Michael Rheavume does not live here

Companies, take note: if I am a current subscriber, and you wish for me to renew my subscription, spelling my name correctly in your renewal letter is a good place to start.

SC GOP chairmen praise DeMint by comparing him to "the Jews who are wealthy"

Two Republican chairmen from South Carolina praised Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) for not using earmarks, comparing his fiscal responsibility to rich Jews: "There is a saying that the Jews who are . . . more

Trouble in the Golden State: End of the California Dream?

A good article in The Guardian's Observer section about the possibility of California becoming America's first failed state - and reasons to hope that this won't happen.

Hasn't This Guy Ever Heard of the Deflationary Death Spiral?

Not sure how, but I get these occasional newsletters from CaseyResearch.com, and this recent one was rather contrarian to say the least. Casey not only says that deflation is a good thing, but he absolutely rips into my beloved Economist (not to mention all those Nobel laureates out there). That got my ire up but I wanted to see what he had to say:

Q: Doug, according to a recent article called "The Greater of Two Evils," The Economist recently stated that inflation is preferable to deflation. What is your take on that?

Doug Casey: It was certainly one of the most ridiculous articles that I have read in recent years. It is disappointing that The Economist is employing the same quality analysts that have populated magazines like Slime and Newspeak for so long -- utterly conventional, thoughtless, and statist in outlook. Everything in this article is not only wrong but the opposite, exactly the opposite of what the truth is.

You know, it is funny. It starts off with a section title saying "Inflation Is Bad, But Deflation Is Worse." No, inflation is very bad, and deflation is actually quite a good thing. I will explain that in a moment. But the first thing that drew my attention in the ridiculous article was a laudatory comment about Paul Krugman, who, they point out, is a Nobel laureate in economics.

My first comment is that the granting of a Nobel Prize in economics is as meaningless and arbitrary as the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize, which is really just a prize in political correctness and whatever appeals to the mob at the moment. These things are all very arbitrary. They have had excellent economists, and they have had anti-economists nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s as meaningless an award as the Peace Prize -- which has been given to criminal personalities like Kissinger and Arafat, and buffoons like Al Gore.

[...]

Deflation is actually a good thing, because in a deflation prices drop and money becomes more valuable, so deflation encourages people to save money. Deflation rewards the prudent saver and punishes the profligate borrower. The way a society, like an individual, becomes wealthy is by producing more than it consumes. In other words, by saving, not borrowing. And during a deflation, when money becomes more valuable, everybody wants money. They want to save. Whereas during an inflation, you want to get rid of the money. You want to consume. You want to spend. But you don’t become wealthy by spending and consuming; you become wealthy by producing and saving.

Inflation encourages people to borrow, because they expect to pay the debt off with cheaper dollars. It encourages people to mortgage their future.

Fiery! I enjoy reading contrarian stuff, although Casey comes across as unnecessarily nasty (looks like that's his schtick, now that I check the site a bit). I don't like having to sift good ideas out of irrelevant invective. I think he does hit on a couple good points - 6-12 mos. of low deflation is probably not a bad thing with regard to increasing personal savings rates, encouraging consumer deleveraging, etc. And it certainly makes the current climate of laughable bank savings and CD interest rates more tolerable. But that's not a sustainable situation. Casey doesn't address the inherent problems of the deflationary death spiral (I love that phrase - sounds like some sort of evil econ prof's terror weapon). He also hints at being one of these guys who wants to return to the gold standard and probably has a custom-made vault in his basement to hold his hoard of bullion. The majority of stuff I've read (admittedly a tiny amount) holds that low to moderate inflation is a good thing.

Then again, I slept through Econ 1, so what do I know?

(Also, Mr Casey, the journalists at The Economist make you look like an arrogant windbag.)

Ca$h Rules Everything Around Me, C.R.E.A.M. Get Those Election Funds, Dolla Dolla Bill, Y'all

(With apologies to the Wu-Tang Clan.)

Not news so much as an acute kick in the cubes of Good Government:

Nobody even tries to hide this any longer. The only way they could make it more blatant is if they hung a huge Goldman Sachs logo on the Capitol dome and then branded it onto the foreheads of leading members of Congress and executive branch officials.

Quoted in the article, this doozy from Matt Taibbi:

That’s why even people like [Glenn] Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. . . .

Actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish . . . can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff.

