H/T Underbelly for the following link.  I first heard of the author of Moneyball around the time I was in Underbelly's class.  A great book about baseball and investing.  Not that I believe the stock market, typified by Wall Street, is dead by any means.  But his central theme, that investing is a game to be mastered, still hits home for me.

Slacker Town

Take Hollywood out of this town, take out the Dodgers, take out surfing and business sophistication and it would be a very different place.  Yesterday I went downtown and, ignoring the decayed opulence of any of its buildings, the town has the feel of any of a number of inland cities - Stockton, Sacramento, Spokane or Fresno.  Cities designed with grain hoppers and train tracks in mind.  Streets now vaguely smelling of dried urine.  Minor league towns.  Towns with some city life, but one with a direct link to the past.  Guys drive hot rods, wear pomade and listen to three-chord punk and the girls cultivate a Betty Paige look.   It's a backward looking thing.  It's a "what are we gonna do next" attitude.

Man that girl can take it.  One thing, tattoos and greased hair only look good until about thirty or so.

Here We Are

I wake this morning happy that last night was not just a dream.  The evening left me spent in celebration.  This morning, my mind remains child-like.  See here for a good speech kinda place for a discussion.  See here for more of the kinda speech (mendacious, distorted, ideologue) that can't seem to understand its failure was a failure of ideas.

And enjoy.

The Battle for Hawaii Minds

Honolulu's afternoon paper, the Starbulletin, has a loose comments policy.  A number of wing nuts on the Mainland (and, to be fair, in Hawaii too - and there is someone from Japan) have figured out that Barack Obama is from Hawaii - he's Hawaii's favored son.   So every piece he gets in Hawaii's press attracts a string of comments loosing forth.  The attacks are of the "how can you all be so stupid" variety - the writers have an interesting take on fact.

In the spirit of countering bad speech with good, readers may want to start work o, their argument skills here.  And then take a good long shower.

I don't normally read sites with this kind of stuff on it.  I'm basically a NYTimes reader.  I read the Starbulletin and LA Times for local news.  But swimming in these comments makes me wonder how many otherwise average people are truly unhinged.  For instance, I had not heard about it before, but this one really startled me.  Our marketplace of ideas seems to not trade very well.  Maybe Churchill was right when he said, "The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."

Could we please have a nanny state?

I'm in the Tank

I support Barack Obama for president.  It's not just that I'm completely wowed by everything he says.  I have substantive policy disagreements with him.    I used to think he was callow.  I still think its a bit of a leap of faith.  I can't completely disagree with the idea that I'm projecting my desires on him, that he is more about hope than about substance.  Yes, I agree that some of this is about a cult of personality.  Then again, that's a pretty time honored reason to vote for someone.

I'm pretty disgusted with the counter arguments for Obama: that people only vote for him because he's black, or because he's not a woman.  I think it's pretty clear that he appeals to a very broad spectrum.  He's transformational: a candidate for all of us, and if he is like the illustrated man, so be it.  I, for one, have been waiting for a symbol of America that is not so tired and so one dimensional.

If I have to pick a shallow reason for choosing Obama, it's because he's likely to be my only shot a voting for someone from my home town.  We share a common story.  We are both born and raised in Hawaii.  My class looked something like his:

I think I recognize some people in that photo - or maybe I know their brothers or sisters.  At any rate, growing up as a white kid in Hawaii in the 70's was pretty special.  And how many times am I going to have the opportunity to vote for another kid with any sort of a background that I have.  Call Hawaii what you want, it's corrupt politics, its racial problems, its closed economy - it is a place like no other.  As much as I love the city I now live in, and love it despite many similar problems, Hawaii remains the place I feel most comfortable.  I'll take rice over potato.

Take Barack: Hawaii born, American mother, Kenyan Father, father left when he was young, taken to be raised in Indonesia and back in Hawaii,, Punahou School, California and New York for college, an awakening and finding a place in Chicago.  Barack is a traveler, and he's had nothing if not a broad experience growing up.  I don't mind that many of my countrymen don't find commonality with his background.  But many Americans, like America, are sheltered by the coasts.  The heartland, our lebensraum, is far removed from the rest of the world, and America only confronts the outside at its edges.  There is something admirable in that removal, something that we can be proud of and which we should protect.  But it is also something that allows us to ignore the reality, that we have a larger place in world affairs.  We have a duty to ourselves and the world to confront and engage the world in more sophisticated terms.  Barack Obama gets that.

