Excerpt from Hilary Mantel’s review of the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained in the Jan 24 London Review of Books.
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“…If you hang around the anomalous long enough, you see that most people within its range have an unexpressed but quite sophisticated sense of ambiguity. They go to a ‘psychic fair’ in a spirit of temporary suspension of disbelief: it is as if they had picked up a novel. For a limited time, events unfold around them as a powerful second reality … Two hours pass; they close the book or rise from their seat, they shut down that other world, run out into the high street and go looking for a pizza.
“In Britain, where mainstream religion is dwindling into a mix of apathy and superstition, alternative views are not part of the counter-culture but part of popular culture …
“We are only in the market for fun-size beliefs, unlike the US, where the aggressive fundamentalist irrationality of evangelical Christianity moves real money around, affects how children are educated, and darkens believers’ perceptions of other cultures.
“On the whole, we have the better part:
“Superstition is easier to accommodate in the body politic than religion. It is less divisive: no one ever went to war about what you should chant when you see a magpie, or was burned at the stake for denying the reality of the Loch Ness Monster.”
This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address occur on the same day — an ironic juxtaposition of events:
One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication.
The other involves a groundhog.
(received by e-mail forward, so no attribution is available)
Gordon Brown’s new government set out recently to frame a values statement for England comparable to our Bill of Rights, but the effort soon degenerated into a brainstorm for mottoes or slogans. Of many dippy suggestions, the best we heard was suggested by the Earl of Mar and Kellie, who said the British could use the Scottish motto, “Nemo me impune lacessit,” which he translated from Latin as,
“Do not sit on a thistle.”
Gilbert & Sullivan could have spared them the search (I thought this was from HMS Pinafore but couldn’t find it there):
“Britannia rules the waves but never waives the rules.”
A Republican’s version of economic stimulus is to take a fat wad of bills out of the right-hand pants pocket and shove it into the left-hand pants pocket while drooling.
(If you recognize that last paragraph as a polite euphemism for autoerotic economic stimulation, please don’t tell anybody.)
George Bush’s idea of a rescue package is for Daddy and his friends to save him from military service, bankruptcy, or jail. After all, he’s not some undeserving welfare cheater is he? Is he?
So it’s no surprise that the Republican idea of a stimulus and rescue package would do little to stimulate the economy and nothing to rescue the folks who most need help.
What is surprising is how timidly the congressional Democrats caved in to this twisted distortion of what they had promised to do. No increase in food stamps (Both Bernanke and the Congressional Budget Office liked that idea – real help, and real stimulus). No extension of unemployment insurance. No help for people facing foreclosure or unable to pay skyrocketing fuel and heating bills. No aid for strapped state governments to save people’s jobs and create new ones. No job-creating acceleration of public works projects, desperately needed with or without a recession to repair our decrepit bridges, electrical grids, water and sewer systems.
Just trifling rebates, and most of that to people who don’t really need it and won’t spend any more because of it.
It’s small and bitter consolation, but the result may well be a truly miserable recession which, by November, will stimulate voters to throw Republicans out of office by the reeking, oinking carload.
I would love to credit the following to its rightful author; but it arrived, as so many e-mail forwards do, without attribution. Astonishingly, it was forwarded to us by an unreconstructed conservative named Mike Geraci, who once headed advertising and PR for Rolls Royce North America and thus cannot be dismissed as an inconsequential symbol of disaffection from George Bush.
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For all educators, both in and out of the education asylum:
1. All school football teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.
2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time, even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents.
ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!
3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don’t like football.
4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. This will create a New Age of Sports in which every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals.
If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind.
If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.
Overheard this week from the corridors of power, the perches of predators, and the burrows of silent prey.
Old Timers who saw it coming
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
Upton Sinclair
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“Some great and glorious day the plain folks of this land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
H.L. Mencken
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On judging the candidates by experience
“With all the sniping from the Clinton camp about whether Barack Obama has enough experience to make a strong president, consider another presidential candidate who was far more of a novice … served a single undistinguished term in the House before being hounded back to his district.
“That was Abraham Lincoln…
“Alternatively, look at the five presidents since 1900 with perhaps the most political experience when taking office: William McKinley, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush.”
Nicholas Kristof
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How do you pronounce GOP?
“The GOP presidential field’s lack of demographic diversity by age, gender, ethnicity or even wardrobe, let alone race, is simply the leading indicator of how out of touch its brand has become.”
Frank Rich
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A right-winger’s view of right wing collapse
“All the usual indicators are dismal for Republicans … Nov. 4 could be their most disagreeable day since Nov. 3, 1964. (That’s the day Barry Goldwater carried only four states. – Ed.)
George Will
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Abhorrence of Arabia
“In Abu Dhabi, (Bush) marveled at the royal family’s plans to build a city based entirely upon renewable energy. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ W. said.
“You know you’re in trouble when your Middle East oil pump is greener than you are.”
