You Can Throw 'em O'er Your Shoulder Like a Continental Soldier

I have to admit I had never heard of "truck nuts" until Underbelly's military correspondent snuffled out a bill proposing outlaw them (link). Seems fair to me; I believe it is already illegal to wear fuzzy dice in your underwear.

Perhaps we could make an exception for any case in which the offending orbs were those of the truckdriver himself.

Mrs. Dewey

I have no idea what this is about. For my trial search, I typed "Tennessee axehandle parrot." She said she wasn't drunk enough to answer an inquiry like that. I don't know what this guy wants with it either.

I Need a Riff on "The Lyon Sleeps Tonight"

The Venetian hotel in Vegas has a nice little model of the City of Venice (it's not still a republic, is it?). Anyway, I have always wondered--if a hotel in Venice puts up a little model of Las Vegas, will it include a little model of the Venetian, with a little model of the little model?

Now this: (link).

Yglesias Channels Buce!

Also Kleiman (link):

Mark Kleiman's with me that Mitt Romney would make the least-bad president of anyone in the field. Kevin Drum sort of agrees with us ... one thing a smart Republican apparatchik would want in a GOP president would be for that president to do a decent job and undue some of the damage Bush has done to the brand.

... The constant throughout Romney's career is a cautious, paint-by-numbers approach. He's running as a conservative right now, and that means that if he wins he'll govern as a conservative -- no use hoping for him to morph back into the moderate he was in 1994 or 2002. But that said, it seems very unlikely that he'd roll the dice on some hair-brained scheme if elected. He might do major harm, but I think it's relatively unlikely.

The whole piece also has some shrewd comments on McCain, and on Bush "cosnervatism."

And cf. here, here, and here.

Samuel Butler, Blogger

From Chapter 73, The Way of All Flesh:

The literary instinct may be known by a man's keeping a small note-book in his waistcoat pocket, into which he jots down anything that strikes him, or any good thing that he hears said, or a reference to any passage which he thinks will come in useful to him.

H/T: Michael Gilleland.

The Old-Fashioned Way

I used to know a banker who said "I won't lend on anything I can't see from my front window." He's looking mighty good this morning. Here's a snippet from the Citibank conference call, announcing its $9.83 billion loss:

Within our bank cards portfolio, approximately two-thirds of the losses occurred in five states -- California , Florida , Illinois , Arizona and Michigan . And the loss rates on customers with mortgages in those states increased by fourfold versus the loss rates in the rest of the country .... Loss rates in the branch-originated mortgage business remained relatively stable, where face-to-face interaction with customers and long-standing relationships have historically resulted in lower losses. The CitiFinancial real estate mortgage portfolio, for example, is comprised primarily of full documentation, fixed-rate loans with low loan to values.

Via Calculated Risk.

The Lyndon Johnson Corollary: the best fertilizer for a farm is the owner's footsteps walking over it.

Lying in Mortgage Apps: A Restatement

Let me see if I can make a succinct restatement of my point re lying on mortgage applications. I think I meant this: let's stipulate that there are a lot of false statements on mortgage applications. Does this fact in itself mean that debtors are "responsible" for default? It does not. The question of ultimate responsibility a different issue--one that will depend, inter alia, on the principles of the law of misrepresentation.

And here's my point: this issue of "ultimate responsibility" is not a matter of "economics." It is a matter of (for lack of better name) moral philosophy. It may be that a truly hairy-chested economist will demonstrate that all questions of "moral philosophy" resolve themselves into questions of economics. But it hasn't been done yet.

US to China: Now You Worry

I well remember the old canard about the debtor who calls up the bank and says “I’m tired about worrying about how much I owe you; now you worry about it for a while.” Last week, I heard my friend Taxmom kick it to a new level: if you owe enough money to the bank, she said, you own the bank.

Maybe she was channeling this guy:

Eumenes of Cardia was principal secretary to Alexander the Great and a member of his army. As a Greek general n the Macedonian force,Eumenes was regarded with suspicion and contempt. Those who served under him had to respect his martial abilities but this made the Macedonians fear and hate him even more. With the death of Alexander, Eumenes lost his sponsor and his situation suddenly became rather precarious. As Plutarch explained, Eumenes’ response consisted of an unusual hostage strategy. He borrowed as much money as he could, especially from his bitterest rivals. As creditors, Eumenes’ enemies acquired a financial interest in his ability to repay them, something which he could not do if he were dead. As a debtor, Eumenes made reluctant allies out of his creditors. He had, in effect, taken their money hostage.

--Bruce G. Carruthers, City of Capital 3 (Paperback ed. 1999)

I wonder of the managers of China’s foreign investments has read Carruthers (link).

