Why I hate artists

Roman's roamin' days appear over:

ZURICH, Switzerland (CNN) -- Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar and Martin Scorsese have "demanded the immediate release" of fellow filmmaker Roman Polanski, who was arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. arrest warrant related to a 1977 child sex charge...

"It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him," said the petition, backed by France's Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers).

"The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance ... opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects," said the signatories, who also included actresses Monica Bellucci and Tilda Swinton and directors David Lynch, Jonathan Demme, John Landis, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Wim Wenders*.

Watching the Vikings clip a few times was therapeutic, but I wonder if it will ever live up to the pure joy of watching pompous, self-absorbed artists whine that them giving prizes to one another is so important that child rapists should enjoy immunity from arrest in transit to and from. Cultural events are deemed rather like Old Testament cities of refuge, except that they magically appear wherever 2 or 3 are gathered in the name of art and that all roads leading to them are part of them, an international spider's web of exculpation.

There are a lot of good arguments for letting the whole thing go. The "child" involved is today older than I am and I'm a grandfather. The Polanski is a septuagenarian**. And he's in Europe; if they want our drug-dealing child rapists, more power to them. The only reason I can see*** for not dropping the charges completely is to keep Polanski safely out of the US; so long as he's afraid to step upon our soil, we are a most fortunate nation. On the other hand, the arguments that art (and by extension, artists) is so important that the rules the rest of must live by they may ignore - that one simply won't fly.

Artists are one group of people who constantly call for more government with more money and more power to run the lives of everyone else - if they weren't, Obama wouldn't bother with offers to rent them by the hour. But I wonder if there is a group who whines so loudly when one of their own falls into the very web they work so hard to create.

* No, I have never heard of most of these people. Since they are named among the hundred or so luminaries who attached their name to this petition, I assume they are the most internationally famous or something.

** Yes, I am generally in favor of letting old people alone, simply because they are old.

*** There is of course the argument that the integrity of the sentencing process absolutely demands international pursuit of Polanski for three decades so he can serve a couple weeks in prison. But I hardly think that's a serious argument for anyone other than those for whom locking famous people away is a good first step toward political office.

Dungeon Siege = pwn3d

Mechanical goblins and all.

Sorry, Terrymum

I saw one commenter on a Vikings story who said that this was proof that T-Jack should be the QB, because with him at the helm, the Vikings would never have been in this position to start with.

I know zombies are slow, but wait up a second...

Rotten Tomatoes has picked the "Worst 25 Movies of the Decade" and I'm happy to note that just from glancing at the pictures above, the only person or scene I even recognize is Larry the Cable Guy in 10th place. And I didn't see his movie, I just saw commercials for it.

But to be honest, I'm amazed that The Punisher (2004) doesn't appear to be on the list. That movie sucked*. The suckage of The Punisher was so epic that seventeen actors and extras, the best boy, and the key grip all changed their names so as to no longer appear in the credits. It sucked so hard I was cheered by it, for it placed into bold relief the sheer number of two-hour segments of my life I have salvaged by missing all** of John Travolta's other movies. Even so, one can only take so much of that kind of joy. It's an hour, tops.

But I really do think the list came out too early - I mean, what the hell kind of a decade ends 5 months before a really conveniently round number, anyway? The decade's not over***. Zombieland is coming out, and looks like it has a really, really good shot at making the list.

And I'm gonna see that one.

* Well, the first half sucked. I have no idea about the second.

** Except Grease. Don't tell anyone.

*** Nothing is over until we decide it is.

They forgot to say "The Islamic Shock"

UPDATE:

"The recording and distribution of the class activity were unauthorized," wrote Christopher M. Manno, superintendent of Burlington Township School District, in a statement to parents.

Well, ok then. Never mind, I guess.

