Cab Thoughts 12/31/11

The EPA has set new standards for power plants that include more stringent rules for arsenic and mercury. Presumably lower doses are more dangerous now. They also are limiting water use for cooling the plants. These decisions have uncertain motives but are good indicators of the potential for government manipulation towards an unspoken or unratified or unproven end. Any attack on domestic energy production in this country until our basic problems are solved is quite mad.

Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the '70s are childless. From 1990 to 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at age 30 almost doubled, from just over 30% to just shy of 60%. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, 20% of 40-year-old women are childless. The welfare state, whatever you call it, depends upon a growing base to the population's pyramid. If the base shrinks, as is apparent, a new model must--must--be created.

If Iran shuts the Straits of Hormuz, their foot will be on our gas hose. The impact will be on farming and transportation. (Interestingly, increase in petroleum costs hurts China's labor advantage in pricing.) For every 10% increase in petroleum costs, there is a 0.2% decrease in GDP.

City Councilwoman Marian Tasco will retire on Friday, collect a six-figure pension payment and then return to work after she is sworn-in on Monday to serve her seventh term.
Francis Bielli, executive director for the city’s Board of Pensions and Retirement, said he was recently notified that Tasco, who is enrolled in the controversial Deferred Retirement Option Plan, will retire on Friday and collect $478,057. (From the Philadelphia Daily News)
I suppose this is the price we have to pay to get really high quality people in government.

The USA installed between 1,700 and 2,000 megawatts of solar during 2011, and new solar power may have exceeded new coal. World investment in renewable energy plants exceeded investment in fossil fuel plants this year. Oil demand in 2011 is about 7% below 2010 levels; gasoline demand is down about 5% from 2011. Electricity demand will barely increase in 2011 and is projected to actually decline in 2012 by EIA. I suppose the less optimistic might say that in a financial slowdown, things slow down but something is going on here. One can only hope that natural gas plays a part.

Happy New Year!

Old New Years Problems

All nations face problems. Some are specific: The management of the rainforest. Some are generic: Management of health care resources. Some are practical: Farmland productivity. Some are theoretical: The inevitability of the destruction of the bourgeois. In all of this international competing mess, the United States has to pick leaders that have insight into the nation's specific and generic, practical and theoretical problems.

We have, for some reason, focused upon a number of bizarre components of the nation's integrity. We worry about coal plants emissions, income disparity, regime change in Libya. Now these may or may not have some value as problems, they may or may not have some relevance in history, they may or may not have some provable importance to us at some time. But there are two obvious, staggering problems that we face that are irrefutable, hazardous and entirely within our control that are almost never discussed. First, we are a culture totally dependent on fossil fuel most of which is supplied by foreigners who do not like us and wish us harm. And, second, we have allowed to develop a financial system that depends upon a growing and productive group of younger people to support programs promised to the older population and the direction of that supporting population is declining.

These two problems can be quantified and must be dealt with sooner or later but there is no evidence that the current candidates plan to discuss or deal with any problems that are not of their own fetish or choosing.

Income Disparity and its Discontents

From Joseph Stiglitz's recent article inVanity Fair:

"It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality , America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow."

The notion of "income equality" is a new one. It is a slight variation of the old socialist outrage. But whether it is earned income or net worth, the idea that the government should have a hand in balancing things out is revolutionary for the United States. This is simply not a nation that historically would permit such an intrusion in peoples' lives. Moreover, there is the question of the value of such an intrusion. Are there studies that support the notion that disparities in income are particularly bad? Is it reasonable to compare the income disparities between those in Saudi Arabia and the U.S.? Are rich people really responsible for the failure of poor people to be rich?

There is a lot going on in this country that is wrong. Cheaper labor competition, short-term economic thinking, unproductive foreign wars, unmanaged entitlements, scandalous financial mismanagement, an aging population are all serious problems with serious negative impact on the country's economic health. The shift in the nation's emphasis from production, creativity and development to the collection of management fees has been a terrible shift as well. But income disparity? Is that a cause or an effect of problems? And can the government fix that fairly? The same government that felt it could fix the Iraqi nation?

A study from the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics reported the following numbers from the period 1984 to 2009:

The median net worth of the members of the house of Representatives rose 2.5 times--inflation adjusted!--from 280,000 dollars to 725,000 dollars. In the same period the average net worth of the average American family fell from 20,600 dollars to 20,500 dollars.

Now there is an income and net worth disparity worth some scrutiny.

Gifter's Remorse

I am having second thoughts about a Christmas present this year.

A good friend has become an American citizen and I was interested in finding a book that might give him some insight into some difficult areas of American history. After some reflection, I decided on The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a 1974 fictional account of the battle of Gettysburg focusing on the Little Round Top. It is a very perceptive, open-minded recreation that gives an idea of the time and the men. And I wanted a hardcover; while there has been an anniversary reissue, intact hardcovers are hard to come by.

I like books. I spend a lot of free time in book stores and I collect first editions. I'm one of those guys who worry about the implications of e-readers. Books are inherently worthwhile to me, the older the better. I prefer hardcovers--unless I'm traveling--and I destroy books with markings, notes and marginal questions unless I think the book has some value. As I wandered over the last months, I found two books I had been thinking of as gifts, one a good hard cover of "Killer Angels"--exactly what I wanted--and a second book, much rarer, "Camp of the Saints", an English translation of the notorious French original that has been vilified for the last generation but nonetheless raises a very interesting and ugly question. I had not seen either one in any condition in months--the "Camp" never. I grabbed them both and gave them both as gifts.
The problem is that the Killer Angels had a dedication on the front page. I saw that; I just did not care. I would have cared if it had been a book I wanted to collect because the market values the pristine; I must confess I do not. I think the history of a book adds to it. (I do not think scars do. Nor do I like books with the awful library stickers--although the famous book thief, John Gilkey, specialized in them.)

While I was thrilled that I found a book of good quality at all, I think my friend was surprised and disappointed by the dedication. Perhaps it was the difference between a new and used car. At any rate, I think, had I to do it again, I would not do it.

Unasked Question from Iraq

So the Americans are withdrawing from Iraq without anyone raising the obvious question:
How can it be that a group of politicians (conservatives), ostensibly philosophically opposed to the notion of the ability of government to plan and develop the political and economic structure of a state efficiently and accurately, moves into a foreign state with the confidence that they can completely refashion it from the top down?
And how can it be that a group of politicians (progressives), ostensibly confident in government's ability to plan and develop the political and economic structure of a state efficiently and accurately, opposes that effort to recreate that state with the opinion that such a refashioning can not be done?

A Democracy of Those who Serve as Well as Vote

A big story recently was Biden getting called for jury duty; he went. Last year Obama begged off. A tiny story, really, but it does stimulate the mind.

A great problem in government well recognized by America's founders and demonstrated at every government turn is the eagerness of some to lead others, the need of the ambition of some to be satisfied. Whether it is driven by philosophy, kindness, hubris, religion, inherited royalty or greed the drive of some to run the lives of others seems to be a curse of man that is both ceaseless and unquenchable. Indeed much of the inefficiency in government that so many decry in the United States was built into the infrastructure by the nation's creators to blunt the aspirations of just such people. To paraphrase Madison: "We have government because men are not angels; we distrust and control government because men are not angels."

A modest proposal: Make the land a true democracy. Eliminate these contaminated elections and select our leaders like we select those who sit in judgement of their fellow citizens and hold their fate, their very lives in their hands (certainly there is no greater responsibility.) Appoint them off the tax rolls like jury duty. Pick our leaders at random. Could the results possibly be worse?

Can't you just envision it: A working guy gets a letter from the draft office, he and his family huddle around it, they worry and pray, finally with trepidation they open it. It's true! He's drafted to be a senator! Immediately the family goes to work: How can he get out of it? They pace. They fret. They call their friend the lawyer. Finally they go to the doctor with the hopes of getting a medical excuse.

How different it would be.

Sunday Sermon 12/25/11

Of the four gospels, only two mention the birth of Christ, Matthew and Luke. The other two, after some Mark's genealogy and John's "In the beginning..." start with Christ and John the Baptist. Both Matthew and Luke describe the Annunciation as well.
Luke's introduction to the gospel is quite lovely. It is rigid in time and space. It is in the time of Caesar Augustus, the governor was Cyrinus and the Romans were enrolling the whole world. Joseph and his wife were to be enrolled in Bethlehem because he was connected to the house of David. Everything is specific, tied down in space and time and history. And then, suddenly, injected into this space and time is Infinity.
Merry Christmas.

Cab Thoughts 12/24/11

Scientists at MIT have sent small, controlled electric flow across 10 meter space without wire via long wave microwave. Imagine your electric car recharging as it drives down the road. Imagine not needing any wires. (Before we get too John Lennon, imagine not being fried between the source and the receiver.)

