perfidy

Loyal reader, historian, and smart dude NDR at Rhine River stretches his fiction muscles with this post commemorating the 60th anniversary of the capture of Adolph Hitler.

I enjoy counterfactuals, particularly ones that don't attribute tremendous consequences deriving from ridiculously obscure moments or personalities. Those stories seem more like vehicles for bored historians to advertise their dissertations, or to showcase how narrowly smart they are, than to tell a spiffy story. Gimme a good, "What if Dubya Dubya Two turned out differently" tale over, "What if such-such minor nobleman had married his mistress instead of murdering her" anyday.

I like the Geisel reference, too. I also don't believe that the country falling apart is peculiar, considering it had only existed for such a short time to begin with, and anyway was effectively bisected in our universe anyway following the war. Seems not too hard to imagine postwar pressures between populations being encouraged by the occupying powers, the better to keep "Germany" weak.

Anyway, it's a neat little read.

It is a reassuring thing for the newly re-employed to perform some (to him) absolutely simple, nearly automatic rote task and receive gushing, heartfelt praise for the sterling quality, integrity (nay, authenticity) and aesthetic verve of a 30-page security checklist composed almost solely of repeating table entries with check boxes for yes, no and N/A.

If I can keep this up, my long term employment prospect is looking rosy. Maybe tomorrow I can sweep them off their feet with a nifty template that saves them the trouble of formatting each document from scratch.

When the end comes, no-one can say we didn't warn them.

From deep underground in the safe embrace of the Ministry Bunker and Castratorium I report news that quisling scientists at Cornell have created simple robots that can replicate themselves. Just what we need. It's like giving your teenaged son out the door with $500, a suitcase of beer, a rented Corvette, the number of an escort service, and a .45 loaded with hollowpoints. You just watch what happens, humankind.

(Thanks to boing boing, who are watching the robots too.)

Boing boing also point out a story about an experimental robot that walks on pointe like a ballerina. Expected applications are for people who have lost a leg or both legs, and for modifying humans to fight on equal footing with the robot enemy that will one day walk among us. To defeat them, we must become a little like them.

Over at Begging to Differ, Venkat collects a few musings from around the inter-web on the subject of social security and investor choice, and asks the astute question, "they sound like they have it all figured out. I wonder why these people aren't money managers??"

For instance, Professor Bainbridge (an actual economist) fisks a Los Angeles Times article by Peter Gosselin, saying:

nvesting is really rather simple. You park your money in no-load passively-managed index funds, weighted as heavily to equities as your risk tolerance can take, and then you get on with the rest of life. As Nobelist Clive Granger told Gosselin (not that Gosselin got the point): "I would rather spend my time enjoying my income than bothering about investments," which is exactly what passive investing allows you to do. If you need proof at length, be sure to check out the latest edition of Burton Malkiel's classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

By the by, Gosselin has tapped into (but not really understood) some of the learning on behavioral economics:

Analysts examining the actual behavior of individuals — as opposed to what most economists' theories predict — find that it rarely conforms to standard notions of what's rational. Instead, it often involves systematic mistakes that end up producing the very opposite of what people say they intend.

That's not exactly right, especially the adjective "rarely," but set that aside. As I wrote in a TCS column a while back, Richard Thaler, the leading exponent of the behavioral finance theories Gosselin invokes, has made a telling admission:

Mr. Thaler … concedes that most of his retirement assets are held in index funds, the very industry that Mr. Fama's research helped to launch. And despite his research on market inefficiencies, he also concedes that "it is not easy to beat the market, and most people don't." (Link)

So if personal accounts come down the pike, put your money in passively-managed no-load funds and forget about it. If the Democrats and their MSM allies like Gosselin manage to block personal accounts, put what little discretionary money Uncle Sam leaves you after taxes in passively-managed no-load funds and forget about it. In the long run, you'll come out ahead of the game with a lot less stress.