Weird stuff comes from Kansas

I have a brother who is always quick to remind me that weird stuff comes from Kansas. And it's not just Spanish Lady Flu or fat chix whose buttocks have melded to their toilets seats, either. In these few short words, the Kansas Supreme Court has set something more akin to the former than the latter loose upon the nation:

The district court properly determined that MERS was not a contingently necessary party in Landmark's foreclosure action... The judgment of the district court is affirmed.

What it means in short is that in Kansas, MERS cannot bring a foreclosure action upon a homeowner. What it means in long is a little more complicated.

MERS, the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, is a private corporation that keeps track of who owns what parts of all those mortgages that Wall Street sliced and diced over the past decade. Mortgages were issued, mortgage banks securitized them and sold them off, and investors bought the securities that represented the value (and delivered the payments) of those mortgages. It's not unlike stocks being held in "street name," an arrangement that facilitates the "transfer" of millions of shares of stocks every day - in fact, it is only the street name arrangement that makes those transactions possible - with the exception that rather than one person "owning" thousands of individual shares of stocks, potentially thousands of bondholders "own" a tiny sliver of a single mortgage.

Now, if someone does not pay their securitized mortgage, the home goes into foreclosure, right? Not so fast. Only the owner of the mortgage can bring that kind of legal action; only they have "standing." MERS, rather than the hundreds of actual owners, has been acting in their place, bringing foreclosure actions against many of the hundreds of thousands* of homeowners who have heretofore not been able or willing to pay their mortgages. Now MERS can't do it - at least in Kansas - the actual owners must do so. If they cannot (and the reality is that hundreds or thousands of actual owners will never be able to), there is no one with the legal right to force a non-paying mortgage into foreclosure. There is no one who can force half the mortgage holders in America to make their monthly payments.

Karl Denninger, while not agreeing that the case is as simple as I have presented above**, nonetheless reaches the same conclusion: "The real bottom line here is that securitized bondholders may in fact be holding worthless pieces of paper."

Follow that green shoot a while and see where it leads.

* by some estimates, fully half of US mortgages have been securitized under this arrangement.

** Probably rightly, I don't claim to be a lawyer.

And to think we didn't need Hillary after all

To get government as scolding termagant:

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons...

“The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.”

Just you wait until your father gets home.

I was rather enjoying the latest round of "Why Can't Obama Get Anything Done?" and "Oh, it's because he's buying NEA artists to create propaganda" articles when I had to laugh out loud at this one. I really figured we needed a stomping and crying Hillary to inform us that we are all unruly children, but it appears that any Democrat will do the trick. Say it together, "Americans aren't acting in the way they should act" if they wish to be good little mud hut dwellers.

I, for one, am glad to reduce mother to tears of impotent rage on this one.

Why historians should ignore scientists

So now that everyone* is gone, I've settled into a couple of books for the weekend, one of them an excellent exposition of Luke's Acts of the Apostles, in which I found this**:

...how wonderously the the speculations of... [The Unseen Universe] lend themselves to this scriptural idea, pointing out the necessity imposed by modern scientific thought for postulating some such internal spiritual sphere, of which the material universe may be regarded as a temporary development. The doctrine of the ascension, when rightly understood, presents then no difficulties from a scientific point of view, but is rather in strictest accordance with the highest and subtlest forms of modern thought.

The only problem is that, since the book was written in 1891, the "scientific point of view" referred to therein is some manner of steady-state universe that no modern scientist (as far as I can tell) would prefer; today we are all about the Big Bang. The physical model that so troubled a prior generation's theology died long before it.

But while this might seem an issue more for theologians*** than historians, I think it illustrates something that might be added to the latter's repertoire of historical truths: what is "modern" and certain today is tomorrow's laughed-at model of the universe and everyone in it.

Just as every generation has its specific morality****, every age has its own "modern thought," and the dangerous assumption is that we have discovered the final truth, the ultimate reality, the model of everything that future generations will look upon with the same reverent awe that we do.

They won't. They will laugh at our silly conclusions the same way we laugh at those of prior generations. Our books are slated for the clearance table as well, artifacts of a prior, ignorant age.