Maureen Dowd
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The three hundred million amigos
“Far from proving the killer app of 2008, illegal immigration is evaporating as a national cause. In the nearly identical findings of the NYT/CBS News and ABC News/Washington Post polls this month, it ranks near the bottom — the top issue for a mere 4 to 5 percent of voters. The economy (at 20 to 29 percent) leads in both surveys, closely followed by the total of those picking some variant of ‘war’ and ‘Iraq’.”
Frank Rich
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On financiers who spend like drunken sailors:
“Actually, drunken sailors tend to spend their own money. By contemporary standards, they’re quite prudent.”
John Lanchester (London Review of Books)
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Stubbornly repeating past mistakes is one definition of insanity
“Like Ronald Reagan, President Bush began his term in office with big tax cuts for the rich and promises that the benefits would trickle down to the middle class. Like Reagan, he also began his term with an economic slump, then claimed that the recovery from that slump proved the success of his policies.
“And like Reaganomics – but more quickly – Bushonomics has ended in grief.”
Paul Krugman
Ornithologists have discovered that bird brains have a closely integrated complex of two billion motor neurons controlling the bird’s left wing in steering, gliding, and maneuvering.
The right wing, however, is controlled by a mere 38 motor neurons, used only in bullying smaller birds, diving to kill something, or stealing food.
The surprising discovery was made while investigating the reasons why right-wing dominant birds behaved so abominably that only dodo birds, gooney birds, and loons would associate with them.
The disorder has been named Right Wing Syndrome. In humans, its apparent cause is a genetic reversion of certain neuronal clusters to more primitive pathways deep in the reptilian brain. This shuts off normal supplies of stem cells which would otherwise assist in restoring intellectual development. It often leads to repressed homosexuality and, in extreme cases, a catatonic refusal to think at all, which narcissistic victims tend to glorify as religious fervor.
The ornithologists collaborated with a group of MIT neuroscientists who had earlier discovered that conservatives lack the usual complement of mirror neurons in the pre-motor cortex. Mirror neurons provide meta-conscious awareness that gives normal human beings a warning signal when what they’re about to do might appear to others as laughably stupid.
The findings were presented at an NIH symposium in Cleveland on diseases endemic to creationists and Southern Baptists. Though generally well received, they were vehemently disputed by a team from the Joy Buzzer Laboratory at Bob Jones University and by Garland Roy Trotter of the Pat Robertson Institute of Degenerate Science.
“Professor” Trotter asserted that genetics is just a theory and that motors don’t have neurons anyway.
A forward from John Waldron, who has no idea who the original author might be:
ELECTILE DYSFUNCTION - The inability to become aroused by any of the presidential candidates in the 2008 election.
Headline from the Sunday Times:
The Two Paths to Wealth: Earn More, Spend Less
See, that’s why college graduates earn higher incomes. They can grasp powerful but subtle concepts beyond the reach of the commoner.
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Bonuses in the News
Stanley O’Neal steps down as head of Merrill Lynch after leading the company to an $8.4 billion writedown in the fourth quarter and a rumored $15 billion loss still to come. He leaves with a severance package worth $161 million. (Had they spent that to send him packing a year ago, it might have been worth it – to head off the $23 billion mistake.)
Timing, as someone said, is the difference between salad and garbage.
Charles O. Prince III steps down as head of Citigroup after losing $64 billion in the company’s market value. He gets $68 million plus a cash bonus of $12 million and an office, car, and driver for the next five years – no, not a Tata Nano.
And Angelo Mozillo, who wrecked Countrywide Mortgages (and a fair percentage of its home buyer customers and its stockholders) gets to leave with $110 million or so after Bank of America acquired Countrywide’s so-called assets for pennies on the dollar (which is like buying the Iraq war on the cheap because nobody else wants it).
The victims lose their homes. The perpetrators walk away with enough money to save at least 15,000 people from foreclosure (my calculations), but you can bet that’s not what they’ll do with it.
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Why do corporate execs get such lavish pay packages?
Are they much smarter than CEOs of the past? Do they work longer hours?
No, but they hire compensation consultants like Towers Perrin, Marsh & McLennan, Hewitt, or Mercer. If the execs take a shine to the consultants, there are many more millions in consulting contracts — for training, marketing, management, logistics, cost control, etc. So the consultants recommend princely compensation packages to directors on the company’s board. The board can’t be faulted for approving such mighty advice, the executives get fabulously rich, and the consultants get tons of additional business. Everybody wins. Except the shareholders. And the rest of us.
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Robert M. Lawless is a professor of law at the University of Illinois law school. He might have changed his name to Lawful, but that rhymes with awful.
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Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.
The verdict is in on the federal programs now burning up $176 million a year to reduce teen pregnancies by preaching abstinence.
It doesn’t work. Teenage pregnancies are up.
And word on the street is that God said he hates the program and everyone who pushes it – which they do not only in the U.S. but also in other countries, as a condition of foreign aid. If they use condoms, we bomb them.
A new study showed that while President Bush was bragging in 2006 about the decline in teenage pregnancies, they were actually rising by 3% a year after declining during the 1990s, before Bush.
