Enough Said

A cartoon from Tom Toles of the Washington Post...

OK... I can't resist throwing in a few words...

What do you expect of a guy like Bush who argues that "government is the problem, not the solution"? Why would a free market fundamentalist like Bush ever think "bank regulation" is needed?

I see the financial crisis as the Katrina-esque unraveling of a consistent philosophy of government that always arrives a day late and a dollar short. This "gang who can't shoot straight" have destroyed the US and taken the rest of the world down as they worshiped on the alter of neo-con theories of government and Chicago School economics with their deification of efficient markets as the final arbiter for all social questions. Obama inherits the empty cupboards, he gets to close the barn door after the horses have all bolted, and he gets the problem of trying to run an economy after -- as the above cartoon illustrates -- the Bush admin has looted the vaults. Bush's advocacy of "small government" through the policy of spend and bankrupt government so the liberals will not be able to institute any social programs has achieved success with his masterfully timed bankruptcy of the US just as he leaves office. (Details on this strategy by the Right can be read in Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.)

Macolm X Charlie

I always enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell's writings. Here you can watch the extended version in the flesh where he does an interview with Charlie Rose on Gladwell's new book "Outliers"...


For those who can't wait to dig into Gladwell's writings, here is his latest from New Yorker Magazine, an essay entitled "Most Likely to Succeed". And here is a follow-up by Malcolm Gladwell in a blog entry with additional comments about this New Yorker article.

Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish"

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a nice romp through developmental biology with lots of annecdotes about Shubin's research. His specialty is the early evolution of tetrapods from fish. This accounts for the title. And he justifies this by telling us that he teaches an anatomy course and uses knowledge about the evolution of anatomical details to help the ideas sink in.

This book is for the general reader interested in evolution, our origins, and who would rather read science mystery rather than murder mystery.

I particularly enjoyed his honesty about his early forays into fossil hunting. He admits he was a failure. He points out that you don't "see" the fossils until something like a light goes on, you develop a "template" which makes the fossils stand out. One minute you can't see anything, the next they are as obvious as the nose in front of your face. That's how it works. It's an honest account of learning on the job.

On quibble I have with the book. On page 127 Shubin states:

Collagen seems particularly important: the most common protein in animals, it makes up over 90 percent of the body's protein by weight.

This disagrees with the Wikipedia entry on "collagen" which states:

Collagen is the main protein of connective tissue in animals and the most abundant protein in mammals, making up about 25% to 35% of the whole-body protein content.

I have no specific knowledge in this area, but the Wikipedia claim strikes me as more "reasonable" than Shubin's claim. I suspect it is an error in Shubin's book that was missed.

How the Other Half Live

My brother loves to boast about how cold it gets where he lives. He positively radiates enthusiasm for -40C temps (this just happens to match -40F, the only place where Fahrenheit and Centigrade temps agree in their measurement).

But his boasting doesn't hold a candle to Oymyakon in Siberia:

Roy Bainton's "A Brief History of 1917: Russia's Year of Revolution"

This was an interesting history on a scale small enough for light reading. It wasn't a standard academic history. Instead it was more of a personal view with a number of comments from elderly survivors that Bainton had interviewed.

There is nothing new or spectacular about this history. My only quibble is that while it notes the vicious killing that the Bolsheviks unleashed, it doesn't come down hard enough of them. At one point in this book he puts Stalin as a 10 on a scale of viciousness, Trotsky at 7, and Lenin at 5. To my mind they would all rank up there as 9s and 10s. These monsters murdered millions.

Do-It-Yourself Mentalism

Here's an interview which gives away the tricks of the trade for cold reading psychics. With this you can start a brand new career and mint your own money...

Thomas L. Friedman Lashes Out

In his latest NY Times op-ed he tears into the crony capitalism practiced in the United States:

But while capitalism has saved China, the end of communism seems to have slightly unhinged America. We lost our two biggest ideological competitors — Beijing and Moscow. Everyone needs a competitor. It keeps you disciplined. But once American capitalism no longer had to worry about communism, it seems to have gone crazy. Investment banks and hedge funds were leveraging themselves at crazy levels, paying themselves crazy salaries and, most of all, inventing financial instruments that completely disconnected the ultimate lenders from the original borrowers, and left no one accountable. “The collapse of communism pushed China to the center and [America] to the extreme,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.

The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don’t want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism — but I don’t want to be eaten by them either.