs:

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone?

Ys

S.L Clemens

 
Whee, I got Blogrolling going! I put in some of the blogs that I had on yellow stickies, and will start transferring others from my links soon. Big bloggers will have their own lists. I also cloned the blog template in "regular" HTML and will use that as an annex with a different host.

Regarding the election results:

I forget who in the last administration it was, but when he got caught in some fundraising indiscretion, he solemnly averred that he had no regrets over what he had done, because it was done to prevent the right-wing takeover of Congress. In other words, he was saying and may have believed that his noble ends justified his sordid means. My sympathies are with the Republicans, for the most part, but please, winners and losers alike, bear in mind that what this man was trying to prevent was the orderly rotation of power following a regular election. This is our most precious national inheritance, and it goes all the way back to Washington's refusal of a crown. Win or lose, this is far more important than who controls what at one time or another. Remember, in most of the world, people leave power feet first.

 
Well, that was productive. Sort of. I sneaked a JavaScript into the Blogger template that creates a "mailto:" without actually leaving it out in the open for the spam bots to harvest, so I won't see a big increase in spam from putting my e-mail on view. If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, relax, it's just something a geek would care about. If you do, you can click "view source" to see it. The original script is at The JavaScript Source. It was written by Rod Murgatroyd, whose primary interest seems to be a New Zealand variant of N-scale model trains. The script can be adapted to your own use -- just be prepared for a session of wrestling with Blogger's dialect of HTML.

 
Online music sales plummet -- Recording industry blames file-sharing. Jeez, that's terrible. In general, I support property rights as an essential guarantor of freedom. Intellectual property rights, the exclusive right to profit from one's own efforts and inspiration, are particularly sacred.

A friend recently described my musical tastes as bipolar. I don't think that covers it. The CD case I have in my briefcase has works by Sibelius, Beethoven, the Ramones, Al Green, Frank Zappa, Aretha Franklin, Rancid, the Velvet Underground, Mozart, and Sam and Dave. The Sam of this last group is Sam Moore. He had a rather unpleasant experience when he retired. He found he could not do it -- he has to keep working. Here is a link to the article in the LA Times about the lawsuit he and other former stars have filed against these same people who are so upset about being ripped off by KaZaA. Turns out that these defenders of intellectual property have (1) screwed the artists by not paying the required amounts, or often anything, into the AFTRA pension plan, and (2) screwed them again by not paying them royalties. Now AFTRA, which is a separate legal entity from the AFTRA pension plan, is shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find out this injustice has occurred, and is joining the artists in the part of the suit targeting the pension plan (as I mentioned, it is a SEPARATE LEGAL ENTITY, despite the similarity of the names). Did I forget to mention that AFTRA is in the middle of an election to continue to represent the artists? Oopsie, my bad.

 
Election day is Tuesday, which means this is one of those rare times I'll be looking forward to a Wednesday. The stereotype in US politics is that Democrats think Republicans are mean, and Republicans think Democrats are stupid. To combat this, here in Massachusetts we have the Republican candidate for governor, Mitt Romney, looking stupid and Shannon O'Brien, Democrat, being mean.

The ads from the New Hampshire senate race are on our TV channels, too. Shaheen is going with the Social Security scare. One of her ads features an old woman saying "What will I do without my Social Security?" Oh, please. The consultant who thought that one up should have his severed head mounted above the Hooksett toll booth as a warning to others.

Reading:

Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent -- Travels in Small-Town America

After "A Walk in the Woods," "Notes from a Small Island," "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," and "In a Sunburned Country," I wish I had quit reading this guy while I was ahead. This was his first travel book and it shows. At the time he wrote this, he was also writing for the Independent in the UK, which is sort of the party organ for Old Labour. He flatters his core readership by confirming what they already know: Americans are fat vulgarians, they litter their breathtaking vistas with strip malls and trailer parks, and the food is bad. Sigh. Maybe we should let the Brussels bunch instruct us in how we should manage our affairs -- at least they are paying proper attention to regulating sausages and cheese.

