Junk sex and Junk Food - the connections

Mary Eberstadt's long but interesting argument that food IS the new sex (she also brings out some surprising similarities between Pornography (junk sex) and Junk Food...)

Pornography is the single most viewed subject online, by men anyway; it is increasingly a significant factor in divorce cases; and it is resulting in any number of cottage industries, from the fields of therapy to law to academia, as society’s leading cultural institutions strive to measure and cope with its impact. This junk sex shares all the defining features of junk food. It is produced and consumed by people who do not know one another. It is disdained by those who believe they have access to more authentic experience or “healthier” options. Internet pornography is further widely said — right now, in its relatively early years — to be harmless, much as few people thought little of the ills to come through convenient prepared food when it first appeared; and evidence is also beginning to emerge about compulsive pornography consumption, as it did slowly but surely in the case of compulsive packaged food consumption, that this laissez-faire judgment is wrong. This brings us to another similarity between junk sex and junk food: People are furtive about both, and many feel guilty about their pursuit and indulgence of each. And those who consume large amounts of both are also typically self-deceptive, too: i.e., they underestimate just how much they do it and deny its ill effects on the rest of their lives. In sum, to compare junk food to junk sex is to realize that they have become virtually interchangeable vices — even if many people who do not put “sex” in the category of vice will readily do so with food.

Image ripped from here.

The real picture

Slumdog Millionaire, has provoked some unusually strong criticism from the average Mumbaikar. They feel that the portrayal of India(n's) in the film is downright degrading and the storyline projects an India whose cup is half empty. Sadanand Dhume on OutlookIndia.com has a different perspective.

Notwithstanding the giant strides made over the past 18 years, Indian criticism of Slumdog also reveals the chasm between the country’s self-perception and projection and any reasonable measure of its achievements. India may boast homegrown programs in space exploration and nuclear power, but -- as a first time visitor to India immediately notices and as the film mercilessly reveals -- it also struggles to provide its people with electricity, sanitation and drinking water. About half of Indian women are illiterate, a higher percentage than in Laos, Cambodia or Myanmar. It is at number 122 -- between Nepal and Lesotho -- on the World Bank index that measures ease of doing business, and 85 on the global corruption index maintained by the anti-graft NGO Transparency International. To put it bluntly, the squalor of the slums depicted in Slumdog is closer to reality than an elaborately choreographed Bollywood dance sequence shot on location in Switzerland.

An individual seems to be taking a leisurly open air leak at one of the numerous communally sanctioned open air garbage dumping spots around the city of Bangalore. I took this picture during a recent visit to India.

Novel solution for sexual offenders

Especially for the ones that harm children. Cruel and dastardly solution, but effective. Of course, getting anything like this rule even remotely near the lawmakers is a non starter here in the United States. The Czechs have better checks on this account...

A doctor makes an incision in a man's scrotal sack and, deftly wielding his scalpel, quickly removes both testicles. In the Czech Republic that simple operation is the punishment for male sex offenders. But to the Council of Europe, the region's leading human rights body, the procedure is "invasive, irreversible and mutilating." In a report issued last week the Council called the punishment "degrading" and demanded it be scrapped immediately. Over the past decade, at least 94 prisoners have undergone the treatment in the Czech Republic, the only country in Europe to continue to surgically castrate sex offenders. The Czech government insists the procedure is a medical issue, permanently reducing testosterone levels to lower an offender's sexual urges. (More here)

Fallouts from a gilded age

An opinion on Bloomberg indicating that banker salaries will fall by 50%...

It is now obvious that a lot of the financial innovation of the last decade was a waste of everyone’s time and energy. We didn’t need all that complexity: It certainly didn’t make the world economy run any more smoothly. This past decade was the best time to be a banker. Yet the one thing we know for certain is that markets get back to normal over time. If oil is trading at $140 a barrel, it’s probably going to fall in price. If gold is trading at $200 an ounce, it will probably rise. And if bankers are paid 40 percent more than their long-term average, then -- well, you get the idea.
The era of light-touch regulation is over. State-run banks will be tightly controlled by their new shareholders. Even the banks that need no taxpayer bailout will find the authorities keeping an eye on them. We are only at the start of that process. In all likelihood, the regulations will get heavier and heavier, leaving little room for innovation because the last thing anyone wants right now is an elaborate piece of financial engineering. Yet if bankers are just doing dull familiar things in a dull familiar way, they can’t expect to be paid very well. Investment banking won’t disappear. But the compliance officer and the corporate social-responsibility executive are suddenly the most important people in the office. And that will make it a quieter, less dynamic and less profitable profession.
To get back to their sustainable long-term level, salaries will need to fall 40 percent. But, as any trader will tell you, markets always overshoot, both on the way up and the way down. So, in reality, a 50 percent drop seems more likely.

Pink undies as gifts

A group of Indian women named The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women are planning on sending a shipment of pink women’s underwear tomorrow (Valentine's day) in protest to the offices of Sri Ram Sena (a conservative Hindu group that advocates among other things, that women not frequent pubs as often). A conservative viewpoint on this otherwise novel protest. Link via Sandeep.