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation disputed the findings and said that blaming Abstinence-only programs was “stupid.” Actually, it’s Mr. Rector who is stupid; but that’s understandable because at the Heritage Foundation you’re paid to be stupid.
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Politicians make lousy economists…
Investment analyst John Mauldin dubs Senators Shumer and Graham as “bipartisan economic illiterates.” The two have been urging the U.S. to insist that China raise the value of the yuan by 30% to reduce our trade deficit. Mauldin points out, first, that the Chinese are already raising the yuan’s value – gradually, to preserve their own banking system – and, meanwhile, the dollar is sliding downwards. By the time a new congress takes office, the 30% will have been achieved without any help from the tough-talking senators.
But that won’t lower the trade deficit. The Canadian dollar has risen much more than 30%, and our trade deficit with Canada has hardly budged.
The only thing that can lower the trade deficit is for U.S. consumers to save more and spend less. Not an appealing solution for a politician, but it may happen anyway if we’re heading into a recession.
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…And so do economists
Alan Greenspan kept lowering rates and flooding the financial system with liquidity, creating the housing bubble, then refused to tighten restrictions on home loans – denying until the bitter end that there was a housing bubble.
If, as a result, Ben Bernanke has to keep lowering the Fed funds rate to save the economy, then another flood of liquidity will set the stage for an outbreak of inflation and/or the next bubble.
I give up. Just tell me where the next bubble will be, and I’ll invest in it.
CNBC has some bright and interesting people; but, with a couple of exceptions, they and their typical guests are prisoners of the Wall Street ethos. They are like railroad firemen reflexively shoveling coal as fast as they can into the boiler of a runaway freight train – a plausible metaphor for 21st century capitalism.
Aside from the skew this gives to their economics, it tends also to warp their perspective. Thursday morning they were discussing a Clinton-era initiative of the early 1990s to expand the possibilities of home ownership in America. A noble and worthy purpose, they lamented, but one which sowed the seeds of today’s collapse in the housing markets.
Breathtaking.
Of course Clinton-era policies could be abused. All policies can be abused. But it was not government that abused the principles of sound credit. Abusers did.
Blaming that on government policy is like blaming the Brinks robbery on government requirements for banks to hold loan reserves.
Nothing in government policy urged no-doc, low-doc, or NINJA loans. Fraudulent mortgage brokers and banks failing to do proper (or any) credit checks gamed the system. Cynical investment bankers bundled these travesties into securitized tranches and seduced fee-loving rating agencies to obtain the eucharistic blessing of AAA ratings. It’s been one of those amazing times when the voracious predators worked themselves into such a feeding frenzy that they devoured each other.
There is one thing the government could realistically have done. It could have prevented some of these excesses with vigilant regulation – which is exactly what the Wall Street Bible and the priestly cult of CNBC hate most.
In Friday’s Times, Floyd Norris observes, “As the mortgage mess grows, we are learning more and more about just how sloppy things were in the mortgage-issuing business as loans were churned out, carved into securities, and sold off.”
He notes that a few judges are now blocking foreclosure proceedings because the would-be repossessors can’t even prove they own the mortgages they’re trying to foreclose on.
And now, he writes, the banks are begging the accounting rule makers to allow them to ignore a standard that has been on the books for almost 15 years — a rule requiring them to report their losses — enacted to correct the deceptive bloating of balance sheets that fueled the Savings & Loan debacle of the late 1980s. Exempt them from that requirement and they can bamboozle their stockholders as well as their borrowers.
But don’t look for this story to emerge from the hosts and guests of CNBC. They’re Wall Streeters. Fish don’t oppose water, and Wall Streeters don’t find fault with banks.
Some outa-towners musta done it.
Government is only one of their scapegoats. They also blame “irresponsible” home buyers – the folks who were talked into believing they could at long last afford to own their own homes.
Of course some of the borrowers were speculators, buying second and third homes and flipping them to sell at higher prices until they got caught when the market topped and the buyers evaporated.
But let’s stick to the typical case where working people are shown the yellow brick road to home ownership by mortgage brokers and bankers looking for the highest possible volume of loans, quality be damned, because they had no intention of adding these loans to their books – they would bundle them off for resale through the investment banks.
Many of them engorged their profits in the process by pushing completely unsuitable high-rate, high-fee loans that they knew could never be repaid but were gloriously lucrative to the banks, lending companies, and commissioned mortgage brokers. The borrowers who now stand to lose their homes will have spent their last dollar fattening up the lenders and brokers with unconscionable fees that go on and on, even after the mortgages slide into default.
And the homeowners are to blame for bursting the housing bubble?
As Norris points out, the banks are now claiming they just don’t have adequate staff or computer systems to comply with accounting rules, but somehow home buyers were supposed to be able to figure it all out on their fingers?
Have you ever met a homeowner who has actually read all the documents he or she signed at a mortgage closing? And if they had, could anyone have translated all that legalistic gibberish well enough to see the pitfalls, the penalties, and the overcharges being shoved down their throats?
Many if not most of the borrowers deserve a reprieve.
And many of the banks and bankers deserve to be foreclosed.
