JayB

Car hipper than a Prius? Surely you jest. Given that the compulsive embrace of irony as a signifier of hippness was extreme and entrenched enough to make large swaths of young-Portland embrace PBR as their beer of choice by 2002, it's possible that anything from Duster's to Firebirds might have displaced the Prius as the Hippest-of-All-Vehicles, but I suspect that there are limits to irono-chic, even for hipsters. Maybe if someone came out with a car that had only one (fixed) gear, the Prius's stature in the hierarchy-o-hipness might be in jeopardy, but until then...

Seems to have struck a nerve, no? Care to explain why? The reason that I'm asking is that it's hard for me to understand why Canadians who are even vaguely familiar with their history (Ypres, Juno, etc [these should ring a bell or two]) would be so easy to provoke with taunts of this kind. I love Canada, and Canadians are great - but I have to confess that I can rarely resist the temptation to engage in a bit of "provoke the Canadian" from time to time, just because it's so damned easy. My personal favorite is giving a quizzical glance when a couple that I run into somewhere outside of that fair country makes it a point to announce that that they're Canadian, at which point I follow the bemused look with the following line - "Canadian?! *Really*?! You just seemed so ...American." Anyone who doubts the persistence of the martial spirit amongst Canadians need only give that routine a try when the opportunity avails itself and they'll quickly be disabused of any such notion!

Unless someone comes up with a way to eliminate greed from human nature, I'd be much happier if legislation enacted in response to this crisis contented itself with devising and strengthening mechanisms to constrain its worst effects in a way that preserves essential rights and liberties instead of attempting to remodel the human psyche. Since most transactions involve a buyer and a seller, one of the most effective ways to combat greed it to put rules in place that use one guy's desire to avoid getting cheated as a check on the other guy's desire to cheat him. Little things like placing the onus for making the buyers of bonds responsible for having a bond issue rated instead of the sellers, and a million other little tweaks to the rules that govern transactions are a very effective way to do so, and constitute a legitimate and essential role for government. This and many other minor tweaks would make it much tougher for the douche with NINJA status to use an uber-douche in NYC as an intermediary to sell a stake in the debt that he used to shoehorn himself into a McMansion to a dupe representing a German pension fund who took one look at the plot of fertility versus pension obligations in Deutschland, slugged down a pentuple dose of prozac with a stein full of Jager, and went on a desperate hunt for yield all over the globe. I'd agree that the ultimate blame for this cluster, while complex, ultimately lies with the people writing the rules and the people lending the money. However - there's plenty of blame to go around, and you'd be remiss if you didn't spare a large helping for everyone you know who borrowed beyond their means to buy a home/car/boat/etc - which I imagine includes quite a few people that you know and like, and no small numbers of your neighbors. At the end of the day - no one forced our personal-debt-to-GDP ratio to $100% (hovered at 30-50% for most of the century, last hit its present level of 100% in 1929) except us. I'd also suggest that this phenomenon is hardly constrained to Americans. Run the metrics on residential properties in Vancouver, BC for example, and I suspect that you'll see home-price-to-gross-household-income metrics that are every bit as bad as most of the worst bubble markets in the US, if not worse. Ditto for large swaths of Europe, NZ, Australia, vacation hotspots around the world, and quite a bit of Asia outside of Japan. I can tell you that the above ratio is currently 3.2 for the US, but sits at 5.7 and 6.2 for NZ and Australia, respectively. Look out below.

