Sterner Stuff - Mattbarr.com - living an online life of ignoble ease since 1998

Mortgageball

2007-09-06T11:23:00.000-04:00

KMW at Hit & Run links to an outstanding piece on the impact of the subprime meltdown on Wall Street by Moneyball author Michael Lewis.

Call me a romantic: I want everyone to have a shot at the American dream. Even people who haven't earned it. I did everything I could so that these schlubs could at least own their own place. The media is now making my generosity out to be some kind of scandal. Teaser rates weren't a scandal. Teaser rates were a sign of misplaced trust: I trusted these people to get their teams of lawyers to vet anything before they signed it.

Read it all and muse about how investors lent trillions of dollars to millions of people who couldn't afford to pay it back and are now surprised that a nontrivial percentage of them can't pay it back.

Because you don't care about my "real" fantasy football teams

2007-09-05T18:41:00.000-04:00

Here is my team in Football Outsiders' Loser League Challenge. Wherein the goal is to field the least productive NFL players who actually play a lot. You're after fewer yards/scores and more fumbles/Dolphins, in other words:

Team Name: Barry Zuckerkorn for the Defense in U.S. v. Vick
QB: Tony Romo
QB: Jeff Garcia
RB: Ronnie Brown
RB: LenDale White
RB: Clinton Portis
WR: Michael Jenkins
WR: Marty Booker
WR: Bernard Berrian
K: Jay Feely
K: Sebastian Janikowski

I know what you're thinking, but you're penalized if your guy gets fewer than 12 pass attempts, eight carries or two catches. So they need to play and then stink, in that order. Kickers though aren't penalized unless the other kicker on the team gets all the action. You want them to either sit or miss.

(It is a little sad, I agree.)

"Oh Armageddon, where do we begin?"

2007-09-05T17:32:00.000-04:00

The (bad) physics behind the movies: A sort of Top 10 list from Popular Science. Including, generically, "sound in space." I've only seen one TV show consistently get this right, and I can't think of any movies that do. (I'm not counting the unwatchable 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

INSPIRED - Chapter One

2007-09-01T10:34:00.001-04:00

I'm posting the first 10 chapters of my novel here, one per Saturday, to get feedback and suggestions as well as to goad me into continuing to write. The prologue can be read here, along with a more detailed explanation. The whole thing on one page, unfortunately in the bloggy last posted first format, can be found here.

I. Chapter One

Comiskey Park – U.S. Cellular Field, whichever – stood in the dull gray sun of a January Chicago morning. And me without my Frank Thomas jersey, thought Bradley Wade, standing on the 35th Street red line El station platform.

It wasn't his stop, or even his start. He was pretty sure he hadn't dozed off, he'd just stayed on the train past his underground downtown destination, until the rush hour traffic on the Dan Ryan and the sunshine and whatever they were calling Comiskey Park now jarred him into something resembling awareness. He waited on the crowded, chilly platform for the next train going north, back into the Loop.

Great, robust buildings loomed to the north, their eastern faces ablaze. It wasn't often Bradley saw the city from the south, and it seemed like someone had rearranged everything. This thought produced only the faintest puzzlement, the tiniest thrill of incongruence. Mostly he was trying to remember which building he worked in.

Losing what probably wouldn't have been mistaken for interest in the ballpark behind him and the skyline to his left, Bradley squared himself to the platform edge and tracks and blinked into the sun. The platform was muted motion, like a great snake uncoiling. Commuters wove around him as he stayed still, a fixed point on a rippling surface.

After minutes of uncoiling and rippling and murmuring the platform seemed to Bradley to drain. His eyeballs bobbed up like bubbles because now they could, as the sun above Lake Michigan had stopped boring into his face. He heard a sound like metal unrolling and thumping, slower and slower, then a loud pfffft – but only well after the sounds had actually been made. By the time he put together the shadow, sounds and stream of people toward the newly arrived train, its doors had closed again and it ground forward.

Bradley's shoulders sagged very slightly. He was never going to get to work at this rate.

Work would probably do just fine without him, he thought with a small snort. It had been impossible, for the last... how long?... to focus on work. More than that. It had become impossible to work, the whole deal, getting coffee, deflecting flirty barbs from Tammy, his department coordinator, deleting spam e-mail. As his mind dully cycled through what he intended to be a catalogue of his most pressing responsibilities, he realized none of that stuff was his actual job. He couldn't immediately get a grip on what his actual job was.

If he'd been alive to the world, even a little bit, that probably would have caused him to panic. This realization – ironically, he thought – was muted by this new emotion-stunting, care-erasing fog of his that made him miss his El stops. And forget people's names. And where the restroom was. Realizing he should panic but couldn't should itself have made him panic, he felt from a considerable, unreachable distance inside himself, but he couldn't rouse himself to those heights of concern.

He willed himself on to the next train and chewed his cheek to keep alert for his stop. His face felt hot and he felt conspicuous for having made such an expedition out of his commute, though he mostly convinced himself nobody was watching. (Somebody was, but he didn't know that.) Lest his mind wander off in that or any other direction he followed the route map posted above the door to each dot the train stopped at. As the train went underground he began saying the names of the stops out loud as they were made – usually, he thought with some disappointment, only after the conductor did. Doing this gave him a good reason for feeling conspicuous. That was a relief.

With an effort equal to the one that got him on the train, he disembarked at Washington Street and followed the crowd, still draining now but upwards, to the surface. Muscle memory took over from there and (quite literally) before he knew it he was in the elevator of his building. "Twelve," he said aloud, to reassure himself he knew where he was going. Fortunately, the woman standing closest to the buttons didn't think he was doing this, because that would have been creepy; she just pushed 12 for him.

On the twelfth floor was the site development and engineering department of MidwesTel, for whom Bradley worked to blight the landscape with towers and rooftop antennas. His office was through the double doors to the left off the elevator, around some filing cabinets, down an aisle between rows of cubicles, past some woman brightly saying "good morning," and first door on the left. Bradley entered it.

"Is anything wrong?" asked Penny, the department's Property Manager, from his office door. A sensible question, since Bradley was sitting behind his desk, still with a long coat and gloves on, and staring unfocused at the door and yet strangely still not seeing Penny, any more than he'd heard her greeting earlier.

Is anything wrong? Bradley snorted. He was moving through molasses, barely able to concentrate long enough to tie his shoes, and reading put him to sleep. He was a ravenous reader, lots of natural and popular science, lots of unexplained phenomena, biography, history – dense stuff, that would put a lot of people to sleep, he thought with a smirk, but lately he'd barely get through a page. His job occasionally involved reading, or at least scanning spreadsheets and such, and he was almost grateful to be spared that the last week or so, though anxious not to be caught napping in his office.

His mother, bless her, had picked up that something was indeed wrong with him from one phone call, two nights before. She'd called, and he hadn't realized the phone was ringing till after it stopped. He called back and within 10 minutes was diagnosed with, if he remembered correctly, a malignant brain tumor. Sure, he could laugh now, but mom was right, something was very wrong. He'd promised to call a doctor and it registered for a moment that he hadn't and that he should. Did he have a doctor?

He'd had mysterious gastrointestinal distress some years before that landed him in the emergency room more than once; inevitably, Maalox and Nexium were prescribed. This and that doctor learned nothing from upper and lower GI tests, the latter of which had been invented to keep patients from complaining about gastrointestinal distress, he was convinced. Not too long ago he'd seen some doctor somewhere about back pain and, hearing about this unsolved mystery and putting two and two together, the doctor sentenced him to an endoscopy, suspecting an ulcer. That test too had been unrevealing, and the punchline was that a second doctor examined him for three minutes, had him lie down, pushed down on his lower spine, there was a heartily satisfying click sound, and his back pain was gone. Doctors were hit and miss like that, but the misses involved foreign objects inserted in places you'd rather they weren't.

Belatedly, three or four rings in, the phone startled him out of his reverie, or rather the intercom did. He glanced at the clock on his office wall: 11:20 a.m. He glanced at his office doorway. Penny wasn't there anymore. She would have been quite the persistent one if she were, Bradley thought with a sigh, having asked him what was wrong two and a half hours before. He picked up his phone glumly.

Someone was there to see him. How delightful. He didn't recognize the name and his visitor had been vague, he was told, about the nature of his business, but he would have felt extraordinarily guilty begging off because he was too busy, considering.

A matted muss of dull gray hair with a nondescript man beneath it introduced itself as Eliot Pulaski and shook Bradley's hand. As they shook Eliot's brow furrowed and he recoiled slightly. Am I that obviously sick? Bradley thought. Eliot was a clothier who made office calls. He didn't have his measuring tape or any catalogues or samples with him, he explained, but he wanted to introduce himself and see if Bradley needed a suit or anything.

