Underbelly

The Great Non-explainer

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:48:18 PST

I suppose I've said things in the same vein before but one of the things that drives me nuts about Obama and his crowd is his/their utter inability to explain difficulties to their audience in ways that will inspire even a minimum of confidence. Here's a selection, culled from current reading although I haven't kept good track of sources. So, they haven't explained that:

We knew last year that unemployment was heading over 10 percent (i.e., where it is now) and we were just going to have to hunker down for the ride.

Shovel-ready never meant "shovel ready." No matter how efficient you are, it takes time to get up-to-speed on a new brick-and-mortar project--i.e., a project that will actually juice up the economy, instead of merely replacing something that was going to happen anyway.

As against new spending, tax cuts are just not a persuasive alternative at this moment. Sure, everyone would like tax cuts. But with so much money already lying on the table unused, it just isn't plausible that a new round of tax cuts will generate new economic activity (and besides: as a percentage of GDP, taxes are already comparatively low).

That sort of stuff. In short: These things take time; bear with me folks, and let me explain to you why. It's something he just doesn't seem to be good at, and so he is falling into the politician's most fatal mistake: he is letting himself be defined by his enemies. They are always happy to oblige, and when they do, they will cream you.

Testosterone Poisoning Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:36:20 PST

Two new items for your "what shall we do with all those men" file:

Educate Boys or They'll Go to War.

Chart of the Day: Where the Jobs Are.

Appreciation: Israel Potter

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:13:25 PST

Nobody would say that Israel Potter is Melville's best novel, or even a very good one: there's an air of incompleteness about it, of exhaustion, as if he couldn't bring himself to do the whole job. Or something that good folks in the entertainment biz might call "a treatment"--a workup and promise of more fully fleshed out things to come.

Yet it has a tang all its own--the odd mix of nostalgia, disappointment, apology and contentiousness which marks so much of Melville's work. I suspect you might even say that it is his most explicitly personal work: the one that most mirrors his own bewildered life. As Israel makes his own sojourn from confident colonial beginnings through a life of isolation and exile that mark the writer's own story.

Some of the very best stuff comes at the very beginning, where Melville offers his threnody to a world gone by--specifically, the Berkshire hills in Western Massachusetts:

Often, as your horse gaining some lofty level tracts, flat as a table, trots gayly over the almost deserted and sodded road, and your admiring eye sweeps the broad landscape beneath, you seem to be Boótes driving in heaven. Save a potato field there and there, at long intervals, the whole country is either a wood or pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep are the principal inhabitants of these mountains. ... [A]s for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here. At any rate, no man by tht means accumulates a fortune from this thin and rocky soil, all whose arable parts have long since been nearly exhausted.

Yet during the first settlement of the country, the region was not unproductive. Here it was that the original settlers came, acting upon the principle well known to have regulated their choice of site, namely, the high land in preference to the low, as less subject to the unwholesome miasmas generated by breaking into the rich valleys and alluvial bottoms of primeval regions. By degrees, however, they quitted the safety of this sterile elevation, to brave the dangers of richer though lower fields. So that, at the present day, some of those mounttsian townships present an aspect of almost singular abandonment. Though they have never known aught but peace and health, they in one lesser aspect at least, look like counties deppopulaated by plague and war. ...

Here Mevlille pauses to indulge himself in an apostrophe to a venerable New England artifact:

On all sides are seen the tokens of ancient industry. As stone abounds throughout these mountains, that material was, for fences, as ready to the hand as wood, besides being much more durable. Consequently the landscape is intersected in all directions with walls of uncommon neatness and strength.

The number and length of these walls is not more surprising than the size of some of the blocks comprising them. The very Titans seemed to have been at work. That so small an army as the first settlers must needs have been, should have taken such wonderful pains to enclose so ungrateful a soil; that they should have accomplished such herculean undertakings with so slight prospect of reward; this is a consideration which gives us a significant hint of the temper of the men of the Revolutionary era.

--Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile,
Warner Paperback ed. 18-19 (1974)

For me, one of the oddest aspects of this presentation, is how accurately it seems to describe the country of my own boyhood in the 1940s--Bedford and even more Bradford, New Hampshire. For another and more sombre take on the New England uplands, read Edidth Wharton's Summer. For Boótes, go here.

Hamlet on Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:56:11 PST

Thanks, Toni:

Hamlet: To be or not to be. Spoiler alert: not to be.

(And thanks, Tony.)

I Really, Really, Really Do Not Want This to be True

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:22:25 PST

...but I hope that someone in the President's inner circle will roll up a copy of the Telegraph and spank him with it:

Bloodless President Barack Obama
makes Americans wistful for George W Bush

Link.

Opera: The Met's HD Turandot

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:17:48 PST

I don't think I ever really got Turandot until today. I had seen it only once before, and that under inauspicious conditions. It was a David Hockney production at San Francisco, with some sort of bleachers/platform built up at the back of the stage. I was way back in the balcony and most of the performance took place way up in those bleachers, so I went through most of the evening seeing the cast only from the waist down. There's a frisson of postmodern hip there, but I can tell you it is distracting.

Having seen today's Met production, I have two words: Zeffer Elli. Everything about this libretto and score is over the top, and you have to have the world's most excessive stager to get away with it. There will never be a Turandot set in a darkened basement or a steam laundry, or if there is, I will stay as far as I can away from it. To do this kind of absurdity with a straight face, there is no one but the Z-ster (not even Hockney? I think not, but then maybe I am not qualified to judge).

The opera itself is kind of a dog's breakfast of materials and styles, based on a Persian story westernized by Schiller and laced with what Puccini seems to have thought was Chinese music. There are indeed some interesting and unfamiliar sounds here, although I suppose you could say the same thing for Hoagy Carmichael's Hong Kong Blues:

It's a story of a very unfortunate Memphis man
Who got 'rrested down in old Hong King.
He had 20-year privilege taken away from him
When he kicked old Buddha's go-ong.

An even closer comparison might by Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado, which probably owes at least as much to Japan as Turandot does to China. Now that I think of it, the comparison is not at all frivolous: both stories turn on a poisonous brew of lust and cruelty that would be horrifying if not laced out in the gauze of exoticism. And Turandot herself probably owes more than Puccini would want to acknowledge to Gilbert's Katisha (I suppose it is pushing things to say that Puccini's Ping, Pang and Pong echo Gilbert's Three Little Maids from School).

But accepting this frontal assault on disbelief it is actually a pretty good show--which is I suppose the least I can say for the opera that brings us the one song that says "opera" in every coffee shop, bookstore or romantic movie comedy--that is, Nessun Dorma (the only competitor is another Puccini--O Mio Babino Caro from Gianni Schicchi). Today's Met performance was well sung all around, although I'd give the rosette to Marina Poplavskaya as Liù--the voice is peachy cream although if you listen, you can pick up just a hint of an underlying abrasiveness that makes you recognize tht Poloavskaya the singer isn't nearly as docile as Liù the character.

And that, of course, brings you back to the ineradicable problem with Turandot. I mean really--in the long annals of operatic absurdity, this one really takes the biscuit. No matter how strong the performance, you can't help but find yourself thinking that if Liù had only stabbed that idiot princeling instead of herself, then Turandot would have made her queen consort.

How Nice to be Out of the Spotlight

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:06:41 PST

Here's some reading with which to idle away the weekend: Calculated Risk is maintaining a list of almost-in-trouble banks (link)--some 550 at the moment, to match the 120 actual failures so far (link)--so you can learn who is coming soon to a receiver near you. It's searchable and sortable, although it does help to have a widescreen monitor.

