idiots' collective

The Enduring Loon Endures

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:01:00 +0000

I've written here before of Huh Kyung-Young, far and away the most, um, interesiting politician in South Korea. As a recap, though, here is the opening sentence from a Joong-Ang Daily feature on him from early 2008: "Huh Kyung-young, who claims he has an IQ of 430, supernatural powers and is perfectly sane, ran in the presidential election last month, his third unsuccessful bid to get into the Blue House."

Always pushing those outer limits of that sanity, however, Huh has now embarked upon a career as a rap singer and dancer. If there wasn't video, I wouldn't have believed it either, so thank the good lord for Naver Video (skip to about 1:00 for singing and dancing). Don't worry that it's in Korean; the language of oddities such as this is universal.

The Untold Riches of a Pooter

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:14:00 +0000

Been a long time, eh?

Between coursework, research and running the day-to-day affairs of Djibouti, I've had no spare time to fulfill my daily, monthly or, hell, even annual quotas at this once-esteemed institution. And what's more, I have recently stumbled into a new business endeavor that has in recent weeks taken up almost twenty minutes of my time.

Being the only American at KDI, I have by default become the exclusive importer of an item known as "The Pooter" (see video above), created by a fellow from California named Jack Vale. Think of it as the next generation of the Whoopee Cushion, the best friend a ten year-old boy ever had...until now. The Pooter - and please pardon the pun and cliche - blows the Whoopee Cushion away.

As readers of this site will know (if any readers remain), I have a fascination with trifles - that is, the seemingly worthless crap on which people choose to spend their time and hard-earned money. As I wrote last year about Bumper Nuts, you can tell a lot about a society by its toys and knick-knacks. So say what you will about financial crises and the purported s hrinking of the American middle class,¹ but any country that can afford to produce and consume Pooters and Bumper Nuts is wealthy beyond the dreams of past generations. Even Kubla Khan, in his stately pleasure dome, didn't have such things - and it wasn't because he didn't see the humor in them. Everyone, in my experience, thinks flatulence and scrotums are funny.

We take for granted that nearly everyone in the United States, at all income levels, is wealthy enough to outsource their laundry to a machine and food production to ConAgra, and now we as a society have become so rich that we don't even have to break our own wind anymore.

Notes______________

¹ And anyway, writes George Will: "Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 -- because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled, from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. 'So,' Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder.'"

Return, With PJ

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:27:00 +0000

I know, I know: this post spells the end of the longest hiatus in the otherwise storied history of this particular outpost. And I promise I'll be better at this posting thing from here on out. Wait, no, I don't promise any such thing, but I will try.

For now, though, PJ O'Rourke - one of my personal heroes - seems to be as a good a way to return to posting as any. Here he is recently at the Australian National Press Club:

The Defense of the Indefensible

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:47:00 +0000

Bloggingheads posted a fascinating conversation (see video above) over the weekend between Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch and Kevin Jon Heller of Opinio Juris. Heller, an American law professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, is currently involved as an advisor to the defense of Radovan Karadžić, the accused Bosnian Serb war criminal, in Karadžić's trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. For those of you not old enough to remember the 1990s, Karadžić is allegedly the man behind the massacre at Srebrenica in 2005, in which 7,500 men and boys from the area were killed.

Not surprisingly, Heller has come in for some criticism for his decision to be involved in any way whatsoever with the defense of a man like Karadžić (who, like Slobodan Milošević, is representing himself). Heller, however, answers his critics by saying that part of what defines liberal, democratic cultures is the belief that even an accused monster deserves a fair trial. As brutal and despised as Saddam Hussein was, his trial and subsequent execution at the hands of a jeering lynch mob did not sit well with people around the world who value a judicial system based on law rather than revenge. Having said this, though, Heller, citing his Jewish heritage as a conflict of interest, goes on to say that he would not have represented Adolph Hitler had the Führer not offed himself in the waning days of World War II.

And how, you're no doubt wondering, does any of this relate to Korea?

Let's say North Korean leader Kim Jong-il somehow finds himself in a jail cell at the International Criminal Court in The Hague later this year. And imagine that you're a criminal defense attorney. Would you represent him?

Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Trifles

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:51:00 +0000

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the economic prosperity enjoyed in Korea is the ability of the country's citizens to pursue the most puzzling and seemingly pointless pursuits. As evidence, I offer the case of Kim Sun-Ok, a South Korean housewife who recently broke the world record for marathon singing by belting out tunes for more than 76 hours straight at a local karaoke bar. Via Perth Now and the AFP:

She started singing at 11.14am local time on Thursday and sang a total of 1,283 tunes before she gave up at 3.21pm on Saturday following her family's appeal for her to quit for the sake of her health, it said.