The Buffett-owned MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company bought a 49% share of the 290 megawatt, $1.8 billion Agua Caliente solar project in Arizona. He thinks something is good here.

The value of the top 15 companies in Silicon Valley is about 500 Billion dollars.

What would happen if North Korea joined South Korea now that the Dear Leader has moved to another plane? My bet would be on a ten year disaster for the South as it accommodates to the poverty, the unemployed and the lack of infrastructure of the North. It is a characteristic of sloth, stupidity and blind politics to expect rescue from the working world when the fruits of your rotten life or philosophy drop rotten to the ground.

North Korea's economy is 3% of South Korea's annual GDP of $1 trillion. There are some economic laws; if you want to create shortages, freeze the price or let a central planner take over.

From John Southerland's review of Morson's book "The Words of Others:"
"Take, for example (not one of Morson's examples), the indisputably most famous and quoted line in English literature, 'To be, or not to be, that is the question'. Most theatregoers would think the sentence spit new. But should they also go to a performance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus they would hear the following in the hero's magnificent opening soliloquy, in which he resolves to sell his soul: 'Bid Oncaymæon farewell, Galen come'. The Greek Oncaymæon transliterates as 'being and not being'. Where is Faustus a professor of philosophy? The University of Wittenberg. Where is Hamlet a student of philosophy? The University of - you guessed it. 'To be or not to be' is not a deeply original thought but a hackneyed sophomoric seminar topic. Hamlet is not thinking, he's quoting."
This completely changes the soliloquy. And it recasts the playwright's vision of Hamlet.

Computer science majors increased 7.6% across the country from 2009 to 2010, the most recent available data, according to the Computing Research Association. on the other hand, several engineering schools have discontinued their job fairs.

When Experts are Wrong

Time Magazine has just named Robert Howarth, a guy who has published not "controversial" but "wrong" papers on the relative byproducts of gas and coal, as one of its "People Who Mattered". There is no way you can get rid of these people. If Lamarck were alive today he would have a talk show. Part of this is our refusal to have judgments because we think being "judgmental" is arbitrary. Part is we have respect for controversy as dialectic, as productive. And part of this is unbridled partisanship, "my opinion right or wrong."

Hanger has a nice blog on energy and this is an excerpt.

From John Hanger:

"In the words of Time

"Robert Howarth...who produced one of the most controversial scientific studies of the year; a paper arguing that natural gas produced by fracking may actually have a bigger greenhouse gas footprint than coal. The study--strenuously opposed by the gas industry and many of Howarth's fellow scientists--undercut shale gas's major claim as a clean fuel."

Time also named Anthony Ingraffea and Mark Ruffalo, as the people who mattered in the fracking debates, which Time declared to be the environmental issue of the year, eclipsing climate change.

Howarth and Ingraffea's study has been debunked by 6 or more studies, all finding that coal emits twice the carbon on a lifecycle basis, but the Howarth paper did matter. It has done major damage to the cause of reducing carbon pollution by so badly misleading millions of people around the world about the carbon impacts of using coal or gas.

On the bright side in the USA, natural gas displacing coal is one reason that US carbon emissions will fall in 2011 and probably again in 2012. But for shale gas that now supplies 34% of all USA gas, the price of gas would likely be over $8 per thousand cubic feet and uncompetitive with coal.

Had Howarth won a broad ban of shale gas, the result would have been devastating for consumers, and especially for low-income families, and the nation would be building more coal plants and not closing many of the 231 units now scheduled to end operation.

While Horwath mattered a lot in 2011, he was unable to prevent substantial carbon reductions resulting from replacing coal and oil with gas. Thank goodness for that."

Progressives, Malthus and Catch-22

The resurgent and indefatigable Progressives raise an interesting historical question. Essentially this group decries the randomness of social and political development. They have no belief in some social guiding hand that so captures the quasi-religious Marxist or the more practical Capitalist; their nitch in the ubiquitous power grab is the belief that intelligent and well-meaning adults can guide social change for the betterment of all--at least avoiding the obvious pitfalls of randomness. They have focused on the need for international diplomacy to smooth national edges thus the U.N.; they recognize the danger of the use of recreational neurotoxins thus Prohibition. Their great bugaboo has been Malthus and his catch-22.

Malthus argued that improved living conditions was an impossibility. As food production improved arithmetically, populations would increase geometrically and outstrip any production advantage. Ditto scientific and housing advances. So as conditions of the population improved, the pesky population, more comfortable, would reproduce more and recreate the problem. At some point the population runs out of food and space. Improved conditions were essentially self-defeating.

This led to an unfortunate but logical period where the Progressives began to see the advantage of controlling population size and, inevitably, population quality. They flirted with eugenics for quite a while and their interest has always been cautionary. But some surprising things have occurred. Population size with technical advances has decreased, not increased, in the technological cultures. The third world continues to grow but the technical world has developed exactly opposite of Malthus' prediction.

This leads to the potential "Camp of the Saints" nightmare, possibly, but it does make Progressives less heinous philosophically. Unfortunately, it also gives the lie to the notion of social planning. Malthus' big picture, top down vision certainly was logical at the time, it just was wrong. That it was wrong in no way should reassure Progressives; theirs is a big picture, top down vision too. Catch-22.

Fear and Loathing on Wall Street

A recent study has shown that the single biggest influence on the decision an individual makes investing his IRA money is the person who sits next to him at work. This may imply a weak-mindedness in us all but likely is more a function of our lack of knowledge of the investment world, perhaps our disrespect for it and that inherent whimsical, crowd-following optimism that all we carbon-based units have. Read a book like "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" and you can throw a little nihilism in as well.

Investing is not complicated, it is impossible. It is a dangerous adventure where people who know little more than you do pose as experts and lead people along paths as poorly understood as the Amazon. In some respect it is reminiscent of our self-appointed political visionaries.The history of investing is littered with overnight wonders, weekly monthly and yearly wonders. There are few decade wonders. The very fact that some are successful over a decade give the rest of us mortals unreasonable confidence.

A simple read of investment adviser sites will tell a lot. One day it will raise a cautionary note about a company or a country or a currency, the next day a rebuttal will appear raising positive points about the previously denigrated entity. So a paper trail is created for any possible eventuality. It is much like the sports betting advice phone numbers. They promise the "lock" game between Pittsburgh and St. Louis--for free! Half the callers are told to bet Pittsburgh, half St. Louis. Half the callers win and think the betting site is great and return to bet with them. The only objective is the fee.

The fee is the motive in almost all of finance.You need to look no further than "The Big Short." People did crazy things for a fee. And for a fee based system, there has got to be volume. And the people who knew the truth were like some Old Testament prophet, ignored, shunned--everything but fed to whales.

Everyone thinks they know something that someone else does not, everyone thinks their intelligence, their information, their experience, something gives them an edge. And the fee is the price of admission. But the best information, the best minds are wrong. Long Term Capital Management was run by Nobel Prize winners in economics and they were so wrong they almost took a bank with them. And they were filled with hubris; after their bankruptcy they came right back with the same philosophy in a new entity and went bankrupt again.

For every seller there's a buyer, for every buyer a seller. Fear and greed. The astonishing behavior of Wall Street the last decade. Fees and hubris. That is all anyone needs to know about markets. The guy beside you has no idea what he is getting into and should not be followed.

The real problem is the money has to go somewhere.

Steven Blank and Start-ups

I heard an interview recently with Steven Blank, the renowned entrepreneur/teacher at Stanford on start-up companies. He is a Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Graduate School of Engineering STVP Program and has been a founder or participant in eight Silicon Valley startups since 1978. His last company, E.piphany, started in his living room. His other startups include two semiconductor companies (Zilog and MIPS Computers), a workstation company (Convergent Technologies), a supercomputer firm (Ardent), a computer peripheral supplier (SuperMac), a military intelligence systems supplier (ESL) and a video game company (Rocket Science Games). Here is a summary of his opinions. What is most interesting is the distinction he makes between large and small. There is no homogeneity between small and large. Small is not a downsized version of large, or a fraction of large. Small and large companies are different entities, different species. And for large companies to create the small company, they must not just downsize, they must mutate.

