It’s been quite an odyssey for the Odyssey

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I was browsing in a bookstore. I had gone to the mall for something else (pillowcases, to be exact) and had some extra time to spend wandering, and so I ambled into this particular mall’s only bookstore: B. Dalton, one of the smaller chains.

B. Dalton deals mostly with the sort of “literature” the mall traffic will bear. There was a rather large bunch of teen literature, for instance, and a pretty big cookbook/diet book/weight loss/work on your body/work on your mind section. The store’s fiction area featured mostly very recent works, and was especially heavy with Oprah-esque selections. My guess is that most of the books sold in the store will not be available even five years from now, except as used books

I had a notion to buy a collection of John Updike’s short stories. No dice; B. Dalton only had his latest novel, Terrorists, and nothing else by that author. But since “Updike” is near the end of the alphabet, I found myself standing next to the meager poetry section. I noticed that at least one volume of the collected works of Robert Frost was stocked, as well on several of those “best-loved poems” collections that actually have some decent picks.

And then, a shelf later, there were a few classics. Two shiny fat paperbacks, The Iliad and The Odyssey, stood next to each other.

I wondered how many people who enter B. Dalton actually buy and read these things today. No doubt there are some students who’ve had the works assigned to them. But wouldn’t they be more likely to use Amazon, unlike the strollers and impulse-purchase buyers of B. Dalton’s mall venues?

And yet here the two books sat, expectant and waiting. As they’ve sat for millenia, ever since their composition and/or compilation by an author or authors who may or may not have been a single individual named Homer, around the 9th or 8th century BC.

That’s a long time to be a best seller, although the royalties aren’t coming Homer’s way anymore (not that they ever did). These two books together are considered the very first works of Western literature.

Hero Odysseus’ wanderings only lasted ten years. But they are as nothing compared to the journey these books have taken from nearly three thousand years ago in an ancient Greece that could not quite have imagined our ubiquitous malls and the B. Daltons that fill them, or the myths and mores of the people we’ve become. And yet, somehow, these books still have a place on these shelves, incongruous though they may seem.

So tell me, oh muse:

Muse, speak to me now of that resourceful man
who wandered far and wide after ravaging
the sacred citadel of Troy. He came to see
many people’s cities, where he learned their customs,
while on the sea his spirit suffered many torments,
as he fought to save his life and lead his comrades home.
But though he wanted to, he could not rescue them””
they all died from their own stupidity, the fools.
They feasted on the cattle of Hyperion,
god of the sun””that’s why he snatched away their chance
of getting home someday. So now, daughter of Zeus,
tell us his story, starting anywhere you wish.

Watch out for the new New Deal

The New Neo Posted on by

This WSJ article by economics professors Harold L. Cole and Le E. Ohanian is a good summary of the reasons some have come to feel that FDR’s New Deal actually prolonged the Depression rather than helping the situation. It’s a cautionary tale of government intervention, in which the right sort (to all except strict air market libertarians) mingled with the wrong:

Some New Deal policies certainly benefited the economy by establishing a basic social safety net through Social Security and unemployment benefits, and by stabilizing the financial system through deposit insurance and the Securities Exchange Commission. But others violated the most basic economic principles by suppressing competition, and setting prices and wages in many sectors well above their normal levels. All told, these antimarket policies choked off powerful recovery forces that would have plausibly returned the economy back to trend by the mid-1930s.

Another factor was the growing power of labor to set artificially high wages. This is one of my biggest concerns with Obama. The labor movement most definitely helped elect him, and he owes them something. High wages sound good to workers, of course. But if they are higher than the company can bear, it will go belly-up and wages will become exactly nothing as unemployment soars and drives the economy down further.

This sort of thing is hardly encouraging, either:

Rep. John Campbell, who owned a slew of automobile dealerships before coming to Congress from Southern California, has been told by a senior executive of Toyota’s American operations that if Toyota were not making substantial profits from its SUVs and pickups, it could not continue making the Prius, which it sells at a loss. The federal government, which is in a position to dictate to mendicants, wants Detroit to make more cars like the Prius and fewer profitable vehicles. This is a novel business model.