"I'm not sure," Bradley said, surveying the way he was dressed, and noticing for the first time the buttons on his shirt weren't lined up. And that his socks didn't match. And that his zipper was down. "I – I don't really dress up more than I have to." Eliot kept on, a little high-strung, Bradley thought, about business and resort casual attire, shoes, a hat that would add a touch of retro class. Bradley narrowed his eyes and began to suspect someone was playing a practical joke on him, making fun of his clothes.

Eliot seemed to detect the mistrust and shifted nervously. He seemed wan and ordinary, and frankly not in the age demographic of anyone in the office likely to try and put one over on him.

"Are you seeing anyone else while you're here?" Bradley asked.

Eliot's eyes widened. "I hadn't planned on it," he replied. "You were referred to me –" a ha! thought Bradley – "and I... had an appointment to fit another gentleman in this building, so..."

"Referred by whom?" Bradley asked.

"I try not to say," Eliot replied sheepishly. And also rehearsedly, Bradley stewed. "I provide a valuable service that saves my customers valuable time and gives them... valuable clothes, but sometimes they're uncomfortable referring me to others who might not feel the same way." Eliot's head bobbed slightly as if to punctuate.

"Before or after?"

"Beg pardon?"

"You had an appointment to fit someone else in this building. Before or after you see me?"

"Oh. After."

"But you don't have any of your stuff."

"My stuff?"

"You didn't bring anything with you to measure anybody. Do you think that was a good idea, considering you have an appointment to fit someone else in this building after you see me?"

To his credit, Eliot didn't hesitate before slapping his forehead, thanking Bradley for reminding him he'd best fetch the tools of his trade before keeping this appointment of his, and hurrying out the door, all but leaving a cartoon poof behind.

Bradley fumed. Not only had someone thought he was dressed poorly enough to play a joke on him over it, it had been the world's lamest joke. Measuring tapes – what are they, $1.99 at Jewel? You send someone pretending to be a clothier into my office and he doesn't so much as have a measuring tape with –

Bradley cocked his head and his eyes widened. Today was Tuesday. He dialed in to a call every Tuesday at 11 with regional site development managers from downstate, Wisconsin and Indiana. He'd missed it, and what's more he hadn't prepared his weekly report and sent it in advance by 10 like he was supposed to – and yet no one had called him on it or wondered where he was for the call, which was probably still going on. Unless he had an e-mail he hadn't read. He checked and his chest fell – he hadn't read any e-mail at all since Thursday. He was panicked... then irritated... then forlorn... then vacant...

Like air escaping from a tire, Bradley began to gradually feel his concern and attention slipping away again.

Friday book review: The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, trans. by Ciaran Carson

2007-08-31T10:25:00.000-04:00

I've loved The Inferno since junior high. I would pull a translation by Rev. H.F.Cary M.A. off the shelf at my high school library every now and then and just be entranced by the illustrations by someone named Dore. The edition, including illustrations, is online via the Gutenberg Project here. If you've ever read The Inferno, you know that the text is often dry and impenetrable. If your first mistake was like mine, it was reading a translation by a priest.

But that's not really fair to Rev. Cary. I have a volume that includes The Inferno, The Purgatorio and The Paradiso translated by layperson John Ciardi, and while very well done, I think the real problem is that Dante's work is EPIC POETRY and translators must feel like they have to be very staid and stolid lest they come off too unserious. For instance,

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.

Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
But since it came to good, I will recount
all that I found revealed there by God's grace.

So translates Ciardi; click through to the Gutenberg site to see Rev. Cary's interpretation. You see that Ciardi's looks sort of like the stuff you read in English class: impressive adjectives, words shoehorned into the meter (drear instead of dreary, scarce instead of scarcely), nouns and verbs befitting an EPIC POET rather than a normal shlub (journey, shall, recount). It even rhymes; the original Italian is in terza rima, aba bcb cdc ded efe, but you can hardly expect an English translation to do that and be faithful to the substance. Can you?

Now, The Inferno, you may know, was written in an accessible vernacular. Dante used then-current figures of speech, had the tortured souls he met speak the way they spoke while alive, not like they'd taken an etiquette class to get in to hell, described things like a man seeing hell and telling friends about it, not like an EPIC POET writing for a 21st century literature class.

Of course, what was accessible in 1300 is still EPIC POETRY today, so you tend to get lots of journeys and recountings and drears, but sometimes you'll find that a writer has tried to make a "modern" translation of Dante. Usually it ends up seeming as gaudy and phony as that Romeo and Juliet movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and that girl from Stardust.

I bought myself Ciaran Carson's 2002 translation of The Inferno a while ago and am just now getting into it. It's absolutely breathtaking: Faithful to the boisterous original, and in terza rima! Here:

Halfway through the story of my life
I came to in a gloomy wood, because
I'd wandered off the path, away from the light.

It's hard to put words to what that wood was;
I shudder even now to think of it,
so wild and rough and tortured were its ways;

and death might well be its confederate
in bitterness; yet all the good I owe
to it, and what else I saw there, I'll relate.

"The story of my life!" "Came to!" Contractions! It's really engaging work throughout. Here are the two different ways Virgil describes the rationale for the lower circles of hell, in Canto XI. Ciardi first:

Fraud, which is a canker to every conscience,
may be practiced by a man on those who trust him,
and on those who have reposed no confidence.

The latter mode seems only to deny
the bond of love which all men have from Nature;
therefore within the second circle lie

simoniacs, sycophants, and hypocrites,
falsifiers, thieves, and sorcerers,
grafters, pimps, and all such filthy cheats.

This is fine poetry, don't get me wrong; but Carson's:

Fraud gnaws every conscience. A man may cheat
someone who trusts him; and he may do the same
to one who does not trust him in the least.

This latter mode seems plainly to disclaim
the bonds of social love that Nature makes,
so in the second circle are contained

all hypocrites, officials on the take,
chancers, panders, crooked businessmen,
and other scum, like conjurors, and fakes.

is readable. I'm really enjoying it, and I think you would too, even if EPIC POETRY usually strikes you as a little clammy.

What Berlin Wall?

2007-08-29T16:53:00.000-04:00

The annual Beloit College "Mindset" report, characterizing the incoming freshman class and making everybody feel old, is out.

4. They never "rolled down" a car window.

39. Fox has always been a major network.

53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue.

61. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.

Etc.

Not hypocrisy, "ideological schizophrenia"

2007-08-29T15:33:00.000-04:00

I am unpersuaded by Dale Carpenter's argument, which seems to be that Republican condemnation of homosexuality is not hypocritical, even given the seemingly disproportionate numbers of Republican public figures who get involuntarily outed.

A Republican condemning homosexuality is not hypocritical simply because another Republican is a gay man in the closet (or suddenly out of it). And what critics often do is try to paint straight Republicans as somehow hypocritical because someone else trolled for sex in a public men's room. I'll grant all that, but then take issue with Carpenter's specifics.

He says,

First, nearly all the gay Republicans working in Washington or elsewhere are to one degree or another closeted. Second, very few Republican officials care whether someone is gay....

So to keep religious conservatives happy the party has done two things. First, it has steadfastly resisted efforts to ease anti-gay discrimination in public policy, even when Republican politicians know better. I can’t tell you how many Republican staffers told me, for example, that their bosses privately opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment but would be voting for it anyway.

Second, to keep the talent it needs and simply to be as humane and decent as politically possible toward particular individuals, the party has come up with its own unwritten common-law code: you can be gay and work here, we don’t care, but don't talk about it openly and don't do anything to make it known publicly in the sense that either the media or the party's religious base might learn of it. It's the GOP's own version of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

This uneasy mix of the public and the private is not exactly what I’d call hypocrisy. It’s perhaps better described as a form of ideological schizophrenia: private acceptance welded to public rejection. It’s a very unstable alloy.

I'll say. I think this can be distilled into a Washington-out-of-touch argument: straight Republicans involved in running the federal government are as tolerant as most straight people who know gay people, because most do; but they think they must publicly condemn homosexual behavior and keep it under wraps because it won't play in Missoula.

I suppose this could be true; I'm the last person who will disagree that Washington is out of touch. Or argue that it should be more in touch, frankly. But it seems like a painful stretch to say that this isn't hypocrisy. If in effect they're saying "I know gay people aren't bad and I don't care what they do, but I'm going to support laws that repress them anyway," and that's not hypocrisy, the working definition has changed.

