¶ Matins: Far be it from me to natter on about the Kurds — the largest ethnic group in the world without a country of its own. Farther still to crow, “I told you so,” as Kathleen reminds me every day that I could. I’m simply relieved to read this (accent on the third paragraph):

The Kurds are resisting, underscoring yet again the depth of ethnic and sectarian divisions here and the difficulty of creating a united Iraq even when overall violence is down. Tension has risen to the point that last week American commanders held a series of emergency meetings with the Iraqi government and Kurdish officials, seeking to head off violence essentially between factions of the Iraqi government.

“It’s the perfect storm against the old festering background,” warned Brig. Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, who oversees Nineveh and Kirkuk Provinces and the Kurdish region.

Worry is so high that the American military has already settled on a policy that may set a precedent, as the United States slowly withdraws to allow Iraqis to settle their own problems. If the Kurds and Iraqi government forces fight, the American military will “step aside,” General Thomas said, rather than “have United States servicemen get killed trying to play peacemaker.”

¶ Tierce: Two pieces about decision-making — on the OpEd page! Let me know if the piece about “Undecideds“ by Sam Wang and Joshua Gold, of Princeton and Penn, tells you something you didn’t know. But don’t miss David Brooks on what he calls “the coming-out party for behavioral economists.”

¶ Sext: Do I really need two computers?* Yes, and Lance Arthur reminds me why.

You can always remove yourself from it by choice, for sure. Go on computer vacation and never check e-mail (unless you have an iPhone) and never get WiFi access in your hotel room and never worry about what’s going on the world at CNN.com or NYTimes.com or the blogs you regularly check or the friends who live — at least partially — online. Frankly, I’ve tried it and it sucks. It’s too much a part of my life now, rather than a peripheral of it. I rely on my computer and the web to be part of my life, and when the familiarity of my own computer is taken away from me, even when it’s replaced by another one, I am left lost and forlorn.

* Two computers that I use every day, with most apps loaded on both.

(more…)

¶ Matins: What I wouldn’t pay to witness an encounter between Joe the Plumber and Joe the Jervis.

¶ Prime: Who knew? New York has five, count ’em five, Main Streets: one per borough! (Can there be but one Wall Street?)

¶ Tierce: Pakistani and Afghan elders are getting together for a jiragai (a “mini” council), to talk over the increased violence in both countries. Right at the start, however, an Afghan official throws a spanner in the works:

Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said last week his government was at the start of a dialogue process, but it would only negotiate with those who lay down arms.

Can anyone tell me the source of this crazy condition, which pops up over and over again when states feel obliged to deal with internal opponents?

¶ Sext: Business as usual: An Army intelligence report notes that terrorists could make use of Twitter. Nobody’s asking why they would want to. Want to be terrorists, that is. Hell, no! What’s the Army without terrorists? (via JMG)

¶ Vespers: Margaret Talbot writes in The New Yorker about recent research into red state/blue state family values. The red state family values — this will come as no surprise to attentive observers — are largely eyewash.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Liechtenstein: There will be a test! You have the weekend to bone up.

Did I say “weekend”? Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

¶ Matins: The only bad thing about Sarah Palin’s $150 K Neiman Marcus wardrobe is that it is not a story. That’s what wardrobes cost for people thrust in the public eye. If Ms Palin were a game show host, her clothes would cost a great deal more. Why are smart, worldly people suddenly pretending to be frugal Yankees, shocked, shocked to discover that Ms Palin wore Cole Haan boots in Bangor? Seal view, play!

¶ Tierce: In what could be a bold stroke for the Information Age — if money doesn’t run out altogether — the MTA will enhance a Brooklyn subway station with computer screens indicating the current location of every train on the L line, which stretches from the old Meatpacking District in Manhattan to Canarsie on Jamaica Bay.

¶ Nones: Leading market indicators suggest that Wall Street is doing fine. Take today’s joke, for example: “What’s the difference between a pigeon and a hedge fund guy?” (Give this a minute, and you’ll see it coming.)

(more…)

¶ Matins: To somebody who loves Les Invasions barbares as much as I do, but wonders what the Gotham equivalent of a lakeside send-off might look like, the story of Marie-Dennett McGill comes as revelation.

