Ripple Effect
At The Glittering Eye, Dave asks a friend in the construction business how it’s going (the exact same thing I do to feel the pulse of the body economic) and hears a story of concussion waves of work loss pulsing outward from banks’ hunkered-down refusal to issue a perfectly routine performance bond.
It might be true that this is just a temporary situation and, once the shock has worn off, things will get back to normal, the appetite of banks and insurance companies for risk will increase, and the business activity that was supported by the willingness to take risks would come back again.
Or it may be true that we’ve been living with an unrealistically low perception of risk for some time that’s supported a similarly unrealistic level of economic activity. If that’s true, this may be the new normal and the coming times could be very hard, indeed.
Riddle Me This
Everything I’ve read about caps on executive pay suggests that such measures are at best a bad joke. Not only do such measures impinge on the freedom of the marketplace*, but they are also impossible to enforce. Salaries can become bonuses, bonuses can become salaries. Executives can be compensated $1 on payroll, along with $9,999,999 in “consulting services.” And so forth.
So given this theory: why is the management of Goldman Sachs claiming that they are going to pay off their TARP financing as soon as possible? As this fellow points out, they have other obligations that constitute a greater burden on shareholder returns. Surely the executive compensation limits imposed by this financing are no burden for them to work around, right**?
* Presuming, of course, that the pay of finance industry CEO’s is presently determined by an actual market, rather than through cronyism laden with conflicts of interest.
** Never minding, of course, that as responsible agents under effective corporate governance they would NEVER put their own needs above those of their principals.
~ Maxwell
Slap My Assets
Wednesday, the Obama administration proposed a “choke the money” strategy to solve complex problems. Obama slapped financial sanctions on three of the most vicious Mexican drug cartels and threatened to prosecute Americans who do business with them. The same day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the administration will try to seize the financial assets of Somali pirates.
Fighting drug lords and pirates by pinpoint surgical strikes on their cash streams sounds like a bad joke in a country where we can’t even discover what our own financiers are doing with our own trillions until it’s too late.
The quickest and cheapest way to undercut the cartels, of course, would be to legalize marijuana, which, according to the White House drug czar, accounts for 62 percent of the Mexican drug cartels’ profits. But Obama doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.
-Miles Lascaux
Pirate Lessons
The media inhabit an eternal and simplified present tense, and when they try to set up a historical backdrop they usually get it backward or upside down.
For instance, AP and other wire service news accounts of the recent dust-up between the U.S. Navy and Somali brigands (I pitched the headline “Yankees 3, Pirates 0” but was overruled) called it “the first such attack on American sailors in around 200 years.”
It isn’t. Evidently the AP was aware of the Barbary Coast pirates but not later cases. Especially the naval war against Sumatra pirates in the 1830s. Which is a shame because the parallels there are a lot more informative than the ones that can be abstracted from the Barbary Coast war.
A good, brief account of the fight is in Max Boot’s “Savage Wars of Peace.” If I can do the link right, the relevant passages are here,from the bottom of page 46 to the end of page 49.
It involves a lawless Muslim land on the Indian Ocean. It involves U.S. merchant ships seeking precious cargoes (spices) and carrying on dubious trade (opium). And it shows the influence of politics on military decisions and the consequences of disproportionate responses and collateral damage.
It also shows that nothing — hard power or soft power — worked for long. What worked was when the Dutch took over Sumatra and banned all non-Dutch ships from the spice trade there. Then and only then did the pirates stop attacking American ships — because there weren’t any.
Unfortunately for modern sensibilities, when you look at history, the best antidote to piracy is colonialism/imperialism. That’s how the British quelled the nasty gang of cutthroats preying on ships from along the southern Persian Gulf in the early 1800s — they cowed them into submission out of fear of what other colonial powers might do to them, and eventually made them a protectorate of the Empire. The Arab pirates learned to behave, then their descendants discovered the virtues of oil. Now they’re our good friends in Dubai. Who recently aspired to run our ports.
-Miles Lascaux
“You Are a Dog!”
What many Shiite Afghan men call a woman with the courage to insist on her human freedom. Sadly, a good number of women agree.
A Grammarian’s Cri de Coeur
The nation’s collective groan over yesterday’s tax deadline, along with the protests that attended it, may have overwhelmed the more cultish significance of today’s date – the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. But if this little book’s birthday does fail to make the news tonight, there’s at least one vital constituency who won’t be disappointed. In a memorable rant, grammarian Geoffrey K. Pullum dishes the dirt:
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
Pullum’s article is far more than your typical ad libris, because he seeks to restore some respect for a venerable institution, one much damaged by Strunk and White’s best-seller – the passive voice:
We are told that the active clause “I will always remember my first trip to Boston” sounds much better than the corresponding passive “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows “by”).