Under Guinness World Record regulations, she was given 30-second breaks between songs and five-minute breaks every hour. She was also barred from singing any song she had already sung less than four hours earlier.

I emphasize that Ms. Kim is a homemaker in a country where women traditionally performed the great bulk of housework - cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and everything in between and on the edges. In the past, if a woman worked before marriage, she would typically quit that job after the nuptuals and stay at home to raise the kids and keep the homefront in order, a full-time job and then some that had her working long hours.

Slowly, though, as the world and then Korea became more prosperous, the formerly backbreaking routine of a housewife (doing laundry by hand, for instance) gave way to an "outsourced" life: the laundry to a machine, for example, or the food prep to restaurants and department stores. Add to this a declining birthrate that has also returned a fair chunk of time to your average ajumma's day and what Korean cities are left with is roving packs of bored, middle-aged women, always on the prowl for some way to fill their time.

All of which has given Korea's housewives the time and energy to head down to the noraebang and act the diva for 76 hours without stopping. Show me the Korean housewife of 30 years ago who had the time for such shenanigans.

Networked Minutiae

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:58:00 +0000

I was born in 1979, which puts me in the final generation to remember what life was like before the internet and cell phones and the other assorted technology that has made our lives so much easier and more interesting. Hell, our family even owned a black-and-white television. As a result, I often feel that I appreciate the wonders of our modern world more than, say, folks who were born after about 1985 and who thus never had to learn how to use a library card catalogue or miss a phone call because the only phone they had was mounted on the wall in their kitchen.

The flipside of having a toe-tip in ancient times, however, is that I am simply unable to see the attraction in many of the latest applications of all this new technology. As this site attests, I appreciate the impact - both potential and realized - of blogs, and photo sites like Flickr are truly a marvel. But I have yet to see a good explanation for the popularity of Twitter, and while in theory I see the attraction of Facebook, I find that I can't read the status updates of more than two friends without wanting to yell, "who the hell cares how many songs you just loaded onto your iPod or what color of socks you're wearing?"

If these social networking sites allow us to be more connected than ever before, they also remind me of why, in the past, I resisted being more connected than I already was: online, just as much as offline, the minutiae of other people's lives is boring and I take offense when they imply, via their Facebook status updates, that I might be interested. My life may not be a thrillride but it's not so bad that I have to care about what you're drinking right now.

These sites do, however, show just how slick a lot of people are at marketing, particularly at marketing themselves. With a site like Facebook, a person can portray himself exactly as he wishes to be seen: no dandruff, no dirty dishes in the sink, no smut under the mattress, no penis stuck in the bathtub drain again. One thing’s for sure, though: Facebook doesn’t make a loser any less pathetic, as evidenced by all the invitations I initially got from the same people to join “Siamese Zombie” groups.

What’s most amazing to me is that a concept as simple as Facebook could be so goddamned successful, or that they could actually charge money for some of things on offer, such as JPG images of a jalapeno pepper for $1 that you can then give to your friend (this - not surprisingly - seems to have disappeared). I’m forever surprised at what people will pay for, and even more at the fact that I couldn’t have thought of charging them for it before someone else did.

Back to Basics

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:54:00 +0000

Today's issue of the IHT has a fascinating article by Su-hyun Lee on the adjustment of North Korean defectors to life in South Korea. After years of peddling their "North Korea as Communist Shangri-la" myth, the regime conceded some time ago that, yes, South Koreans have the better standard of living of the two countries, a level of prosperity they have attained by selling their souls to imperialistic occupiers from the United States. A lot of defectors, then, arrive in South Korea expecting that their lives will be a featherbed of delights, only to be sorely disappointed:

After she defected here from North Korea in 2006, Ahn Mi Ock was shocked to learn that most South Koreans lived in small apartments and had to struggle to buy one.

Ahn, 44, had fully expected that once in the South she would enjoy the same luxurious lifestyle portrayed in the television dramas she had watched on smuggled DVDs. It had not occurred to her that the fashionably dressed characters sipping Champagne in the gardens of stylishly furnished houses were not, well, average South Koreans.

For my part, I've long been fascinated by the exposure of North Korean defectors to the outside world and to a semblance of reality. Due to the regime's near-monopoly on information in North Korea, many citizens have never heard of, much less used, basic ideas and technologies that we take for granted every day. When they arrive in South Korea, defectors generally spend three months in a government-run "reeducation" center - ideological detox, if you will - in an attempt to gain a basic understanding of how a market functions and how to conduct one's daily life in such a system. Three months, though, is scarcely time enough to learn the things that the rest of us have absorbed for our entire lives. To that end, other programs have been established:

To alleviate their confusion, a Newspaper in Education program to encourage young people to read was introduced a year ago at Setnet High School, an alternative school for North Korean defectors. There, they can ask an instructor to explain concepts they encounter in newspaper pages.

