It Seems the Rumors Were True

A great investment bank is much more than the sum of its capitalization. Thus, the $15 billion or so lost on this deal is a lesser evil than the who knows how much rides on Bear Stearns being able to meet its credit obligations.

The Fed is upholding the current economic order in this deal. Believe me, this is quite an improvement on those bygone days when the leading investment bankers would meet in a room and agree to pump the blue chips. At least, the government is a little more involved.

ESA(20080316.1)

In Which Peer Review Saves My Butt

So there's this project I've been working on for more than two years. And it consumed so much of my life that I was so extremely happy when the paper was submitted that I quoted the "Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" address from the Aeneid . Basically, the project depressed me. By the end of it, I felt like I was merely quantifying ignorance. I felt deeply intellectually unsatisfied. So this week I received the reviews back on the paper, which can be summarized as: "We're kind of glad that you're doing this, but you really suck at doing it."

So I read the reviews in more detail and realized that they were quite right. I had interesting and original ideas, but there were a few key points I had not quite understood, which completely destroyed the paper. But in the last three days, I've managed to right much of the boat and now feel enthused and intellectual excited (if not yet satisfied). So many things I didn't understand before now make sense. The best thing about this is that if I'm right, the next few years of my career become just a little easier.

I've spent much of my life hating criticism of my academic work. So much of my sweat and soul has been poured into them that I identify deeply with the "brats of my brain" (I think that's Defoe). Criticism has become deeply emotional. As I start publishing more and more, I need to take a different approach. Criticism is sometimes unjustified (but is an opportunity to educate and clarify), but good criticism (as a colleague said recently) prevents you from making a fool of yourself in public. I can't say that the emotional turmoil of the last few days has been particularly good. I've been rather snippy for the last 48 hours, and I didn't get much sleep on Wednesday night. But I didn't need to cry and the feeling of minimal self-worth went away quickly. Most of you haven't known me since elementary school, but those who do will remember I used to deal with failure much differently. Hooray for progress!

ESA(20080215.1)

I Think I Can Vote for Barack Obama

Of course, talk is cheap, but I've found American politics goes faster when a wide variety of people acknowledge a problem and then compromise about a solution rather than impose a solution from above. For instance, nothing has been done about Social Security, because President Bush refused to discuss other options but individual accounts.

Obama has the same list of problems I do and so does John Edwards. I'll have to see whether Hillary Clinton does, too, but I have yet to see her in a debate speak with this kind of clarity. She spends much of her time on the attack and the defensive feint. This isn't exactly subtle political analysis.

If it comes to it, I could vote for John McCain. While I'm not sure if fiscal conservatism and strict constructionism are unmitigated goods, McCain's consistent application of them sets him apart from much of the rest of the Republican Party. I think leftists other than myself will appreciate someone who actually believes in states' rights. Not many Senators swing back and forth from highly conservative to highly liberal ratings unless they're horse traders or genuinely interested in the common good to the exclusion of ideology. Looking at McCain's legislative history, horse-trading never seemed up his alley. As a Senator from a Mexican border state, McCain chose a middle ground between the xenophobia many of his constituents often embrace and the ethnic feeling of some of his other constituents, angering many of the people who could make him the Republican nominee. That's courage even for a man who once observed in his mid 40s that the place where he had lived the longest was Hanoi, Vietnam. Despite the Vietcong's poor hospitality, McCain led the charge to normalize relations, angering many of his fellow Vietnam veterans.

McCain famously has said that he is now a Baptist, because their praxis was more emphatic about forgiveness than Episcopalianism. In the Republican field, you really have to appreciate a candidate whose Christianity is mainly indicated by his mercy and compassion because he knows how much he needs to be forgiven. Most immediately, he has foot in mouth disease of a rather insensitive order, joking about military action against Iran or buying Jon Stewart an IED in Baghdad. His common reply to criticism of these problem is "Get a life." But he is a man who's been on both sides of bombs and for McCain, like Vonnegut, war can be equally horrible and humorous. Indeed, what could be more attractive in the midst of our present national moral crisis regarding the limits of the war on terrorism than a President with firsthand experience of being on the receiving end of torture?

But ignoring his war service, McCain has other skeletons in his closet. When he was young and stupid, he was young and stupid. His misspent youth was not unlike our current President's, except I've yet to hear of a President dating an exotic dancer. Returning from Vietnam, his first marriage broke down for reasons that McCain admits had more to do with his inability to settle down at 40 than the relics of war in his soul. His present wife has struggled with drug addiction, though this hasn't stopped her from an active career in philantropy and running her family business as a beer distributor.

All of this and he's still viable. Amazing.

All right. Enough politics. I'm watching Northanger Abbey .


ESA(20080120.1)

Trying to Fix the Comments on this Blog

My goal for the day: Pseudo-code a quick and dirty radiative transfer model.

