Best. Thing. Ever.

You guys.



MY SISTER IS GETTING MARRIED.

Ohio peoples, I'll see you next year.

That is all.

Some American Catholic Highlights

If you haven't yet become a regular of The American Catholic, but enjoy a bit of Darwin political commentary every so often, you might want to check out:

"Preferential Option for the Middle Class?", on how both political parties strive to buy elections by pouring benefits on the middle class.

"Abortion Will Not Go Away", on how outlawing abortion would not end it -- and why we should outlaw it anyway.

and

"The Scary Thing Is, We Really Mean It" on the growing rift between beltway and flyover conservatives.

Also strongly recommended is:

"Humanity Without Limits" by Zach on the dangers of a society where every form of "progress" is seen as not only possible a very nearly a right.

"Tom Cruise, First-Rate Philosopher" by Chris Burgwald -- you'll have to click through to see what lies behind that delightful title.

And a heartwarming story about a Protestant and a rosary by Donald McClarey.

The Peripatetic School of Russian

I did indeed follow through with my intention of starting to learn a new language, and the language I eventually picked was Russian. The more I thought about it, Russian was the logical choice because I have a great fondness for Russian literature, and so I'd be much more likely to use a knowledge of Russian and keep it up. While Persian and Arabic strike me as interesting because I'm interested in Islam and the Middle East (and because I just find the Arabic script which both languages use attractive) but present rather less that I'd be actively interested in reading. (Though I did pick up a few books on Persian from the library and get through learning part of the alphabet.)

So I ordered a copy of the Penguin Russian Course by Nicholas Brown from Amazon, and from the library I picked up Pimsleur's Basic Russian at the library.

I've been progressing through both programs slowly. In the Penguin text, I've worked through the alphabet and some basic words, but am taking some time to be able to write reliably, due in part to the fact that handwritten Russian script is in a few cases drastically different from the printed alphabet. For example: the Russian "t" sound is represented by a letter that looks pretty much like an English "t" or Greek tao -- but the cursive version looks like an English cursive M. Almost makes me tempted to forget about cursive (as I long ago did in English) and just write the exercises as if they were typed. But some it seems like one ought to try to do the thing properly.

With the Pimsleur audio course, I've been extracting the lessons to my iPod and listening to them while taking my afternoon walk around the corporate campus. I'm now moderately proficient at saying things like "Excuse me", "Hello", "Goodbye", "Do you understand English?", "I don't understand Russian very well", "I'm American", etc. However it's been making me realize how essential spelling (and the instincts coming from knowing the phonetics of English, Latin and Greek) is to my language acquisition skills. In English, and to an extent in Latin or Greek, I can hear a word and pick it up pretty quickly because I'm fairly confident as to what phonetic sounds make it up. I know enough of those languages to know how a word is likely to be spelled -- and thus what phonetic sounds I am likely to be hearing.

However, I have no such instincts when it comes to Slavic languages as of yet, and so I find it very difficult to tell if what is being said and say it correctly. For instance, the word for "hello" is (spelled very roughly phonetically) edravstvoyte. However, to hear it (even with many, many repetitions) it was hard for me to tell if it ended in an "itche" or "oyte" kind of sound.

Clearly, we must originally learn language without giving any thought to spelling, but it seems that I at least have lost much of any ability to address things in that manner. I find it very hard to feel confident in using a word if I don't know for sure what phonetic sounds compose it, and in a langauge I'm not yet very familiar with, I can't feel confident in knowing the phonetic compostion without knowing the spelling.

So while I'm enjoying the walking and listening approach (and it assures that I get my daily dose of Russian) I'm finding that as of yet there is no replacement for book learning.

More Classics for children, or, Screwball

Continuing our journey through the classic children's compilation: The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Vol. 1.



Ain't I a stinkah?

Krugman Wins Nobel in Economics

To most of the reading public (including me) this looks like a classic example of the politicization of the Nobel Prizes -- however I've consistently found very smart economics that I read online to say that Krugman is in fact a very good economist when he's dealing with economics, though a total hack when writing for the NY Times.

For those interested in reading about "the other Paul Krugman", Marginal Revolution provides a good and readable explanation of Krugman's academic work, and his achievements in trade theory. Also readable (and very short) is Arnold Kling's post on EconLog.

One more time, with feeling

Yet again I wish that a description of my day's work as "cleaning up sh*t" wasn't quite so literal.

Marginalia

At first having a boy wasn't much different from having a girl, and then I took him in to be circumcised. The event itself had an oddly spectacular feel, as the room was crowded with women -- the assisting nurse, two young blonde med students, and their supervisor -- cooing over a furious Jack. The doctor himself was all business, explaining each aspect of the operation to the med students, who nodded sagely. I was prepared to be jolted to tears by a sudden shrill scream from the child as he underwent the knife, but the tone of his yells remained constant throughout. What seemed to anger him most was being strapped snugly to the baby-shaped board (trade name: Circumstraint). He exacted his revenge on me by sleeping soundly for the rest of the day, despite my best attempts to wake him up to nurse.

----

I suppose that if you want to showcase a television's image quality, you let the customer see it in action. However, in that case you want to play the same movie on all the sets. The two televisions on the floor in the back corner of the Salvation Army store were out of sync. On the left glared Waterworld, the Heaven's Gate of the 90s, the saturated colors sloshing and glinting off all the shiny junk on the nearby shelves . (In an ironic twist, I recognized the box office flop because I'd been one of the few people to see it on the big screen.) The caliginous glow of Sleepy Hollow frosted all the knick-knacks on the right. The odd juxtaposition and muted sound robbed Sleepy Hollow of any terror, and I gazed on beheadings and impalements with detached curiosity, until I realized that my children were watching with the same bemused fascination.

-----

The same trip to the Salvation Army netted me the funniest book I've read in a good age, a novel that had me rolling on the couch weeping from laughter and gasping for breath as I tried to read bits aloud to Darwin. Yet I'm divided over whether, in good conscience, I can possibly recommend it to anyone (except Matthew Lickona). However, since I've brought it up: When Sisterhood Was In Flower by Florence King, an author to whom the overused descriptor "profane" applies in spades. Here she's skewering the feminist movement, ca. 1971. Much of it is hilariously unquotable on a family blog (at one point the narrator takes to writing cheap porn novels), but I can excerpt this bit from a women's issues talkshow:

"Now I know what your question is, " said Ms. Garrison-Talbot. "Everybody always asks it. You must be worried about the baby's soft spot."

I was worried about hers. She turned the birth bucket on its side so the camera could pick up the interior.

"You have to put something soft in the bottom for the baby to land in. Ancient Egyptian women used crocodile dung. It's not available here in Massachusetts, but if you plan to give birth in the Gulf Coast area, your husband or the father of your child can gather it for you as mine did. It's a good way to test his supportiveness. Remember, though, it must be fresh dung. The best way to gather it is to wait behind a crocodile who is moving his or her bowels. When the dung emerges, thrust a skate board under the anus to catch it. Do not use plastic bags! Their crinkly sound tends to anger the crocodile."

"Is it possible to get the dung from zoos?" asked Polly.

Ms. Garrison-Talbot's eyes hardened. "The zoos have ben totally unsupportive."

"What are the chances of setting up a meaningful dialogue with zoo directors?"

"Nonexistent," Ms. Garrison-Talbot said grimly. "We've tried to get our dung through the proper channels but we met with mockery at every turn. My car was even defaced. Someone wrote 'baby sitter' on the windshield and a male veterinarian referred to me as the 'ding-dung' lady'."

Polly Bradshaw grimaced in disgust. "We'll never be free until they stop calling us ladies. Grace, what are your plans for the Birth Bucket League now?"

"Polly, we're going to fight for our rights to crocodile dung. We're setting up a letter-writing campaign to put pressure on the zoos, and my husband is chairing the Ad Hoc Dung Now committee from his hospital bed in Everglades Memorial. We're not going to give up until every woman is able to purchase crocodile dung from the zoo of her choice."

"Beautiful! Right on!" cheered Polly Bradshaw.

"In the meantime, I can recommend some substitutes for crocodile dung. Moldy bread is the best. Crumble it and line the bottom of your birth bucket with it. It's soft, and a natural source of penicillin, which means it's sterile. And best of all, it's easy to obtain -- every active, involved woman's kitchen is full of it.

A Financial Conscience

Reader J. Christian dropped me an email pointing me towards a piece to today's WSJ about the importance of good and honest financial information -- as underlined by our current crisis. From it comes this description of John Moody, the originator of Moody's Investor Services:

When Moody published a statistical manual in 1900, followed by a system of rating securities with categories Aaa, Baa etc, and a series of investor-advice books, he provided reams of information to everyone, for just the price of a few books. These beginnings led to the development of Moody's Investor Services and other rating agencies. The securities rating system has now spread from the United States to the whole world, and helped make possible the capitalist explosion of growth and prosperity.

Moody left behind an autobiography, "The Long Road Home," 1933, and so we can glean some of his motivations.

Though Moody was a democratizer, he was not acting out of populist philanthropic motives when he launched Moody's. As he makes very clear in his autobiography, he did it to make money. But there were other things he cared about besides making money. People asked him around 1900, why give away all this information so cheaply? They told him he might expect to make a lot more money as an underwriter, middleman or bond salesman. But he recognized that was not his personality, and that "there was that 'literary' or writing bent of mine. To bring out a book -- even a mere compilation -- fired my imagination far more than could any dreams of becoming a successful banker."

He called it a "writing bent" but as is plain from his autobiography, it might be considered an impulse to speak perspicaciously and openly to the people. A "writing bent," connotes an impulse to consider the interests of a broad reading public, and publishing tables of statistics and ratings, as well as the various investing advice books Moody wrote for retail investors, is just that.

Moody was not selfless but he cared about people, and he cared about ethics. His autobiography was filled with admonitions about speculative bubbles that draw in unsuspecting investors (as he himself had personally experienced). He wanted to provide the careful information that would prevent financial misfortune for the average family. He was obsessed with ethical behavior and musings about his traditional Roman Catholic religion. He wrote about moral dilemmas, and his refusal to accept money under terms that would bias his ratings.

I know little else of Moody other than that, but what the article says I found charming, and a little inspiring. We could use more like him.

And, gratuitous baby pix

And for the three of you wondering how the floor turned out:

Educating kids in the classics, or, Leopold!

You guys would not believe how long it takes me to write even a non-substantive post these day. Maybe that's because I'm busy schooling my children to appreciate a long and noble tradition going back to Plautus and Aristophanes: slapstick.

The Predictions Game

I deal with data. Much of it has to do with looking at sales over the last 3-12 months, and then making predictions as to how many units of a product we would sell at a particular price point. This is predictable up to a point. A product which has never responded to discounting before probably won't respond to it next time. And one that has always done so before will probably respond again.

However making predictions about the future is vastly more inexact than analyzing what went on in the past -- and a lot of people seem to have difficulty dealing with that ambiguity. When looking at an upcoming sale, I might give a sales estimate with a huge amount of deviation: "We'll sell 2000 to 3000 of those cameras at $199." When looking back, it's easy to say, "Well, sales were soft because Circuit City came in with a more aggressive offer; macro economic scares had people reluctant to make major purchases; and we're headed into the season trough where people but off purchases until the holiday season." Is any of true? Probably to one extent or another, but none of it is stuff that is easily to factor in reliably before hand. (We have models for the seasonality, the rest is after the fact guess work.)

This has been striking me in particular as I read about the global financial problems. Financial columnists cheerfully explain what the reasons for a sell off or recovery were, as if these were some sort of easily analyzed or predicted system. But really, these are only explanations that can be applied after the fact. They're stand-ins for the multitude or reasons that might have caused individual people and fund managers to sell particular assets are particular times.

There are broad themes to a set of events made up of millions of unknowable individual decisions. People experience fear and uncertainty and so they're reluctant to lend others money and eager to divest themselves of assets they believe will fall farther in value. But within those themes are uncountable and unknowable numbers of individual decisions that we really can't, as analysts, know much about.

Taliban Splits With Al Qaeda, Seeks Truce?

Taking this to be accurate, I'm surprised that I stumbled on it burried a few layers back on CNN.com. One would think that it would be a moderately important story.

Life's burning question answered

And that question is, "What if the Beatles were Irish?"



Tip of the black hat to Man With Black Hat.

American Catholic

I've been invited to join the blogging team at a new group blog focusing on the intersection of politics and Catholicism: American Catholic. I've accepted, and you can see my first post up there today, along with some great content from some of the eleven other authors.

This also gives me the chance to make some changes in the overall blog-life balance around here. I'll be funnelling most of my political posts over to American Catholic, so if you enjoy my more partisan side I strongly encourage you to join us over there. I'm also going to be reducing the post frequency on DarwinCatholic to probably 2-3 substantive posts per week -- though we may have short links and such up on other days. And for those who can get a bit tired of my election season partisanship -- the DarwinCatholic posts will be going back to your normal, non-election-year balance.

The last couple weeks my time commitment at work has been ramping up as I switch to a new set of responsibilities (more time in meetings and less time sitting around crunching data and blogging in between queries.) Also, with the new school year, I've realized that if I don't get my rear in gear with the Humanities Program it will take me upwards of a decade to work through it. And I don't want that. So I'm going to be putting more time in over there and thus necessarily less here.

All that said, DarwinCatholic will most certainly not be going away -- nor will MrsDarwin and I.

Welcome to Texas (again)

I never had allergies before moving to Texas. Never. I was happy then, and I didn't know it. Now I'm not happy, because the pressure my sinuses are putting on my head it throbs I've just taken some allergy medicine it makes my head oh so heavy... This stuff works fast -- I only downed my pill ten minutes ago. Good thing I didn't take it while driving.

I've always found "non-drowsy" to be false advertising. Nighty-night, ya'll.

Quick Debate Follow-up

For my fellow political junkies: A debate thread.

Following up on my Palin post yesterday, I'd say that Governor Palin turned in a solid but not outstanding performance at the vice presidential debate last night. She had no particular gaffes and she held her own against Senator Biden. She was honest and charming and almost always sounded like she was talking rather than reciting.

However, I would have liked to see her go on the attack a bit more. Biden got away with some insanely blatent falsehoods. For instance, he claimed that we've spent less in the entire Afghan war than we do in any given month in Iraq. So far we've spent over $170 billion on the Afghan war, and the Iraq war costs roughly $10 billion per month. So Biden was wrong by nearly a factor of 20x. He also lied in saying that McCain had voted "the same as Obama" to cut off funding to the troops int he field. McCain opposed a Democratic funding bill (which Bush had promised to veto if it passed) which included a demand for a scheduled pull out -- but he supported the bill which actually passed, and which Obama opposed. And perhaps most blatant of all, Biden claimed that McCain "wants to give $4 billion in special tax breaks to Exxon Mobile". This is true only in the sense that McCain wants to cut corporate taxes on all companies to bring them in line with those in Europe and Asia and keep American companies competitive. The others require a bit of googling (which one can't do in the middle of a debate) to look up the facts, even if you immediately know that Biden's claims ring false. But that last one is huge, blatant and easy. And it would have been a great chance for Palin to call him on the carpet for lying to the American electorate.

And as a principled conservative I'm not at all impressed with some of the standard populist lines which she came out with about "Wall Street greed". I'm sorry: If you buy a 300k house when you could only afford a 100k house (to use the example she gave) you are at least as at fault for your resulting troubles as the lender who was foolish enough to give you the loan. You should know your situation better than your lender does, not count on them to tell you what you can afford.

So while I thought Palin turned in an overall solid performance -- vastly exceeding the expectations set by the "she's an idiot" chorus of the last couple weeks -- I didn't think it was stellar, and I wish that it had been.

Thoughts?

An Idea on Pricing Bad Assets

One of the many points of worry about the bailout is the need to find a balance between buying enough mortgage backed securities to get the credit markets flowing again and relieve fears about bank collapses, while at the same time not massively overpaying and thus having the government take a bath in the process while rewarding people who bought junk (and deserve to take losses as a result.)

At first glance, I like this toss-out idea from Warren Buffet:

But Buffett described a plan he thought of Thursday morning on the way to the Summit that would allow Treasury and private investors to buy assets together. He said his proposal would quickly kickstart demand for mortgage-backed securities and help find a market price for these troubled assets.

"One easy way to do part of the program is to say to anybody - hedge fund operators, Wall Street firms, or anybody else - that the Treasury will lend you 80% of the purchase cost of a bunch of distressed assets," he said, explaining the concept of his proposal. The investors benefit from borrowing at lower rates, but Treasury would get first claim on the sale of those assets, which means it would get its loan back plus interest and possibly turn a profit.

"Now you have someone with 20% skin in the game," he explained. "Believe me, I won't be overpaying if I'm buying with that kind of leverage. And you have someone [the investors] to manage the assets to the extent they need to be managed."

Unqualified?

Like, I suspect, many conservatives, I can't help feeling a little nervous about how the vice presidential debate tonight will go. Governor Palin is, from what I can tell, fundamentally sound when it comes to a conservative outlook -- and the vice presidency, I think, a better place for an up-and-comer than for someone who thinks he is more experienced and skilled than the president and will proceed to attempt to run his own shadow administration. But though I generally like McCain's choice of VP, there is certainly the possibility that Palin will struggle a bit tonight -- and so it seems more honest, if I'm to post on this topic, to get it out before the debate rather than after. Making the call while the cat is still inside the box, so to speak.

There are a lot of claims going around that Palin is "obviously unqualified" to be vice president -- fueled by increasily silly reactions to her recent interviews. For instance, when Palin failing to name, in response to questioning by Katie Couric, another Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade which she disagreed with, opinion makers immediately rolled out the meme, "Palin can't name a single Supreme Court decision other than Roe." When asked the same question by Couric, Biden refered to the Supreme Court's rejection of his attempt to make all violence against women a federal crime. He failed to give the name of the case, and claimed that they should have supported his law, because violence against women affects interstate commerce in that "Women who are abused and beaten and beaten are women who are not able to be in the work force." (Text of both candidate's answers.)

I'm disappointed that Palin didn't have the presence of mind to fire back, "The Dredd Scott decision -- which I think actually has a lot of parrallels to Roe in that it was decided on the basis of what the justices wanted the constitution to say rather than what it said." But at the same time, I'm frankly pretty horrified by the asinity of both Biden's justification for Roe (he basically argues it was a good compromise regardless of whether it correctly interpreted the constitution) and his claim that assault should be federalized because of its effect on interstate commerce. If you asked me which of these two is likely to cause damage to the Republic through his/her ignorance, it's Biden all the way to my mind.

As if commentariat hysteria could not get any sillier, Palin's refusal to list off which newspapers she reads in a response to Couric (which, incidentally, I think was a bit foolish of her -- she should have gamely listed off a few papers, though it's a dumb question) had bloggers screaming, "She can't even name a single major newspaper!" and "She doesn't read!"

Indeed, the general consensus among those who pound keyboards for fun or profit seems to increasingly be that Palin is dumber than pond scum and that it's gravely irresponsible of McCain to have picked her. (Some commentators, even on the conservative side of things, are urging that she bow out and let McCain replace her -- an odd suggestion given how well that worked for McGovern.)

So, is Palin unqualified to be vice president?

Let's look at this honestly: To my knowledge, every single person elected president in the last 100 years has been a current or recent governor, senator or vice president. Nearly every vice president has been drawn from the same pool, though I'm a little less sure there. Cheney springs to mind as someone who had not recently been in elected office -- and he doesn't have a lot of fans at the moment. Gerald Ford was a representative rather than a senator when he was appointed vice president.

Working from that prescident, this means that there are 200-250 people out of a population of 300,000,000 at any given time who have the career track record to be vice president. (And half of those are of the other party, so McCain and Obama effectively each had a pool of 100-125 prospects.) Palin is one of that select group. Within that group of current and recent governors, senators, vice presidents and well known members of the House of Representatives, her track record is fairly short, but it's also pretty accomplished. Still rather green, but promising, is how I'd describe it.

But she's not Ivy League! But she isn't a lawyer! But she hasn't been on Meet The Press! But she's been flustered in some interviews! But she hasn't been "vetted"!

All true to one extent or another. But frankly, there's something a bit self congratulatory about much of the commentary that's being put out about Governor Palin's alleged lack of qualification. The complaints basically boil down to: "Palin is not enough like me."

Those who spend a lot of time writing and reading political columns doubtless imagine they would sound very, very intelligent if put in front of Couric or on Meet The Press or if otherwise allowed to pontificate on policy in public. And the propensity of Senator Obama to think out loud and wonk up new policy on the fly certainly appeals to such people. However, while reading up on issues and speaking about them clearly is an important part of being a successful and effective politician -- it is most certainly not the sum and total of it.

In my own life in the corporate world, I recently worked under a divisional VP who had never gone to college and was frank in telling people that he hadn't read a book cover to cover in ten years. To which my immediate gut reaction was, of course: "What an idiot. I could do that job better than him."

But I couldn't, you see. He'd been in the world of business for 30 years and had been a moderately successful COO and then CEO of a fairly large company before coming to our very large one. He made some good decisions, and some bad ones, but overall I'd say that he was more effective than his predescessor, a Warton MBA with the tendency to head off in vastly varying directions based on whatever her wonkish close set decided was the direction of the moment. The ability to pick a good staff of experts, listen to their advice, weigh it, and make the right decision requires a combination of skill and talent which not many people have. (Few to none, I would suspect, of the media and blogsphere types declaring Governor Palin to be so obviously unqualified, either have this quality or indeed much understanding of it. They are seeking a bigger version of themselves for president -- a wonk and commentator writ large.)

Does Palin have the skills to be a good vice president? I don't know -- though I certainly hope so as I am quite convinced that Obama and Biden have the ideology to be an absolutely disasterous administration. I would feel much more confident in my support of her if she had six or eight years of successful governorship behind her rather than only two. But to claim that she is "obviously unqualified" is clearly wrong. If you're one of the one out of every million Americans with the career qualifications to be a vice presidential candidate -- you're qualified.

Some Light Thoughts On A Potentially Dark Matter

Bernard of A Little Light From the East provides an amusing tour of the economics behind the "bailout".

Carnivores But Not Killers

I had to run out and do some errands during lunch, and then picked up a hamburger to eat at my desk. These two facts cause me a little reflection because up here north of Austin, when you drive around on the interstates you constantly see cattle out eating in their fields, even here in what is in effect suburbia. Indeed, as I sit here in my corporate office building, if I headed out the door and walked across the street and down the road, perhaps a fifteen minute walk, I could gaze across a barbed wire fence at cattle grazing.

However, though I very much enjoy a good hamburger or steak on occasion, I have never killed and cleaned a cow -- or any other food animal. I don't have any particular objection to doing so. Indeed, it seems to me that at some point in my life I should go hunting or help slaughter farm animals, simply in order to have an appreciation for how this everyday act of eating meat ties in with the greater fabric of life and human experience in other times and places.

I suspect that a solid majority of Americans, especially city-dwellers, have never killed and cleaned their own meat. (Sure, lots of people hunt -- but think its a minority, and probably a shrinking one.) And I can't help wondering if after a generation or two that that starts to change cultural attitudes on a range of issues -- some of which would seem at first to be only tangentially related to food.