Science, of course, seeks to understand reality - at least material reality - and it does a quite reasonable job of explaining it. But we make a mistake in assuming that we understand it to such an extent that whatever is discovered in the future will fit neatly into the current scientific superstructure, respectfully filling in blanks that our present instruments merely lack the precision to measure. If historians have anything to offer us concerning ourselves, it's the assurance that, since every previous generation was just as convinced as us that their great models explained reality, we ought to possess the intellectual humility to admit our understanding is likely to discarded with just as little fanfare.

* In addition to our kids and foster kids, we had my daughter and grandsons, my parents, and Beth's mother-in-law staying with us, as well as another dozen people visiting. Since it was supposed to be my (belated) birthday party, I couldn't really sneak away. And I was totally jealous of the killer nap that Mitzibel's husband snuck during it all.

** It's on Google Books, but I bought a deadwood edition for 5 bucks. Hardcover, of course.

*** Who would certainly assure us that the doctrine of the Ascension remains in strictest accordance with the highest and subtlest forms of modern thought.

**** As CS Lewis pointed out, while we may find the cruelty of former ages appalling, they would probably have the same response to some areas of our modern morality that we don't think much about - perhaps the cowardice with which we face our own children. We would both be correct.

So this is how I go broke

Thanks to Google:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AP) -- Google Inc. is giving 2 million books in its digital library a chance to be reincarnated as paperbacks.

As part of a deal announced Thursday, Google is opening up part of its index to the maker of a high-speed publishing machine that can manufacture a paperback-bound book of about 300 pages in under five minutes. The new service is an acknowledgment by the Internet search leader that not everyone wants their books served up on a computer or an electronic reader...

I already have a filing cabinet full of Google books that I have printed off from PDF, three-hole-punched, and bound, so doubtless the appearance of a machine that would bind them for me into paperbacks* will save me a lot of space. And I really can't complain about getting a custom-printed, brand new paperback for $8.

But I seriously wonder if it might make more sense to just spring $100k for the machine.

And another $100k for a library wing addition to the house...

* Unfortunately, hardcovers - which I vastly prefer for many reasons - cost about 3x what a paperback costs, at least custom printed. That fact does not make me love paperbacks.

Credit where credit's due

Obama earns his props:

The White House will shelve U.S. plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move likely to ease tensions with Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Nicely done. Seriously.

Of all the things Bush was accused of lying about, one tall tale that was mostly ignored was the most blatantly dishonest: building a missile shield 100 miles from Russia and then constantly claiming that it was designed to counter missiles from Iran. Missiles which could not reach it anyway. Even if the Iranians decided to attack Poland for some odd reason.

It was a thumb in Russia's eye and a stupid one at that. I mean, we wouldn't mind if the Russians put a bunch of missiles in Cuba, would we?

Blatantly stolen from Huck.

It's kind of a shame

But you might have a tough time winning a senate seat if this is what you do for a living.

I'm personally of the opinion that a couple of well-delivered tombstone piledrivers might actually improve the senate.

What a ride

So anyway, I have seasonal allergies and this is the season. But this post is not about those, they are just the reason that I woke up at 2:30 with sinuses full and realized that my night of uninterrupted sleep was probably already over. I moved down to the basement so as not to disturb the lovely and gracious Rogue with hourly snorts and snoring and settled in as best I could. Sure enough, I woke up just about every hour, three times that I can remember and maybe there were more.

But here's the weird part: every time I fell back asleep I fell back into the same dream. I was living in a house that was very much like the house of my adopted daughter's late great-grandmother, except that it was in Duluth instead of Kansas City. And I was driving my old red Cavalier (fondly known as The Rocket) that has long been sold as scrap to the Chinese. At least I was driving it until it disappeared.

I was trying to drive to work, but for some reason I had to get out of the Rocket and go back to the house, and when I got back, the car was not there. I even called Rogue from the old, rotary phone that was in the car to tell her that I could not find it*. So I got home again somehow to get a different car and I couldn't find the correct keys and so I woke up.

