Apes of the Apocalypse

Health care debate

2009-09-19T08:56:00.001-07:00

As a former professor of constitutional law, Obama should know that the plan to transform the healthcare system in this country is a constitutional question, and should be preceded by a constitutional amendment granting government the powers that he seeks. The debate on healthcare should be a debate over a hundred word long amendment rather than competing hundred thousand word long congressional bills.

A Billy Jack moment at the beer summit

2009-07-30T09:12:00.001-07:00

Shilling for the Jackson family Budweiser distributorship is a bit too predictable. Obama should pour some of the Red Stripe in his glass, and then mix it with the "Blue Moon".

If you think about it, a working engine is a much simpler thing than a broken one

2009-03-07T08:06:00.000-08:00

Nobody understood the economy when it was working -- so why should they understand it better when it is broken?

2009-03-07T08:05:00.001-08:00

If the New York Times is right, and what we are seeing is a necessary restructuring of the economy, then the high unemployment rate is indicative of out-sized opportunities. As the economy restructures, talented people are released and are now able to help the visionaries who can see the future.

If we can just silence those creeps who keep whispering about inevitable currency revaluations -- which would require a constitutional amendment anyway -- we can focus on the fact that the United States is the wealthiest country in the world, and capital's favorite haven.

But what if we are selling our sound dollars in exchange for soon-to-be-revalued foreign currencies? Currency revaluations are quite contagious.

New economic policy

2009-03-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

Rather than having the government control the "commanding heights of capitalism", we need to structure things so there aren't any natural monopolies and no commanding heights at all. With interchangeable standards, there could be one hundred thousand different car companies rather than three.

What we need is a strong government with a deep faith in capitalism

2009-03-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

Choose a number -- say $250,000 -- and then let each person convert up to that number from the old currency to the new currency.

There is a mad shuffle, plenty of black market opportunities -- assets switch hands and as many people as possible get the full subsidy.

However, once the currency revaluation is over, you have effectively taxed all wealth over a certain sum. Like a jubilee, but a little less frequent.

With the whiff of a currency revaluation in the air, the prices of real assets skyrocket (because, of course, they are being paid for with soon-to-be-worthless money). That should at least resuscitate the real estate market.

Once money has been reestablished and equitably distributed and the future can be clearly assessed, capitalism will do its magic -- people will organize, et cetera. Foreign countries might be marginally less willing to export to us -- but we have been very forgiving of their currency revaluations, so fairness demands that they should give us at least one pass -- and we will be forced to come up with innovative domestic solutions if they are really such sore losers to boycott us. Win win.

So why is everyone so upset about all the trillions of dollars being spent to "save" the financial system? When we fail, we will need a currency revaluation, anyway.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

2009-03-06T13:37:00.001-08:00

So, 2 days after the assault of political robocalls that were the price of living in Illinois' fifth congressional district during the recent special primary should have ended, I received a robocall telling me "Don't hang up! You've won a fabulous Caribean vaca --". Of course I'm on the don't call list, and this is the very first time I've gotten this blatant a robocall -- it is doubtless because discount firm used by O'Connor, Fritchey or Feigenholtz for their dinner-interrupting harrassments had archived the number to sell other unscrupulous customers. Now -- as a result of their carelessness -- residents of the fifth can expect quasi-illegal phone calls for many months in the future.

Moving from a melting pot to a stew

2009-02-22T09:14:00.001-08:00

It always confuses me when, in Holder's recent speech for example, superficial people decry the social segregation of individuals into like-minded communities by saying that those individuals have incomparable riches to offer one another. I agree with the second sentiment, but those riches are the product of the social segregation that nurtures their unique cultural perspectives, and a project of massive integration would deprive future generations of that wealth.

Frank conversation

2009-02-21T03:04:00.000-08:00

Eric Holder wants us all to have a frank conversation about "race". But the beginning of that frank conversation would explain that most European-Americans have virtually no racial prejudice. They genuinely appreciate Africans, they respect their intelligence, admire their cultures, and appreciate their sense of family. No, their antipathy is is much more deeply rooted than something as superficial as racial prejudice -- they are irritated by African-American culture, and those feelings are vindicated when people like Bill Cosby express the same feelings, and doubly confirmed when their trusted African friends explain that they do not particularly enjoy African-American culture.

But when African-Americans process cultural biases as racial prejudice -- and respond with rage rather than self-examination or dismissal* -- a frank conversation would probably help them work through their issues. But remember, Holder said that we are a "nation of cowards" -- not that white people were cowards -- so maybe he was trying to initiate this helpful conversation in a particularly hamhanded way?

(* Just as an Indian might say, "those stupid Europeans make fun of us for wiping our butts with our hands, but we know they can never get truly clean with their wasteful toilet paper, and they are all walking around with shit on their asses".)