Insight: See above. Also, 15,000 miles in a Chevette is probably not as good an idea as it sounds (the book was published in 1989, so there were some still running).

Quote: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." This should have stopped me.

I haven't been blogging, I know. I've been putting another site together, graphics and all, which you can access through this site.

 
On the subway this morning, my heart was nearly broken. A man got on with 2 little girls at Downtown Crossing (Washington St.). The younger one, about 5, got a seat immediately. I stood up and the elder, about 8, sat down a few seats away, and sat scowling, looking at the floor. The man stood by the younger one.
She asked "Who was that little boy?"
"He's older than both of you. His name is Junior."
"But who is he? Is he part of our family?"
"Yes, he is."
"Then why doesn't he live with us?"
"He lives with his mother."
Silence.
"Daddy, are you going to live with us now?"
"Yes, I am."
More silence.
"Daddy, if you promise to never go away again, then I won't be mad at you."

 
On the Bellesiles issue for what is very likely the last time, Instapundit tells us that Prof. Michael Bellesiles has resigned from Emory after the committee investigating the charges against him found that they could not prove falsification. This was mainly because the supporting documentation he provided was so poor that they could not tell whether it was fraud or just incompetence. Some of the documentation he provided was just unexplained tickmarks on yellow legal paper. In any event, the sloppiness and inability to show how he got the results was professional misconduct. You can read the committee's report, and Bellesiles' reply (Instapundit links to the .pdf documents) to judge for yourself.

I'm a CPA (though not working in that field now), and before Arthur Andersen raised the bar, one of the worst things a staff auditor could do is what is called "ghost-ticking." This means marking your workpapers to indicate that you performed a procedure without actually having done so. Anyone caught doing this was immediately fired (this was a long time ago, as you can tell). I occasionally suspected it myself when the prior year's workpapers showed everything done in record time without exception, while I was finding missing, inaccurate, or incomplete records in the same client's records the next year, but with last year's staff gone, there was nothing to be done. One incident when I was still a staff auditor involved a young woman who breezed through difficult areas and often left early. The in-charge accountant on the job saw that the time she devoted to the work was nowhere near what he expected it to require and eventually laid a trap. He removed some pages from the middle of several reports and asked her to check the client's totals. She reported back that it all added up without exception. She was escorted out of the building that day.

 
The Nation has a breathtakingly incompetent defense of The Arming of America by Michael Bellesiles. The Guardian, hardly a haven for right-wing gun nuts, also summarized the criticism of Michael Bellesiles' work. The Guardian, though, cites a finding that completely obliterates the position taken by the Nation. The Nation argues that because the disputed records in San Francisco pertained to the period around 1850, they have no bearing on the central thesis that gun ownership was rare before and during the period that the Second Amendment was crafted. Indeed, they were at worst tangential and could even support the Bellesiles theory of the 19th century origin of widespread ownership.

According to the Guardian, Lindgren went over the same Vermont probate records from the late 18th century that Bellesiles cited. Instead of the 14% of households owning guns that Bellesiles found, Lindgren found 40%. This is a very strong argument against Bellesiles and a significant demonstration of fraud or incompetence. Not surprisingly, the Nation omits the stronger argument and attacks the weaker in order to prove its point.

Another fine example of the Nation cherry-picking its facts is its citing the battles of Lexington and Concord as an example of Americans' unfamiliarity with the use of firearms, and I quote:

"One of my favorite examples: Of the famous Minutemen at Lexington Green in 1775, only seven actually fired their muskets, and only one Redcoat was actually hit."

True enough as stated, but there is more to the story.