"What is business and sales?" asked Park Jeong Hyang, 18, during a Setnet class.

"Amateur? Is that something to do with sports?" asked Mah Gwang Hyuck, 23.

"Can you explain what marketing is again?" asked Kim Su Ryun, 18.

Where to begin?

Guys in the Sky

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:55:00 +0000

Foreigners, with good reason, are usually surprised and perplexed to learn that Korea has a Ministry of Gender Equality. Not that the relations between the sexes in Korea couldn't stand to improve, but I, for one, am skeptical that simply creating another layer of government bureaucracy will have any appreciable impact on the matter. Of course, as the Korean economy is liberalized and becomes more globally competitive, the opportunities for women will expand accordingly - as they have over the past thirty or forty years. Officials over at the Ministry of Gender Equality, however, will no doubt be quick to take credit for these gains in the status of women, but what we'll really have is a problem of simultaneity: opportunity increased and Korea has a ministry that ostensibly promotes such advances, but correlation does not indicate causation.

My reason for bringing this up?

The JoongAng Daily yesterday ran a lengthy feature piece on the relative scarcity of male flight attendants on Korean airlines. Despite having won numerous industry awards for excellence, Asiana and Korean Air continue to come under fire for discriminating against men:

Korean Air has 463 male flight attendants, which is about 11 percent of its total flight attendant contingent.

The ratio is 34 percent for Air France, according to [The National Human Rights Commission], and 6 percent for Asiana Airlines, according to Asiana management.

To which I can only ask: so what? These airlines continue to win plaudits for their customer service so we can assume that they're doing something right. Perhaps the management at these companies knows something that the human rights watchdog and the Ministry of Gender Equality don't, namely that customers, for one reason or another, prefer female flight attendants and are willing to patronize carriers that provide them. That may - or may not - be sexist on the part of the passengers, but meeting that preference is wholly rational on the part of the airlines. Quite frequently, companies are merely reflecting their customers' preferences when they adopt employment policies unrelated to technical productivity.

The JoongAng article does, however, point out that male flight attendants can at times be preferable to their female counterparts:

...there are times when a male presence is called for. Kim, who still flies about 10 hours a month, says there are still a few old-school (if not chauvinistic) passengers who demand male flight attendants, saying that they will talk only talk to another man.

Kim also mentioned an incident when a sick passenger defecated in his pants and Kim helped him get cleaned up.

“If I were a woman, I think the man would’ve been extremely humiliated,” Kim said.

(Yes, I'm sure that having a man there to clean him up meant that the incontinent old bugger could see the full humor in his situation.)

Finally, it bears noting that this particular instance of gender discrimination takes place in a highly-regulated and protected airline industry (although it is becoming less so), where for many years entry by foreign firms has been subject to all manner of local barriers. Coincidence? Maybe.

Godly Pecs

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:50:00 +0000

It does beg a question or two (from Prem River):

I was out on a Sunday at about midday, when I saw a man doing this...most disciplined of push-ups. He seemed to pause forever at the bottom and at the top. But he was not at the park or some inconspicuous spot. He was doing it on the steps of a nice-looking church.

That it was Sunday was interesting and I got to wondering about it. Was he walking past, and suddenly remembered that he had not done his daily allowance of exercise, and chance had it that Church happened to be there? Had he arrived late for church and missed the service, and decided to pay homage to his deity in another way?

Or, finally, has the Church doctrine been rejigged and re-tweaked for modern times?

In the movies when the actor goes to confession, and says "I did this" and "I did that" and "I'm sorry father," the priest usually orders him not to do it again, and to say ten Hail Marys. But these days perhaps he is told not to do it again, to go outside, get down and "do 50 good ones."

SERI's "New Familism:

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:02:00 +0000

This week, in the Samsung Economic Research Institute's "Weekly Insight" paper, research fellow Jeon Young-Jae offered a five-page summary of Korea's ten major economic trends for 2009. These trends are mostly the usual suspects - deflation, a credit crunch, proposed government spending, and the like - but amidst all the negatavism, Jeon is also predicting that you and your mother-in-law will finally stop bickering and learn to get along:

Under such [dire economic] circumstances, a new “familism” may come forth as people seek to ease financial and emotional difficulties stemming from a sagging economy through family solidarity. Amid an anticipated painful period of restructuring, many workers who had been preoccupied only with work will rediscover the value of family. Business activities will tend to decrease whereas non-business activities among family members and relatives will generally improve.

How a person who works for a (supposedly) reputable think tank can offer such nattering sociological nonsense is beyond me. Isn't it equally likely that as a result of the economic turbulence more people will discover the value of a bottle of soju and a day at the horse track?

Your Prize, Mr. Hill? Iraq.