From here: The issue really isn’t one of culture and tradition, which are far too complex for those who look askance at responsible behaviour to comprehend, but the manner in which they view others who may refuse to embrace or applaud their lifestyle. It is also to do with perverse notions of ‘modernism’ and assertion of perverted ‘modernity’. For instance, The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women — this Facebook group also has men as its members — would consider women who don’t consume alcoholic beverages or smoke cigarettes, wear saris and are not necessarily long-suffering wives who spend their lives as home-makers but in building successful careers, as ‘backward’.
They would view working women who travel in over-crowded buses and commuter trains and return home in the evening too tired to contemplate a night out on the tiles, or those who contribute to the family kitty to keep the home fire burning and, therefore, cannot afford the luxury of scoffing exotic cocktails at pubs, as losers deserving of their pity. The women who scrub floors, wash clothes and clean dishes to eke out subsistence wages from which they save money to pay for their children’s school fees and books, and are regularly beaten black and blue by their husbands after they have had their fill of liquor at ‘pubs’ which cater to the underclass, simply do not matter and, hence, are not worthy of The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women’s attention.

Livni / Bibi faceoff today

Analysis on Israeli poll outcomes...

If Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu's Likud proves the polls right and emerges as the largest faction, heading a right-wing bloc with a Knesset majority, Peres, who will consult with the various party leaders once the official results are in, will be spared much deliberation and the man who lost power a decade ago will be given the presidential nod. Alternatively, if Tzipi Livni's Kadima maintains its final-days momentum, eases ahead of the Likud and, however improbably, Livni wins the prime ministerial recommendation of party leaders representing a Knesset majority, she will be given the president's authority to try to succeed where she failed just three months ago in building a governing coalition. Where Peres would have a certain dilemma is if the final tally shows Kadima as the largest party, but Netanyahu the favored prime minister of most of the new intake of MKs. Here, too, though Peres's decision should be relatively straightforward: Netanyahu would be given the first chance to build a government.

Some new digital work...

Too lazy to paint...

'If you meet Darwin on the road, kill him' chronicles

In an article that is sure to set creationists and evolutionists talking animatedly, Carl Safina (a SUNY professor) makes the argument that Darwinism and an ideological adherence to his ideas bred creationism and we should get away from a cultish following of Darwin’s ideas.

By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin. Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.

I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight. Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples.

Pictures from a visit last year to Kate Clark's exhibition 'Perfect Strangers' at Claire Oliver.


Rhyming extracts from 'Stephen Jay Gould is my name' by Richard Milner

Oh! Stephen Jay Gould is my name
And fossils and shells are my game
Canadian shales
And Bahamian snails
Have brought me a measure of fame.

If Darwin is your cup of tea
But you don’t have a lot of time free
You don’t have to look
Through his wearisome book
You can learn evolution from me.

I can tell you a tale of a trial
Where Bryan and Darrow once tangled
A courtroom so laden with bile
That truth got distorted and mangled.
Fundamentalists shouted defiance,
“Darwinian textbooks must go,
The Bible contains all the science
A biology class needs to know!”

Inclination to Indulge

This news item on the resurrection of an ancient practice called the indulgence into mainstream Catholicism leaves one wondering if it is supposed to signal a more conservative shift in Catholic beliefs or what it is touted to be - bringing back the idea of personal sin and appropriate repentance.

The indulgence is among the less noticed and less disputed traditions to be restored to Roman Catholics. According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory, before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament. There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it, until another sin is committed. You can get one for yourself, or for someone who is dead. Any Catholic could receive an indulgence by fulfilling the basic requirements: going to confession, receiving Holy Communion, saying a prayer for the pope and achieving “complete detachment from any inclination to sin.”

Photo

Melted metal from the alloy wheels of burnt out vehicles lies on the ground after a bushfire swept through properties on February 9, 2009 in Bendigo, 160 km north of Melbourne, Australia. From here.

A cartoon from the 70's

Lee Lorenz, 1976 from The New Yorker Collection (ripped from here)

On Greed

Finally, an essay supporting the 'Greed is good" axiom (amidst these troubled times). The funny thing is that it sounds hollow and strangely compelling almost all of the way... (and where else should it be printed, but the Wall Street Journal).

"Wall Street" has always been the quintessential, if ill-defined, symbol of American capitalism. In reality, Wall Street today includes many large banks, investment groups and other institutions, some not even located in the U.S. It has become a euphemism for the global capital markets industry -- one in which the combined market value of all stocks and bonds outstanding in the world topped $140 trillion at the end of 2007. Well less than half of the value of this combined market value is represented by American securities, but American banks lead the world in its origination and distribution. Wall Street is one of America's great export industries.

The market thrives on locating new opportunities, providing innovation and a willingness to take risks. It is also, regrettably, subject to what the economist John Maynard Keynes called "animal spirits," the psychological factors that make markets irrational when going up or down. For example, America has enjoyed a bonus it didn't deserve in its free-wheeling participation in the housing market, before it became a bubble. Despite great efforts by regulators to manage systemic risk, there have been market failures. The causes of the current market failure, which is the real object of the public anger, go well beyond the Wall Street compensation system -- but compensation has been one of them.