After the quick and easy victory at Lexington, the British advanced to Concord. We Americans were rarely stupid enough to stand up in close ranks and trade musket volleys with the British regulars. Instead, the Minutemen reverted to the tactics they had learned in 100 years of intermittent Indian wars (I wonder what weapons they used in them? No matter, I suppose). The British retreat was harassed all the way back from Concord to Lexington by hidden marksmen. They were slaughtered in an ambush at Bloody Angle and routed at Fiske's Hill, suffering 273 casualties out of a force of 700 vs. 94 losses from a smaller American force. The arrival of a relief column at Concord prevented their annihilation or surrender. Not bad for people who had few guns and didn't know quite what to do with them.

Instapundit shoots some more holes in the Nation. It's just a big fat slow target -- who could resist?

 
The Boston Globe covers the Harvard divestiture story. Five professors who signed the anti-Israel divestiture petition all got together and agreed with themselves that, yes indeed, they were right all along. Most of the audience disagreed.

The reporting was actually more balanced than the usual Globe article, which could have taught its parent company, the New York Times, some new tricks about biased reporting. Some of the facts presented were soft-pedaled, so let me stress what they did not:

  >  > The audience did not shout down the speakers, as is the custom with leftist and pro-Palestinian audiences. They let the speakers finish and then asked questions. There were some boos and catcalls.

  >  > The article mentions 74 signatures at Harvard and 56 at MIT (Noam Chomsky must have signed a dozen times himself) in favor of divestiture and states that the petition drive is gaining momentum. As an aside, it mentions that there are "several hundred" signatures at these schools on petitions against divestiture. It sounds like the force of friction is gradually reducing the momentum. Maybe it's rubbing against reality.

 
Mark Steyn follows the continuing saga of Barbra Streisand's gallant battle with the English language and foreign policy.

Maybe it's just me, but why does anyone care about Barbra Streisand's views on foreign policy? Does anyone out there think she has any expertise in this area? If she is being heavily recruited by the Kennedy School of Government, or in line for an ambassador posting or State Department policy post, it's news to me.

Perhaps we're overlooking a great intellectual resource here. If she has solved the Middle East problem, maybe it's time for her to move on to other things. I hear that Europe is devoting more resources to nanotechnology, with a view toward overtaking the US. Hah! We'll trump their ace by putting Barbra's special powers to work on this, and soon we'll be exporting our cheap and abundant buckyballs, nanotubes, and artificial spider silk.

And I would dearly love to hear her review of the proof of Fermat's last theorem -- does the proof stand up? Inquiring minds want to know!

Alternative theory: Ms. Streisand has more money than brains, making her a member of a key constituency of the Democratic Party in California. When a fool with money calls, Mr. "Gebhart" picks up the phone. Or the fax. What colors go through the fax machine best? Ms. Streisand is clearly missing a couple of colors from her set of Crayolas.

 
In re-reading the last post, I saw that I might have misled you about the materialist thing. It's not me.

About a month ago, the parents' meeting for the swim team had to get canceled because the library room we had booked was going to be used the same day by the World Church of the Creator, which like the Holy Roman Empire or Meals Ready to Eat (US military field rations), comprises three distinct lies -- it's a US neo-Nazi organization that certainly has nothing to do with the God of Jesus, Moses or Abraham (Jews all three). The library advised us to cancel because there might be trouble, and there was (see the local newspaper article in the Wakefield Daily Item). I went down to see the freaks and found two sets of them, since the street was occupied by the Progressive Labor Party chanting "Death, death, death to the Fascists." Very enlightening. Naturally, I started looking around for a brick, figuring this was a target-rich environment, but there were approximately 250 police there keeping things from getting even uglier, so I settled down to watch the show. I noticed that the Communists tended to affect Lenin-style goatees rather than the Stalin soup-strainer, no doubt because Lenin got better press. The Nazis tended to be clean-shaven except for their eyebrows, but I noticed again that white supremacists don't present very convincing examples -- these looked like cleaned-up hicks and sounded like dull normals, at best. If these losers are the master race, I'm going to the courthouse to have my species legally changed.

