P.S. A Column On Things

Heading off for the Glorious Fourth

Like millions of other Americans, Vicki and I are hitting the road for the Fourth, headed for my natal city in my natal state, Portland, Oregon. We'll watch the fireworks over the Willamette River, once an open cesspool and now a lovely little river (let's hear it for the environmental movement!) I'll be catching up with old friends for a few days, touching down briefly at home and then heading off for a week at a National Endowment for the Humanities workshop in Lowell, Mass. near Boston, and more visiting with friends. A busy 2 and a half weeks for sure, but I'll endeavor to keep you posted. In the meantime, I'm closing this week's blog early, and wishing you a Glorious Fourth!

Torture Again

In honor of Independence Day and the Declaration of Independence, let us remember that

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

This means that any one destroying or interfering with the unalienable right of Liberty of each and every person detained at Guantanamo is doing so in violation of Creator endowed unalienable Rights.

As Firedoglake commented: "You follow the Rule of Law. You uphold the Constitution, what it stands for, and honor every drop of blood spilled since the Revolution to establish and defend it. You honor your oath to office. You do the right thing and have accountability on the merits. That is what you do, and it is time for a concerted effort from the grassroots to demand just that. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, those who would give up the essential Rule of Law for temporary security and political gain, deserve neither."

Note that President Obama's nominee to be the next general counsel of the agency, when asked whether waterboarding is torture (paragraphs 12 and 13), reportedly testified:

"I have not reached that conclusion."

Thus leaving open the prospect that Obama's nominee will decide, as did his predecessor, that waterboarding is not torture, leading to the literal death by what amounts to essentially crucifixion of yet more people in government custody.

In a few years, there will be yet another article by Jane Mayer such as this one referred to at the press conference where the commencement of professional disciplinary proceedings against two lawyers who were allegedly torture enablers at the CIA was announced:

"According to a June 22 article in The New Yorker magazine, cited during the press conference today, an Iraqi prisoner in US custody was crucified – dying from asphyxiation while hanging from his arms during a CIA interrogation.

'An Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died on November 4, 2003, while being interrogated by the C.I.A. at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad,' the New Yorker’s Jane Meyer wrote. 'A forensic examiner found that he had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs. Military pathologists classified the case a homicide.'"

It's time for this nominee to stay in the private sector until he has reached the conclusion that waterboarding is torture and sufficient additional time has elapsed, say about 40 years.

It's time for President Obama to stop listening to and employing (using hard earned taxpayer dollars) the people who found, allegedly vetted, supported, and proposed this nominee.

Torture autopsy. More here, and here; apparently we're not through yet. Yes, we. This is being done in your name. Angry yet? Tell your elected representatives!

***

Briefs

• Pink slip would be Sanford’s fate in private sector. As someone else observed, when are the Republicans going to advocate using the always superior private sector principles and procedures in this case:

• US Supreme Court delays decision on Uighur case. Justice delayed is justice denied?

• Raw Story » Stewart: CIA hopes Wall St. geniuses will help other ‘calm, stable countries to collapse’

Whatever Works

4 stars out of 5

The reviewer in the S.F. Chronicle divides Woody Allen's work into great, OK and lousy. He places this film in the O.K. category. I agree, but to me that's still a 4 star film, while great Woody Allen is a five star film, and even lousy Woody Allen is better than the best thing most directors will ever make. Is there anyone in the world who doesn't know this is a 30-year-old script, originally written for Zero Mostel? Now Larry David is no Zero Mostel, but of all the Allen stand-ins of recent years, he does the best job of capturing the Woody zeitgeist without just turning in a half-baked Woody impression. David plays a retired Columbia professor who thinks life is a shit sandwich and every day we take another bite. Judging from his recent interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, and based on his other films, this is probably an accurate reflection of Woody Allen's world view--despite his protests that his films aren't autobiographical in any way. (By the way, since Allen rarely gives interviews, it is worth listening to this one, as well as the interview with Larry David.) This film is not laugh-out-loud funny (no Woody Allen film has been that since Love and Death in 1975). Remarkably, this is Allen's 40th film. I only wish he could possibly live long enough to make 40 more. Just think, if you watched his films eight hours a day, it would take you about two weeks to watch all of them. What an idea! Maybe a retirement project...

Neal Vitale: Shades of O Lucky Man!