Don't have much time to add anything to this thread other than to confess to having just had a moment of head shaking and rapid blinking upon having found myself in broad agreement with many statements put forth by both Tvash and JosephH in a single thread - and to recommend that anyone who has an interest in the bank implosion listen to the "This American Life" episode entitled "Bad Bank" that came out last week. I also think that on a long-term basis we'd be much better off if our policymakers put their emphasis on dramatically improving the rules that govern how all debt is originated and securitized, and spent less time pondering how to fundamentally restructure the mechanisms that govern large swaths of the economy and placing the government at their center as a participant rather than a neutral rule-maker/enforcer. And - while I wish Obama the best and think that it'd be insane to expect him or any other president to have made much headway on a crisis of this magnitude - I do think it's fair to criticize his response in terms of the message that his budget and his policy biases (inasmuch as their evident so far) are sending about the future. Expectations about the future establish economic incentives that have enormous impacts on the decisions that people make in the present. If you are fortunate enough to have capital to invest at this point, and are attempting to decide where to do so, it's hard to imagine that the prospect of the "Employee Free Choice Act" will tip the ledger in America's favor.

almost no taxation, rule of law, it follows from Milton Friedman that this would be a socially liberal paradise right? Oh, wait, it was for tax cheating europeans, Indian criminals and oil money Compared to its neighbors, it certainly looks like one. I think that the argument was that political and economic liberties are mutually reinforcing and the latter can act as an essential check on state power - not that Lubbock Texas and Venice Beach will have the same social attitudes because the citizens there have the same economic rights.

Since we're on the subject of homeopathy, I'm reminded of a joke I heard not long ago: "Did you hear about the guy who OD'd on his homeopathic remedy and died?" "Seriously!? What happened?" "He forgot to take it." DeC: Not sure what angle that you are coming at this from, but what do you think of homeopaths who sell patients homeopathic remedies for malaria prevention (this actually happened in England a year or two ago)? Even if they sincerely believe that their remedy will work, do you think that this belief is defensible on the basis of the best evidence available to us, and/or that their actions are ethical? What would you think of a pharmaceutical company that sold anti-malarial medications which had the same amount of empirical evidence to support their safety and efficacy?

[video:youtube]

"Driven down by debt, Dubai expats give new meaning to long-stay car park For many expatriate workers in Dubai it was the ultimate symbol of their tax-free wealth: a luxurious car that few could have afforded on the money they earned at home. Now, faced with crippling debts as a result of their high living and Dubai’s fading fortunes, many expatriates are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans. Police have found more than 3,000 cars outside Dubai’s international airport in recent months. Most of the cars – four-wheel drives, saloons and “a few” Mercedes – had keys left in the ignition. Some had used-to-the-limit credit cards in the glove box. Others had notes of apology attached to the windscreen. “Every day we find more and more cars,” said one senior airport security official, who did not want to be named. “Christmas was the worst – we found more than two dozen on a single day.” When the market collapsed and the emirate’s once-booming economy started to slow down, many expatriates were left owning several homes and unable to pay the mortgages without credit. “There were a lot of people living the high life, investing in real estate and a lifestyle they couldn’t afford,” one senior banker said. Under Sharia, which prevails in Dubai, the punishment for defaulting on a debt is severe. Bouncing a check, for example, is punishable with jail. Those who flee the emirate are known as skips. The abandoned cars underscore a worrying trend. Five years ago the Emir, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, embarked on an ambitious plan to transform Dubai into a hub for business and tourism. A building boom fuelled double-digit growth, with thousands of Westerners arriving every day, eager to cash in on the emirate’s promise of easy living and wealth. Many Westerners invested in Dubai’s skyrocketing real estate market, buying and reselling homes before building was even complete. But, as the recession took effect, property and financial companies made thousands of workers redundant and banks tightened lending. Construction companies have delayed or cancelled projects and tourism is slowing. There are increasing signs that the foreigners who once flocked to Dubai are leaving. “There is no way of tracking actual numbers, but the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Dubai is emptying out,” said a Western diplomat. International schools are having to be flexible on fees as expatriate parents run out of cash. Louise, a single mother from Britain, said that her son’s school had allowed her to pay a partial fee until she found a new job after her redundancy in December. “According to the headmaster, a lot of people had come into the school saying they had lost their jobs so the school was trying to be a bit more flexible,” she said. Most of the emirate’s banks are not affiliated with British financial institutions, so those who flee do not have to worry about creditors. Their abandoned cars are eventually sold off by the banks at weekly auctions. Those recently advertised include BMWs, Porsches and Mercedes. Simon Goldsmith, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Dubai, said that that there were approximately 100,000 Britons living in Dubai last year. However, the embassy has no way of tracking how many have fled back to the UK. “We’ve heard stories, but when somebody makes that kind of decision, they generally keep it to themselves,” he said. Police have issued warrants against owners of the deserted cars. Those who return risk arrest at the airport." http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/the_gulf/article5663618.ece

