Shepard Smith has his Howard Beale moment.
I saw it in real time, and it was quite refreshing.
Senator Dodd didn’t write the bonus loopholes…
Or maybe it’s the other way around.
It’s so dreadfully hard to keep it all straight, isn’t it? So it’s totally understandable that Senator Dodd might be a wee bit confused about what he did or didn’t do.
Either way, though, I’d say he’s in deep doodoo:
Dodd just admitted on CNN that he inserted a loophole in the stimulus legislation that allowed million-dollar bonuses to insurance giant AIG to go forward ”“ after previously denying any involvement in writing the controversial provision.
Science does jello
Are you down and blue, and don’t know what to do?
It’s been a while since I last visited the happy world of jello (see my previous posts on the subject under the category “food”). But take heart—it’s jello time again at neo-neocon.
I thought I’d pretty much exhausted the jello archives at Google, searching for jello images to brighten your day. But here’s a new one:
It’s from graphics artist and former computer science professor Paul Heckbert, whose jello-besotted page can be found here. It illustrated a study by Heckbert that appeared in 1987 in Computer Graphics magazine.
Here’s a sample of Heckbert’s instructions on how to create your own jello images in just a few easy lessons, for those of you who care:
To model static Jell-O ® we employ a new synthesis technique wherein attributes are added one at a time using abstract object-oriented classes we call ingredients. Ingredient attributes are combined during a preprocessing pass to accumulate the desired set of material properties (consistency, taste, torsional strength, flame resistance, refractive index, etc.). We use the RLS orthogonal basis (raspberry, lime, and strawberry), from which any type of Jell-O ® can be synthesized [Weller,1985]. Ingredients are propagated through a large 3-D lattice using vectorized pipeline SIMD parallel processing in a systolic array architecture which we call the Jell-O ® Engine. Furthermore, we can compute several lattice points simultaneously. Boundary conditions are imposed along free-form surfaces to control the Jell-O ® shape, and the ingredients are mixed using relaxation and annealing lattice algorithms until the matrix is chilled and ready-to-eat.
Previous researchers have observed that, under certain conditions, Jell-O ® wiggles [Sales, 1966]. We have been able
to simulate these unique and complex Jello-O ® dynamics using spatial deformations [Barr, 1986] and other hairy mathematics….
Somehow I think the above is at least partly tongue-in-cheek. But with computer folk (and jello), it can be hard to tell.
AIG outrage[s] of the day
There’s an awful lot of outrage going around.
The American people are outraged that their hard-earned money has been taken from their pockets and doled out by Congress and the administrations (Bush’s first, and now especially Obama’s) with virtually no oversight as to who gets what, or why.
Congress is outraged at the very people they failed to police, but not of course at themselves or members of their own parties (funny how that works) for that sin of omission.
Obama is outraged at the handouts that he knew about earlier (see this and also this) but failed to be outraged about (got that?). Perhaps he’s really outraged at Geithner for appearing to be a pallid, clueless milquetoast, or at Summers for not sounding outraged enough when Summers pronounced the AIG bonuses “outrageous” but added there was nothing legal to be done to stop them.
Larry Kudlow swallows his outrage long enough to ask this very pertinent question:
Incidentally, has anybody asked Team Obama why it is more than willing to break mortgage contracts with a bankruptcy-judge cram-down, but won’t cram-down compensation agreements for AIG, despite the fact that the U.S. government owns the company? Kind of odd, don’t you think?
Tim Rutten of the LA Times is outraged about the same thing.
Kudlow thinks Geithner cannot survive this. I’m inclined to agree. One of the reasons for my opinion is that I spent a goodly part of last evening visiting a couple of the major blogs on the Left and looking at their comments sections.
The general trend was to blame Geithner and Summers. Hardly a word was said about Obama himself; the sense I got was that the commenters agreed with Maureen Dowd that Obama is being ill-served by his financial appointees (the few he’s made so far, that is; perhaps that’s why he’s been so slow in appointing the rest).
Those who remain Obamaphiles (a dwindling crew, perhaps?) are outraged at the whole situation but so far find it easier to castigate Summers (who was disliked by the Left even before he took the job) and Geithner, who has been a bipartisan public relations disaster, than to point the finger directly at Obama himself.
Obama should have a sign at his desk that says “The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here.” Or perhaps “The Dog Ate My Homework.”
[ADDENDUM: On watching just a few minutes of members of the Congressional committee grilling AIG head Liddy, I’m outraged at the outrage of many of the questioners. Some who are now so very outraged at the relatively piddly $165 million in AIG bonuses want us to forget the trillion-dollar outrage of the pork-laden stimulus package that many of them voted for plus the enormous proposed budget that many of them still support. (Here’s a list of committee members.)
And some of them (the cable networks are very bad at identifying who’s speaking, so it’s difficult to say who’s who at this point) are fuming at Liddy for moves made long before he came out of retirement to try to clean up the mess. This sort of grandstanding and self-aggrandizing puffery is what we’ve come to expect of members of Congress, especially in televised hearings that give them the opportunity to show how tough they are.]