Carruthers quotes the original account in Plutarch:

Eumenes, however, perceiving that, while they despise done another, they feared him and were on the watch for an opportunity to kill him, pretended to be in need of money and got together many talents by borrowing them from those who hated him most, in order that they might put confidence in him and refrain from killing him out of regard for the money they had lent him. The consequence was that the wealth of others was his body-guard, and that, whereas men generally preserve their lives by giving, he alone won safety by receiving.

--Plutarch, Eumenes

Update:From this morning's cull, some useful background.

Shakespeare on Pride

Ever notice how much “pride” figures in Shakespeare? Here is a light selection, out of many possibilities:

King Henry IV: …that title of respect
Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud.

Henry IV Part I, I, iii

Richard II: fair cousin, you debase your princely knee
To make the base earth proud with kissing it:

Richard II. III, iv

Pembroke (of the young Price Arthur): Oh death, made proud with pure and princely beauty.

--King John, IV iii

Oberon: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

--Midsummer Night’s Dream II, i

Cleopatra: What's brave, what's noble,
Let 's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make death proud to take us."

--Antony and Cleopatra, IV,xv

Border-Jumping for Traditionalists

With one ear, I am listening to Joseph Ellis on CSpan2 discuss the relationship between the new United States (in the 18^th Century) and the Indian tribes. Apparently George Washington had a threshold problem in treating with the chiefs: he couldn’t deliver. That is, Washington might have wanted to guarantee the security of Indian lands but meanwhile, his European-Americans were tumbling out into the new frontier and there was nothing, practically speaking, he could do to stop them.

May be excused if I note the beginning of a grand tradition here? Seems like he had the same problem we have/had when we tried to keep 12 million illegals from storming the barricades today. It’s not that we might not want to stop of it—clearly, quite a few Americans do want to stop it. But the inconvenient truth is that we haven’t a clue how to do it.

OK, I guess if you are willing to devote the resources that the Soviets devoted to keeping people in, then you might staunch the flow, at least for a couple of generations, until the dam breaks and the flood comes raging through anyway. But without spotlights, brick walls, electric fences and battalions of sharpshooters, mass (im) (e)migration control is simply not an option, except in the rather short term. And that is the sort of Sovietization the United States has never been willing to accept, and is not willing to accept now. Border jumping is, as they might say, as American as apple pie. Or chili rellenos.

Afterthought: Of course, this may reinforce the notion that we can expect the United State to split up within, say, 50-75 years.

The Dustman Strikes Again

In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens chronicled the life of “the Golden Dustman,” and his monumental heap of garbage. Now this:

Japanese Garbage Datapoints of the Day

The value of indium in Japan's garbage dumps: $833 million
The value of lead in Japan's garbage dumps: $15 billion
The value of silver in Japan's garbage dumps: $30 billion
The value of gold in Japan's garbage dumps: $178 billion
The value of copper in Japan's garbage dumps: $283 billion

The 6,800 tons of gold in Japan's "urban mines" compares to 765 tons in Japan's official reserves; it's more even than the official reserves of Germany and the IMF combined.

HT: Felix Salmon, Portfolio.com: Market Movers, and beyond.

Tyler Cowen is Shocked, Shocked

I see that Tyler Cowen is back to touting his own form of “blame the victim” re the housing meltdown (link):

IT’S NOT JUST THE LENDERS There has been plenty of talk about “predatory lending,” but “predatory borrowing” may have been the bigger problem. As much as 70 percent of recent early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications, according to one recent study. The research was done by BasePoint Analytics, which helps banks and lenders identify fraudulent transactions; the study looked at more than three million loans from 1997 to 2006, with a majority from 2005 to 2006. Applications with misrepresentations were also five times as likely to go into default.

Oh, Tyler, Tyler. I tried to explain this to you before (link). Okay, I grant you could find any number of consumer advocates who do embrace the straw man that you seek to set afire. But that’s economics, that’s advocacy. Grownups know (and have known all along) that the loan market is like any other bazaar—lots of lying on both sides. And if the lenders try to move money with a steam shovel, can they be surprised that they find some borrowers who are happy to scoop it up with a spoon?

Technically speaking, the answer is: no, they cannot complain. To make a case for fraud, you have to prove not just “misrepresentation,” but “reliance.” Granted that a lot of the paper in the loan apps file would look bad in the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction finals. But in spite—no precisely because—of that fact, the lenders cannot seriously claim that they were ever misled. If you hoik up some derelict off the street and tell him that you will fork over $1 million if only he will sign a piece of paper avowing that he knocks back $300 thou a year, why of course he’ll sign. There used to be a doctrine—maybe there still is—that a taker of negotiable warehouse receipt cannot claim to be “in good faith” if he takes from “a tramp or a professor.”

There also used to be as rule that “anyone who meets the definition of ‘good faith’…cannot be a ‘bank.’” But that takes us down a different path.

Footnote on “things we learned” in economics: I pluck my example out of Tyler’s menu of wonders that the economists have (allegedly) conferred upon us. If his other examples are as shaky as this one, I’d say he might want to go back and review his fieldnotes. But I have a particular problem with his final example—you live longer if you get out of a cold climate. As one who grew up in New Hampshire and watched the annual procession of snowbirds (and who eventually got out myself) I do not find this exactly news. But if it is news, it is economics? Tyler cites a study by two guys in an economics department. But does that make it economics? If anything, isn’t it demography, or population studies? Or is Tyler’s point that nothing is true until some economist believes it?

Update: Big Picture is a lot less kind than I am. DeLong has reservations. Paul Beard predicts: "Next up, how patients are to blame for malpractice. . ."

Mark Perry discovers that there are markets in everything.

Chris Matthews: Plays Well With Others

I confess to a guilty pleasure: I like Chris Matthews. Okay granted, somebody must or he would have lost his MSNBC slot. But it’s not that easy to find people who will confess to it publicly. He’s too brash. He’s too loud. He’s insufficiently respectful.

And of course, he’s way to partisan. Or so they say. Indeed he seems to have achieved the kind of partisan hostility so much desired by the mediocre journalist: everybody hates him. Google “Chris Matthews” and “right-wing hack” and you get 694 hits’; substitute “left-wing hack” and you pick up another 280. Of course Googling is not an exact science; some of these hits are just accidents. But it is almost comically easy to find attacks on him from both ends of the spectrum. “Funny that anyone on the right would hate him,” grumbles a commentator at Democratic Underground, “given that he's just another right-wing hack” (link); cf. (link), (link). “Mathews is a left wing hack of the first order!” grumbles a commentator at the Politico (link); cf. (link).

Of course this kind of thing as an easy way out for anybody who isn’t doing his job right; maybe what they hate you for is not your independence, but your sheer incompetence. As I guess, I'd say I’ve made clear, that I don’t think Matthews is “incompetent.” But I’m not sure “independence” captures the right nuance, either. In Matthews’ case, it is more of a jaunty insouciance—a sense that this, too, shall pass, and that lots of things in life do not matter as much as they seem to matter—together with an old-fashioned love of process.

For many in politics, a love of process is an indifference to substance and so itself a kind of philistinism, if not nihilism. But I think it may be—what I think Matthews appears to convey—is that process itself is a kind of substance. For Matthews, a love of process is, inter alia, a love of conviviality, of good food and good booze in good company, friendship in the Epicurean sense. It’s also a recognition that the process of politics is a craft, and that the able practitioners are much to be admired.

His love of conviviality comes through never more clearly than in his enthusiasm for House Speaker Tip O’Neill and President Ronald Reagan. I have to cut Matthews a bit of slack here: I am one of a seeming handful of people on the planet who never found Reagan personally likable (so far as I can tell, Gore Vidal is the only other). But I have to be won over by Mattews’ account of their affection for each other—who can resist the picture of O’Neill at Reagan’s bedside, reciting the 23d Psalm?

Matthews’ love of craft shows through in his admiration for Reagans’ sometimes Chief of Staff, James A. Baker. Baker is, shall we stipulate, a Republican, but he is hardly everybody’s model of a good Republican. Matthews admires him as the ultimate safe pair of hands, the grownup who we hope is in charge when the kindergarteners start throwing their GI Joes at each other. It explains also, I think, his reserve about Barack Obama. Hillary fans believe Matthews has sold out to Barack, but listen closely and you won’t be so sure. I think Matthews likes Barack’s warm-heartedness, and his optimism, and his ability to connect. But I think he sees him as an untested item, not at all demonstrably ready for the hard work of high office.

I think it is a fair cop on Barack. Sadly, I suspect (and I suspect that Matthews suspects) that maybe nobody else is either. Heaven send us a safe pair of hands: somebody who understands that politics ain't easy; that it takes wisdom, foresight, craftiness, empathy and heaven knows how many other qualities always in short supply. Or as Matthews himself might say: Tip O'Neill, where are you when we need you?

Update: I wrote this before I saw this. Well, can't please 'em all.

Department of Nanoseconds

Hooboy, that was fast. Just yesterday, John Kerry endorsed Barack Obama. As the Boston Globe reported, Kerry Bolsters Obama's Fund-Raising Clout.

I'll drink to that. I and at least two of my emal buddies can report receiving money pitches from our new friend Barack, endorsed by our old friend John, just this morning. Now, where is that spam filter button...

John Collier: A Little Happiness on Account

I don’t read John Collier after 4 p.m. But I guess the surprise is that I read him before 4 p.m. I don’t like creepy: never read Lovecraft, or Philip Dick, wouldn’t let a Steven King in the house. Collier is creepy enough that I wouldn’t want him to disrupt a pleasant evening any more than I would a double chocolate chip latte.

Yet for a sunny morning when the blood is up, there is no better way to start the day. In small doses, of course, like other such high-intensity delights. At hand I have the NYRB reprint of Fancies and Goodnights: by my count, there are 50 of them which, accounting for other distractions, ought to enough to keep you going for a couple of months.

[I am also the proud owner of a copy of a screenplay that Collier wrote as a treatment of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Whatever possessed him to undertake this perverse folly is quite beyond me; maybe he needed a new sofa.]

So the appeal is real enough, but I’m also oddly curious to figure out just why it is there: as I say, I don’t like creepy. I assume part of it is just the good writing, but it is good writing in a distinctive context. Consider:

This cloaked double figure, this walking embrace of life and death, this beautiful nightmare under its carapace of cotton cloud, now ran noiselessly, staggering a little, up the light spirals of fretted iron, over the flying bridges, now to be seen rounding some high gallery, now swallowed by darkness, now seen higher, still mounting like a spider, till at last it reached the uppermost corridors, and the sanctuary of the little store-room.*

Okay, I grant this has a bit of the flavor of the copybook about it, but would it help to know that the subject is a department store mannequin, with whom the hero is in love, desperately and beyond all reason, just like the idiot Snopes boy in Faulkner’s The Hamlet who has fallen in love with the cow?

Indeed I’d say this story (“Special Delivery”) is about as representative of Collier stories as you are likely to get. His heroes are often little men with big, if sometimes bizarre, dreams, comical to those who observe, even if tragic to those who suffer. It’s only a mild stretch, channeling Nabokov on Russian literature, that they crawled out from under Gogol’s Overcoat.

Maybe this genre is timeless. But I suspect there is also something about Collier that is very much of a nostalgia trip: they speak loudly to me of period before and just after World War II (it says here that F&G was first published in 1951)—a treacherous and unstable time, full of small men with more imagination than they could easily manage. “After all,” says a character (in “If Youth Knew If Age Could”) “a young man is entitled to a little happiness on account.”

Indeed. A little happiness on account. I ask you, is that to much to desire? Ah, right. Maybe that is exactly what makes them so creepy.

==

*John Collier, “Special Delivery,” in Fancies and Goodnights 233-54, 238 (NYRB Paperback ed. 2003).

In Your Dreams

No, wait, it's real (link).

Who was it who said that you join a political party out of enthusiasm and stay out of embarrassment.

Back On the Coalface In the Classroom

I returned to honest employment today; four units of commercial/bankruptcy, three units of basic finance, to run through May. That's enough to keep the brain drained, especially seeing as how I have to compose and read a finance problem sheet every week. But I am glad to be back. I've been away only since last May but somehow it seems like a thousand years.

Four months of work, then a thousand-year vacation. Yes, that seems about right.

Iranians v. Navy Nukes, and the Boy Who Cried Wolf

The Iranian boat and the US fighting vessel?--Underbelly's military correspondent smelled "Gulf of Tonkin" from the get-go. "Yeah," he snarled in an email that I stamped in at 9:15 a.m. Monday. "Right: you normally play chicken with a destroyer armed with nukes?" I'm not informed enough to contradict him--but comes now the formidable Glenn Greenwald who makes a powerful (if not completely slam-dunk) case that the report was, indeed, a fake (link). Looks to me like Greenwald has the best of it, but consider this possibility: these guys have, at the very least, a real "cry wolf" problem--that is, they've lied so often, and about so much, that we just naturally assume they are lying now.

Remember the BBC in World War II--when they started reporting Allied victories, people believed them because they had conscientiously reported allied defeats.

Most Annoying Ad

Of the current crop, out of tough competition:

Always use payday advances responsibly.

Couldn't they just once say:

Never use payday advances irresponsibly.

For more, go here.

Oh, and By the Way, Speaking of Neckties...

I admit it, I'm an imp. Couple of years ago, I had to buy a proper business suit, charcoal gray, deep stripes, the works. The salesman, quite reasonably, was trying to suss out my taste, when I suggested "you know--something I could wear to an indictment." It flashed into my head that he probably didn't know whether I was kidding or not. Under the circumstances, perhaps best to leave it that way.

Otherwise, I agree 100 percent with this guy.