True Blood Opening

This sequence is so good.



And the singer Jace Everett live on The Tonight Show:



I'm going to have that song stuck in my head forever.

The opening borrows some visual style from Trent. Though the NIN version is a bit more desolate. Just a bit.



He was so skinny back then!

Ernest Gellner - Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion

This book is short and tendentious. It categorizes modern thought into three dominant strains, which you can derive from the title. Religion, in his case, mostly means Islam. I write this with regret, because I enjoy many of his other works.

Unfortunately, he chooses to not seriously engage with poststructuralist thought (and barely engages with modern Islam), and instead chooses to write a polemic against postmodernism. He bases his argument mostly on one book edited by Paul Rabinow, which is essentially the proceedings from a conference, I think. Could you think of a more vulnerable straw man? I don't understand how such a normally rigorous thinker (as in his work on nationalism) can make such a basic philosophical error: that is, confusing a "there exists" with "for all". He also makes a number of startling claims, for example that poststructuralist thought ignores economics (patently false). My only explanation is that he is so disconcerted by the style of the more flamboyant pomos that he is incapable of learning from the others.

I will see his positivist method and raise him a myriad of other knowledge classes. To give just one quotidian example, consider the knowledge required to decide whether or not to cross the street. There can obviously be no Popper-style falsification involved. Yet decisions get made systematically nonetheless. And there are plenty of other fields like this: memory, aesthetic judgment, historical analysis; even within science proper there are divisions between probability based analysis, mechanistic analysis, mathematical model theorizing, and many other methodologies.

His sociological ideas about how these three ways of looking at the world function are more interesting to me, but are made less pleasant by their setting.

Glass House

Slate has a photo essay of Johnson's glass house. I still have not visited it in person, though I would badly like to.

I think Philip Johnson will be remembered as far more than merely an influential impresario (though he was that); his formal accomplishments are greater than is usually admitted (probably because his work was uneven, and he was also totally shameless with adopting the styles of others when it suited him).

Anybody who thinks that the Farnsworth house and the Johnson glass house are anything other than superficially similar simply has not looked at them with any degree of seriousness. They are in fact in many ways diametrically opposed.

(Note this is in no way denigrating to Mies.)

To warp the Clinton campaign slogan, it's the debt, stupid.

Isaiah Berlin - Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

This book, like much of Berlin's work apparently, is an edited collection of lectures. As such, the writing is somewhat uneven: it goes from average and somewhat repetitive for several pages, to absolutely beautiful prose. And every so often, totally out of left field, there will be some amazing insight which you know will stick with you. I keep many of my books because I might want to reference them in the future or reread them. This one, I am sure I will reread.

30 Rock Season One

Decor Warp

Living in a Time Capsule

This is my favorite picture from the slide show. 50s design has some sort of special timeless quality. I think it has aged more gracefully than most.

Niall Furguson - Empire

A more accurate title would be A Defense of British Empire. Furguson, however, does not sugarcoat. He covers, sometimes with gleeful abandon, the many things done in the name of Empire which make us Moderns now cringe. The argument is not that the British Empire was perfect, but that most or all of the time that the alternatives were worse, and that much of what we now take for granted (and, generally, think highly of) would likely have been different but for the Empire. Though intended largely for the general reader, his knowledge of business and financial history make the narrative detailed in ways that popular histories usually are not. I enjoyed this book, and would recommend it.

They Call This a High Savings Rate?

Home Economics

But it also made us a nation of compulsive savers. In 1929, the personal savings rate was about 4.5 percent of disposable income. After World War II, it was more like 7 to 10 percent—until the oldest survivors of the Great Depression began leaving the workforce in the early to mid 1980s. That’s when the savings rate began its long decline, bottoming out in 2005 at just 0.4 percent.

How could 4.5 percent (or even 10 percent) possibly be considered "compulsive" saving? I am continually mystified by my own people. Can't Americans do basic math?