¶ Prime: Ah, for the good old days (Mortgage Banking Division):

“We had streakers during the 1990s, but that was a joyful, happy thing,” said Mr. Lucas, who had been coming to such events for 20 years and recalled how a group of inebriated and naked bankers had once entertained the crowd. “But now everyone is blaming us for everything.”

In other developments, a woman tried to arrest Karl Rove for treason. Way to go! Jesse McKinley reports.

¶ Sext: Anne Barnard writes about the welcome that gangsta lit is getting at the city’s public libraries. Whatever gets people to read is fine with me.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Call it Serene Socialism: the Crown Estate, which administers land belonging to the Queen of England, will match investments in deep-water wind turbines.

The decision by the Crown Estate to pay up to half of all pre-construction development costs has brought a huge surge in applications for the latest round of licensing, with almost 100 companies wanting to build wind farms far into the North Sea.

¶ Prime: Comes now Michel McGee, laid-off trader, in Laid off by Lehman. Now that he’s “salt of the earth,” he’s thinking of maybe working at Starbucks, which is a special joke all by itself. (Merci, Édouard)

¶ Tierce: Our current copyright laws create issues that swarm like mayflies at the intersection of politics and property law. What happens when everything that a candidate tells a reporter is copyrighted and, through a narrow reading of the “fair use” doctrine, made unavailable for use by his or her opponent? When — much worse — those remarks remain unknown to everyone who doesn’t buy the reporter’s employer’s product, whatever it might be? Lawrence Lessig opines.

¶ Sext: From Sunday’s Times Magazine (which I never got to), a truly heartwarming story about schooling autistic teenaged boys. Melissa Fay Green reports.

Because the goal of D.I.R./Floortime is the kindling of a student’s curiosity, intelligence, playfulness and energy, the lessons can take on a spontaneous, electric quality. I have seen sessions with young children during which the child and his or her therapist or parent tumbled across the house, behind the sofa, into closets or onto the porch, picking up balls, puppets, costumes, books and snacks along the way. At T.C.S., classes can look like debates between equals; school days can include board games, sports, plays, science experiments, music, art, ropes courses or rafting trips in which all students and teachers playfully compete, contribute and perform. All the boys at the school probably have average or better intelligence. Onlookers might call a few “high functioning” (though that adjective has no clinical meaning), and T.C.S. is an accredited high school and middle school, offering college prep and high-school courses to students able to complete a conventionally rigorous course of study. (Other students pursue less-demanding tracks oriented toward getting a G.E.D., attaining job skills or developing independent-living skills.) So it’s not all fun and social time. But rote learning is never the goal; the goal is that the students should be able to think, to feel, to communicate and to learn. Most of the kids are making the first friends of their lives here.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Can’t make a difference? Do like Luis Soriano, the librarian with “4800 books on ten legs.” At least figure out how to get the man another burro and a few hundred extra books.

¶ Tierce: Best cheeky story in today’s Times: Stephanie Clifford reports on Ivanka Trump’s latest venture, a collaboration with ConAgra in which the entreprenootsie plugs prepared lunches that will last for up to a year in your desk drawer. No refrigeration required! “Office Workers, Ivanka Trump Is Thinking of You.” Yeah, sure.

¶ Sext: Another chapter of the terrible and unnecessary collateral damage of drug-prohibition: Mexican children coarsened by gangland slaughter. Marc Lacey reports.

¶ Compline: Bird & Fortune explain it all to you: Chronicle of the crash foretold:. But people were laughing then, way back in 2007.

(more…)

¶ Matins: “10 Reasons Why Newspapers Won’t Reinvent News.” A very persuasive list, and one worth thinking about because of its core idea: today’s newspapers are keeping tomorrow’s from being born, so the sooner they step aside the better. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Kathleen, who reads the Letters to the Editor if she reads the paper at all, pointed out the following response to the American Dream of “Joe the Plumber”:

To the Editor:

Fair taxation isn’t about “redistributing the wealth” — it’s about giving back to the great country that gave you the opportunity to benefit so greatly.

It’s not about taking money from “Joe the Plumber.” It’s about making sure that “Joe’s Mega-Plumbing Incorporated” gives back to the country and the people who gave him:

¶Roads and bridges for his trucks to roll on.

¶Support for research for his latest plumbing equipment.

¶Public education so he can have a well-trained work force.

¶Markets so he can raise capital.

¶Police and firefighters so his business is protected.

¶Health care so the employees who helped him build his business can stay on the job.

¶Freedom so that he can build his business creatively.

If “Joe” has been able to become wealthy because of the bounty of America, then he should pay his fair share back to America — that is patriotic.

Daryl Altman

Lynbrook, N.Y., Oct. 16, 2008

¶ Sext: One of the best bits in Ghost Town is Kristen Wiig’s turn as a colonscopist. I had not heard of Ms Wiig before, but now I’m not surprised by the comedian’s virtuosic range, from Judy Garland to Suze Orman. (Thanks to Andy Towle)

(more…)

¶ Matins: The other day, writing about The Seagull, I came across a commercial term paper site. I had forgotten that they’re out there. This morning, I see that Jason Kottke set up a poll yesterday about paying for term papers in high school — an option that didn’t exist in my day. What would I have done?

¶ Tierce: In honor of Joe Wurzelbacher and the American Dream, I think it’s best to take a break from the Blogosphere — lest I say anything that I’ll regret.

(more…)

¶ Matins: One of the saddest things that I’ve read in a long time is also one of the most timely: Paul Reyes’s account, in Harper’s, of clearing foreclosed houses for resale. (“Bleak Houses: Digging Through the Ruins of the Mortgage Crisis“) A big part of the job is hauling left-behind possessions to the landfill.

There, among the whines of reversing garbage trucks, the shriek and hiss of brakes, the groaning of horns, Sue’s possessions slid down into a heap, got fluffed, and were carried over the wall to burn, dissolve, and compress, all traces of what she once prized dragged along the sludge and shoved over the edge into an ash pile so tidal in its proportions as to be barely comprehensible. Foreclosures, in their own way, regenerate: one family’s loss is another’s first home. But this was the colossal deposit left behind, and it was growing by the cubic foot, by the ton. Pulling out of the hangar, driving toward the landfill’s exit, we could see the earth movers perched high up on the trash bluff, where their drivers awaited orders to till another layer, to massage that Kilimanjaro of garbage, and where—if they looked away from the incinerator— they would have had a pretty good view of the city from whose ruin that mountain grew, and into whose streets we now descended to fetch the next load.

¶ Lauds: I didn’t get to the end of this link before I had to go to bed, but I stuck with it a lot longer than I ought to have done. A O Scott showcases films that he finds particularly timely, from Wall Street to State of the Union. And beyond, for all I know!

¶ Tierce: The most curious cog in Sarah Palin’s infernal machinery has been her ability to deflect attention away from the overt racism with which many voters respond to Barack Obama. Democrats and progressives are too busy lambasting the Alaskan’s professional inferiority to attend to boneheads like Ricky Thompson, quoted in today’s Times:

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Instead of Brains-Against-Palin, Democrats ought to be supporting a Scripture-for-Obama movement. Has everybody forgotten the political implications of the Gospels?

¶ Vespers: In his column this morning, Thomas L Friedman quoted a book that ought to be required reading for every high-school student, Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:

Money … has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Head scarves for women — in Turkey! How transgressive! But, wait: Does this mean that Orhan Pamuk completely fabricated the head-scarf controversy that kicks off his last novel, Snow? It was translated into English, by the way, four years ago.

¶ Prime: Once again, Kathleen and I will be spending Thanksgiving at a pleasant old place on St Croix. But if it weren’t so far away, I’d prefer to do my beachcoming along the Gill Sands, on that remote and longed-for Indian Island jewel, San Serriffe.

¶ Tierce: I thought that it would be very clever to say that I’m having my head examined today, but I Googled the phrase first, and it led me to the creator of FeedDemon. I don’t know anything about this app, but it looks very useful. Unfortunately, as a head case, I can’t deal with technology today — I’m leaving that to the doctors.

¶ Vespers: Wow! Christopher Buckley has (a) endorsed Barack Obama and (b) resigned from The National Review. (Thanks, evilganome.)

(more…)

¶ Matins: Any lingering doubt that No Child Left Behind was a screw put to public education by arrogant Bushies whose only acquaintance with public schools is via their servants’ children will be quashed by Sam Dillon’s report.

¶ Tierce: The news from Thailand is weirdly familiar: city-dwellers — and not just the people of Bangkok — feel that rural voters are uneducated and ill-informed. They go further, proposing that rural votes be seriously diluted by interest-group appointments to Parliament — something that looks like the old Catholic idea of corporatism. Aside from that, however, it all sounds just like the American polarization of “flyover” areas — the Continental heartland — and the passengers flying from one Coast to the other. Seth Mydans reports.

¶ Nones: Jolly good news: Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. An economist whose Times columns are models of lucidity! Even better: the guy from the University of Chicago, Eugene Fama, didn’t win.

(more…)

¶ Matins: “No sex please; we’re not finished with the story: Joe Jervis of Butterfield, New York, attributes his longevity to virginity. He’s 105 today.”

— What? Oh! Sorry!

¶ Tierce: Looking into my crystal ball, I foresee a wave of circumspect austerity sweeping the affluent areas of the world (or what’s left of them) in the coming years, as the costs of energy and food are moralized into a kind of green vegetarianism. Here’s how it starts: “Pint-Size Eco-Police, Making Parents Proud and Sometimes Crazy,” by Linda Foderaro.

Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

¶ Matins: Regular readers will have learned to sigh when I mention the name of Alan Greenspan. I have certainly felt like something of a crank on the subject of this man’s failure to stanch the market’s foolishness. So I felt rather transfigured by the discovery that I was not alone: witness Peter S Goodman’s “Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy.”  

¶ Prime: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

¶ Tierce: Cook County Sheriff Thomas J Dart has called a halt to foreclosure evictions in Chicago. John Leland reports. In many cases, diligent renters are unaware of a property owner’s default until the marshalls would show up to evict them.

¶ Sext: Nom de Plume sent me the link to a curious video, of unexplained provenance (and 1999 vintage), concerning, straight-faced, the unlikely bond between a crow and a kitten. I watched it in wait for a surprise, but there was none.

¶ Compline: No sex please; we want to live forever: Clara Meadmore, of Perranporth, Cornwall, attributes her longevity to virginity. She’ll be 105 on Saturday.

(more…)

¶ Matins: I wouldn’t have watched last evening’s presidential debate for less than a million dollars. A million dollars, invested in the right Madagascar Triple-A’s, would allow me to hold on to my rent-stabilized apartment for at least eighteen months. Happily, the Times assigned a dozen (!) journalists to the fun job of assessing the truthiness of the candidates’ claims. No need to submit one’s person to all that body English!

¶ Prime: I’ve just seen the instantly infamous “that one” clip, from last night’s debate. Ouch!

¶ Tierce: The press corps in Albany dwindles, with the closing of the Sun, to about forty reporters. That sounds like a lot, though, doesn’t it, to cover a climate notoriously afflicted with political lockjaw. The good old days in Byzantium seem more spontaneous by comparison.  

¶ Sext: Maybe what’s going to save us from the 1929 playbook will be the 1789 playbook! “After bailout, AIG sent executives to the spa.” (Thanks, George.)

(more…)

¶ Matins: Floyd Norris on our current adventure, “The Long Way Down”:

Will this fall be recovered within a week? That is not likely unless someone develops a financial system to replace the fallen one that was based on the fantasy that investors could finance very risky loans, via complicated securitizations, without taking risks.

¶ Tierce: Just my luck: having decided to steer The Daily Blague on a course of secular humanism, I confront a wave of financial disaster that, just to make things irritating as well as inopportune, I’ve been worried about for years. At some point, I knew, some event would act to pull the plug on the warm bath of Greenspansiveness.

I could spend my days writing links to old Portico pages and Daily Blague entries that illustrate my prescience (which was really just common sense), but I think it more sporting to let others demonstrate, if they can, that I was just as deluded, on occasion, as the tycos of Wall Street. I’m too busy, anyway, listening to foreign language lessons on my Nano. Can Teach Yourself Latin — as an audio course — be far off?

¶ Sext: It’s heartening to see Jason Kottke zero in on what’s most important about the coming election. Writing about The New Yorker’s endorsement of Barack Obama in the current issue, Mr Kottke writes,

The key part of the article concerns the candidates’ possible appointments to the Supreme Court and their consequences. A more conservative court scares the shit out of me.

¶ Compline: When I wrote the entry for Sext, I hadn’t read “The Talk of the Town” myself. When I did read it, just now, over dinner, my eyes welled over. As long as an organ of the MSM can turn out a Ciceronian oration of such efficient persuasion, the United States is not altogether broken.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Sam Harris’s Newsweek piece, “When Atheists Attack“ gets to the heart of the Palin phenomenon — and why I call her “The Infernal Machine.” For a Democrat or a Progressive to notice her is to contribute to her magnetism.

¶ Tierce: From the editorial pages of the Times, today’s moving piece by Lawrence Downes on Vets 4 Vets, a network of veterans of the War on Terror (a/k/a Iraq) who get together to talk about what they can’t tell anyone else; and an  Op-Ed piece by Roger Cohen, “Kiplin vs Palin,” datelined yesterday but not to be found in “The Week in Review,” about what we might call Sarah Palin’s larger heedlessness (the lady appears to be rivetedly mindful of her own career).  

¶ Compline: Just what the world needs right about now: the authorized sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Authorized by his heir and great-grand-nephew, Dacre Stoker; he’s going to write it, too. (“Dacre”? What were his parents thinking. He can’t not have been “Dracu” all through school.)

(more…)

¶ Matins: When I read yesterday’s Matins to Kathleen, she sighed and wondered if I wasn’t getting carried away about Alan Greenspan’s role in the credit crunch. For backup, I decided to search for a report of the disagreement that Mr Greenspan had with late Fed Governor Edward Gramlich. 

Gramlich, long worried about the fragility of the housing market, wanted an investigation that would close down predatory mortgage lenders. Here’s what — according to a Wall Street Journal article by Greg Ip, dated 9 June 2007 — Mr Greenspan had to say about that, last summer.

Mr. Greenspan, in an interview, says he doesn’t recall a specific discussion of the idea but confirmed his opposition to it.

There is “a very large number of small institutions, some on the margin of scrupulousness and very hard to detect when they are doing something wrong,” says Mr. Greenspan, who retired in February last year. “For us to go in and audit how they act on their mortgage applications would have been a huge effort, and it’s not clear to me we would have found anything that would have been worthwhile without undermining the desired availability of subprime credits.”

¶ Compline: How neat it would be to see this: “Paul Newman: Broadway to dim lights in actor’s honour”.

(more…)

¶ Matins: “The athlete is on the floor”: listening to Warren Buffett discuss the credit crunch with Charlie Rose. The American economy is a great athlete, but it has suffered cardiac arrest. The only thing to do is to get it back up and running. That will involve convalescence in the form a two-year recession.

I piously wish that everyone in the country could listen to Mr Buffett’s remarks and, wherever necessary, have them explained just as clearly.

¶ Tierce: Brent Staples writes concisely about the flummery surrounding college-entrance exams. Schools aren’t the only institutions whose reliance on test scores is lazy.

¶ Sext: Except for brief and urgent messages, I refuse to have cell phone conversations with people who are driving. Here’s why.

¶ Vespers: David M Herszenhorn files an interesting report about senatorial dissent to the rescue package, “A Curious Coalition Opposed Bailout Bill.”  

(more…)

¶ Matins: Mayor Bloomberg’s third term: an endlessly interesting question that won’t be answered until (a) Mr Bloomberg fails to win the term by one means or another, or (b) long after his third term. Michael Barbaro and David W Chen report.

¶ Tierce: A word about credit:

In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.

A year later, Mishkin was out of business: no workingmen customers. “It” served him wrong, and it’s likely that a similar credit crunch today would have the same impact on ordinary Americans who have never actively invested in anything except a house. (The story was told by Mishkin’s grandson, a former Federal Reserve Board member, to David Leonhardt.)

¶ Sext: Wanting to see what Le Figaro had to say about Belgium’s breakup (the latest on which I read about at Joe.My.God), I came across something far more amusing: Are American writers too ignorant for the Nobel Prize? Horace Lundgren, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel) seems to think so.

(Ha! Now that I read Joe’s update, I understand why there was nothing about Belgium at Figaro to keep from scrolling all the way down to Mr Lundgren.)

¶ Vespers: I have a new crush — and it’s very educational. Sarah Sherborne is the moderating voice on the latest crop of Teach Yourself language courses from Hodder & Stoughton. I felt the first flutter of attraction in Teach Yourself Arabic, but before Teach Yourself Turkish Conversation was halfway through, I was besotted. I’ve now added Chinese, Chinese Conversation, and Dutch to my collection, and I’m longing for Portuguese.

(more…)