And don't forget:

One might think it would be a big news story for the second most-powerful member of the U.S. Senate to baldly state that the Congress is "owned" by the bankers who spawned the financial crisis and continue to dictate the government's actions. But it won't be.

Indeed. Ah, America!

Greenwald over at Salon. Good stuff, if you don't mind vomiting after reading.

Is This Rally for Reals?

Probably not. But what do I know?

For more authoritative opinions, check out this roundtable over at NYT between Simon Johnson, Nicholas Bloom, and Barry Ritholz about the market's rally since its March 9th low. Johnson's all doom and gloom; Bloom's a bit more measured in his take on the situation; Ritholz offers investment strategy more than analysis of the virtues of this recent rally.

(Although Ritholz seems to offer somewhat contradictory advice. If buy and hold is a "losing strategy" in a bear market, then why does he say "For many investors, dollar cost averaging into broad index funds works well" and then actually suggest that they increase their investments during major downturns like the present? "If you want to be a bit aggressive, you can increase your contributions once the markets fall 30 percent or (like now) 50 percent." I think the key here is the difference between active traders and passive buy-and-hold investors - active strategy will change depending on the market situation; for most average investors, passive dollar cost averaging is the way to go regardless of market conditions. And indeed in the case of the latter, increasing that investment during major downturns is a way to pick up extra shares on the cheap.)

Life Imitating Art Imitating Life

In this Washington Post piece, David Simon (creator of HBO's The Wire) rails righteously against the Baltimore Police Department's questionable actions and the failure of the enervated Baltimore Sun to hold them to account.

In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

Read it. (And watch it, in case you haven't.)

The Triumph of the Readers

Ann Patchett had a nice piece in the WSJ a while back about numbers released by the NEA showing that the number of people reading fiction is on the rise. Especially surprising, perhaps, is the increase in the 18-to-24-year-old demographic.

There were a couple of passages that struck me, including this on reading bad books:

I am a firm believer in the fact that it isn't so much what you read, it's that you read. Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin....Even if you're stepping into "Valley of the Dolls," it's better than nothing. I'm all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug. People who read bad books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.

I remember when I was younger and met kids who didn't read at all. It baffled me. I meet people today who don't read at all. And it still baffles me. They are missing out on so much.

And towards her closing:

If someone gave you a device with which you could see entire worlds just by holding it in front of your eyes, worlds of such beauty and complexity that they took your breath away, worlds of suffering and redemption, love and suspense and enlightenment, all of them there for the taking, wouldn't you want to show this device to everyone you knew? Why are more people reading? Because they are either discovering or remembering just how good it can be. I've got a book for you, my friend, all you've got to do is open it up.

Tonight I plan on seeing the world of Kars, Turkey. My viewing device is Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. I'll let you know how it turns out.

The Obama Code

Via FiveThirtyEight, a thoughtful piece from George Lakoff, professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, on what he terms the "Obama Code," which is the President's dual system of communication and morality. Lakoff lays out his claim in seven parts:

1) Value Over Programs
2) Progressive Values Are American Values
3) Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship
4) Protection and Empowerment
5) Morality and Economics Fit Together
6) Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk
7) Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language

The article is worth a read. It's a decent length but Lakoff is fairly concise in his points. I liked how he framed Obama's values as fundamental "American" rather than "progressive" values:

Obama has consistently maintained that what I, in my writings, have called “progressive” values are fundamental American values. From his perspective, he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move.

Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider—who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama’s foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states—with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.

I really liked his treatment of patriotic language in #7:

In his second inaugural, George W. Bush used “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” over and over—first, with its common meaning, then shifting to its conservative meaning: defending “freedom” as including domestic spying, torture and rendition, denial of habeus corpus, invading a country that posed no threat to us, a “free market” based on greed and short-term profits for the wealthy, denying sex education and access to women’s health facilities, denying health care to the poor, and leading to the killing and maiming of innocent civilians in Iraq by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of “freedom.” It was anything but a progressive’s view of freedom—and anything but the view intended in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

“Freedom” will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama’s inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration.