It would also be indefensible on a more basic level. Would anyone care if it was "hypocritical" for a white politician to demonize African Americans when he himself knows that African Americans don't deserve to be demonized, or would they just think it was reprehensible, regardless of the personal, non-public experience and feelings involved? Aren't bigots and people who know better but support policies that court the bigot vote just two different kinds of rotten people?

In short, I think Carpenter errs when he says Republicans aren't hypocrites but rather "ideologically schizophrenic" because they support anti-gay policies. I think that if he's right that most Washington Republicans know enough to be tolerant and even accepting of gay people, supporting anti-gay policies plainly describes hypocrisy. If they deserve a defense it's that not every Republican is a hypocrite because one was involuntarily outed.

NYC can ban metal bats

2007-08-29T11:08:00.000-04:00

A federal judge upheld a New York City Council measure banning the use of metal baseball bats in high school games in the city.

All sorts of minor, completely disposable issues are raised:

Of course New York City Council can pass a law banning metal bats.

"The protection of the health and safety of high school-age students is entitled to great weight," Judge Koeltl wrote. "While the record does not include clear empirical evidence showing that more serious injuries would occur without the ordinance, it is the city’s legislative assessment that the risk is too great."

Running to court to try and strike down a law you disagree with is a 21st century cultural phenomenon on a level with flash mobs and Lost, so far be it from me. But honestly, do you wonder whatever happened to electing new Councilpersons and getting the law changed, if you're so right and they're so wrong? It takes time, sure, but democracy isn't always instant gratification.

Save me, Mayor Bloomberg!

The outfit that brought you a citywide ban on trans fats and a law making businesses that employ bicycle riding employees provide helmets could hardly be expected to let schools, coaches and parents decide how to play baseball. But the most irritating part of the bat ban is that America's Nanny, Mayor Bloomberg, whose harebrained ideas these sorts of things usually are, vetoed it. "I don't think it's the city's business to regulate that," Hizzoner said. Jigga-wha? The measure having passed 40-6, it was veto proof, which is probably the only way to make sense of Bloomberg's discovery of something the city shouldn't be micromanaging.

Metal bats may not be more dangerous, but they're more wussy.

There's a reason college-spawned ballplayers who succeed in the Cape Cod League have a leg up on their fellow prospects: The league uses wood bats, which daunt so many NCAA players used to metal exclusively that success gets you noticed. The Yankees play with wood bats, and so should Stuy High.

Just ask Casey Martin

If the plaintiffs really wanted to win in federal court, they should have argued that since baseball is played with both aluminum and wood bats, bat choice is not a fundamental part of baseball, so requiring one or the other is unconstitutional. A similar tack worked with golf.

Coming October 2

2007-08-28T17:17:00.000-04:00

'Magic,' Bruce Springsteen's new studio recording and his first with the E Street Band in five years, is set for release by Columbia Records on October 2, 2007. Produced and mixed by Brendan O'Brien, the album features eleven new Springsteen songs and was recorded at Southern Tracks Recording Studio in Atlanta, GA.

'Magic' Song Titles:

1. Radio Nowhere
2. You'll Be Comin' Down
3. Livin' in the Future
4. Your Own Worst Enemy
5. Gypsy Biker
6. Girls in Their Summer Clothes
7. I'll Work for Your Love
8. Magic
9. Last to Die
10. Long Walk Home
11. Devil's Arcade

'Magic' is the first new studio album by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band since 2002's GRAMMY Award-winning, multi-platinum, number one album 'The Rising' (Columbia Records), which was also produced by O'Brien.

Bruce Springsteen's longtime manager Jon Landau said, "'Magic' is a high energy rock CD. It's light on its feet, incredibly well played by Bruce and the members of the E Street Band, and, as always, has plenty to say. It's also immensely entertaining. 'Magic' is the third collaboration between Bruce and Brendan O'Brien and is a culmination of their very productive creative relationship."

I'd go ahead and pre-order the CD from Amazon if I were you.

I'm from the government; drop and give me 20

2007-08-27T18:03:00.000-04:00

Overweight? The Trust For America's Health wants a federal fat camp:

Nationwide, two-thirds of U.S. adults are obese or overweight, according to the fourth annual report from the Trust for America's Health, titled "F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America." The report's co-author says the government needs to treat this trend as an epidemic that threatens the health of Americans and put in place a national plan in place to combat obesity.

"The key recommendation in the report is we need a national strategy," said report co-author Jeffrey Levi.

He noted that the federal government has created a comprehensive plan to be implemented in the event of an outbreak of pandemic flu.

"We need something like that in obesity that says this is what every agency of the federal government is doing. [It's] what we can do to directly affect this problem and motivate individual communities and businesses to play their role as well," Levi said.

Right: Obesity should be handled exactly the way deadly outbreaks of communicable disease are handled. Because they both threaten a disruption of services and commerce, scores of immediate deaths and can strike anyone without warning. I guess. They found some crackpot willing to call bullshit:

A senior analyst for The Center for Consumer Freedom, a food industry trade group, said government involvement is not needed. "Obesity is a private issue and we do not need Big Brother wagging his finger at us every time somebody wants to eat a doughnut," said Justin Wilson. "If someone wants to be a little heavier because they enjoy eating food that tastes good, that's a person's personal right."

He cited two simple ways for people to lose weight -- "closing their mouth, going for a walk. It's the world's easiest diet plan."

Way to win hearts and minds, Mr. Wilson. How about: You've tried all sorts of diets, and none have worked for you. Now the same people who brought you the Hurricane Katrina response and Hillarycare are going to get you to drop the pounds the fascist way!

Great YouTube debate question. "I'm 40 pounds overweight. How many pounds will I lose in the first 100 days of your administration?"

Plus, he's a Republican

2007-08-27T12:54:00.000-04:00

Thorough and balanced piece in TIME on Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy experience. But I had to chuckle at this quote in it from Jamie Gorelick, 9/11 Committee member and former Deputy AG under Clinton:

[For President], I think you want someone who is not polarizing. Someone who brings people together by the power of persuasion rather than the power of dictate. Someone who is considering of other points of view and ultimately decisive. And on all three scores, I have serious doubts about the mayor.

You can probably see this coming a mile away, but which currently announced candidate for President does Ms. Gorelick think is non-polarizing, non-dictatorial and open to other points of view enough to donate $2,300 to? You get three guesses, but you'll only need one!

Specter for Attorney General?

2007-08-27T12:42:00.000-04:00

Mark Levin, on The Corner today:

Why not just formalize Patrick Fitzgerald's role as the roving attorney general? O.K., bad joke. Or maybe the president can appoint Arlen Specter and after he gets confirmed, fire him. O.K., another bad joke.

I wasn't joking in 2004!

More people with mortgages isn't the main cause of home price decline

2007-08-26T15:53:00.001-04:00

They're expecting the first year-over-year median house price decline in the U.S. ever. Incredibly lax lending standards are blamed by some, but that doesn't tell the whole story.

True, many more people are approved for home loans now than ever were. As recently as 1998 the denial rate for conventional home purchase loan applications was 29 percent. In 2005, the last year for which data has been aggregated and released by the Federal Reserve (see a summary here), it was 16.4 percent. Importantly, the rate bobbed down to 14 percent in 2003 and was steady after that, rising slightly only recently.

Why is that important? From 1996 through 2004 about nine percent of mortgage loans were subprime; from 2004 through 2006 the figure was 21 percent. (Source here; that squares with my understanding so I didn't dig much deeper, but I would be surprised if this were not true.) "Lax lending standards" may partially account for so many more people getting mortgage loans in the early 2000s than previously, but "incredibly lax lending standards," insofar as most people understand that to mean the boom in subprime lending, clearly was not a factor. The market for home loans opened up before lending standards were relaxed, at least "incredibly."

So what happened in the late 90s and early 2000s to create millions of potential new homeowners? Automatic underwriting systems combined with the use of the credit score to make the cost of making mortgage loans historically low. Making decisions more quickly and reliably made underwriters able to consider more people and originators to reliably prequalify applicants so that the greater number of people being considered had a better chance of being approved. Previously, the chance that a great deal of work would be put in to an application only to see it fail selected out a number of probably qualified applicants until technology made AU systems and credit scoring possible.

As it became cheaper to make loans, more were made. Not exactly a revolutionary economic concept. AU and credit scoring also made it easier to measure and distribute risk globally. Secondary market investors were more sure of their level of risk and bought more freely, which also made underwriters more comfortable making loans.

(It may be true that mortgage industry deregulation created the subprime boom, but I think AU and other technology and information sharing developments are key. After all, again, many more conventional loan applications overall were starting to be approved even before subprime boomed.)

