Sunday, March 29. 2009
John 12:20-33
12:20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks.
12:21 They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus."
12:22 Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
12:23 Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
12:24 Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
12:25 Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
12:26 Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
12:27 "Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say--' Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.
12:28 Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again."
12:29 The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him."
12:30 Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.
12:31 Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
12:32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."
12:33 He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.
Saturday, March 28. 2009
 How will you celebrate Earth Hour tonight? Had I a Hummer, I'd take it out for ice cream.
Even though there is no warming, everybody seems to want to do the meaningless but conspicuous token virtue thing. Watt's Up. Moonbattery wants to celebrate Tom Edison via Human Achievement Hour.
If anybody really believed this stuff, they would cancel their electric instead of wagging their finger at me.
Caledonia with Louis Jordan, thanks to a good site that is new to us, Paco Enterprises. (A good name. Paco is the name of our pup.)
 We'll quit putting out bird seed as soon as our diminishing supply runs out: the bugs are coming out despite our sub-30 degree nights (the earth is cooling, you know - climate change), so the birds can go off welfare for a while. What's been around ye olde feeder today?, you ask.
Cowbirds, Redwing Blackbirds, Mourning Doves (tons), White throated Sparrows (lazy ones - should have migrated north by now), Song Sparrow, Chipping Sparrow, Blue Jay, Purple Grackle, Cardinal, Goldfinch, Red Bellied Woodpecker, House Finch, BC Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, WB Nuthatch. All in their splendid breeding plumage.
Plus some Chipmunks and, of course, Grey Squirrels working the system.
Photo: A male Goldfinch, before fully changing into his Spring plumage.
 Buddy and his team of eight SEALs are in harm's way, doing difficult, challenging, and enviably-exciting nighttime work. The SEALs own the night.
Buddy sends this email: "Everyone out here appreciates being remembered at home - that's what gets us through the fights."
Churchill, not Orwell as is commonly thought, said "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." We have known Buddy since he was about 5, and, while I can see his capacity to be a very rough and dangerous man on the job, he has the warm, gentle, generous, and considerate soul with which strong, competent and confident men are often blessed.
In a dispute, you want these guys on your side.
Have no fear, guys: we think of you and pray for your success in your missions and your safety every day, and we soft candy-asses back home with our non-dangerous lives are grateful for the work you are doing for us.
(Put a comment on this for them - they go online when they are able to do so. These intertubes are amazing, aren't they? They reach all the way over to Wherizzitatistan.)
Friday, March 27. 2009
Discovery's Mike Rowe on work. 20 minutes. Just wonderful. (h/t, Synthstuff):
This from Woody Allen in The New Yorker, Tails of Manhattan:
Two weeks ago, Abe Moscowitz dropped dead of a heart attack and was reincarnated as a lobster. Trapped off the coast of Maine, he was shipped to Manhattan and dumped into a tank at a posh Upper East Side seafood restaurant. In the tank there were several other lobsters, one of whom recognized him. “Abe, is that you?” the creature asked, his antennae perking up.
“Who’s that? Who’s talking to me?” Moscowitz said, still dazed by the mystical slam-bang postmortem that had transmogrified him into a crustacean.
“It’s me, Moe Silverman,” the other lobster said.
“O.M.G.!” Moscowitz piped, recognizing the voice of an old gin-rummy colleague. “What’s going on?”
“We’re reborn,” Moe explained. “As a couple of two-pounders.”
“Lobsters? This is how I wind up after leading a just life? In a tank on Third Avenue?”
“The Lord works in strange ways,” Moe Silverman explained. “Take Phil Pinchuck. The man keeled over with an aneurysm, he’s now a hamster. All day, running at the stupid wheel. For years he was a Yale professor. My point is he’s gotten to like the wheel. He pedals and pedals, running nowhere, but he smiles.”