The capital-markets industry operates in a very sophisticated and competitive environment, one that responds best to strong performance incentives. People who flourish in this environment are those who want to be paid and advanced based on their individual and their team's performance, and are willing to take the risk that they might be displaced by someone better or that mistakes or downturns may cause them to be laid off or their firms to fail. Indeed, since 1970, 28 major banks or investment banks have failed or been taken up into mergers, and thousands have come and gone into the industry without making much money. Those that have survived the changing fortunes of the industry have done very well -- so well, in fact, that they appear to have become symbolic of greedy and reckless behavior.

Friday poem

Days Inn from Linda Smukler's Home In Three Days. Don't Wash.

It was astonishing to walk into room 233 at the Days Inn / the door open for us / to turn on the lights and to close the curtains / to see you first locked into that tan recliner as I sat on the (slightly darker) tan carpet / my back up against the coarse blue bedspread / to smell disinfectant and to drink bitter tea / to feel the minutes of our short afternoon slip away into nervousness and the prints on the off-white walls / then how you lay down on the bed / and I lay next to you / to kiss / no to talk / to get comfortable with each other again / we heard raised voices from somewhere / from the side or overhead / we couldn't figure out where / perhaps a meeting or ten TVs / screaming children or a gathering of boys to watch the football game / these were all possibilities as gradually the voices got so loud I called the front desk to complain / the desk clerk said the voices were coming from below something religious for sure / evangelists or a revival meeting / I told the clerk that I would call her back if we needed to move / then you asked me to turn off the hard lights and I did and lay back down next to you and then on top of you and I finally forgave myself for letting you wait at the train station / I remember you turned me over and how delirious I became at your touch and at a certain point I was overwhelmed with the desire to enter you and all the while beneath us they called on the Lord / they called for salvation / the desk called and out of breath I answered and said we were fine and did not want to move and it was true / the room had become as if lighted by candles and we lay on a sacred bier accompanied by hosannas and hallelujahs / and the chalice of your scent the icon of your face / the idols of your breasts in black lace / the staff of your finger in my ass and my cock in your cunt / our coming joined from below by shouts and applause and the exalted blessings of the possessed

Women - the primary one

According to a new report, due to the current economic meltdown women are finding themselves not only labeled as the primary care-giver for their children, they also find they are the primary bread winners in the family (with most of the men out of jobs).
While it is commendable that the numbers of women in the workplace will increase relative to men, it is indeed sad that it takes an economic meltdown to achieve that statistic.

The report also highlighted the following fun facts about men out of work:

When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.

W

Interesting characterization of the protagonist in a new play starting on Broadway this week.

He's a cocky but bumbling fellow, trapped forever in puberty, always eager to play and eternally armored in the self-assurance that often goes with a lack of self-knowledge. He is given to jaw-dropping malapropisms and misinterpretations, and he has a raunchy exhibitionist streak. He is, in other words, a typical leading man from a Will Ferrell comedy. The character being portrayed is exactly the right leader for his time: a man who translated the most enduringly popular movie archetype of the last two decades — the clueless doofus — into the most powerful political position in the world.

While on the subject of lampooning political figures, they have another play starting in Chicago about an equally clueless, bumbling person who also seemed to be smugly stuck with the self-assurance that sometimes tags along with a head full of h(air). It starts next week. The teaser video is hilarious. Jon Stewart called him ScumDog MillionHair just the other day.

Comment on a recent report of brain drain

Yesterday, President Obama announced a $500K salary cap on executives of companies that were planning on using the bailout money from TARP funds. I immediately heard commentators on the evening radio (NPR) lamenting about a brain drain on Wall Street due to the reduced incentive structures. My view is that if these are the brains that have managed to get us into this financial sinkhole, then the right solution is to drain the place of such brains. No, we do not need brains of this nature gallivanting around Wall Street anymore. The brain drain might actually be a good thing for the nation.

Chart data from here.

Secretary of the Arts (petition)

Link to an online petition that urges President Obama to consider appointing a Secretary of the Arts. Here is a Times article that talkes more about the idea.
Of course, Republicans think any effort spent on the arts amounts to efforts wasted...

Comment by a petitioner:

The arts are very important and often overlooked in our country as little more than occasional entertainment and not seen for what they really are: the second most important way that people can express themselves, after language. We communicate thru art, we learn about ourselves and others thru art and we find release and freedom of expression in art. We need to stop the diminution of the importance of the arts in our schools, and our communities on the whole. And there needs to be someone who will work to ensure this. Someone whose goals will be focused on the betterment of the arts and will not be distracted by other issues. We need someone whose job this would be. We need a Secretary of the Arts.

Greed is good (also addictive)

The adjustments to life made by the spouse of a Wall Street banker after the banker's bonus was reduced (noticed in comments made on the DABA blog).

We’re looking at just enough money to make our mortgage payments, paying none of the principle down. So we aren’t going to lose the house yet, but we aren’t going to think about THAT until NEXT January. Meanwhile: My own dinky-by comparison salary, which had been my own since I went back to work so I could have the company of grownups, is no longer my own. It all will be spent on family expenses. The sitter’s hours are cut, both the family and my private credit card are cut in half, and I’m switching from having my facials and massages in my earthy, yoga-and-wine serving downtown spa to a midtown been-in-business-forever place with ladies in cubbies wearing pink jackets and lots of make-up giving facials only. I know, I know, only old people and gay men go there these days, but congested skin isn’t an alternative for me, so I have to go someplace. I’ll do it once every 6 weeks instead of monthly, and it is 1/3 the price of the facials at the spa. And I remember from the 80’s that they do a good job.