Blank:
In the start-up building there are no rules, only opinions.
Start-ups are not small versions of large businesses, therefore, there cannot be a business plan.
Business plans explode with the first customer contact.
Start-ups evolve with rapid and nimble experimentation.
The notion of start-ups is really from engineering, not business schools. Business schools are taught by consultants to large businesses. The start-up entrepreneur must escape them, not adapt them.
Large companies are good at innovation only to sustain themselves; it is an elaboration of or improvement on existing products. It is very difficult for them to innovate disruptively. Large companies that have done so successfully have broken their innovative team into small groups and have not allowed them to report to middle management.
Marketing is extremely difficult for start-ups and small companies. Unlike mature companies where the customer knows what he wants and can guide the company, the new market can not be predicted. (e.g. the small dot com companies trying to market on the Super Bowl.)
His three recommended start-up books: Business model Generation by Alex Osterwalder, Lean Start-Up by Eric Reese, and 4 Steps to Epiphany by Steven Blank (Himself)

Seeking Alpha and the New Storage Companies

Mr. John Peterson, the always entertaining and sometimes combative contributor to Seeking Alpha on energy topics, has an interesting post this weekend. He notes that the companies he has picked in the energy storage space have generally had a very poor year. "December 31, 2010, .......18 of the pure-play energy storage device manufacturers had a combined market value of $5.9 billion. At last Friday's close, the 12 survivors had a combined value of $2.4 billion."

The specifics are not particularly interesting (unless you have a horse in the race)---he might have lousy judgment, the specific companies might be swamped by the general market---but there is a jarring generality: Isn't this the area in which we all expect great strides to be made? Isn't this the area that will transform energy usage in the next decades? None of the new ideas--electric transport, wind and solar energy capture, geothermal energy-- make any sense without the ability to store energy with more efficiency than we can manage today. If these new storage companies are not thriving, what does that tell us? Are we not seeing the potential they offer? Or are we seeing the truth? Do these companies actually have little to offer the future?

Sunday Sermon 12/18/11

There was an interest years ago that emphasized when Christ showed emotion in the gospel. The notion was, as God, such a moment must be special. Two of today's readings focus upon essential moments in Christianity, moments of huge importance, but somehow, hand in hand, is intergalactic laughter.

In the first, in the Old Testament, David decides to build a house for God. God says to David's intermediate/prophet Nathan, "I have allowed you to survive the hostilities of the greatest powers of the world, brought disparate people together as a coherent and successful group amidst this hostility and plan to allow you to become the greatest influence on man's history ever and you are going to build a house for me?"

Similarly, Gabriel announces God's plan to Mary and her first response is, "Wait, how is this conception thing going to be done?"

Sometimes a philosophy of wonder breaks out and people theorize "Why, in this universal vastness, did God pick us, these tiny people in this tiny speck in this inconceivable universe?" Every once in a while, God tells us. Entertainment. We are just worth the price of admission.

Cab Thoughts 12/17/11

Life lesson: If you have a "tweety bird" speech defect, do not wear a sweat shirt with a picture of tweety bird on it. In the words of the prophetess (Claudia Black), sometimes "Irony is overrated."

Taxation on corporations started in 1909 and was 1%. It is now 39% and, since it is passed on to consumers, amounts to about a 2400 dollar consumer tax. 75 countries, most of our competitors, have a corporation tax 1/2 of ours.

Health care: 21% of national payroll, 27% of physicians earned degrees outside the country, medicare population was 8% of population in 1990 and is 11% now.

This year the Americans will be net exporters of energy. The Institute for Energy Research predicts that by tapping shale and other sources, the U.S. should be the world's top oil and gas producer by 2020, outpacing Russia and Saudi Arabia. Imagine that. How many jobs that can not be outsourced, how much money flowing back here.

Corzine, whom Biden once called "the smartest guy in the room", does not know where 1.2 billion of his customers' investments are. One thing that is known is that his company bought a lot of Mediterranean euro debt, essentially investing (betting) on government.

There is international debate, especially in Arab countries, about the legality of the U.S. hunting, killing and detaining its enemies all over the globe. The Bush and Obama administrations both claim that terrorism is world wide and essentially endless therefore all of their actions are justifiable. Even El Jazeera is upset at this. But isn't this what they wanted?

The job estimates from Marcellus shale is now 870 thousand jobs.

There have been a number of studies on happiness and money and most recently point to certain conclusions. While money doesn't bring happiness, having an income of greater than $75,000 does take some discomfort out of life; more does not seem to matter. However achievement to get to an increased salary seems to be a real source of happiness.

British joke: "Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?"

India is outsourcing call-centers to the Philippines.

A recent speech I heard on the targets for Angel Investors had three main topics. First, The Third World. This market is growing because its income is growing.American companies with relationships there should do well. Second, Health Care, not in its delivery but in its efficiency. Sooner or later the delivery will decline because we just can not afford it but anything that improves efficiency will sell. Third, energy, particularly in distribution lines or in the exploitation of existing lines. (e.g., there are companies that try to generate power out of the existing valves in water lines.)

Ron Paul and Unfair Nice Treatment

A bit of paranoia has arisen among the Republicans. They claim that Ron Paul has not had any real scrutiny from the press. In particular are some old newsletters put out under his name that have some outrageous stuff--as is there weren't enough already. Some of this is reactive against the surprising blitzkrieg against Herman Cain but there is a motive they see: They think that Paul, if left untouched, will be strong enough and well motivated enough to form a third party, a vote splitter that would protect a weak Obama in 2012.

They usually don't get a fair deal from the press but complaining because you are not attacked is a bit much.

Obama in Kansas #3

There have been many reactions to the unhappiness and failure of men. Of the political, some are abstract and violent like Marxism, some center on withdrawal like the old socialist religious sects, some are interesting but without a format like Wendell Berry or the Distributionists. The Progressives believe the complexity of the world, the concentration of wealth and power that inevitably results from any competitive success, the randomness of economic and political evolution demand that well schooled and disinterested experts guide the culture towards rational and purer ends for the betterment of the nation and the individual. In some respects it is reminiscent of the democratic managed economies of the emerging Eastern nations, but with a broader moral base. Hence the Federal Reserve, Prohibition, Dewey's education system, the United Nations--all perhaps reasonable but ironic, certainly not what one would put in one's portfolio of success. And all quite opposed to the nature of this nation.

So what did Obama say in his speech in Osawatomie?
His opponents feel "we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules," "the free market will take care of everything," "if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty." They want "free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can." This approach "doesn't work. It's never worked....Understand, it isn't as if we haven't tried this thing." And the solutions? "A higher education is the surest route to the middle class," "making wind turbines and semiconductors and high powered batteries." Is there anyone who believes any of this who isn't a polygamist in the hills of Utah? Even libertarians don't believe this. Even Hannity doesn't believe this.

This is where Obama becomes so confusing. Obama is the leader of the country and as I am on the county's side I am on his side. I see him as struggling, trying to make his vision, his word, real. But this is simply nonsense. Nobody believes any of this. This is a war with straw men and caricatures, much goofier--and more shallow--than one expects from him. And if you hear this kind of stuff often enough you begin to wonder about him.

I have no love for the rich. We don't even date. But this terrible insincerity demands honesty in response. There are many contributing factors in our economic problems--cheaper labor competition, short-term economic thinking, unproductive foreign wars, unmanaged entitlements, scandalous financial mismanagement, an aging population--but being rich is not one of them and I can not pick up my torch and pitchfork and follow.

There was another famous--well, less famous--event in Osawatomie. John Brown, the fierce abolitionist, brought a wagon load of weapons to the town to support the anti-slave faction battling the pro-slavery forces in "Bleeding Kansas". Brown eventually led a raid, called a massacre, where several men were killed. John William Reid led a pro-slavery force of 250 men into Osawatomie in response and Brown fought him there until he ran out of ammunition. Several of his sons were killed and the town was burned.

Not everything that happens in Osawatomie is worthwhile.

Siga, Critics and the Government's Idea of Competition

So now the fuss about Siga, the company that has developed an antiviral agent against smallpox, is beginning to die down. The critics have said it was too expensive; now it seems it is less expensive than the other less successful antivirals. The critics said Sterns and Perelman were inappropriately influential with their government friends; now it seems there is no evidence for that. The critics said there was no competition; now it seems there was no competition because none exists. The critics said that there was no need for this drug; now it seems that the incubation period for the virus is 9 to 17 days and, since it is very infective, that means that anyone with an exposure would get the disease and be entirely dependent on antivirals alone.

The opponents of Siga and their drug have taken the astonishing position of being opposed to a smallpox cure, this in a time of homicidal religious maniacs and political philosophers (smallpox was the grim darling of the Russian Biopreparate bio-weapons program). But these guardians of the public money and safety have an option.The government, in order to make the competition fair, has given millions of dollars to a company whose drug does NOT work, this in the hopes that some competition might be developed.

Now, how about some scrutiny of that.