In 1973, in our days at MIT's The Tech, Paul and I famously (at least to the two of us) disagreed over the merits of Lindsay Anderson's film O Lucky Man! Interestingly, the intervening years seemed to have mellowed us both, or at least seen the convergence -in broad measure - of our tastes (Paul's a little more generous with stars than I am, but directionally we are most often aligned).

Until last week. I so differ in my views of the two films that Paul reviewed, I feel the need to present the other side of the story on The Hangover and Year One.

Neal Vitale Reviews: The Hangover

4.5 stars out of 5    

The Hangover covers familiar terrain - a bachelor party gone awry - but does so in a fresh, riotously hilariousfashion. The three main characters (the groom-to-be is absent for much of the film), played by Bradley Cooper (Wedding Crashers), Ed Helms (TV's "The Daily Show" and "The Office"), and Zach Galifianakis (Into The Wild), drive The Hangover with raunchy charm, nerve, and sheer idiocy as they recreate their lost weekend from the debris and aftermath of the morning after. By far, the funniest film I have seen in years.

Neal Vitale Reviews: Year One

1.5 stars out of 5    

Year One is a spectacularly stupid and inane showcase for Jack Black (School Of Rock, Nacho Libre) and Michael Cera (Juno, Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist). Directed by Harold Ramis (Ghost Busters, Groundhog Day), Year One moves from prehistoric times into biblical times with a talky, indulgent tale of two inept and awkward buddies coping with an assortment of assaults andchallenges. Other than Oliver Platt (Frost/Nixon, TV's "The West Wing") in a wonderful over-the-top turn as a furry-chested, hot-oil-loving high priest, and a brief appearance by the beautiful Olivia Wilde (Thirteen on TV's "House"), there is little to recommend Year One.

Dan Grobstein File

• BUSINESS | June 30, 2009
  Airline Has Nothing to Hide. Really.
  By BETTINA WASSENER
  The in-flight safety instructional video and a companion ad series show employees of Air New Zealand unclothed, concealed only by body-painted uniforms and strategically placed props.

• TECHNOLOGY / INTERNET | June 29, 2009
  Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia
  By RICHARD P
  The New York Times asked Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia, for his help when David Rohde was kidnapped and the news was being posted.
• Chinese building falls on side

• NEW YORK REGION | June 30, 2009
  A Historian Is on a Quest to Locate Lost Events
  By SAM ROBERTS
  An amateur historian is working to locate, mark and preserve the places where historic events occurred - and then were forgotten from memory.

• quote:
  Modoc has the highest Republican registration of any county in California, it unfailingly elects anti-tax Republicans to office, and the vote here against last month's ballot measure that would have raised a variety of taxes was one of the most lopsided in the state. And yet, per capita, Modoc County gets more state taxpayer dollars than all but one of California's 58 counties....
  unquote

• INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | June 30, 2009
  Yeongju Journal: Rural South Koreans' Global Links Grow, Nourished by a Satellite Crop
  By CHOE SANG-HUN
  Lee Si-kap's enthusiasm for satellite dishes has helped to provide a valuable link between the community of foreign brides in South Korea and their homelands.

• BUSINESS | July 01, 2009
  The Work-Up: Insured, but Bankrupted by Health Crises
  By REED ABELSON
  Some people counted as medically insured have coverage so meager that a medical crisis means financial calamity.

End of July 6 column

The Lack of Personal Entries

Well, you might say to yourself, Paul's on summer vacation, so of course he'll be having lots of adventures to share with the 90 or so of us who glance at this blog now and then. So it would seem. But in fact, job one each summer is to clear off the nine-month accumulation of backed up projects and filing that I don't get to during the school year. And I do so enjoy the opportunity to catch up on my reading. And I have a lot of travel this summer, some of which requires advance planning (Portland and LA), and some of which requires homework (my week in Boston at the NEH program on the Lowell Mills). I did manage to separate out five years of old transactions from our accounting program, and eliminate a bunch of unused categories, and cut my rolodex back from 1800 entries to 900 (and now I have to reload my iPhone) by eliminating the dead, the useless and the forgotten. Lots more reading ahead (and I'll share the results with you), as well as news of my trips, and a reorganization of my journalism movies page. More anon!

Obama Still Hasn't Taken Our Advice

Check out this article by MIT Professor Simon Johnson

"Writing in the New York Times today, Joe Nocera sums up, "If Mr. Obama hopes to create a regulatory environment that stands for another six decades, he is going to have to do what Roosevelt did once upon a time. He is going to have make some bankers mad."