Boomer roomers
We boomers started out in communes, and we may end up in them. Or in their less-trendy cousins, rooming houses.
And here’s a pretty picture:
Boomers will be competing with their children and grandchildren for jobs that in many cases do not pay living wages.
When is a bonus not a bonus?
When it’s a contractual obligation.
Not having a lot of experience in the corporate world myself (my only stint having been a summer job in college) I always thought the word “bonus” meant something extra, a special payment given for merit. Dummy me.
The argument for the AIG bonuses goes something like this: for government to arbitrarily abrogate these contractually obligated bonuses would undermine employees’ confidence in the sanctity of contracts. What’s more, in the case of AIG, it would antagonize—and perhaps cause the resignation of?—the very people AIG needs to sort out the mess.
Well, perhaps, although I’m not totally convinced.
Edward M. Liddy, the new government-appointed head of AIG who can hardly be accused of taking too much taxpayer money (he’s working for the sum total of a dollar a year), thinks so:
We cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff [the company] if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.
I certainly wouldn’t call this “arbitrary;” there seems to be just cause. But then again, not all AIG employees are responsible for this mess. In fact, it is a relatively small percentage, and there should be some way to discover who these people are and stop their bonuses, which would make the decision non-arbitrary. After all, although the general idea of the binding contract is vital to the functioning of our society, individual contracts and their terms, as well as how they might be enforced or abrogated, are the subject of lawsuits all the time.
Such lawsuits tend to be expensive, however, and therein lies the rub. Would it cost more to fight these bonuses than to grant them? But would it be worth it, because failure to stop the payments would be a bad example not only because it would violate our “fundamental values,” as President Obama has declared, but also because it would provide a reward for bad behavior?
Unfortunately, that bad behavior has already been rewarded financially. And it probably will continue to be rewarded, since the article also quotes Pearl Meyer, a “compensation consultant” at Steven Hall & Partners, as saying, “The word on the street is that A.I.G. employees are being heavily recruited.”
And she doesn’t mean by the cops. Let’s just hope that those AIG employees who are so heavily sought after are not the same ones who were responsible for the debacle. But I’m wondering: what Wall Street companies are hiring these days?
[ADDENDUM: Here’s a grisly suggestion. But it would be nice to hear some reasonably calibrated admissions of accountability and remorse from those who messed up so grievously.]
More delicious spam
Every now and then the creativity of the email spammers and phishers brings a smile to may face. Perhaps you’ll agree with me that the following demonstrates a certain flair and, shall we say, audacity:
I will like to start with reminding you that your unclaimed inheritance is still lurking around, up till now I am amazed at the way you have ignored all the notice I have sent out to you.
Upon the receipt of this mail I will want you to reconfirm to me your details and also tell me the reason why you have kept quiet all the while; I do believe you should have a logical answer to that.
Oh dear, oh dear, I better come up with something good.
And then there’s this:
This message will be the last notice that I will be sending out to you.
Is that a promise?
Testing spam filter
Since my spam filter has decided to go nuts today, I’m starting a new thread in order to see whether comments will go through on this one. Comment away!
I’ll begin….
[NOTE: So far it appears that the spam problem is confined to the previous post.]
[ADDENDUM: I think I spruced up the spam filter to make it a bit more forgiving. I hope this will solve some of the problems.]
Those AIG bonuses prove…
…that the law is an ass.
Is there no way for the Obama administration to stop huge amounts of taxpayer money from getting to the very executives responsible (or irresponsible) for making such lousy and self-serving decisions, and bringing us all to this sorry pass? The answer is: apparently not.
This is not just a shot at just the Obama administration, by the way. The bailouts were a bipartisan endeavor, begun—in a great hurry—by the Bush administration in concert with the Democratic-controlled Congress. Haste makes waste, as they say, and there seem to have been a paucity of restrictions on what the companies could actually do with that money.
At the time of the AIG bailout, the crisis was billed as one that had to be acted on immediately or the entire financial system would go down. I have my doubts about that, but who knows?
And who was willing to risk it and see? We don’t have an alternate reality in which to test what would have been the result of delay.
I’ll repeat the very wise words of author Milan Kundera on the impossibility of ever knowing the consequences of having done something different:
There is only one history of the Czechs…
In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not.
Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czech’s country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In countrast to 1618, they opted for caution. Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation’s freedom for many decades or even centuries. What should they have done?
If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to check the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses”¦
The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of all of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe are a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience.
Not to mention the history of America, and of the world. “Mankind’s fateful inexperience.” I love it.
[NOTE: Here’s an explanation for why it might make sense to pay the price—apparently, these AIG hacks may be the only people who can unwind this mess. What a sad state of affairs.
Here’s a comment that’s pretty on-target:
Basically, $100 million is something like 0.1% of the money that’s tied up in these trades. We the people now owe 80% of AIG. Having new folks try to understand the deals and clumsily unwind them will cost us a lot more than 0.1% of their value, so it’s cheaper to just pay the bastards their money and have them do it.