It gets worse. I’ll now be doing my pilates with others, in class, on the mat instead of on the machines with my private instructor. This truly frightens me. I could hurt myself competing with you 20-30 yr-olds. Private was so much less humiliating. And yes, cooking at home. We had been enjoying the new Whole Foods to-go foods section so very much. Oh well - hello Associated Market. Did you know you can sauté’ an entire bag of frozen spinach in a large frying pan with a bit of onion and olive oil, chop a bit of domestic feta into and serve it to your whole family with a squeeze of lemon, and it’s a healthy and cheap alternative to pasta as a main dish? It is so good for you and the kids love it. And we’ll need the alternative because there will be a lot of pasta. Cooking pasta sauce on the weekends isn’t my idea of a good time, but that’s what we will be doing because I’m not ready to do something original every day. I have always been a great appreciator of other people’s cooking.

Behind the soundbites

Actual news item on Bloomberg today...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. wants to repay the $10 billion it got from the U.S. Treasury last year to signal the firm is healthy.

What this story actually translates to:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. would like to continue paying clueless investment bankers millions of dollars in bonuses and does not really want to be shackled by the $500K limit on executive compensation that President Obama plans to impose on firms who have been bailed out by the Federal government.Cartoon ripped from here.

I read about Treblinka yesterday – a poem

How many were dragged?
Did all of them hold hands?
Was there innate goodness?
How long is to the other side?
Why do the children last so long?
How many of them saw the truth?
Why do herds behave the way they do?
How many heard a whip lash overhead?
How many people does it take to satisfy?
How many sank tired into the frozen earth?
How many found it a beautiful place to die?
How many indulged in complete surrender?
Would the guards have been someplace else?
How long before they stopped following orders?

If you know, let me know.


Side note: I find German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open criticism of the Vatican based Christian leader Joseph Alois Ratzinger commendable.

Reading

Mark Slouka's rant about ignorance in America in the latest issue of Harpers. Long, but provokes thought.

What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about, particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame—no longer. Today, across vast swaths of the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We’re deeply loyal to it. Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.
Seen from a sufficient distance (a decade abroad, for example), or viewed through a protective filter, like film, or alcohol, there can be something almost endearing about it. It can appear quaint, part of our foolish-butauthentic, naive-yet-sincere, roughhewn spirit. Up close and personal, unromanticized and unfiltered, it’s another thing entirely. In the flesh, barking from the electronic pulpit or braying back from the audience, our ignorance can be sobering. We don’t know. Or much care. Or care to know. What do we care about? We care about auto racing and Jessica. We care about food, oh yes, please, very much. And money. (Did you catch the last episode of I Love Money?) We care about Jesus, though we’re a bit vague on his teachings. And America. We care about America. And the flag. And the troops, though we’re untroubled by the fact that the Bush Administration lied us into the conflict, then spent years figuring out that armor in war might be bookstores to lay our money down.
Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has migrated to the region of the belt—not below it, which might at least be diverting, but only as far as the gut—where it has come to a stop. The gut tells us things. It tells us what’s right and what’s wrong, who to hate and what to believe and who to vote for. Increasingly, it’s where American politics is done. All we have to do is listen to it and the answer appears in the little window of the eight ball: “Don’t trust him. Don’t know. Undecided. Just because, that’s why.” We know because we feel, as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in the human heart, like love. I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don’t believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about—constitutional law, for example, or sailing — a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don’t believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers’ speculation that’s so divorced from actual, demonstrable fact, that’s so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. “Way I see it is,” a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”

Comment

Left a little unsure on what might be the greater of two evils: Outsized bonuses on Wall Street or an outsized stimulus bill for Main Street. Cartoon ripped from Slate.

Is being rich the new 'being dumb'?

I’ve become increasingly concerned about the rising number of rich people who are being caught unawares by shifts in the sumptuary code. First, there were those auto executives who didn’t realize that it is no longer socially acceptable to use private jets for lobbying trips to Washington. Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch washroom. Then there are the Wall Street executives who were suddenly attacked from the White House for giving out the same sort of bonuses they’ve been giving out for years. Now there is Tom Daschle, who is being criticized for making $5 million off his Senate prestige.

On the way home

Yesterday evening

This is yet another way to spend Superbowl Sunday - no ads, no consumerism, no nothing - just watching nature.
Meanwhile, the creepiest and most depressing ad yesterday night was the one from Careerbuilder. I guess grossing viewers out was one way they could have people talking about them. If there was one ad that was a sign of the times, it was the spot from a company that cannot even spell its name right - 'cash 4 Gold'. One can only imagine how terrible a time this must be when a pawn broker dressed up with a dotcom moniker peddles ads during the Superbowl. The Recession must really be on us.

Putting a price on toxicity...

One of the ideas put forth by the Obama administration is to create a bad bank that will help absorb bad assets (like toxic mortgage securities) from good banks, hold it over time and then sell the assets to recover some or most of what it had paid thus aiding the taxpayer. Freed from the drudgery of holding onto these toxic assets, the good banks would start lending again and bring our economy back to full steam.

Sounds easy - until one considers on how best to value the underlying toxic assets... as this example from the Times amply demonstrates...