The Communist countries taught us the dangers of a managed economy. No one (well, almost no one) is suggesting management of that magnitude and scope. But how much—and what type—is too much? And how much—and what type—is just enough?

So long, PJ, and thanks for all the fish

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who follow blogosphere scuttlebutt may already know that Pajamas Media has decided to dump its blogger ads. That means if I want to make up the bit of money I’ve received from that source for the last couple of years, I’ll have to scramble for other ads or pass the PayPal hat.

Some who predicted this long ago are crowing. Some who were getting more money than I from their ads (based on their higher traffic) are grieving or angry.

Me? I expected it. It’s been apparent for a long time that PJ was not getting much ad revenue. It’s also been apparent for a long time that PJ’s original model had changed and that it was relying more and more on a stable of big-name bloggers and their traffic, as well as efforts such as PJTV which were/are of no interest whatsoever to me.

I wrote about my attitude at the beginning of the venture, here. And guess what? I’d say the same today. So I’ll be parsimonious and quote myself:

I don’t think my blog ”“or the blogs of any of us, including its founders”“will live or die by the success of PJ Media. We all define success differently; right now, I consider this blog to have been successful, if not beyond my wildest dreams, then certainly beyond what I considered any realistic expectations. Great readers, and plenty of them”“what more could a person want?

I certainly didn’t go into blogging for the money”“that would have been like going into poetry for the money. I may be economically illiterate, but I’m not financially balmy. I can only speak for myself, but I know why I blog, and I don’t think that reason will ever change. I knew from the start what my niche would be”“what the story was that I felt internally driven to tell.

What is it I needed to say, and why am I so compelled to tell my tale? Well, it just so happens that I once wrote a post on that very topic. So if you want the best answer I can give, see here for more.

[ADDENDUM: For what some of my fellow soon-to-be-former-PJ-bloggers have to say, see this, this, and this.]

It’s a disaster

The New Neo Posted on by

From the beginning of the economic crisis back in the pre-election fall, Barack Obama has been consistent about one thing: rhetoric that maximizes whatever panic and fear might be driving it.

And here he goes again. In naming Joe Biden to head a task force on the middle class and its economic woes, Obama uses his usual inflammatory rhetoric (emphasis mine):

This [recent shrinking of the economy] isn’t just an economic concept. This is a continuing disaster for America’s working families. As worrying as these numbers are, it’s what they mean to the American people that really matters.

There is no doubt we are in difficult economic times. But “disaster?” Obama’s words are certainly not “the only thing we have to fear.” But they cannot help but add to the fear that already exists and is probably helping to drive investment and consumer spending down; they neither reassure or inspire confidence.

Obama is not a dumb man, so I can only conclude that the consistent negativity of his pronouncements is deliberate, meant to provoke a fearful response that gives him carte blanche to do whatever he thinks best. In this he is also like the doctor who gives the patient a poor prognosis, knowing that if the person gets well sooner, it may well be interpreted as due to the doctor’s fabulous intervention.

Doing the ipod shuffle

The New Neo Posted on by

The ipod is a wonderful invention, especially for those of us old enough to remember when the music collection of the typical adolescent consisted of just a few scratchy but beloved vinyl records.

If someone had told me back then that one day I’d be able to carry an entire record collection of many thousands of songs in a slim black gadget weighing just a few ounces, and could effortlessly dial up almost any tune I liked at any time I liked and listen to it through the privacy of earbuds, I’d have been flabbergasted and entranced in equal measure.

But sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Having total control of song selection, being able to hear whatever you choose in the order you wish, can be like having too many chocolates at once.

It used to be that on an album there was a certain ratio of boring ho-hum songs to the socko ones. Using a record player meant you usually had to wait through the bad ones to get to the good ones. This taught a certain amount of patience. Plus, it was often the case that if you listened to the less immediately likable songs enough times, you would come to appreciate qualities in them that were not immediately apparent on the first few listenings. This taught you patience as well, and to keep an open mind.

If you were like me, you sometimes circumvented the whole operation by standing poised at the record player at the end of the song, placing the needle on your favorite over and over till that particular band (or your hand) wore out. Maybe this taught patience, as well, although of a different sort.

With an ipod, every song we select to load is one we like. There are no bummers; every selection is a keeper, or we would not have selected it and kept it.