Economics as morality - this was perhaps the most important section to me, encapsulating what I had been feeling on some subconscious level but had not formally conceptualized until I read Lakoff's take on it:

5. Morality and Economics Fit Together

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues—education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

Lakoff gets a bit over-the-top anti-conservative towards the end - I'm heartily unconvinced that Limbaugh and his ilk will necessarily destroy the world - but on the whole he makes some excellent points. Commenter Mr. E. actually has a great response to Lakoff's life-or-death call to combat the ultra-conservative media machine:

I liked the linguistic analysis. I am not particularly convinced by the need for a call to action to create a response to the Republican media machine. What he envisions would be nice, but recent history and demographics belie its necessity. The Dems won big in 2006 and 2008. Any reader of this blog knows that all lines point to continued Republican losses in 2010 and beyond, unless the Republicans do the unlikely and change direction, away from their shrinking base.
The movement conservatives attacking the moderate Republicans make it more likely that those seats will flip to Democrats. If Snowe, Collins or Specter lose in primary challenges to more conservative Republicans, Pennsylvania and Maine are more likely to vote for a Democrat. With a commanding lead in the House and an increase of just 3-4 in the Senate, the Republicans will become both more shrill and more irrelevant. The current group will not wake up and become more pragmatic, they will scream louder, and be quicker to wield their long knives. Instituting a firing squad while circling the wagons creates a circular firing squad.
So long as Obama and Republicans continue their current trajectories, the message gets out, even against the tide of the conservative media

It's worth reading the entire thing.

Crisis as Opportunity

Richard Florida, an urban theorist, has an interesting piece in this month's Atlantic entitled "How the Crash Will Reshape America." He talks about how America has rebounded from past crises with innovation, expansion, and prosperity, sustaining declines in regional economies while fostering growth elsewhere. He predicts a few things about a changing regional economic landscape in America as well as a shifting global economy. He makes the case that a few "mega-regions" will come to dominate innovation and progress in the future, driven by the snowball effect of accelerated "urban metabolism":

[A Santa Fe Institute research team] found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve “super-linear” scaling. “By almost any measure,” they wrote, “the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.” Places like New York with finance and media, Los Angeles with film and music, and Silicon Valley with hightech are all examples of high-metabolism places.

He talks about the specifics of our current crisis, including the cataclysm in the housing markets in areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas. His plan to deal with the meteoric rise in the foreclosure rate was one I hadn't heard yet:

The foreclosure crisis creates a real opportunity here. Instead of resisting foreclosures, the government should seek to facilitate them in ways that can minimize pain and disruption. Banks that take back homes, for instance, could be required to offer to rent each home to the previous homeowner, at market rates—which are typically lower than mortgage payments—for some number of years. (At the end of that period, the former homeowner could be given the option to repurchase the home at the prevailing market price.) A bigger, healthier rental market, with more choices, would make renting a more attractive option for many people; it would also make the economy as a whole more flexible and responsive.

Contrast this with Obama's announced plan to avoid foreclosures. On the one hand Florida's idea seems like a great way to help keep people in their homes by renting at a lower price. This might help some overcome the inability to make mortgage payments due to job loss. On the other, allowing these foreclosures will cause continuing declines in home prices. Obama's plan seeks to avoid this for a certain demographic segment of homeowners. It will probably be better to hit the market bottom sooner rather than later, however, if such a thing can be effected by public policy. Just as with the stock market, we cannot have a true recovery until a bottom is reached.

Florida is anti-homeowner in the sense that he feels government policies gave the housing bubble the potential to get as big and unstable as it did. He makes a pretty convincing case, and predicts that in the future we will see a lower homeownership rate among a more mobile populace of renters.

Florida talks about how geography impacts economy, and while suburbanization was the perfect answer in postwar America, its continued sprawl without adjustment is likely an unhealthy situation for society. We need an entirely new way of thinking about and approaching a host of problems, none of which can be permanently fixed by ad hoc, stop-gap measures:

But different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody. Band-Aids and bailouts cannot change that. Neither auto-company rescue packages nor policies designed to artificially prop up housing prices will position the country for renewed growth, at least not of the sustainable variety. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography.

Then of course there's this:

On one level, the crisis has demonstrated what everyone has known for a long time: Americans have been living beyond their means, using illusory housing wealth and huge slugs of foreign capital to consume far more than we’ve produced. The crash surely signals the end to that; the adjustment, while painful, is necessary.

But even though it is painful, we might just come out the better for it in the end - whenever that may be. As Florida concludes:

At critical moments, Americans have always looked forward, not back, and surprised the world with our resilience. Can we do it again?