Obama in Kansas #2

Roosevelt was angry that the Republican nominating structure was not standardized and consequently allowed local political bosses to sidestep candidate popularity and chose nominees on their own. His "New Nationalism" was an attempt to control corruption and favoritism, substitute national concerns for local ones, but also tried to recognize the development of expertise in the society and both exploit and control it. So success in business led to inevitable domination but also potential abuse. Government would be the overseer. Government would bring experts and impartiality to economics and legislation, developing what was reasonable for the nation as a whole, leapfrogging petty local concerns. Strangely he did not see this potential for abuse as a risk in government as well. In essence he was reigniting the old, basic argument between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists that Hamilton and Jefferson had played out years before. How strong should the states be, how strong the national government? (Before the Civil War the United States was a pleural noun, only after did one say "The United States is...".) And he injected a new element, the one thing, with enthroned monarchy, that the country was created to avoid: State sponsored religion. Government had, somehow and somewhere, a new mandate, a new moral authority, indeed a moral obligation to create a new morality-based world. Experts, convening together, would know best. Dewey in education, Sanger with eugenics, Prohibition.

Croly in The Promise of American Life wrote that the American vision had been co-opted by entrenched wealth and random development of the economy. "They have been promised on American soil comfort, prosperity, and the opportunity for self-improvement" and these visions are fading. Control of the economic development by experts, not the erratic evolution that cursed both economics and society, would restore the balance.

Roosevelt lost the nomination, ran as a third party "Progressive Party" (The Bull Moose Party--"I'm as fit as a bull moose") and came in second--the only time a third party ran second--to Wilson. Wilson continued with Roosevelt's confidence in the nation, the righteousness of its leadership and the value of expertise in government. The Americans joined the European war, an income tax was introduced, international aggression appeared and prohibition--all the result of confident, righteous people in power.

This is the intellectual history that Obama either calls upon or read about. But this nation is very different from others; contrary to Croly's claim, it does not promise "comfort, prosperity, and the opportunity for self-improvement". It offers "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and hopes "comfort, prosperity, and the opportunity for self-improvement"--as well as much more--follows. This country was created out of the belief in the dignity and value of the individual and the fear of organized government and government sponsored religion. What the Progressive movement saw was inefficiency and the manipulation of inefficiency by unscrupulous people and offered to reorganize the process and institute high level managers to guide the new system.

But the Progressive movement is more than anti-corruption, national over local, expert guidance over random; it is unteachable. It can not learn. No failure discourages it, no disaster makes it question itself. The "best and the brightest" have indeed been tried. Who now could be confident in it or them? Expertise and information is always revered and touted from the classroom to the surgical suite. How reliable are they? What more information and what more expertise can be brought to markets and investment? Why doesn't Long Term Capital Management give any of these people pause?

More to come.

Obama in Kansas

Obama's speech in Kansas last week was so interesting and revealing of us, our history and current American directions in politics that I think it is worth a few comments the next several days.

Mr. Obama spoke at Osawatonie, Kansas several days ago. It was a major, major event as it described and revealed much of Obama's thought process and philosophy. First, it was a political speech; it was so inherently controversial that it could not be considered a presidential speech. Secondly, it was symbolic. The speech in place and content called upon Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism speech. Third, it was strange; honest in that it was revealing of Obama's underlying view of problems suited for government intervention but guarded, raising questions--some with distorted imagery--but never offering solutions, never came to a conclusion. This was not an inherently American speech with musings more in the tradition of European Socialism or the modern Asian managed economies. It without doubt asks for a basic change in how America is governed.

Osawatomie was the site of two major events, the famous one the radical speech Teddy Roosevelt made August 31, 1910. In it he attempted to bring the diverging parts of the Republican party together. (It failed and he started a third party.) Roosevelt's speech was influenced by Croly's "Promise of American Life", also controversial. Croly himself later became a socialist with a labor/farmer coalition bent and then a spiritualist.

Below are two excerpts, one from each. They contain a vision that is foreign to many Americans but the explanation will ring familiar to all. It is that mixture of popular anxiety and organizational confidence that typifies the American Left. These two men offered a new vision of America, a vision that Obama seems to share. Both are revealing and eyeopening, well worth the read.

Roosevelt:
"The American people are right in demanding that new Nationalism without which we cannot hope to deal with new problems. The new Nationalism puts the National need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat National issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over-division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring National activities to a deadlock. This new Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people… . I believe in shaping the ends of government to protect property as well as human welfare. Normally…the ends are the same, but whenever the alternative must be faced I am for men and not for property… ."

Croly: The Promise of American Life:
"They have been promised on American soil comfort, prosperity, and the opportunity for self-improvement; and the lesson of the existing crisis is that such a Promise can never be redeemed by an indiscriminate individual scramble for wealth. The individual competition, even when it starts under fair conditions and rules, results, not only, as it should, in the triumph of the strongest, but in the attempt to perpetuate the victory; and it is this attempt which must be recognized and forestalled in the interest of the American national purpose. The way to realize a purpose is, not to leave it to chance, but to keep it loyally in mind, and adopt means proper to the importance and the difficulty of the task. No voluntary association of individuals, resourceful and disinterested though they be, is competent to assume the responsibility. The problem belongs to the American national democracy, and its solution must be attempted chiefly by means of official national action."

More to come.

Sunday Sermon 12/11/11

The readings today are of groups and individuals.

First is Isiah. Isiah is captured by the spiritual world and has found fulfillment there. There is no need for him to look elsewhere; in his relationship with God he has found freedom and justice, attributes usually thought of in terms of the relationship with an individual and his society. He does not go into the areas described by Paul or Mark later in the readings. He is just fine without inquiry, without defining action. He is Mary to the world's Martha.

Then comes Paul with surprisingly modern advice with an equally surprising conclusion: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.""Prove all things?" Paul, a man of science? A man of rational inquiry? And after your testing, throw out that which is not good? After what is not good is proved true, reject it. So evil is both true and excluded. Is Paul some time-traveler from modern day with scientific questions and a giant moral conclusion? Reject what is true if it is not good? Uncertainty might be true but you cannot live by it. You must build your world with that which is both true and good, a remarkable demand of personal responsibility, power and judgment.

Finally, John the Baptist. Questioned by the emissaries of the Pharisees as to who he is, John answers only in the negative, only who he is not. It must have been a maddening discussion. But John has a point to make. In a world of names, linage, family identification and tribes John wants to be seen as a doer of deeds, a man judged by his actions.

The spiritual, the rational and moral decider, the doer of deeds--all have fulfillment in God, and God accepts each and all of their paths to him.

Cab Thoughts 12/10/11

Medical staff at an Indian hospital abandoned their patients and fled for safety as fire and smoke poured through the building, leaving 73 people dead, many from smoke inhalation.

The EPA has debated regulating "farm dust". Farm dust. The legislature just passed a law preventing them from doing it. One part of the government legislating against the other. Farm dust.

After the Duke Lacrosse lie, I will never believe a story up front, especially sexual allegations. I don't know what to make of this Penn State problem. I do know that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion and many of these institutions do not see that.

English words from dead languages: moniker from Shelta, the language of the Irish Travelers (gypsies); chaparral from Basque; taboo from Tongan; cacique from Taino (West Indies); wampum from Massachusett, a member of the Algonquian language; mantissa from Etruscan; dragoman from Aramaic via Akkadian

The Boston Bruins look very good. I saw them play this week and remember how surprised I was they won the cup. The are absolutely the real thing, big, fast and mean.

UCLA political science professor and economist Tim Groseclose estimates that the pro-liberal mainstream media add 8 to 10 percentage points to the ratings of a Democratic candidate in a typical election. I have no idea how one would measure this but the thought is a worry.

More small business created millionaires were created during the Great Depression than at any other time in history.

Peter Drucker said that marketing and innovation are the only two factors that generate business. Everything else is an expense. He also said innovation refers to anything (technology or otherwise) that brings greater advantage, access, impact, interest, connection, trust, and buying motivation to the customer.

The problem in Europe is not liquidity, it is solvency. The banks need about 3 trillion euros and the countries are connected to these loans. Writing off so much debt in the midst of a recession, coupled with austerity moves, will be massively deflationary for the eurozone. But Merkel sounds as if the Germans will not allow the euro to inflate. This might be ugly. Austerity--deflation, no austerity--inflation.

The Western press has made little out of the explosion in Iran's nuclear development area. Nor has much been said about the Iranian scientists who are being assassinated left and right. There have also been a number of accidents involving them.

Camp Followers of the Political Wars

Small businesses stake out territory all the time. But a new small business has emerged which does more than stake out territory, it creates it out of whole cloth and then exploits it. It is reminiscent of the line about Lacoste shirts, "a club where you can nominate yourself--then vote yourself in." So someone endows a university chair in "environmental international politics" or "transgender studies" and a whole new world of unasked questions emerge which they now dominate by fiat. Charities are terrific for this. One can create your own charity and spend the rest of your life attracting tax-free capital to investigate anything you want, transgender studies included. You can give organizational leadership to your kids. (A Hollywood star asked that his son receive no gifts at his birth but rather requested that donations be made to a newly created charity that he would run when he grew up. His parents could also contribute unlimited money and deduct the capital their son would live on.)