Well, yeah. Bainbridge is dead right: if you're not a professional investment manager, or if you don't have the time or inclination to keep yourself constantly updated as to what moves to make to optimize your market position, it's best to park your dough where it will do the most good for the least amount of work. Investing is simple... it's just not easy. But t's also easy, per Bainbridge, Galt, and Collier, to sit back and armchair-quarterback other people's best interests. It's even easier to look at, say, GM's pension plan and say "how stupid for them to fund pensions with debt!" Sure, it's clear now that that scheme didn't work out so well for the company or for GM's pensioners, but you know what they say about hindsight. Not that there's nothing to objecting to recent scandals and stories -- it is in fact dumb to invest your pension in the company you work for. But what do you do when, like my father-in-law, the company invests your pension in its own stock, and you don't get a say in that?

So it is that I am brought to wonder about Social Security and what's actually a solid idea. Maybe I'm being unspeakably naive, but I really do wonder have to wonder about these "private accounts" they talk so much of these days. They sound in theory like a decent proposal, but without more information it's not worth deciding whether they are a good idea or a bad one. Kind of like saying "yes, I would like a sandwich," but not knowing whether you're getting shit or salami.

I'm assuming that if private accounts ever get off the ground, the Social Security folks will have to offer a limited and relatively risk-averse basket of intrinsically diversified investment instruments to consumers (i.e., me and you.). But if we are held to investing our SS monies in, say, a limited group of mutual funds or even hybrid instruments containing a yearly adjusting blend of mutual funds and bonds like Vanguard's "Target Retirement" funds, then how much "choice" will we really have? As I see it, that's probably the best outcome for everyone, but it raises tough questions as to who gets to manage that money and how they will get paid. Harvard University recently weathered a controversy during which the money managers for their endowment got gigantic bonuses after a very, very good year. The controversy was over whether it was right for a private institution, whose income is dedicated to the future improvement of the institution only, has a right to pay money managers huge bonuses. On the "no" side, there's what I just said. Universities exist to educate students, and funds need to be carefully and dutifully put to that end. On the "yes" side, there's the very powerful argument that to attract and retain top managers who are more likely to achieve top returns, you have to pay them as well as they'd be paid at Fidelity or Goldman Sachs.

Who will be the government's money managers? Will those contracts be competed for by private firms? Will their fee structures and practices then be regulated by the government, making those contracts into golden handcuffs for the companies that win them? Is it right for the US government to funnel Social Security through private firms?

And what if the government's money managers work for... the government? Not only will we see the Harvard controversy writ in flaming letters ten miles high every time a good year comes around, but when's the last time a government bureaucracy excelled at anything productive? Just what we need... surly underpaid career bureaucrats with bottom-tier MBAs chucking our money into whatever's easiest.

But if we as investors are given more latitude to invest our gubmint pensions, is that better? I have asked, and been assured that, even if everyone in the country puts all the weight of their social security money into index fund account, it isn't enough to skew the market. That's a big market. But what happens if we are given more freedom to invest, and actually use it? In Sweden, every citizen got a telephone book sized pamphlet listing every single investment choice they could ever want for investing their state pensions. That turned out very poorly. If the menu gets too big, and no guidance is given, investors make wildly foolish choices. Even if we were offered a more modest palette of investment choices, what would the effects be of periodic "dumb" investor-driven SS-money gold rushes on small market segments that get a lot of hype? Will the emerging markets securities market and the small-cap widgets market periodically bubble and crash as overeager and underthinking investors move their money around? Not that most people will, probably. But the dim stars could ruin the game for everyone.

Hei Lun of Begging To Differ expects that whatever options we get, it will probably be something like we now get for our 401(k)s - a dozen or two dozen limited options keyed to different horizons and risk aversities. That would be perfect. But again, who will manage that money?

Me, I'm not a money manager because I don't have the quant skills, and because I spend too much time wringing my hands over naive questions like I've just posed. But naive as they are, I would really like to see them answered before I throw my support behind the President's, or anyone's, plan to overhaul Social Security.

One more thing. Some critics see the President's proposal to means-test Social Security payments as an attempt to frame Social Security as welfare. I hope that doesn't happen, and I really hope that pensions and welfare don't become conflated in people's minds. We're a rich country, and as I see it there's nothing wrong to lending a hand to old people who have worked all their lives and have nothing (or very little) to show for it.

I hope you all subscribe to the Atlantic, which is still the best magazine in the USA (with the possible exception of Cook's Illustrated, but that's not quite as general interest, y'see.). If you do, you can access this link. In the most recent issue of the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens reviews a new biography of John Brown that argues that Brown was more important than previously thought in the struggle for abolition. Rather than being a crazy outlier, he and his band of dedicated fanatics were the ones who convinced the South that not all Yankees were effete jellyfish unwilling to fight for their principles. An interesting and intriguing thesis, but one I will need to read the book (soon!) to really pass judgement on.

But the internet being the internet, opportunities for greater things abound. The Atlantic was founded as a Progressive magazine in the Antebellum era and as a consequence have a rich trove of important and groundbreaking stories to share. (If you didn't know, Julia Ward Howe first published the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in its pages.) What the Atlantic have done is to tie Hitchens' review of the John Brown biography to several pieces published in the magazine over the past 150 years, giving us sort of a capsule Atlantic-style historiography of John Brown's legacy.

The Atlantic helpfully supply links to two articles from their 1872 issues by Franklin Sanborn, a Massachusetts businessman who was one of a half dozen secret financiers of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. From 1879 come three interviews of Brown by William Addison Phillip, who met Brown in Kansas in the 1850s. Finally, from 1922 comes Gamaliel Bradford's piece, "John Brown," which attempted to cut through the myth and expose the man there behind. Taken together, subscribers can get a detailed view of how John Brown's legend and legacy has been preserved in the pages of one of the country's oldest and most staunchly progressive (in the old, good sense) magazines.

This is what the internet is for. Holy crap.

The Ministry's inboxes have been flooded recently with missives bearing anguished cries from our many readers. "Why," they ask, "has the Ministry scaled back on its unusually penetrating and insightful coverage of the current political scene? Where else can we go?"

It is time for a reply. For my part, the decline in politically themed posting stems mainly from the fact that, though I am to a certain degree wonkishly interested in policy and politics, I am more interested in sharing embarrassing stories from my past, interesting food or beverage experiences, and random musings on topics that actually have very little bearing on whether we all live or die. It's not just that Politics:Blogs::Keith Richards:Heroin, though that's a part of it. There are plenty of top-shelf bloggers out there reading bills, parsing doubletalk, and watching out for our collective asses. Obsidian Wings, John Cole of Balloon Juice, and the staff of Reason's Hit and Run are three such shining exemplars.

But - and let's be frank - politics is done to death. As anyone can see from reading the archives at Little Green Footballs, it is difficult to stare day after day into the abyss and retain a sense of scope. Every new dawn brings a fresh raft of stunning outrages-- which ones are for real? Which ones are not worth fretting over? It quickly becomes hard to tell.

For instance. Should I be concerned that Congress tacked legislation creating a national ID program onto an appropriations bill regarding money for the war in Iraq? Orin Kerr of the Voloks says "yes, but not too much." So why do I get the creeping horrors at the mention of Senator Sensenbrenner's name?

Should I be worried about Social Security? Alex Taborrok says "Yes!!!". Indeed, private companies can bail out on their pension schemes if they can't pay them, trusting that the Feds will pick up much of the tab. If the Feds can't pick up their tab, who do they bail to?

Should I be outraged that the NIH used foster children as guinea pigs for experimental AIDS drugs in the 1980s and 1990s? There are apparently glaring irregularities in how subjects were selected, monitored, informed, and tracked. Ah, but maybe it saved lives! Why does this remind me of Kazuo Isiguro's latest novel?

Should I care that Congress recently upped mandatory minimums for drug offenses, tacking on special extras if a crime was committed within a city block of a gun? Or if one of the perpetrators was thinking about guns? (Check this out, and see if you can spot the giant pit of stupid:)

"Mr. Forbes argued that critics who say jail time only turns juvenile offenders into hardened criminals overlooked the potential for keeping them behind bars when they are most likely to commit crimes. "The crime-probability ages are 15- to 24-year-olds," he said, "and if you take the person off the streets for that period then the statistics go enormously away in terms of perpetrating additional crimes."