There was some pantomime violence, someone whacked someone else with a stick from a protest sign and a half dozen jerks were arrested for other infractions, nothing that would get you a game misconduct penalty in a hockey game. We locals got to watch the 1930's being reenacted right here at home. Spanish Civil War reenacters -- whodathunkit?

So anyway, the next week a local woman wrote in to the Daily Item celebrating the glorious victory over Fascism, and recommending that the heroes of the class struggle arrested for such thrilling deeds as sucker-punching another fool in Dunkin Donuts should be set free by a grateful populace. She is the materialist I was referring to. Sorry for the confusion.

 
Thanks for the mention, Haggai. Don't let up on the clueless ninnies!
I went to get pizza last night, and saw that they had felafel on the menu as well. I love falafel, so I ordered that, too. The woman behind the counter started chatting with me and my 10 year old daughter. She had never tried the felafel (it turned out to be excellent) and asked me where it came from (Middle East -- it's the one thing everyone there agrees on). They don't have felafel in Brazil, where she and her husband came from, so she asked if I was from the Middle East. We wound up all laughing about an Irish guy buying Arab food in an Italian restaurant from a Brazilian, and I told the bunch of them (the rest of the staff had joined in by then) about going to get my dry cleaning down the street and listening to the shop owner talking to her kids in Hungarian while the seamstress chatted with her husband in Vietnamese. All this in a smallish town (22,000 souls and one materialist).
Lessons learned:
1. I don't know if it will ever happen, but if humanity ever outgrows tribalism, it will happen in the USA first.
2. Americans are fat because we invented pizza.

 
About these posts
I started writing the content back in August, twiddling with the blogskin in my spare time. No, I didn't read all this stuff in a day. After I finally realized I was never going to be happy with the look of the free weblog, I decided to back up the truck and kick the whole load off the tailgate. Maybe I'll fix it later. Mañana, inshallah, whatever.

Oh no, it's gone! Oh, wait, there it is again!
Arts & Letters Daily has shut down. The website was the property of Lingua Franca, another keenly regretted loss. The editors of the site, Denis Dutton and Tran Huu Dung, immediately started a new weblog called Philosophy and Literature. Marvelous to relate, it looks and reads a lot like the old site. If anything, the design is cleaner. Whatever mental illness or defect causes these two to persist in their behavior, I hope no one finds a cure for it. Thanks, guys, and welcome back!

Currently reading
I just finished the second volume of The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper gave a good brisk beating to Plato in volume 1, then severely punished Hegel in the opening of volume 2. Hegel, as Popper tells it, justified the Prussian militarized autocracy as the "highest" freedom and the acme of the realization of the collective spirit of the nation. This should sound sadly familiar. Hegel, in effect, was a hack and a toady.
Imagine my surprise when he let Marx off lightly. Marx's big problem, to Popper's mind, was historicism, the idea that there are immutable laws in history that can be discovered. Marx did not allow for the possibility that we can learn and change things. Capitalism did not fail - it was reformed by moral suasion and democratic intervention. Child labor laws, unemployment insurance, collective bargaining and other innovations have kept the machine running without overheating, and were accomplished without civil insurrection. The genius of democracy is its ability to detect and correct systematic failures. The capitalism of Marx's day is long gone and unlamented, but what replaced it was nothing Marx envisioned. Since Marx founded his system on its historic laws and their inexorable operation, it stands or falls based on his predictions. They are consistently wrong. So why does Marx escape a well-deserved drubbing? The usual reason: his good intentions. I was a little disappointed that Popper spared him a flogging, but since the hideous results of his system were not clear until after his time, and we already have seen that he was not good at prophecy, it would not be fair to hold him strictly accountable for the whole sanguinary failure.

Thinking deep thoughts
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?

Currently reading
Mr. Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard. I didn't think I had to explain this author, but a friend who reads mysteries had never heard of him. She caught on quickly when I mentioned Raymond Chandler. Writers love this guy. His style is spare, not a word wasted, and you can hear the characters speak. Think about J.J. Cale or Steve Cropper playing guitar and you get the idea.

