Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: europe, flat, music, notes and chords, the final countdown
The second-best version of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” that I have ever heard.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blogging, egotism, no accounting for taste
I was rereading some old posts of mine and realized something: I actually kinda like this blog.
If it were some other blog that wasn’t mine but was written by someone else, I’d totally read it and everything.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: "stimulus", crime, economy, labels, stock market, technical analysis, three black crows
Via MR, a good post about how the very term “stimulus” essentially wins the debate before it starts.
After all, who could be against “stimulating” the economy? What, you want to depress the economy?
It’s like “campaign finance reform”. Who could be against it? You don’t want to reform campaign finance?
Almost all our political debates, when you think about it, are plagued by these problems of propagandistic, biased, screwy, or otherwise misleading terminology: health care reform (”single payer”), Middle East relations (”the Muslim World”), the climate (”climate change”), etc.
I guess that having become so disillusioned with politics that I don’t believe any of it anymore, and with an administration whose foreign policy I expect to accomplish nothing good whatsoever, it’s only natural that this has become my latest pet peeve: terminology and how it influences (and in some cases, biases unrecoverably) our debates.
Here’s a more controversial example: “recession”. Everyone knows that we’re “in a recession” right now, right?
Well hold on. What’s a “recession”? Is a “recession” a real, tangible, objective, physical phenomenon? No. It’s just a label we’ve made up to slap onto certain economic states of affairs. It has a definition. The economy meets that definition, so we’re “in a recession”, something that all sorts of smart people have thought it terribly important to take note of. Or when it’s not “a recession”, people start to prognosticate and wonder whether we are, or will be. People actually get in fights about it. That’s how important some people think this label is.
But I disagree. Yes, sure it’s important & noteworthy that the unemployment rate (say) is going up, and all sorts of related economic facts – things that can be measured – are bad. But that would be important whether or not we called it “a recession”. (Would this unemployment rate be ok if it weren’t “a recession”? No!)
These labels we have – “recession”, “depression” – are stupid and screw up peoples’ thinking.
For example, once people become convinced “there’s a recession”, they are suddenly easy to convince to throw all the rules of common sense out the window. In ordinary times, of course, the idea of government spending 800 kabillion dollars it doesn’t have on unspecified pork would be seen for what it is. But last fall, most of the country clearly got freaked out of their minds by so much talk about “the recession” that they said “Sure, go ahead! After all, there’s a recession on! So we should do it!”
Stupid thinking.
As an analogy suppose I studied crime statistics with my free time, and I invented some term, let’s say ‘Alpha-Wave Crime Pattern’ (AWCP). I make a definition for what an ‘Alpha-Wave Crime Pattern’ is, and write it down. (Let’s say it’s: three consecutive quarters of violent-crime increase in at least 70% of the top 15 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), along with a jump of at least 15% in mortgage defaults for in quarter #2 of those 3; doesn’t really matter. The point is it’s just some criteria I pull out of my butt and call the ‘definition’ of an AWCP.) Then I set up an Organization dedicated to measuring these crime statistics, and when an AWCP is reached, I make a big grandiose press conference and announce my Official declaration that the crime situation is now, Officially, an AWCP.
So far so good?
Actually, so far, you wouldn’t care. Big deal. Let me make my announcement. But what if there were all these pseudoscientific theories about what AWCP’s meant? Like, everyone who went to college had to study the definition of AWCP’s, and historical examples of AWCP’s, and thus anytime we near the onset of an AWCP (again: a term I made up), people started to get nervous? And ask each other “do you think an AWCP is coming?”, and get in arguments over whether we ‘really’ are or aren’t in an AWCP?
Start to seem silly yet? Well I’m not finished. Now ordinarily there are certain things we all take for granted about crime and crime-fighting:
-people are innocent until proven guilty.
-habeas corpus.
-trial by peers.
Now, suppose that an ‘AWCP’ came along – an Official AWCP, you see – and suddenly a bunch of opportunistic politicians and ideologues started shrieking: “Don’t you understand? We can’t afford to stick with your arcane rules at such a time as this! There’s an Alpha-Wave on you heartless bastard!“
And then they rushed through a giant “alpha-wave-fighting” bill through Congress, a bill that none of them read, which
-suspends habeas corpus.
-bypasses criminal trials.
-changes burden of proof to the defendant.
“Because there’s an Alpha-Wave! Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures!”
This whole example seems silly but as a matter of fact it’s exactly what has happened to us in the past 9 months. Just replace “crime” with “economy”, “Alpha-Wave” with “recession”, and “alpha-wave-fighter” with “stimulus”.