But here's a curiosity: we're up in northern California, but inland, not the tourist part, Californie Profonde. And I skimmed the list to look at our neighborhood. And you know what? Nobody. Redding, Red Bluff, Chico, Paradise? Zip. Yuba City/Marysville? Nope. No Sacramento either,although we do find the Granite Community Bank of Granite Bay in the Sierra Foothills just east. With 2009 assets of $137,28,000, it is fairly small potatoes, bankwise (for some details, go here). But so far as I can tell, that is the only one even remotely close to this neck of the woods.

I haven't been buying or selling real estate lately (I paid off my last mortgage about eight years ago) but this pretty much fits my intuition. So far as I can tell, prices around here never skyrocketed that much, and haven't fallen that much either. From local gossip, I hear that neighbor put her house up last year at $300,000; she thought she had a deal at $295,000 but it fell through; she sold it a second time a few weeks later at $305,000. Sheesh, what century are we in, anyway?

Maybe They Were Onto Something

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:00:41 PST

For major public policy decisions, the Romans used to check which way the birds were flying. Now this:

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak
Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)

Link.

Bankruptcy Graphic

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:29:00 PST

A cute bankruptcy graphic (link I can't get it to format right here), but less information than perhaps appears at first sight. Example: not a clue as to why they file. Although there is some debate at the margins, the evidence is overwhelming that the modal cause is medical: often the family that has been living frugally until someone falls to an uninsured injury or disease. Then s job loss, then a few months of hand-to-mouth while the credit card balances build up, and then BK--but not before the compulsory credit counseling session where the counselor tells them, "yep, you sure are broke..."

HT Kedrosky.

Animosity metric

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:15:18 PST

A Google search for "lies about the French" yields about 1.5 million hits; "lies about the Jews," only 1.1 million; "lies about the Germans, 428,000; "lies about Swedes," six; "lies about Norwegians," just one.

Bring Out Yr Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:55:50 PST

I'm just now catching up with the idea of the "celebrity dead pool," not least through this helpful Wiki, with the caution that "in most pools, killing the celebrity in question is considered cheating." How dismaying also to discover that a--the?--principal broker of celebrity dead pools is, well, dead.

Swifties

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:04:00 PST

Remember Swifties? But oddly, this list does not include my favorite, coined by John Fetterman at The Louisville Times:

Watch where you kick, said Tom, testily.

Nor this oldie:

My movie camera is broken, said Tom, bellowing and howelling.

I'm Not Disappointed wth Barack

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:05:02 PST

There's a line in Samuel Johnson somewhere in which he considers the popular nightmare that one has not lived up to one's potential. Hey, says the good doctor, nobody else expected all that much out of you in the first place.

Now here comes Charlie Cook with his typically astute appraisal of Tuesday's election results and the resounding evidence that the Obama honeymoon is over. File that with all the vignettes you've seen/read lately about people who are disappointed in the president.'

Allow me to go on record Mr. President, with the reassuring pronouncement that we here at Underbelly central are not disappointed with you, for the very Johnsonian reason that we never expected much from him in the first place. Indeed I once called him "an empty suit,"* which was probably a bit harsh but I did hold onto my view that, however likeable he might be (and he is likeable), still the most important executive job he'd held before now was editor of the Harvard Law Review.

I'd say that events have vindicated me pretty well so far. His charm just does not seem to translate into the Washington sweatbox; at least so far, he hasn't figured out how to deploy the daring, the nerve, the guile you need to be a first-class leader.

But even knowing what I know now, I'd vote for him again in the twinkling of a gnat's eyebrow. What a shame that we are stuck with one party seems largely unable to govern and another that seems bound and determined not to. Under the circumstances, I'll stand with the view that I'm thankful for small favors.

==
*And note the ludicrously inexact predictions.

Why Not Privatize West Point?

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:29:58 PST

Lunching with a visiting libertarian today, I yielded to the usual professor tricks to test his limits. Would he favor letting me contract myself into slavery? No, slavery was special, but he'd consider an involuntary Chapter 13 bankruptcy, and he liked indentured servitude. How about a 40-year term? Well, now...

And still determined to be annoying, would he like to abolish the Food and Drug Administration? He's thinking about that one. And the Center for Disease Control? I think on that one, he changed the subject.

Well, what about West Point? Privatize the military academies? I'm not sure about him, but as I talked, I realized (perhaps with a bit of a surprise) that I might be willing to consider the idea myself. Consider the following thesis: one of the prime functions of government is to develop a resource until it is economically viable, at which point some private person screams "socialism!" and gets the government to transfer it to private hands where it turns a nifty profit.

It's been true for so many other assets--why not soldiers? What happens now is that (a) at great expense, we train them and (b) provide a bit of battlefield apprenticeship, after which (c) they go to work for Blackwater or Halliburton at 10 times the money. So many private companies, having given up on public education, fully expect to have to bear the costs of training their own staffs. Why should we taxpayers continue to subsidize the production of mercenaries?

You Didn't Read it in Archie Comics

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:18:12 PST

My 84-year-old cousin Dave is waxing nostalgic for high school:

As a high school student I remember a boy, an athlete, with a name from central casting: Soc Babotas. I didn't know him but I so admired that name. I envisioned book titles. Soc Babotas and his Electric Canoe. Soc Babotas in Yellowknife. Soc Babotas and his adventure with Anacondas. All these dreams must have been when I was freshman. By senior year I surely was thinking, Soc Babotas Gets Laid.

Elecric canoe?

Update: John thinks the electric canoe may come from the Tom Swift novels. A plausible guess, but it's not on the Wiki list, although we do get runabout, rifle and locomotive. And here's this:

The name "taser" was originally "TSER", for "Tom Swift Electric Rifle". The invention was named after the central device in Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911),

Link.

Update to Update: Oh, wait, it's this guy.

Claude on the Cannibals

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:48:01 PST

Larry's been haunting the obituary pages again where he finds this from the account of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died October 31 at 100. Among other things he chose to

consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies.

[But ah, how that takes me back: I had a girlfriend in the old days who figured that Lévi-Strauss' stories would brighten up any party. "Let's ask Claude," she would say. Now that I think of it, Larry's would, too.]

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:51:11 PST

Annals of Undeserved Promotion: Dickie

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:50:23 PST

Here's an edifying little tale with two morals: one, horses for courses. And two (following Nietzsche, or was sit Arnold Schwarzenegger?) anything that doesn't kill you will educate you. The subject is Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, Lord Louis Mountbatten and a lot of other titles, known to his friends as "Dickie." His only qualification for high office appears to have been tha the was buds with two kinds--Edward VIII (as in "the woman I love") and his brother/successor, George VI.

As a commander of naval vessels in World War II, Dickie couldn't catch a break. His first ship, the destroyer HMS Kelly, was "a catalog of disasters" (113). At one point, retrieving the ship from drydock after an early misadventure, Dickie plowed the Kelly straight into another ship. It is said that only his birth saved him from court-martial (114).

Wrecking a destroyer may count as comedy. A more somber chapter followed. Dickie presided over one of the most incompetently managed military episode in British history, saved from the annals of major disaster by its small size. That would be the Dieppe Invasion, the ill-conceived and ill-executed attempt to anticipate (in 1942) the Normandy Invasion of 1944.

Undismayed by any of this, Dickie nurtureda project to build an aircraft carrier on a man-made iceberg. To show the durability of his artificial ice, Dickie fired a pistol at it. The bullet indeed bounced off the artificcial ice--and stung the American chief of naval operations in the leg. (132)

Armed with this resume, Dickie won the appointment to what was, at the time, the position as Vicory of India--a ruler at times more powerful than the King himself.

Granted, Dickie's brief differed from any of his predecessors. The government sent him out not to preside over the Empire but to preside over its dissolution. Still, it is hard to think of anyone more grotesquely unsuited for an important office of trust & profit under the crown.