Good point – but Nocera is thinking about the wrong Roosevelt (FDR). In order to get to the point where you can reform like FDR, you first have to break the political power of the big banks, and that requires substantially reducing their economic power - the moment calls more for Teddy Roosevelt-type trustbusting, and it appears that is exactly what we will not get."

It's time for the people to insist on trustbusting and real regulation in the public interest (rather than in the interest of the banks which pay the salaries of the regional Fed officials). That is, to insist that your employees (President Obama, Treasury Secretary Geithner, Federal Reserve Chair Bernanke, Presidential advisor Summers, and each member of the Congress) implement the steps PSACOT urged more than four months ago. Since then the Obama Administration has shockingly done nothing to implement PSACOT's proposals (and most members of Congress have done very little).

Those proposals included:

1. restore the Glass-Steagall Act
2. close the insolvent banks
3. help the banks and the bankers by limiting the assets which may be held by a single bank to about $100B
4. reform the currently big banks by having their shareholders split them into banks holding no more than about $75B in assets thus allowing for growth up to the $100B limit
5. help the banks and their shareholders by eliminating the risk currently posed by tranche-laden Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps by:

1. banning any trading or new sales of these toxic derivatives effective immediately in the United States or by anyone dealing with the U.S. financial system
2. banning the holding of naked Credit Default Swaps (a CDS not owned by an owner of the entire underlying credit) after December 31, 2009, or the due date of the next insurance payment due on the CDS, whichever comes first)
3. allowing the current obligations of current CDOs and CDSs to be met

1. help the housing industry and the banks by requiring down payments of at least 25% on any new loans for the purchase of homes or commercial properties
2. require any new securitized debt obligations to be without tranches (all purchasers share pro rata in the payments received) and to be rated by agencies not paid by the issuers or sellers of the securities (the assessment of creditworthiness will be by the purchasers or agencies paid directly by the purchasers)
3. ban off balance sheet activities (effective with any financial report filed on or after December 31, 2009) by any company whose securities are traded in the United States or which deals with the U.S. financial system
4. use mark-to-market accounting
5. assess, effective October 1, 2009, an additional fee of 2 cents per share and $20 per bond on all equity and bond trades on any U.S. stock exchange or bond market including NASDAQ. A fee of $2 per option contract and $20 per commodities, future, or option on future contract subject to limited exceptions for agricultural commodities and physical goods. The proceeds will be available first to hire additional trained and experienced bank examiners and staff at the SEC and CFTC and second to reduce the national debt.

Call your members of Congress, tell them to implement the needed changes, announce their retirements, or be retired.

Also:

• Federal Reserve Asleep At The Switch on Systematic Risk

• More reasons to ban derivatives from a pioneer of financial engineering in Derivatives Tug of War Takes Shape, by Floyd Norris. "Derivatives provide a means for obtaining a leveraged position without explicit financing or capital outlay, and for taking risk off-balance sheet, where it is not as readily observed and monitored." In English: Derivatives "let institutions dodge taxes and accounting rules." Mentioned in It’s Not Gambling If the Casino Has Access to the US Treasury

• Maybe we need regulation without discretion

***

Briefs

• Justice Dept. asks judge to drop Obama from suit filed by Geronimo’s heirs
• MoveOn Resumes Antiwar Stance
• The Malls Will Slowly Disappear...
• Army bars Stars and Stripes reporter from covering 1st Cav unit in Mosul
• Are Pulitzers revocable? With coverage like this, Tricky Dick would have stayed in office.

• What ever happened to the Obama Administration policy (for example on fulfilling his oath of office requiring investigation and, where supported by the investigative facts, prosecution of torturers) of looking forward and not backward? There is almost no chance this person will ever again be allowed to handle other people's money in this nation, so why pay any attention to what has happened? Why seek any penalty or time in prison?
• Change?
• Wrong agency Mr. President
• FBI Broke Saddam Without Torture
• Dog bites man: Insurance companies uninsure sick people
• Sanford owes Hikers an apology
• Signing Statement. Oh God, here we go again. Didn't we vote against this?

Year One

3 stars out of 5

Jack Black and Michael Cera, stars of Year One, have a sort of Laurel and Hardy vibe going, or, to take a more recent comedy team example, David Spade and Chris Farley. Let us hope that Black manages to live longer than Farley, so that we can see this team at work again. Laurel and Hardy made more than 100 films. Modern artists don't have careers that long, but I'd love to see a few more featuring Black and Cera.