I just don't know what to think any more, so I'm resorting to blogging about food, music, and the occasional footwear. Perhaps Minister Buckethead can take up the political side of things, and at least give me a wall to bounce my objections off of. That doesn't hurt when I do that, does it dude?

Before me on the marble slab that keeps our remote controls and magazines off the floor is a mug of liquid. Darkly roiling currents well up from deep within, disturbing the tranquility of a surface lightly stippled with irridescing dots of oils. It is a cup of decaffeinated coffee.

But Johno!?, you might ask in wonder? What happened to the solemn vows? What happened to the blood-oaths? What happened to the co-founder and manager of the coffeeshop that has so far given the Starbucks' empire a measurable fraction of its up-and-coming management team? Remember when you said that through your veins coursed the brown tears of the Bean? Remember that time in college you stayed up for eleven straight days, aided by your best friend and boon companion, coffee?

Yeah, so what? Somewhere along the way I turned thirty, the coffee in my veins turned to water, and I discovered that staying up all night at eighteen is a far cry from staying up all night at thirty, like running a mile is a far cry from running a mile with broken kneecaps. So, these days I tend to turn my penchant for stimulantary gourmandizing toward the heady and beguiling world of teas. There is an even bigger world of experience to discover, from the most plebian Assam blend to the most exotic monkey-picked Chinese oolong. Tea has some ancillary health benefits that I am only on the verge of imagining, my hands no longer shake, and when I sweat I no longer smell like I've bathed in gallons of Maxwell House.

So, decaf. Not all the time, not every day, but: decaf. When I want coffee but don't want the jitters: decaf. And sometime's it's just fine.

As we all know, decaffienated coffee is usually a sick joke. Coffee such as comes from diners, coffee carts, downscale restaurants and donut shops (including the mistakenly vaunted though perfectly inoffensive Dunkin Donuts coffee) isn't a beverage to be enjoyed so much as it is a caffeine delivery vector, different from the auto-antenna-cum-crackpipe only by the varying respectabilities of the stimulants in question. Now that's fine. But ask yourself: why would you drink that swill if not for the rush? If it's a crackpipe, why only pretend to smoke rock?

Decaf comes into its own only when the stakes get higher. You see, 8 oz. of diner coffee contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 180-210 mg of caffeine. Respectable, but not outrageous. By comparison, the same amount of a nice full city roasted Costa Rican or Papua New Guinea can contain 300 mg or more. Over the course of a 16-oz cup of joe, that's the same as having a whole extra cup of the regular stuff. Unless you're used to popping that much at once decaf becomes as much about portion control as it does about anything else. These days, if I were myself to dump 600 mg of caffeine right in the middle of my day, I would pass from "hyperactive child" to "cranky toddler" by dinnertime and spend the night sleeping fitfully and fighting off a bitch of a headache. If I had to guess, I would say that my years of wanton bean abuse in college and after have caught up with me.

But the point of all this was the coffee. The mug before me that is rapidly donating its thermal energy to the marble slab which keeps it stationary relative to the dominant local gravity well. This mug of decaf is delicious. It's a Colombian water-process decaf from Rao's Coffee Roasters in Amherst, Massachusetts, and I can say with total confidence that not only is it the best mug of low-octane I have ever tasted, it's very nearly the best mug of Colombian I have ever tasted. The Colombian flavor profile is all there, the medium body which balances a clear palate reminiscent of Costa Rican beans with an earthy tone like a good Brazilian, the bright caramel references in the nose and at the mid-tongue, the hints of spices at the back of the tongue, and a pronounced hint of cocoa in the finish. The decaffeinating process has undoubtedly dulled the flavors a little bit; the cocoa comes through a little more than it should since it rides the muddy note of the decaffeination, and the aftertaste doesn't linger like it should, but considering that this is a cup of decaf, and decaf can never quite be the same thing as the real dea, I can't complain.

Julia Child always said that it made more sense to live well than to merely live. She preferred one tiny sliver of buttercream-frosted carrot cake to an entire box of low-fat Snackwells, and I know what she means. If enjoying what you do gives your life texture and meaning, than doing what you enjoy is part of the point of life. For those who care about coffee, decaf is both like smoking an empty auto antenna and like eating a dozen Snackwells. Lucky for me, there's ways to cheat.