These distortions are probably inevitable in a free and open minded society but the political entrepreneurs are increasingly harder to take. The Left and the Right have become their own propaganda machines that hawk products to reinforce the prejudices of their supporters, aided and abetted by their respective radio and television networks whose programs have become products themselves. FOX is the worst.It has become like a local sports show. Every story is inflammatory, everyone furious to keep the audience's blood (and viewership) up. Every interview has the ulterior motive of some nitch the guest is trying to fill. Every guest has a book and a website. (A radio station owner recently described his audience as "angry white males" with an emphasis on "angry.") There is no objectivity, no compromise, no progress and certainly no solutions to be offered when your audience is specifically characterized as "angry." Everything is designed to feed into this vortex of ever decreasing radius, pointing to the apex of isolation and fury, every step bought and paid for, every step with a book or a button or a shirt available as well.

The difficulty here is that we generally think of politics as debate, give and take, then resolution. But that is not possible when your opinions are a product.

Republicans and the Stockholm Syndrome

A friend of mine recently returned to his old stomping grounds, Washington, D.C.. He had worked there as a Nixon White House staffer under Haldeman (before the Watergate event) and had left really because he missed home. (He was only a few years out of college when he was there.) Over the last several years many of the old White House staffers started to have reunions and he went back this year to see them all. Some he knew well but many were on a higher level and he knew them only in passing. It was fun as reunions are and there was a lot of political talk with the success the Republicans had in 2010 and the coming election next year. During one of the formal discussions he raised his hand and spoke from the floor about the Tea Party. It was serendipitous that they had arisen coincident with this debate over how government worked, important, he thought, with the need for organization in the coming election. The dais could not have been more scornful. "We have to teach them how we do business here," one said to the agreement of all.

Unlike my friend, they had never left. They had never returned to the real, working world. They had stayed in some capacity, in office, out of office, living that isolated and self-contained political life that the rest of the country has begun to disdain. And they have been so inured, they do not know it.

Coal, Gas and Hot Air

While on the topic of inexplicable influences on the culture and society we can not overlook the strange open-mindedness we have for totally discredited people and opinions. These are especially common in science which the public cannot seem to understand despite all the information conceivable. The overwhelming difficulty seems to be in understanding the limits of studies, how evaluations cannot be perfect and how conclusions are often only extrapolations, not decisions. So otherwise reasonable people deprive their children of vaccines on the advice of an exposed scoundrel.

The debate over gas exploration supplies another example.
"Natural gas has been widely touted as a clean energy source that will help the U.S. transition to renewable energy options while lowering greenhouse gas emissions relative to other fossil fuels. While it is true that end-use combustion of natural gas emits markedly less carbon dioxide (CO2) than other fossil energy sources, methane (CH4) losses during modern gas exploration and development, as well as processing, transmission and distribution may fully negate these CO2 savings. A full accounting of modern gas development indicates that natural gas may actually exacerbate, rather than mitigate, global climate change." This is an overview of a paper by Professors Howarth and Ingraffea that analyze and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of coal versus gas energy. But six recent studies have criticized this paper and have dismissed it: Carnegie Mellon University study financed by the Sierra Club, the WorldWatch Institute study, the National Energy Technology Laboratory Study, the University of Maryland, other researchers at Cornell University itself, and CERA. Yet despite these papers Howarth continues to be quoted and lionized, recently by Robert Kennedy, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Chesapeake Bay Journal.


Everyone has an agenda, everyone their own ax to grind. No one wants to surrender any ground. This type of behavior is a hallmark of non-science. Science is where truth is the only agenda. But in non-science opinions will lurk forever in the background, like vampires, long after they are dead and buried.

Dead Souls, Dead Minds

In Czarist Russia, one of the taxes applied to estates was a head tax on the number of serfs on the estate. This number was determined by a census and periodically was revised depending upon the addition or subtraction of the number of serfs over time. But the census was infrequent so if a serf died, the estate still had to pay for him until the census eventually corrected the numbers. Enter Chichikov, the main character of Gogol's novel "Dead Souls."

Chichikov, a delightful con man, has a plan. He goes to the owners of the estates and offers to buy their dead serfs. He says he will pay the taxes on them. He then plans to go to the bank with his list of serfs, borrow money from the bank using the serfs as collateral to buy a farm.

Is this first cap-and-trade?

Gingrich, Bork and Manning the Backroom Barricades

Gingrich is just another politician. What puts me off about him is his practiced sincerity. But Barney Frank's accusation of his being responsible for the acrimony in Washington because of his combativeness with the Clinton administration really deserves a lot of assessment and criticism.

Much of the integrity in politics has the sincerity of a television preacher or the World Wrestling Federation. Entertainment and survival trumps philosophy. Lingering in the background of all these political moments is the suspicion that none of these people are very good at leadership and legislation but are very good at politics and the intricacies of government. One wonders if they all were displaced for new blood what would happen. Would all the office staffs be retained because no one can do without them? Would the new people even know how to get anything done, even know who to call?

So the machinery of Washington seems a mixture of hardwired mechanics and the sorcerer's apprentice. Political philosophy from any of these people seems a bit much to ask. And such demands may be inappropriate for politics. Churchill himself was not a particularly consistent politician but he was a focused and consistent leader regardless of the times. Lincoln, a truly great man in my eyes, has been criticized for his slowness in freeing the slaves as weak and uncommitted when I believe he was demanding sequentially only what the country could bear.

The rancor in Washington certainly was evident with Gingrich's success in 1994 but I wonder at its source; the Democrats had always had their way and I doubt the change was easy for them. But anyone who thinks that the struggles of that administration initiated rancor in Washington is not remembering the single seminal moment of domestic politics in my lifetime, the domestic counterpart of the foreign adventure in Viet Nam, a moment that made me reassess the entire American political process. Bork.

Robert Bork graduated Phi Beta Kappa in law, was a U.S. Marine, became a lawyer and eventually specialized in anti-trust where he developed a unique notion that emphasized maximizing consumer welfare which, over time, became the dominate thinking in antitrust matters in America. He became Solicitor General and, during the "Saturday Night Massacre," when Nixon tried to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox for trying to examine the Oval Office tapes of president conversations, U.S. Attorney Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelhaus both resigned in protest and Bork became Acting Attorney General. He planned to resign as well but Richardson and Ruckelshaus persuaded him to stay on to maintain the Justice Department's continuity and Bork fired Cox. He then became a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. There he developed a reputation as a constitutional scholar in his efforts to deal with the judicial problem of making law without popular approval advocating "originalism", guiding decisions based on the understanding of the framers' original understanding of the U.S. Constitution. Bork said, "The truth is that a judge who looks outside the Constitution always looks inside himself and nowhere else." He built on the Alexander Bickel's influential critiques of the Warren Court for poor reasoning, activism and misuse of historical materials. Bork said, "We are increasingly governed not by law or elected representatives but by an unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable committee of lawyers applying no will but their own." His reputation grew and, before long, he was the most highly regarded judge in the American judiciary. In 1987 Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court.

No one who knew anything about Bork or law felt that he was anything but a significant legal scholar of the highest integrity. One may not agree with him but everyone recognized that he was eminently qualified to be on the Supreme Court, perhaps more than all but a few past judges. But quality was and would not be the point. Bork did not follow the current in Washington and would be challenged, not by reason or argument but by a monumental smear campaign, aided and abetted by the press. The leader of this unconscionable attack on this distinguished man amazingly was one of politics most disreputable characters, Sen. Edward Kennedy, a man devoid of redeeming values. In a speech that will be remembered as a nadir of political behavior he cried " Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy ... President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice." So a private citizen, respected and accomplished, is savagely attacked by his own government representatives.

The Senate did not rise above this mockery. Bork was voted down and his name became a word used to describe vicious and ad hominid attacks with the help of the media to destroy the reputation of an individual and eliminate him from political contention. This event had more of an impact than any other political incident in the 1980's and the image of politicians and Washington has been irrevocably stained in many minds since. The ersatz attack on Clarence Thomas later--no less inspired but peculiar and creepy--tried to be the 1990's equivalent of political disillusion but was easily displaced by the Clinton circus later in the decade.

Gingrich is no innocent but he is innocent of this.

Sunday Sermon 12/4/11

Today's gospel is the first entry in the gospel of Mark which opens "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." Mark was the friend and companion of St. Peter and wrote what Peter had seen and experienced. He was a contemporary of Peter and Christ. As to Christ's nature, Mark has no ambivalence at all.