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:03:00 +0000

If this is the reward, I'd hate to see the punishment.

In a show of gratitude for his years of loyal service in dealing with the North Koreans, the Obama administration appears ready to send Christopher Hill on an all expenses paid trip to...Iraq. According to CNN, Hill will replace Ambassador Ryan Crocker when Crocker retires next month.

Hill, of course, has had a long career in the foreign service:

Hill was widely credited with helping persuade North Korea to agree to abandon its nuclear program in favor of better ties with the West.

During the Clinton administration, Hill was the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia and special envoy to Kosovo. He was also part of the U.S. team that negotiated the Bosnia peace settlement.

He also served as U.S. ambassador to Poland and South Korea during the Bush administration before taking over the North Korea assignment as assistant secretary and lead negotiator to the six-party talks aimed at getting the country to end its nuclear program.

And just how, you may wonder, is the process of de-nuking the North coming along? Well, funny you should ask, because just today UPI reported our trusty friends north of the 38th having this to say: "North Korea Vows to Retain Nuclear Weapons."

Finally, an interesting tidbit of trivia which might interest Mr. Hill: if you look up "impossible" in the dictionary, it gives as examples "bringing peace to the Middle East or dealing with the North Koreans."

The Most Hated Family in America

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:53:00 +0000

I've moved around a fair bit in my life and, as a result, have had the inevitable misfortune of living next to some of God's stranger creations, including - as chronicled on this site - the Munsters and the Dragon Lady. During my university years, I lived in a second floor apartment above an aspiring jam band that regularly tried to set records for longest drum solo. Fed up with the noise, I finally moved, only to land in another upstairs unit, this one above a man with severe mental illness who once or twice a week would punch out his windows.

Never, though, have I lived next to anyone as odd as this:

The video is a BBC documentary, hosted by Louis Theroux, entitled "The Most Hated Family in America." The hated titular brood is the Phelps clan of Topeka, Kansas, who, along with their patriarch Pastor Fred Phelps make up almost the entire membership of the Westboro Baptist Church. To call this family "homophobic" would be unkind to homophobes, but then, I'm not really sure what the next step up the ladder of hate is called. Suffice it to say, I've never seen anyone as obsessed with fags and fornication, to use the parlance of the Westboro parishioners, as these folks.

I do find it, um, queer, however, that the state of Kansas hasn't raised more of a fuss about the kids being raised in such a hateful atmosphere, especially when the parents take them to their protests, which as one incident in the BBC documentary shows, often puts them in harm's way. If the state of New Jersey can take a kid named Adolph Hitler Campbell away from his parents,¹ what's it take to get a child extracted from the Westboro nuthouse?

______________
¹ To be fair, New Jersey officials claim that young Adolph's name was but one reason for their concern.

Sure Beats a Swift Kick in the Pants

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:14:00 +0000

Well, this is peculiar.

Idiots' Collective has apparently been nominated for some kind of an award, and suprisingly enough, it's not for the "Most Posts Related to Bodily Fluids and/or Functions" prize. I won that trophy last year.

No, indeed. The crew over at The Hub of Sparkle!, it seems, have seen fit to put my site into the running for "Best Personal/Diary Blog 2008," which is odd given that 2008 was not a stellar year for this outpost of idiocy where personal/diary blogging was concerned. Oh sure, the year kicked off with some cretin taking a crap on my street - an all-too-personal event for the ol' diary - and made its way through Bumper Nuts, wedding pissers, driving with the wife, the Olympics and, of course, Guro, Guro, Guro, but looking back at the year's output, I'm struck by just how impersonal the posting was. I guess a presidential election, a financial crisis and the prospect of one's government frittering away trillions of dollars rather focuses the mind on matters external. How posting on such matters gains me recognition as a "personal/diary" blogger, however, remains unclear.

But given that a man should never turns down kind words, I choose merely to be content in my good fortune.

Come Ye Back to the Puckerbrush

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:56:00 +0000

There's a reason people move to Seoul, and believe me, it's not for the clean air, the laid-back pace, or the friendly bus drivers. They come for the jobs, for the schools, for the avenues of cultural enrichment - in other words, for opportunity, of which there's precious little out in the countryside wop-wops of, say, the Jeolla or Chungcheong Provinces. But just you wait, the Korean government has a plan up its sleeve:

The Ministry of Agriculture said yesterday that it will foster new development in five cities in North Chungcheong, South Jeolla and North Jeolla provinces as part of a trial project to lure big city younger adults back to their hometowns.

The areas slated for development - including the lovely town of Danyang - are all in farming or fishing areas where employment has been falling for years thanks to modernization and lower prices due to imports (yes, a few get in). Couple that with an advanced Korean economy which demands a highly-educated workforce and most folks don't have to think twice about slipping off the farm and heading for a job in the big city.