I am not under any contract for Rao's Coffee nor have they requested my services. I just happen to think that I owe it to the world to point out that the best coffee in the Eastern United States is available from them via a ruthlessly efficient and chipper mail order staff. Try their Kenya AA and their Brazilian Natural Dry high test, and their Colombian decaf; you'll be very, very happy you did.

The road I grew up on is a beaut to drive, the two well paved lanes running alongside a lovely lake in sweeping curves and gently undulating hills through the backcountry of Nutsack Township, Ohio. It also happens to be the best route from Stinktown to Nutsack Township if you don't want to take the highway. The result: speedway. Every summer you can sit on the porch and watch the cars shooting past at 60, 70, 80 miles per hour. Every winter you can sit indoors and listen for the crunch of metal on tree. The brother of a friend of mine once got busted by his parents as they passed him doing 110 the other way on the long slow curve past the lake; knowing that the police never patrolled that particular stretch of Ohio roadway, he asked them later, "Well who's gonna catch me... the squirrel patrol?"

Turns out we should all watch our backs. Loyal reader #0017/EDog sent me this link, a story of fear and squirrelling on the back of a high-horsepower Valkyrie hog that made me laugh so hard pizza came out my nose. Which hurt a lot.

Last week I wrote briefly about the importance of epiphany to music lovers. Careful readers of this weblog will know already that I'm a principled agnostic; principled in that I've given it a lot of thought, contemplated deeply both my navel and the nature of existence, and come to the conclusion that this whole God thing isn't my bag, though if at some future date something happens that undermines my deep skepticism (e.g. rapture, Cleveland Indians winning the World Series on the strength of their pitching) I am perfectly willing to reconsider my stance.

Even so, I do spend a fair amount of time thinking about religion and how people use the faith that they have. For a number of reasons both personal and intellectual, religion is a favorite object of my contemplation. It's also bit of a habit. Even though I'm not a particulary godly dude, thanks to vestiges of my upbringing I still go in for some aspects of Inner Light Protestantism and its reliance on ecstasy, abandon, and the ability of a person to be moved. After all, I'm from Ohio, where all that stuff was started. A good Southern Baptist sermon complete with choir and congregational participation gets me all worked up. Gospel music (viz. The Staples Singers, not that whitebread pop shit that passes these days) rings my bell but good. The ecstatic aspect of religion exercises a profound draw on me. The god part... not so much. But the transcendence of self? Yeah.

So, being not the godly type, I seek out ecstasy elsewhere - especially through music. It's only natural; I'm a music geek and spend the portion of my time not devoted to thinking about food, sex, politics, or the nature of other people's devotion on mental kabbalah like putting together the all-time greatest backing band ever (which would include John Lord of Deep Purple on the keyboards and Clyde Stubblefield of the JBs on drums, incidentally).

It occurred to me the other day that I have a fairly extensive collection of amateur-sounding rock and blues music that I like precisely because of the abandon involved in its creation. Somehow records that come across as incompetent and/or unhinged can appear under the right circumstances to be more right, more truthful than any display of great skill. On one level this sentiment is a shiney'd up version of the inadvertently horrible things that well-meaning liberals used to say about race records in the '50s ('Honeyboy Edwards is so good because he's so real! No intellect in the way of his emotions at all!'). And while the central thesis of such bigotry falls down as soon as you abandon race-based notions of intellectual capacity, in a larger sense there's something there.

Central to (nearly) any religious experience is the act of surrender; the faithful are asked to surrender their will, their ego, their trust, to a higher power who is in charge of making things work out okay in the long run. The same goes for music, if you're willing to seek it out. Some music lovers love to lose themselves in, say, a particularly excellent reading of Scriabin or Mozart. Some can check out entirely for the entire duration of an Anita O'Day album or a Coltrane solo. Through their dogged simplicity, the Ramones aimed to make pop music that was pure and true, and that was, broadly speaking, the defining mission of punk. On a different note, it's no longer even worth arguing over whether there's an ecstatic/devotional aspect to rock concerts (or whether they are more like Nuremberg rallies or church services) - what do you think all that screaming was about at Beatles concerts?