Upon falling back to sleep, I found some keys and tried to drive to work in a rainstorm and rear-ended someone. I don't know if it killed me, because the impact woke me up.

Then I was driving in a city full of one-way streets that all led away from work (wake up).

Then I was in a restaurant that had no exits, so I had to wait for a dumbwaiter full of laundry so I could ride down multiple floors to try to find a way to get to work. All the while the clock is ticking away.

When Rogue finally woke me up, I had full knowledge that I had been dreaming (as I did each time I awoke during the night) and yet I had to consciously try to remember what kind of car I drove and what my own house looked like.

But the most confusing thing was this: It's Monday. Why the hell did I want so badly to go to work?

* It's a dream, you can drive a missing car while talking on a land line.

Jumping off God's Bridge

Jesus Metropolitan Community Church wonders if Jesus would OK it if you're really, truly tempted:

There are, no doubt, modern people who engage in homosexual sex for reasons similar to those identified in Romans 1. If someone began with a clear heterosexual orientation, but rejected God and began experimenting with gay sex simply as a way of experiencing a new set of pleasures, then this passage may apply to that person. But this is not the experience of the vast majority of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people.

The blog offers a very good examination of Romans 1 and fills in a lot of background for Paul that people might not understand today, not sharing Paul's cultural experience. Like the lawyer he is, though, I think the author identifies many trees correctly and yet misses that he's standing in a forest. He is perfectly correct that we can't know what Paul would have said had he known committed gay couples, for example, but he may be in error in presuming that Paul had never heard of such cases. Why should we have them today, and in such seeming abundance, and yet the premier evangelist of that generation never heard of such a thing?

But that's not the important part. Ignoring for a minute why a person is engaging in that behavior and concentrating only on the behavior, we must confess that Paul uses words like "unseemly," "left the natural use," and "error" to refer to it. I cannot help but believe that it's Paul's opinion that such acts - while perhaps perfectly in line with the individual's purest feelings - are not in line with God's created order of things. And acts not in God's order are the very definition of sin.

But taking it out of the realm of sex, what if there was a person whose every natural inclination was to torture animals*? Ever since he was a kid, he has felt a desire to do so - in fact, he wants to follow God, but he has this burning desire that he cannot shake, and he also cannot shake the feeling that God created him that way. I'll even confess that God may have done just that**.

I would think that none of us would argue that since that's the way God made him, that he ought to just go ahead and do so and with our blessing. We would rightly conclude that, for reasons outside his desire, the action is wrong. If he's going to follow God, he's going to have to learn to act in contradiction to his feelings. He is going to have to stifle this particular temptation.

Now, one might be tempted to argue that this action is wrong because it hurts an animal but gay sex hurts no one, and perhaps that's correct but it's not really the point. The point is that the rightness or wrongness of an act exists outside how a particular person feels about doing it. In that sense, it's entirely irrelevant whether Paul knew people in committed gay relationships - Romans is not about how we feel or who Paul knew but about God's created order and how we fit into it. And there is no shaking the argument that gay sex stands outside God's order.

But Paul concludes that not only homosexuals struggle with desires that contradict that order. He confesses that he, like the rest of us, shares a twisted orientation:

[W]hen I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members***, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
-- Rom 7:21-24

All of us are twisted in some way. Each of us bears certain burdens, struggles with certain temptations that others do not. Some of us may have a will to power, to move our fellow men about like so many tin soldiers. Some of us are obsessed with remaining forever young. Some of us may desire to accumulate shiny things simply to prove we are a better man than someone else. Some desire to bed every woman or man who comes our way. And some of us desire to share sexual intimacy with a person of the the same sex. The temptation is different on the surface, but it is still a temptation to act in a way that stands outside God's will for us.

