Frequent Citations

I Heard There Was A Campaign, But I'm Reading Property Outlines

I'm assuming the campaign will still be going after I take the Bar. If I have any brain cells left, I might be interested.

In the meantime, here is my favorite blog that I'm not looking at much these days. I don't care which candidate it favors (and it does favor one)--it's all about the numbers! It's got to be the geekiest political blog going, where people get all excited about new models and I don't mean cover girls.

You sort of get the impression that the creators and commenters are appreciative of these little campaigns we have from time to time that provide them with so many lovely data to play with.

Some of my data for you: 24 essay questions behind. Yeah, baby. Obviously I'm counting the essays assigned instead of writing them.

For The Love Of Wheels

TFL brought home the Smart Car from work yesterday, and is using it to fetch GirlChild back today. It's pretty darn cute, and at 45 mpg it's one heck of a lot more economical than anything except Bonnie.

The other day TFL and I were waiting to cross the street to catch the bus when I heard this amazing, gorgeous engine just as TFL said, "Look--it's a Lotus." Oh my, but that engine sounds sweet. I'm imformed it's an extremely stiff ride. It's nothing but a race car, with no concessions to creature comforts.

And so what? With an engine sounding like that, you better be more about the driving and less about the riding.

Yeah, I grew up with dinner table conversations about cars and engines, and my nickname was Mario when I started learning to drive, and I've never veered from my preference for a stick shift and weakness for a car with excellent handling on a hilly and winding road.

But it looks as though engines are an endangered species. When Mercedes says it's doing away with petroleum based engines, well, that's it. It's all over but the shouting. And the Big Three had better get off their rear ends and get on the (fuel cell/electric) bandwagon.

It's been fascinating, from a social and economic perspective, to watch the rapid changes the price of oil is forcing in people's behavior. This isn't cigarettes, where a sin tax doesn't do much to discourage people from smoking and has no effect on the millions who don't smoke at all. The price of oil affects every darn thing in our lives, and the price of gas has a profound and immediate impact on the budgets of most families.

When I see one of my brothers, who typically drives those enormous SUVs in which you can haul around a football team and all the equipment (I swear, one of them is only slightly smaller than a semi), orders a non-American hybrid, that's when I know the excrement has really hit the air circulation device. People are beginning to regret living in remote suburbs, the roads are less crowded, the cost of everything airline-related is soaring while the market is tanking. It's a mad world but, as I said, a fascinating one.

I've long been baffled with American auto companies' intransigence regarding fuel efficiency and alternatives. It's as though they're in a race to see who can progress the least. This dynamic is truly odd, because the engineers who work for these companies are often flat-out brilliant. They're thick on the ground where I grew up, and I'm confident that they could engineer pretty much anything they wanted. But the manufacturers just haven't seemed willing to tap into that talent pool. Maybe that's changing now. It had better.

I admit, however, to a nostalgia for cruising, and a visceral love of high-performance cars and their marvelous gas-guzzling engines. I guess, like hot-fudge sundaes and deep-dish pizza, they just can't be an every day indulgence any more.

Equal Time On Patriotism

Warning: post about politics. If you are allergic thereto, check back soon for another post on shoes or something.

I stumbled upon this piece in Time--it's actually two pieces, as each candidate wrote his own essay. Reading them, I'm pretty sure the candidates themselves actually wrote them. What they reveal is interesting, not so much for the candidates' views on patriotism which anyone paying the slightest attention to the campaign could recite cold, but for their communication styles and strengths.

The one is scattered, lacking an overarching theme but full of shotgun pellets of solid rhetorical tropes. Arlington. Duty. Service. Worship. Genuine in feeling but uneven in tone. It's more stream of consciousness combined with bullet-pointed list than an essay Emerson would recognize.

The other is polished, dynamic, cohesive, evocative, but ultimately predictable. On the one hand, when your own story is so emblematic of our fondest patriotic views or delusions I can see how resorting to the same line would be irresistible. On the other hand, when the rest of the piece is so fluent and vivid throwing in a recycled line feels cheap no matter how true or apropos it is.

Still, if we were electing presidents based on writing ability there's no question who the winner would be.

One other note, which I think speaks to the genuineness of the candidate as reflected in his words. Yesterday the Supreme Court handed down a decision about the death penalty. His reaction seemed to come in part from being rather familiar with constitutional law and principles of federalism, but driven more by being the father of young girls. As such, I thought it was highly appropriate. I also thought it was quite well-hedged. That mix of specific knowledge, emotion, and careful hedging is what you see pretty consistently in his campaign; sometimes it's good and allows him to tell the truth without massively offending people or committing political suicide, sometimes it's just a bit too slick.

/political nerdiness

Presenting Economonster

Today I presented the Economonster, complete with slides and a picture of Jude Law. No, there was no particular reason to include his picture--it was gratuitous.