In today's readings several ideas are juxtaposed. Most prominent is the mind-bending concept that God's eye sees a day in a thousand years, a thousand years in a day. But then we see the image of building roads to smooth the way for the coming of God. And John the Baptist is seen as a path-maker for Christ. Both are images of man in a world of sequence, man as a creature of time.

But there is another sequence, the key one. The Baptist is described as one bring baptism to those with penance, for those with sorrow for their sins. That is the prerequisite, the first of the sequence. The human step. The next step, the step in the sequence that John can not supply, will follow with the appearance of Christ. That part of the sequence is forgiveness.

So God, a Being outside time, enters the the sequence and confines of time to offer forgiveness for those who repent their sins.

Cab thoughts 12/3/11

I was looking for a house based telephone system off a land-line and a salesman told me to shop around, that such sales were rare and I could get a good price somewhere. No one is buying land-line phones.

Benjamin Franklin had a rule of conversation I have never heard: He would never, NEVER, start a topic of conversation. He would only follow the topic. It sounds like good advice. I certainly could learn from it.

Why does the literature on competition always tell us that we should redistribute capital gains or inheritances and never tell us that we should redistribute academic chairs or book contracts?

A serious rumor from Yannick Noah on tennis. Are we really to believe that all of a sudden from nowhere 3 or 4 tennis players from Spain are now the best in the world, some of the strongest players in the field and impervious to pain, fatigue and injury? He suggests Hans Selye would be proud.

More than 14 million mortgages are "underwater" in America, meaning the mortgage debt exceeds the value of the property mortgaged.

Barney Frank has decided not to run for reelection. This is a real surprise. Powerful arrogant people rarely give up their source of power and arrogance.

I care little about Cain but it is astonishing how locked in step the various sides are over the information of the sexual behavior of a candidate. It is as if a candidate's sexual behavior had a known correlation with his success as a leader. (Psychological Homogeneity!!) Cain has had several anonymous complaints that one could take as rude, perhaps, or boorish. His announcement of his retaining a lawyer to sue the women drove them underground. Then the affair/girl friend arose, although not much of a friend and, if this is an indicator of his judgment of people, it might disqualify him from any leadership position by itself. The Dems are wild with indignation, the Repubs. cautious and forgiving. But Clinton, whose girls showed up with tape recorders and one with a witness--she with a complaint that was a felony, A FELONY!--the Dems. are cautious and forgiving, the Repubs. wild with indignation.

Psychological Homogeneity and Statutes of Limitations

More on psychological homogeneity:

One of the problems that psychological homogeneity presents is the validity of the message from a flawed messenger. This is a deeper question than the validity of advice from people accidentally or coincidentally placed in the public eye, like the political advice of a baseball pitcher or the economic advice of a sociologist--although politics tends to create these questions too. But a democracy often has to evaluate opinions of people thrust upon it less by chance than by malice and its resulting notoriety. Somehow the opinions of terrible people get to be taken seriously by the society.

Do we need to know Ted Kaczynski's opinions on industry and the environment? After anonymously bombing strangers' homes, maiming and killing randomly, does one get to continue on commenting in a sphere only peripherally related to one's felonies? After all, Nietzsche had syphilis and we take his musings seriously. Or should we declare a kind of statute of limitation on public utterances. Perhaps you should be able to offer opinions seven years after a felony and seven years before a diagnosis of mental disease.

The source of the Sally Heming's story was James Callender. Callender was an alcoholic Scot. He was driven from England after writing an attack on George III. In America he wrote anti-Federalist attacks on Hamilton (perhaps at the behest of Jefferson). He wrote that John Adams was a British spy and that Washington personally robbed the army treasury. One of his famous attacks was that John Adams imported two mistresses from Europe, one French and one German, but returned the German. (Adams said he was flattered but it was believed an angry German vote cost Adams the Pennsylvania vote in his first election.) He died bankrupt.

William S. Burroughs was one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation, the other two being his friends Kerouac and Ginsberg. He came from a productive family and had a small trust fund. In New York he became interested in the local demimonde and drugs. Soon he was dealing drugs and living with the city's thieves and drug dealers. Herbert Huncke was one of these worthies who was a thief, drug user and murderer, killing a shopkeeper with Burroughs' gun. Lucien Carr whose son, Caleb Carr, wrote "The Alienist" fled to their house after stabbing his tutor and stalker David Kammerer to death. He married Joan Vollmer and the two, birthed from this lovely environment, went on the road to explore cheaper places to live, take and sell drugs and enjoy the trust fund. While in Mexico he shot her in the head. (There is debate over the circumstances as if they mattered.) His major work," Naked Lunch," was published as a result of the anti-censorship cases of Joyce' "Ulysses". One might wonder how in God's name Burroughs could be mentioned in the same paragraph as James Joyce or could be seen as anything but a criminal. But one need only read one of his literary creations : "If civilized countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with the blood of human sacrifice, let them see what they actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon." Heavy.

Lost Money is...Lost Money

As the oxymoronic Super-committee declined to come to grips with the plan to cut 1.3 trillion dollars in spending the next ten years, the next day the American stock market declined in response. A look at the Russell 3000, a collection of 3000 American companies, showed that the collected loss among these companies that day was 4 trillion dollars in value. 4 TRILLION DOLLARS. So the 1.3 trillion dollars in cuts was too much for the nation to tolerate, 4 trillion dollars in losses resulted which the nation presumably will just shrug off.

The ripple effect in the economy that government can generate, in this instance by NOT doing something, is impressive.

Strangely many think that inaction by the government is desirable with the logic that "at least they're not harming anything" but that is clearly simplistic.

Just because the lever is defective does not mean you can ignore the quality of the man with his hand on it.

Dogs, Parking Meters and the Rule of Law

There is a neighborhood area where the locals take their dogs to run with each other. It is a sizable park, not fenced but well away from pedestrian traffic, sometimes frequented by sunbathers in the early day. The dog people always come at dusk when they are off work, the dogs have been indoors all day and there are no people around. It has become an interesting little social subset, people of all ages, stripes and backgrounds joined by their care and love for dogs. The group is self selecting; the aggressive dogs, the less disciplined dogs, the dogs that run away are not brought to the park. The owners sit, some bring light folding chairs you see at high school ball games, and socialize while the dogs play. On Fridays people bring hor d'oeuvres and share some wine.

The city, like most, has a leash law. Any dog without a leash draws a 30 dollar ticket for its owner. It is a reasonable law. Dogs loose in the street can be a problem. Here in the dog park the dogs run in a controlled area without risk to themselves or others. But they are off their leashes.

Recently, drawn by the smell of potential fines, the police have moved in. They have actually begun to stake out the dog park and have started ticketing any owners there. Taking a law aimed at safety and quality of life in the city they have enforced the letter of the law to the detriment of both. Like parking meters which used to encourage the availability of parking spaces for businesses and now discourage parking at all, the leash law has become predatory. Initially the owners reacted by assigning lookouts, like pickets at a military camp, but gradually the group wore down. Now no one goes to the dog park.

Immigration and Our Failures

The integrity of the borders is likely to be a debated point this election. With 11 million illegal immigrants looking for work, subsidies and health care and an unknown number with bloody murder on their minds it should be. Bachman recently espoused a search-and-export plan for every single illegal, reminiscent of the ancient repatriation movement after the Civil War. Gingrich recently suggested a moratorium on illegals who have been here for 25 years. The suggestions will attract fire but do suggest a more significant question: How can a nation deal with a problem of this magnitude sensibly?

The American Mexican border is 1954 miles long and covers huge deserts, two major rivers, fierce heat and rugged hills. Twenty thousand border agents are spread along the border to enforce the country's immigration policy. Yet it is estimated that about one half million illegal immigrants cross the border every year. So far one suggestion taken seriously has been to build a fence along the border to contain the movement. While this effort has come a cropper the problem is no less serious. How can a border be defended?

There are some precedents. The Berlin Wall encompassed all of West Berlin for a distance of 91 miles and then also separated West Berlin from East Berlin for an additional 27 miles. There are some successful modern borders, North and South Korea, Israel and Everyone Else. These borders, however, have a characteristic in common: The willingness to kill the violator. The image of immigration units trapping and firing on drug dealers is one thing, trapping and killing families of illegals quite another. I do not mean to say that the failure of the nation to defend itself is a failure of will, like the horrid "Camp of the Saints", but there is a human and humane question here that complicates simple efficiency. Think of a military medical officer faced with a wounded enemy.