The wild variations on the value of many bad bank assets can be seen by looking at one mortgage-backed bond recently analyzed by a division of Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency. The financial institution that owns the bond calculates the value at 97 cents on the dollar, or a mere 3 percent loss. But S.& P. estimates it is worth 87 cents, based on the current loan-default rate, and could be worth 53 cents under a bleaker situation that contemplates a doubling of defaults. But even that might be optimistic, because the bond traded recently for just 38 cents on the dollar, reflecting the even gloomier outlook of investors. The bond analyzed by S.& P. is just one of thousands that the government might buy or guarantee should it go forward with setting up a “bad bank” that would acquire $1 trillion or more of toxic assets from banks.

One hopes fervently that the Obama administration will do a fair job of valuing these assets in ways that will provide incentives for the taxpayer rather than give it all away to the banks who led us into this mess. Given the ill conceived mish-mash loaded into the current stimulus package winding its way through the Senate, one hopes that the financial bailout will contain less excreta.

Bailouts and moral hazards - are they linked?

James Surowiecki makes the case for financial bailouts and why bailouts may not bring the ticker of moral hazard attached...

Why might the effects of moral hazard be smaller than expected? To begin with, most bailouts aren’t like deposit insurance, which is certain and quick. Financial bailouts are uncertain and messy, and they typically occur only after institutions have already suffered extensive damage. Bear Stearns, for instance, was “saved” only after its shares had fallen almost ninety-five per cent from the previous year, and it seems unlikely that either its laid-off workers or its battered shareholders came out of the experience anxious to engage in more foolhardy behavior.

The moral-hazard argument also assumes that the most important factor shaping corporate decisions is the interest of the company as a whole. But, more often, what’s shaping those decisions is the interest of individuals, and on Wall Street those interests are often only loosely connected to the long-term health of companies. The fact that people can reap enormous rewards for decisions that are beneficial in the short term but costly in the long term is likely to lead to reckless behavior, regardless of whether companies are bailed out or not. Even if we allow Citigroup to fail, after all, Chuck Prince, the former C.E.O., will still have walked away with a package reportedly worth more than seventy million dollars.

Finally, the biggest reason that moral hazard matters less than it might is that it can operate only if people actively countenance the possibility that their decisions could lead to complete disaster. But it’s well documented that people generally, and investors particularly, are overconfident and significantly underestimate the chances of being wiped out. The moral-hazard fundamentalists argue that banks and other financial institutions will act recklessly if they think they’ll be rescued in the event of failure. But Wall Street was reckless because it never believed that failure was even a possibility.

Quotable Quotes from the annals of Supremacism

From here: American Cause, a group seeking to speak for the future of the Republican Party declared that its November defeats in Congressional races stemmed not from having been too hard on foreigners, but too soft. The group, released a report arguing that anti-immigration absolutism was still the solution for the party’s deep electoral woes.

“Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.” - the report’s author, Marcus Epstein, urging Republicans to double down on their efforts to run on schemes to seal the border and drive immigrants out.

Two pictures from yesterday morning

Publicity props

Publishing a book is the new calling card. The self publishing business is really taking off even as mainstream publishing houses are laying off people...

From here: In 2008, nearly 480,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from close to 375,000 in 2007, according to the industry tracker Bowker. The company attributed a significant proportion of that rise to an increase in the number of print-on-demand books.

“Even if you’re sitting at a dinner party, if you ask how many people want to write a book, everyone will say, ‘I’ve got a book or two in me,’” said Kevin Weiss, chief executive of Author Solutions. “We don’t see a letup in the number of people who are interested in writing.” The trend is also driven by professionals who want to use a book as an enhanced business card as well as by people who are creating books as gifts for family and friends.

“It used to be an elite few,” said Eileen Gittins, chief executive of Blurb, a print-on-demand company whose revenue has grown to $30 million, from $1 million, in just two years and which published more than 300,000 titles last year. Many of those were personal books bought only by the author. “Now anyone can make a book, and it looks just like a book that you buy at the bookstore.”

Will this bill pass? My guess is no!

Under the terms of a bill introduced by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, no employee of any company that accepts federal bailout money would be allowed to make more than the president of the United States ($400K).

"We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer, They don't get it. These people are idiots. You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses."

McCaskill's proposed compensation limit would cover salaries, bonuses and stock options. I liked the flowery language used, but vested interests will not allow this bill to go anywhere...

Reading

1980's economist Mancur Olson's interest group theory partly helps explain why rich and affluent countries like ours could fail. Excerpted from an excellent article on the looming economic crisis facing the current administration by David Leonhardt here:

Successful countries give rise to interest groups that accumulate more and more influence over time. Eventually, the groups become powerful enough to win government favors, in the form of new laws or friendly regulators. These favors allow the groups to benefit at the expense of everyone else; not only do they end up with a larger piece of the economy’s pie, but they do so in a way that keeps the pie from growing as much as it otherwise would. Trade barriers and tariffs are the classic example. They help the domestic manufacturer of a product at the expense of millions of consumers, who must pay high prices and choose from a limited selection of goods.

