Bauen

Cool.

2006-10-27T15:20:00.000-05:00

When I walked into my building just now, I said "Bonsoir" to a French Senator.

Another good word

2006-10-25T06:23:00.000-05:00

pixilated (PIK-suh-layt-id) adjective

1. Mentally unbalanced; eccentric.

2. Whimsical.

[From pixie, a mischievous fairylike creature.]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=pixilated

-Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org)

"Robert De Niro redeems himself after his disastrous work in 'The Fan' by
displaying a refreshing flair for screwball comedy as Bessie's pixilated
physician, Dr. Wally."
James Verniere; 'Marvin's Room' Hits Home; Boston Herald; Jan 10, 1997.

NYT comment

2006-10-25T03:23:00.000-05:00

If voters had a sense of history, an appreciation of human variety expressed through culture, an acceptance and application of scientific truths, and dispositions to think critically, or at least insisted that their elected leaders have these qualities, then perhaps we wouldn’t be looking for optimism. We would be looking for wisdom. The two are not the same.

— Posted by dan stern

Favorite Quote of the Day (But way too optimistic)

2006-10-24T05:36:00.000-05:00

Dirk Cheney would croak due to the pressue, but he's in line for jail time first.

We might be seeing Pelosi as the first female president which I consider an excellent opportunity.

Posted by: christofay | October 23, 2006 at 11:12 AM

Very sad

2006-10-23T15:25:00.000-05:00

Such a sad story.

Great word.

2006-10-23T04:29:00.000-05:00

pertinacious (pur-tin-AY-shuhs) adjective

1. Holding resolutely to a purpose, belief, or opinion.

2. Stubbornly unyielding.

[From Latin pertinac- pertinax, per- (thoroughly) + tenax (tenacious),
from tenere (to hold).]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=pertinacious

-Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org)

"A man is pertinacious when he defends his folly and trusts too greatly
in his own wit."
Geoffrey Chaucer; Canterbury Tales: Explicit Secunda Pars Penitentie;
1387-1400 (Translation: Walter W. Skeat).

The Big Bang

2006-10-23T03:44:00.000-05:00

"[T]he notion of the Big Bang is quite a recent one. The idea had been kicking around since the 1920s, when George Lemaitre, a Belgian priest-scholar, first tentatively proposed it, but it didn't become an active notion in cosmology until the mid-1960s when two young radio astronomers made an extraordinary and inadvertent discovery. ...

"Their names were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. In 1965, they were trying to make use of a large communication antenna owned by Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, but they were troubled by a persistent background noise--a steady, steamy hiss that made any experimental work impossible. The noise was unrelenting and unfocused. It came from every point in the sky, day and night, through every season. For a year, the young astronomers did everything they could think of to track down and eliminate the noise. They tested every electrical system. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs. They climbed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as 'white dielectrical material,' or what is known more commonly as bird shit. Nothing they tried worked.

"Unknown to them, just thirty miles away at Princeton University, a team of scientists led by Robert Dicke was working on how to find the very thing they were trying so diligently to get rid of. The Princeton researchers were pursuing an idea that had been suggested in the 1940s by the Russian-born astrophysicist George Gamow that if you looked deep enough in space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang ..."

"Still unaware of what caused the noise, Wilson and Penzias phoned Dicke at Princeton and described their problem to him in the hope that he might suggest a solution. Dicke realized at once what the two young men had found. 'Well, boys, we've just been scooped,' he told his colleagues as he hung up the phone. ...

"Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation ... they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times."

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Broadway, 2003, pp. 11-12.

Testing.... My iTunes "Party Shuffle"

2006-10-20T04:57:00.000-05:00

From The Same Hill 3:00 Brian Eno Music For Films Electronic 14 20/10/06 11:39 AM
Night Fight 3:11 Tan Dun Crouching.Tiger.Hidden.Dragon. Soundtrack 2 20/10/06 11:42 AM
Joyful Sounds 3:45 S-WORD The Word Rock 2 20/10/06 11:45 AM
Ozone 1:39 Brian Eno [Textures] Electronic 2 20/10/06 11:47 AM
01 Aria 3:05 Composer: J.S.Bach; Pianist: Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations BWV 988 Classical 4 20/10/06 11:50 AM
Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber - Part II 5:08 Wu-Tang Clan Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) Hip-Hop
One Love 4:48 Massive Attack Blue Lines Trip-Hop
Hindsight 6:51 DJ Shadow Preemptive Strike (CD1) Electronic 11 25/4/06 2:16 PM
Octopus's_Garden 2:47 The Beatles Abbey Road Classic Rock
Willie 5:57 Cat Power The Greatest Indie 6 28/9/06 10:26 PM
Pueblo Nuevo 6:08 Buena Vista Social Club Unknown Jazz
Keyboard Concerto 0:30 RZA The Formula for the Cure Hip-Hop
Improvisation #2 6:39 Miles Davis The Cellar Door Sessions [Disc 2] Jazz 1 25/1/06 12:12 AM
Highway Chile 3:35 Jimi Hendrix Are You Experienced? Classic Rock
The Fake Headlines 2:45 The New Pornographers Mass Romantic Indie
Suzy Lee 3:23 The White Stripes The White Stripes Indie 1 4/10/05 7:03 PM
Waltz No. 12 in F minor/A flat, Op. 70 No. 2 1:44 Chopin, Frederic The Piano Works Disc 8// Waltzes Classical
07 Led Zeppelin - [Complete Studio Recordings (CD 01)] - 07 - Communication Breakdown 2:28 Led Zeppelin [Complete Studio Recordings (CD 01)] Classic Rock
Way To Blue 3:11 Nick Drake Five Leaves Left Indie 4 12/10/06 8:29 PM
Yakuza Oren 1 0:20 RZA Kill Bill: Vol. 1 Soundtrack 3 16/8/06 10:32 PM
E lucevan le stelle 3:45 Giacomo Puccini Tosca (Disk 2 of 2) Classical

Wow

2006-10-18T17:08:00.000-05:00

I am a bad blogger (and I think I may be starting over with a new blog), but this picture is just killing me.

How Sad.

2006-10-16T13:58:00.000-05:00

Even the French have home remodeling shows.

Larry David

2006-10-09T04:35:00.000-05:00

"Andy Breckman: I was there when Larry David wrote for Saturday Night Live. He was there for one season and he did not get one sketch on the air. Not one. And then he went on to do Seinfeld and be Mr. NBC. It was a Dick Ebersol year, and I'm sure that Larry has nothing good to say about Dick Ebersol, but of the sketches that Larry David didn't get on, some of them ... became the seeds of Seinfeld episodes. ... One sketch was about a guy who left a message on his girlfriend's answering machine that he regretted leaving, and he broke into his girlfriend's house to retrieve the answering machine tape. ...

"Elliot Wald: Larry would write pieces that, you know, we would just be falling on the floor over. Some of those became great Seinfeld episodes. The one about trying to get someone's apartment at a wake? Elaine did that in Seinfeld, but Larry wrote it first as a sketch. And we were falling down laughing. And Dick would say, 'That's not going on the air; that's not funny.' ...