Back to reality, here’s a real term people use that, in my view, isn’t actually all that different from “recession”: “three black crows”. You don’t know what “three black crows” is? Why, it’s a term in ‘technical analysis’ of stock trading, a somewhat maligned and goofy but persistent art that involves studying stock graphs to (supposedly) find patterns that can be used for profitable trading. You can read about “three black crows” here. Like “recession”, you see, it’s a human-made-up term that has a definition, and at any given time a stock’s chart will either display a “three black crows” pattern or it won’t.
Now then, I think it’s perfectly clear that when a stock is “in a three black crows pattern”, everyone understands that however meaningful the underlying movements might be, calling it something like “three black crows” is an arbitrary label that people have attached to the stock price. It’s not some sort of law of nature that when a stock gets into a ‘three black crows’ state, that such-and-such will happen. There is no such law. Yes there are stock traders who might think so, but those are conjectures, or perhaps one should say hunches, or hopes, and they may or may not be right – and make or lose a ton of money – at any given time. God be with them.
But certainly if the US President ever began a sentence with, “My fellow Americans, the stock market is in a Three Black Crows pattern, which means [A, B, C], and therefore we need to [X, Y, Z]“, you’d think he was a superstitious lunatic who should keep his chart-reading theories to himself, and perhaps even be more than a little freaked out.
But for some reason he can say “My fellow Americans, the economy is in A Recession, and therefore we need to spend 800 billion dollars we don’t have on whatever-the-hell we can think of”, everyone nods their heads at the wise caring sage. He sure knows what he’s talking about! That’s Keynesian!
Look. The economy is bad, there’s no doubt about that. And to the extent that government can fix it, it should try to do so. But the things done to fix it should make sense on their own terms, from first principles, with real arguments, and not due to barely-better-than-superstitious theories based on these labels we have – “recession”, “stimulus” – which are not helping. Indeed they bypass actual human thought.
I spit on these made-up labels. People who attach too much meaning to them are morons.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: michael jackson, not my lover, pedophilia, pop, self-hatred
AP story headline: Poignant service says goodbye to M.J., the man
As opposed to M.J., the _____________?
Netflix has a feature called “see what’s popular somewhere else”. This allows you to enter a location (city/state or zip code) and get a list of movies that people in that location are currently renting “much more than other Netflix members”.
I wish I had time to poke around and explore in greater detail because the results seem potentially interesting. Here’s the top 5 for New York, New York:
- Rogue Trader (an older B-movie-quality Ewan McGregor Wall Street movie)
- The Last Kiss (all I know is this was remade in English as a Zach Braff vehicle)
- New York Stories
- Next Stop, Greenwich Village
- L’Innocente
Wall Street shenanigans, Italian stuff, and movies with “New York” in the title. Predictable?
How about Mountain View, California (home of Google):
- Palo Alto (lo-budget wannabe college-angst thing that I couldn’t get through)
- A Wednesday (Indian movie)
- Die Another Day
- The Valet (French Daniel Auteuil movie)
- Physics: The Elegant Universe And Beyond (documentary)
So: local interest, nerdy stuff, Indian stuff, and crappy but action-packed (read: international-friendly) James Bond vehicle. Yup, rings true as stuff that might be rented by Google engineers.
What about, for no apparent reason, Ames Iowa?
- Iowa (indie meth thriller)
- Beverly Hills Cop III
- The Final Season (HS baseball movie with Sean Astin from “Rudy”)
- K-19 the Widowmaker
- Beerfest
Local place in title, sports movies, beer movies, military movies, and crappy Hollywood comedy schlock like you’d pick up for the kids on a trip to Wal-Mart. This rings true as well!
What I find fascinating is how utterly predictable are the movies that filter up to the top of this. You put in New York, a lot of Woody Allen comes up. You put in heartland America, and sports movies come up. And of course having the name of a local place in the title of the movie is a surefire winner.
How about, oh, Ashland Oregon, the granola-crunching home of a yearly Shakespeare festival? “Lefty agitprop, foreign movies and lesbian stuff”, I guessed before even typing it in. And I was right! (#1: Hearts and Minds, Vietnam doc. #2: Foyle’s War, British serial. #13: Three Days Of The Condor, Robert Redford vehicle of “This is about oil isn’t it?” fame. #15: The L Word….)
Are people so predictable? Is geography destiny? Or does culture determine geography?
The next step is for some enterprising programmer to create an app that scans your movie preferences/ratings and uses these lists to compute your ideal location. Where should you be living, purely based on your movie tastes? From what I’ve seen here, the results look as if they might end up fairly robust.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: racism, russia, spanish, nigaz, outrage, gangsta, playa, beach, nigeria, n-word
I must have read about a dozen blog posts expressing shock and disbelief about the Russian naming of the new Russian-Nigerian joint venture Nigaz, before I figured out what everyone was upset about.
Naturally, being somewhat familiar with Russian, I assumed this was a transliteration of something like “нигаз” and just read this as nee-GAHZ. Big deal. I did think it a little odd because my amateurish Russian was initially inclined to parse this as “not gas”, but then I conjectured that the “Ni” part was probably a “ни” for “Nigeria”, not a “не-” prefix for negation. Anyway, is that what everyone’s so upset about?, I wondered. That they almost named a joint gas venture, in effect, “not-gas”? Maybe that doesn’t make sense, and is a little stupid and unimaginative, but so what? There are plenty of foreign corporate names that sound stupid to English ears (”TotalFinaElf”, anyone? Or one of my favorites that I kept encountering at work, the troubled Icelandic bank “Kaupthing”, which I instinctively mentally pronounce to the tune of that song “Wild Thing”?). Oh well, I shrugged, figured I was just missing something, and let it go.
But I kept seeing post after post on it, and they were talking about things like “racism”, and such, that made absolutely no sense to me. Finally, on like the dozenth blog post, I figured out how everyone else must be reading it.
But this is easily answered: they’re just not pronouncing it correctly. They literally don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re looking at an English transliteration of a foreign word, reading it wrong, and getting outraged.
This reminds me of the whole “niggardly” brouhaha a couple years back. Ignorance, it seems, gives one license to vent the dumbest sort of outrage. And clearly the more ignorant you are, the more opportunities you have to find things to be outraged by. And it increasingly seems as if the ignorant are demanding that everyone else conform to standards of language and thought that won’t even offend the ignorant. So now when you name something, or use a word, you not only have to be careful not to offend normal people who have a minimum amount of intelligence/knowledge and will read/interpret you correctly, you have to also try to imagine all the ways which ignorant idiots could misread/misinterpret/etc., and make sure not to offend them, either.
It’s exhausting.
Side note: not sure if this is related, but it always irks me when the “gangsta” pronunciation of “player” is transcribed as “playa”. Maybe it’s just because I used to live in San Diego, close to Mexico, but every single time I come across this usage of “playa”, at first the only thing I think of is the beach….
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: "stimulus", blogging, economics, timewasters, Yglesias
For those curious, see me waste tons of time in this Matthew Yglesias thread below a post about how we need more ’stimulus’.
My take-away lesson from that thread is that I’m on the right track with my bleeding analogy for ’stimulus’. It really appears to hit home – ’stimulus’ advocates definitely are bothered by it enough to feel compelled to respond – and yet they have no good substantive response for it, and simply can’t explain how their approach is different from, and more informed by reality than, bleeding-the-patient-till-he-gets-better, which strengthens my conviction that I’m really onto something.
I think I’ve figured it out, lefties: Palin didn’t quit. She’s not dead. Feel that empty pink pant-suit…..
….she’s just pulled an Obi-Wan. Haha!
That’s right! She dropped her lightsaber, you’ve foolishly struck her down, and so now she’s more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Suckers!
This report, if true, implies that the Obama Administration is opposed to new sanctions against Iran re: their nuclear program. (HT: Pastorius at Infidel Bloggers Alliance). This calls to mind a pet peeve of mine: arguments that are only tactics.
This, in broad outlines, has been an ongoing political debate in the United States in recent years:
R: “Hey look, Iran’s trying to make nuclear weapons.”
L: “No they’re not. You can’t prove that. They say they’re not. Nobody saw anything. Can’t prove anything.”
R: “Yes they are. Wake up.”
L: “Well what if they are? What gives us the right to stop them? We have nukes.”
R: “They are a crazy, virulently, genocide-advocating theocracy though.”
L: “Well even if they are, we can stop them with sanctions or whatever. You know, soft power.”
R: “That’s not going to work.”
L: “Yes it is. I totally believe it kinda could. Shut up.”
And now,
R: “Hey lookie, your guy Obama doesn’t even want to use sanctions in the first place.”
L: ????
I don’t know what (L) will say at this point. I suspect it will be something like
L: “Obama what? Well, er, sanctions are just going to antagonize them. We shouldn’t use them in the first place. Yeah, that’s it.”
And so on, and so on. Here’s what it doesn’t take a genius to notice about this conversation: at precisely no point in the conversation does the (L) side actually care about or believe in what they are saying. Right? I submit:
No (L) seriously believes Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. But they pretend to believe it for tactical reasons.
No (L) seriously thinks that ’sanctions’ or soft power will prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. But they pretend to believe it for tactical reasons.
And as we are now seeing, and are likely to see from the silence that will most likely greet this reported stance of Obama’s, no (L) even sincerely cared about using ’sanctions’ against Iran in the first place. They pretend to care about it, for tactical reasons.