Illegal immigration is a journey, an illegal one, but a journey. It has a beginning, a trip and a destination. Unlike a vacation, the destination in immigration--legal or illegal--is more than geographic, it entails reward. At the end of the traveler's rainbow there is work, medical care, Walmart. We cannot influence the nature of the country the immigrant leaves and we clearly cannot efficiently interrupt the journey. But we can influence the rewards of coming to the U.S. illegally. First, any employer who hires non-citizens should be fined and jailed. This will be awkward as there is an industry of falsification of documents but we can manage it. Secondly, there should be no benefits for illegal immigrants, no health care and no schools. The notion that we cannot ask for identification because someone saw a bad World War II movie with "Papers, please" in it is absurd. And it is against the law to ask for identification in school applications.

That might be "Camp of the Saints."

Compartments and Psychological Homogeneity

A new phrase has emerged in contemporary conversation: compartmentalizing. It allows for the use of sets in thinking that may not overlap, that may be contradictory. It allows for a freedom in evaluation where someone might approach a new problem unencumbered by previous experience or decision. What used to be called inconsistent or cynical is now compartmentalizing.

I'm sure it has been around for a long time but I first noticed it with President Clinton who was excused his social behavior with this notion. The idea was that he was a competent leader, had been creative in managing the economy and his personal behavior was "something different", something to be examined by means other than were applied to the real reason he was there. This is more forgiving than the old utilitarian excuse that "at least he made the trains run on time."

In essence, this means that we are all watered by several different streams and we have different qualities with different growth and speed. So Michael Corleone can be a stone cold killer but a loving family man, Ted Bundy the Prince of Darkness to a young woman but a kind and interested conversationalist. It is in distinction to the "seed" notion of life--"psychological homogeneity"--which sees an individual as a whole, not as a crazy quilt of various and competing inclinations that break through to the surface at one time or another and under certain circumstances. And it feeds a modern need: We do not want to generalize, we do not want to judge.

There are times we should yield to the wisdom in the New Testament: By their fruits you will know them. Michael Corleone was a stone cold killer with a few exceptions; Bundy was The Prince of Darkness, but chatty. Both of these men may have something to say to us, just not much.

Sunday Sermon 11/27/11

Today was the first day of the new Mass and aside from "consubstantial" in the Creed was not very noteworthy. The music seemed particularly bad but that might have been regional. The gospel was another of the "prepare yourself while the master is away" gospels, not the exciting ones that inspired the book series of the vanishing spouses and workmen, "Left Behind," but the gentle reminder without the foolish virgins or unproductive servants. It does, however, have an unsettling line. The returning master is likened to "a man traveling abroad."

This is an extremely upsetting simile and I'll bet anything Christ delivered it with a smile. The notion of a traveling God, visiting the universe where man is not, invokes a shiver. What would he be doing? Sightseeing? Vacationing? Where would God go? Neptune? Alpha Centauri? What about us?

The Enlightenment, the reliance on reason, created tremendous problems for religion. Regardless of the various times and philosophies, religion relies on faith. The unreasonable, the miraculous, the the very essence of the unknowable was anathema to the Enlightenment and eventually this strictness created a reaction with a new reliance on the individual and the value of his own feelings, Romanticism. A quasi-enlightenment bridge for religion in this time was Deism. Deism was the belief in a God who created existence but did not interfere in life. The classic image was the Watchmaker, used by William Paley. (Paley asks himself what would he think if, while walking in a field, he came upon a stone? Not too much. But if he came upon a watch! What would that complexity imply!) God, as the Watchmaker, made this complex world but did not interfere with it. Once created, the watch ran on its own.

One can see this would be a highly satisfying analogy. Not only could a reasonable man look at the complexity of life and see the logic behind this complex Creator, he could rationalize why he need not hold God responsible when things went wrong. This analogy continues to this day in various guises, most recently in the Intelligent Design movement which argues the cellular information-based genetic system is a modern example of the computer oriented Watchmaker. So each age builds it own mirror.

The "traveling" master is anything but. We are his agents. Where we are, He is.

Cab Thoughts 11/26/11

The word "pharaoh" means "great house". I think it is literal, not meaning "family." Interesting that power is seen in a dwelling, like "White House."

So Michele Bachman shows up on the Jimmy Fallon Show and the band plays the song "Lyin' Ass Bitch" by Fishbone as she walks out. Now this is a comedy show and Bachman should expect the worst but the worst should not include gross disrespect. That the people on the show thought the joke was worth the disrespect--that is a real problem in the culture.

Barry Eisler, a thriller writer, turned down $500,000 to sign with St. Martin's publishing house and has signed with Amazon. This, if it continues, will be a major change in publishing and a blow to the publishers. Imagine Amazon just sending books to electronic readers without a stop at the publishing house. Huge. HUGE! I'm no longer a book collector, I collect antiques.

The Iowa caucus is in 6 weeks and the Republicans still look like the seven dwarfs. Ron Paul has tapped a hardcore angry crowd who will not give up. Gingrich looks to be a reasonable default candidate but he would be symbolic. He cannot win.

Women just hate Gingrich. He got tarred with the divorce papers somehow. The wife initiated the divorce and he brought some stuff to sign while she was in the hospital. The Dems just did a great job in smearing him. (The woman is still alive.) Gingrich is an intelligent guy with diffuse opinions that are not locked in to any passion (a negative with Republicans) but his real defect is that he loves power.

China is 20% of the world's population but the largest energy consumer in the world. Over 50% of the coal consumed is in China.
It is also currently building an incredible 27 nuclear plants.

Amy Chua, her family being my new poster child for the need for redistribution of personal wealth and talent replacing Gwyneth Paltrow, says that richest one percent of the people in the world have the wealth equivalent to 57% of the poor of the world. Wanna bet where those people live?

Is it true that Gingrich is a Catholic convert?

Yesterday was the anniversary of the sinking of The White Ship: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/White+Ship

JFK: The Movie and the Problem

The Thanksgiving holiday, one of the best holidays and certainly the best secular one, has been spoiled for everyone who was awake and thinking in the mid 60's by the assassination of Jack Kennedy. That promising shift from the generation of Eisenhower to its sons, to youth and its potential, to the charismatic and the virile was just stopped cold by Oswald in Dallas. We defaulted back to the older, ponderous Lyndon Johnson, a true guardian of the Old Guard. That loss--of youth, of hope, of promise, of beauty--has never been overcome and we are reminded of it every Thanksgiving. One only wonders how much of the unrest in the 60's and 70's was a result.

An aspect of the assassination that has dogged its shadow has been the shameless exploitation of the atrocity by writers, politicians and artists. This exploitation, which has become almost a cult, believes--or says it believes--that the assassination was a conspiracy of a number of men, groups or organizations. Every aspect of the event has been picked over, every inconsistency of life magnified, every possibility made a probability. The result is that the event, right before many of our eyes, has been completely recreated and, like an alternative universe, continues without interference with its own laws, experts and history. It is very like those academic musings run wild. "If, instead, you assume that history and archeology was 300 years wrong--or falsified--and Moses was actually alive in the court of Akhenaton...." "If, instead, you assume there is a unexplained and unexplainable driving force in history..." "If, instead, you assume that everyone is possessed at birth by sexual urges towards their immediate family...." It is another victory of the Art of the Plausible.

This is nowhere more revolting than is seen in the movie "JFK" where a seemingly respectable director rewrites the assassination story according to a man whose grasp on the event is dangerously close to psychosis. Oliver Stone writes a story of the assassination through the eyes and the belief set of James Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who had arrested, charged, indicted and tried a local community figure, Clay Shaw, for involvement in the Kennedy murder. Shaw's arrest was virtually random. There was no evidence against him other than the word of a psychiatric patient who failed a lie detector test and refused to testify. How an American citizen could come under such unreasonable, whimsical charges has never been explained. But Garrison persisted and then Stone followed up after the laughable trial (where the jury took longer to find their seats than to find "not guilty") with a movie inexplicably presenting the Garrison thesis as within the same time zone as reason. Of course, all the facts of the assassination were changed to implicate the innocent, the shooting presented was almost a complete fiction and this all was delivered by Kevin Costner, a credible actor, with certainty and outrage. Anyone who knew anything about the assassination walked from the theater with their collective heads spinning. But many with less of a good grasp left alarmed and resentful. This constant barrage of misinformation has done a lot to undermine this country's credibility and value in the minds of its people who, after all, own and run it.

There are two bad lessons here. The first is there are people and industries in the world who, even in those cultures with the highest of ideals, will do anything, say anything, publish anything to make a buck. If possible they will take the Plausible-made-Art and create an industry of it with historians, academics, and franchises. The second is that they often hide their entrepreneurship in the gowns of Art. How many of our greatest artists have questioned the reliability of memory, the interaction of history and art--even to the point of their blending? So Stone calls Julian Barnes and Cormac McCarthy as witnesses for his defense.