Moscowitz did not like his new condition at all. Why should a decent citizen like himself, a dentist, a mensch who deserved to relive life as a soaring eagle or ensconced in the lap of some sexy socialite getting his fur stroked, come back ignominiously as an entrée on a menu?
Read the whole piece here.
Picasso biographer John Richardson discusses the new show of Picasso's late work at the Gagosian Gallery. Multimedia.
Thursday, March 26. 2009
He comments on the Youtube of his speech the other day, which went viral, worldwide. Key quote:
Breaking the press monopoly is one thing. But the internet has also broken the political monopoly. Ten or even five years ago, when the Minister for Widgets put out a press release, the mere fact of his position guaranteed a measure of coverage. Nowadays, a politician must compel attention by virtue of what he is saying, not his position.
It's all a bit unsettling for professional journalists and politicians. But it's good news for libertarians of every stripe. Lefties have always relied on control, as much of information as of physical resources. Such control is no longer technically feasible.
Videos at Thompson, Parts 1 and 2
Tuesday, March 24. 2009
While searching info about Kenyon (it was Paul Newman's alma mater, along with EL Doctorow, Robert Lowell, William Rehnquist - and Rutherford B. Hayes), I stumbled upon an op-ed written for the NYT by Kenyon's Director of Admissions: To All the Girls I've Rejected.
It's about how colleges are dealing with the disproportionate numbers of female applicants they have been seeing over recent years, and why they feel forced to raise their admissions standards for them. It's Gender Discrimination!
Photo: Kenyon College
Monday, March 23. 2009
Fascinating story. From Kimball re AIG bonuses and the CDSs:
...Epstein explains, for more than a decade some 400 traders in a London-based subsidiary of AIG have managed $1.6 trillion in derivative contracts for the company. It’s an interesting story:
In 1998, this tiny group got into the newly-created credit default swap business when JP Morgan Chase came to it with a proposition to transform debt on its books into security packages that could be sold off its books. To make these bank debt packages salable to other institutions, they needed credible insurance against default to get Triple-A rating. So the AIG financial product group, seeing no risk of default, sold it in the form of credit default swaps. Soon afterwards, with the support of Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers (now President’s Obama’s economic advisor), the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was passed, which excluded credit default swaps from being considered a “security” under the jurisdiction of the SEC or any other government agency. This act allowed these swaps to be deployed on a massive scale to convert all kinds of debt, including even subprime mortgages and car loans, into triple A securities and turned AIG’s arm, now headed by Joseph J. Cassano, an aggressive Brooklyn-born alumni of Drexel’s back office operations, into a multi-billion dollar profit center for the insurance behemoth. Even though the unit’s 400 or so traders constituted less than one-third of one percent of AIG’s loyal employees, it produced close to twenty percent of its total operating profits. While Cassano kept the list of his counterparties in the credit default swaps a closely held secret, he bragged at a conference in 2007 that they included a global swath of “investment banks, pension funds, endowments, foundations, insurance companies, hedge funds, money managers, high-net-worth individuals, municipalities and sovereigns and supranationals.” By 2006, his group was raking in nearly $4 billion in profits, and, as is the tradition in the derivative game, he and his traders got a rich cut of the loot, which on average amounted to roughly $1.1 million a trader.
So far, so good, right? No complaints then. These guys were coining money and a lot of people got rich, spent their money, and made a lot of people happy.
But into every life a little rain must fall. Epstein continues:
With the collapse in 2008 of the debt AIG was insuring, came such massive losses that Cassano resigned, and AIG, unable to post collateral, faced bankruptcy. At this point in September 2008, the US government rescued AIG, pouring in $173 billion of tax payers’ money. Even so, there remained a $1.6 trillion in potential liabilities that could be triggered by thousands of the credit default swap contracts, many of which would not expire until 2012. To prevent hundreds of billions of losses, these custom-designed contracts had to be continually watched, and, if necessary hedged, by traders who understood each one’s particular vulnerability.