We can play our favorites over and over almost effortlessly with the mere press of a finger, until they are our favorites no more. We can play our tunes in alphabetical order. We can create playlist after personalized playlist that mix and match the tunes in the ways we deem most agreeable: some for the sad times, some for the happy; some for the contemplative moments, some for the active.

But after a while the steady diet of exactly what we like, exactly what we want, begins to pall. We get—impatient.

Too much richness and predictability can be boring. Human beings like to mix it up. But, wonder of wonders, the ipod folks have anticipated this problem and invented the shuffle, which adds some randomness to the proceedings.

We like to say, “surprise me.” And the ipod does, sometimes giving us old favorites we’d practically forgotten about and never would have chosen for ourselves. And then everything old is new again.

Beware: earworm ahead

The New Neo Posted on by

Read this at your peril. It’s a list of the ten most supposedly earworm-inducing rock songs.

Luckily I’m so out of touch that I don’t know most of them.

I was thinking of listing my ten most earworm inducing songs, but then I thought better of it. Why spread the pain?

Updike and the literary lights on war and peace

The New Neo Posted on by

I first read John Updike’s Vietnam War essay “On Not Being a Dove” in 1989. That’s when his memoir Self-Consciousness, the book in which it was included, was first published.

At the time the essay seemed to me to be a curiosity, a slight work of little import. After all, so many years had passed since the turmoil of the 60s and early 70s, with their fevered and nearly endless arguments about the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War. Updike was a reluctant hawk—or, rather, a non-dove—back then, and he explained why in the essay. But it had no particular resonance for me then, so many years after the fact.

My, the times they have a-changed. On reading the essay now, newly republished in Commentary, I find sentence after sentence to be not only extraordinarily insightful about what was going on back then, but remarkably relevant to what this country has just been through regarding Iraq. Not only that, but Updike’s description of his discomfiture in attempting to explain his more conservative stance on Vietnam to his liberal literati friends contains echoes of my own experiences with political discussions in the last few years.

In looking back from the vantage point of 1989, Updike quotes a letter he wrote in 1966 in response to a NY Times book review:

Anyone not a rigorous pacifist must at least consider the argument that this war, evil as it is, is the lesser of available evils, intended to forestall worse wars. I am not sure that this is true, but I assume that this is the reasoning of those who prosecute it, rather than the maintenance of business prosperity or the President’s crazed stubbornness. I feel in the dove arguments as presented to me too much aesthetic distaste for the President”¦

Updike is writing about the dislike for Johnson. I cannot help but notice that the dislike for another, more recent, Texan president is also at least partly aesthetic in nature (in fact, I compared Bush and Johnson in this respect in an earlier post).

Here is Updike in 1989:

The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world.

There is more; much more. Updike considered himself a liberal Democrat. But his basic intelligence and drive to be honest, both with himself and others, compelled him towards quite different conclusions than most of the people with whom he hobnobbed. And to speak up about it:

I would rather live under Diem (or Ky, or Thieu) than under Ho Chi Minh and his enforcers, and assumed that most South Vietnamese would. Those who would not, let them move North. But the foot traffic, one could not help noticing in these Communist/non-Communist partitions, was South, or West, away from Communism. Why was that? And so on.

I wanted to keep quiet, but could not. Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socioeconomic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of.

Updike’s fame was gained primarily as a writer of fiction; he was neither a politician, historian, nor statesman. In his essay, he asserts that writers’ views on the subject of the Vietnam War have no special authority. That is true. But his depth of thought, and the clarity with which it is expressed, creates its own authority:

My thoughts ran as follows. Peace depends upon the threat of violence. The threat cannot always be idle”¦ It was all very well for civilized little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft evaders, but the United States had nobody to hide behind. Credibility must be maintained. Power is a dirty business, but who ever said it wasn’t?…

The Vietnam war””or any war””is “wrong,” but in the sense that existence itself is wrong. To be alive is to be a killer; and though the Jains try to hide this by wearing gauze masks to avoid inhaling insects, and the antiabortionists by picketing hospitals, and peace activists by lying down in front of ammunition trains, there is really no hiding what every meal we eat juicily demonstrates. Peace is not something we are entitled to but an illusory respite we earn. On both the personal and national level, islands of truce created by balances of terror and potential violence are the best we can hope for.