For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.
Moreover, he damningly points out that The Elements of Style demonstrates a miserable understanding of the passive voice, offering four examples of its use of which three are actually in the active voice. They also fail spectacularly to take their own advice:
“Put statements in positive form,” they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent “not” from being used as “a means of evasion.”
“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)
And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.”
That’s actually not just three strikes, it’s four, because in addition to contravening “positive form” and “active voice” and “nouns and verbs,” it has a relative clause (“that can pull”) removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: “Keep related words together.”
The most striking aspect of Pullum’s critique is the extent to which its echoes reverberate into the present day. As he points out, Microsoft Word’s grammar checker automatically underlines every passive construction in a document, even if it is gramatically correct. But beyond that, Strunk and White’s “overopinionated and underinformed little book” eerily fortells the bloviating world of blogs, text messages, and Twitter, where factual (and needless to say, grammatical) accuracy frequently matters less than the frequency and forcefulness of assertion.
– Maxwell James
She Dreamed a Dream.
When Susan Boyle came out on the stage in “Britain’s Got Talent” — their version of “American Idol” — overweight, frowzy-haired and 47, looking more like a charwoman than a Spice Girl, and confessed that she’d always wanted to be a professional singer, the judges and the audience, Beautiful Young People all, sniggered and got ready for some fun. Then she opened her mouth.
Trembling on the Brink . . .
. . . of huge changes, we are. Will we make it across this threshold? Will we fall back into comfortable darkness, still warm and smelly and shaped to our bodies like a dog’s nest? Will we disintegrate trying to cross the threshold, like a spaceship shuddering apart under the stress of approaching the speed of light?
Science has everything to do with it. Working with science is making me perpetually uneasy. First of all it is disorienting. And humiliating. Finding out how infinitesimally tiny and limited we are. We’re just big enough, and just smart enough, to have found out how tiny and dumb we are, in a teeming, swarming universe that doesn’t need us and that we’re too short-lived and body-burdened, with our brief window of negentropy before we fizzle out like Roman candles, even to get a tiny little piece of. We were better off when we were as myopic and as obsessed with our own blown-large biological affairs as ants, or rutting deer. (Maybe I’m only speaking for myself and how fearful it is to lose the rosy blinders and the purpose of sex.)
With science comes terrifying power that we’re not wise enough to wield, and . . . and a loss of orientation that is expressed both in the unwarranted cockiness of atheists whistling in the dark and in the head-in-the-sand atavism of all kinds of fundamentalists. We’re going over the threshold into an understanding of the cosmos and the gene that will require that we throw out the horse-and-buggy metaphysics that got us this far and almost start over from scratch. Anybody — New-Ager, “Bright,” or traditionalist — who thinks there’s a quick, easy, comfortable answer to that is in denial.
How to stay open, yet to have some guidance . . . what a challenge. You see it in this post at Althouse about Sharia, and you see it in these recent notes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Even more tha[n] in Hayek’s days, the ecology of the real world is becoming too complex for Aristotelian logic: very, very little of what we do can be safely formalized, meaning asymmetries matter more than ever. Which puts the Western World today at the most dangerous point in its history: unless we get the Bernanke-Summers crowd out of there, it will eventually be destroyed by the machinery of arrogant, formal-thinking civil servants, and Ivy-league semi-retards.
Finally, beyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions –we can’t live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we’ve used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!
Is that so? Can religion handle this? Can anything aged handle this, anything that was built on the snug foundation of our ignorance? Can the moral parts of religion withstand cosmology’s assault on its myths? Isn’t religion a willfull staying childish? And isn’t atheism just braggart adolescence with zits? Aren’t all bets off? Can religion’s knowledge about us, what we are, what we need, survive stripped of the myths? Or are the myths part of what we need? If so, then we cannot evolve beyond our current condition, we should never even have gotten this far, and we’ve hit a wall.
Economic lack of confidence coming at the same time is a double whammy. Boom times make people feel manic and optimistic and anticipatory. It’s like those pirates chewing qat for courage. Bust times make us feel shadowed and threatened and like no good can come of this. We’ve swum out too deep, it’s cold and the drug is wearing off.
~ amba, at 4 A.M.
Afterthought: Maybe we must cling to the comforting husk of religion for a while (a century?) the way a butterfly or moth clings to the chrysalis it has just crawled out of while its wings expand. (I’m not saying religion’s knowledge of human nature isn’t deep and wise. I’m saying that scientific discoveries are shattering the myths and explanations that were among religion’s major mechanisms for managing that nature. Of course, I think those discoveries are also shattering the assumptions of mechanistic atheism. So again, all bets are off.)
Ambiance 