Sorry, John Paulson

2009-02-19T04:59:00.001-08:00

The beauty of Obama bailing out the bottom tranche is a textbook demonstration of why "legal risk" is such a notoriously difficult parameter to put inside a risk model. Trading companies zeroed in on the most outrageous mortgages like heat-seaking missiles, since they had the most edge when they shorted them. However, since bets were clustered in the same place -- the ratio of CDSes to Underlyings on bottom tranche mortgages is something like 7:1 -- so, if it is structured correctly, every dollar Obama gives away to the most obviously unworthy recipients should take away seven dollars from utterly unworthy trading companies. It almost gives one hope.

2009-02-16T15:29:00.000-08:00

In our Utopian totalitarian future, theaters and concert halls will maintain biometric "no buy" lists analogous to the "no-fly" lists kept by the airlines. The under-motivated and highly unionized staff at Orchestra Hall refuse to enforce concert manners at the level of a midwestern movie theater in the 1960s -- but salvation will come when computerized surveillance cameras record all violations of protocol, from unwrapping candy to unanswered cell phones, from grunting along with the music to learning forward in the gallery, and will forbid the transgressors from returning to any of our temples of culture, until they have demonstrated sufficient penance.

In the meantime, until Orchestra Hall rethinks its systematic policy of allowing the few to disrupt the concert-going experience for the many, I suggest you get a good stereo.

2009-02-16T15:24:00.000-08:00

The problem with parenting is that when they are younger, your children literally look up to you, but when they get older, they literally look down on you.

Fulcrum point

2009-02-15T04:26:00.001-08:00

There is a point in an artist's career where he has mastered his craft but has not lost his youthful enthusiasm for his material. This is why an artist's best work usually comes in the middle of his career. In literature and film, fans gravitate toward an artist's best pieces, but theater is ephemeral, and once it is gone the only thing that remains are memories for the audience, regrets from people who missed the show, and reputation for the director.

Sean Graney's production of "The Hairy Ape" is doubly marvelous because the play itself comes the central period of O'Neill's work, and Graney is entering into his own central period.

What if the layoffs are bullish?

2009-02-10T14:51:00.000-08:00

A major chicago institution enjoyed record growth year after year, but during this period, the Tribune carried story after story of mass layoffs at that exchange. I asked a staffer why they kept getting rid of people, with their net employment continually rising, and he explained that layoffs were a golden opportunity to fire pesky and litigous employees, and were necessary in an age of deep pockets and lawsuits. Managers would maintain lists of dispensible people, and -- when the summons for a layoff would come -- they would use the list to fill the quota.

In other words, they practiced a Welchian culling without stigmatizing the bottom ten percent, and since that time, I have viewed news articles about "layoffs" with suspicion. With that said, there is something more happening when the economy sheds a half million jobs. Could it be that companies are positioning themselves to take advantage of Obama's abandoned tax credit for new employees?

2009-02-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

So if we accept the biologo-biblical necessity of septanual cycles -- seven fat years followed by seven lean years -- and we accept that monetary policy has thwarted this fundamental cycle of life in the name of maximizing the return on capital -- then what exactly does Obama mean when he says that our economy will irreversibly slip into a deep depression if we do not act on his stimulus package? Is he saying that, even after seven lean years of poverty, simplicity and contemplation, nobody will be in the mood to dance, ever again? Or is he saying that unless we shoot ourselves up with adreniline the Democrats have a reduced likelihood of retaining their majority in the 2010 mid-term elections?

The difference between crap and art? Just ask Aristotle.

2009-01-31T02:22:00.002-08:00

When suffering is caused by an essential defect in the characters, the absence of that central defect in our own lives is a cause for joy. Individual suffering in the theater drives us towards Maslovian stasis by motivating us to increase our own happiness -- a tale with a sad ending is two thirds of a story, with the final third to be improvised by the audience in their own lives. However, when a "sad ending" is not rooted in the subjectivity of its creator or its characters -- but is represented as a failure of humanity humanity in a neutral and objective way -- the art work fails its Aristotelain cathartic function. It suspends the audience at the two-thirds mark, telling them that the narrative is insoluble.
Which is to say I liked "Batman returns" but hated "The Dark Knight". "Let the right one in" was unsettling in the way that a violation of narrative convention is unsettling. It is both memorable and unsettling to go to the opera and then have someone dump a bucket of pigshit on you, but does that make it art?

2009-01-31T02:22:00.001-08:00

Someone should start a foundation called the "Fuck the Elizabeth Cheney Foundation Foundation", and donate money to any group that is willing to forgo her money.

2009-01-30T12:39:00.000-08:00

The Companhia Triptal shows at the Goodman have been a highlight of several decades of Chicago theater -- it is unlike any show that has ever been seen on a Chicago stage. How does a show like this come into being? For one, they spend time slowly organically growing their productions -- four months of ten hour days developing one hour of theater, while most local productions are lucky to spend one month of six hour days developing three hours of theater. The missing element in Companhia Triptal's formula for excellence -- other than being Brazilian and being Geniuses -- is that they are supported by government grants rather than by ticket sales and dishwater dull utility-maximizing charities.

So the stimulus package has a contested 50M for the NEA, and an eager 14B for the universities. But what is more stimulating than good theater?

