We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
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?
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.
Unbelievable. Did she leave her tin-foil hat in the cloakroom? She doesn't have the brains to last three hours as a receptionist at Goldman. h/t Riehl:
Does anybody know who said that? I forgot. Maybe Archibald MacLeish? And does it make any sense? Or does the quote itself just "is" and doesn't "mean"?
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!
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.
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."
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.
“I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can't keep up and I can't stand to pay attention.
“His aim seems to be to reduce us to government dependents. His inattention to rehabilitation of the financial system in lieu of vastly expanding the size and scope of the government is a dead giveaway, as is his lack of concern over the vast destruction of wealth his policies are working (and will continue to work).
“Perhaps most depressing to me is the manifestation of his adolescent grandiosity in his stewardship of foreign policy and national security. He doesn't understand that the government of Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons it can put to evil purposes. He thinks he can sweet-talk them out of achieving this objective.”
“Why are Americans hesitant, bewildered after the arrival of the Messiah?
“Not for the reason our President attests about high unemployment or shaky GDP or the lack of national health care. We simply are ashamed of our profligacy; we don’t trust those who should be trusted; we put up with the crass and honor the mediocre and ugly; and we fight and bicker over the distribution, never over a share in the creation.
Hope and change, indeed.”
Both Johnson and Hanson, in effect, point at frustration at both external events and at our own behaviors.They are correct.And, for me, they are incorrect.Depression comes from frustration with non-attainment of unrealistic objectives and inadequate actions to overcome.
I’m not depressed.Mostly because I’m a glass-half-full type, with the life experience that with difficulty and pain has seen and been shown that it is.
Depression implies a fixation upon the perceived negative forces at work, with a tendency toward paralysis of action to change them or our self.These are unconstructive and self-defeating attitudes and behaviors.
Avoidance of or ending depressed feelings and behavior comes from attitudinal resilience and from engaging in efficacious actions.
No doubt, we’re in a mess, both of our own making and by others, and many in our political and societal elite are making it worse, with potential dire consequences.Still, one must recognize the resilient strengths we have.Forty-eight percent did not vote for Obama, despite a perfect-storm in his favor, and current polling shows him losing support, and even his allied media are having to take some notice of his excesses and lackings.The US is emerging from this economic calamity relatively stronger than other countries.The positive trend-line in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that was hard-earned under Bush has not been abandoned by Obama, though it may become weakened.Ordinary Americans are buckling down in their personal affairs and continuing to achieve for themselves, society, and our futures.
Scott Johnson, however, seems to recognize the negative feedback felt by being ignored and powerless to be efficacious.Those who’ve argued long and hard for greater sanity do not feel recognized with success or able to measurably change that.Are they heading to a new version of tuning out?I don’t think so. But, what is needed instead is even more diligence and exertion, particularly in new ways – sane ways -- of engaging themselves and others.
Many are working at that.Real change takes a while, in fits and starts, through trial and error, but relies ultimately upon faith in oneself, in one’s beliefs, in the decency and sanity of others, and thus in outcomes.
I’m not Pollyanna, but even prefer that to a depressed hole.So I’m not depressed, but energized. I know it works.
It's ACORN that is running those AIG bus tours in CT - meaning that this is being done on our nickel (ACORN was given $2 billion in the stimulus). Remarkably, Conyers plans probe of ACORN.
The Global Warming Three are on thin ice. This was pure publicity stunt posing as "science." Amusingly, it was too cold for them. Gotta love this quote:
The idea is that the expedition should take regular radar fixes on the ice thickness, to be fed into a computer model in California run by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams”.
The video to Iran is the latest catastrophe. Mr. Obama simply does not understand how his "olive branch" will be received, not only by the mullahs in Iran itself, but wherever else on the surface of the planet the United States has enemies. It "reads" -- to people who do not share anything like America's aspirations -- as an unambiguous confession of weakness. He has moved the American position towards Iran from offensive to defensive, for no defensible reason.
I have a special needs child. He looks like you’d imagine a special needs child looks when he throws a ball. He looks like you’d imagine a special needs child looks when he catches a ball. He looks like you’d imagine a special needs child looks when he runs. He looks like you’d imagine a special needs child looks when he bowls. He rode the short bus for a while.
Sounds hilarious doesn’t it? You know, running, throwing, bowling awkwardly because of muscle imbalances and fear of falling and fear of being hit by the ball. What’s amazing is that his Little League teammates haven’t laughed or poked fun. Not. Once. They have managed to show more class, patience, empathy and charity than the President of the United States, but that’s turning out to be no big feat.
Some banks took the bailout money as a favor to the Feds to put more capital out there. Luskin:
No one seems to care that the 90% tax will apply to all banks that have accepted federal money, not just to AIG. That includes banks like Wells Fargo, who told Treasury secretary Henry Paulson that they didn't even want the money when the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was enacted last October. Reluctantly, Wells took the money at Paulson's urging, as did other healthy banks such as JPMorgan. Now virtually every employee of every one of them faces a 90% tax on their bonuses.
This administration really is Clown Central. You thought last month’s grotesque budget was bad. It turns out that the projected deficits are now $2.3 trillion worse than the estimate made just last month. Incredible.
3:14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
3:15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
3:17 "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
3:18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
3:19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.
3:20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.
3:21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God."
Mr. Free Market offers the contents of the Ladybird Easy-Reading series on
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