My place is in the City of Angels.

My story: Born in Hawaii to an American father and a Danish mother.  Until I was almost nine or ten my father sent us to live with my grandparents in Denmark every summer.  I left Hawaii at eighteen and travelled in Europe and in Australia/NZ.  I went to college in Oregon and found some place, but was not a huge fan of that place.  I went back to school in California and New York.  I now practice law in this city, a wonderful city.  I did not have to search as hard to find a home like Barack.  My dad's dad raised a family here and, well Hawaii kids have a tendency to move away if they want to make something of themselves.  I have heaps of childhood friends who live in this state with me.  I still call them friends.  I have family here.  But I do understand the need to get away to some place larger, a place where I can put myself to use.

BTW: I'm not tired of the Duke.  I think he's one of the greatest of Americans.  I just think the common regard for him is too simplistic.

Your Winnings Sir

From Reuters: 

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress on Thursday he is "shocked" at the breakdown in U.S. credit markets and said he was "partially" wrong to resist regulation of some securities.

Much has been made as to how this current crisis resembles the events of 1929.  Or could it be 1939?

How can you close me up? On what grounds?

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Your winnings, sir. 

Oh, thank you very much. [aloud] Everybody out at once! 

H/T Cardiogirl for the photo, (and yes, she truly does look lovely).

JSM Channels Chamberlain

There's an insightful article by Adam Gopnik on John Mill in this week's New Yorker. The point of the article is to say that Mill's views on Liberty, his fierce advocacy for freedom, were right (in the sense of he was correct).

Interestingly, there is a sense of let down - that freedom didn't, in the end, mean freedom in the sense that Mill had hoped for. I turn the keyboard over:

"Mill has a principle of liberty, but far more important is that he starts a practice of liberal thought. ... When he asks us to think about liberty, he doesn't want us to ask, Can this odd thing people are doing be deduced from some ethical axiom, that lets me call it "good," and permits them to go on doing it? He wants us to ask something simpler: Is this practice causing me any real harm? Not potential harm to my feelings, not social harm to my idea of right, not damage to the great precepts of religion or to my stuffy uncle's sense of propriety. Unless the speaker is actually about to cut your throat, you have to let him work his jaw."

And later

"Mill's theory of freedom does make an unwarranted assumption -- that people want a rich life where knowledge increases, new discoveries are made, and new ideas found, where art flourishes and science advances. If you don't want that kind of society, you don't want liberty, in Mill's sense. Part of what makes him as touching as he is great is that is scarcely occurred to him that anyone would not."

Mill seems to have too-late realized that conservative opposition to his ideas was due to the fact that there are things that liberty would demand, that many simply cannot tolerate.

"[Mill] became notorious for once having described the Conservatives as "necessarily the stupidest party." ... He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one's own case to consider it as one of many.... The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another's shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

"There is a non-stupid conservative reproach to Mill. It is that his great success at changing minds has made a world in which there is not much of a role for people like him. Mill and Harriet, to a degree that they could hardly recognize, flourished within a whole set of social assumptions and shared beliefs. Respect for mind, space for argument, the dispersal of that respect throughout the population, even the existence of a rentier class who could spend their time with ideas - all of these things were possible in a society that was far more hierarchical and elitist than the society they dreamed of and helped to bring about."

"You can also fault Mill for the grasping something that a crazy reactionary like his friend Carlyle recognized: the depths of violence and rage and hatred beneath the thin shell of civilization. Mill is like a man who has spent his life on one of those moving walkways you find in airports. He takes the forward movement so much for granted that he never makes it his subject. "Most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits," he wrote, a little too assuredly"

Okay, maybe the title of this post is inaccurate, I'd like to think Mill would have recognized the danger. Mr. Gopnik says there is something touching about Mills' naivete. Maybe that is so. What I find interesting is the way he at once so inspiring, maybe universally so, and at the same time so infuriating. I suspect most of us are really just stupid conservatives.

That line about conservatism being "complicated" is pretty funny too.