Meanwhile, the tax system was ensuring that home owners were paying in many cases much less to own than they would have to rent, and it's difficult to conclude that a bunch of people getting into houses who didn't deserve to is fueling a property value decrease.

More likely culprits are the rolling in of seller paid costs and concessions into loan balances, and the nature of the housing market. In 2000, about two percent of FHA loans included down payment "gifts" from nonprofits. Today, fully one in three do, and HUD thinks upwards of 90 percent of nonprofit “gifts” are actually repaid, plus a fee, by sellers. What happens is that nominal nonprofit groups will put the FHA-required three percent down on a home for a borrower, with the amount of the "gift" plus a "service fee" repaid to the nonprofit by the seller or another party with a financial interest in closing the loan.

HUD and the Government Accountability Office each say that down payment gifts from nonprofits double or nearly double the rate of mortgagor default. This makes sense -- if you need to make a downpayment to get a loan (which you technically do to get an FHA-backed loan) and you can't afford to, you're probably the kind of buyer who isn't going to weather tough economic times in the near future after you close on your new home.

The problem with property values is that seller paid costs like this, and other concessions, are portrayed as part of the sales price of a home, when in fact the arm's length market value agreed to by buyer and seller is something sometimes much less. With the practice being so rampant, appraisers looking for recent sales of comparable homes are using the inflated sales price in their analysis, and it feeds on itself over and over.

Eventually, you have buyers no longer willing to pay a "comparable" price for a newly marketed home, in part because as interest rates rise and ARMs adjust and subprime lenders go out of business these zero-down programs aren't as available and sellers aren't in a position to pay costs or include concessions. That's in part what's happening now.

The housing market is also unique in that there really is no one involved in the transaction interested in keeping prices down. The only drag on an asking price is what other homes have sold for recently in the area. Sellers, Realtors and commissioned mortgage originators certainly want the highest price possible; buyers generally only care to the extent they could go down the street and get a similar home cheaper. Because they're not making significant down payments anymore and are only concerned about their monthly payment, they don't act to keep prices down.

INSPIRED - Prologue

2007-08-25T12:28:00.001-04:00

I'm writing a novel. I have been for many years, and it's only been in the last few months that I've really made an effort to tease out the parts of the story I don't imagine during mental downtime. You know, back story, character development, all that. I've shown the prologue and first three chapters to several people and have gotten a lot of good and constructive feedback. I hope to accomplish the same thing by posting the prologue and first ten chapters here on the blog, one each Saturday.

In addition to feedback, which I welcome -- heck, I'm dying for it -- via comments or e-mail, I'm hoping to prod myself into writing regularly. A recent wedding, honeymoon, pickup in work and freelance activities and inertia have kept me from writing much the last couple months. As I write this, the prologue and chapters 1-5 are done, and so is chapter 8, sort of -- it was the first thing I wrote, actually a few years ago, but once I'm done with 6 and 7 I'll need to go over it thoroughly to conform it to everything that's happened before it.

Thanks for reading.

i. PROLOGUE

Where Karol came from, people didn't just run around hitting other people with baseball bats. Nor did they stagger down narrow apartment building hallways with baseball bat-inflicted welts on their thighs.

Yet here he was, in the River North neighborhood of Chicago – and therefore quite far from home – lurching for his life as quickly as the radiating pain in his leg and his baseball bat-wielding pursuer would allow.

Happily, his assailant seemed overcome with rage. Happily, because he heralded each new swing of the bat with an enraged shout. Karol was hopeful the shouts would wake some sleeping neighbors, and in the meantime, it made it easier to get out of the way of a swing.

A new swing of the bat dented the drywall of the hallway, not Karol's round, mousy face, but in avoiding the blow Karol leaned his weight onto his bruised leg and sucked in breath. As he stumbled forward he rattled nearby doorknobs, hoping to rouse help, now that it was clear all the doors were locked. Something else you didn't do where Karol came from.

Karol turned, and his attacker stalked him deliberately, bat over his shoulder. Karol crept backwards, awkwardly and painfully. Ruing the necessity – Karol was already in a great deal of trouble – he barked, "Roger!" Like he might at a misbehaving dog.

The batsman, Roger, took two or three more steps forward, then pulled up, a look of confusion and annoyance on his face. After a few beats, he asked, in a way that suggested he wasn't keenly interested in the answer, "how do you know my name?" He swung hard to punctuate his question – whoosh, KANG! He missed Karol and the bat head caromed off a metal fixture.

I can't very well tell him that, thought Karol.

Now facing Roger and backing up, Karol ignored the doorknobs and instead pounded on doors as he passed them. The sight, if anyone would get a move on and come out to see it, was probably pathetic: a late 20s, fit, flushed, enraged young man with a bat trying to beat an older, more ashen, smaller man to a bloody pulp. Chicago couldn't be so strange a place that its population ignored baseball bat attacks in their halls, could it?

Karol heard an alarmed voice behind one door he rapped on. He stopped his backward progress long enough to pound even more urgently on the door and shout for help.

Crack. Karol's knee on his already injured leg felt like it had been smashed like an eggshell. He yelped in agony, and noticed gratefully they'd made their way as far as the stairs. He threw himself down them as Roger flailed the bat at him again. On the landing, he rolled over, dragged himself toward the next set of stairs with his arms, and tumbled down those, too.

Bruised now in several places other than his leg, Karol drew himself painfully onto his haunches, concentrated hard, and… nothing happened.

He drew a panic suppressant breath, concentrated again – his teeth ground, his head even shook – and still nothing happened.

Now Karol was starting to worry.

He heard Roger's raised voice a flight above. He assumed the alarmed sounding apartment dweller and Roger were catching up on recent events. Karol straightened up, with great effort, and heaved himself toward the next set of stairs, leading down to the ground floor and the outside.

Suddenly, he was caught in a vice-like grip from behind. "All right, old man," his captor warned. Roger had been shouting, stop him! from above, Karol realized. His captor was obliging. Karol couldn't see him, but he felt like an enormous and strong man, and his voice while not menacing sounded confident Karol was immobilized. City of broad shoulders, Karol thought stupidly.

He wondered if with others present he might be able to reason with Roger, but he suspected not, and the price if he was wrong was high. So in desperation he tried to wrench himself free as Roger bounded down the stairs. Unbelievably, he felt the huge man's grip loosen. For good measure, Karol leaned a shoulder into him from behind and shoved. He rebounded out of his captor's grip and toward the stairs.

Roger had reached them, with alarmed sounding neighbor trailing. Karol drove his injured leg – it hurt more to plant his weight on it than kick with it – at Roger's torso, and connected, forcing a pained oof out of him. Karol's own cry of pain was muted into a whimper, but he knew enough not to rely on the leg further. He threw himself down the stairs again, backwards, so as to get a look at his former captor.

He was huge, but his eyes were unfocused, his mouth agape, and other than how Karol had manhandled him to get out of his grip, he hadn't moved a muscle. Roger now shoved the larger man's shoulder, screaming something about letting Karol go. The man recoiled and looked at Roger dumbly, but otherwise did not respond.

Karol's landing on the landing, while awkward, didn't hurt much, and he once again rolled over, dragged himself to the top stair, and this time, tried harder to slide down rather than tumble.

The large man on the second floor was acting strangely enough to stop Roger in his tracks. Alarmed sounding neighbor, too. They both looked at the man, who stared back, wide eyed. After some ragged breaths through his nose, the man seemed to shake himself back alert and soften. Roger screamed at him again about letting Karol go. The man seemed undisturbed.

So Roger took the last set of stairs three at a time and burst out the front door of the building, onto the sidewalk. Looking all around for a sign of a battered, lame, older man who had to throw himself down stairs because he was too hurt to go down upright, he saw nothing. Karol had vanished.

Grow the pie

2007-08-24T08:10:00.000-04:00

Nintendo approaches gaming differently from its rivals. To overgeneralize, Sony and Microsoft target committed gamers and sell them on richer, more complicated gaming experiences. Nintendo, again generally, keeps it simple and makes its games more accessible.

Producing the Wii was courageous because when you're the first to do something radically new in a highly competitive industry, your rivals almost always learn from and capitalize on your mistakes. In a few years, the Wii will probably look rather dated compared to what Sony, Microsoft and whoever else have out. But in the meantime, Nintendo has grown the pie, rather than trying to elbow Sony or Microsoft out of the way to grab a bigger piece of what they're all fighting for.

From BBC News:

The Wii, as it was later named, introduced motion sensitive wands instead of traditional controllers and its focus on participation and activity removed many of the barriers to games encountered by would-be players....