Olson’s book was short but sprawling, touching on everything from the Great Depression to the caste system in India. His primary case study was Great Britain in the decades after World War II. As an economic and military giant for more than two centuries, it had accumulated one of history’s great collections of interest groups — miners, financial traders and farmers, among others. These interest groups had so shackled Great Britain’s economy by the 1970s that its high unemployment and slow growth came to be known as “British disease.”

Germany and Japan, on the other hand, were forced to rebuild their economies and political systems after the war. Their interest groups were wiped away by the defeat. “In a crisis, there is an opportunity to rearrange things, because the status quo is blown up,” Frank Levy, an M.I.T. economist and an Olson admirer, told me recently. If a country slowly glides down toward irrelevance, he said, the constituency for reform won’t take shape. Olson’s insight was that the defeated countries of World War II didn’t rise in spite of crisis. They rose because of it.

The parallels to the modern-day United States, though not exact, are plain enough. This country’s long period of economic pre-eminence has produced a set of interest groups that, in Olson’s words, “reduce efficiency and aggregate income.” Home builders and real estate agents pushed for housing subsidies, which made many of them rich but made the real estate bubble possible. Doctors, drug makers and other medical companies persuaded the federal government to pay for expensive treatments that have scant evidence of being effective. Those treatments are the primary reason this country spends so much more than any other on medicine. In these cases, and in others, interest groups successfully lobbied for actions that benefited them and hurt the larger economy.

The gentile giant - a poem

(This is a first draft : With apologies to Oscar Wilde)

Every afternoon, after they
came back from school,
the children would go and
play in the Giant's garden.
It was a beautiful garden,
where the petunia overflowed
amidst lush green grass and
olive trees. The date palms
grew rapidly in spring making
the birds happy and sing
"How happy we are"...
A peculiar tune, I must say.

One day, the Giant came back, and
he had a determined look on his face.
When he arrived, he saw
children frolicking and happily playing.
"What are you doing here?" he sternly asks...
To which the children knew not what
to say, needless, they hastily disappeared.
"My land is my land.. It belonged
to my ancestors and now it belongs to
me and is mine only.
He soon decreed that anyone caught or
entering his land will face consequences.
He built a high wall all round his garden,
a wall so tall, that the children by and by
slowly forgot what secrets lay within.

Every once in a while, when he stood up,
the giant so towered
over the neighborly children
they often cowered and wondered,
why one needed a wall as tall.
The children continued living
and minding their petty
businesses, some in squalor
some in splendor, but commonly shut out
of their childhood garden.

Some of us have naughty neighbors,
others have haughty ones,
this giant too was not spared of such.
His neighbors were children
and like children denied, they
threw the occasional stick, lobbed an
errant stone and every once in a while
using a toy bow (fashioned out of olive
tree branches and goat gut) shot; stray
arrows towards the giant’s home.
Some of the arrows would clear the wall,
and land in the garden, whilst some,
would fall back on the children.
The occasional arrow falling back
resulted in the curious case of a
child blinded by his own arrow.
A self goal, kind of…

And every once in a while, an arrow would
find its mark, lightly poking the giant. Of course,
in cases such as that, his thick epidermal armor
protected him. The giant would roar and bellow,
gnash his teeth and grunt menacingly.
He sometimes would throw little rocks
back at the children. Providence is funny,
he was blessed with deadly aim and every
time he threw those stones, many children
were crushed by its deadly force.

The other day, the children were up to their
tricks, and in the heat of the moment,
they decided to send out a shower of arrows.
Only this time, the giant was asleep.
Unlucky fate. The shower of arrows
happened to chance,
on the giant deep in slumber.
The pinpricks were felt and
an angry awakening ensued.
Insult to injury, he seemed to take notice of
an arrow that lodged itself in his left toe.
He gingerly pulled it out
and let out a murderous shriek. He decided to
teach the little ones a lesson.
One they might never forget.

He went into his large castle,
to his large private room. A dank, musty room
where he stored his weapons. He took
the choicest ones out,
gloating all the time.
He selected gleaming body armors,
adorned with a glittering coat of arms
climbed into his gunship,
and armed his missiles.
He had made sure (previously),
to sharpen the titanium tipped edges
of his steel swords
and properly arm the phosphorous bombs.
He also made sure the cluster munitions
were set to the right charges.
All the while, he was singing a merry tune.

The children on the other side of the wall
(sensing what was coming) cowered
in their little rickety mud homes.
The foolish children, they filled their quivers
full of toy arrows. Hoping to fight back.

The giant casually stepped over the high
stone walls, thinking to himself how easy
it was for him to casually step over.
He stoops to examine the little children,
(who by now) are running helter skelter
between his large, pink toes.
He is surprised to find that
some were blind and weak
some as thin as a rail
and others starving.
A few were holed up in their homes
hoping to defend their little families…

He proceeds to gingerly pick up the
little ones between his index and
middle fingers. He then uses his
opposing grasp to slowly squeeze
their little lungs. And just as they
are about their last gasp,
he lets them go. He drops them on
the ground and using his large toe
proceeds to casually step on their
little skulls. The funny thing was that
he actually seemed to enjoy the urgent
red spurts of blood that seemed to
erupt from their ears. He then wipes
his toes clean on the sand (the sand
between the olive trees) and goes in
search of the next one.