The Ministry of Agriculture, however, sees this population shift in purely negative terms:

“Securing a younger workforce [in the rural areas] is needed because the agricultural and fishing industries are currently led by older and poorer folks and few are willing to take over their jobs,” said an Agriculture Ministry official. An aging population and low birth rates in rural areas have emerged as serious social issues in Korea, which still relies heavily on home supplied farm and marine goods. “We will form a successful model through the trial project and expand the beneficiaries starting 2012.”

So, let me get this straight: the government is going to bribe people - well-educated, highly-skilled cityfolk - to go back to the farm and seed rice paddies, even as the country maintains, for example, a 360% import tariff on garlic. Had the country followed the same logic in years past, Koreans would still be stitching cheap-ass sneakers in a firetrap factory in Garibong.

Listen up, then, all you government-types: the goal is - or at least should be - to move people out of jobs like farming and fishing and into more value-added positions that create further wealth for humanity. That's how we humans have come to live in a world of iPods, indoor plumbing and Bumper Nuts.

Goodness, it's nice to know that governments aren't actually in charge of anything.

The Flatlines of Stimuli

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 07:57:00 +0000

Color me less than surprised. From David Brooks in yesterday's International Herald Tribune:

According to The Washington Post, of the $30 billion devoted to highway spending [in the proposed government stimulus package], only $4 billion will be spent in the next two years. Less than $3 billion of the $18.5 billion for renewable energy and less than half the financing for school construction will be spent by 2011. The Appropriations Committee chairman, Representative David Obey, fulminated against the CBO on Wednesday, and the uselessness of economists in general, but he had no answer to these findings.

Third, the spending measures in this bill have no sunset. In the middle of the appropriations markup, the ranking member, Representative Jerry Lewis asked his chairman the crucial question: What happens when the economy recovers? Does this new spending disappear?

Obey refused to answer, but he didn't have to.

And Brooks is a writer who actually believes in the government's capacity to stimulate wisely. Russell Roberts, writing at Cafe Hayek, is less sanguine:

But maybe, just maybe, there is nothing the government can do in the short run to help the economy improve. What if it's like a cold? There are pretend cures and cures that look like cures because of spurious correlation. But what if there's nothing the government can do other than avoid mistakes?

Admitting that the best thing they can do is nothing, however, doesn't come easily to politicians.

Bookish Reflections on the Inauguration

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:55:00 +0000

"In just a few weeks the young man would become President of the United States, and...there was an air of excitement about every small act, every gesture, every word, every visitor to his temporary headquarters. [The reporters] complained less than usual, the bitter cold notwithstanding; they felt themselves part of history: the old was going out and the new was coming in, and the new seemed exciting, promising."

David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
Writing of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961

Amidst all the pomp, splendor and emotional caterwauling surrounding the inauguration this week, I've had two books in particular on my mind: David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest and A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell, neither of which, should they prove prophetic, bodes well for the years to come.

Halberstam's book has, quite justifiably, become an indispensible guide to understanding the roots and causes of Vietnam War, and specifically how a crack team of such intellectual heavyweights - including Robert McNamara, the Brothers Bundy, Dean Rusk, etc, et al - could have stumbled into what became a national, and completely unnecessary, catastrophe. How could these guys, who had always been the smartest guys in the room, fail to see the consequences of their decisions? The answer was twofold.

These men, yoked to insecurities from which even today the Democratic Party has yet to free itself, suffered a hangover from the days of Communist witch hunts at the hand of Joseph McCarthy and lived in fear of being painted as weaklings on foreign policy, as they had been when they "lost" China to Mao's Communists in 1949. Damned if Vietnam would fall on their watch, too.

The history, however, served merely as impetus. A more fundamental tripwire within this group was what Sowell calls their vision - the implicit assumptions under which we, as humans, operate and which we often do not even articulate, even to ourselves. In his discussion of the matter, Sowell characterizes people as holding one of two visions - the "unconstrained" or the "constrained." In the unconstrained vision, human nature is seen as malleable: selfish and myopic right now perhaps but capable of great transformation - indeed, transcendence - given the right direction, usually at the hand of "great leaders." Sowell gives as historical examples of this vision Rousseau and Condorcet and, more recently, Barack Obama, more on whom in a minute.

The constrained vision, by contrast, is characterized by a view of human nature as unchanging and instead of trying to lead mankind to salvation, as it were, the constrained vision seeks to steer human action - to constrain it - through the proper incentive structure. Adam Smith, according to Sowell, is perhaps the classic example of this vision, though as Peter Robinson notes in the following discussion with Sowell, the conflict between these two visions extends as far back as Plato and Aristotle.

The men forming Kennedy's - and later, LBJ's - inner circle evinced quite clearly the unconstrained vision, believing, as Halberstam put it, "in the capacity of rational men to control irrational commitments." Winning in Vietnam was, for them, simply a matter of getting the arithmetic right, of convincing the Vietnamese that we Americans knew what was best for them. These men, Halberstam writes, felt that "people who are about to be saved from the Communists should feel some element of gratitude, and at the very least that gratitude should surface in the form of knowing they were being saved, and more important, wanting to be saved."

It's been with no small amount of consternation, then, that I've heard numerous figures in the professional commentariat refer to Barack Obama's cabinet appointments as "the best and the brightest," obviously forgetting that the book of this title does not end well. Such comments betray the prevalence of the unconstrained vision in today's society, a sense that if only we can get the right people into elective office, everything will be rainbows and cinnamon.

David Harsanyi, columnist for the Denver Post, neatly distilled this topic on Wednesday when he wrote:

Yes, two important historical events transpired Tuesday: The first was the peaceful transfer of power from one freely elected politician to another (an uninterrupted streak we often take for granted). Then there was the first presidency of an African-American, which proves we can transcend our unsightly past.

After that, what we had was just another election. We conduct one every four years. For those of you not shouting hosannas, it might have occurred to you that we are suffering from a rampant sickness in American life that casts government as the author of your dreams and an Illinois politician the linchpin of your hopes.

The truth is almost always unsightly and now is no exception, but let's take that truth as it is. Perhaps, and hopefully, Obama will roll the US out of Iraq as soon as possible, but we should remind ourselves that nothing in the Middle East ever ends well and withdrawal may turn out to be almost as disastrous as remaining. So, too, for Afghanistan - nothing has ever ended well there either. And for all the debate over tax cuts, stimulus packages and bailouts, we would do well to consider that perhaps there is nothing the government can do to stem the current financial woes - an admission, however true it may be, we'll almost certainly never hear from the mouths of elected officials, most of whom are wholly unconstrained.

American Whiner

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:51:00 +0000

Perhaps it started with Holden Caulfied, protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye and he of the red hunting cap with the old peak swung round to the back.

"Holden," wrote George Will in a 2001 column, "was a new social type, which subsquently became familiar: the American as whiner."

I've flashed back to Holden Caulfield a couple times over the past year - my viewing of Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road last night being the most recent occasion - and have come to wonder if there is anything more tedious than watching the lives of uninteresting people who fancy themselves exceptional. The success of the blogosphere proves unambiguously that I am, in this opinion, in a minority and I suppose that the existence of this blog - my blog - probably indicates that I hold myself in higher esteem than I deserve.

But leaving that aside for the moment...

Revolutionary Road is about as dismal as movies come. By that I don't mean that it's a bad film, only that two hours watching the comings and goings of a cast of such vapid people rather saps a person of his own sense of vigor toward the world.

The main characters of the film, Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslett, the reunion tour), have it in their heads that they experience the world more deeply than those around them, that they're somehow above the prosaic suburban world in which they live and that, by moving to Paris, they'll manage to outrun themselves. Spend ten minutes with the Wheelers, though, and you'll quickly realize that they'd never do anything so risky. Heavens, no: moving to Paris might change their lives, open a door toward happiness. The Wheelers, as Will wrote about Holden Caulfied, are clearly "alienated" by the shallowness of American society but, rather than seeking like Huck Finn to liven things up, they mope through life and relish "the pleasure of despair." They're miserable, they love it, and for two hours they made me miserable.

Somewhere amidst the same genus of entertainment sits Six Feet Under, the HBO dramatic series of which I wrote last summer and about which, since watching it, I've had second (and third) thoughts. Although not as guilty as Revolutionary Road on this front, SFU similarly confuses "self-absorption with sensitivity," as Will put it, investing the characters' "banal discomfiture with more meaning than they can bear."

I'm tired of watching well-heeled people complain about the emptiness of their lives. I'm cautious in that statement, however, because I realize that satire and other forms of social commentary are at their best when they irritate us, elbow us, and generally make us uncomfortable. Still, watching Revolutionary Road and Six Feet Under, I couldn't help but think back to a previous Mendes film, American Beauty, a movie that also lays into suburbia and its various insipid qualities. The difference? Lester Burnham (the main character, played by Kevin Spacey) actually does something about his misery and whether or not it ultimately makes him happy is hardly the point because at least he, existentially if not physically, did as John McPhee suggested: he threw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jumped over the back fence, so to speak. He got out of his own head, and my movie-viewing experience was better for it.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:05:00 +0000

People watch South Korean President Lee Myung-bak on TV, delivering New Year's address to the nation at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, Jan. 2, 2009. Lee said Friday he will make it his priority in the new year to pull South Korea out of the global economic crisis as Asia's fourth-largest economy reported a trade deficit for 2008, its first in a decade. (Photo by Ahn Young-Joon)

In his New Year’s address, the president promises to bring the economic crisis under control. He faces an uphill battle, however, given that in 2008 Korea posted its first trade deficit in more than a decade and the KOSPI finished the year down more than 40%. And even Lee admitted that the actions of other countries around the world may do more to help or to hinder Korea’s recovery than the actions taken within the country.