Hillary Wins in NH

I was discussing the possibility of a Clinton-Obama ticket yesterday. The conclusion: possible but disastrous. Really hoping for Edwards to steal Hillary's thunder in the South.

But the real news is John McCain takes Romney in New England. And as scary as it is to say, I may vote for John McCain over Hillary Clinton, because McCain is the one Republican I trust to deal with global warming and not start a war with Iran.

Live From Manchester, It's the New Hampshire Debates

I can't admit to viewing these in their entirety. Man, as the Philosopher says, is a political animal, and this particular zoos politike enjoys being political amidst friends and drinks. Viewing a debate alone lends itself to too many distractions. So I chose Korean drama over much of the Republican debate and missed a smidgen of the Democratic debate.

Some observations:

1. The informality of our society now lends itself to perversity. The moderator addresses Senators, Governors, Congressmen X,Y, and Z, but amidst the candidates, we have John, Ron, Bill, and Hillary. It smacks not of democracy but of royalty amongst themselves. Our respectful forms of address are not anti-democratic but a recognition of the dignity of each individual. It was a blow for equality when African-Americans went from boy to sir, from X to Mr. Y.

2. It's easy to see why Ron Paul is despised by neoconservatives. He's completely unlike anyone on the Republican side, having more in common on foreign policy with the extreme left than anyone else in his party. As anyone who knows Pat Buchanan will tell you, the extreme right and the extreme left have surprisingly similar views on post-WWII foreign policy. Paul ranted constantly, but I thought it was frightening when Romney alluded to Al-Qutb (of In the Shade of the Quran fame) and the idea of the universal caliphate, but Paul seemed to have the deeper understanding of what could motivate Al-Qutb's extremist philosophy. I don't think a little regret for the conduct of the Cold War while asserting the rectitude of our cause is problematic. But clearly the Republicans aren't there yet.

3. I don't know why Hillary Clinton breeds such contempt in me. I like much of what she's done in her own capacity even if I really have little respect for her form of contract with Bill. But two moments really disturbed me. At one point, she quoted from an AP story about Senator Obama saying something like, "Senator Obama could have an animated debate with himself three years ago.". Of course, it's an AP story, not an opinion piece, so Obama quickly exposed the quote as from someone connected to her own campaign. It looked like some sort of rhetorical device to deceive the simple and a crude one at that. Then later in the debate, she talked about the changes that would come if she was elected the first woman president. I suppose I have to admit gender essentialism to a limited degree, but there are serious problems facing the Republic. If I could be convinced that those problems could be solved most effectively by a black lesbian Jew, I gladly would vote for one. But this is not the time in our nation's history to elect the identity politics equivalent of a novus homo just for kicks.

4. Poor Bill Richardson. If elected, he actually might try to do something, but I look at his record as Energy Secretary and as envoy to the North Koreans and wonder whether he can make anything last.

5. Best moment of the debate was when Charlie Gibson estimated the salaries of two St. Anselm College professors (SLAC, I'm betting) totalled over $200,000.

6. Obama and Edwards belong together as running mates. They're both extremely good-looking. They seem to like each other even if they disagree on the nitty gritty of everything. John Edwards has his sexy Southern drawl and Barack Obama has his sexy Northern aloofness. And they do like to talk about change at every opportunity.

7. Edwards seriously proposed nuclear disarmament. There's hope for this country yet.

Happy Epiphany!

ESA(20070105.1)

Iowa Caucuses

One of my colleagues asked me yesterday for my predictions. I went with Huckabee and Clinton. Well, Huckabee did extremely well for the reasons I cited, but Clinton was outdistanced by both Obama and Edwards. The source of this miscalculation? I expected women my mother's age to turn out for Clinton in droves. Instead, I think many of those women turned out in droves for Obama along with first-time caucusers my age. John Edwards' advantage was to be the second choice. He may find himself on the vice presidential ticket very soon.

While the result among the Republicans is a good indicator of what the heartland base of the Republican Party is looking for in a presidential candidate and is therefore no surprise, Clinton's third place finish is a historically significant result. I didn't read the New York Times Magazine article about "Clintonism" that appeared a few weeks ago, but I think we should read these results as a prairie-style rejection of the centrist strategy of the Democratic Party. Iowa Democrats disliked the 2004 campaign, for instance, where John Kerry tried to outdo the President's hawkishness and gave voters little confidence in his ability to fix the economy, which was as deep a concern as the war. Most of the Democratic base would have preferred that Kerry prosecute the President for his incompetent prosecution of the war. He would have lost but at least lost with integrity.

Now both Obama and Edwards represent a more leftist economic strategy even if their foreign policy strategy still seems ephemeral. One other idea to consider is whether Obama had a particular Iowa strategy due to his political origins in neighboring Illinois (southern Illinois isn't much different from Iowa after all), but I think such a hypothesis will require more detailed investigation that I've had time for. Now on to New Hampshire where the party's centrist strategy will try to reclaim power through the famously independent New Hampshire voter.

(20080104.1)