It still warrants serious consideration (for you) in light of the fact that in the very states that are either unwilling or unable to hand over the guys that the US wants are quite unlikely to have much formal recognition or consideration for their human rights en route to the airplane? We're not likely to have the luxury of knocking on doors with a "thoroughly vetted" warrant in one hand an a badge in the other in the tribal areas, or anywhere else that terrorists tend to congregate these days. That's in the event that it's us that do the knocking, and not some bought-off local drug-lord's thugs who'll "secure" the guy in exchange for cash and/or weaponry, etc.

I think that there's no question that torturing terrorists in order to secure information that may help spare innocent lives is orders of magnitude more moral than airstrikes that kill both the terrorists and anyone around them. However, it's clear that airstrikes are more palatable to the average persons sensibilities on a number of levels, and it's much better politics to disavow torture loudly while maintaining special exceptions that will come into play in practice when the stakes are high enough, and discretely (as possible) kill as many terrorists as you can with whatever means you have at your disposal in the meantime, while striving to minimize civilian deaths but not letting it paralyze your offense. As conducted under Bush, the political/strategic damage stemming from their approach to these matters ("enhanced interrogations", Guantanamo, etc) probably resulted in more strategic damage than the tactical gains that any info derived from torture/exceptional interrogation, etc generated. Obama is smart change the PR facade while retaining the capacity to engage in much the same practices if necessity forces him to. Ultimately neither airstrikes or torture can ever be considered "moral" in any abstract sense, but we don't live in an ideal world, and morality - in practice - often comes down to choosing the least immoral alternative. Even in cases - as with carpet bombing German cities, or firebombing Japan, which are at least at reprehensible as anything that they could have thrown at us - physical equivalence doesn't render all actors morally equivalent to one another. Neither action made us as bad as the folks that we were fighting who wanted to turn the parts of the world that they controlled into ethnically cleansed totalitarian slave-kingdoms, and if Obama ever exercises the exceptions necessary to engage in "extraordinary interrogations" in order to prevent the likes of Al Queda or one of their franshisees from fulfilling one of their jihad fantasies via the death of as many people as they can kill at once - that certainly won't render us their moral equivalents either.

There's a reference to Appendix M in the Army Field Manual here: More Confusion on Renditions: The Role of Ostensibly Liberal Bloggers Great link. I'd probably disagree with the guy on many things, but it's refreshing to see someone who hasn't changed his tune simply because he likes the new director better than the old one. I suspect that he will incur no small amount of wrath from his erstwhile fellow-travelers for calling them on this one.

Serious question: What about people who approved air-strikes or other military actions in which civilians were killed alongside the intended targets, and knew that this would be unavoidable? Is execution by JDAM or guided missile with no trial or legal safeguards whatsoever, much less of innocent bystanders, not a much graver ethical transgression than water-boarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad et al? Just trying to figure out where and how you draw the line.

Ya, I agree with you to a point. I've read some of that stuff before. I just don't believe the ideology is confined to the Republicans. It follows the power shift. Do you get what I'm saying? You've done an admirable job of calling people on this one, but don't expect much in the way of public concessions of your points, since doing so would require making - at the very least - a tacit admission of the extent to which their previous statements on these matters where driven by political opportunism masquerading as principled opposition.

I am pretty sure that the "extraordinary methods" that you are referring to here would be classified as torture if the standards applied to the Bush administration are applied to the Obama administration with the same rigor. So, if we have a formal set of rules vetted in open daylight that state when, exactly, the president can order that a known terrorist can be tortured in order to extract the necessary information - we're still engaging in torture, no? Finding a way to make it legal suddenly makes it moral? The folks who were cringing and gnashing their teeth over a Koran in the toilet are now suddenly cool with torture as long as there's "a vetted legal and Constitutional basis for the use of any extraordinary methods which in turn would need to be authorized on a case-by-case basis by him personally"? Can't recall anyone saying, "Gee - I'd be totally cool with torture as long as there's a legal framework in place and it's personally approved by the president" when Bush was in office. I'm saying all of this as someone who thinks that Obama has made the right rhetorical, political, and legal moves by closing Guantanamo, etc.

"Beginning in 2002, Nancy Pelosi and other key Democrats (as well as Republicans) on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were thoroughly, and repeatedly, briefed on the CIA's covert antiterror interrogation programs. They did nothing to stop such activities, when they weren't fully sanctioning them. If they now decide the tactics they heard about then amount to abuse, then by their own logic they themselves are complicit. Let's review the history the political class would prefer to forget. According to our sources and media reports we've corroborated, the classified briefings began in the spring of 2002 and dealt with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a high-value al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan. In succeeding months and years, more than 30 Congressional sessions were specifically devoted to the interrogation program and its methods, including waterboarding and other aggressive techniques designed to squeeze intelligence out of hardened detainees like Zubaydah." Etc. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123120464870255997.html

Always impressed by the drive, the perma-stoke, and the positive outlook. Thanks for sharing.

Easy there Baron Von Munchausen - your friend is in no peril, real or imagined, that you need to charge in and save him from. Ditto for any non-existent slight that you feel compelled to rectify on his behalf.

Oh come on now, the hombre doth protest too much methinks. You resemble a man who puts principle above politics about as closely as Mike Ditka in a little black dress resembles Audrey Hepburn. To paraphrase Churchill a bit: we both know what you are, we're just quibbling about the label.

funny - whenever i hear anyone talking about anythign i wish they'd STFU and read "the stranger" Wishing for a CP Snow Quote from the above work, were you? Here you go: "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

The difference is the rule of law or lack thereof. For some of us, that's a pretty big difference. Yes - I'm sure that a McCain administration's decision to continue the use of renditions under the very same set of guidelines would have elicited the very same response heralding the resurrection of the rule of law and all the rest of it. Please.

What was once fodder for uncritical, categorical denunciation now requires elaborate exercises in ethical spectrophotometry, such are the many hues of grey associated with "rendition" these days. "Oh...well...there's rendition and then there's rendition..."

A healthy exposure to the humanities* is necessary for a complete education, but far from sufficient. Whenever I hear lit majors or their equivalents lavishing praise on themselves for their elevated sensibilities, I can't help but wish that they'd read CP Snow's "The Two Cultures." *Personal definition excludes Communications, Media Studies, and a raft of other programs dedicated to vogueish parsings of inconsequential ephemera.

Smart political moves by Obama. It's important to understand the value of appearances.

I'd settle for the elimination of the "credulity" gene. I'll buy a year's subscription to "The Nation," if conclusive proof emerges that Mengele's work work is responsible for any statistically anomalies in the rate of twin-births in this town.

From the "comments" section: "My grandchild (when he starts talking!) will call me Gaia. Gaia is a primordial and chthonic deity in the Ancient Greek pantheon and considered a Mother Goddess or Great Goddess --Wikipedia. It is to me "Mother Earth." I like it, my daughter-in-law likes it and we're all happy! Joal Peugeot Northfield, Illinois" Ack. Yes - even when it comes to grandkids, it's all about you. Jesus. The unspoken tragedy here is that these people will go to their graves never knowing what it's like to love something more than themselves.