Lee, however, has reaffirmed his vow to focus on deregulation, reform of state-run companies and the public education sector, and what he calls a “Green New Deal” that includes a plan to refurbish the nation’s four major rivers, a project that Lee claims will create 280,000 new jobs. The government is also set to invest trillions of won in “green” research, seeking to make alternative energies the next stage of Korea’s economic growth.

In addition, the government will provide subsidies to companies that offer temporary leave to their employees rather than cutting jobs. Oddly, though, Lee himself last week called on conglomerates to voluntarily downsize their operations and workforces.

Reading the recaps and punditry of Lee's speechifying - filled as it was promises to spend money here and inject liquidity there - put me in mind of Bastiat's notion of what is seen and what is unseen: government projects may appear superficially productive and worthwhile (the seen), but where did the resources/money come from and to what other, perhaps more productive or at least more voluntary, uses might it have been put (the unseen)?

I was reminded, too, of one of the fundamental obstacles to enacting sound economic policy - namely that of information, as the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek discussed in his classic essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society:" "The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality."

Finally, President Lee has recently tried to fashion himself as a crusader against corruption (no small irony for those of us who've watched his political rise). Trouble is, the price of a government throwing piles of money at a problem is waste, fraud and abuse. Absent some great stroke of divine fortune, governments don't spend money both efficiently and quickly, which could pose a problem in Lee's anti-corruption crusade.

But perhaps we needn't worry: Lee has a stack of economy-related bills he'd like for the National Assembly to pass, and at this point, the Assembly members can't even agree on the lunch menu.

Here's to governmental gridlock.

The KIKO Affair

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:07:00 +0000

I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

With emergency loans being extended around the world to failing and failed companies (GM, Chrysler) and busted financial institutions (AIG, Citigroup), why wouldn't the Korean courts step in and protect companies from losing money on contracts to which they themselves agreed?

I ask because the Seoul Central District Court this week ruled that a series of currency option contracts between SC First Bank and two Korean exporters are invalid, saying that the bank did not adequately inform the companies of the risk involved in the contracts.

The contracts in question are what is known as a Knock-in/Knock-out (KIKO) contract. From the Korea Times:

KIKO options allow businesses to sell dollars at a fixed won/dollar rate if the exchange rate stays within the range fixed in the contract. If it soars above the upper limit, however, exporters can sustain huge losses, as they have to pay more for dollars on the currency market to sell them at the fixed rate to the banks. With the won plunging against the dollar in recent months, many local businesses suffered massive losses and are now on the brink of bankruptcy.

As the Korea Times mentions in the same article, this ruling may spawn numerous future lawsuits as companies seek to get out from under hedges that have gone rotten along with the Korean currency.

Pleading ignorance may help these companies in the courtroom but one wonders what the CFOs of said firms were being paid for if not their understanding of these sorts of contracts. Bloomberg, in fact, reported on just this problem back in October:

Cho Moon Hwan, a lawmaker with the ruling Grand National Party, said most contracts were written in English, meaning some buyers couldn't understand them.

"Banks didn't notify companies of potential risks at all,'' he said.

One KIKO buyer, Kim Sang In, chief executive officer of a construction-equipment maker in Hwaseong, 56 kilometers (35 miles) south of Seoul, agreed.

"Banks never, never notified us of these KIKO options' high risks,'' Kim said. "They said they were 99 percent sure the won would continue to rise.''

I would suggest, perhaps naively but nevertheless, that a person ought not sign a contract that he doesn't understand, and that a CFO worth his compensation should know better than to just assume that a currency will rise because a bank says so.

No doubt the banks will take a lesson from rulings such as this, too, and may in the future be far less willing to enter into such contracts, fearing that swings in the market might not only affect their balance sheets but could also land them in a courtroom. Indeed, a recent piece in the Korea Herald reports the emergence of this precise sentiment:

A bank official in charge of derivatives investment said the court's ruling will damage the development of the nation's financial market. "All financial transactions are based on exchange rates and share prices at the point of contract. If all contracts should be nullified because of that condition, how can anyone make financial contracts?" he said.

Another bank official said that banks will avoid dealing with currency-hedging derivatives due to the court's decision and this will backfire on exporting companies.

As above, though, rescuing the ignorant and ill-prepared has become an international pastime of late.