It is a truism that our educational system was obsolete by the time Gutenberg invented the printing press -- the purpose of a "lecture" was to have the students copy a text by hand -- and that academics, by maintaining a monopoly of credentials, have installed themselves as a mandarin class. However, their grasping greed in inflating faculty salaries during the last economic expansion should leave them vulnerable during the downturn, and a truly transformational President would let the universities suffocate for lack of oxygen while creating an alternative credentialing system that allies itself more closely with post-medieval technologies.

So imagine a stimulus package that included money for continuing education theater workshops, where -- all over the country -- people were invited to contemplate and discuss the great books, and create pieces of community theater that encapsulate their percieved essences. Wouldn't that workforce be both more motivated and more intelligent and more optimistic about humanity?

2009-01-30T12:38:00.001-08:00

What particularly galls me about the stimulus package is that our period of social transformation and chaos would be an excellent time to rethink the university, but Obama's 14B of Pell Grants shows that the best idea he can come up with is to tax the rest of our society in order to maintain faculty salaries at their current inflated levels.

2009-01-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

An interesting implication of David Brooks' much discussed recent column is that the Ivy league educations favored by our elites have cultivated the sort of self-centered intellectual facility that allowed them to manipulate and destroy the financial system for their own benefit -- and it has the chilling implication that the Harvard-trained brainiacs filling the ranks of the Obama administration are exactly the wrong people to preside over our social and cultural transformation.

2009-01-30T12:04:00.000-08:00

I recently saw a fifty seven minute long play at one of Chicago's great theaters, and the twenty-second minute, a woman got up from her seat, walked in between the forty person audience and the ten people on stage, and left the theater. Five minutes later, without waiting for a break in the one-act play, she returned, once again walking in front of the stage, and back to her seat.

At the point when she returned, a row of college kids who were watching the play started whispering to one another. The couple next to me glared at them, I glared at them, the person behind them glared at them, but they continued their conversation.

I blocked them out and focused on the play, but my attention returned when I heard a scuffling sound, followed by a queeny shriek from one of the college kids, who yelped "You SCRATCHED me, BITCH!" in a high-toned voice.

The kids were quiet for the rest of the performance, and bolted for the door when the lights came up. As we were all gathering ourselves and getting up, I approached the woman who had successfully silenced the kids, and congratulated her that on doing God's work. "I just wish God had spoken to me sooner", was her quotable reply.

Two decades of Chicago theater-going have exposed me to some pretty marvelous examples of audience rudeness -- for example, kids listening to rap on their Ipods while attending the CSO -- but now that the Obama era has officially started, people are using physical violence to enforce social norms. In the Laissez-Faire Bush years, we would have silently endured the kids' misbehavior -- but just in the last week there is enough optimism about the future of our country that people are literally willing to fight for what they believe in.

I'm gonna miss those guys...

2009-01-08T02:53:00.001-08:00

Remember the studies that showed that a person in a room with a photograph of Abraham Lincoln's glowering image was less likely to steal than a person in a room with an empty wall? The idea is that our deep psychological architecture is more likely to behave ethically when we feel we are being observed. Thus, it should not surprise that deeply unethical people (Foucault?) conflate surveillance with punishment. So maybe the Bush administration was watching out for us, by watching us, and we should not be so quick to abandon his utopian vision of an intrusive 24-hour government, watching our internet usage financial transactions, and telephone calls.

Bernie Madoff is not a refutation of this -- he succeeded because of a lack of surveillance rather than a surplus. And, the one unfortunate psychological byproduct of surveillance -- the squelching of creativity and independent thought (*) -- was apparent in excess among his customers.

(*) This, of course, is why certain philosophies of software project management, which look great on paper and seem compellingly logical, often completely destroy all productivity, and why -- even when they work -- dictatorships tend towards a toxic groupthink that dissociates from reality and ultimately collapses.

2008-12-29T05:46:00.001-08:00

If you wend your mind back to the ancient Halcyon days of August, you might remember that the American Newspaper industry was in a tailspin, and people assumed it would collapse within a few years. As a thought-experiment, consider the likelihood that a moderate recession is being spun into a full-fledged depression by negativistic Newspapermen? What kind of logic trusts people in a vanishing industry to report on the state of the country?

Samuelson, Summers, and other made men

2008-12-29T02:36:00.000-08:00

Obama's staffing choices to deal with the current market failure are part of the academic mafia that monopolized economic credentials to prevent the emergence a viable critique of the Efficient Market Hypothesis until quite recently. If you doubt this, check up on Samuelson's war on the Kelley criterion -- it violated his theological precepts, leading to outsized profits for trading companies that eschewed a Harvard pedigree.

Rethinking Universities, Part 2

2008-12-29T02:33:00.001-08:00

And what if the wild inflation of academic salaries were caused by the same expansion of credit that caused the housing bubble? Will the tuition bubble be the next to burst, or will Washington accept outsized professorial compensation as a given, and increase federal programs to subsidize it at current levels?