At the heart of the Wiimote controller is an accelerometer, made by an American firm, which can detect movement along three axes.

It has helped make gaming a more social and interactive experience and the internet is filled with videos of children, parents and grandparents playing tennis or bowls on the Wii.

In Japan, the TV industry is becoming concerned that it is losing audiences to Wii families....

"If we do introduce people to games who had never even thought of playing, then it's to the benefit to the industry at large," said [company president Satoru] Yarnton.

This kind of thinking is difficult, in my admittedly limited experience. There's always immediate bottom line pressure. When you expand the pool of potential customers for your product you invite others to poach them later, and not every effort like that scores immediate profit like the Wii.

I have a Creative Zen Touch and I imagine the people who market it love the iPod for what it's done to open up demand for portable mp3 players. I switched from a 2G iPod to the Zen a couple years ago because I wanted something that worked with Napster To Go and had a battery life of longer than seven minutes. I'm happy, Creative Labs are happy, and Apple rolls around naked in piles of money, which I'm guessing also makes them happy.

v.4.0

2007-08-23T11:28:00.000-04:00

Hi, I'm Matt. I used to blog on a site I called New World Man, which isn't around anymore but which I renamed Socratic Rhythm Method. That's not around anymore either, but it was recast as Matt Barr Live! which is still around, for archival posterity.

It's been about a year since I blogged with any vigor and I think my last blog post was put up in November, 2006. A lot went on in the last year that bumped blogging down far enough on my priority list that I didn't do it.

I used to blog about politics a lot, and then more about law and the Supreme Court than anything else. Here's a link to Blawg Review #62, my daughter's favorite Blawg Review ever. So you're likely to find stuff like that here, as well as sports, music, space, and other stuff that interests me and I think might interest you.

The title of the blog is meant to be a little ironic. When I was justifying to myself not blogging for many months I often reminded myself how strident my own blog, and many of the blogs I read frequently, had become. I didn't like it and I still don't. Version 4.0 here is going to be more detached and try to be more interesting than all echo-chambery. So I'm going for less "stern," but the effort to improve will call for "sterner stuff," or something. Also, it's Shakespearean, which may be considered a step up when version 1.0 was named after a Rush song.

I've reproduced a half dozen posts from previous versions of this blog, not too carefully chosen but hopefully giving you an idea how I write and what about. They're below and/or in the August, 2007 archives.

Enjoy yourself.

Life'll kill ya

2007-08-23T11:02:00.000-04:00

There is no easy answer to the question whether there is a principled libertarian argument in favor of animal cruelty laws, which Jim Henley asks. Acknowledging that there is also no easy answer to what "libertarian argument" means, I think the problem can be fairly stated as: If you want people to be free to do whatever makes them happy as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's right to do the same thing, whose rights are being circumscribed when you force dogs to fight one another, then drown or hang the losers?

If there were an easy answer, people a lot smarter than me, like Megan McArdle, Julian Sanchez and James Joyner, would have figured it out by now. But I think an intermediate question is a lot easier to answer. What reason is there, if any, to treat dogs differently from other property? The easy answer is what you call what Michael Vick and his buddies did. There is no such thing as "house cruelty" or "42 inch high definition plasma TV cruelty" or "mint condition X-Men #94 cruelty." We don't call it "animal cruelty" because that's how it's written in the law, which would beg the question. It wouldn't be against the law to be cruel to animals if it weren't possible to be cruel to animals.

But that sounds like an unsatisfying gotcha. How about this: Animals share something with us most property doesn't -- life. (And faces!) Ask 100 people to make a list of their most cherished rights, and the right to life will appear near the top of every one. I don't think it disfigures a Platonically ideal libertarian scheme to enforce a respect for life.

I hate to couch this in terms of "respect for life," because we all know what that's usually a code phrase for, but if possible, I want to set that aside. If you agree that criminal law should be used to defend life and exact punishment when it's taken, it's not a huge leap to apply that -- to a reasonable extent -- to things besides humans which have life.

By no means are humans equivalent to dogs equivalent to praying mantises in terms of the degree to which we might enforce a minimum respect for life. That doesn't defeat the point, it makes it just like the fact an emancipated adult has a greater right to liberty and autonomy than a 17 year old than a six year old than a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees have no liberty, at least none you could reasonably codify and defend by force of law. Chimpanzees do have life, and the long tail of the scale continues on longer down the Y axis when it comes to life. Or it could. Couldn't it?

Whether something is alive or not is important, but not determinative, of course. You want to feed people, encourage commerce, science and medical advancement, and keep the lawn looking nice. But even under libertarianism, there are very few bright-line either A or B scenarios anyone can successfully defend. And we humans have a long history of imposing and/or enhancing punishments when an offense is particularly depraved -- or cruel, if you prefer. If your criminal law is set up to protect life, it might proscribe drowning and hanging dogs who don't fight well, and not shooting them when they're rabid, or putting them down when they're old.

The intersection of terrorism and a free marketplace of ideas

2007-08-23T10:36:00.001-04:00

Originally posted in August, 2006

Hezbollah's TV network, Al Manar, is banned in the United States.

You may think that's odd and perhaps disturbing at first blush. But Al Manar itself has been designated a "global terrorist entity." The designation prohibits any transactions between Americans and the network.

Running afoul of the law was Javed Iqbal, who was arrested Thursday and charged with conspiracy to support a terrorist group for providing New Yorkers with access to Al Manar on their satellite networks along with other Arab TV stations.

Al Manar is of a different kind and quality than other Arab TV stations, as you might expect. The Washington Post reports:

Mark Dubowitz of the Coalition Against Terrorist Media (CATM), which is composed of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and secular organizations, said yesterday he is "saddened" that a U.S. resident was allegedly facilitating the transmission of Al Manar "but pleased that the U.S. is taking the necessary steps to ensure Al Manar's incitement to violence is stopped."

Al Manar, he said, was placed on the terrorist list because it was used to incite violence, recruit people to a terrorist organization and raise funds for terrorist activities, including the provision of bank accounts where money should be sent.

Cori Dauber provides related perspective:

If you could see clips from the thing you'd realize that this is far more than just news with Hezbollah's perspective -- it is propaganda of the crudest and most vile sort imaginable. And the point of the propaganda isn't lost in translation, either: we're evil, the Israelis are evil, and violence is more than justified, it is often glorious.

Hassan Fadlallah, Al Manar's news director, told the New Yorker:

"Neutrality like that of Al Jazeera is out of the question for us," Fadlallah said. "We cover only the victim, not the aggressor. CNN is the Zionist news network, Al Jazeera is neutral, and Al Manar takes the side of the Palestinians....

He said Al Manar's opposition to neutrality means that, unlike Al Jazeera, his station would never feature interviews or comments by Israeli officials. "We're not looking to interview Sharon," Fadlallah said. "We want to get close to him in order to kill him."

We're not talking about CNN, in other words. Not that anybody would be tendentious enough to compare the two. I'm sorry. What?

[A] spokesman for Mr. Iqbal called the government's charges ridiculous. "It's like the government of Iran saying we're going to ban The New York Times because we think of it as a terrorist outfit," the spokesman, Farhan Memon, said before the hearing. "Or China trying to ban CNN."

As Dauber points out, Iran does ban the New York Times, and China CNN. "That would be a dictatorship without a generally free press banning responsible news agencies," she notes, casting the debate in the appropriate terms.

There should be no doubt that this is different, and that it demands thoughtful consideration. That consideration must start though with the bare fact that the United States is prohibiting the dissemination of speech based on its content.

It may constitutionally do so if the speech is an incitement to violence, but it seems unlikely that the government can avail itself of that exception to prohibit hours upon hours (I don't know and can't find easily whether Al Manar broadcasts 24 hours a day) of daily material in advance.

It seems to me that a prohibition could pass constitutional muster if Al Manar is nothing but a fundraising arm of Hezbollah. Imagine PBS or NPR pledge weeks were devoted to raising money for terrorism and genocide. Would the FCC be estopped by the First Amendment from shutting them down because Jim Lehrer is on an hour a day? May you disseminate and receive child pornography if it includes a headline from the day's news?

What is bothersome about laws banning propaganda, apart from the interesting constitutional issues, is that they assume a level of control the government doesn't deserve -- or have.

There is an undercurrent to such laws that assumes recipients of the propaganda can't determine for themselves that the information is unreliable and that civilized people ought to be watching or reading something else instead. But that lurks below the surface. I don't think the point of a law banning propaganda is to protect ordinary channel-surfing Americans who have no interest in Middle Eastern affairs.