I wonder about these denominations who single out homosexuality as some "special" temptation against God's order and say, well, so long as you really feel that way (i.e. so long as you're truly tempted deep in your heart), that's fine. Every behavior is done because a person is tempted to do it. They want to do it. Deep in their very self they feel that this act is going to give them pleasure, even if it's only the pleasure of hurting someone by throwing themselves off a bridge. Every sin fulfills a deep-seated need within us. But it is in fulfilling it outside God's will that makes it a sin.

There is an order in creation, and especially in marriage and procreation. It appears to be one to which we humans are particularly vulnerable to violate. Sex saturates our culture, our entertainment. It excites us. And it tempts us. As CS Lewis once noted, we are not obsessed with it because we hushed it up; we once hushed it up because we are obsessed with it.

But the fact that we are tempted to do an act does not change the nature of the act. It is not, in the end, our innermost feelings that determine whether we are obeying God. It is whether we are obeying God.

* No, I'm not saying gays torture animals: my example has nothing to do with them.

** Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?
-- Rom. 9:21.

*** Paul uses the plural, but he might have helped us more here if he used the singular.

(Hat tip: Mitzibel)

Mass Effect

So anyway, the lovely and gracious Rogue was harassing me last night about a few of my judgments of historical relevance. For some odd reason, of the dozen or so historical events or people I have to research and write up, the Nineteenth Amendment, women's voting rights, was not only at the back of my theoretical relevance line, but huffing and puffing just to stay within hailing distance.

The reasons for this were several. The first is that the Nineteenth Amendment has been a jurispruidical non-starter. Because all it did was remove sex-based restrictions on voting, it hasn't been nearly as overtly impactful to law and case as, say, the Fourteenth (another I have to write up) which significantly changed the power relationship between the states and the federal government.

The second is that, to be blunt, any 'right' where the majority of people who could exercise it voluntarily ignore it can't be that important*.

But then as I was looking at the opponents of the Amendment's passage, I realized that while most opposition came from southern Democrats and quite a bit from German immigrants, a significant source of opposition was from the liquor business. They argued, with very good reason, that women voting would result in nationwide prohibition***. A look at a lot of the suffragist literature like that above gives a similar outlook. "We want the vote," it says, "to stop the white slave traffic, sweated labor, and to save the children." In this case, "white slavery" has nothing to do with chattel slavery, but with long factory hours. In addition to banning beer, the suffragettes wanted to interject government into the workplace, and to "save the children." They accomplished all of them, though maybe the children aren't quite saved yet.

So while the amendment itself has not played a major role in a whole lot of court cases, I suppose it could be argued that its passage has played a major role in the government beginning the long journey of ignoring the rest of the Constitution****. If the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment added a whole truckload of voters who wanted a government that would tell people what they could drink, where they would work, and how they could raise their kids, I think the changes that were made in response are pretty meaningful after all.

* In fact, if you consider the act of voting as a 'vote' for the right to vote, women** solidly vote against women voting by not voting in huge numbers. In some local elections, the non-voting proportion can reach 85%. That's what I call a mandate. Most women, I suspect, really don't give a hoot about voting. They just don't want to be told they CAN'T vote.

** This is not specific to women; most men don't vote, either. That's fine by me. All this mantra that somehow we are a better people if everyone gets out to vote is not a faith I share: I rather think the list of people who should not vote is far longer than the one of people who should.

*** It's a bit ironic that prohibition was actually Amendment 18 and woman suffrage Amendment 19. That doesn't mean the brewers were incorrect in their assessment, if only because both prohibition and women voting were going on in various states before the amendments; the amendments just made them both uniform across the nation. Prohibition was considered a women's issue and, short of the right to vote itself, the premier women's issue.

**** For example, while the last great Democrat president, Grover Cleveland, would not sign child-wage legislation because he could not find authority for it in the Constitution, progressives of both parties managed to find it there just about the time women got the vote.

Building a lesser mousetrap

In a comment to a recent Ambrose Evans-Prichards piece on the Chinese buying gold to protect themselves from the dollar's coming fall, a commenter illustrates why, even when given levers, springs, and cheese, some people will never have the world beating a path to their door:

Ah…gold….you dig it up at great expense and then put it back into the ground in a vault that you guard at great expense. It has no inherent value, other than to make pretty jewellery and to fill teeth. Such wonderfully sensible stuff for the Chinese to invest in*. My own belief? Never underestimate the ability of the Americans to sort out problems.