Stone is more Goebbels than John Huston here. He is everything that is wrong with businessmen gone rogue. His product is harmful to the society, toxic to the young and delivered without an ounce of social conscience. The real story about Garrison is how is it possible that Clay Shaw could be treated like a Kafka character in the United States. Another would be a clarifying and cleansing explanation of all the facts and evidence that has been gathered over the years about the murder. This might set the country at ease. But there's probably not much money, or return on arrogance, in this. Instead why not take advantage of the distressed and confused citizens, contribute to their malaise and cash in.

In 1976 the U.S. House of representatives created a commission, The House Select Commission on Assassinations, to investigate all the evidence in the murder again. This time they applied all the newer technologies available as well. Aside from the single and erroneous "fourth bullet thesis" not a single new conclusion was reached. Instead this august deliberative body concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy--but they believed one existed anyway.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a tricky word. It means gratitude but it implies more than something to be grateful for, it implies something to be grateful to.

In the fall of 1621 the Plymouth settlers had a celebratory meal with a local Indian tribe as part of a traditional English harvest festival. There are two accounts; no mention is made of a Day of Thanksgiving but they were probably happy; since their arrival they had a 50% mortality. It lasted three days. A Day of Thanksgiving, a day the English would have considered religious, was first held in the new land in 1623 following a needed rainfall. Various days of thanksgiving were celebrated by the country over the years, the first in commemoration of the end of the Revolution by Washington. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln formally made Thanksgiving an annual event.

It is interesting to see these two men, Washington suspicious of organized religion and Lincoln harder to read, celebrating an official Thanksgiving, but both seem heartfelt, Lincoln's surprisingly so. Washington's is almost a mirror of the mindset of the time. The two proclamations are below.

The Thanksgiving Proclamation
New York, 3 October 1789

By the President of the United States of America: a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor--and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me `to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.'

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be -- That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks -- for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation--for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed--for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted -- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions--to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually -- to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed--to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn [sic] kindness onto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord -- To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease [sic] of science among them and us -- and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

George Washington

Proclamation Establishing Thanksgiving Day October 3, 1863

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence [sic], have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.

Abraham Lincoln

A Bigger View of the Elephant

In a country where the main political debate centers on 1% of the population, an overall view of the country and the world might seem too much to digest. After all, don't we have our hands full with this 1% argument?

The following contains a number of snippets from the Simon Hunt November/December Economic Report made available by the Mauldin Report. It contains some nice observations about the world economy, its direction and some predictions. Some are quite shocking, like the vulnerability of the Chinese economy and the low likelihood of inflation. There is also the suggestion, not included, that businesses will try to move closer to their homes to manage costs better. As always there is a buyer for every seller, a seller for every buyer and, in general, at least two sides of any argument. These guys may be completely wrong, or half wrong. But it is a concise presentation (perhaps ineptly summarized) and worth the consideration.



The monetary assumption that what was appropriate for Germany in the EU would be appropriate for all of the other members. Herein lay the fault lines. The weak members were able to get a German credit rating which meant that they could borrow to consume goods and finance industry and infrastructure that otherwise would not have been possible. Banks, too, were happy to lend to the governments of these countries because they could take the loans to the ECB and use them as collateral for even more borrowing. A credit frenzy followed which has resulted in today's debt crisis.

The world will suffer from rolling recessions starting either next year or in 2013 lasting to about 2018. Global industrial production should fall by an average of 0.25% a year during this period.
• By then the process of deleveraging should have run its course. The world beyond 2018 will be a different place. World industrial production should average around 3% a year to 2030 compared with an average of 3.3% in the period 1990-2010. Monetary policy will also be quite different; global money supply will match global GDP, not the massive increase experienced since 2008.
• Asset inflation will be virtually non-existent

Each of the three principal pillars of the world economy, the USA, Europe and China, has their own problems, but they boil down to two simple ingredients: debt and demographics
The choice before Germany is then simple but harsh. Either to throw caution to the winds and hope that by printing money the Euro Zone can be saved and stability created or to accept the painful truth that "the Euro is an incoherent nonsense which, in its current form, is doing far more harm than good", as Liam Halligan wrote on Sunday.

The financial fate of Europe's banks and its governments are inextricably linked: because the banks are the primary source of funding for government deficits, government debt represents a large proportion of the asset base of most eurozone banks. Insolvency of one therefore threatens the insolvency of the other
In the end, the only way out is to increase saving." This is part of the process of deleveraging which is likely to take until around 2018 to run its course. These years will be characterized by rolling recessions and deflating asset prices interspaced by short periods of recovery.

Debt is bad for growth. "In the end, the only way out is to increase saving." This is part of the process of deleveraging which is likely to take until around 2018 to run its course. These years will be characterized by rolling recessions and deflating asset prices inter-spaced by short periods of recovery. So, as public debt rises and populations age, growth will fall. As growth falls, debt rises even more, reinforcing the downward impact on an already low growth rate.

"Aging will cause growth in household financial wealth to slow by more than two-thirds across countries we studied (USA, Japan, and W Europe), from 4.5% historically to 1.2% going forward. The slowing growth will cause the level of household financial wealth in 2024 to fall some 36% or by $31 trillion, below what it would have been had the higher historical growth rates persisted."

A surprising development is that the demographic profile of the USA is so much better than that of China. Once the USA puts its financial house in better order, which it will if not willingly, its growth expectations will be better than China's. As we say in Yorkshire, "Think on". For China, based on simple fundamentals, growth has peaked.

Bon Mots and Good Men

"Somebody said he's a stupid man's idea of what a smart man sounds like."

This effort of a man in search of a bon mot is that of Paul Krugman speaking about Newt Gingrich. It is brilliant in many ways. First it is innocent; "someone"--that is "someone else, not me"--said...and I am not responsible for the arrogant, complex slur but you can spread it if you like. Second, it diminishes Gingrich (who could use some diminishing) indirectly; he is not being called stupid, only attractive to stupid people. Third, it diminishes his supporters, who clearly are not going to make a competent decision in the voting booth, and raises the question in the minds of anyone who finds Gingrich attractive of their willingness to be stupid by association.

As the Republicans search for a candidate, the media treats it like "wack-a-mole"; anyone who rises as a frontrunner draws their fire. Bachman, who sounds like an interesting woman, is attacked and is gone. Cain's accusers are nowhere to be found after a evanescent life of a mayfly. Paul is a constant crank. Romney, alone, seems not worth their time.

This cruel behavior is not limited to a party but it is limiting to the democracy. Some hard decisions are coming down the road at us and will be made by either us or circumstances. I hope we would do a better job than circumstances. But arrogance and soundbites are not a fertile field for solutions. The Supercommittee microcosm should be an alarming wake-up call for anyone who has continued sanguine about our political process. Crisis management should be a last resort, not a routine policy.

Obama and his supporters have had some opportunity here and the results are not stellar. At least a consideration of some alternative ideas seems reasonable.

But the Hatfields and the McCoys never look to the future.

The Sense of an Ending: A Review

"I hate the way the British have of not being serious about being serious," says Adrian, a young man in Julian Barnes' Man Booker Prize winning novel "The Sense of an Ending." Barnes takes his character's criticism to heart and writes a serious story about time, history, memory and life. It is structured as an older man's reflections on his life with many quotable observations and a mystery.

The narrator is Tony, a comfortable retiree who has lived an unchallenged life of few successes and well tolerated failures. We first meet him in prep school with two friends and a newcomer, Adrian, who seems to the narrator as a cut above. They adolescently theorize and debate among themselves and with teachers about history ("History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation") and Camus' musings on suicide and the assessed life. The friends separate, go to college, Tony has a restrained affair with Veronica and meets her family then breaks up with her. She takes up with Adrian who commits suicide. Eventually Tony marries Margaret (a woman with "clean edges"), they have a daughter, and the two eventually amicably divorce. Tony retires. Tony learns that Victoria's mother has died and has inexplicably left him money and Adrian's diary. Victoria, in possession of the diary, refuses to release it to him. The second half of the book concerns Tony's efforts to explain this strange bequest and Victoria's position.

The search for answers calls into question all of Tony's life, the events he experienced, his motives and the accuracy of his memories. "When we are young we invent different futures for ourselves, when we are old we invent different pasts for others." What evolves is a coming of age story in retrospect, a counterpoint to what has been revealed before.
In one of Tony's earlier observations he says adolescence was a "holding pen" from which he would be released into the adult life of "passion and change, ecstasy and despair." This never happens for him. He never matures into that intensity. Responsibility becomes safety, maturity cowardice.

Lack of desire, the failure to engage life does not make for a good protagonist and this short, well written story suffers from it. But this story is full of wisdom, not the least is history "isn't the lies of the victors..it's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated."