Over that the National Review, Ed Whelan has publicly “outed” anonymous blogger publius of Obsidian Wings. This is in retaliation for some blog posts that were critical of Whelan.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of their respective political positions (and regular readers will know that I am far more likely to favor the National Review’s take on any given political subject than Obsidian Wings’), what Whelan has done here is shameful. If Whelan cannot endure public criticism, then he shouldn’t be in politics. I am embarrassed to share a political party with such a petty man. The NRO should be too.

Update: Ed Whelan has apologized. Good for him. It is hard to do a heel face turn when one has made a public mistake. This speaks highly of his character.

So. I have celiac disease. I think that in time, as I learn more, I’ll start blogging about gluten free cooking and living without wheat.

For now, however, I wanted to notice an odd, anecdotal correlation I’ve noticed between (a) lawyers who are unhappy as lawyers, and who seem to have temperaments that are similar to mine, and (b) problematic autoimmune disorders that manifest in the stomach. For example, both Amateur Content and Sherry (whose thoughts on the practice of law are gathered, in part, at her old blog) have recently been diagnosed with Chron’s disease. Chron’s and celiac are very similar autoimmune diseases which are often mistaken for one another.

This is, of course, not the entire story: celiac is at least partly genetic, and there appears to be at least some hereditary component to chron’s. But I wonder if the old wive’s tale about suppressed emotions causing stomach problems doesn’t contain a grain of truth.

(Not that I’m planning to leave the law. Quite the opposite: I enjoy the practice of law. I just don’t enjoy practicing in the environment that I’ve been in for the past several years).

I’m frankly still in shock at the Chrysler debacle:

“Fleecing lenders to pay off politically powerful interests, or governmental threats to reputation and business from a failure to toe a political line? We might expect this behavior from a Hugo Chávez. But it would never happen here, right?

Until Chrysler…

The Obama administration’s behavior in the Chrysler bankruptcy is a profound challenge to the rule of law. Secured creditors — entitled to first priority payment under the “absolute priority rule” — have been browbeaten by an American president into accepting only 30 cents on the dollar of their claims. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union, holding junior creditor claims, will get about 50 cents on the dollar.

The absolute priority rule is a linchpin of bankruptcy law. By preserving the substantive property and contract rights of creditors, it ensures that bankruptcy is used primarily as a procedural mechanism for the efficient resolution of financial distress. Chapter 11 promotes economic efficiency by reorganizing viable but financially distressed firms, i.e., firms that are worth more alive than dead.

Violating absolute priority undermines this commitment by introducing questions of redistribution into the process. It enables the rights of senior creditors to be plundered in order to benefit the rights of junior creditors.

The U.S. government also wants to rush through what amounts to a sham sale of all of Chrysler’s assets to Fiat. While speedy bankruptcy sales are not unheard of, they are usually reserved for situations involving a wasting or perishable asset (think of a truck of oranges) where delay might be fatal to the asset’s, or in this case the company’s, value. That’s hardly the case with Chrysler. But in a Chapter 11 reorganization, creditors have the right to vote to approve or reject the plan. The Obama administration’s asset-sale plan implements a de facto reorganization but denies to creditors the opportunity to vote on it.

By stepping over the bright line between the rule of law and the arbitrary behavior of men, President Obama may have created a thousand new failing businesses. That is, businesses that might have received financing before but that now will not, since lenders face the potential of future government confiscation. In other words, Mr. Obama may have helped save the jobs of thousands of union workers whose dues, in part, engineered his election. But what about the untold number of job losses in the future caused by trampling the sanctity of contracts today?”

– Todd Zywicki, Chrysler and the Rule of Law, Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2009, via .

Commenting on a related facet of this mess, Megan McArdle provided the best summary:

This move has shown potential partners that government funds are dangerous, and potential lenders that union firms are risky bets; both have probably cost American citizens more than they saved. So why did the government risk so much for so little gain?

You know the answer, don’t you? Because they’re planning to do it again.

The QOTD:

“There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.

Despite President Barack Obama’s early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the “tea parties” that have sprung up around the country… [T]he tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an “ethical populism.” The protesters are homeowners who didn’t walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don’t want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don’t need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right — and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.”

- Arthur C. Brooks, The Real Culture War is Over Capitalism, Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2009.

One of the hardest, most profound, and most illuminating lessons that I’ve learned is that truth is hard to find. It is hard to be right about anything. It’s much harder than people think.

“One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller’s Las Vegas show begins when Teller—the short, quiet one—strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it.

No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn’t stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it’s a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you’re shown that it is not.

The trick is called Looks Simple, and the point is that even a puff on a cigarette, closely examined, can disintegrate into smoke and mirrors. ‘People take reality for granted,’ Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. ‘Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.’

For Teller (that’s his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don’t see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like… This may be why exposing the ’secret’ of a magic trick is so often deflating. Most of the time, the secret is that we’re gullible and our brains are riddled with blind spots.”

- Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion, Wired Magazine, April 20, 2009.

In a strange way, I believe that this is what the techniques of the meditative traditions (e.g., mindfulness based-stress reduction, zazen, etc.) may really be about: our normal consciousness is cluttered by concepts of the world around us. We create conceptual categories so that we can analyze and understand the world and then predict what it will do. These concepts are necessary because our minds aren’t capable of seeing all of reality. Consequently, as Teller points out in the article, our attention functions as a spotlight in the dark which reveals its subject but which necessarily conceals everything else. Our concepts, while necessary at times, leave us open to biases, distorted thinking, and unexamined assumptions.

In meditation, by clearing your mind of distractions and focusing on the present moment, you are, with practice, hopefully, able to perceive the world with more immediacy.

“We each have three lives: the untouchable past, where our mistakes are stored; the immeasurable present, where we make them; and the impenetrable future, where they group and marshal. The present is the bottleneck: and the only reason most human pasts are not more untidy than they are is that we can only manage one mistake at a time. That bottleneck is the pinch in the hourglass, the restrictor which means events must pass us by one single grain at a time. We could take this as an opportunity to see things clearly, but it seems we’d rather not — most of us prefer to speculate hopelessly in the unfathomable scale of the future, or flounder hopelessly in the massive scale of the past. It’s an unfortunate distraction because, as we often tell each other, once the moment has passed we don’t get it back.

What this means is that those who can see the present clearly, and who do view the past and the future with the precision of good perspective, have a tremendous advantage over everybody else. They have a different relationship with fortune than the usual fumbling that the rest of us can muster. They can slip through the gaps between events that others do not even notice. They can make coins disappear.”

- Dave Whiteland, Planetarium (which I highly recommend, by the way), September 9, 1999.

Via Bruce Schneier:

The single greatest killer of Americans is the so-called “lifestyle disease”. Somewhere between half a million and a million of us get a short ride in a long hearse every year because of smoking, lousy diets, parking our bodies in front of the TV instead of operating them, and downing yet another six pack and / or tequila popper.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, between 310,000 and 580,000 of us will commit suicide by cigarette this year. Another 260,000 to 470,000 will go in the ground due to poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. And some 85,000 of us will drink to our own departure.

After the person in the mirror, the next most dangerous individual we’re ever likely to encounter is one in a white coat. Something like 200,000 of us will experience “cessation of life” due to medical errors – botched procedures, mis-prescribed drugs and “nosocomial infections”. (The really nasty ones you get from treatment in a hospital or healthcare service unit.)

The next most dangerous encounter the average American is likely to have is with a co-worker with an infection. Or a doorknob, stair railing or restaurant utensil touched by someone with the crud. “Microbial Agents” (read bugs like flu and pneumonia) will send 75,000 of us to meet the Reaper this year.

If we live through those social encounters, the next greatest danger is “Toxic Agents” – asbestos in our ceiling, lead in our pipes, the stuff we spray on our lawns or pour down our clogged drains. Annual body count from these handy consumer products is around 55,000.

After that, the most dangerous person in our lives is the one behind the wheel. About 42,000 of us will cash our chips in our rides this year. More than half will do so because we didn’t wear a seat belt. (Lest it wrinkle our suit.)

Some 31,000 of us will commit suicide by intention this year. (As opposed to not fastening our seat belts or smoking, by which we didn’t really mean to kill ourselves.)

About 30,000 of us will die due to our sexual behaviors, through which we’ll contract AIDS or Hepatitis C. Another 20,000 of us will pop off due to illicit drug use.

The next scariest person in our lives is someone we know who’s having a really bad day. Over 16,000 Americans will be murdered this year, most often by a relative or friend.

After that, it’s an overdose on “non-steroidal anti-inflammatories”, acetaminophen or aspirin. About 7,600 hundred a year, perhaps due to the aftermath of those tequila poppers.

Next most dangerous thing is going to work. About 5,500 of us will buy the farm due to “occupational trauma”.

If that’s scary enough to skip work, we might want to skip lunch, too. Next most dangerous thing is the food we eat. About 5,200 of us will hurl our lives away due to “foodborne agents”.

Another 4,000 of us will drown. A significant percentage will be fishermen found floating with a high blood alcohol content and an unzipped fly.

As the data clearly shows, the things that genuinely threaten us are the ones we are most likely to ignore or simply accept. (We’re statistically far more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than by an action of Al Qaeda, for example.) The ones that we’re scared witless of – and spend trillions of increasingly scarce dollars to avert in our boundless paranoia – are less likely to harm us than a bag of peanuts. (Deaths in America due to peanut allergies average 50 – 100 per year.)

…The things we fear most may be least likely to occur, which means the time, trauma and treasure we invest in them is a complete waste.

Security itself is an illusion. It is a perception that exists only between our ears. No army, insurance policy, hazmat team, video surveillance or explosive sniffer can protect us from our own immune system, a well-intentioned but clumsy surgeon, failing to look before crossing the street, an asteroid randomly hurtling through space or someone willing to die in order to do others harm.

In this sense, the only things that can truly make us more “secure” are not things. They are the courage to face whatever comes with dignity and intention, and the strong relationships that assure we will face the future together, and find comfort and meaning in doing so.

Imagine, then, what might happen if we simply quit listening to the scaremongers and those who profit from our paranoia. Imagine what the world could look like if we made a conscious choice to live out whatever time we have with courage, compassion, service and joy.

Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks.

– John Goekler, The Most Dangerous Person in the World?, Counterpunch, 3/24/2009

The QOTD:

Chapter 2 summarizes Olson’s groundbreaking work on how interest groups work to reduce a society’s efficiency and GDP. Some of this work seems obvious in retrospect and indeed Adam Smith noted that businessmen rarely met without conspiring against the public interest. There are a handful of automobile producers and millions of automobile consumers. It makes sense for an automobile company, acting individually, to lobby Congress for tariffs. The company will reap 20-40 percent of the benefits of the tariff. It doesn’t make sense for an individual consumer, however, to lobby Congress. It will cost him millions of dollars to lobby against Congress and preventing the tariff will save him only a few thousand dollars on his next car purchase. The economy suffers because some resources that would have been put to productive use are instead hanging around Washington and because cars are more expensive than they should be…

How could the Great Depression have lasted so long? Olson suggests assuming that a lot of prices are fixed by colluding business cartels and/or by government regulation. The prices are fixed higher than they would be in a free market, which imposes costs on society and guarantees supranormal profits to cartel members. If there is inflation, the losses to the economy from the cartel are ameliorated. The fixed price is no longer than much higher than what would have been the market price. In the event of deflation, however, the fixed price is now ridiculously high, demand for such an overpriced product plummets, and production plummets. Investment in new factories will fall to zero almost immediately.

Olson divides the economy into a fixprice sector and a flexprice sector. The fixed price part of the economy includes government workers, union workers, products produced by cartels, agriculture supported by government, and imported raw materials whose price is set on world markets. The flexprice sector would include simple services such as cleaning houses and babysitting, In the event of deflation, the output in the fixed price sector will collapse, driving a flood of young and newly unemployed workers into the flexprice sector. The schoolteacher will continue to earn $100,000 per year and retire at 52. The laid-off manufacturing worker will find that the market-clearing wage for cleaning houses is one third of what it was before the economic downturn. This is in fact what happened during the Great Depression. Folks who kept their jobs sailed through; folks tried to make a living as street vendors could not earn enough to eat…

Olson showed back in 1982 that modern macroeconomic theory was basically worthless in developed stable countries. Macroeconomics posits a free market in which wages and prices adjust dynamically. That applies to an ever-smaller sector of the U.S. economy. We have a rapidly growing governnment that directly or indirectly employs more than one third of our workers, many of whom are unionized. We have a health care system that consumes 16 percent of GDP and is staffed with doctors who restrict entry into the profession via their licensing cartel. The financial services sector is about 10 percent of the economy and they now tap into taxpayer money to keep their bonuses flowing in bad times. The automotive industry kept itself profitable over the years by successfully lobbying for import tariffs. When the profits turned to losses, they successfully lobbied to have taxpayers pick up those losses. A university-trained macroeconomist might be able to predict what will happen to babysitters in a depression, but not the price of cereal, the wage of a manufacturing worker, or the fate of those Americans who collect most of our national income (e.g., Wall Street, medical doctors, government workers).

A cashflow approach is much more effective for figuring out where we’re headed. Money flows out to the folks on Wall Street who bankrupted their firms, to schoolteachers who’ve failed to teach their students, to government workers who feel that simply showing up to work is a heroic achievement, to executives and union workers in America’s oldest and least competitive industries. If times are tough and money is tight, that means almost nothing is left over for productive investment. What would have been a short recession will turn into a long depression and decades of higher taxes and slow growth to pay for all of the cash ladled out. Special interest groups will continue to gain in power.

– Philip Greenspun, reviewing Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, 1982.

“The modern mind,” writes Wendell Berry, “longs for the Future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven.” Berry argues that we’ve been conned into believing that the present is something we need to escape because it’s just not good enough. We can’t be here now because we don’t yet have enough money, enough gadgets, or a large enough house. We’re not yet powerful enough or “happy” enough to live in the present. The truth is, if we’re satisfied with what we have in the present, we’re less likely to be obedient consumers, so the supply-side of the economy has invested trillions to engineer dissatisfaction into our shell-shocked psyches. Leisure, love, and laughter can be best had in the future, we begin to believe, but we can’t put our fingers on where that disturbing idea came from.

- David Wann, Simple Prosperity, quoted by My Money Blog.

The QOTD, on doubt:

All philosophy begins in wonder, said the ancients. With exceptions, contemporary philosophy stops at wonder. We are told: don’t ask, don’t wonder, about what you cannot know for sure. But the most important things of everyday life we cannot know for sure. We cannot know them beyond all possibility of their turning out to be false. We order our loves and loyalties, we invest our years with meaning and our death with hope, not knowing for sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, whether we might not have gotten it wrong. What we need is a philosophy that enables us to speak truly, if not clearly, a wisdom that does not eliminate but comprehends our doubt.

- Richard John Neuhaus, Born Towards Dying.

The QOTD:

“None of this is to imply that new professionals are left without goals. Ironically, however, the primary goal for many becomes, in essence, getting compensated sufficiently for sidelining their original goals… Once the professional adopts this new, quantitative measure of success, the system has him in the palm of its hand, for he maximizes his compensation by working hard to further the goals of his employer… And work hard he does - 12-hour or longer workdays are standard for many young professionals. According to the Wall Street Journal, “in some investment-banking and law firms, seven-day, 100-hour work-weeks aren’t uncommon.” At First Boston Corporation, a large international investment banking firm headquartered in New York City, “Young associates stay late about three nights a week. The other nights they’re out by eight or nine,” the chairman of the corporation’s recruiting committee tells the Journal.

Moreover, in spite of his marathon effort and to his employer’s further delight, the young professional feels that he must not be working hard enough, because the compensation never quite seems to satisfy him; the feeling of “having it all” eludes him. In fact, his efforts are futile, for no amount of income or status can make whole a social being who has abandoned his own intellectual and political goals. The situation tends to be self-perpetuating. The professional’s priority on compensation inhibits him from developing and pursuing his own intellectual and political goals, because the independent thinking necessary to do that is incompatible with the mind-set necessary to do best for his employers and therefore do best in the rat race. Furthermore, the rat race is an all-encompassing effort: the young professional works the week like a sprint and is left with only a few hours of leisure time out of the week’s 168 hours. To prepare his mind adequately for the professional work ahead, he must spend his hard-won free time “working at relaxation,” certainly not reflecting. Until the professional assigns highest importance to developing and advancing his own political goals, serving the system will be not just his job, but his life.”

- Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, pg. 121-23.