Yet, by all accounts, Dickie did a splendid job of it. Granted, there was epic-scale rioting and mass murder. But almost everyone concedes that it could have been far worse, and that it was Dickie's peculiar chemistry that made it work.

So, look again at his resume. What do we see? We see a man who has consorted and cavorted with royalty all his life--so, as peer or a superior to everyone he had to deal with in the subcontinent. We see, by corollary, a man who is besotted with ceremony and the trappings of office (one suspects he wore his medals to bed with him)--so, uniquely suited to provide over one of the greatest of ceremonies. We see a man almost impervious to any perception of his own shortcomings; a man who, in time of chaos and disaster, is ready to shout "full speed ahead."

And so, ideally equipped for a job which, in the end, he did quite well. Horses for courses. Anything that doesn't kill you will educate you--if you now how to put it to work.

[It did nothing to refurbish his general reputation, though. Later the Minister of Defense, Denis Healey, had to consider whether he should reappoint Dickie to a top defense post. Healey asked 40 of Dickie's underlings. Thirty-nine said "no." (368)

Mostly culled from Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann (2007), a ripping yarn if ever I read one. Numbers in parentheses are references to pages in that book.

Afterthought: Actually, there are two other events in Dickie's life that cry out to be remembered. One, he was perhaps the principal force behind the marriage of his nephew, Philip Battenberg, to his Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth. And two: his life came to a violent end when he was blown up aboard his yacht by Irish terrorists. "The I.R.A. are not looking for an old man like me," he had said with characteristic charm, insousiance, and error.

Rubber, She Said, and Rubber I Did,

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:57:46 PST

...and I don't go there any more.

Thanks, John. No more than vaguely relevant. My friend Scott wonders about all those, yhou know, packages that were knocked off famous statues in, like the Counterreformation. Scott reasons: the Vatican never throws anything away. There must be a priest who is custodian of a file room where they are all stored away.

It's Not Just About the Money

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:43:37 PST

The Epicurean Dealmaker makes a point about bankers that I've tried to make before about people in general: it's not just the money. Tempting to summarize, but you'll enjoy his version more than you would enjoy mine. So, go awready.

Pensions: Bad News for (Municipal) Bonds

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:58:48 PST

Another corollary of the (horrrendous) current state of pension funds: the municipal bond market heads for the tank.

In Which I Flunk Bob Lawless' Secured Credit Exam

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:33:24 PST

Remember that tee-hee about OJ's mortgage and how a note in the WaMu file said the judgment against him wasn't any good because (he said) he didn't do the crime (tee-hee)--? My friend Bob Lawless suggests that WaMu was in fact very likely on sound ground. Florida has an unlimited homestead exemption, so the judgment lien may in fact not have reached his Florida home. But homestead exemptions aren't valid against secured lenders (for more on this, go here).

Amplifying in an off-line exchange, Bob points out that there probably was some kind of lawyer protocol on record telling the folks tweendecks that the mortgage would have priority, and so the note in the file was just chatter.

I am persuaded, with one minor exception. That is: a handful of Florida cases seem to have let creditors wiggle in past the unlimited homestead. It's hard to find a golden thread through these cases, except to say that the judge seems to have found the creditor particularly unattractive.

But this is a pretty slender reed. I'm inclined to say game, set and match for Bob. But what am I missing this time?

Eeuw, Plastics

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:13:22 PST

Link.

On a good many South Sea Isles today, you can't set foot for the tourists. Time for a cull?

SPI #23028

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:46:41 PST

Thanks, Frank.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Men are from Alabama, Girlie-men from Vermont

noreply@blogger.com (Buce) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:53:23 PST

Matt Yglesias confirms that there is a great gulf fixt:
I suppose the main thing that impresses me is that the divide isn't sharper. The great swath of the midwest, for example, seems firmly rooted in the temperate zone.