This film is more "smile" funny than "laugh out loud" funny. Highly amusing turns are offered by Oliver Platt as the high priest, Hank Azaria as Abraham and Juno Temple as the cute girlfriend ("When do you get off?" "Never. I'm a slave."). The humor is sophomoric ("Will you be my right hand?" "I've seen what you do with your right hand."), but not everyone can be S.J. Perlman. I mean, I hate to make Land of the Lost my new standard for lousy, but the fact is that while I rarely laughed out loud during this film, I rarely felt cheated or disappointed either.

With David Cross as a very amusing Cain (and Paul Rudd as the uncredited Abel), Cera once again heads an Arrested Development reunion. That fantastic under-appreciated Fox program will prove to be the minor league team that produces a lot of major league comedy talent.

The Hangover

2.5 stars out of 5

This is the humor of embarrassment and excess, taken to, well, excess. It is mildly amusing in places, but not outright funny. Hardly a waste of time. There is apparently some hidden charm, since some savvy moviegoers I know have recommended it. As a result, I sat through the whole thing, hoping for it to improve, whereas under most circumstances I'd have bailed halfway through. It isn't awful, there are moments that are surprising, and even some moments that are touching. But overall, just tain't funny McGee.

Chéri

3 stars out of 5

Michelle Pfeiffer. I mean, really, what else does a movie need? Even though this wasn't a BBC production, it reads just like one, with beautiful scenery, great acting, and languid plot development based on the work of a classic author (in this case, Collette). It seems a shame that a women of Pfeiffer's tender years (51) is cast as "the older woman," but that's Hollywood for you. Kathy Bates is a kick in the pants as Pfeiffer's rival/friend, and the mother of the title character, her son Cheri, the May in this May/December romance. In addition to being languid, the plot is also depressing (things don't work out so well in the end), and there's a lot of narration. Is that OK? William Goldman wrote that narration is for losers, but there are films where it makes sense. I can't make up my mind whether this is one of them, especially as the saddest moment of the film is narrated rather than shown.

Dern Finds Hodgman Video, Tiger Woods Note, Kodachrome, Three From Craig Reynolds, Dan Grobstein File

Lots of comic book and sf refs, as Hodgman quizzes President Obama on nerd/geek trivia.

A Sports note: Tiger Woods (tied for 6th) was the only player to score three rounds under par in the 2009 U.S. Open.

They are taking our Kodachrome away.

Carig Reynolds notes Dynamic Soaring; gliders at 400 MPH. Also, Microsoft Imitates Another User Interface. Also Why doesn’t the weather forecast have a confidence interval?

Dan Grobstein File

• 6.3 million = 50 jobs @ $126,000
  News Alert
  from The Wall Street Journal
  The head of fixed income at Harvard Management Co., the company that manages the nation’s largest college endowment, plans to step down at the end of the month, according to a person familiar with the matter.
  
  Marc Seidner was among the top paid at the endowment with $6.3 million in compensation from the previous fiscal year. Michael Llodra, a top fixed income portfolio manager for the endowment, is also leaving at the end of June, according to the person.
  
  Harvard officials have warned of a 30% decline for the fiscal year ending in June. In February, the endowment said it would eliminate 50 jobs, or a quarter of its staff.
• HEALTH | June 23, 2009
  Well: How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains
  By TARA PARKER-POPE
  A recipe for indulging: salt, sugar and fat, mixed many ways. But we can fight it.
• SCIENCE | June 25, 2009
  Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music
  By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
  Archaeologists said a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes discovered last fall represent the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture.
• GOP Dillema: Hiking, writing or having an affair?

• quote:
  
  An honest mistake, explained
  by Jed Lewison
  Wed Jun 24, 2009 at 07:00:08 PM PDT
  
  An anonymous reader writes:
  
  Subject: Inside word from Sanford
  
  It was a slight miscommunication between Sanford and his staff. He told them he'd be "spiking some Argentina tail," and they thought he'd said, "hiking the Appalachian trail." It was an honest mistake. I think they handled it well...family values and all.
  
  unquote

• TECHNOLOGY | June 25, 2009
  Bits: Google Starts Welcoming New Users to Voice Service
  By Miguel Helft
  Google is allowing some new users to open accounts with Google Voice, the call-management service that is an evolution of GrandCentral.

• A Deadly Ingredient in a Chicken Dinner
  By Douglas Gansler (Washington Post)
  Why do our chicken, our water and our air contain arsenic?

End June 29 Column