Mostly, laws banning propaganda assume that if we can just keep it away from those most receptive to it, we won't create any more jihadists, Holocaust deniers or anti-West zealots.

You simply can't -- as in, it won't work -- use the power of law to keep someone disposed to hatred from feeling or expressing it. To be powerful enough to do so, a law would have to get a little too far inside someone's head. Or it would have to choke off ten times more legitimate news and opinion than the propaganda it's targeting. Neither option is attractive in a liberal society.

The primary argument for something like this is that it ferrets out and punishes actual material supporters of terrorism, like (the argument goes) Mr. Iqbal. But there is a principle in First Amendment jurisprudence that a restriction on speech must be as narrowly tailored as possible to serve legitimate state interests; if overbroad, the First Amendment prohibits it. Similarly, I think it's worthwhile to figure out whether prohibiting and punishing the dissemination of propaganda is the most direct way to root out terrorist supporters without potentially infringing on legitimate First Amendment activity.

Laws like the one at issue usually include exceptions for news media; in fact, according to the ACLU (NYT link above), this one does. The reason for that isn't -- or isn't just -- some special extralegal status journalists have come to expect. It's that without an exception, the law could be enforced in such a way to choke off legitimate First Amendment activity. In fact, with an exception, the same possibility exists. (And it starts by qualifying "First Amendment activity" with words prone to subjective massage like "legitimate.")

There are many ways to support Hezbollah besides hooking satellite subscribers up to Al Manar, and if you're inclined to support Hezbollah, that's not all you'll do. Erring on the side of not prohibiting First Amendment activity, however distasteful, does not mean letting facilitators of terrorism walk.

And frankly, opening the arena of ideas to absolutely every perspective, however hateful or harebrained, is what we do in America. It's how it works. The government is never, ever going to know better than the collective wisdom of a free people which ideas are best and worst.

Who do you trust with your Constitution?

2007-08-22T10:35:00.000-04:00

Originally posted in May, 2006

Well, this is the monkey in the wrench, isn't it? Jonathan Rowe points out a flaw in the approach of those who would tamp down "judicial activism" by deferring to the constitutional judgment of Congress (via Prof. Barnett):

When Congress was exercising "legislative restraint” by considering itself bound by limited and enumerated powers, its judgment on this question may have merited the deference showed to it by Hamilton, Jefferson, and others as well. But when Congress has abandoned any sense of constitutional limits, then there would seem to be no real judgment of constitutionality to which to defer.

(Rowe has a longer post that's well worth reading at his own blog that goes into more detail.)

Deferring to the judgment of Congress on anything is a bad idea, and if you're going to frame the question the way Rowe and Barnett do, sure, I'm all for judges saying we can never vote on things ever again. If I have a rat problem, get me that cat, and if the cat starts peeing on and scratching up the furniture and making me sneeze then, well, at least the rats aren't bothering me anymore.

First, let's pull back from Barnett's comment and acknowledge that the only people who have a problem with the Court striking down acts of Congress are Congresspersons. When the Court decides that the Clean Water Act doesn't apply to a puddle in your yard, nobody cares. Well, you do if it's your yard, or if you're the Army Corps of Engineers, but I don't. We get into trouble when the Court starts rewriting 50 state constitutions and acting as though, for example, it knows more about trying criminals in Missouri than Missourians.

Barnett's question is, who would you rather have figuring out whether things are constitutional, the Supreme Court or Congress? Poll every adult American and the answer would be hundreds of millions to 535 in favor of the Court. But no serious observer of the Court in recent years can escape the fact it's making policy judgments in the guise of constitutional interpretation. "I want a do-over on my juvenile death penalty vote from 15 years ago, because... now it's unconstitutional!" You may gravely nod and muse that this is just as Marshall intended, I guess.
Laws can be changed. State laws even more easily than acts of Congress. They are changed, all the time. Some that aren't changed aren't enforced anymore. But that doesn't cover every situation! No. You should aspire to perfection in church, not in government. You'll still be disappointed, but there's songs.

The problem is that an edict from the Supreme Court can't realistically be changed. I'm sure that anyone who argues that it's a terribly hard row to hoe to change a state law will acknowledge that Supreme Court opinions are exponentially harder to reverse. There's your first problem. If you're going to hang your hat on the fact it's hard to change laws in the legislature, it doesn't make any sense to conclude that therefore, the Supreme Court should step in. Unless, I guess, you think the Court is infallible and will agree with your personal position on things 100 percent of the time. You must have another argument knocking around somewhere.

Maybe it's that you're impatient. If even one more Christopher Simmons has to be executed, then it's taken too long to come around to the enlightened view that people like him don't deserve to die. That seems to be the impetus on the Court itself: Mr. Justice Kennedy's argument for unconstitutionality of the so-called juvenile death penalty (as we've discussed, that's a very misleading term) was that states were changing their laws to outlaw the practice.

Five States that allowed the juvenile death penalty at the time of Stanford have abandoned it in the intervening 15 years, four through legislative enactments and one through judicial decision....

Since Stanford, no State that previously prohibited capital punishment for juveniles has reinstated it. This fact, coupled with the trend toward abolition of the juvenile death penalty, carries special force in light of the general popularity of anticrime legislation.

Roper v. Simmons took care of that "trend," in a way many death penalty opponents and liberty-lovers favor. But, while I'm not widely read, I have never heard what would be an honest argument for this: "Yes, democracy works, blah blah, but it takes too long, and that's why we need a Court that is nimble enough and responsive enough to the popular will to strike down laws before the people of a state get around to it." Does constitutional interpretation really have a countdown? Does this make sense on principle?

Framing all this as "I'd rather the Court than the legislature be in charge of figuring out what's constitutional" is sure to get an amen from the choir, but isn't really on point. A democracy rarely settles anything for once and for all. Every argument against our lives being run by a bunch of rich white men who lived 200 years ago equally applies to a group of nine people living comfortably in Washington today. Within specific limits -- the "abridging freedom of speech" and "no warrants shall issue except on probable cause"-type, clearly established limits -- we should be able to work things out for ourselves. Well, yeah. That's not just an argument in favor of a "living Constitution," it's an argument in favor of the Constitution.

The Constitution does not prohibit states from passing dumb laws. It doesn't even prohibit states from passing laws that infringe on liberty. (The Ninth Amendment!!! Right. Listing "freedom of speech" in the Constitution does not itself mean I don't have the right to wear flip flops in the shower. Quit trying to tell me it means no state can abridge any freedom I can think of, ever. There is that pesky Tenth Amendment, too.) What it does is ensure that we can change dumb laws and laws that infringe on liberty.

What the Court does too often today is take away the most powerful guarantee of the Constitution: that we -- everybody, with equal access and equal ability to debate and persuade, without being censored, without being thrown in jail for dissent -- can get together and go pass a new, different law or repeal an old one. In Roper, Kennedy basically said, "look at all the cute states outlawing the 'juvenile death penalty.' You can stop now, I've got it from here."

That's not democracy, it's not promoting liberty, and it's not Constitutional. Calling it "constitutional interpretation" does nothing more than make it easier to get people to agree that as between the Court and Congress, the Court should be doing it. But neither should. We should.

I’m from the government, and I’m here to help with your postpartum depression

2007-08-21T10:35:00.000-04:00

Originally posted in April, 2006

New Jersey, which if you ask me should be primarily concerned about where its bubonic plague-infested lab mice disappear to, now mandates that new mothers be screened for postpartum depression, as they leave the hospital (which, these days, is what, 15 minutes after delivery?) and in follow up postnatal care.

I have questions. One of them is not whether the state does or does not have any business getting involved in women's reproductive health care, even though I've heard both, and now maybe you have, too. That would be unduly divisive.

One is, why postpartum depression? I mean, and not other things instead or too?

One in eight new mothers is said to develop postpartum depression, with some indeterminate fraction of cases either lasting months or developing into a more serious psychosis. In some other indeterminate fraction of cases, women do not get treatment, because their husbands or other family members discourage it, because the women themselves think it's normal "baby blues" they'll recover from naturally, or they seek treatment but are rebuffed by doctors, or some other reason.

My point is not that this isn't serious, of course it is. I don't understand how much more urgent screening for this is than for, say, thyroid disease. Or breast cancer. Don't misunderstand me to be saying people should be compelled by law to submit to tests for those things, too; in fact the very moment I'm required by law to have regular prostate exams, the tea's going in the harbor.

The answer to my question has something to do with former state first lady Mary Jo Codey, who very publicly championed the law, plus the Andrea Yates nightmare and Tom Cruise dissing Brooke Shields. I'm glad prostate cancer doesn't normally result in multiple homicide or celebrity books, but it seems like if, and I don't concede this, government should be passing laws requiring doctors to do certain things, it should be motivated less by true crime stories and celebrity publicity.

Another question is, does anyone else think it's creepy when former Governor Richard Codey, now a state Senator, says women "facing the fear and uncertainty of postpartum depression will have someone looking out for them"? Considering who he means? I know if I'm facing fear and uncertainty, I want the closest bureaucrat to hold me. But I'm just that way.

Ok, that may have been a cheap shot, but it's also a good segue into my last question. What could possibly be wrong with a law that simply makes doctors do what they should be doing anyway, when it will unquestionably help women who otherwise wouldn't get help? Surely you're not hanging your hat on a general distrust of government, are you, libertarian boy?

Here's what could possibly be wrong, even assuming you don't believe the distance between something like this and mandatory digital rectal exams is uncomfortably short. New Jersey has around 115,000 births a year. Celeste Andriot Wood, assistant commissioner for family health services, says (link above) "10 percent of the new mothers will require intervention." Set aside how fascist that sounds, since we're being skeptical toward complaints about this. That's not 10 percent of New Jersey mothers who are not apt to otherwise get help. Remember our indeterminate percentages? Some will get help on their own; some, the mildest cases, may franky not need or want help. Is New Jersey treating a (say) three percent problem like a 10 percent problem?

How about whatever percentage of postpartum depression sufferers who would get help -- the personal, specialized, doctor-patient kind, not the one-size-fits-all state recommended kind? Are they better off? Are you ever better off when your consultation with your doctor is replaced by a nurse's followup phone survey that triggers the state-certified "requires intervention" scenario? Administration of the law is in the hands of the Commissioner of Health and Senior Services. Are you confident the Commissioner's not going to shunt mothers who would otherwise get actual, personal, professional care through some state hoo-hah involving doctors or professionals of the Commissioner's choosing? Commissioners of things hardly ever take care of their friends in New Jersey, but it's possible, anyway.

Pulling back from the floaty-hair black helicopter theories, what happens every single time you start requiring people to do things you would normally rely on their good judgment to do? Right, they bob down to your waterline of competency. I know the problem here is doctors who are not rigorous enough about discovering and treating postpartum depression, but those who are are now, essentially, off the hook. They are less likely to take a personal, profesisonal interest in their patients' postpartum health, because as long as they do what the state tells them to do, they're good.

If you don't believe that this is human nature, then have a kid, get him into fifth grade, and have his teacher assign essays with no set length. He's apt to fill a couple pages, if he's interested in what he's writing about. Now have the teacher say the essay must be at least two paragraphs long, because some of the kids are turning in "the cat sat on the mat." I'll give you three guesses how long your kid's next essay is going to be, but you'll only need one. Teacher has improved the performance of the lazy, good for nothing kids, but if yours wasn't one of them, how are you doing?

This is what happens, absolutely without exception every time, when you have some people doing well, some people doing barely passably and some people not doing, and you require that they all do barely passably. Hurray for the people relying on he doctors who weren't doing anything for them -- now they have one less reason to switch doctors to one who knows what he's doing next time they get pregnant. But not everyone's care has improved; some are worse off. Right?

Ode To a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning

2007-08-20T10:34:00.000-04:00

Originally posted in February, 2006

[Source of post title, for the hopelessly out of touch]

Is there a blog -- new media, Army of Davids, wisdom of crowds, blah, blah -- revolution going on? One that will hollow the Dinosaur Legacy Mainstream Media into an Ozymandius-like shell, surveying its dead works, playing Nearer My God To Thee and toasting to its own castrated power? The people telling you so are all trying to make money off such an allegedly burgeoning revolution. Have you noticed? So, set that aside.

Is Citizen Media simply the next Internet bubble, bloated fit to pop once information consumers realize news dailies are more than four sections and 80 pages of op-eds a day? The people telling you so are members of the Dinosaur Legacy Mainstream Media, who are probably sick of hearing how the asteroid is coming and Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi went up there without Bruce Willis.

It's all noise, in other words, as is most stuff covered on blogs, but this is navel-gazing, self-aggrandizing, preening, echo-chamber noise, which is tons more annoying. Big-traffic blogs that caterwaul about how the DinosaurLegacyMainstream Media could possibly fail to cover such and such pet story or could devote so much attention to this or that nonsense labor under the illusion their complaints are qualitatively different from the world-class athletes and professional coaches with decades of experience who talk over their cube walls on Monday about how the football team boned it big time over the weekend.

Now, what the DLMSM is or isn't telling us is terrific fodder for conversation, including the online variety. Blogs at their root, when commenting about news coverage, are letters to the editor. (You don't have to be brief, cordial or spell stuff right to get them published, either!) Or, you know, people talking over their cube walls.

Then, though, there's the guy in the office who decides to talk loudly enough for everyone to hear and offer what he considers the official office take on the news. In real life, people drop their jaws briefly in disbelief before shaking it off and returning to what they were doing, or chuckle and shake their heads, or tell the Poindexter to shut the hell up. In the blogosphere, we go hear! hear! and enter the site's caption contest.

What accounts for this? Online communities are of indefinite size, unlike your office environment, and leave a great deal to the imagination. There is a human impulse to be part of a grand, cohesive band of brothers, where everyone shares your senses of outrage and humor, are attractive and think you're exceedingly clever. When you routinely see and know everyone in your community, such as your coworkers, there are no illusions, and you spend most of your time trying to make everyone understand you're not like them in key ways.

What motivates some bloggers to try and cover every bit of news they think is important on their sites? Not your Red States and Daily Koses, those sites are trying to channel like minded activism into a credible outlet. I mean the sites that have entries like "Cheney said to have shot hunting buddy" and "Bush inaugurated" and such. Far be it from me if they're working their way into a revenue-generating model of some sort that I can't immediately imagine, but is that really the gold standard for blogs? Sites where you get your news... via quotes and links to DLMSM websites?

In my far from influential opinion, blogs are valuable, and will exist in five years, as commentary sites, places you can go to read perspectives on unique, niche-y things that are important to you. If you're interested in the things I'm interested in, maybe you'll plug this blog into your aggregator and check in once in a while to see what I'm saying about those things. What a coincidence! You think the best blogs are... most like yours! No, not best, not at all. I think the best blog by this model is something like Hit and Run, the kind of countercommentary and perspective you don't get much of anywhere else. You don't read Hit and Run to find out that D.C. has implemented a smoking ban in public places, but you do expect to learn there that Congress has exempted itself from it.

Contra: Sites the value proposition of which purports to be the deployment of bloggers to cover actual news stories. (I have long suspected that the deal there is trying to get high-traffic bloggers to link to one another to drive network page impressions to boost ad rates, but that's not what the value proposition purports to be.) If you take as given that DLMSM reportpersons have an inextricable institutional bias that prevents them from covering stories correctly, you still have to weigh that liability against assets like news bureaus, equipment, distribution infrastructure, networks of background and on-the-record sources, access, travel budgets and so on. It's hard for me to believe there's a net negative in most cases.

But at least they have some coin behind them. Sites that try to be all things for free confound me. There's a flag-planting, territory-conquering aspect to it, I'm sure, but enough to try and be DLMSM outfits with more exclamation points with little hope for meaningful remuneration? I've seen too many endeavors, online ones especially, that try to conquer the world fizzle when their own unreasonable expectations aren't met to think that's a good idea.

I've blogrolled and visit a few of the sites I'm talking about, and I don't mean to suggest they're not worth anyone's time. I just don't think they do what they're unaccountably trying to do as well as sites that spend a lot of money and manpower trying to do the same thing for profit. Free markets, etc. For myself, I will cheerfully ignore most important news stories until I think I can add a perspective I haven't seen and find interesting. I will still imagine that all you readers are attractive and think I'm exceedingly clever, though.

Incompetence

2007-08-19T10:34:00.000-04:00

Originally posted in March, 2005

Accusing U.S. forces of intentionally killing journalists in Iraq is so February, 2005 (or May), but something called the International Federation of Journalists is taking a different tack, and wants U.N. intervention (bring a good book or two!).

The International Federation of Journalists today said that the shooting of a Reuters sound technician by United States troops in Iraq at the weekend brings to 18 the number of journalists and media staff killed by US troops since the invasion of Iraq.

"The number of unexplained media killings by US military personnel is intolerable," said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary. "Media organisations and journalists' families face a wall of silence and an unfeeling bureaucracy that refuses to give clear and credible answers to questions."

In a letter to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, today, the IFJ called upon UN leaders to establish an independent inquiry into the killings of media staff at the hands of US and coalition forces.

Before muscle memory kicks in, note that the complaint here seems to be that the U.S. isn't investigating these deaths thoroughly or, at least, transparently. Unlike you get from certain American Chief News Executives or Newspaper Guild Presidents, there isn't an unsupported allegation that U.S. soldiers are intentionally targeting journalists. A federation of journalists should be expected to be roused to action over the deaths of people who share interests and working conditions with their members. So set that aside and get a load of the interesting (to me) part.

The IFJ accuses the US army of incompetence, reckless soldiering, and "cynical disregard” for the lives of journalists – particularly Iraqi – who are covering events in Iraq.

The shooting of Waleed Khaled in the Hay al-Adil district of west Baghdad, an incident in which cameraman Haider Kadhem was wounded, brings to 70 the number of Iraqi media staff killed since the US invasion in March 2003. Altogether, and counting all essential media staff including drivers and translators, the IFJ says 95 journalists and media staff have died in the Iraq conflict.

Pull out that word "incompetence" and think about it for a bit. Color your consideration with this excerpt from the IFJ letter to Kofi Annan:

Altogether and counting all essential media staff including drivers and translators, we have registered some 95 journalists and media staff who have died in the Iraq conflict.

The toll is appalling, with many of our colleagues helpless victims of a conflict in which there will be, inevitably, unavoidable casualties.

However, some of these deaths could and should have been avoided. We have noted that 18 of these deaths have been at the hands of US soldiers.

It seems to me to be telling, and important, that 77 deaths of journalists and support personnel in Iraq are regarded, here, as among the inevitable, unavoidable consequences of covering a war.

There is no demand for investigations, transparency or U.N. action in the case of Steven Vincent. Nor for Khaled al-Attar, an Iraqi producer for state news channel Al-Iraqiya, who was kidnapped shortly after noon July 1, and whose bullet-ridden body was found later in the day near a local mosque in Mosul. Nor Jerges Mahmood Mohamad Suleiman, a news anchor at Nineveh TV, a local affiliate of Al-Iraqiya, who was shot by unidentified assailants in Mosul in late May. Nor Najem Abed Khudair and Ahmed Adam, reporters with the private Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada whose throats were slit and whose bodies were left on the side of the road in Latifiyah, south of Baghdad in May.

Nor Ahmed al-Rubai'i, reporter and editor at the U.S.-backed daily Al-Sabah and media officer for the Iraqi National Assembly, who was abducted and murdered in April in Baghdad. Nor Saman Abdullah Izzedine, a news anchor for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)-backed Kirkuk TV, who was gunned down in his car in Kirkuk. Nor Hussam Sarsam, a cameraman for Kurdistan TV, kidnapped then shot and killed in public in Mosul in March, likely because he had videotaped confessions of insurgents held by Iraqi police in Mosul that were aired on his station.

These deaths are selected for their chronology, working backwards. And we've gotten only to March, 2005. See more here.

The point is not that the IFJ should demand the U.N. pay attention to all 95 journalist and support personnel deaths in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. It's that some of the harshest critics of American forces' actions in Iraq consider deaths at the hands of the U.S. avoidable, and the result of incompetence. (What makes you say the IFJ is necessarily a "harsh critic?" This, this and this help make the case.)

It's an important, and in its way, heartening point.

To be incompetent, U.S. forces would have to be held to a standard that requires them to take care to keep journalists covering the war safe. No such standard exists for "insurgents."

For the 18 deaths at the hands of U.S. forces to have been avoidable, American soldiers would have to be expected to desire and consider the safety of innocent civilians who largely try to be as close to danger as possible. A list of fighting forces about whom this could have been reasonably expected, and certainly its lapse complained of, in human history would be awfully short.

For the IFJ to demand justice for these 18 deaths, the American occupation of Iraq must be regarded as a benevolent force, comprised of just soldiers.

We sometimes say that the most objectionable demonstrations inspire us to the most pride to live in a country where they're part of the bedrock of public discourse and protected by law. The same should be true of accusations of "reckless soldiering" resulting in "avoidable" civilian deaths in Iraq, vis a vis our pride in Operation Iraqi Freedom and its participants. From the CPJ link above we learn of some of the murdered journalists in the last few months in Iraq:

"Insurgents have killed at least three other employees of [Al-Iraqiya] and its affiliates since last year, and the offices of the station and its affiliates have repeatedly come under mortar attack."

"Insurgents have frequently targeted Nineveh TV's offices with gunfire and mortars."
"Kurdish journalists said Kirkuk TV's anti-insurgent stance has made it vulnerable to attack from armed groups, and they believe Izzedine, a prominent personality on Kirkuk TV, was targeted for his work with the station."

The IFJ is right not to demand redress for avoidable death caused by incompetence in these cases, or the case of Steven Vincent, or, say, Daniel Pearl. Its members are on the ground in Iraq, shooting pictures and filing stories, because one side isn't that "competent," and does have the desire and power to "avoid" the brutal death of innocents.

Natural rights

2007-08-18T10:33:00.000-04:00

Originally posted in March, 2005

Jon Henke at Q and O posits that they don't exist, because you can't see or smell them:

"Your rights do not exist unless your fellow men agree that they exist. ... it is empirical reality".... I still await verifiable, physical proof of the existence of "rights". If they are natural, surely there should be evidence, no?

Yes! It's a myopic mistake to ask whether the people in the room, (garage,) state, country, or even world, living today, agree you have natural rights to life and liberty. There is no consensus worldwide that you do, and no incentive other than self-preservation that would encourage another to recognize that you have the right to your liberty.

The empirical evidence of a right to liberty is in observing how men and civilizations prosper in proportion to liberty being acknowledged and guaranteed. Has a system of ordered liberty, assuming a combination of resources and markets enough for the society's maintenance, ever failed to prosper and become wealthy?

A blank-slater may step back even further and argue that there is no objective reason to assume wealth and prosperity are indicia of a "good" outcome; there have been perfectly happy serfs living under tyrants throughout history. You do have to reject that counterintuitive argument, and assume that long life, wealth, happiness, security, tradition, family, industry and creativity are leading indicators of a "successful" outcome.

If you do, and you measure (however you might do this) liberty and these indicia, you will find an irrefutable correlation. Liberty, then, is unquestionably a necessary, whether or not sufficient, condition of prosperity. The aggregate of people currently alive may not realize this, but the evidence is mounting, and in time all men will recognize that everyone's liberty is in everyone's interest. Science has the term "deep time": that's what's necessary to this thesis, and what's missing from Henke's.

UPDATE: Henke responds:

Barr is engaging in the (very common in the "rights" discussion) argumentum ad consequentiam fallacy -- an appeal to consequences. That is, he is arguing that a "proposition is true because belief in it has good consequences, or that it is false because belief in it has bad consequences". If such an argument was valid, then we'd all have to believe in whatever religion offered the most beneficial outcome. After all, if we believed anything else, we'd be giving up all those wonderful, supernatural goodies!

I'd like to believe that rights are a fact of nature, and not a result of applied power. Unfortunately, all of history indicates otherwise.

I don't doubt that my answer can be read as "it must be true because if it's true that's good," but I was getting at something else. Henke mentions "survival of the fittest" in his original post, in the context that that is the law that governs everything, and natural rights advocates would exempt human beings and say they're governed by some other law. In fact, my answer has to do with "survival of the fittest."

If it is true that a condition is necessary (as I argue above) for the prosperity of a system, then in order for the system to prosper, its component parts must not act to suppress that condition. Others do have the option of suppressing it, in me or others or even themselves (assuming someone else willing to dominate them), but they should not. That's the character of a right: You could, but you ought not. The "right" to free speech: You could suppress my speech, but you ought not. The "right" to contract my labor out: You could suppress my contractual options, but you ought not.

A right to life and liberty, I would argue, is "natural" in character because it is a condition of being human -- being born -- that to the degree we have liberty, we may (personally) or will (in the aggregate) prosper. Flipped 'round, as liberty is suppressed, the race moves closer to extinction -- the extreme opposite of prosperity.

Henke's comparison to insects is inapt because a right involves a choice: You have the "right" to something only if you can choose to exercise it or not. And there is another reason argumentum ad consequentiam doesn't apply here, and it's in Henke's own post: There are many valid rationales for a belief in and commitment to liberty. My belief that life and liberty are rights inhering in every human because it is necessary for the survival and prosperity of the species does not lead me to any better, warmer, fuzzier result than cultural evolution or social contract.

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2007-08-01T15:25:00.000-04:00

My and your rights

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