People had a gazillion questions, I have no idea how it went, but I'm done. Phew.

In other news: liberal or conservative, few have served this country with the dedication and perseverance of Ted Kennedy. My heart goes out to him and his family.

For A Land Of Immigrants

These stories are sickening.

Are we so weak, that we must add insult to injury? Have we become that insensitive to what is just and decent? 

Ugh. Here, at least, is something fun to watch: polar bears and dogs.

Let That Be A Lesson

It is a spectacularly gorgeous day today. This comic strip seems a most apropos lesson.

In other news: I need to do laundry. And I much prefer doing RA stuff to reading economic-y stuff. Oh well.

Wary, With Questions

This story about the polygamous sect in Texas is quite a drama. Perhaps especially after seeing up close and personal the devastation of having a child ripped from his loving parents' arms, my heart cannot help but go out to the women sitting in the courtroom, praying to get their babies back.

But.

My, what an entwined mess it is. It would be easy enough to separate out all the girls above the age of puberty and cart them off to safety, and there may be ample grounds to do so. But does the abuse end there? Where is the line between religion and sanity? Between religion and a cult? (Yes, I know, some will argue there is no line, but I don't. And even so, no one would sensibly argue that long-underwear in Texas is sane.) And is there a point at which we say a religion goes too far? If so, at what point do we, as a people, gain that authority?

I'm thinking child sacrifice to the gods is right out--Iphigenia would be safe today. Then again, there are oh so many ways to sacrifice a child. And so many ways to harm a child--ways that affect their world view forever. If the father says his religious belief compels him to instill fear in his child, is fear another way of saying respect? Because mainstream society has rejected (mostly) that connection, does that give society the right to sever it for everyone?

Some of these fathers seem to have engaged in activity that would easily be found to be abuse in our courts today. But how far can we extend our outrage over harming innocents? Can we essentially abolish an entire system of belief? Because if you take away the children, you doom the religion.

The mother in me says get those kids out of there now now now, but let them stay with their moms. My experience with, shall we say, over-dedicated disciples of religion says forget it, they better be taken away from the moms, too, because the cult mindset cannot otherwise be overcome. But the skeptic and cynic in me sees these photos of the government invading private property (with or without good cause) and with a heavy hand smashing apart families and, perhaps, an entire religion, and I think, who's next?

Even if we label this group a cult and not a religion, what or who is to stop any given religion or sect from being labeled a cult? Not a one of them is truly rational. The point of religious freedom is not to guarantee the right to worship the same way everyone else does, but the right to worship in your own weird way. That leaves the freedom vulnerable to encroachment when a group that sees itself as a religion is deemed by others to be a cult.

I am wary. Wary of leaving children where they will be hurt, to be sure. Wary too, though, of denying them, one day, the right to worship as they see fit. I do not think that freedom of religion includes in any way the right to harm others. But it is a fragile and difficult freedom. So I am wary.

Paved With Gold

Making this kind of money is undeniably absurd.

All questions of right and wrong, fairness, paternalism, and jealousy aside, one question still remains. Where is all that money coming from? Those are real dollars, and plenty of them. These people aren't (exactly) running a gold mine, or a going concern of any real kind.

Last spring or maybe earlier, someone was explaining the subprime market to me, how these loans were bundled and redivided and sold in bits. It was like throwing a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and mucking about until eventually you were selling pieces of cake--all the same ingredients, transformed. And I asked what happened when the real estate market tanked, or when people couldn't make their loan payments. Because, you see, I couldn't figure out how they could separate the loan from its collateral--a very real house owned by people who may or may not pay their mortgage.

And I was basically laughed at. I was thinking too small, I guess.

So I know that fund managers are paid a percentage of profits, and they're paid fees by their wealthy clients. But those fees and profits? That money is coming from somewhere and going to a private bank account. And even if it's then reinvested, things have shifted and changed. But what? And how, and to where?

How profound of an economic shift is this, and what are its effects? Are these the robber barons of our age? They hardly seem brutal despots--they seem mild-mannered bankers and (dare I say) geeks.

Henry Ford mass-produced cars and became staggeringly rich. Gates and Jobs did the same with computers. The Google guys with, essentially, knowledge. People who gain the wealth of Croesus but give the world something in return, well, that's not too hard to understand. Perhaps it's the difference between fortunes made and fortunes won--the former seem admirable, the latter more questionable, even if the resulting bank balances are roughly equal and astounding. But why?

Knowledge Is Power

So keep an eye on Congress. I stumbled upon this site while doing research for my paper on doing research. Oy. But it's a great little site, much more user-friendly than the government's own sites. Plus, it has pictures! Seriously, when you look up a floor debate it puts pictures by the Senators' speeches--how cool is that?

Who are you calling a dork?

Never Underestimate The Little Guy

I admit it: I find this story mildly hilarious. Come on, like they didn't have it coming!