Daily Reads

These are the five sites that I check almost every day:

Real Clear Politics (and its sister sites)
Financial Times
New York Times
Arts & Letters Daily
Financial Post (the biggest Canadian financial paper)

I have found that feed readers are not a practical way to stay abreast of general news and coverage (though I do use Google reader for following the blogs of friends, and a few other sources of which I really don't want to miss a single item). Anything that publishes more than one or two stories per day does not belong in a feed reader, unless your time is worthless (or you enjoy standing in front of fire hoses).

The quality of The Times has declined, but it still has David Brooks and good cultural coverage. The political coverage of the Washington Post is (unsurprisingly) better, so sometimes I stop by there too, though not every day. I have not yet found a Canadian paper or news source that I really like. The Globe and Mail is probably my favorite so far. The National Post (related somehow to the Financial Post) is somewhat like USA Today, though a bit more serious.

The highest quality mainstream journalism is currently coming from the Financial Times. Full access, however, is still not free (and probably will not be as long as many businesses and institutions are willing to pick up the subscription tab).

If you are not familiar with AL Daily, you are in for a pleasant surprise. It is the best source of middlebrow intellectual fare available, and is updated only a small bit every day, and do does not contribute overly much to information overload. Real Clear Politics is similar, though it is less carefully curated. What I would really like is a kind of cross-disciplinary AL Daily-style scholarly digest. More or less a blog of recent influential scholarly papers in all fields, intelligently chosen by a human editor (the same sphere of ideas covered by search engines like Google Scholar). I have not yet found such a site though.

What are your daily reads?

Mark Kingwell - Concrete Reveries

As the title suggests, this is less a sustained argument or a detailed treatment than a series of musings, aimed at the general (but educated) reader, on recent currents in philosophy and critical theory, approached via urban development and architecture. The chapters are adapted from articles published elsewhere, so sometimes the transitions are weak, but that does not harm the overall product.

I love the connection drawn between embodied consciousness and, for lack of a better term, emplacement. That is, just as thoughts are always moderated by existence as a body (with all of its needs and limitations), they are also moderated by where you think them, whether it is a built environment, or an interior that is a property-extension of yourself, or a public space, or something else. Or, to be more concrete, the imaginary public sphere of political science is never actually abstract. It is always somewhere, and at a particular point in time, and this emplacement changes its meaning and its dynamics as an actual functioning system of communication and government.

The infrequent political references are simplistic, declarative shout-outs, essentially preaching to an assumed choir. For example, Rumsfeld is described, without argument, as "a lackey of recent American empire". Whatever you may think about Rumsfeld or the administration to which he belonged, this is foolish. Rumsfeld was a powerful executive (one of the most powerful Secretaries of Defense), with a very clear policy regarding military modernization, which was derailed by the aspects of US foreign policy that could be considered potentially imperial. Kingwell either does not know this, or does not care and is only attempting to score political points with his "base".

Kingwell is also a tremendous name-dropper; for example, all on page 158 of the paperback: Don DeLillo, John Llewelyn, Hegel, Heidegger, Kafka. This is forgivable to some degree since he wants to keep the text uncluttered by footnotes, and generally readable. And all of these are certainly authors worth being familiar with. What is less forgivable is the annoying habit of qualifying and explaining all pop culture references, but assuming that the reader is familiar with all of Twentieth Century philosophy. For example, The Simpsons and Frasier must be explicitly described as "television comedies", but much more arcane authors are dropped in with little commentary. There is nothing wrong with doing all one or all the other, but doing a little bit of both seems to show a confusion regarding the intended audience, or the author's attempt to distance himself from the lower-status works. This is also somewhat amusing, given that he at one point deploys a well-written attack on the heavy exclusionary jargon of academia (this is in keeping with the general theme of borders, thresholds, the definition of the other, and transgression).

There is a bibliographic essay in the back, rather than just a list of references. I love the idea of this, especially for a book aimed at the non-specialist. Almost all books should have something like an annotated "further reading" section. Examples of texts where this is done well are Spivak's Calculus textbook, and Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Unfortunately, this particular bibliographic essay is better in theory than in practice. The biggest problem is that it is really more a set of footnotes without explicit anchors.

However, having registered those two criticism (name dropping gone mad, an unrealized bibliographic essay) I will say that the actual body of work that he is discussing is wonderful, and you could do far worse than immersing yourself in it (if you are interested in twentieth century philosophy and critical theory, that is), and some of his writing is downright gorgeous. Chapter six, The Thought of Limits, was my favorite (see the discussion of porches and terraces).

Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals

Metacritic reviews

I've been meaning to read this for a while. I always enjoy seeing Doris on Charlie Rose.

I really enjoyed this. It would probably be more profitably read along with a more general history of the period, since Goodwin focuses almost exclusively on the interpersonal interactions of the cabinet. This can sometimes make external events seem like they come out of left field, but I suppose that is inherent in the narrative concept.

Recommended, though it is long.

Deficit Humor

The Deficit Blame Game

For some end of the day laughs:

Every time the presidential party turns over, I get the pleasure of watching deficit-hawk Democrats suddenly discover that borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars actually has no moral or economic implications, especially when compared to national health care. Meanwhile, Republican scientists who presumably spent the last eight years locked in a vault in the basement of Heritage run out into the metaphorical street screaming that they have just made a shocking, horrible, and totally unexpected new discovery: budget deficits will make the economy melt down into a pool of manufacturing-depleted sludge, and also, cause rabies.
...
But that's not the point of worrying about the budget deficit. The point of worrying about the budget deficit is to bash your political opponents. Why this works, given the obvious hypocrisy of all parties on this score, is beyond me. But apparently it does, or at least a lot of people think it does, and so we're stuck with the current silly debate over how bad our budget deficits are, and more importantly, who we can blame them on.

A particularly good comment:

Here's how it goes. program X, any program, is scheduled to go from 1 billion to 4 billion. A politician recommends that, instead it only goes to 2 billion. The headlines will read something like: "Senator wifflesniffle calls for 50% cut in Program X."

Also see: plans to "save or create" N jobs.

DeLong Contra Posner

The Chicago School is eclipsed

Derivatives were supposed to assist in risk spreading and diversification. Amateurs and outsiders could take on a position easily, and the professionals who sold it to them could then dynamically hedge it away, and so tap the risk-bearing capacity of the public to a greater degree. It did not work, and it made the books of Wall Street firms opaque even to the most sophisticated of executives. Kenneth Arrow would tell us that stocks, bonds, commodities, puts, and calls alone already carry us as close to a spanning set of securities as we are going to get. The potential diversification benefits of more complicated securities appear to be outweighed by the information they destroy.

And a less dismissive treatment:

How to Understand the Disaster

The discussion over at Baseline Scenario is also interesting.

Fukuyama on Manual Trades

Making Things Work

To be fair, he overstates the drudgery of much knowledge work. For example, there is something of a sense of building things when programming, and you certainly get the feeling of "I did that" when a program is done and working. But not everyone can, or should even want to, be a programmer.

Fukuyama writes:

Crawford asserts that he is not writing a book about public policy. But he has a clear preference for a “progressive republican” order in which the moral ties binding workers to their work or entrepreneurs to their customers are not so readily sacrificed at the altar of efficiency and growth.

Practically speaking, efficiency also has a cost that often goes unrecognized. Resilience and efficiency are almost always inversely related, as the recent fate of many businesses that relied on credit for day to day operation demonstrates clearly. And that is just one example out of many possibilities.

Economic ties, like those between a borrower and a lender, were once underpinned by face-to-face contact and moral community; today’s mortgage broker, by contrast, is a depersonalized cog in a financial machine that actively discourages prudence and judgment.

Somehow, that should be restored.

More on Korea

North Korea Overplays Its Hand

By taking American civilians, North Korea may have crossed a line with the American public. The United States is an individualistic country and little, if anything, impassions Americans more effectively than the personalization of an issue. Strategic threats can be de-prioritized and detached notions of malevolence can be ignored. The thing that resonates with virtually everyone, however, is the individualization of an issue. It may have been inadvertent but North Korea has now attached a human face to its game of brinksmanship; the American public now has a discernable vested interest in the outcome of this developing crisis.
...
To date, the Obama administration’s response has been appropriately measured. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to the North Korean trial verdict was a declaration that U.S. policy is to treat the issue of the journalists as a humanitarian issue distinct from the security issue involving nonproliferation.

"Delinking" is not, however, a policy.

Developments in Korea

North Korea Convicts U.S. Journalists

Sentencing two obviously innocent women to 12 years of hard labor is the way wars are started. No U.S. politician will be able to survive not getting them released, if this catches on as an issue. Military tests can be ignored to some degree as provocation and justifiable sovereign activity, but flagrant violation of nationals is much more difficult to deal with. Abduction of Japanese citizens is the key issue that has kept Japan from any kind of reconciliation with North Korea. The Iranian hostage crisis is what took down Jimmy Carter.

North Korea is playing a very dangerous game now. It is possible that they are planning a quick turnaround in order to secure some concessions (much like Iran did with Roxana Saberi), but given that they have pulled back on almost all of their recent promises, this seems unlikely.

Kissinger, as always, has a thoughtful analysis.

This article adequately lays out the regional dynamics, though the tone is partisan and reckless. The important point is that the Korean peninsula has always been the pivot in North East Asian history, and it remains so as an important buffer between the American sphere of influence and the Chinese sphere of influence.

Increased Censorship in China

China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs

More than 40 million personal computers were sold last year in China, one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Despite the slowing economy, industry analysts expect that figure to rise by 3 percent this year.

Unfortunately, capitalism deals poorly with such legal differentials. I doubt Western computer manufacturers will be courageous enough to pull out. They should though. This is much worse than requiring information providers to censor data (though that is bad too). To argue by analogy: restricting Google is like requiring Ray-Ban to only make purple glasses. Unfortunate, but avoidable. This law is like requiring all sunglasses to be fitted with purple overlays.

As long as Hu remains in power, this will get worse. He is a capable technocrat, but his instinct is to clamp down. On his way to the top, he was Party Chief in Tibet during the late 1980s; that should say something about his governing sensibilities.

Terminator Salvation

Going into this movie, I didn't have very high hopes. Just another summer action movie, right? The first Terminator movie holds a special place in the history of film for the simple concept and now iconic scenes. The second, due to its generally excellent acting, and more complicated ideas about fate and war, is also a classic. The third, unfortunately, was mostly just spectacle and gimmick. (What can we do different this time? How about cast a hot chick as the next model of terminator! Yeah, that will do it!) I expected more of the same from the fourth.

But Salvation surprised me. It is really good. Probably the best popular action movie that I have seen in a long time. In fact, I'm having trouble recalling the last such movie I really liked. Maybe the first Daniel Craig James Bond movie, or The Dark Night (I didn't like the end of that one, but Heath Ledger's Joker saved it).

Why was Salvation so good? First, the plot held together. This is no longer a given in Hollywood movies (see, for example, the recent Star Trek remake). There were not really any ridiculous coincidences that would require huge suspension of disbelief. The acting was excellent, particularly Sam Worthington.

The best part, what really got me, was the camera work. Most movies when faced with a scene that requires lots of movement or action, just cut like mad and blur everything. You can more or less follow what is happening, but have trouble following the exact thread of the narrative. Complicated cutting used to be hard to do, and could result in wonderful montage, but few directors use it that way anymore, particularly in big-budget action movies. But in Salvation, the action cuts are long, following actors almost in the first person, with the voices of other character bleeding in and out of the audio track. My favorite was the scene leaving the Resistance camp.

Further, it quotes heavily from the earlier movies in a very clever way. For example, the scene after the helicopter and the scene with the robot skeleton walking up the factory stairs. I'm sure there were many more that I didn't catch too. And the animated Arnold cameo was great.

Now, for the few bits I didn't like. I'm not the biggest fan of Christian Bale's gruff voice. It irritated me a little in the most recent Batman movie too. But it's not that bad. There is one Resistance military innovation which seems at best orthogonal to the story. And an almost extradiagetic explanatory villain monologue at one point could have been done more elegantly. Overall though, very good.

Happiness

Really interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12brooks.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness