Correct.

Time magazine has a very disturbing cover image this week, because the magazine thinks it has a very important point to make about the war in Afghanistan. Editor Richard Stengel decided to make the cover a photograph of an Afghan woman with a gaping hole where her nose used to be, where the Taliban had mutilated her.

But the pretense that putting the woman's picture on the cover is politically neutral is fake naivete, covering over a real and dangerous naivete. The headline on this non-political image is "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan."

It is a gut-wrenching assertion of what's at stake in the Afghan war—except, as a photo caption, it is completely false. A correct and accurate caption would be "What Is Still Happening, Even Though We Are in Afghanistan."
-Scocca

America! Opiates! Jail!

Massachusetts is a liberal state, but its drug laws are anything but. It treats opium-derived painkillers such as Percocet like hard drugs, if illicitly sold. Possession of a tiny amount (14-28 grams, or ½-1 ounce) yields a minimum sentence of three years. For 200 grams, it is 15 years, more than the minimum for armed rape. And the weight of the other substances with which a dealer mixes his drugs is included in the total, so 10 grams of opiates mixed with 190 grams of flour gets you 15 years.

Why is white bro yelling so much?

Lizzy Caplan

Basically, every book about a reformed addict is Sarah Palin's Going Rogue but with more self-aware debasement at the beginning.
-AWL

Hunter S.

"Fuck England," I said. "This is Middle America. These people regard what you're doing to them as a brutal, bilious insult. Look what happened last night. I thought my brother was going to tear your head off."

Steadman shook his head sadly. "But I liked him. He struck me as a very decent, straightforward sort."

"Look, Ralph," I said. "Let's not kid ourselves. That was a very horrible drawing you gave him. It was the face of a monster. It got on his nerves very badly." I shrugged. "Why in hell do you think we left the restaurant so fast?"

"I thought it was because of the Mace," he said.

"What Mace?"

He grinned. "When you shot it at the headwaiter, don't you remember?"

"Hell, that was nothing," I said. "I missed him...and we were leaving, anyway."

"But it got all over us," he said. "The room was full of that damn gas. Your brother was sneezing was and his wife was crying. My eyes hurt for two hours. I couldn't see to draw when we got back to the motel."

"That's right," I said. "The stuff got on her leg, didn't it?"

"She was angry," he said.

"Yeah...well, okay...Let's just figure we fucked up about equally on that one," I said. "But from now on let's try to be careful when we're around people I know. You won't sketch them and I won't Mace them. We'll just try to relax and get drunk."

"Right," he said. "We'll go native."

?

It’s an economy that suggests an EKG- shaped recovery -- a sequence of mini booms and busts as consumer fads and pent-up demand drive sales, until the impulses fade.
-BLMBG

David Foster Wallace Predicted the Housing Bubble!

As of spring '04, though, the most frequent and concussive ads on KFI are for mortgage and home-refi companies—Green Light Financial, HMS Capital, Home Field Financial, Benchmark Lending. Over and over. Pacific Home Financial, U.S. Mortgage Capital, Crestline Funding, Advantix Lending. Reverse mortgages, negative amortization, adjustable rates, APR, FICO … where did all these firms come from? What were these guys doing five years ago? Why is KFI's audience seen as so especially ripe and ready for refi? Betterloans.com, lendingtree.com, Union Bank of California, on and on and on.
-David Foster Wallace, "Host." Atlantic Magazine, April 2005.

Not Cool. I checked.

Russia Update

As if the heat were not enough, Moscow has lately been coated with a patina of smoke from fires that have broken out in dried-up peat bogs in the suburbs. Throw open a window in a desperate bid to catch a breeze and the unpleasant smell of smoke bounds in. One of the country’s chief medical authorities estimated that walking around Moscow for a few hours was the equivalent of smoking a pack or two of cigarettes.

-NYT

Turns out it sucks

The guides in Saudi Arabia have a hard time staying on message, veering wistfully toward memories of time spent in the United States, studying in Palo Alto, San Diego, or Boulder. They still obsess about their college sports teams—staying up until all hours to watch games via satellite. At the Masmak Fortress, in Riyadh—the scene of a critical battle for Abdul Aziz ibn Saud—the guide soon lost interest in leading us among displays labeled “Some Old Guns” and “Cover for the Udder of the She-Camel” and began to wax nostalgic about a married woman named Liz in Grand Rapids.

-A Girls Guide to Saudi Arabia

What Atlanta Used To Be

Along came Verna, in a purple dress and a string of pearls. She looked at her son’s grand possessions and hoped he had gotten them the right way, with love and honor, but she said nothing about it, because he was no longer a boy. Along came Dana, who couldn’t help wondering how Darren was paying for all this, but he kept that to himself. Along came Steve Ewing, president of Wade Ford, the seventh-largest black-owned auto dealership in America; and John Applewhite, a Pinnacle executive and inventor of toy guns for children; and Robb Pitts, Fulton County Commissioner and former Atlanta City Council president. Pitts knew Darren through a friend who had met Darren at a Sonny Perdue fundraiser. Yes, Darren was a Republican. He said Democrats take too much of your money. All this was theoretical, since Darren rarely paid his taxes.

This is from an amazing article from a list of amazing articles. Thank You.

This is Difficult

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
-Paul Graham, What You Can't Say

Wikipedia on Regulate

The third verse is more expository, with Warren and Nate explaining their G Funk musical style. Nate displays his bravado by claiming that anyone with the same amount of knowledge as himself would not even attempt to approach his level of lyrical mastery. He also notes that if any third party smokes like he does, they would find themselves in a state of intoxication every day. From Nate's other works, it can be inferred that the substance being smoked is marijuana. Nate concludes his delineation of the night by issuing a vague threat to "busters," suggesting that he and Warren will further "regulate" any potential situations in the future (presumably by Nate engaging their enemies in a battle of small arms fire, while Warren watches and shares credit afterwards).

Daniel Schorr

HANSEN: Dan, if you don't mind, I'm going to keep you in the studio just for a second.

SCHORR: Oh?

HANSEN: Because you knew the Depression, you were there.

SCHORR: Yes.

HANSEN: And there was so much music that came out of that time.

SCHORR: You said it.

HANSEN: Now, were you hearing it? Were you hearing the songs?

SCHORR: There's one song over this three-quarters of a century that I can still remember from memory.

HANSEN: Really?

SCHORR: Yeah.

HANSEN: Which one?

SCHORR: (Singing) Once I built a railroad, made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower to the sun, brick and water and lime. Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once in khaki suits, gee, you look swell filled with that Yankee Doodleyum(ph). Half a million boots went sluggin' through hell. And I was the kid with a drum. Say, don't you remember? They called me Al, it was Al all the time. Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal. Brother, can you spare a dime?

That was Depression.

-NPR July 2008

Proposal

As Don would no doubt tell you, BP's brand is as done as horsemeat dog food. The only option is a new approach...

(Open on oil-smeared beaches, dying pelicans etc.)

Voiceover: In 2010, a terrible disaster befell America. It changed everything.

(Teary Louisiana fishermen, empty boatyards)

And those responsible pledged not only to fix all the things they'd done wrong, but make sure nothing like this ever happened again.

(Cut to a grave-looking BP man taking off a pair of oily gloves, then a contrite-looking Tony Hayward alongside Obama)

That was us.

(cut to black)

We realized what we had to do was rebuild, from the top down. Listen to those who know us best. Do away with everything that made us what we were.

(Cut to sunrise. Actual footage of focus groups, then a BP logo being taken off a gas station)

We saw that through all of this, one thing didn't change. And that was America's need for safe, clean energy from its rich abundance of natural resources.

(Cut to a busy highway, power stations etc)

That's why we’ve changed. We've changed so that safety and responsibility is behind everything we do.

(Man in hard hat, ticking boxes on clipboard)

We've changed to bring transparency and openness to our every action.

(Hard hat man shaking hands with inspectors)

And we've changed so that the millions of Americans we work with can be sure they aren't just employees or customers, but human beings.

(Hard hat man and fisherman, laughing together)

We haven’t forgotten our responsibilities to those we’ve hurt. But we’ve remembered our responsibility to America.

(Billowing flag, images of booming industry)

Now, we’re ready to start helping you again. Introducing…

(New logo)

Phoenix Energy. Everything's changed, but you.

[Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce may need to do some focus testing on that name, though]
-NYMAG

The Straight

One thing does seem clear, though. The US Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and Republicans generally have the wrong answer. The reason businesses are not hiring is not that their taxes are too high or that they're over-regulated or that their healthcare costs are too high or that they don't have enough cash or that they can't borrow. The reason is that there's fewer and fewer people left to buy their stuff (except the Chinese, but that's another story). It's not even clear, really, that's there's anything government can do. But if we have to pick between the Republican solution and the Democrat one, well, the Democrats win by default.

Low Interest Rates as Debt Cloak

This Brady-bond talk may seem largely academic, but it has a very important modern-day implication. It means that financial repression also matters a lot – even though it gets little attention in discussions about sovereign credit risk. In some countries, most notably Japan and China, interest rates are set artificially low – much lower than they would be by the market. Local central banks can do this because the financial systems in these countries are heavily banked (i.e. most savings and financing occur through the banking system), there are few investment alternatives, and the financial authorities determine deposit and lending rates.

Forcing down interest rates in this way has exactly the same effect as the lowered coupons on the “par bonds” described above. It implies significant (and hidden) debt forgiveness, so when we look at Japanese and Chinese debt-to-GDP ratios we must remember that we should conceptually reduce the nominal debt levels to reflect the fact that the interest coupon is artificially low – perhaps reducing nominal debt by as much as 30-50%.

This is why Japan was able to raise its nominal debt level to what seemed unimaginably high (and why if it is ever forced to raise interest rates to a more reasonable level, it will face real difficulty), and why although I believe China has a debt problem, I do not believe this problem will show up in the form of a banking or sovereign debt crisis (instead it will show up as lower consumption, as I explain in my July 4 post).
-China Financial Markets

I love movies

Brick original teaser from rcjohnso on Vimeo.

This is all I have on Inception

David Edelstein usually knows what he's talking about so when he panned Inception I took notice of this deficiency in the plot

Cobb accepts the job because he longs to see his two little kids in the U.S. and is forbidden to return on account of a Crime to Be Revealed Later; and Saito says that with one phone call he can make the legal problems go away. (He just can.)

If you assume Chris Nolan is smart and did not take ten years scripting his movie only to ignore glaring problems there must have been some reason Saito could with a single phone call return Cobb to America. There is another instance where Mal reminds Dom that circumnavigating the globe with his gang of jetsetting dream theives is hardly the most logical reality to dwell in. The film was never about Cobb implanting an idea into Cillian Murphy or returning to his kids. The characters were trying to wake up Cobb.

The C Word: Peggy Noonan Edition

All right, you know what I think people miss when they look at Washington and our political leadership? They miss old and august. They miss wise and weathered. They miss the presence of bruised and battered veterans of life who've absorbed its facts and lived to tell the tale.

This is a nation—a world—badly in need of adult supervision. In the 50th anniversary commentary this week of Harper Lee's masterpiece, "To Kill A Mockingbird," a book long derided as middlebrow by middlebrows, no one fully noted the centrality, the cosmic force, that propelled the book, and that is the idea of the father. Of the human longing to be safe and watched over by one stronger. And so we have the wise and grounded Atticus Finch, who understands the world and pursues justice anyway, and who can be relied upon. "He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning." That's the last sentence. Ms. Lee was some kind of genius to throw the ball that soft, and that hard.

What Mr. Obama needed the past 18 months was a wise man—more on that later—to offer counsel and perspective, a guy who just by walking into the room brings historical context.

I know, "the wise men" are dead. Vietnam killed them. They were the last casualties, pushed off the roof with the helicopters. Their counsel on Vietnam was not good. But we learned the wrong lesson. We should have learned, "Wise men can be wrong, listen close and weigh all data." Instead we learned, "Never listen to wise men," and "Only the young and sparkling, not enthralled by the past, can lead us."

On Wall Street the concept of the statesman—the wealthy man who after a storied career enters public service and takes tough, risky stands on public policy issues—seems largely a thing of the past. In journalism the effects of cutbacks and lack of mentoring are showing their face, and will continue to. Maybe we'll see it most dramatically when the lone person on the overnight news desk, aged 28, in a cavernous room with marks on the industrial carpet from where the desks used to be, gets the first word of the next, possibly successful terror event. On the Internet, you read the fierce posts of political and ideological writers and wonder, Why do so many young bloggers sound like hyenas laughing in the dark? Maybe it's because there's no old hand at the next desk to turn and say, "Son, being an enraged, profane, unmoderated, unmediated, hit-loving, trash-talking rage monkey is no way to go through life."

-Some Cunt Writing for the WSJ

Compare and Contrast

So are the characters in the songs the same? Did he lose his house, boat, kids, etc and start working for "fast food wages"?

Little Minds

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
-MR

The interview is just plodding along, Exile in Guyville, record labels blah blah BAM!

Emily: So, I feel like I have to tell you, in my book there's a chapter called "Flower," based on your song, that's about how when I was 17 I took the virginity of a 14-year-old guy who was on my swim team, and everyone in my high school found out about it and it kind of sucked.

Liz: God, I'm sorry cause that sounds awful, but how hot is that?

Emily: He was so gorgeous, too. He definitely did not look like a 14-year-old. Um, it's disgusting to think of it now. But I was 17, it's not like I was a sexual predator…

Liz: Is it wrong that I'm sort of feeling like, you go girl?

Emily: I felt very justified by the song "Flower"—the lyric "You act like you're 14 years old" really resonated for me because he really was.

Liz: It was very concrete for you!

Emily: I'm friends with him now on Facebook. He's a painter. He seems to have turned out totally fine, so, no harm, no foul.

-Daily Beast

Yes!

An economist would find it inefficient to carry two lungs and two kidneys -- consider the costs involved in transporting these heavy items across the savannah. Such optimisation would, eventually, kill you, after the first accident, the first "outlier". Also, consider that if we gave Mother Nature to economists, it would dispense with individual kidneys -- since we do not need them all the time, it would be more "efficient" if we sold ours and used a central kidney on a time-share basis. You could also lend your eyes at night, since you do not need them to dream.
-Kottke

Assholery

"Mississippi Public Broadcasting strives to deliver educational, informative, and meaningful content to its listeners. After careful consideration and review we have determined that Fresh Air does not meet this goal over time. Too often Fresh Air's interviews include gratuitous discussions on issues of an explicit sexual nature. We believe that most of these discussions do not contribute to or meaningfully enhance serious-minded public discourse on sexual issues. Our listeners who wish to hear Fresh Air may find it online."

I hope the oil spill fucking goes till Ramadan. I hope every cocktail waitress mother of three in Biloxi is unemployed and whoring by next week. I am rage and vengeance.

Winter's Bone pt. 2

Uncle Teardrop was Jessup's elder and had been a crank chef longer, but he'd had a lab go wrong and it had eaten the left ear off his head and burned a savage, melted scar down his neck to the middle of his back. There wasn't enough ear nub remaining to hang sunglasses on. The hair around the ear was gone, too, and the scar on his neck showed above his collar.

Three blue teardrops done in jailhouse ink fell in a row from the corner of the eye on his scarred side. Folks said the teardrops meant he three times done grizzly prison deeds that needed doing, but didn't need to be gabbed about. They said the teardrops told you everything you had to know about the man, and the lost ear just repeated it. He generally tried to sit with his melted side to the wall.

Winter's Bone

My Dad's hometown is in western Maryland very close to West Virginia. On the drive into town you fly over a two lane road that winds up and down hills for hours. You pass small houses and plots of land squeezed in between the hills and the creeks and rivers. It seems like a narrow landscape to live in. You would feel claustrophobic I think living there, hemmed in by the topography without a car to carry you to a bigger town. If you have been to any depressed, non-college town, small town on the East Coast you will recognize the setting of this film immediately. Its depicts the privations of rural America for two hours without dwelling upon sterotypes or red state/blue state tropes. That is an achievement. The girl is beautiful like the girls on those MTV reality shows about teen moms only not a fucking idiot. Breaking Bad is a TV progame about Meth in its 4th(?) season and you will feel more in tune with the media meme of meth in Appalacia or whatever that means in fifteen minutes of this film than 50 episodes into the AMC show.

It's also got something to do with Antigone

/\/\ / /\/\ /\

Wednesday

-The American People Have Spoken

Euro membership has nevertheless sheltered Germany, which relies on exports for 41 percent of gross domestic product, from the ravages of the global financial crisis, said Juergen Pfister, chief economist at Munich-based lender Bayerische Landesbank. Prior to the euro, the mark was a haven in times of turmoil and prone to volatility, surging about 50 percent against the Italian lira in the first half of the 1990s.

“The deutsche mark would have appreciated massively as a result of the financial crisis, harming German exports and making the 2009 recession much worse,” said Pfister. “The euro provides stability.”

Mark Cliffe at ING Bank NV calculates that any splintering of the euro area would mean a deflationary shock in Germany and a slump in output of about 10 percent over two years.
-Germans Show No Way to Give Up on Euro

The Obama administration expects a record budget deficit this year of more than $1.5 trillion, or 10.6 percent of GDP, according to projections the White House released in February. The U.S. deficit is a greater percentage of GDP than any other major industrialized nation except the U.K., where it is estimated to reach 11.4 percent, and Ireland, where it will be 12.2 percent, according to International Monetary Fund projections released in April.

The only deficit-reduction measure that gets strong support in the poll is higher taxes on upper-income Americans.
-Americans in 70% Majority See More

Mad men marathon

Preventing 2006

I won’t comment on the “wonderful outburst of productive energy” Keynes attributed to the late 1920s. But I do have an opinions about the quinquennium from 2004 to 2008.

It was stupid. We were profoundly stupid. We mismanaged resources catastrophically, idiotically. We substantially oriented our economy around residential and retail development that was foreseeably excessive and poorly conceived. We encouraged ordinary consumers, rather than entrepreneurs, to take on debt, and let the credit thus created serve as the kitty in a gigantic casino of egoism. We saw the best minds of a generation destroyed by madness, glutted hysterical in suits, dragging themselves through the Street at dawn, looking for an angry bonus. We accelerated the unraveling of physical, social, and intellectual infrastructure that took a century to build and that we will desperately need some day, perhaps quite soon. We celebrated our stupidity. Based on some back-of-the-napkin theorizing, we turned virtues like planning and prudence into cost centers, and eliminated them. We idolized “the market” while at the same time reorganizing it so it would tell us exactly what some privileged groups found convenient to hear.

I am sure someone will shout “20/20 hindsight”. That’s bullshit. Everything I am saying now was obvious five years ago, and lots of smart people knew and understood it.

...As we evaluate financial reform and political change, we should keep in mind that it is not 2008 that we must struggle to prevent. It’s 2006 that was the worst of times, the piranha were feeding while we splashed and giggled in our water wings.

-Interfluidity

Danny

Since his 1995 star-making turn in Heat (in which he played a character named just "Trejo"), Trejo has had well over 100 roles, almost all as characters like Razor Charlie, Poacher, Scarface, Fred, Collins, Pierce, Vito, Jumpy, Slim, Machete, Pedro, El Jefe, Bob, Manny, El Patron, Cucuy, Raul, Papi, Harold, Rondo, Apache, Fury, Roy, Creek, Shady Chuck, Priest, Albert, Junk, El Chivo, Clint, Capone, Manolo, Perry, Barro, Captain Podrido, Mario, Esteban, Crazy Joe, Jimmy, and Tortuga. He has played a character with the one-word name "Hector" no fewer than five times.

Imagine

Louie

Mr. C.K.: I haven't had sex without a shirt on, God, since I was about 23.

GROSS: Is that true?

Mr. C.K.: Yeah, I just don't think it's fair. I mean, you know, let her think she's with somebody decent, you know.

Like on the show, I do have sex sometimes on the show, and there's a rule in my head that I have to be on my back because...

GROSS: Because your stomach flattens?

Mr. C.K.: Well, no, no, God, no. I don't think - I'm not laying back in the bed thinking I look awesome right now.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. C.K.: It's because I think I should always be the victim of the sex. I shouldn't be...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. C.K.: I don't think anyone wants to see me looming over her. I think that's an upsetting image for most. And then also, the puppy - the stomach I get. The mother-dog stomach that I get when I'm kind of - you get the point. It's not good.

So yeah, on my back, T-shirt, I'm okay. I can hang with that. I can be okay with a young woman, on my back, T-shirt on. Anything else, it's not fair.
-NPR, Fresh Air

Fact

Kung fu films:Wu Tang Clan , Founding Fathers:Tea Party

ok

right now the Japanese general government is producing the equivalent of 10 percent of GDP in new debt. That’s clearly not sustainable. So at some point the market will start to think that it will be very difficult to absorb this amount. Japan probably still has more time. But the longer it takes for a medium-term solution, the more nervous the market will become about future increases in new lines to finance the government.
-Could Japan Collapse?

How espionage should be conducted

A cursory Google Earthing of North Eastern Estonia suggests that the bridge from Narva to Ivangorod could work very well. The exchange needs to be conducted at dawn and the spies brought to each side in military lorries or dark limousines. The dress code is sombre, bleak and ill fitting. Cigarettes should be provided for each spy so, as they are released, they can trudge across the bridge and share a smoke and a wry exchange with their counter part. As the last exchange is made the sun will rise and, modern day traffic can re-enter the bridge and the cold war can once again slip into the past.

-Bronte Capital

Can we get the Yukos guy, Khordokovsky? I bet he has some great stories/rapes.

More..

It is not clear that the British respected pre-World War I Germany; it is clear that they feared it, and armed against it. As Winston Churchill said, when the magnitude of the German naval construction program became clear, “the politicians proposed [to build] four [new battleships every year], the admirals demanded six, and we compromised on eight.”

It is worth stepping back, and noting that all of these politicians and military officers were at best badly mistaken, and at worst criminally insane. Nearly ten million people would die in World War I. All of the continental European emperors whose ministers made war would lose their thrones as a direct result of the war, the British monarch alone surviving (the kings of Italy and Belgium also survived: their countries joined the winning Anglo-French side).

...To fight one set of wars at the start of the twentieth century to unify Serbs and Croats and to fight another set of wars at the end to dissolve the union and “ethnically cleanse” the region seems among the sickest of the jokes that History plays on human populations.

...no one remembered that Bismarck had never had any desire to escalate political conflict in the Balkans. Perhaps his second-best-remembered sentence is that: “There is nothing at stake [in the Balkans] that is worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”

So with the Archduke dead, with Austria having rejected the Serbian response to their ultimatum, mobilizing, and on the point of attacking Serbia, with Russia mobilizing...

At that point Germany attacked Belgium...

It was that stupid.

Why did Germany attack Belgium?

...Hence the first shots in what was a dispute between Austria and Serbia were fired on the German-Belgian border. The laughter of the guns began as Germany’s heavy artillery began destroying Belgian forts and killing Belgian soldiers and civilians.

And, indeed, since Fehrbellin, the odds are that first a Prussian and then a German army would be a fearsome and terrifying foe, greatly outpunching its weight on the tactical and operational level—but, as far as logistics, industrial mobilization, strategy, and grand strategy are concerned, a group that could be out-thought and out-fought by a committee of six-year-old children.

...10 million dead; 10 million maimed; 10 million lightly injured—out of major belligerent populations of some 100 million adult men.

-Brad Delong, Slouching Towards Utopia

Boer War

...Thus the Boers struck first in self-defense in October 1899, besieging British garrisons in towns named Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley, and defeating British relief columns in battles at places named Spion Kop, Vaal Kranz, Magersfontein, Stormberg, and the Tugela River: 20% of Sir William Gatacre’s 3,000 troops captured at Stormberg as British troops fled after being sent up a near-cliff against entrenched Boers with rifles; 10% of Lord Methuen's 14,000 killed or wounded at Magersfontein as they assaulted the Boer trench line; and Buller's 21,000 suffering 1200 killed and wounded to the Boers’ 50 in a failed attempt to cross the Tugela River. Any cost-benefit analysis done at this point would have led to an obvious conclusion: back down. Protest that the war was a mistake, and have some chair-polishing leading to British promises to respect the independence and autonomy of the Boer Republics and Boer promises to respect the rights and liberties of British-flag immigrants.

That is not what happened.

The Boer Afrikaans-speaking population of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State was 200,000.

The British sent 500,000 soldiers to South Africa starting in February 1900—the same proportional manpower commitment as four million would be for the U.S today. The British sent a competent general—Field Marshal Lord Roberts. They outnumbered even the total mobilization of Boer military manpower by fifteen to one. The Orange Free State capital Bloemfontein fell on March 13, Johannesburg on May 31, and Transvaal capital Pretoria on June 5.

The reaction at home in Britain to victories was as if the country had won the World Cup in soccer: half a million British soldiers could defeat armies one-fifteenth their size!

...Nearly 100,000 people died in the Boer War: in addition to the 30,000 Boer civilians, perhaps 8,000 British battle deaths, 14,000 British soldiers dead of disease, 10,000 Boer soldiers, and perhaps 30,000 Africans—nobody counted them. Britain mobilized 2.5% of its adult male population for the war. One in ten of those died.

-Brad Delong, Slouching Towards Utopia

Andy Xie

The problem is that Americans are deep in debt. Why should they bother if visiting France has become a bit cheaper? They should be saving money to pay off their debt. But, Americans are in Paris for a good time again. They stay at nice hotels, drink good wine, and eat expensive French food.

On the other hand, Chinese tourists go in groups, stay in cheap hotels, eat instant noodles and then spend ten thousand euros on an LV bag. I disagree with the choice. LV bags are sold almost exclusively to the Chinese and Japanese, believing it is a prestigious luxury brand. In fact, the product has been designed to profit from Asia's misunderstanding of western luxury.

My view on LV bags is beside the point. The main point is that Chinese leave with something that will last, while Americans put everything in the stomach. This fundamental difference in behavior won't change with a yuan revaluation. If the yuan goes up, it will benefit LV sales, not American exports.

hahaha

The attacks on Berwick are wildly unfair, but they also reflect the core incoherence of today’s conservative movement on the subject of health care policy.

Sarah Palin summed things up with a pithy tweet:

SarahPalinUSA: Press Corps-pls do your job as Obama sneaks in Berwick appt;pls cover his mission:socialized healthcare&rationing based on”quality of life”

You have it right there. Conservatives are against “socialized health care” (i.e., the public financing of health care services) and they’re also against “rationing” (i.e., limits on the availability of public financing of health care services). Their position is that whoever’s already been granted socialized medicine—i.e., old people—are entitled to have an infinite quantity of funds spent on their health care services. At the same time, they deem it intolerable for the government to provide health care to anyone else, since to provide it in unlimited quantities would be unaffordable. It’s as if we said we ought to ban everyone under the age of 65 from the library, because if we let them in we’ll have to “ration” the books by asking that they be returned in a timely manner.]

Think about it.

As I’ve said before, if we’re going to cut spending on retirement programs then it makes much more sense to reduce Medicare outlays by $1 than to reduce Social Security benefits by $1. Social Security benefits can be used to buy health care, and reducing Medicare spending could reduce system-wide health care costs. What’s more, if we’re going to cut spending on retirement programs then such cuts should be broadly shared and not exclusively inflicted on younger people. Such moves are both fairer and more credible. Last, if you want to cut Social Security benefits you should just cut Social Security benefits. Reducing outlays via the mechanism of a higher retirement age is going to mean that the incidence of the cuts falls most heavily on people with physically taxing—or simply boring and annoying—jobs. It’s one of the most regressive possible ways of trimming spending.
-Matthew Yglesias

That's a pretty good argument for cutting Medicare benefits and murdering the Baby Boomers. My favorite is the following clip which shows the people whose lives we toil to extend:

I think Tarantino lost

oh

Now, just as many consumers can no longer use their homes as cash machines, many small businesses can't draw on their properties to invest and hire. In a 2008 survey, 22% of small employers told the federation that they had taken out at least one mortgage to support their business operations.

"In olden days, many of the start-ups got financing by refinancing their homes. That's gone," said Sung Won Sohn, a California State University economist.

Sohn recalled a small auto dealer in Los Angeles who made most of his money not by selling cars but by frequently refinancing the mortgage on his lot, which until recently kept rising in value.
-LAT

What I learned of world affairs watching No Reservations this afternoon.

Answers

Eminem’s Recovery just sold 741,000 copies in its first week of release, making it the biggest first week since AC/DC’s Black Ice in 2008. when i was in high school my mom would bake cookies and cupcakes to bring to a group home for mentally challenged adults in our town around thanksgiving and christmas. she would bring me with her to drop them off. the last time i went i remember seeing all of the residents crowded around the TV, singing along to every word of The Real Slim Shady. now i’m not saying they bought ALL those copies of Recovery, but, like, they definitely bought some
-Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

This is what you get when you look up "Hotel Yorba" on Google Maps

Go read this

Bronte Capital on the Bond Insurers

Bill Ackman’s short on MBIA was a short with an ever-changing thesis. What he saw was a highly levered company – often 140 times or more levered – doing things that were not quite straight. His original observation was the AHERF transaction – something I understood from my first look at MBIA in year 2000. Then he saw one I did not know about – a securitisation of tax liens over properties in Philadelphia. More accurately this was a securitisation of uncollectable tax liens from crack houses and the demolished houses of the dead. The transaction however was rated AAA with MBIA’s guarantee. Moreover MBIA unambiguously knew fraud was going on – firstly there was a tape of a meeting of senior executives in which the truth was on open display – and then there was the name of the transaction – which translated (badly) from the Latin as “black hole”.

Question

Which show is a more accurate portrayal of New Orleans,
Treme or MTVs, The Real World New Orleans (2010)?

Soccer Ideas

Add a goal tunnel. Have a corrugated metal tube that runs into the goal from beyond the goalie area. If someone can kick the ball into the tube, it is an automatic goal, since the goalie cannot defend it. New and entertaining strategies can be added with this feature. For example, players can be "tunneled" by being slammed against the sharp metal edges of the tube, thereby increasing the physical component, and with it, the entertainment value of the sport.
-Bookstaber

(BTW is the greatest last name evah)

Chemistry of Common Life

Private payrolls were a disappointment at just +83k, versus consensus of 112k. Birth-death added 147k. Census removed 225k, in line with consensus. Temporary help was another terrific "green shoot" increasing by +21k. And the Unemployment rate dropped to 9.5% because 652k people walked out of the labor force, which dropped from 154.393 million to 153.741 million.
-ZH

China

I may sound like a complete Luddite, but I have LONG questioned the wisdom of foreign firms locating factories in China and exposing themselves to the risk of piracy, counterfeiting, and other forms of technology transfer. This is an authoritarian country where organs are harvested from prisoners who are still alive.
-NakCap

Mexico

Oil is a case in point. Pemex, the state-owned oil company, occupies a unique place in Mexican hearts: each year on March 18, school children celebrate with theatre and speeches the 1938 decision to nationalise the industry. Yet oil makes up an un-healthy proportion of government income - more than one-third - and production has plummeted, from about 3.4m barrels a day in 2004 to just 2.6m b/d as lack of investment and of foreign know-how made themselves felt. In private, Pemex officials admit Mr Calderón's reforms, meant to give the company more flexibility to work with the private sector, are too meek to turn things around.

?

In my few months of meeting transgender children, I talked to parents from many different backgrounds, who had made very different decisions about how to handle their children. Many accepted the “new normalcy” line, and some did not. But they all had one thing in common: in such a loaded situation, with their children’s future at stake, doubt about their choices did not serve them well. In Brandon’s case, for example, doubt would force Tina to consider that if she began letting him dress as a girl, she would be defying the conventions of her small town, and the majority of psychiatric experts, who advise strongly against the practice. It would force her to consider that she would have to begin making serious medical decisions for Brandon in only a couple of years, and that even with the blockers, he would face a lifetime of hormone injections and possibly major surgery. At the conference, Tina struggled with these doubts. But her new friends had already moved past them.
-The Atlantic via Kottke

Update

Of course in a system in which the government can create money at will, deflation should theoretically be an easy problem to solve; central banks can, in Chairman Bernanke’s famous image, simply drop money from helicopters.

That, of course, is a bit like saying that anyone can rid their house of termites, as long as they have enough gasoline and matches; it will work but there may be considerable collateral damage.

...This is how we reconcile a world with U.S. 10-year bond yields below 3.0 percent and gold at $1244 per ounce. Many sensible people believe very much in the threat of deflation and a substantial minority think that contains within it the seeds of an inflation to come.
-Inflation or Deflation