A lurker pointed me at this review of Debt by Gabriel Rossman, a Princeton sociologist. It links back to my earlier griping about the Apple-was-founded-by-ex-IBMers weirdness, and also critiques Graeber's argument that US borrowing from other countries is a form of military tribute:

The thing that really bothers me though (because it's more than an isolated sentence) is the last few chapters, which argue that America's current account deficit constitutes military tribute. He means this literally. For instance, he suggests that the Iraq War was punishment for Iraq switching to the euro -- meanwhile back in reality the euro area itself overlaps pretty closely with NATO and several eurozone countries invaded Iraq together with the United States. I guess we've just been too busy punishing Iraq for using euros to get around to dropping a few bombs on the European Central Bank which actually issues those euros. (This is pretty strange since the ECB is just a few minutes of flight time from a massive USAF base, so bombing it would be a very convenient way to ensure the continued flow of tribute).

When I first read this military tribute argument in the early 1990s (in Chomsky's Deterring Democracy) it made a lot of sense to me, but two things were different then:

1. I was a lot younger, less informed about economics, and more paranoid in my political thinking.

2. In the early 1990s the US government's major foreign debt holders were countries that could plausibly be described as military protectorates (Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc.). Now the single largest holder of US government debt is the People's Republic of China. For those of you following at home, China is most certainly not a US military protectorate but our major geostrategic rival against whom a post-GWOT DOD is orienting its strategic doctrine.

Graeber addresses problem #2 head on and tries to explain this away by some convoluted argument that I can't even reproduce but I find his argument much less plausible than the more parsimonious explanation that the Chinese are buying t-bills (a) as a store of value (b) as a medium of exchange and (c) as a tacit export subsidy that suits their domestic politics. That is, they buy t-bills for basically the same reasons as everybody else, including those countries where we have Air Force or Navy bases.

The review is still generally positive in the sense that it describes the book as worth reading even if unreliable in specifics, which is mostly how I felt about it.

(Also, the same lurker informs me that Graeber, on Twitter, sourced the Apple claim to his memory of a lecture by Richard Wolff. So that's where that came from.)

Is it wrong that I'm terribly excited for the Iowa Republican primary? Whoever will they choose of this batty group of fuck-you clowns?

In honor of Santorum's recent gains in the Iowa polls, let's let this be the thread that increases the number of links to this website. Go go google ranking!

"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.....
The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbors, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger."

Stephen G. Bloom's "Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life" has apparently been controversial. (I heard he even got death threats.)

It's odd. He doesn't actually say anything that's not true.

Why does the CFL continue to house the goal posts at the front of the end zone? This sort of thing seems inevitable.

According to Wikipedia, "She also did the Swedish voice of Anne-Marie in All Dogs Go to Heaven."

What's not to love about Robyn?

I called my mom today for clarification on the details of the ritual of my father on New Year's Day. When he still lived in Chicago, he would go around to all the relatives' houses early (like 7am, when people had likely been up late). Once inside, he would reach into a can of oats and pennies and toss a handful up in the air while shouting "Happy New Year!" (I went along several times as a kid. It was great fun for everyone.)

It turns out the tradition dates to his Polish grandfather (who's named something kind of badass-yet-evil), who had passed it on to my father, including the original chicory coffee can that houses the oats and pennies.

Oats are for good, uh, something in the new year, and the pennies wish you wealth.

I was recently thumbing through Political Fictions, the collection of Joan Didion's political reporting for the NYRB, and I was struck by how dated the following anecdote, from 1988, sounded.

I recall having dinner, the weekend before the California primary, at the Pebble Beach house of the chairman of a large American corporation. There were all white, all well off, all well dressed, all well educated, all socially conservative. Over the course of the evening it came to my attention that six of the sixteen, or every one of the registered Democrats present intended to vote for Jesse Jackson. The reasons were unspecific but definite. "I heard him, he doesn't sound like a politician," one said. "He's talking about right now," another said. "You get outside the gate here, take a look around, you have to know we have some problems, and he's talking about them."

It's unspecified, but I understand the "some problems" as referring, in large part, to economic and class disparities. It struck me that the, Occupy Wall Street aside, that discussion has really changed in the last 20 years.

Obviously there are probably many reasons but I wondered how much the dot com bubble, specifically, shifted the stereotypes about class and wealth in this county, and whether the rise of "the age of the geek" has served to blunt some of the class resentment and sense of class conflict.

The explosion of internet wealth seems like it's unusual in two important ways. First of all, compared to somebody who made their money in a manufacturing or service-sector company the dot com companies had no visible group of exploited workers. The return to the founders (and to capital) was not obviously an accumulation and capturing of surplus value from labor, but looked more like just being in the right place at the right time. Like striking oil, except without an physical commodity underlying the windfall. Secondly there was a sense that people could be participate in this explosion of money without having to commit to toadying up to power or being "socially acceptable" to the traditional gatekeepers of wealth and privilege. For those reasons it was wealth that could seem "harmless" in some ways -- even as inequality grew you might say that the dot com money seemed to do less to social inequality.

I just wonder if the fact that, for a period of year, the internet bubble was the face of American wealth creation and opportunity, along with general economic prosperity, helped suppress awareness/salience of class conflict s a social force. If true I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I think it's been a challenge politically, but it's also easy to remember why there was so much that was likable about the early internet boom.

Sherry (you all remember Sherry, right? Used to blog at Stay of Execution, and then with Megan at Rhubarb Pie) pointed me to an interesting blog by a twenty-something who's living in Austin and trying to pay off about $100K in debt from a Harvard MBA in ten months by living cheap and working two jobs (but not doing porn. He's considered it, but no): No More Harvard Debt.

Financially, of course, it's perfectly sensible: he's making quite a lot of money at his primary job, so it really is practical for him to do this in a way that it wouldn't be for someone who's not. But the kind of 'quite a lot' of money he's making is the kind that most people who make it fritter away invisibly, and it's impressive seeing someone not do it. Socially is really interesting -- while the dude is managing okay, he seems to have no idea at all how people without a lot of money have fun. He's still spending weekend nights in bars with his friends who are making more money, ordering Coke and spiking it with cheap whiskey out of a flask: cooking his friends dinner and drinking cheap whiskey with them in the comfort of his own home doesn't seem to have occurred to him. And (while he doesn't seem like a terrible person overall) he's awfully flummoxed by how he can possibly date if he can't spend money on the women he's dating: he's still living larger than most people in the country, even at his maximum level of frugality, and there are plenty of perfectly respectable people out there who are familiar with not having buckets of money to throw around on dating.

Anyway, living cheaper is something I've been thinking about for this upcoming year (we're not horrifically extravagant, but man does takeout add up. I have to start getting out of work earlier to cook dinner more. And I have a tendency to think of expenditures under about a hundred dollars as unimportant and not worth keeping track of, and that's not something we can afford to do and save properly). So an interesting read for the beginning of the year.

I shouldn't have said this:

I'd a million times rather feel like this and be in decent mental health than be back to having some kind of psychological breakdown and being suicidal, so, bring it on, bacteria. Bring. It. On. I don't give a fuck. You can't hurt me nearly as bad as I can hurt myself, punk-ass microscopic rods. You're going to eat horseflesh.

Because that just never works unless you're a Russian general facing a land invasion, you know? Even if Poland is there. (Remember how he was obsessed with how Poland was helping?) I mean, I'm still right about the mental health vs. physical health thing, but it's clear I should have been knocking on wood superstitiously rather than going on about how bacteria can't hurt me. See, it turns out they hijack part of you into becoming little factories for them, and then that's kind of a drag. Fucking little rods. Oh well, it's way less serious than real typhoid.

God, I really hate that man. One forgets, sometimes.

From time to time Penelope Trunk has registered on our radar. Conversation usually degenerates into a debate as to whether she's a lying liar who's too boring to discuss, or is she merely exaggerating, and aren't her stories butty? Her shtick is to overshare crazy details about her life, and then give pat career advice, especially if it up-ends conventional wisdom by extrapolating from some shred of science. Also she (claims to) have Asperger's. (Lying liar or basically honest?)

Oudemia sends this link along. Apparently she is now blogging about physical abuse in her marriage.

Trunk has created a public account of what sounds like ongoing spousal abuse by a man whose photo is on her site and who would probably be relatively easy to identify -- Trunk herself has a high enough public profile that she worries about getting recognized at a women's shelter. She never mentions calling authorities, but what she's written seems like evidence enough for them to pay a visit to the Farmer. Hers is the rare blog post that appears also to report a crime.

In my uninformed opinion, I'm not too disturbed by her accounts. There's a difference between a marriage with fights that become violent, and Battered Woman Syndrome. Definitely it sounds like the marriage is awful and should end. But when you invoke SPOUSAL ABUSE, it tends to register like "evil abuser who dishes it out" and "meek abused recipient", because sometimes that really is the roles. I don't think that's the case here.

That last paragraph was written in about two seconds with kids badgering me, so it's not exactly phrased well, and I've got to go right now.

I kinda liked Bob McDonnell. He was a Republican governor in a purple state who was just getting things done, without being controversial. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli was the zany one.

Nothing to see here, just raising the state speed limit to 70 MPH (popular!), passing budgets by talking to Democrats (popular!), and generally having a well-coiffed mop. (The man has nice hair, it must be admitted.)

He's on anyone's shortlist for VP.

So why not release the hounds on abortion clinics on the last business day of the year, right after Baby Jesus Birthday, when no one's paying attention to the news?

That's politics.

The NYT had another article about the experiment to make a more dangerous form of bird flu virus. I don't see such experiments as having a favorable cost/benefit ratio and I think they should be discouraged. I have a bad feeling about this.

From Heebie: I recently read some snippet where they created mosquitoes that have a gene that makes them self-destruct. Then they introduced them into the wild. The tampered mosquitoes bred with regular mosquitoes and it seemed to be working, "it" being something about fighting dengue fever. I know mosquito-borne diseases cause tons of horrible deaths, but this seems like a sequel to Jurassic Park. Scientists and their hubris and unintended consequences and all that.

In general I think scientists are wise and cautious. But still, what if the dinosaurs test every inch of that fence and find that self-destruct gene.

I'm curious about the emotional lives of people who live in the poorest, densest parts of the world, like the slums in cities of India where there are layers and layers of shanties. Do people have a way of finding privacy every now and then? Is privacy a Western concept and I'm revealing my narrow world-view? Is the density of people traumatic, like a war-zone, or just hard, like a well-functioning family dealing with extreme poverty, or just a fact about life, like it is in Manhattan? (Obviously additional factors, like abuse, can transform it into a traumatic zone.) But the density in particular: what kind of toll does it take?

The other day I took a shower because I felt like being alone. We're in a big house, in the middle of Montana, and I needed some personal space. I'm probably fragile or something.