Evolving in the Kitchen

An interesting Economist article about the theory that cooking evolved as an essential human activity.

Obama's Golden Trumpet

Jonathan Raban has an excellent analysis of the President's inaugural address.

Hat tip to BRhé for the link.

In the Mood for Cheesecake

A pretty interesting article over at The Economist about the possible evolutionary reasons behind music. Many questions but few answers, aside from why that DB in the band gets more women than you.

On Butter

“I can tell a margarine cookie as soon as I bite into it,” [Olson] said. “And then I put it right down.”

I don't bake, but I do so love butter. Read about this most wondrous of foods in this New York Times article here. I think I'd actually be a decent baker but I generally don't have any desire for sweets, desserts, baked goods, etc. It's a glaring weakness in my culinary repertoire.

But I do butter up just about everything under the sun. The best butter I ever had was in June of this year. Mom and I got a big slab of fresh, golden, West Cork butter in Skibbereen and enjoyed it along with some bread, cheese, crackers and wine on our first evening in the Old Country. Now that was some serious butter.

Last night at Club Passim, inspired by a fairly tasty but cottonmouth-inducing orange spice cake, the conversation turned to the necessity of animal fats for moist, delicious desserts - niceties absent from the vegan menu of Club Passim/Veggie Planet. I respect personal dietary choices, whether for health or ethical reasons, but it's quite the flavor and texture sacrifice. I just can't imagine seraphim snacking on soy butter brownies.

Thanks to Butterchurn Johnston and Rhode for buttering up my internets this morning.

The Good Side of Bad Books

I enjoyed this recent post by Stuart Evers about the benefits (yes, benefits!) of reading bad novels. I've had a couple recent clunkers, so this had a special appeal to me. And I think there's some truth to what he says.

But I think we should still strive for an extremely high ratio of good books to bad, no?

Wasilly

Hilarious piece from Dick Cavett (he's still alive?) in the Times about Sarah Palin's continuing presence in the national spotlight, her execrable grammar, and her complete inability to communicate in a coherent manner. Say what you will about her politics (and there is little there to recommend her), she is quite literally incomprehensible for the majority of the time.

Golly, I'm glad she's nowhere near the District!

Greenland

Greenland. A weird place: part of Denmark but semi-autonomous; a gigantic landmass mostly covered in ice (85%); a population of 57,000, mostly Inuit; huge untapped oil fields off the west coast; the eastern part of the island mired in poverty and pervasive social ills like domestic violence, alcoholism, underage pregnancy, sexual abuse, and a shockingly high rate of suicide (Twenty percent of girls 15 to 17 years of age have already attempted suicide once).

This article in the Spiegel Online takes a look at Greenland and an upcoming referendum, the approval of which will set in motion Greenland's path to independence. Tapping into the vast oil reserves could bring desperately-needed economic vitality to this strange place. Take a look.

The Origin of the Spouses

An amusing - if perhaps slightly depressing - piece about modern dating over at the City Journal. Although there's a lot of truth in the so-called Darwinian theory of dating, I think that there are just as many people who don't play the dating "games" as those who do (whether consciously or not).

Either way, there is a lot of BS out there. Watch your step.

Fare Thee Well, FireJoeMorgan

It's a sad, sad day. FireJoeMorgan.com is closing up shop. Since 2005 this has been one of my favorite blogs. Aside from my friends' blogs (which I'm obligated to follow, despite content highly variable in frequency, quality, logic, and entertainment value) this has been a must-read for three years now. During baseball season, FJM's weekly breakdown of Joe Morgan's ESPN chats were the ultimate in sports meta-criticism; the innumerable other posts on broadcaster and sportswriter idiocy were just as enjoyable. The crew at FJM demonstrated a passion for baseball rivaled only by their admiration for logic, rationality, data, and facts to back up (or more often, refute) claims made by people paid ridiculous sums of money to expound upon sports incorrectly for the common man.

I can only hope that they will reconsider, or find another outlet for their dedication, panache, joie de vivre, and limitless other foreign catchphrases that deserve italicized font.

RIP FJM April 2005 - November 2008

The Economist Endorses Obama

Boom. Take a look at their Global Electoral College map, too. Good stuff.

Once again, tip o' the cap to Steele's Facebook status. Nice ticker, that.