I’m somewhat more attracted to an alternative where we enslave these people for six months and make them unwind the trades for nothing. But that’s neither legal nor feasible…]
[ADDENDUM: Evidence that the Left is far from happy about this state of affairs, as well. And Obama seems to be hearing it—or at least making a show of hearing it.]
[NOTE: My spam filter seems to be overactive today. Bear with me as I try to fix the problem.]
[UPDATE: There doesn’t seem to be any reason these comments aren’t going through properly. My best guess is that it is something about this particular post rather than a generalized problem. Keep trying to post comments, and I will re-post them if they fail to show up, because they are showing up in my spam filter. If the difficulty continues, I’ll have to make some sort of a more general change.]
Is Obama’s bait and switch a surprise?
Clive Crook reflects on Obama’s hard tack to the Left [emphasis mine]:
Mr Obama came to the presidency uniquely equipped to command and retain the confidence of the country—not just his own party. He was elected because he was a hit with centrists…The US wanted to come together and Mr Obama looked the most intent on making that happen.
To a surprising degree, Mr Obama is failing to play to that strength…[H]is budget made no effort to keep centrists on board: it enchanted the left of the Democratic party and might have been calculated to infuriate moderate Republicans. Some of the White House’s recent political stunts…are old-fashioned Washington politics at its worst: polarising, juvenile and unserious.
Mr Obama was supposed to be above all that. This perception was his greatest asset. He has let it depreciate in recent days and the prospects for his ambitious and mostly admirable agenda are diminishing with it.
Shorter Crooks: what we saw is not what we got.
My response: it depends what you think Obama’s agenda was, and is.
The apparent change in Obama should be surprising only to those who failed to look closely at him during the election, and to examine his record. I, along with so many others, was always worried about Obama’s actual plans versus his stated ones, and wrote many posts about what I saw as the large number of troubling signs that he was far more of a Leftist (as well as more hypocritical, misleading, and historically ignorant) than his lofty rhetoric would indicate. This notion didn’t require a perception of him as a Manchurian candidate, just as a politician with a gap unusually vast (even for politicians) between rhetoric and truth.
But still, I preferred to hope that I was wrong, and that his more centrist side was sincere. I was determined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to wait to form a judgment until he started actually doing things.
Now Obama has done quite enough, thank you, to bring me to the reluctant conclusion that the explanation for his behavior is actually rather simple: the old bait and switch.
Obama’s centrism was necessary to get elected. Now that he is president he can shed the mask and try to use the remaining goodwill and trust he garnered during the campaign, as well as the traditional tendency of the American voter to give new presidents a honeymoon, in order to hurriedly advance causes and proposals that are sharply to the Left, and to enlist the hugely Democratic Congress to pass bills codifying them into policy before most of America—or the press—wises up to the game.
Am I wrong about this? It’s always possible, but the evidence has become overwhelming. The tipping point was reached with Obama’s budget proposal, which seemed designed to outspend the Great Society—and swell our debt to gargantuan proportions, as well as “skyrocket” (his words during the campaign) energy costs—at a time when growing the economy and reassuring the markets and the public should have been his focus.
Is the bait and switch working so far, or have there been enough speedbumps along the way to slow the process down in time? Will Obama feel the need to damp down his Leftist ardor in order to reassure the American people and get his bills past the Republicans and their allies among the more moderate Democrats in Congress? Or will Pelosi and Reid succeed in whipping those recalcitrant Democrats into line?
Larry Summers comes by it naturally—or is it nurturally?
I hadn’t previously been aware of these facts about controversial Harvard ex-President and current National Economic Council head Larry Summers:
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, Summers is the son of two economists, Robert Summers and Anita Summers, who are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (sibling of Robert Summers, who, following an older brother’s example, changed the family name from Samuelson to Summers) and Kenneth Arrow (Anita Summers’s brother).
That’s quite a genetic legacy. Not only does he have economic Nobel Laureates who are close relatives on both sides of the family, but these are two of the most influential economists ever. In addition, both are still alive—Arrow at eighty-seven and Samuelson at ninety-three—as his parents also seem to be (from a brief Wiki perusal).
No wonder Summers has a special interest in nature/nurture issues within the rarified heights of the superstars of science.
Obamlet?
Sam Schulman offers an interesting notion of Obama as Hamlet. We differ on certain things; Schulman does not believe Obama to be a radical, whereas I currently strongly favor that interpretation.
But the following sounds about right:
[Obama] is a 20th-century liberal of a very conventional type: incurious, superior, and vain. What is unique about him is what is unique about Hamlet…He deliberately prolonged his youth, avoided responsibility and serious challenges, put his great gifts to work in the tiniest possible ways—all in order to protect his illusions from contact with very much reality. And now, in this particular job, he is up against the real world for the very first time. Obama’s trajectory is Hamlet’s, a youth spent as the recognized, indulged, and inevitable Prince, untrammeled by responsibility or experience.
Let’s just hope it ends better than Shakespeare’s play did.