"Larry David: It was the day before read-through around seven o'clock ... and I had been there maybe three weeks ... I had already written written maybe two or three sketches and maybe two news pieces for the update thing. So I was all set.

"So I'm waiting for the elevator to go home, and I remember Dick came out of the elevator, and I said, 'Good night,' and he said, 'What are you doing?!?' I said, 'Oh, I'm going home.' And he looked at me like I was out of my mind. He said, 'What do you mean, going home?' I said, 'Well, I've written three sketches and two news pieces and that's it, you know.' And he goes, 'But we stay up all night.' I go, 'What for?' He says, 'To write the show. That's when we write the show.' I said, 'But I've already written three pieces.' And he goes, 'Well, we stay here all night.' I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. And I said, 'I'm not staying up all night. For what? What am I going to do--just walk around? I'm all done.' So we kind of looked at each other and I said, you know, 'Good luck,' and I got on the elevator and left. I think that was the beginning of the end for me.' "

Tom Shales & James Andrew Miller, Live from New York, Little, Brown, 2002, pp. 269-272.

Sorry

2006-10-07T11:01:00.000-05:00

I moved to a new flat in Paris, so I have been very busy.

I will update soon. But I will leave you with a picture. The building dates from the 17th century.

Yum!

2006-09-28T16:55:00.000-05:00

Kermode

2006-09-28T15:30:00.000-05:00

"[Theory] attracted quite a lot of opprobrium. I never thought it should be taught to undergraduates. In those days teaching graduates what was then essentially French theory was exciting, as long as you were in control of what you were doing. I'm reminded of what Wayne C Booth (another of those once-famous critics) said: 'The really difficult thing is to understand why one has to work so hard to understand something that you do every day without the slightest difficulty' - reading a book, that is.

"I don't at all think that the time we spent on Theory was wasted. One of the great benefits of seriously reading English is you're forced to read a lot of other things. You may not have a very deep acquaintance with Hegel but you need to know something about Hegel. Or Hobbes, or Aristotle, or Roland Barthes. We're all smatterers in a way, I suppose. But a certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering".

Warning: First Impression Commentary

2006-09-27T12:44:00.000-05:00

Maybe this is a poor, jingoistic, stupid, superficial, or inaccurate first impression, but I get the feeling that France is going to get killed in the world economy.

I will explain this more in the future.

The drug war is fucking ludicrous.

2006-09-26T16:23:00.000-05:00

“These two men were responsible for importing more than 200 tons of cocaine into this country over the course of many years,” Mr. Gonzales said. “While at the height of their power, the intimidation and violence of their cartel held the people of the Colombian countryside hostage to fear.”

Mr. Gonzales said the two brothers also agreed to pay $2.1 billion in forfeiture.

“The brothers’ guilty plea effectively signaled the final, fatal blow to the powerful Cali cartel,” Mr. Gonzales said. “There are always other traffickers and thus continuing challenges for law enforcement, but this is a day of pride for the people of Colombia and for international law enforcement.”

THESE GUYS WERE BILLIONAIRES.

Yum!

2006-09-25T17:56:00.000-05:00

Now that's something you don't hear in America

2006-09-20T06:55:00.000-05:00

I am watching a Renault commercial, and the background music is Devendra Banheart ("I feel like a child").

So sweet!!!

2006-09-20T06:41:00.000-05:00

I am watching the World Cycling Championships on France 3 TV!

First Post

2006-09-19T18:37:00.000-05:00

IN FRANCE

Least Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-09-12T21:47:00.000-05:00

"Have you ever tried this EPO?" - My mother after reading this NY Times story about US Postal doping.

Least Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-09-09T10:57:00.000-05:00

"One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror," Bush told Couric, exclusively. "I believe it. As I told you, Osama bin Laden believes it. But the American people have got to understand that ... if this government [in Iraq] fails, the terrorists will be emboldened."

Schopenhauer

2006-09-07T10:18:00.000-05:00

"I [mention] Arthur Schopenhauer's well-known fable, a story Freud liked enough to cite in his book on group psychology [and] I paraphrase the fable as follows:

" 'A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter's day. In order to keep from freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to stop the pain, they spread out, lose the advantage of commingling, and begin to shiver. This sends them back in search of each other, and the cycle repeats as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.'

"The story spoke to Freud as a lesson about boundaries. ("No one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbor.") It also spoke to his belief that love is everywhere a thorny affair. Freud wrote: 'The evidence ... shows that almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time--marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children--contains a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility, which only escapes perception as a result of repression' ...

"All relationships ... require us to contain contradictory feelings for the same person. As the poet Molly Peacock observed: "There must be room in love for hate."

Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Schopenhauer's Porcupines, Basic Books, 2002, pp. 2-3.

Word of the Day

2006-09-07T10:15:00.000-05:00

pervicacious \puhr-vih-KAY-shuhs\, adjective:
Refusing to change one's ideas, behavior, etc.; stubborn; obstinate.

In fact, I'm a word nerd. I get a kick out of tossing a few odd ones intomy column, just to see if the pervicacious editors will weed them out.
-- Michael Hawley, "Things That Matter: Waiting for Linguistic Viagra", Technology Review, June, 2001

One of the most pervicacious young creatures that ever was heard of.
-- Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

The language of the bureaucrats and administrators must needs be recognized as an outgrowth of legal parlance. There is no other way to explain itspervading, pervicacious and pernicious meanderings.
-- New York Law Journal, May 27, 1909

Pervicacious is from Latin pervicax, pervicac-, "stubborn, headstrong," from root pervic- of pervincere, "to carry ones point, maintain ones opinion," from per-, "through, thoroughly" + vincere, "to conquer, prevail against" + the suffix -ious, "characterized by, full of."

Possibly the deepest sentence ever written?

2006-09-05T23:39:00.000-05:00

"Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word." - Louis Althusser

Watch Inside A Cell!

2006-09-05T18:20:00.000-05:00

Link to a video of the inner workings of a cell.

Cycling is Beautiful

2006-09-04T21:44:00.000-05:00

Gerolsteiner sprinter Robert Förster learned on Sunday that the hardest thing about a race is not the rivals or the course itself, but "the fight against yourself." And he won that fight yesterday, telling Radsportnews.com proudly, "We all survived! A great feeling."

After only 15 or 20 km, he was ready to throw in the towel and "get in the plane, go home." Directeur sportif Raimund Dietzen persuaded him to try it a little longer. As they started up the first Cat. 1 climb, it was teammate and roommate Marcel Strauss who helped him along, saying, "Just ride, Frösi, don't even think about it."

Eventually he caught up with teammates Markus Fothen and Heinrich Haussler, and the trio made plans to drop out at the feed zone. But before that, they joined the Petacchi group, and realized they weren't the only ones who wanted to take the easy way out. "It's just that, in this kind of a situation, no one wants to be the first to give up. If you drop out and the other 14 make the finish, then you can't look at yourself in the mirror. The others are torturing themselves just like you are. So you keep on going."

Things got better on the next to last climb. Förster felt that his only chance to survive was to ride at his own rhythm, which just happened to be a little faster than that of the grupetto. So he, Haussler and Staf Scheirlinckx of Cofidis took off together. Once they hit the top, they went for all-or-nothing, riding "80 or 90 km/h in the curves, even if you don't know what's there. Heinrich and I are both good descenders. Some colleagues say we're crazy. I'm not afraid, I find it fun," he said, but conceded, "But it is dangerous, you have to admit that."

The trio stayed together for the final climb and made the finish 32 minutes down. "I don't know why we ride such stages. Sure, those in the lead like Vino or Valverde put in great performances. But I think that someone like my teammate Strauss accomplished even more than they did. He rode 205 km behind everyone else, never saw more than an 8-man group. You need a lot of morale in order to get through that. In those six hours you age a few years. It is not only the physical stress, but also the mental, the fight against yourself."

AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-08-30T10:12:00.000-05:00

I hate our government.

Ambivalent Quotes of the Day

2006-08-28T13:35:00.000-05:00

"I swore since I can remember, I'm not going to let anyone kill a Jew, just because he's a Jew," Avi Dichter, then (2003) the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency.

"I learned, 'Remember and don't forget.' I drank it like mother's milk. It meant that Jews shouldn't be killed, but it also means that we don't kill others. You need strength to defend Israel, and on the other hand, to be a human." - Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, military chief of staff from 2002 to 2005.

The Moral Calculus of Targeted Bombings (Assassinations)

2006-08-28T13:27:00.000-05:00

Yaalon was directing the operation by conference call from his bedroom, where he sat in a blue tracksuit, scribbling notes. The air force chief was on the line, assessing the likely impact of the bomb. He said there was a problem.

A half-ton bomb wouldn't finish the job, the air force chief said. A one-ton bomb would blow out the neighboring apartment building, which was filled with dozens of families.

Immediately, Dichter and Yaalon began to argue. Dichter favored the heavy bomb; Yaalon wanted to abort the operation. They both had worked for decades in counter-terrorism, had served in the same secret commando unit and had, as Dichter put it, "traveled together without passports deep into Arab lands."

But they had emerged with different conclusions. For Dichter, "the barrel of terrorism has a bottom." If you captured or killed enough terrorists, Dichter believed, the problem would be solved. "They deserved a bomb that would send the dream team to hell," Dichter said. "I said, 'If we miss this opportunity, more Israelis will die.' "

Yaalon disagreed: "We won't get to the bottom of the barrel by killing terrorists. We'll get there through education. Dichter thinks we'll kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. That's it -- we've won. I don't accept that."

While Yaalon said the army had to consider the support of the Israeli public -- unlikely to favor civilian deaths -- and international legitimacy, Dichter said that from an operational point of view, a one-ton bomb made sense. "There is no fair fight against terrorists," Dichter said. "Never has been. Never will be."

Least Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-08-27T16:15:00.000-05:00

ORLANDO, Aug. 25 -- Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) said this week that God
did not intend for the United States to be a "nation of secular laws" and
that the separation of church and state is a "lie we have been told" to keep
religious people out of politics.

"If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to
legislate sin," Harris told interviewers from the Florida Baptist Witness,
the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention. She cited
abortion and same-sex marriage as examples of that sin.

Harris, a candidate in the Sept. 5 Republican primary for U.S. Senate, said
her religious beliefs "animate" everything she does, including her votes in
Congress.

Stop Right There! You! The Matter in Your Hand is NOT Allowed

2006-08-21T10:39:00.000-05:00

Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-08-20T21:12:00.000-05:00

"A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries." - The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

What's your opinion of education in rural Africa?

2006-08-20T12:56:00.000-05:00

But they're learning. Christina Carroll, a sophomore at the College of William and Mary, tells me that conservatives on her campus are afraid to speak out and that she's trying to do something about it. She took a women's studies course last semester and the professor so disliked her conservative take that she got kicked out of class once for her opinions.

Pressed, she's vague. "I believe, I'm not exactly sure, I think that day we were talking about education in rural Africa."

"She kicked you out because you disagreed with her about education in rural Africa?"

"Well, it's more that she got fed up with me in general."

Firm in her understanding of the power of the isolated anecdote, Carroll is struggling to gain command of the convincing details. Still, she's in good company. She is being tutored.

What Bay Buchanan and Christina Hoff Sommers and YAF and Clare Boothe Luce and all the other organizations courting campus conservatives know is that the way to counter "statistically challenged" progressives is not with better statistics (after all, those might be hard to find) but with good stories. Passion motivates.

And in the battle for young minds in the academy, it's all about perception. Targeted attacks and cultivating a few loud voices can generate media attention to the conservative presence on campus. A little money, well spent, can create an illusion of discontent. And, when speaking in neighborly, over-the-fence yarns, sometimes all you need is one good anecdote.

Good comment at CT

2006-08-20T12:44:00.000-05:00

#

> I bring this up because I see this all as
> part of a great tug-of-war between vigilant
> consumers and clever companies.

The typical consumer goods company has hundreds if not thousands of people working 70 hours weeks using the most sophisticated research, tools, etc. known to man to persuade (generous interpretation) or trick (more reasonable interpretation) the consumer into buying its product. The consumer has about 7 seconds at the grocery store (or 7 minutes if considering a big ticket item) to make a choice. How do you think this tug-of-war will come out?

Cranky
Posted by Cranky Observer · August 14th, 2006 at 8:17 pm

In reference to DRM and P(roperty)RM

Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-08-18T22:25:00.000-05:00

Much of Benjamin’s early writing, though always stamped with his oblique intelligence, is the small change of journalism: travel pieces, book reviews, an article on the Berlin Food Exhibition of 1928. In addition to giving Benjamin a precarious living, such work helped him adapt his extremely dense style, formed in the harsh school of German idealist philosophy, into a more appealing literary instrument. Even so, his prose remained challenging. A friend once told him, “In great writing, the proportion between the total number of sentences and those sentences whose formulation was especially striking or pregnant was about one to thirty—whereas it was more like one to two in [your] case.” (“All this is correct,” Benjamin admitted.)

Spinoza

2006-08-18T20:16:00.000-05:00

"Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and compassion. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of which had never before been seen on this earth.

Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics on the march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry world would have been without it."

Experts

2006-08-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

"Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study."

Bolivia

2006-08-17T00:59:00.000-05:00

"The café was the same one in which years ago I had interviewed the legendary mining leader Juan Lechìn, and Flores took note of the coincidence with pleasure. I asked him why, of all the many grass-roots leaders the years of misery and turbulence in Bolivia had produced, it was not a campesinoor a miners' union leader who emerged as the consensus choice to lead the party and run for president, but Evo Morales, a coca farmer who represented only a tiny sector of the population, "Because the cocaleros had a different struggle," he answered. "In my district no one was bombarding my cows or eradicating my soybeans. They weren't threatening our very livelihoods, so our farmers could choose whether or not to join the Federation or go on a roadblock. It made organizing very difficult. In the Chapare there was no choice; they had to fight. So the cocaleros would always arrive at our congresses as a tightly-knit, forceful body. Logically, Evo was elected as the leader.""

Least Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-08-15T14:41:00.000-05:00

On his return, Bush held a press conference during which, it seemed, he could barely contain his enthusiasm. In response to a question about progress in providing electricity, producing oil, and controlling violence, he swerved into a discussion of his encounter with the speaker of Iraq's parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani. The President didn't seem to recall his name but readily remembered his religion:

"The Sunni—I was impressed, by the way, by the Speaker—Denny Hastert told me I'd like him; Denny met with him. And I was impressed by him. He's a fellow that had been put in prison by Saddam and, interestingly enough, put in prison by us. And he made a decision to participate in the government. And he was an articulate person. He talked about running the parliament. It was interesting to see a person that could have been really bitter talk about the skills he's going to need to bring people together to run the parliament. And I found him to be a hopeful person.

They tell me that he wouldn't have taken my phone call a year ago—I think I might have shared this with you at one point in time—and there I was, sitting next to the guy. And I think he enjoyed it as much as I did. It was a refreshing moment."

The incurious White House press corps never asked the obvious question: Why had the United States jailed al-Mashhadani? According to Sunnis and Shiites at the top levels of government in Iraq, al-Mashhadani was a member of, or closely associated with, two al-Qaeda-linked terrorists groups, Ansar Islam and Ansar al-Sunna. The first operated until 2003 in a no man's land high in the mountains between Iraqi Kurdistan and Iran while the second has been responsible for some of the worse terrorist attacks on Iraq's Shiites and Kurds. The Iraqis say they gave the Americans specific intelligence on al-Mashhadani's affiliations with those groups and his actions in support of terrorists.

None of this seems to have mattered to a president who is as casual in his approach to national security as his defense secretary. At the same press conference Bush repeated that "the American people have got to understand that Iraq is a part of the war on terror."

Perhaps the two most important American mainstream media sources are the New York Review of Books and New Yorker.

Review of Sen's Identity and Violence

2006-08-13T14:27:00.000-05:00

Identity and Violence is his attempt to overcome that bewilderment. As an economist Sen has been hugely influential, helping found the new discipline of social choice theory and winning the Nobel prize for economic sciences in 1998. Through his seminal studies of famine and his theory of freedom as a positive condition involving the full exercise of human capabilities, he has done more to criticise standard models of economic development than any other living thinker. In his new book he writes more as a liberal philosopher than as an economist. Impassioned, eloquent and often moving, Identity and Violence is a sustained attack on the "solitarist" theory which says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group. Sen believes this solitarist fallacy shapes much communitarian and multicultural thinking, as well as Samuel Huntingdon's theory of "clashing civilisations". In each case it involves the fallacy of defining the multiple and shifting identities present in every human being in terms of a single, unchanging essence. In Sen's view the idea that we can be divided up in this way leads to a "miniaturisation" of humanity, with everyone locked up in tight little boxes from which they emerge only to attack one another.

Quick Thought

2006-08-12T21:11:00.000-05:00

Hegemonic Stability Theory but for politics. The US and Israel must suffer some acts of violence (corresponding to having an open market but having developing countries being closed) and respond with diplomacy.

If this makes sense to no one else, that's fine. I just need to write it down for myself. Otherwise it goes down the memory hole.

Least Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-08-12T20:20:00.000-05:00

I'm a proponent of developing solar energy so we can ignore that entire part of the world just like we do with Africa.

Posted by: gswift | Link to this comment | 08-12-06 02:24 AM

Of course, it is a joke. But it is also trenchant and profound.

Least Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-08-11T22:07:00.000-05:00

Back to that email, Mr. Secretary. Hundreds of people have been awakened with dreams of a war with Iraq quickly escalating into World War III. What can effectively be done to limit the conflict, and what is your opinion about the possibility of a wider war breaking out?

Rumsfeld: In the event that force has to be used with Iraq, there will be no World War III. The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that. And, it won't be a World War III. And if I were to characterize the difference between 1990 and today, the United States military is vastly more powerful. And the Iraqi Army and military capability has declined substantially. The difference is, the reason for needing to disarm Iraq, and that is chemical and biological weapons today, and a very robust effort to develop nuclear weapons tomorrow. And, that is the difference between today and then.

Least Favorite Quote of the Day

2006-08-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

"How the heck can we be in a battle in which we are fighting as Democrats and Republicans against each other, when these terrorists certainly don't distinguish based on party affiliation? They want to kill any and all of us." - Joe Lieberman

Informative article on a CIA operator

2006-08-10T20:03:00.000-05:00

Informative article on Blackwater (the private military firm)

2006-08-09T11:14:00.000-05:00

Good comment at Crooked Timber

2006-08-08T11:35:00.000-05:00

#

Richard Cownie got it right. Israel and Lebanon can only lose from this madness, but Olmert and Nasrallah come out political winners. (Just as Bush gained politically from Iraq until very recently, while the national interest of the US took a big hit.) Without understanding this, it’s impossible to understand why the madness continues.
Posted by Steve LaBonne · August 1st, 2006 at 8:35 am

Interesting Pink Floyd (just Syd, actually) footage

2006-08-06T21:19:00.000-05:00

Health Care

2006-08-05T17:51:00.000-05:00

"...when one compares life expectancy in the United States with that of other countries, it quickly becomes evident that the vast sums the United States spends on healthcare buys very little health. The United States spends far more on healthcare than any other country--roughly $4,500 per person annually. Yet three-fourths of developed countries outrank America in life expectancy and infant mortality. Even some Third World countries have life tables comparable to the United States, despite miniscule spending on health care. In Costa Rica, total health care expenditures per person come to just $273 a year in 2000. And there are little more than half as many doctors per capita as in the United States. Yet life expectancy at birth in Costa Rica is 76.1 years, virtually the same as in the United Sates. Moreover, the adult population in Costa Rica has a substantially better chance of becoming elderly. In the United States, the chances of dying between age 15 and 59 are 14.4 percent for men and 8.3 percent for women. In Costa Rica, the chances are 13.4 percent for men and 7.8 percent for women.

"...the biggest reasons have to do with behavior and environment. Per capita cigarette consumption in Costa Rica is half that of the United States..The rate of car ownership (and accidents) is rising, but most Ticans spend much of their time walking up and down steep hills. There are more McDonalds and KFCs all the time, and obesity among children is starting to be a problem, but with a traditional diet based on rice, beans, plenty of fruits and vegetables, and moderate amounts of fried food, the number of overweight people is still strikingly less than in the United States."

Phillip Longman, The Empty Cradle, Basic Books, 2004, pp. 100-101

Scary article about David Addington

2006-08-03T16:36:00.000-05:00

Note how often the word "flexibility" comes up. Note how often the phrase "maximum flexibility" comes up. They want unbounded power. They do not believe in the rule of law.

Talking about Wikipedia

2006-08-03T16:01:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker article reflects my ambivalent attitude towards Wikipedia. Although I love reading about DEVGRU and the drug trade (where rumors and hearsay are more fruitful than expert peer-reviewed knowledge), most topics do benefit from a cautious and belabored vetting process to arrive at truth.

Good Point

2006-08-03T14:22:00.000-05:00

#

I’m waiting for market capitalism, free or fair, to be inserted into the “funamental attribution error” column, so we can quit talking about competitive management fads and get down to cooperative social solutions.

I’m still waiting.
Posted by jim · July 29th, 2006 at 2:38 am

Genius

2006-07-31T15:16:00.000-05:00

"Herbert A. Simon (of Carnegie Mellon) coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. (Based on the evidence) even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others.

"...K. Anders Ericsson (of Florida State University) argues that what matters is not experience but 'effortful study,' which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time...

"Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or driving a car. But having reached an acceptable level of performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their field."

Philip E. Ross, "The Expert Mind," Scientific American, August 2006, pp. 69-70

Weber

2006-07-28T13:43:00.000-05:00

"The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient to their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than an intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts. I would be so immodest as even to apply the expression 'moral achievement' though perhaps this may sound too grandiose for something that should go without saying." - Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation" (1918).

A Word That Belies Its Meaning

2006-07-28T13:31:00.000-05:00

Stentorian

The Dhimmi

2006-07-28T13:05:00.000-05:00

"...Jews throve under Muslim rule, especially after Islam expanded into Byzantine lands, where Orthodox rulers routinely persecuted both Jews and non- Orthodox Christians for their religious beliefs, often forcing them to convert to Imperial Christianity under penalty of death. In contrast, Muslim law, which considers Jews and Christians 'protected peoples' (dhimmi), neither required nor encouraged their conversion to Islam. (Pagans and polytheists, however, were given a choice between conversion and death.)

"Muslim persecution of the dhimmi was not only forbidden by Islamic law, it was in direct defiance of Muhammad's orders to his expanding armies never to trouble Jews in their practice of Judaism, and always to preserve the Christian institutions they encountered. Thus, when Umar (Caliph and second successor to Muhammad) ordered the demolition of a mosque in Damascus that had been illegally constructed by forcibly expropriating the house of a Jew, he was merely following the Prophet's warning that 'he who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgement.'

"...Islamic law did prohibit Jews and Christians from openly proselytizing their faith in public places. But...such prohibitions affected Christians more than they did Jews, who had been historically disinclined toward both proselytizing and public displays of their religious rituals. This may explain why Christianity gradually disappeared in most Islamic lands, while Jewish communities increased and prospered."

"(Muhammad) saw these differences (among the three religions) as part of the divine plan of God...Thus, to the Jews, God sent the Torah, 'which contains guidance and light'; to the Christians, God sent Jesus, who 'confirms the Torah', and finally, to the Arabs, God sent the Quran, which 'confirms the earlier revelations.' In this way, the ideological differences among the Peoples of the Book is (sic) explained by the Quran as indicating God's desire to give each people its own 'law and path and way of life.' "

Reza Aslan, No god but God, Random House, 2005, pp. 94-5, 101

On another note:

2006-07-28T12:44:00.000-05:00

Firefox is so much faster than Safari. I cannot believe I waited this long to switch. I do a lot of tabbed browsing and Firefox just kicks the crap out of Safari.

An Unfair Tribute of Suffering

2006-07-28T12:43:00.000-05:00

"The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering."

"Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it's the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell."

~ Roland Barthes, French philosopher and bicycle racing fan, author of Mythologies, describes Mont Ventoux in the Tour de France.

So True

2006-07-28T12:37:00.000-05:00

"But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race."

~ Donald Antrim

Exactly what I am thinking towards the end of a 160 km road race or a 90 minute criterium.

Creative Quote

2006-07-27T19:44:00.000-05:00

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature
born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound
is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a
lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate
organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something
of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour
out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really
alive unless he is creating. -Pearl S. Buck, novelist, Nobel laureate
(1892-1973)

Das Capital as Literature

2006-07-25T23:23:00.000-05:00

File under worth looking into.

Fascinating Book Review on Free Speech

2006-07-25T14:47:00.000-05:00

Not that I reject the arguments for free speech, but I have found many of them to be glib - e.g. "the marketplace of ideas" and "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The abyss-redemption argument also seems problematic, but we need to study it more.

I wonder if there have been any empirical (consequentialist) studies on free speech (Is the marketplace of ideas efficient? Do the best ideas rise to the top?) Are the familiar deontological arguments for free speech more convincing than empirical defenses?

Pretty Pictures

2006-07-25T14:11:00.000-05:00

Somerby

2006-07-25T11:30:00.000-05:00

"Simply put, that is one of the ugliest moments in recent American history. In this moment, Connolly—a journalistic disgrace throughout this campaign—invented another fake claim about Gore, a claim that would be repeated, far and wide, for the rest of Campaign 2000. If you want to know why the U.S. Army is now in Iraq, go ahead—reread those three paragraphs by Connolly, who would be drummed out of any real profession for her astonishing conduct throughout this campaign. Starting in early April 1999, Connolly just kept making up bogus claims about Gore. Result? George Bush ended up in the White House—and the US Army ended up in Iraq. If you don’t understand that chain of events, you don’t yet understand recent history."

Ten Dimensions!

2006-07-21T20:43:00.000-05:00

A concise, cogent presentation of higher dimensions.

The Sublime.

2006-07-21T20:41:00.000-05:00

The Sublime

2006-07-17T22:06:00.000-05:00

Good comment at Brad DeLong's

2006-07-17T17:46:00.000-05:00

«I've frequently heard something like "Education is the best single factor deciding lifetime earnings". So if we want to increase equality, we should promote education,»

This is just a way of saying that income inequality depends on objective factors, and since people with less education tend to be ashamed of that, it is a way of making them feel guilty for being poorer.

«If education is being used as a selector, then increasing the educational level of the populace will just raise the bar.»

Well, one could advance the idea that rewards flow to the top 5%, irrespective of the absolute educational level. Let's look at graduates...

When only 5% of the population got a degree, 100% of graduates had it very good, as their degree had scarcity value.

Now that 40-50% of the population has a degree, not having one sucks; but having one is not awesome either, unless it is from the same institutions (Ivy league, Oxbridge) that graduate the top 5%, and once granted all degrees...

Mass education as you say does not much affect the _distribution_ of the pie, because it does not much change the bargaining power of employees vs. employers. It does not even affect much the absolute level of compensation, according to the data, as all productivity gains go to asset holders (and the top 1% of income earners are really asset holders).

More education has sure and immediate costs and uncertain (for those not in the top 5%) and long term benefits. Then what matters is who captures the benefits if any...

With mass education the benefits are largely captured by _employers_, because increased competition among employees reduces the scarcity value and pricing power of ''bulk headcount'' credentials.

Mass education also has wonderful side effects: it considerably reduces the reported rate of unemployment (a very important factor for many OECD governments), and makes employees more desperate to get a job and afraid of losing it because of university debt.

No wonder that the ''more education'' line is so common among certain advocates...

As to productivity, a good high school education is usually all that's needed to obtain the productivity benefits in a modern economy. Degrees are really only necessary for the professions and for access to the elite jobs.

Posted by: Blissex | July 16, 2006 at 07:34 AM

Somerby

2006-07-15T20:27:00.000-05:00

Being human, we’re all inclined to put our thumb on the scale when we review events around us. But we don’t see how we can build a real progressive politics out of posting embellished complaints. Going a bit further, it seems to us that progressives will be poorly served by adopting the tactics of the kooky-con right (something this writer at the Huffington Post seemed to advocate this weekend). Increasingly, our politics is going to feature battles between the haves and have-nots. For progressives, the other side will increasingly be better-connected and more powerful. In these future debates, the most powerful tool we’ll have on our side will be an insistence on traditional standards of fact and logic. We will never be able to out-bullroar the tribunes of the rich and the powerful. Our view? When we head down that tempting road, we commit ourselves to future defeat.

We don’t know Harwood, and we’re not major fans. As noted, he’s competent, bland, conventional, predictable—but no, his isn’t a right-winger. On Meet the Press, he went after Bennett for the whole segment. But then, there was nothing surprising about that. In fact, Meet the Press had not assembled a panel of “right-wingers” that day.
On the liberal web, we often brag that we represent the “reality-based” community. In the future, progressives will continue to find themselves at war with well-funded dissemblers—tribunes of powerful upper-class interests. Our view? Aggressive embrace of “reality”—of the traditions of fact and logic—will constitute our best hope for success. It’s always tempting to overstate—and being human, we all end up doing it. But for progressives, it’s a road to defeat. There they go again, we should say, when tribunes of the powerful do it.

Sweet Sailing

2006-07-13T20:46:00.000-05:00

An impressive use of carbon fiber to say the least.

The Sublime

2006-07-12T21:16:00.000-05:00

Tom Petty

2006-07-11T23:44:00.000-05:00

"The war in Iraq is shameful. Whether you're pro or con Bush, you've got to admit: The guy lied. And he continues to do so. I can't understand why he's just not run out on a rail. To send somebody's kids off and have them killed for no good reason--he's going to have his day in hell for that. I wouldn't want that karma.

When you kill somebody's little sister with a missile, he's going to hate you forever. And the next generation will hate you even more." - Tom Petty

The Sublime

2006-07-10T19:52:00.000-05:00

Bilabial

2006-07-06T23:10:00.000-05:00

I wonder if the bilabial sound of papa and moma were selected so babies could alert their parents?

bilabial (by-LAY-bee-uhl) adjective

Using both lips.

noun

A bilabial sound or consonant, for example p, b, m, where both lips
touch each other, and w in which lips are rounded.

[Latin bi- (two) + labial, from labium (lip), ultimately from Indo-European
root leb- (lip, to lick) that's also the source of lip, labrose (having
thick or large lips), and labret (an ornament worn in a pierced lip).]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=bilabial

-Anu Garg (gargATwordsmith.org)

"Bilabial sounds like mamma, papa and baba are probably the easiest for
the infant mouth to master."
Jack Rosenthal; From Arf to Zap; The New York Times; Jun 30, 1985.

Groups

2006-07-06T22:40:00.000-05:00

"We thought that perhaps our species thrives best and most creatively in a state of semi-anarchy, governed by loose rules and half-practiced mores. To this we add the premise that over-integration in human groups might parallel the law in paleontology that over-armor and over-ornamentation are symptoms of decay and disappearance. Indeed, we thought, over-integration might be the symptom of human decay. We thought: there is no creative unit in the human save the individual working alone. In pure creativeness, in art, in music, in mathematics...the creative principle is a lonely and individual matter. Groups can correlate, investigate, and build, but we could not think of any group that has ever created or invented anything. Indeed, the first impulse of the group seems to be to destroy the creation and the creator...

"Consider, we would say, the Third Reich or the Politburo-controlled Soviet. The sudden removal of twenty-five key men from either system could cripple it so thoroughly that it would take a long time to recover, if it ever could. To preserve itself in safety such a system must destroy or remove all opposition as a danger to itself. But opposition is creative and restriction is non-creative. The force that feeds growth is therefore cut off...thought and art must be forced to disappear and a weighty traditionalism take its place...A too greatly integrated system or society is in danger of destruction since the removal of one unit may cripple the whole.

"Consider the blundering anarchic system of the United States, the stupidity of some of its lawmakers, the violent reaction, the slowness of its ability to change. Twenty-five key men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but we could lose our congress, our president and our general staff and nothing much would have happened. We would go right on. In fact we might be better for it..."

John Steinbeck, The Log From the Sea of Cortez, Penguin, 1951, pp. 257-8

Funny comment at Phrayngula

2006-07-06T18:56:00.000-05:00

"Hmmm, wasn't January around the time Tim Curtin et al were braying loudest about the genocidal atrocities of the environmental movement and loudly and sanctimonously accusing people of not caring about Africans'lifes?"

"How dare you criticize the right of companies to flood the market with drugs, quickly establishing resistance, thereby requiring new drugs to be developed"

Anxiety

2006-07-03T08:53:00.000-05:00

"Such is the depth of anxiety that one-fifth or more of Americans believe they will personally be victims of a future terrorist attack. This number has not budged in the last four and a half years." - Source unclear

Walter Benjamin

2006-07-02T21:49:00.000-05:00

"With Benjamin there was, I think, an inability to embrace the illusion of a future. Yet without an investment in what might be, one is doomed to dwell solely on what was, and, in the case of those in extremis, to see the hardships one is presently forced to endure as the only reality. I have always shared Adorno's and Horkheimer's view that Benjamin's social criticism was compromised by his religious idealism, and I have, in particular, never accepted the idea that the present is simply a site of eternal return for all that has gone before, and that the possibility of renewal lies in meditating on a dismembered past.10 In this view, entropy is inescapable (the debris piling up at our feet as the storm of progress hurls us away from paradise), and redemption dependent on the appearance of a savior. But perhaps it was Benjamin's unworldliness I found so unsettling—the accusation that the intellectual is by definition maladapted to real life, to practical tasks, to marriage, to human relationships, his head in the clouds, his life in an ivory tower, his ideas of no earthly use. Yet I shared the view of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno that the thinker does not owe it to society to demonstrate how it might be changed for the better. Although Marx had taken exception to the notion that the task of the philosopher was simply to understand the world, not change it, I had a deep aversion to prescriptions and exhortations as to how one should lead one's life, and was drawn to Anna Akhmatova's desire to describe, before all else, and to "stand as witness to the common lot.""

Lord Acton (1834-1902)

2006-06-27T13:03:00.000-05:00

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority." Letter to Mandell Creighton, 1887

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." Letter to Mary Gladstone, 1881

"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end." Lecture, February 26, 1877

"The man who prefers his country before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority."

"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason."

"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities."

Meh

2006-06-27T12:56:00.000-05:00

"Dali described the genesis of this painting in his 1942 autobiography...in which he claimed that the unforgettable limp watches were inspired by the remains of a very strong Camembert cheese. He had contemplated this cheese one evening after dinner, when he stayed at home with a headache while Gala went to the cinema with friends. Having meditated on the 'super-soft' qualities of the runny cheese, Dali went to his studio where he suddenly realized how he should finish a lonely landscape featuring the rugged cliffs of the Catalan coast, illuminated by a never-setting sun, which had been sitting on his easel awaiting inspiration.

"I knew the atmosphere which I had succeeded in creating with this landscape was to serve as a setting for some idea, for some surprising image, but I did not in the least know what it was going to be...

"Throughout his career Dali explored his fascination with softness and malleability in numerous paintings, sculptures and works on paper...However none has a more obvious sexual significance than the limp pocket watches in this painting...

"Although Gala would prophetically claim that 'no one can forget it once he has seen it,' The Persistence of Memory was left unsold when it was first shown in Paris...However the young American art dealer, Julien Levy, acquired the painting shortly after the close of the show, paying the trade price of a mere $250."

Dawn Ades and Michael R. Taylor, Dali, Rizzoli, 2005, p. 148

Somewhat Sanctimonious

2006-06-27T12:54:00.000-05:00

"Perhaps the most astute financial mind in the Oppenheimer (investment management) galaxy was Daniel J. Bernstein...

"Daniel Bernstein died of leukemia at age 51 in 1970...He left behind a legacy of good works that reflected his diligence and originality. He started the National Scholarship Fund and Service for Negro Students when, after calling around the country, he realized there were many scholarships for African Americans that went begging simply because students weren't aware of them. He was able to enlist scores of college presidents to support the effort. Also a vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam, he paid for a series of ads in The New York Times that listed the names of professors and other prominent Americans who called for an end to American involvement.

"Although Danny was clearly a master of the game, making money was not an end in itself for him. I think that is true of many successful people in finance. Apart from giving money away, they have passionate outside interests. George Soros wants to rescue civil society; Jim Wolfensohn, a gifted dealmaker who is now president of the World Bank, has a passion for music; Jon Corzine seamlessly stepped from running Goldman Sachs to pursuing a liberal agenda in the U.S. Senate.

"It is easy to dismiss the outside indulgences of the rich as hobbies they can afford, but I think this misses the point. Quite often those outside interests provided an anchor or larger perspective that was essential to their success in finance. In the top financial ranks are disproportionate numbers of contrarians. (This makes perfect sense, since investors too deeply wedded to conventional wisdom will perform only as well as the bulk of the crowd.) These successful contrarians often have a worldview of which finance and the markets are but a small part."

Leon Levy, The Mind of Wall Street, Public Affairs Press, 2002, pp.71-4

Roger Waters

2006-06-26T20:51:00.000-05:00

"Those fundamental issues of whether or not the human race is capable of being humane are still right in our faces. There's an optimistic side of me that thinks that - that feels that - not just individuals but hierarchies - authorities - are capable of rehabilitation. You know, wouldn't it be wonderful to think that G.W. Bush was capable of transcending his background and becoming a person who could understand broader and more fundamental issues of human contact than that kind of you know sheriff thing that he's got going on. The fundamental question that's facing us all is whether or not we're capable of dealing with the whole question of 'Us and Them.'"

Derivatives

2006-06-20T10:59:00.000-05:00

"...derivatives (are) financial instruments whose values are tied to the performance of assets such as individual stocks and bonds, or to benchmarks such as interest rates. Investors use them to hedge risk. An investor can buy a derivative, for example, to neutralize the effects of rising interest rates or fuel prices, of declining bond values, of swings in the price of a commodity like corn, even the effect of weather on crops.

"...The over-the-counter market is far larger than the exchange-traded ones. Derivatives traded in this market had a total face value of about $285 trillion at the end of 2005, up from about $94 trillion five years before, according to the Bank for International Settlements, an association of international banks based in Switzerland...In comparison, exchange- traded derivatives had a total face value of about $58 trillion at year-end, according to the bank group."

David Reilly, "An Arcane Corner of Finance Creates a London Billionaire," The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2006, A1, A15

Exertion

2006-06-20T10:44:00.000-05:00

Everyone confesses that exertion which brings out all the powers of body
and mind is the best thing for us; but most people do all they can to get
rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances
drive them to do. -Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and novelist
(1811-1896

Zarathustra

2006-06-13T17:06:00.000-05:00

"More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation that a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil. At the center of Zarathustra's theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god, Ahura Mazda ('the Wise Lord'), who fashioned the heavens and earth, the night and day, the light and the darkness. Like most ancients, however, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as being the source of both good and evil. He therefore developed an ethical dualism in which two opposing spirits, Spenta Mainyu ('the beneficent spirit') and Angra Mainyu ('the hostile spirit') were responsible for good and evil, respectively."

Reza Aslan, No god but God, Random House, 2005, pp. 12-3

Mark Twain

2006-06-13T12:52:00.000-05:00

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow- mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." The Innocents Abroad, 1869 (Conclusion)

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." Life on the Mississippi, 1883 (Chapter 17)

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits." Pudd'n'head Wilson, 1894 (Chapter 15)

"The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it," and

"To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently aware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct." Both from How to Tell a Story, 1895

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." (attributed)

"A classic is something that everybody praises and nobody has read." (attributed)

A Sentimental Education, Flaubert.

2006-06-11T20:16:00.000-05:00

"He ran all the way to the Quai Voltaire. An old man in his shirt sleeves was weeping at an open window, his eyes raised towards the sky. The Seine was flowing peacefully by. The sky was blue; birds were singing in the Tuileries."

One of the most haunting fictional passages.

Very Very Interesting, but do we want more myths? (even if they are created by the people)

2006-06-06T22:29:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking about Rauschenberg and the Situationists recently as two (albeit unlikely) sides of the same coin in an effort to understand the historical precedents for what appears to be an emerging trend or, at the very least, a shared sensibility among some individual artists who are exploring the confluence of art and life. They are combining Rauschenberg’s incorporative tendencies with the Situationists’ programmatic call for the dissolution of art into lived experience to produce work that infiltrates the world and subtly alters reality by rewriting its cultural narratives. Situating their art firmly within the everyday, they are each creating ‘real’ fictions with the goal of modifying the very fabric of our social discourse. These fictions are often staged as events, but it is less the performative aspect of the work than the way it is remembered, discussed and disseminated within the public’s collective consciousness that constitutes the conceptual core of each project. In short, the artists are producing contemporary myths from the stuff of the real world, converting the ordinary into the remarkable or, at least, the merely memorable.

I first became aware of this tendency in 2002, when Francis Alÿs moved a mountain – or so the story goes. As his contribution to the third Ibero American Biennial, Lima, the artist directed 500 shovel-wielding volunteers standing in a single line at the base of a 1,600 foot-long sand dune to displace enough earth to shift its location, albeit by just a few inches. This project, When Faith Moves Mountains, evolved out of Alÿs’ response to the havoc wreaked by the decade-long presidency of Alberto Fujimori in Peru. In a place of such severe deprivation and desolation he wanted to create an extreme yet poetic gesture that would reverberate beyond the comfortable confines of the art-viewing audience. Hence Alÿs gave the inhabitants of Lima a ‘social allegory’ to tell and retell until it becomes the stuff of local legend, a story recounting the day the earth moved. Although there are photographs and a video installation documenting this most ephemeral of earthworks, the art, according to Alÿs, can be fully realized only through the recitation and circulation of its narrative. He understands this process as the fabrication of a myth, which, rather than being about the perpetuation of political or cultural values imposed from above, requires the direct interpretive participation of the audience, who must determine the work’s meaning in relation to its own experience.1

Hey! It's me at 28mph

2006-06-06T20:30:00.000-05:00

The Sublime

2006-06-05T21:10:00.000-05:00

Marx

2006-06-04T18:10:00.000-05:00

In our day everything seems pregnant with its contrary . . . .Some parties may wish to get rid of modern arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts . . . .We know that to work well, the new-fangled forces of society [need only] to be mastered by new-fangled men—and such are the working men. They are as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself.

—Karl Marx, Speech on the Anniversary of the People’s Paper, 1856

The Street

2006-06-04T17:36:00.000-05:00

"Although America was poised for a great boom, most people did not know it. When I joined Wall Street, we were in the middle of the longest bear market of the post-World War II period...The bear market was a gift of the Federal Reserve Board, which had raised margin requirements to 100% to head off a speculative frenzy after the war. It is difficult to overestimate the degree to which the psychological legacy of the Depression weighed upon the market in those days. Memories of the role of margin debt in the 1929 crash were fresh in people's minds. The Fed not only raised margin requirements from 40 percent to 100 percent, which forced speculators to sell stock to meet margin calls, but it also imposed a regulation that sellers of stock who had margin debt could use the proceeds of the sale only to further reduce that debt. This knocked the Dow Jones Industrial Average down by 25 percent in the span of three months.

"The investment climate was deeply conservative...Trust funds in New York State could at best keep only 25 percent of their holdings in stock, but most trustees opted to stash their entire portfolios in bonds. The logic of this analysis was that stocks are inherently more risky than bonds and thus should provide their holders with a 'risk premium.'

"Those who did trade stocks were few and did so rarely. In the 1950s, only 5 percent of Americans owned stocks, in contrast to over 50 percent who own stocks today. Tape watchers had to be a particularly patient breed then, as Dow Jones computed its industrial average only once every hour, and even then it was often late."

Leon Levy, The Mind of Wall Street, Public Affairs, 2002, pp. 42-3

Oscar Wilde

2006-06-01T20:48:00.000-05:00

"The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself."

"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." An Ideal Husband, 1893

"I can resist anything but temptation." Lady Windermere's Fan, Act I, 1892

"Only the shallow know themselves." Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, 1882

"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has the right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution." The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I, 1895

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

Propaganda

2006-06-01T20:11:00.000-05:00

"In December 1916...Buchan was put forward to run a propaganda department.

"Propaganda was not a new weapon in the Government's armoury. . . Charles Masterman . . . had been appointed to head a propaganda bureau...and on 2 September 1914 he brought together twenty five leading British authors to discuss propaganda. They included J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Robert Bridges, G.K. Chesterton, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Hope Hawkins, John Masefield, Gilbert Murray, Sir Henry Newbolt, G.M. Trevelyan and H.G. Wells. Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, though unable to attend, also offered their services.

"The Central Committee for National Patriotic Associations had been formed in August 1914 with Asquith as honorary chairman...and coordinated the activities of other groups such as 'The Fight for Right Movement'..."

"(Buchan also) brought in...the explorer Reginald Farrar, E.S.P. Haynes and the cricketer Pelham Warner. Other members of the department included...Sir Ernest Shackleton and the historian Arnold Toynbee...The head of Reuters, Roiderick Jones, whom Buchan had known in South Africa, was appointed to run the section on cable and wireless propaganda, F.S. Oliver went briefly to the British Dominions Section and Alexander Watt was made the Department's Literary Agent."

Andrew Lownie, John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier, Godine Publisher, 1995, p. 127-8

Pier Paolo Pasolini

2006-05-31T22:13:00.000-05:00

In politics too, or better, in the social debate, Pasolini was able to create scandal and debate with some assertions that were as much unheard as, at the same time, true: during the disorders of 1969, when the autonomist university students were acting in a guerrilla-like fashion against the police in the streets of Rome, all the leftist forces declared their complete support for the students, and described the disorders as a civil fight of proletarians against the system. Pasolini, instead, alone among the communists, declared that he was with the police; or, more precisely, with the policemen, considering them true proletarians who were sent to fight against boys of their same age for a poor salary and reasons which they could not understand, because they had not had the fortune of being able to study. This ironic statement, however, didn't stop him from contributing to the autonomist Lotta continua movement.

Pasolini was also an ardent critic of consumismo, i.e. consumerism, which he felt had rapidly destroyed Italian society in the late 1960s/early 1970s, particularly the class of the subproletariat, to which he felt both sexually and artistically drawn. Pasolini observed that the kind of purity which he perceived in the members of that class (as portrayed e.g. in Acccattone) was rapidly vanishing, the animalistic joie de vivre of the boys being rapidly replaced with more bourgeois ambitions such as a house and a family. The coprophagia scenes in Salò were described by him as being a comment on the processed food industry.

Not only economical globalization but also the cultural domination of the North of Italy (around Milan) over other regions, especially the South, primarily through the power of TV, angered him. He opposed the gradual disappearance of Italian dialects by writing some of his poetry in Friulian, the dialect of the region where he spent his childhood.

Why I love WFMU

2006-05-30T16:08:00.000-05:00

"Ken Freedman is the current General Manager of WFMU, a freeform radio station. He is also co-host of the radio show Seven Second Delay with Andy Breckman and hosts his own freeform radio show on Wednesdays. Ken began his radio career as DJ and later station manager of WCBN, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's freeform radio station where he is still remembered for marking the election of Ronald Reagan by playing Leslie Gore's It's My Party (and I'll cry if I want to) for 18 hours straight. His brother, Samuel G. Freedman is a reporter, professor, and writer."

Change

2006-05-23T16:06:00.000-05:00

“My general experience in life has been that most people can change only within a narrow range, if at all. Many people can acknowledge criticism and advice, but relatively few internalize it and alter their behavior in a significant way. Sometimes someone can change in one respect but not in another. I was involved in many discussions at Goldman over the years that centered on the question of whether a person who was highly capable professionally, but limited in some way, could grow to assume broader responsibilities. Often the limitations revolved around the ability to work effectively with colleagues and subordinates.”

Robert E. Rubin, In an Uncertain World, 2003, Random House, 2003, p. 83

"Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass."

John Steinbeck (1902-1968). American novelist, story writer, playwright, and essayist

An Ahistorical Language

2006-05-22T22:54:00.000-05:00

Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. "The language is created by the culture," says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. "All experience is anchored in the presence," says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past -- limiting the language accordingly.

Living in the now also fits with the fact that the Pirahã don't appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: "Everything is the same, things always are." The mothers also don't tell their children fairy tales -- actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art.

Beautiful Word

2006-05-22T20:37:00.000-05:00

palimpsest \PAL-imp-sest\, noun:

1. A manuscript, usually of papyrus or parchment, on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible.
2. An object or place whose older layers or aspects are apparent beneath its surface.

The manuscript is a palimpsest consisting of vellum leaves from which the "fluent and assured script" of the original Archimedes text and 55 diagrams had been washed or scraped off so that the surface could be used for new writings.
-- Roger Highfield, "Eureka! Archimedes text is to be sold at auction", Daily Telegraph, October 3, 1998

Each is a palimpsest, one improvisation partly burying another but leaving hints of it behind.
-- Robert Hughes, "Delight for Its Own Sake", Time, January 22, 1996

It's a mysterious many-layered palimpsest of a metropolis where generations of natives and visitors have left their mark, from Boadicea and the Romans, through the Middle Ages and the Elizabethan era to the present.
-- Philip French, "Jack the knife", The Observer, February 10, 2002