I personally can lose myself all kinds of ways, whether it be Beethoven, Mingus, the Cramps, or a Flaming Lips show, and indeed ecstatic transport through music is the closest I come to worship of any kind. I often prefer to take a shortcut and make the path to ecstacy easier by cheating. Some of my favorite music is downright dumbass dumb, and through being dumb achieves both greatness and enormous potential for ecstatic transport.

In fact the very song that sparked this entire meandering rant was a very dumb song indeed. It was The Contours' early '60s hit, "Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance)?" On the surface, that's a decided long shot for being a source of anything serious. First of all, it's a Motown recording. Even though it's early Motown, made before Berry Gordy had quite decided that smoothness was his guiding principle, the song still bears the mark of the Guiding Hand of Gordy. Second, it's a song about some dumb fad dances; the mashed potato, the twist, etc. Third, it's definitely a minor achievement when compared to apexes of Motown's art such as "Tracks of My Tears," "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?" and "Mercy, Mercy Me." Fourth, it's just plain dumb.

But wait. What's really going on here? Why does this song inspire in me near-religous feelings of ecstatic release every time I hear it? I swear, it's precisely in being so stupid that it achieves greatness.

Listen. Some nerdy guy in too-short pants and a bad haircut is panting after a stylish girl who will never appreciate him regardless of what he does. She breaks his geeky heart right there in public. Uncowed, he goes off and learns some of the new hot dances of the day in hopes of winning her heart. At the next school dance, he corners her and begins showing her what he can do. "Watch me now!" he commands! He shakes it up! He shakes it down! He does the mashed potato! He does the twist! The whole time his face is frozen in a rictus-grin as his newly pomaded hairdo shakes out and out and falls in his face, as he sweats and sweats and sweats, as his hair sticks to his forehead and dark saddlebags form under his arms, as his freshly ironed white shirt comes untucked from his best wool slacks, as his new shoes leave black streaks all over the gymnasium floor. Ooh! He's hot! He's in the moment! Oww! He's slick! He's hep! He's in love with his own moves! Yeah! Yeah! And the whole time, he asks the girl over and over and over again, "Do you love me? Do you LOVE ME? DO YOU LIKE IT LIKE THIS?!? DO YOU LOVE MAH?!?!?"

Like Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles trying desperately to wow Molly Ringwald, yet shot through with some of the uncomfortably-awful-yet-strangely-excellent aura of the dance scene from Napoleon Dynamite, this kid - whoever he is - is trying far too hard at something he's probably pretty good at. But no matter what, this kid has definitely let go. He has transcended fear. He has transcended ego. He has transcended that which ties him to his sense of self and has dissolved himself in the purity of the moment, taking a leap of faith into the unknown for the sake of young sweaty love. Yea verily, our young hero possesses a singularity of motive and will to surrender that your most hardened jihadi would witness and envy.

On so many levels - the incongruity of the premise and the performance, the infectiously danceable beat, the enthusiastically off-key backup vocals, the various shouts, hiccups, and squeals that erupt as the singer begs to be noticed, "Do You Love Me" is as close as a song about the mashed potato could possibly come to speaking in tongues. I can identify completely with this scenario. As I recently documented at painful length, I grew up a dork, and the utter dorkiness of this song speaks straight to my soul. This, combined with the uplifting parable of our hero's Quixotic quest, push "Do You Love Me" into territory heretofore unexplored by Jesuit and Sufi alike. So, even though "Do You Love Me?" is in fact a dumb song about some dumb dances, it truly and honestly ends up feeling like touching the face of whatever god hears the prayers of the terminally unhip.

Today my son is two years old. After playing in the sandbox his grandmother gave him for his birthday, here he sits, just before holding forth on the tensile and shear strength of support elements in all sand construction. Later, in a similar pose, he lectured the family on the history of the sand castle, its persistence as an image of transience and instability, and its connection to the 'building on sand' metaphors in the theology of the Early Church Fathers.