After about a hundred of them were finished
this way, the giant is tired.
He decides to take a break.
He goes into his castle for some
(much needed) food and rest.
The next day it is the same story.
For thirteen days, he walks over the
little homes of his neighbors,
destroying their schools, universities
and play areas.
He took care of their day care centers,
their shelter homes,
the homes of their fathers,
sisters and mothers. He does not spare
their graveyards nor their places of worship.
The mom and pop stores, the cobblers,
the olive oil merchant, the handyman
he manages to attend to them all.
When he is done, nothing is left standing.
Just mud, smoke and dust swirl
amidst the ruins of burning phosphorous.
This time he is really tired.
He decides that he has had enough,
and bellows to his neighbors
that in his well intentioned mind,
the suffering that the children have endured
is enough and he is magnanimous enough
to declare a cease fire.

Distant applause is heard from all
quarters of the world. All the fair and noble
minds applaud the cease fire. They reason that
one can endure only so many toy arrows before
the use of deadly force is sanctioned.
The giant now retires to his private quarters and
plans his next move. As he was stepping
into his home, he looked back and saw
a strange sight. The swans in his garden,
those stately white ones, the ones he
so dearly loved - they were singing,
loud and clear notes in the limpid waters.

Palestinian doctors carry the bodies of children killed by an Israeli tank shell, to the morgue at Shifa hospital in Gaza January 5, 2009. An Israeli tank shell killed three Palestinian children in their home in eastern Gaza City on Monday, medical officials said. They said several other Palestinians were wounded in the incident in Gaza's Zeitoun neighbourhood. An Israeli military spokeswoman said she was checking the report. Photo ripped from Reuters Pictures.

Best time to enact a universal health care bill - is NOW!

Paul Krugman on why this might be the best time (between the confusion surrounding the stimulus and the economic crisis) to enact a universal health care coverage bill..

The political argument that this is a bad time to be pushing fundamental health care reform because the nation’s attention is focused on the economic crisis is precisely wrong. Indeed. F.D.R. was able to enact Social Security in part because the Great Depression highlighted the need for a stronger social safety net. And the current crisis presents a real opportunity to fix the gaping holes that remain in that safety net, especially with regard to health care. And Mr. Obama really, really doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Bill Clinton, whose health care push failed politically partly because he moved too slowly: by the time his administration was ready to submit legislation, the economy was recovering from recession and the sense of urgency was fading.

Contemplating the road ahead...

Greed is good

From here:

Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year. That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.
Many corporate governance experts, investors and lawmakers question why financial companies that have accepted taxpayer money paid any bonuses at all. Financial industry executives argue that they need to pay their best workers well in order to keep them, but with many banks cutting jobs, job options are dwindling, even for stars.

Detainee 063 began to cry - a poem

Detainee began to cry.
Detainee cried.
Visibly shaken. Visibly emotional.
Very disturbed. Detainee sleeps awhile.
Detainee rudely woken up.
Heavy Metal. Judas Priest.
Iced water laced with seaweeds.
Strapped to a metal chair.
Incandescent light bulb overhead.
Detainee began to cry.
Detainee cried.
Detainee bites the IV tube.
IV tube splits in two. Meshuggah.
Injected again intravenously.
Rants and raves. Delirium.
Moaning softly. Detainee mutters.
Curses at the doctor. Lunges.
Visually uncomfortable. Moaning.
Turned his head from left to right.
Detainees clothes changed. Naked.
Someone pokes and prods.
Detainee began to cry.
Detainee cried.
Detainee begins to pray.
Strapped to a plank. Uncomfortable position.
The sounds of flowing water.
Blindfold. Heavy Metal. Steppenwolf.
Detainee wears her panty as crown.
The female orderly sniggers.
Detainee plans on confessing.
Object inserted into detainee’s anus.
Routine body cavity search.
This time a little more painful.
Looks at the corporals eyes.
Remorse and loathing. Spinal Tap.
Detainee began to cry.
Detainee cried.
Plans on making confession.
Urinates on self. Smell of urea.
Falling asleep. Very uncomfortable.
Detainee angry. Struggles.
Agitated and violent.
Wet and soggy pants. Excreta.
Detainee regurgitates food.
Detainee proclaimed his innocence.
Pushed guard. Solitary 24 hours.
The silence hurts and soothes.
No bright lights for 24 hours.
No flowing water for 24 hours.
No nothing for a whole day.
Dizzy. Headache. Near tears.
Detainee began to cry.
Detainee cried.
Yelled at Allah. Yelled for Allah.
Yelled for deliverance. Screams.
The water seems to ride into the lungs.
The fine muslin taut over detainees face.
Near crying. Tears and sweat stream.
Irritated and annoyed.
Attempted to liberate himself.
Plastic hangar too flimsy.
Strapped to links on the wall.
Aeroplane stress position is what this is called.
Made several attempts to stand up.
Unsuccessful.
Detainee screamed....

Note: Poem quickly stitched together after reading this article in the Vanity Fair magazine…

Through the windows of a train the other day

Why it might be a good idea to get a job on Wall Street

I sometimes read reddit, and this morning I ran into a post that was emblematic of the times... Click on the image below to enlarge...

From a recent Salon interview of John Updike (1932 - 2009). He passed on this morning.

When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop -- it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word. They're less comfortable with novels. They don't have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It's sad. It's momentarily uphill, I would say.

And who's to blame? Well, everything's to blame. Movies are to blame, for stealing a lot of the novel's thunder. Why read a novel when in two hours you can just go passively sit and be dazzled and amazed and terrified? Television is to blame, especially because it's come into the home. It's brought the fascination of the flickering image right into the house; like turning on a faucet, you can have it whenever you want. I was a movie addict, but you could only see so many movies in the course of a week. I still had a lot of time to read, and so did other people. But I think television would take all your day if you let it. Now we have these cultural developments on the Internet, and online, and the computer offering itself as a cultural tool, as a tool of distributing not just information but arts -- and who knows what inroads will be made there into the world of the book.

Timing

It is amazing how concussion stories like this appear right on cue before every Super Bowl, year after year. This was the lede on CNN this year.

"Dead NFL athletes' brains show stunning damage from concussions..."

A new Conciliatory Phase??

"Too often the United States starts by dictating — in the past on some of these issues — and we don't always know all the factors that are involved, what we want to do is to listen, set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have built up over the last several years. And I think if we do that, then there's a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs." - Barack Obama in an interview to Al Arabiya on Jan 26 2009

The erstwhile neo-cons who ruled us till recently will not be able to sleep tonight... or possibly for many nights henceforth...

On my mind

Not too sure if one can find another place on earth where the public is taxed, part of the proceeds of public taxation is used to bailout large banks that were on the verge of bankruptcy and then the large banks decide to promptly reward their underperforming bankers with large bonuses. Ah, the joys of capitalism...

Read here and weep...

For Better or for Verse

By chance, of course ---- By Wendell Berry
(while attending the annual convocation of cause theorists and bigbangists at the local provincial research university, the mad farmer intercedes from the back row)

“Chance” is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.

From the February 2009 issue of Harpers Magazine.

Mass Migration after India's Independence from British dominion, 1947, by Margaret Bourke-White. (From LIFE Archives)

Three years later, India would celebrate it's first Republic Day.

Quote

David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English Yale University on the recent events in Gaza in the LRB:

In the United States, since this one-sided war began on 27 December, facts are not suppressed but fiction pervades the commentary. We are offered an analogy: what would Americans do if rockets were fired from Canada or Cuba? The question has been repeated with docility by congressional leaders of both parties; but the rockets are assumed to come suddenly without cause. The choking of the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air, the rejection by the US of the Palestinian Unity Government, the coup launched by Fatah and bankrolled by the US, which ended in the seizure of power by Hamas – all of this happened before the rockets fell from the sky. It is as if it belonged to a prehistoric time. American politicians exhibit an identification with Israel that is now in excess of the measurable effects of the Israel lobby. The blindness of the identification has led the US to respond with keen sensitivity to Israeli requests for assistance and moral support, and to underestimate the suffering caused by the Gaza blockade and by the settlements and checkpoints and the wall on the West Bank. Yet grant the potency of the lobby and the identification – even so, the arrogance with which Israel dictates policy is hard to comprehend on the usual index of motives. Ehud Olmert boasted to a crowd in Ashkelon on 12 January that with one phone call to Bush, he forced Condoleezza Rice to abstain from voting for the UN ceasefire resolution she herself had prepared. The depth, the efficacy and the immediacy of the influence are treated by Olmert as an open secret.

Two pictures

10 New Yorkers talking about their faces... An art project by Simon Hoegsberg.

Once in a while I see a person on the street who immediately attracts my attention. I’m fascinated by the appearance of the person and feel a strong urge to walk over and say hi. I spent one month, seven hours a day, walking the streets of New York in search for people who had this effect on me. I found ten, and asked each of them the same question: What do you think about your face?

Photograph of Joan Darrow, an image consultant - ripped from the artists website...

When I used to work on face paintings, I tried to do something similar sometime back, but for some reason found it too exploitative and then stopped publishing the pictures I had taken. I liked Simon's work for the nice narrative quality that he brings to his subjects...

It is slowly becoming clear that we have moved from a 'gut based, touchy feely' policy and decision making apparatus to a more rational, 'brain oriented' policy and decision making...

From here: President Obama is expected to sign executive orders today directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year. This will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects.

Loved the cover image on the latest New Yorker...


Metro, a free newspaper distributed in New York City had the following insightful words:

Still, as we celebrate this watershed moment, it is important that we not become too self-satisfied, too pleased with our collective maturity. Indeed, it is one thing for a nation to finally accept that a black man can represent its interests. It is another thing entirely to question the nature of those interests. The working poor will be no happier to know that a black man is undermining their prosperity. Gays and lesbians will see no moral victory in having their civil rights stripped away by fellow minority. Continental Africans will find no solace in the fact that one of their sons is aiding and abetting its exploitation. For America to truly mature, we must not only acknowledge its bright light, we must also come to terms with its dark underside. Militarism, violence, consumerism, homophobia, patriarchy, anti-intellectualism, and countless other hallmarks of the American empire must die in order for a new, more mature America to be born. Otherwise, we have done nothing more than put a slave in charge of the plantation.

4 pictures

Quotable

"Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good."

- Barack Hussein Obama, Jan 20, 2009. Full text of his inauguration address here.

I cannot seem to get this image off my mind as Barack Obama prepares to become the next POTUS.

Cartoon ripped from the Fall 2008 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review magazine.