While I think solving problems is something at which Americans excel, and while I would not be surprised if our economic problem turns out to be less problematic than I expect, I would be even less surprised if it turns out to be worse in the short run. But I really do think that to whatever extent we surprise to the upside, it will be to that extent that American policies fail**. In other words, I have greater trust in individual Americans acting in their own interest than I do in our government acting in our perceived collective interest.

But that said, it is of interest that the commenter, in expressing his admirable faith in Yankee ingenuity, maligns gold on the very two attributes that distinguish it from its replacement, paper money. As I wrote before, though I'm too lazy to dig up the reference, if the only value gold possessed was the ability to make women more beautiful, it would have more real value than all the paper money ever printed. And in having more intrinsic value, it would be better money than all the paper money ever printed. I wonder what the commenter would answer when asked how, given that it's only good for jewelry and teeth, it ever became money in the first place?

It is no coincidence that paper money is designed to avoid the two attributes of gold that make it hard for government to "sort out problems." While gold is hard to come by, paper money can be printed in unlimited quantities and denominations. While gold has value as something other than money, paper money has none except maybe to snort cocaine through. In every way except one, paper money is a lesser mousetrap.

But that one makes all the difference: paper money makes it cheap, indeed free, for the government and bankers*** to purchase the products of your labor, while charging your children interest in perpetuity.

Americans will sort this problem out as well, I have no doubt. But I have tremendous concern that the Chinese are going to sort it out first, this time.

* the Chinese have a lot of teeth to fill, it might be noted.

** For example, I think that we can best put ourselves back on a solid financial foundation by a period of reduced consumption and by paying down our debts. The government's policies are universally designed to get us further in debt and to consume more. To the extent they fail to get us to borrow more, to that extent we are better off.

*** to the extent there is a difference.

So long, Dungeon Siege

So anyway, I've kind of given up on Dungeon Siege after 5 chapters, and not only because I have too much history to do to be playing games until all hours of the morning. It just kind of annoyed me.

As you might imagine, it's a fantasy, Tolkien, D&D-style knockoff, or at least I thought it was. My guy had a sword and could cast a few spells. And it followed that theme until I got to the goblins.

Now we all know what goblins are*, and we all know that you fight them early in the game, while you're weak, because they're weak. Well, in chapter 4, I finally ended up in this goblin cave, but instead of fighting wimpy goblins, I'm fighting the world's freaking toughest goblins. Then I start fighting robotic(!) goblins, then robotic spiders, then goblins in tanks and some with flamethrowers, so I pick up a chain gun and a grenade launcher and start mowing them down.

Has this ceased to make any sense? It ceased enough for me. I killed the Boss Goblin's mechanical suit (he gets away) and then completed a little of the next chapter, launching an unlimited number of grenades at the these huge, loud salamanders with 480 hit points each, but somehow in the transition from Icewind Dale to Call of Duty 5: Amphibian Takeover I sort of lost interest.

* Though if you're a Tolkien reader but not a D&D player, you might make the same mistake as Bilbo in thinking that they are Orcs. They're not, really.

Managing Expectations

While it was announced this morning that while the "official" unemployment rate hit 9.7%, there was an interesting note tucked into the Bloomberg story of the milestone:

Employers cut payrolls by 216,000, fewer than forecast, after a 276,000 drop in July, Labor Department data showed today in Washington.

I'm always kind of amused by the phrase tucked into bad news that informs us that the bad news was not so bad. At least it was "fewer than forecast."

Now, for economists, that's nothing to be proud of. If numbers come in fewer than forecast or more than forecast, it's not the numbers' fault; it's the economists' fault for guessing wrong. The numbers are what they are.