Updike loved this country and the comfortable and pleasant life he had carved out for himself within it. He never sought to become a pariah within the literary establishment; he wrote that “it pained and embarrassed me to be out of step with my magazine and literary colleagues.” But he could not embrace a position which he believed to be wrong—even if it was wildly unpopular—merely for the sake of convenience.

So, what did Updike think about the Iraq War? After all, he only died a few days ago; he was alive and kicking for most of it. After a quick Googling I was unable to find anything he wrote on the subject, but I think that this is very revealing. It’s a report by a blogger on a talk Updike gave back in 2006, in which he was asked his opinion of the war in Iraq. The questioner made a specific reference to Updike’s earlier views on Vietnam (the interviewer was Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker):

Goldberg points out that John Updike had been one of the few literary figures of the 1960’s to express support for the Vietnam War, and asks him to talk about George Bush and the war in Iraq. Updike accepts the comparison and acknowledges that, as in the 1960’s, his current feelings are mixed: the war is going badly, but the Bush administration faced hard choices and deserves some sympathy for the frustrating position it’s in.

Updike is clearly a principled moderate, and it’s brave of him to insist on ignoring the popular delineations between red-state and blue-state dogmatism”¦

Yes, indeed. Not that it got him much praise, then or now. Last night, for example, as I was watching a Charlie Rose tribute to John Updike that featured a panel composed of Updike’s editor Judith Jones, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and editor Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times Book Review, the latter casually mentioned, amidst the praise and reminiscence, that “of course, Updike was on the wrong side about the Vietnam War.”

Of course. Anybody who’s anybody knows that.

The octuplet mom and her doctors: no doubt she’ll end up with her own reality show

The New Neo Posted on by

The California woman who gave birth to octuplets last Monday is now revealed to be the mother of six other children. What’s more, they are alleged to be living with her and her parents, and not a father in sight—except the grandfather of the (now fourteen) little ones.

Ah, but who are we to judge? Here are two quotes from doctors not directly involved with the case:

Doctors say they advise against higher-order births, but acknowledge the decision is not theirs to make.

“Who am I to say that six is the limit?” said Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, medical director of Fertility Institutes, which has clinics in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York City. “There are people who like to have big families.”

Dr. James Grifo, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the NYU School of Medicine, added: “I don’t think it’s our job to tell them how many babies they’re allowed to have. I am not a policeman for reproduction in the United States. My role is to educate patients.”

I agree with the doctors that they are not the reproductive police. Nor should they force parents who are carrying more than one fetus—even as many as eight, as this woman was—to selectively abort. And don’t get me wrong; I wish the mother, her babies, and in fact all her children (not to mention the grandparents, who probably have a bit of babysitting ahead of them) well.

But although not “police,” doctors make ethical and practical judgments about elective medical treatments all the time (in practice, they even make judgments about life-saving treatments, although they’re supposed to leave that to the patients). To my way of thinking, these two questions should have at least been asked by the doctors: (1) should fertility treatments be given to single parents?; and (2) should fertility treatments be given to people with six children? My answers would have been “yes, under certain circumstances” to question (1) (the circumstances would include age of parent, resources, and emotional health of parent); and “no” to question (2).

We already make similar decisions about whether such parents should be allowed to adopt. And although there are huge differences between the two situations (adoption is about someone else’s biological child, and fertility treatments are about one’s own, albeit with the help of extraordinary measures), the line should be drawn somewhere on both. I’m not a pure libertarian on this issue.

Of course, there is the knotty problem of what number of children a “too-large-for-further-fertility-treatments” family would consist of. Different doctors would draw the line at different points, no doubt. But a line should be drawn, or the doctor is being irresponsible.

It’s not that I don’t have lots of sympathy for people who have trouble conceiving. Hey, I even watch “Jon and Kate Plus 8” on occasion (shh, don’t tell anyone), although I balk at “17 Kids and Counting.” The former family, however, consists of a married couple who had fertility treatments when the only children they had at home were a set of female twins. The latter is another married couple who have had all their children, multiples and singletons, the good old-fashioned way.