Enron and WorldCom for dummies
First, a little Accounting 101. Debit and credit don't mean bad or good. All they really mean is left and right. Assets (the stuff in a business) go on the left. Debts and owner's equity (the ones who own the stuff) go on the right. Revenues are left, expenses are right. When you record a transaction, you have to put something on the left and something on the right, and they have to come to the same amount on each side to balance.

WorldCom had a very simple way of doing things: if they had to record a "left," they picked an asset instead of an expense.

Suppose the accountant should have done this:

(Debit)Expense $3.8 billion
(Credit)Cash paid $3.8 billion
Memo: Miscellaneous expenses

Instead, they just did this:

(Debit)Imaginary asset $3.8 billion
(Credit)Cash paid $3.8 billion
Memo: Don't spend a lot of time looking for this asset

Voila, you just made $3.8 billion.

Enron was a little more complicated. It had to be complicated to work at all, but the theme was this: eat tomorrow's supper tonight. Enron would enter into a contract to deliver something (maybe natural gas) over a period of years. That would usually mean that they would have to take in the income several years as they got paid. What they did instead was set up partnerships that were sort of, kind of, but not really separate from Enron. So now they "sell" this contract to the partnership at a profit. Ta-dah! Instant profits! The partnership has nothing else but this contract, so they "pay" for it with borrowed money. Enron is a co-signer on the debt, but since it was borrowed by the partnership, they can just forget about putting it on their books.

As they say on the television show, these people are professionals, so don't try this at home.

Currently reading
The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 1, by Karl Popper.
Popper was the philosopher who made clear one of the main principles of scientific investigation. In his famous example, a good scientist is one who, having hypothesized that all swans are white, looks for a black swan to invalidate his rule. The number of white swans observed is not enough. A theory can be considered valid if there are no meaningful exceptions. (By the way, there are black swans native to Australia.)

You have to admire the man's audacity in this book. He sees in Plato's works the beginnings of 20th century totalitarianism. Plato's Republic is meant to be an ideal city-state. The rulers rule, and the workers work. The caste system is immutable. The rulers should apply the same principles of breeding humans as they do in breeding horses. The state is everything, the individual is nothing. Justice is what tends to serve the state's interest. Having come as close to the Ideal as possible, all change should cease, since change would be deterioration.

It's not hard to see the connection, once it's pointed out. The "leading party," eugenics, racism, revolutionary justice, Marx's true communism, the thousand-year Reich. Popper cites Plato's call to drive everyone over the age of ten out of the city, in order to start afresh. This to me was a chilling foreshadowing of Pol Pot's "Year Zero" program some thirty years after this book was written.

Popper sees the idea of historicism at the base of utopianism. The idea that "scientific" laws can be squeezed out of history is probably related to the patterns people see in winning lottery numbers. There is a quirk in human intelligence that sees more patterns than really exist, and then makes predictions based on the patterns. What claim to certainty can historicism make? Not deductive certainty — none of the systems stand up without begging the question. Not inductive certainty, either - why did socialism maintain and extend its reach in the last century despite an unblemished record of failure? And whatever happened to the alienation and pauperization of labor that Marx said was inevitable? Did I miss something? If you want to claim the scientific method, you rely on small-scale experiments, accurate recording and publication of the results, comparison of the results to the prediction, reproducibility, challenge and defense of the method, and ruling out other explanations. Instead, utopians simply explain away their disasters and start a fresh one.

I have long been a skeptic of Utopianism. The idea of "investing" in current human misery — even death — for a golden future is a sucker's game. The future keeps receding as the corpses pile up in the present.

Popper's notes are indispensable. Don't skip them - use two bookmarks. They contain a sharp answer to utilitarianism: human happiness and human suffering are two different things. One does not offset the other, and they are certainly not transferable. We are obliged to relieve or avoid causing suffering, but each of us is best able to know and look after our own happiness. If we want to contribute to our neighbor's happiness, very good, but let's not force it on him.