So what would you do if you were Obama, Maxine Waters, or some other moralistic scold? Deplore the bonuses? Easy to do, but at what cost?
All those complex contracts: who was going to deal with them?
To perform this critical task, the remaining 370 or so remaining traders in the group wanted the same sort of guaranteed compensation in the form of retention bonuses as had in their two year contracts. The situation for AIG, and the US government that now owned 80 percent of it, was not unlike the one in Mario Puzo’s Godfather in which an offer is made that cannot be refused. In this case, even without a bloody horse head under the blankets, AIG and its federal overseers could not risk falling into a $1.6 trillion black hole by turning down the demands of the traders in the financial product group. It was not that these traders had such unique skills in managing derivative contracts that they could not be replaced by other people but that they knew the business’ crucial secrets, including the identities of he counterparties to the credit default swaps and the vulnerabilities in their positions. The implicit threat: they could use the secrets to which they were privy to trade against AIG’s positions as it attempted to unload its $1.6 trillion dollar portfolio.
Maybe, all things considered, AIG did the right thing, the prudent thing, the fiscally responsible thing?
Under these circumstances, rather than risking immense losses from having their secret book compromised, AIG paid to keep its traders from defecting. Their compensation, when approved by the Fed and Treasury, would amount to about $500,000 a trader a year ( less than half what they had been getting in 2008.) The staff at the NY Fed, while Timothy Geithner was still its head, in fact helped negotiate the terms for these retention bonuses. When Geithner moved on to become Treasury Secretary in January 2009, he presumably understood how financially dangerous it could be to do otherwise, since he intervened with the Senate Banking Committee Chairman in February to get a provision dropped from a bill that would have prevented AIG (and other recipients of federal money) from paying such huge bonuses. In fairness to Geithner, the alternative to making these pay-offs might have proven a thousand times more costly to AIG, and its defacto owner, the US Government.
Moralistic outrage can be a delicious emotion. But it is worth making sure that you have the right target before going to town with it.
So this London group sold the insurance (CDS) based on a low-risk prediction, predicted wrong, and left us looking at such vast and disruptive counterparty risk that something had to be done. The bankruptcy of AIG was not a reasonable or responsible option. Apparently making CDSs "non-securities" made the whole mess possible, but I understand why the Clinton admin did that at the time: they did not anticipate that it would make it possible to put lipstick on pigs, and that one could run out of lipstick.
It's all about the unintended and unexpected consequences of financial legislation. Even the smart Larry Summers was the biggest supporter of CDSs, and tons of supposedly savvy folks wanted to get into the CDS market for speculation, hedging, or arbitrage. Wiki has a good description of the CDS markets.
Re our video post on Pledging your loyalty to Obama, this image from Theo:
Americans are Lockeans: recognizing that work is necessary and will produce well-being; following their natural inclinations moderately because their passions are balanced; respecting the rights of others so that theirs will be respected; obeing the law because they made it in their own interest. From the point of view of God or heroes, all this is not very inspiring. But for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, it is the promise of salvation. As Leo Strauss put it, the moderns "built on low but solid ground."
Allan Bloom
 Andy McCarthy says:
Congratulations to our friend Mark Levin on the publication of Liberty and Tyranny — A Conservative Manifesto, which is officially released this week. It's going to be a huge bestseller, and deservedly so. Mark has written a crystal clear and coherent summons to first principles against the statist onslaught — whether the issue is religious liberty, the free market, federalism, national-security, immigration, the environment or the welfare state. Through and through, Mark's love of country, his passion for our history, and his mastery of the Founding and constitutional law are striking. Yet the book is completely accessible to the non-lawyer: it is written for conservatives and recognizes, first and foremost, that the law and the state are meant to serve American freedom and self-determinism — not the other way around. And best of all: it's a great read. Do yourself a big favor and read it.
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Mr. Free Market offers the contents of the Ladybird Easy-Reading series on