One last thought

To steal a line from Churchill, freedom of religion is the worst system possible, except for all the others that have been tried. But freedom of religion is a legal concept, and there's still the question of public attitudes. I think we'd all be better off if we swapped the roles of religion and sex in our society. Religion would be something you did in private, and politicians would spend their time explaining how awesome they are in bed instead of how much they love Jesus.

Wouldn't you rather the President said "Hope you get laid tonight, America" instead of "God bless America" after promising to spend billion of dollars killing random civilians in Afghanistan? At least with the former you don't have to think about how what kind of God would approve of mass murder...

An expert on money

I'm proud to be a graduate of the Harvard Extension School. I got a wonderful liberal arts education, and it wasn't even that expensive. Unfortunately, when it comes to economics the Extension School is just as bad as the rest of Harvard: worse than useless.

For example, this fall you can take ECON E-1452: "Money, Banking and Financial Institutions." According to the syllabus, "this course is an analysis of money and its role in financial markets and the economy. It considers the impact banks and other financial institutions have made in the United States and internationally, as well as the events leading up to the financial crisis of 2008." The course textbook was written by Frederic S. Mishkin.

This is the same Frederic Mishkin who was apparently paid $124,000 to write a paper which stated that "it [is] unlikely that there are serious problems with safety and soundness in the [Icelandic] banking system," and though a financial meltdown might be possible, such "self-fulfilling prophecies are unlikely to occur when fundamentals are strong, as they are in Iceland."

The Icelandic banking system subsequently collapsed. Mishkin never disclosed in the report that he was paid to write it by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce.

Apparently one Charles Ferguson is making a movie about the financial crisis, and he interviewed Mishkin on the subject:

(The CV has since been changed to include the correct title of the paper mentioned in the video.)

The Wider Point of View

All fiction is a reflection of its time; only rarely does it poke its head through the mirror and take an active look around. Good science fiction is more likely to do this because its writers, like anthropologists, have internalized that the present is contingent, temporary, always provincial. Travel a bit in time or space, and the world is a different place, seen through alien eyes. But since fiction is a reflection of its time, often the same critical theme crops up again and again, the product of a particular soil and climate.

The last time I noticed this, the theme was the corruption of power. In book after book published in the same couple of years, thrillers and mysteries (all in the SF or fantasy genres) came to the same revelatory climax: the government or those in power were the villains. I'll omit the names of the authors for fear of spoilers.

This time the pattern I'm seeing is antagonistic reflections on religion, although the list of books is shorter so far. Stross' "The Fuller Memorandum" isn't quite as good as his previous two Laundry novels, although it'll still appeal to Lovecraft fans, and Ken Macleod's "The Night Sessions" (still!) hasn't made it to the US yet so I've yet to read it. Ian McDonalds "Ares Express" is quite good, as is China Mieville's "The Kraken", which I just finished reading. Strangely, the novel feels like Mieville is channeling Terry Pratchett, in his guise as humanist rather than humorist. There is some of the latter though, and Mieville can wield a sharp pun, e.g. in the climax of this short story.

All of these authors are British, though I couldn't say why. Perhaps now that religious discrimination is becoming fashionable in the US maybe we'll see some American authors chiming in. I do sympathize with the claim that religions whose members have been involved in religiously-motivated bloodshed should be looked upon with suspicion. The Spanish Inquisition, all the Jews slaughtered during the Crusades, the Protestants killed by other Protestants during the Reformation for believing in the wrong method of salvation (theological disputes are easy to win if the municipal executioner works for you), the Thirty Years War... violent bunch, these Christians. As one of many contemporary examples, there are all those avid readers of "The Left Behind" series (millions of copies sold!), excited about the impending death of my siblings in the coming apocalyptic wars in Israel.

Lets ban some churches first, and then maybe we'll talk about mosques.

Here's what Schaffer the Dark Lord has to say (or rather, sing) on the subject:

A hero for our time

I grew up in Kochav-Yair, an Israeli town named after Avraham "Yair" Stern. When an Israeli minister gives a speech extolling Stern's memory, I can't help read and wonder:

"Stern's words of eternal dedication and national Jewish pride have been contaminated in public discourse. They have been turned from words of national consensus to negative remarks seen as 'extreme' and 'uneducated.'"

In 1940 Stern founded a militant organization -- terrorist, even, to his enemies -- dedicated to fighting the British rulers of Palestine and founding a Jewish State. When Ayalon, Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs, thinks of this eternal dedication and national Jewish pride, was he thinking of Stern's attempted negotiations with the Nazis (before the Final Solution, to be true) who were after all fighting the hated British? Or Stern's organization's participation in the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the town of Deir Yassin?

What I'm Reading

"If we look at Europe with Latin American lenses, we realize that the Eurozone is ... a bunch of over-indebted countries with their currency pegged to, of all the economies of the world, Germany."

"The last thing the West wants is to help potential competitors develop in the way that it has developed itself ... The strategy is for global conglomerates to buy up property (with tax-deductible credit), while European banks extend loans to fuel debt bubbles. This policy has left the Baltics and other post-Soviet countries economically dependent beyond their ability to pay down the debts they have run up so rapidly over the past decade."

"The success of the [Jobbik] party, which has railed against “Gypsy crime” and Jews, threatens to tarnish Hungary’s international image ... Some economists fear that the growing influence of Jobbik, which wants to eliminate tax rules favoring foreign companies, could undermine the country’s economic recovery by alienating already jittery investors, spooking credit agencies and making it harder for the country’s next prime minister to shepherd the economy."

"This hostility to universal citizenship is, I submit, the main characteristic of fascism. And the rejection of even a tempered universalism is what we now see repeated under democratic circumstances."

Facing the presence of the past

There is no explanation of how each of the detainees, much less all three, could have done the following: braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell—a violation of Standard Operating Procedures, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation, hanged until dead and hung for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards.

The Economist's Democracy in America blog has more more details:

All three men were found to have rags inserted in their throats to a point where it would have impeded breathing. The camp commander, after first ordering guards to make sworn statements, retracted his order and forbade them to make sworn statements, instead holding a group meeting that appears to have been intended to get their stories straight. And these are just some of the most glaring inconsistencies; there's much, much more in the report.

How do you deal with the aftermath of war crimes, murder, torture? In most countries, for most people, the answer is simple: pretend such things ever happened. It's even easier if you won the war, or have an enemy whose own atrocities you can focus on. McNamara describes the firebombing of Tokyo he helped plan, long before Vietnam: "In a single night we burned to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians – men, women and children." It's hard to believe that these actions have no consequences, no impact: the the people who ordered such actions don't disappear from government, the people who executed the orders eventually go home to their families.

Of course, Japan lost their war, and were both perpetrators and victims on a vast scale. So maybe it's not surprising that Japanese culture has created shows like Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood whose themes would be unimaginable in the US. It's completely horrifying... and one of the best shows on TV today (far better than the first series).

A historical moment

I can't decide which is worse: Obama winning the Nobel Prize for being less of a jerk than that other guy, or the Washington Post noting that the "Twitterati appear perplexed by [the] selection" (on the front page of the website, no less). It appears we've entered an age of lowered expectations, where not being completely incompetent is astonishing, and trivial thoughts even I can come up with win you that the most prestigious of suffixes, -ati.