___________________
Further Reading: Of Knock-ins, Knock-outs & KIKOs

If Borat Was Korean...

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:34:00 +0000

...he'd be singing about Dokdo. Priceless:

Everybody wants to be there 'cause of the holy sights
Everybody wants to be there hoping to meet seagulls
Yes, nobody is greedy for them 'cause of the holy sites
But some people covet them that is real nonsense!

Compare with the opening lyrics to Borat's version of the Kazakhstan national anthem, as performed in his film:

Kazakhstan greatest country in the world.
All other countries are run by little girls.
Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium.
Other countries have inferior potassium.

(h/t: The Marmot's Hole)

The Return of Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:24:00 +0000

"Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider."

Sir Francis Bacon

Over the past few years in Korea, I've had the opportunity to work with and get to know a number of corporate executives in a variety of fields. These men - and yes, the executives I've known have all been men - all score high in the generic qualities one typically associates with business success: drive, intelligence, curiosity, political acumen and the like. Often overlooked, however, by younger employees aspiring to such positions of power is another habit of these C-suite occupants: reading. Newspapers and magazines, sure, but almost to a man, I've observed in these fellows an insatiable love of books and a desire to more deeply understand the world in which they live and work. In fact, upon entering their offices, I often have to push stacks of books aside to make room for myself at a table.

There is, of course, the question of why, in this age of the Blackberry and instant information, such busy people trouble themselves with books at all. Couldn't they just learn what they need to know online or, at worst, in the latest issue of BusinessWeek? Unfortunately, for all the information on offer in the modern world, there is amidst it a troubling lack of wisdom on offer and, perhaps even worse, an increasing lack of solitude to the reading experience, leaving little opportunity for thought and reflection. The literary critic Harold Bloom has written, quite correctly, that "reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is the most healing of pleasures." Unless you turn off that Blackberry, though, solitude may be in short supply.

And then there's the matter of what these business leaders read. In this 2007 article in the New York Times, Harriet Rubin quite correctly noted that "serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete." Quite true: highly-effective people don't spend their time reading about their own seven habits, as related to them by the likes of Steven Covey. Rubin continues:

Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries. “I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction,” [Michael Moritz] said. “I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove’s ‘Swimming Across,’ which has nothing to do with business but describes the emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E. Lawrence’s ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from atop a camel.”

I often feel, though, that I, my wife, and a scattered few business executives are the only people who read books anymore. Oh sure, the bookstores in Seoul are always packed full of people browsing the stacks and lining up at the register, but too often I get blank stares when I ask people about the books they've read recently. I suppose that, in addition to those Blackberrys, there are simply too many other ways to a pass one's time these days.

But as Pope said, hope springs eternal, and Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, is optimistic that reading might be posied for comeback.:

I suspect reading is about to make a big comeback in America, that in fact we're going to be reading more books in the future, not fewer. It is a relatively inexpensive (libraries, Kindle, Amazon), peaceful and enriching activity. And we're about to enter an age of greater quiet. More people will be home, not traveling as much to business meetings or rushing out to the new jobsite. A lot of adults are going to be more in search of guidance and inspiration. The past quarter century we've had other diversions, often expensive ones—movies, DVDs, Xboxes. Books will fit the quieter future.

Anything's possible, I guess. We've seen the iPod - and the podcasts it wrought - save the concept of radio, so perhaps the Kindle stands a chance of doing the same for books. Let's hope so, because given the current financial crisis, there's clearly a need for the wisdom contained in those books.

Boring Man Killed in ATV Accident

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:22:00 +0000

(click image to enlarge)

Between Portland and the western slopes of Mount Hood sits the small town of Boring, Oregon. You can imagine the jokes made about the place and the people who call it home, to say nothing of the problems faced by newspaper editors in writing headlines for, well, Boring stories. Today's front page of KGW.com - NBC's Portland affiliate - is evidence enough of this (see above pic). It's bad enough to live in a town named Boring, let alone having it as the final adjective placed before one's name.

Governor Rod Blago...Governor Smith

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:56:00 +0000

Remember those halcyon days back in 2006 when Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was just another seemingly shady Chicago politician?

Here's your trip back that simpler time, via the Daily Show.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Pill of Rights

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Hire Me or Out Come My Butt Cheeks

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McKenzie) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:42:00 +0000

Should you ever be rejected for a government job, you might consider this fellow's solution: take your morning constitutional in the nude on the lawn of the National Assembly.

You have to give the guy credit for efficiency. After all, he managed to get some exercise, show his displeasure, and air out his bits-and-pieces all in the same activity. Having said that, if it was a job he was hoping to get, I would have recommended a jacket and tie. Maybe even toss on a pair of britches while he's at it.

A couple more pics here.

(h/t to Korea Beat)