Or are they? A funny thing occasionally happens to government numbers on their way to the newspaper; they somehow consistently manage to beat expectations, making bad news seem less bad or good news even better. It's as if someone told you that your dog was killed by a car and then later said that it was just moderately wounded. You still worry about your dog, but you do feel better that he wasn't killed like you thought. You might even be a little bit excited at the "good" news.

So according to the stories in the financial press this morning, the unemployment rate is the highest that it's been in a quarter century, and 216k jobs disappeared. That's bad. But, as the Washington Post is quick to note, "forecasters expected" a loss of 230k jobs. So there is good news: we beat the expectation by 14,000 jobs. In fact, if you squint just right you might even see a green shoot. Or you may see a red box.

What's a red box? That's what surrounds the government's "fudge factor" number above, known as the Birth/Death Adjustment*. This is a number that's not actually a count of jobs, but is based on the jobs the government thinks were created or lost that they didn't count. The government added 188,000 jobs as a result of "new businesses" that somehow didn't make it into the real counts. Amazingly, while this month the economy lost more than 200k jobs, it still managed to add jobs in every single category of birth/death. And though the overall economy has lost jobs some 20 months in a row, the birth/death adjustment has added jobs for 7 months in a row, a total of about a million new jobs.

Now I'm not saying that the government's fudge factor number is designed specifically to beat expectations and turn bad news into not-so-bad. I'm not even saying that its reason for existence is to give talking heads an "on the other hand" when talking about bad news. I'm just saying that if you did need such a number, the birth/death adjustment comes in pretty handy.

* It's not the birth or death of people, but of businesses.

(chart stolen from Mish)

Can you flunk for being a smartass?

So anyway, it pretty much comes down to two tests*. In order to finally complete this degree, I have to pass a class called “Senior Assessment,” HIST699, a 100-point, one credit hour class that features two three-hour exams on consecutive Mondays.

The concept of the class is an interesting one. The powers that be choose 8 people or events, either from world history or US history. In addition to defining them, we have to compare them in bracketed divisions (think those NCAA basketball pools that you always lose a couple bucks in**). For each pair we write a short essay arguing why one of the two is more significant than the other. All the "winners" advance to the next bracket where they are paired with the other winners. Then the winners of those brackets face off to see which is the most significant person or event in US history***. World history follows the next week.

Each test works out to eight short essays followed by seven that may be a little longer, over the course of three hours. And the results go in your “permanent record****” so the department can ignore them when giving you a good job reference.

But we don’t go in blind. The beauty of the preparation is that we have the list of 48 people or events ahead of time from which each of the sets of eight are chosen, and one of our pre-test assignments is to do a little writeup on a number of them, which writeups are shared among all your classmates so they can study. I have twelve of them to do, one of which is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

So I wonder if anyone would think it funny if I wrote up the Warrant song Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a significant milestone in American history rather than the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel that obviously stole its title:

Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A rock song by the hair band Warrant (Cherry Pie, 1990) that examines the problem of police corruption in rural 20th Century America and its effects on civilians.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the unnamed narrator and his uncle are river fishing late one night when they hear a disturbance in the nearby brush. Silently climbing a tree, they witness the local sheriff, John Brady, and an accomplice the pair recognize as Deputy Hedge, dump two presumably dead bodies into an abandoned well under cover of night.

Escaping back to Tom’s nearby ramshackle cabin, the two discuss possible courses of action and their consequences. Since the sheriff belongs in prison for what is obviously a crime, and they are the witnesses who can not only finger the guilty but can produce the evidence, it is their duty to expose him. On the other hand, as the sheriff is a trusted law enforcement authority, it is uncertain whether anyone will believe their story. In addition, if Brady has compromised local judges or elected officials they may place themselves in personal danger by coming forward. Tom eventually convinces the narrator to take what he has seen to the grave, leaving the crooked sheriff and his co-conspirators free to terrorize and murder other innocent Americans.

The narrator describes his dilemma in the chorus: I know a secret down in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I know a secret that I just can’t tell. I know a secret down in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, know who put the bodies in the wishing well.

While I would have to invent a few congressional hearings, a blue ribbon commission, and an omnibus crime bill to give the song the gravity to top, say, the Market Revolution of 1800-1840, I think I could pull it off.

On the other hand, Dr. Schick doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who has ever heard of Warrant. And he takes his history too seriously, probably, to see the humor in it.

* Technically, it’s 6 tests, 6 book reports, and a dozen small write-ups, but all but the two tests are routine.

** I lose them so consistently that I’ve come to think of it as a tax on the month of March.

*** For the record, I’m leaning toward Pocahontas’ husband.

**** I know you all feared your permanent record as kids. I feared for mine when I got busted for setting a guitar pick on fire in the seventh grade (those suckers BURN). But this is pretty much the only thing in a history major’s permanent record - they don't really care if you can't play "Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley".

Panarin's back and there's gonna be trouble...

They may not be good at this yet

But at least they're trying:

The watchdog of the Securities and Exchange Commission has found that three agency exams and two investigations of Bernard Madoff's business were incompetent, despite ample warnings of the multibillion-dollar fraud.

But SEC inspector general David Kotz's report found no evidence of any improper ties between agency officials and Madoff.

"Incompetent but not improper" is a great slogan. It's not that we won't enforce all the laws and protect all the widows like we promised, it's that we can't do it. But, hey, progressivism is based almost wholly on intent anyway*, so the conclusion will be that we need new and improved rules that we can't enforce.

UPDATE: Here's a guy who ought to go to work for the SEC:

Police have said they have "no known suspects" in the case [of eight murdered in Georgia]. "We are not looking for any known suspects," Doering said. "That doesn't say that there are no suspects. They're just not known to us."

That appears to be the problem the SEC had with Madoff: he was the suspect, but no one knew it.

* meaning that so long as you want to do something, even if you can't, that's what counts. Unless you're a Republican, in which case the stuff you could not do is wholly because you did not want to.

CNBC Knows Football

What shall be done for the erstwhile gatekeepers?

The publishing industry considers a future in buggy whips:

The pressure from Google’s digital library project and Amazon’s electronic books is forcing publishers to consider drastic price cuts, the head of the world’s second largest publisher of books by sales has warned.

Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre, said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy profits and kill the lucrative trade in hardback editions.

Not surprisingly, a stilted, bureaucratic 19th century industry misinterprets the times. Rather than worrying about the lucrative trade in hardcovers, publishers ought to be asking themselves, "why do we exist at all?" In a world where books can be written, sold, delivered, and read without a single piece of paper being used, what purpose to publishers serve, what need do they meet?

Well, if you take a look at the requirements to join the SFWA, for example, you'll notice that it's not enough to be a science fiction or fantasy writer, but you must be published by certain publishers. If you are in academia, you are expected to be published and to continue publishing, even if it's only via the stodgy, inbred world of university presses. While private sector and public sector publishers may seem to be quite opposite*, they fulfill the same function for different markets. One primary need they meet is that of "gatekeeper," of deciding who is worthy of being published, of being heard, and who is not.

Bureaucracies love gatekeepers, of course, so long as they get to be them - in fact, any long-lived industry** will eventually become encrusted with gatekeepers, sycophants, and petty tyrants whose very presence signals the arrival of the industry's death throes. Bureaucracy also requires inefficiency to survive. The publishing bureaucracy has thriven*** on the fact that creating, printing, distributing, and selling a book has required more capital than most authors have access to - it is inefficient for every author to be his own publisher. They have built an entire industry on that fact. That fact no longer exists.

And because it no longer exists, it will not be terribly long before the ability of publishing houses and their editors to decide who is worthy of being heard will cease to exist. At least in hardcover.

* Capitalist theory is weak when it comes to interpreting bureaucracy.

** And for purposes of this argument I consider religious denominations an industry. That explains the ELCA's actions as well as anything I think.

*** yes, I said "thriven." Sue me.