At any given point of the debate, while the (R) (who may or may not be correct in what he’s saying) is at least attempting to debate in good faith, you literally cannot take anything the (L) side says at face value, seriously, as a sincerely-expressed statement of position, worth the time of taking seriously and debunking. After all, it’s all an act, a ruse, a tactic, a feint, designed to….
Well, designed to what? At this point we are faced with quite a puzzle. Why does (L) continue to put forth phony, insincere arguments that no serious, intelligent person could possibly sincerely believe, at every stage of the debate? Just, why? One has to extrapolate and look for the common thread in (L)’s position.
And it’s not that difficult to see: the common thread is simply that (L) doesn’t want the United States to use military force against Iran – or anyone. Ever. For any reason. Period. Thus, we can rewrite the (L) side of the argument above more simply and concisely – but most importantly, honestly – as:
(L): The United States must not use military force against Iran, ever, for any reason.
(L): The United States must not use military force against Iran, ever, for any reason.
(L): The United States must not use military force against Iran, ever, for any reason.
Handy rule of thumb: Any argument that might conceivably end in the United States using military force against someone, the (L)’s will instinctively flock to the other side. At any stage of said argument, the (L)’s will grasp for and pretend to believe in some tactical, temporary, phony talking-point they think they can spout to forestall and delay and muddy the argument that (they fear) will end in the United States using military force against someone. And when that talking-point they never believed in anyway inevitably fails to survive contact with reality sooner or later, they will drop it and instantly cling to another, with the alacrity of Liz Taylor finding a new hubbie, with no memory or apparent consciousness of the resulting hypocrisy and inconsistency and self-contradiction.
There is evidently a persistent, sizable faction of people out there one of whose primary political polestars is the prevention of United States military force against anyone else. Alternatively, and objectively, one may flip this around to observe that their motivating drive is the protection of every rogue regime on the planet from attack, unseating, or inconvenience of any kind. As long as said rogue regime primarily opposes us, that is.
In short, their statements and actions can be neatly and accurately summarized as: any regime that opposes America in any way is ok in their book, and must not be harmed. This is the Pro-Antiamerican Party. So now Obama’s opposed to sanctions? Trust me: the people who were chanting “let’s use sanctions” the past four years won’t care.
They’ll just find a new argument tactic to pretend to believe in. Any (R) who wasted any amount of time debating (L)’s regarding ‘whether sanctions will work’, ‘whether we should try sanctions’, the general efficacy of ’soft power’, etc, should feel like a total sucker. Clearly, sanctions were never the point. Protecting all Antiamericans from American use of force, is.
So Sarah Palin is resigning as Governor of Alaska. I assume this means everyone will shut up about her now? Or will the obsession continue? I wonder if she’s doing this just to check how deep this obsession goes.
Let’s round up some of the recent genius emanations from the front page of your favorite lefty blogger and mine, Matthew Yglesias.
Here Matthew Yglesias praises Washington DC for the fact that the bigger-time people who work in the White House make ‘only’ $172k/year. (Of course, this is merely their official salary now, not whatever perks they’re getting, condos in their sister-in-law’s name etc., nor whatever post-administration consulting/lobbying/etc. gigs they’ll be taking.) Anyway, to Matthew, all of this makes Washington DC ‘relatively egalitarian’, and he ‘likes’ that, compared to New York or LA. Longtime Yglesiasphiles will recognize this as a recurring theme: he is obviously intensely jealous of people who make a lot more money than he does and come from even more wealth than he does, but as a lefty in good standing can’t admit that he craves wealth, and so wants social policy to make things more ‘egalitarian’ to relieve him of the resultant stress/jealousy he feels (and imagines everyone else feels as well).
Here Matthew, who supported (the original) TARP, and the newfangled/improvised TARP, complains about a plan to sell warrants that were obtained as part of TARP or at least under the all-inclusive TARP umbrella that (we see in retrospect) essentially allowed the government to fling money at whoever it wanted, however it wanted, with no limitations or rules whatseover. Matthew doesn’t appear to suffer from any cognitive dissonance in supporting a boondoggle with no rules and then complaining about one of the ways it is used. Nor does he recognize that this means the original TARP opponents – opponents of flinging money around with no rules – may have, um, had a point.
In this post on unemployment state variance, Matthew claims sans evidence that ‘the national unemployment rate would probably be lower had Ben Nelson (D-NE) not joined with some Republicans to render the stimulus stingier and less effective.’ This of course follows from the well-known, valid economic theory that all government spending, regardless of details, automatically makes more jobs, as long as you call it ’stimulus’. According to this theory you can therefore always say that unemployment would be lower if more money had been spent, period, and you can’t be disproved. On a similar note, I declare that Matthew Yglesias’s salary would be twice as high (something he clearly cares deeply about, see above) if he would buy these magic rocks from me. If he doesn’t buy the magic rocks, I’ll point at his salary and say ‘would’ve been higher!’ If he does buy the rocks and his salary goes up I’ll say ‘See?’ And if it doesn’t go up I’ll just say ’should’ve bought more rocks’. Like ’stimulus’ proponents, I’ve got all the bases covered….
Here, in the process of explaining why 60 Senate votes isn’t enough for the (D) party, Matthew brings up a longtime bugaboo of his, the nature of the government of the United States of America as set up by its Constitution, which he doesn’t like. (In particular – he doesn’t like that pesky, silly, 200+ year tradition of the Senate not being proportional to population)
Another post on not-enough-jobs-means-not-enough-stimulus.
Something on health care legislation haggling/budgeting that’s far too boring for a normal person to read. I wonder how long and hard Matthew looked to find that GIF of a stethoscope on a dollar bill. Or does he actually have an assistant?
Something on ‘transportation law’ (stifling yawns here). Only noteworthy part was that he actually put this passage in BOLD: The biggest item on the administration’s agenda is $310 million to help state DOTs and local Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) begin collecting data on the usage and ridership of transportation projects.. Money for data! Isn’t that exciting?
In this link roundup post (which he’s taken to calling “Endgame” for some reason, not that my titles have been any better) Matthew sneakily demonstrates his indie hip-hop cred – he remains safely in indieland with the offhand “I’m not a big hop-hop guy normally”, yet he proves he’s not a racist by linking to a hip-hop video, but it’s a cartoon hip-hop video (which makes it funny and ironic) so no reason to be scared all you indie fans – no actual black people in sight. A nice trifecta there Matthew, bravo.
Here Matthew offhandedly shows he’s a cosmopolitan world traveler while supposedly making some point about “soft power”, which seems to mean “corporate brand names that you notice while staying in hotels in other countries” to lefty Matthew Yglesias. He considers that “the real strength of the United States”, you see. He says “Our culture, our technology, and our ideas—things that like sushi and the klippan sofa are good enough on their own terms to be appealing to others without resort to coercion and domination”, which of course is why nobody hates America or wants to attack us anymore. Well color me convinced, next time America is hit with a terror attack let’s drop some Dunkin’ Donuts cups on the Afghanistan hinterlands. This is truly incoherent stuff; do lefties even know what they think they mean by “soft power” anymore?
This post is pretty straightforward: Matthew Yglesias is frustrated that Congress exists, because it might prevent President Obama from doing 100% of whatever the hell he wants.
A fairly recent favorite theme repeated here on the topic of reverse discrimination. Matthew’s clever discovery, you see, is that it’s far too difficult to actually argue against people who oppose affirmative action and other forms of reverse discrimination, using, y’know, actual valid arguments. Instead his trick is simply to change the subject and complain that conservatives who oppose reverse discrimination don’t “[wax] indignant about some instance of racism directed against an African-American or Latino in the United States” as often as (presumably) they should. The great thing about this trick is that he can now use it in any post on affirmative action/reverse discrimination whatsoever, he never has to address the actual argument, and (apparently) he doesn’t even seem to feel the need to supply any examples whatsoever of all these oh so numerous instances of racism directed against African-Americans or Latinos in the United States that (he claims) conservatives don’t get indignant enough about. Which makes it impossible for conservatives to refute or argue against, essentially (how can I retort with an “I do too get indignant about X!” when I don’t know what examples of X he has in mind exactly?)
Another stethoscope on a dollar bill post. “Public option”, Max Baucus, bla, bla, bla. Yawn. Can’t he at least change up the GIFs?
Here he fascinatingly complains that the economy “has bizarrely dropped off the political agenda”. Gee, could it be because leadership – cheered on by folks like, oh I don’t know, Matthew Yglesias – is bizarrely obsessed with things like climate change and government health-care takeovers that at best have nothing to do with helping, or at worst will actively harm, the economy?
Here he writes a whole blog post to say, in effect, that he “basically agree[s] with” someone named Chris Anderson’s book-length assertion that “free is the future”, whatever the hell that means. This brings to mind something I’ve often wondered, does a professional ‘blogger’ like Matthew have some sort of posts-per-day quota he has to fulfill in order to receive his paycheck? It would certainly seem so. Well after all, quality blog posts like this one don’t come free (ironically).
Something about Iraq that looks like it was intended to be a gracious partial admission that much of his earlier whining was off base, although if so the message got characteristically garbled by his famously weirdo typos/syntax (”when you look back at the things liberals like me said about Iraq back in 2007 and thereabouts, you can find a lot of stuff that doesn’t look so much.”?)
Finally, Matthew bravely does some data mining about suicide in socialist countries. It turns out that not as many people commit suicide in Scandinavian socialist countries as you think. That’s an important point, to Matthew Yglesias. I can totally understand that. It’s important to preserve and nurture the Scandinavian-socialist fantasy. (As my longtime readers know, my pet theory about Scandinavian socialism is that lefties find it appealing not because they actually know anything about those places let alone how their governments work, but primarily because they find Scandinavians sexually attractive, as in ‘the Swedish bikini team’.) Which makes me wonder: Why did Matthew Yglesias go to Finland and Iceland, anyway? What sort of tourism was that?
Well folks, this has been the front page of Matthew Yglesias’s fine blog, 7/2/2009.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: forgetting sarah marshall, freaks & geeks, random, vacation
I wonder whether it would be economically feasible to just live year-round, full-time, on a vacation resort type place or (similarly) on a cruise ship. At first glance of course you might think it would be prohibitively expensive, given how much those things cost when you do them as a vacation. But what if you wanted to live there? Like live live? Wouldn’t they have to cut you a deal? Overhead cost is more or less fixed. The marginal cost of letting you stay there is probably minimal. For most places there’s likely to be an offseason of 6-9 months in which they’re never at full capacity anyway, so you’d just be taking a room that would otherwise be empty. For some places this may actually give them a slight benefit (so the place doesn’t look quite as empty/boring). In fact the only real effect would be that you’re occupying a room that would otherwise be a paying customer during the busy season (whatever the season is when they expect to be at full capacity 98% of the time). On the other hand you’re booking a giant bloc of time in advance and they should be happy to get that, so you should get some sort of discount rate.
So the manager should pretty much be content to charge you the equivalent of their weekly rate for the 3-month busy season, less perhaps a 10-20% discount. Depending on what your rent/mortgage already is, this may start to look economical.
Warning/disclaimer/apology: I don’t know what my point is. This post was conceived while watching that movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where the hot dark-haired chick from That ’70s Show lets the flabby alcoholic dude from Freaks And Geeks stay in the $6000/night room at a Hawaii resort for free just out of sympathy. Perhaps if the movie had actually been funnier, my brain wouldn’t have had to go to such weird places. I blame the overhyped Judd Apatow.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cap and trade, climate change, iran, michael jackson, renee zellweger
I’ve seen Renee Zellweger in many, many movies by now, and I still don’t feel as if I actually know what her eyes look like. Does she even have any? Or just empty sockets where her squints all spiral together in an unidentifiable non-Euclidean vortex?
Why is it a left-wing issue (”cap-and-trade”) for the government to artificially create another security for Wall Street traders to get rich trading? Answer: Because in doing so it will force people to drive less. See, nowadays a lot of left-wingerism is about seeking to prevent (other) people from driving or doing anything else that embodies independence. Especially lower-class, poorer people. So that Wall Streeters can get rich(er).
This may be an unorthodox opinion, but that Michael Jackson struck me as something of an odd bird. Hey I call ‘em as I see ‘em.
It’s pretty surprising that nobody (as far as I have seen) has yet tried to blame the unrest in Iran on the fact that the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Well, I know of at least one person who will….
Filed under: Uncategorized
You must click and read these links now.
LINKS:
- Fascinating post from curi on One Tree Hill Plotlines. Note: I gather that One Tree Hill is a television show.
- Quotes from Justice Scalia, who’s apparently way more kick-ass than I’d given him credit for.
- How a rhinoceros can be used to improve your self-esteem.
- Calculated Risk on the amazing pulloff of a CDS swindle.
- Teaser of a remake of The Prisoner, with Jim Caviezel. A while ago I watched through the whole Prisoner series. Far as I could tell, being “the Prisoner” meant you were stuck on a Mediterranean nautical resort, where everyone dressed in charming 19th-century fashion, with no contact to the outside world, and miniskirt-wearing ladies attended to your every need. But the remake, by contrast, sounds like it turns all that around and being the “prisoner” is now a bad thing. Just shows how times change….
- The previously-unsuspected connection between philosophy and detective fiction. This reminds me, I’ve been (re) reading some P.G. Wodehouse, which always reminds me of detective fiction – a comedy version. Is there anything funnier than P.G. Wodehouse?
- Bryan Caplan has toenail fungus. Oh, but the point of the post: he explains why you should be happy to discover that insurance doesn’t cover a treatment you want.
- Corrupt on why nerdiness leads to totalitarianism.
- Arnold Kling says “If you want your shirts to be manufactured using primitive technology so that they cost a lot, then buy local.”.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: depeche mode, health care, iran, lefties, obama
Unemployment at peaks and still going up. Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security a fiscal shambles. Government has taken Fannie and Freddie and pretty much everyone, far as I can tell, onto its balance sheet. No new jobs coming, no pay raises coming, yet tax increases coming. In foreign affairs, Iran escalating its inevitable crackdown (as I predicted, and feared). North Korea has demonstrated nukes presumably up for sale/extortion, China is China, Russia is Russia, partying Europe still on our tit.
And Obama, and half of our insular self-involved country, is still freaking yammering away about “health care”.
Health care health care health care. Waaah we want health care. So the President keeps talking about copays and x-rays. Historic stuff, what? Just historic. 500 years from now everyone will be so impressed that President Obama of the early 21st century spent approximately 98% of his waking hours dedicated to how many catheters should be allocated to 55 year olds and whether womens’ mammogram histories are computerized or on paper charts.
It’s pathetic. It’s almost childlike. Mommy I want my medicine. I want the medicine that tastes like cherry. That’s what we care about. Those are our priorities, as expressed through our man of the moment.
It’s an obsession with all these people. I can’t even listen to these health care monomaniacs anymore. The answer to economic problems? “Health care”. The answer to foreign policy troubles? “Health care”. The answer to the Navier-Stokes equation? Health care. The answer to life, the universe and everything? Health care. What’s the exponential of pi times the square root of minus-one? Health care.
I’m through taking this obsession even remotely seriously.
I’m reminded of an underappreciated little Depeche Mode song called “New Dress”, that I now proceed to borrow from its context/intent:
Sex jibe husband murders wife
Bomb blast victim fights for life
Girl thirteen attacked with knifePrincess Di is wearing a new dress
Jet airliner shot from sky
Famine horror, millions die
Earthquake terror figures risePrincess Di is wearing a new dress
It seems to me that “health care” is the left’s “new dress”. Obama and the left want a new dress. They want their pretty, pretty new dress. So don’t confuse them with anything else.
Despite my “pessimism”, I have been watching many of the video clips coming out of Iran, trying to catch up, at least a little.
I don’t like what I’m seeing. Let me specify what I mean by that. First, obviously there is a natural revulsion to the chaos and bedlam they (at their worst) portray. Whatever their meaning and eventual outcome, it must be admitted that at the moment, these events are literally nightmarish. Try to imagine them on the streets of your city for example. It is the stuff of nightmares. I would not like to see it. I would not like to experience it. I want to stay as far away from it as possible. I shudder at the thought of it spreading, of it being the way of the future. We ought to be careful what we wish for, and cheer on. There’s no reason this sort of thing couldn’t come to Detroit, to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to New York.
But more to the point, even if I assume that I’m on the side of the protestors (and vice versa, more importantly), I simply don’t see these actions as likely to accomplish anything. These are some properties of scenes I have seen:
-lots of people out in the streets, mostly standing around, looking confused. Maybe walking/rushing from one place to another when this or that thing happens.
-lots of posing and posturing on the one hand, and gawking and rubbernecking on the other. At times it seems like the entire crowd is composed of posturers and rubberneckers. Reminds me of my time at Berkeley.
-chanting/yelling stuff. “Allahu Akbar” being the only thing I can make out, of course.
-rocks. People pick some up, others throw them (I think?).
-standoffs with policemen. I haven’t seen clips of policemen being particularly brutal (which doesn’t mean none such exist) – at least, not compared to, say, the French in Sierra Leone a couple years ago
-at one point in one of the clips I saw, a body is carried through the streets. He’s put down on the ground. Picked back up. Put down somewhere else. Maybe it’s just me but violence in Middle East crowd scenes always seems to be followed closely by medical nincompoops.
-Another guy soon follows running down the street with a bloody hand. he holds it up in the air for all to see. Circles back, does it again. The point being…? (I know, I know, “in their culture” that probably means something significant..)
-people pushing one way. then something happens. so they get scared and run backwards. Policemen.
The general properties I perceive in these protests, or whatever they are:
-disorganized
-gawking
-superficially demonstrative (”hey look at me”) with no substance; emoting/posing/posturing.
-fear/retreat (on both sides) in the face of any true direct confrontation.
-chants (this behavior at least is universally recognizable; the behavior of a rock concert, a pep rally – apt analogies in my view, because those things accomplish just about as much)
-fascination with blood. I gather that seeing the blood is supposed to make other people do stuff/react a certain way. Blood is magical.
I could be wrong but this is not the stuff that simultaneously successful and good revolutions are made of. (I could, alas, see a successful but not good revolution coming out of this, I think.) What are all these people trying to accomplish? What are they going to accomplish? What they are demonstrating is that they can be called upon to provide chaos. But chaos is just chaos; it is not focused, it is not disciplined, it has no aim, it has no defined end. This is not warfare, it’s not a revolution, it doesn’t even rise to the level of gang warfare (which at least might tend to have clear targets and aims). It’s almost a form of violent performance art. “Look at us, listen to us”, they are saying. And so we do. But so what? The “best” outcome one can hope from all this is that the Ahmadinejad challenger points at them, says “cut me a power-sharing deal and I’ll call them off”, and so a deal is cut, all his distant cousins get on-paper jobs/sinecures in parallel with Ahmadinejad’s cousins, the rest of people go back to work, the dead are buried, the old women wail on camera, Time Magazine does a glossy cover story on the whole thing, and then things get calm again. Soon Iran gets the bomb anyway and that will be that: deterrent. Untouchable.
Maybe I lack imagination. But I can’t imagine anything good coming from this. Besides, at best, the paltry accomplishment of getting some other guy’s good-for-nothing cousins more jobs/cashflows/apartments.
I view this, and similar recurring patterns in that part of the world, as part of what appears to be a long-nurtured cultural trait in some parts of the world: the deeply-held belief in trying to win all wars without actually fighting them, and deeply-held ignorance of how to win wars any other way than through symbolism and theater. At its worst, in our modern era, this becomes the instigation/Palestinian terrorism method of warfare: randomly blow something up somewhere until you induce a response, then when response comes, preen for cameras, and cry, and wave a bloody shirt, and say ‘look how oppressed we are, the UN should do something’. Repeat until it works. I have no respect for this form of warfare. I have no respect for the cultural tradition which values and propagates it.
Seriously: what the heck are these people doing exactly? Are they fighting? Who are their leaders? Who gives them orders? What are their targets? What is their strategy? What are their tactics? Are they gaining territory and establishing footholds? Are they organizing supply lines, chains of command? Engaging in shadow diplomacy, forming alliances, arranging for loans, setting up government in exile, getting arms? Turning former enemies, subverting opposing generals, making secret deals to divide the enemy?
Or are they just wandering around streets pelting policemen, yelling stuff, videotaping it on cellphones, and then posting it to Youtube?
What’s that accomplish? Seriously what? I know, I know, these are just normal, for the most part unarmed people, what can I expect them to accomplish? Well maybe nothing. But so then why should I pretend they will accomplish anything with this bedlam, other than some of them getting killed? Because it would feel so good to pretend? I think we’re all really fooling ourselves as we watch this stuff, tell ourselves “we’re seeing history unfold”, call Twitter the future of revolution, and blog to each other about how exciting this all is. Because at the end of the day, this stuff is not going to accomplish anything.
Let me take the most optimistic view possible and assume (unjustifiably) that the younger generation of Iran, and a majority of Iran, is indeed opposed to theocracy and dictatorship and wants a government that respects human rights and views their current government as an enemy of those aims, and therefore has declared war on that government with the aim of seating a rights-respecting republic that won’t prioritize exporting revolutionary terrorism. Well, ok then. But that’s a serious declaration. It’s a serious act. Running around on city streets mindlessly is not going to get them there. Ever. I just don’t see these methods getting them from A to Z, even if Z is where they want to go, which I doubt.
Maybe it’s just that these cultures have lived in cities too long. They seem to think like herded, hounded city dwellers. It seems like they think street corners are important. It seems like they think whether cars are on fire is important. This is not just Iran, I see this in other parts of the Middle East and in Europe as well; there is to my mind a “citified”, narrow, local, failure-to-think-outside-the-box thought process dominating their actions that makes the overal endeavor look pathetic. Overall their acts appear reactive and constricted and sheeplike and herdlike and small to me. I see no vision. I see no plan. I see no leaders. I see no honorable behavior. And so, I see no victories in their future. I do see street chaos, and perhaps the chaos will be scary or damaging enough to push one guy or another over the top in the halls of power – because his gang is more chaotic/scary than the other guy’s gang. But that is not liberalization, it’s not ‘opening up’, it’s certainly not democracy. To me it looks like more of the same. Or worse – because you never know what the ultimate outcome of this sort of thing will be, which Bonaparte these people might induce to rise to the occasion and put them down. We’ll just have to see.
The only cold comfort I have is that these events must surely be causing distress for the regime and for Ahmadinejad. But at the end of the day, so what?
I want to be an idealist. I want to be a “neocon” and a liberal. I’d love to be wrong. But I just don’t get it. I’m even depressing myself here with my pessimism. Am I missing something here? What am I missing? Please, tell me I’m wrong.