The behavior of both of the couples, and their doctors, seem quite defensible. I would never argue that a couple with two children at home should not be helped with having another, or that a couple should be forced to limit the number of its own naturally-conceived biological children, although I could write another article about what I think about their decisions to air their whole families on reality TV.

I can’t help but think that the current octuplet mom has been watching too much TV on The Learning Channel, as have her doctors. How else to explain their decision to help this women have more children? Doctors can set a limit somewhere, as they are supposed to do with cosmetic surgery. There is no absolute right to have either, just because one can afford it.

Of course, the cosmetic surgeons who deal with this man and this woman seem to have the same difficulty just saying “no” to their patients’ requests.

[NOTE: The mother is keeping mum on certain relevant questions, such as whether she had fertility treatments. But since naturally-conceived octuplets are unknown, I think we can safely assume she did.]

Power failures and the financial meltdown

The New Neo Posted on by

The wacky winter weather we’ve been having lately has led to the phenomenon of ice storms and resultant power failures in places such as Arkansas and Texas that seldom see them. As readers of this blog are aware, I had a pretty nasty experience recently with a four-day power failure myself, and so I can relate and commiserate.

The power failures caused by ice storms are understandable: the usual mechanism is that heavy ice weighs down the trees, which fall on the wires and collapse them. The damage can be widespread if the storm covers a wide area. But essentially, it’s a local phenomenon.

The great power blackout of 1965 was a very different animal indeed. I recall it quite well; it involved most of the northeast United States, with twenty-five million losing power in a cascade of events stemming from a single failure in an isolated spot in Canada.

Such a thing wasn’t supposed to be able to happen. But it did:

The cause of the failure was human error that happened days before the blackout, when maintenance personnel incorrectly set a protective relay on one of the transmission lines between the Niagara generating station Sir Adam Beck Station No. 2 in Queenston, Ontario and Southern Ontario. Instead of the relay being set to trip and protect the line if the flow of power exceeded the line’s capacity, it was set for a much lower value.

As was common on a cold November evening, power for heating, lighting and cooking was pushing the electrical system to near its peak capacity, and the transmission lines heading into Southern Ontario were heavily loaded. At 5:16 p.m. Eastern Time a small surge of power coming from Lewiston, New York’s Robert Moses generating plant caused the misset relay to trip at far below the line’s rated capacity, disabling a main power line heading into Southern Ontario. Within seconds, the power that was flowing on the tripped line transferred to the other lines, causing them to become overloaded. Their protective relays, which are designed to protect the line if it became overloaded, tripped, isolating Adam Beck from all of Southern Ontario.

With no place else to go, the excess power from Beck then switched direction and headed east over the interconnected lines into New York State, overloading them as well and isolating the power generated in the Niagara region from the rest of the interconnected grid. The Beck and Moses generators, with no outlet for their power, were automatically shut down to prevent damage. Within five minutes the power distribution system in the northeast was in chaos as the effects of overloads and loss of generating capacity cascaded through the network, breaking it up into “islands”. Plant after plant experienced load imbalances and automatically shut down.

In that power failure and other subsequent ones, the problem was caused by a mechanism designed to protect the system: the interconnectedness of its parts. It may be stretching a metaphor almost to the breaking point, but the current financial crisis that began last fall reminds me a bit of those huge power failures.

How? The problems in the mortgage sector were bound up, bundled, derivatived (is that a word?), tranched, and seeded throughout the entire system. This was supposed to reduce the risk by spreading it around. But in the end it only guaranteed that the infection would affect even banks and institutions that were otherwise solvent. And the interconnectedness of the entire financial world guaranteed that the problem would not be kept to one country.

Was Madoff’s operation a hedge fund?

The New Neo Posted on by

Starting with this comment in a previous thread about Madoff, a discussion ensued about whether the operation he ran that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme could be called a hedge fund.

Here are some definitions of “hedge fund.” It seems to me to be a fairly loose term, and that Madoff’s scheme (at least as presented to investors) would qualify.

Of course, in reality it seems to have been no sort of fund at all, but rather a pure Ponzi scheme—or, as this writer states, a virtual reality game—with some very nasty consequences in the real world.