Margaret Atwood and me

Margaret Atwood was born a few years earlier than me and somewhat northward. She's also of the other sex and is one of the best writers in the world. These differences between the two of us suggest we have little in common. All the same some of her memories tally fairly closely with mine. They're in excerpts from her new book: Payback in FT: Forgive us our debts. Her topics are things that are on my mind these days: debt and debtors; banks and interest; revenge and forgiveness; and what can happen when you let your reptilian brain control the somewhat more rational one upstairs. But she leads with the reminiscences and they are what resonated sympathetically this bright Sunday morning.

She remembers the allowance she got (a nickel for her, a quarter for me) and how its spending -- in those primitive days -- led to much tooth decay. She remembers the tactics we used for accumulating wealth in comic books, glass marbles, and cards. (She recalls cigarette cards while mine mostly came from bubble gum packs.) She remembers the bank where she deposited money earned on her first paying job -- the fear of the tellers behind their high counters and the mystery of money "earning" more money in interest that showed up in the little savings book with its dark blue cover and light blue pages. About bank interest she asks "How could a fiction generate real objects? I knew from Peter Pan that if you ceased to believe in fairies they would drop dead: if I stopped believing in banks, would they too expire? The adult view was that fairies were unreal and banks were real. But was that true?" I never asked myself that question. But -- although I couldn't slake my addiction to candy or discipline myself to frequent and thorough tooth brushing, my first experience of banking did lead me to understand that you could save and, much later, buy things much more expensive than a ten-cent ice cream cone.

My first real job was a paper route. It was 1956 and I was 14-15. The route was long: out-and-back, about 4 mi. each way. It took me over the biggest hills our village possessed and it passed through none of the new housing "developments" with their closely-set newspaper customers. It must have been one of the least desirable I think now, but then it just was what it was. I was proud to learn the ways of shouldering the loaded bag on my Rudge Whitworth and was mostly conscientious -- in my own shy way -- in making my weekday afternoon round. I plagued my mom to drive me (in snow, ice, or pouring rain) as little as might be.

{A Rudge Whitworth, courtesy flickr}

{The red line shows the route; I left from and returned to our home, just about where the "e" is on Dalmeny Rd. -- upper right; Kemey's Cove (mentioned below) is left of the square by Revolutionary Rd.}

I earned money and remembered who paid up on time and who didn't, who tipped in coins and who in candy bars. I banked much of my take. And I observed.

I knew the mom's, some of the kids, and all of the dogs. And, because it was in the blood of boys my age at the time, I knew every car in every driveway.

Those were the years when performance and efficiency mattered little, style much. Cars were V8 powered, chromed, finned, and huge. I appreciated the cars of that time though never thought to own one. (My first car, bought 3 years later for $50, was a '50 Chev, all black with rusted out floorboards.)

Observing the newer models on my paper route, I noticed the three-tone jobs and in particular the three-tone Desoto. It's now hard to find images of this car. Here's one:

{Desoto three-tone 1955 on allpar.com}

Here is a shot of the much-finned 1956 Fireflite, two-tone:

{1956 Desoto from a geocities page}

(If you care, there's a A Full History of DeSoto.)

Though I didn't really aspire to own a Desoto, I did have plans for my paper route savings. For $110 I bought a kit to make a 10-foot racing pram much like this.
"

{This comes from jimshotwellboats.com; I have a photo of mine somewhere or other which I'll post if ever found*}

Typically, I researched the purchase, carefully made the boat, and then didn't find much use for it. The river wasn't all that close to home and I couldn't drive myself there. I had no local friends with boats. So it sat down on Kemey's Cove while I found other things to do with my adolescent life and later became an embarrassment to my parents while I stored it in our next door neighbor's garage.

You'd think there was a lesson for me in this -- one about spending as wisely as you save, but I think I got all I really wished for in saving for, purchasing, and building the kit into a seaworthy racer.

------------------
* I found it:

photojournalism

The Boston Globe appears to be in a small class of city papers that isn't afraid to face the future. Case in point the excellent photojournalism blog by its website developer Alan Taylor. This comes from a current post:

Here's a direct link: The sapphire mines of Madagascar
The blog itself:

The blog says: "The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, compiled semi-regularly by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com's Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm's MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting."

Photo by Buster McLeod

The blog's FAQ is here. I think it's significant that the BG hasn't walled off its web developers. I think it's pretty common for papers to treat the web as another piece of equipment (like their presses) and the developers as cerebral mechanics. It might be a better model for the news rooms and the tech rooms to merge, as seems to be the BG model.

There's more here: Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe's The Big Picture

democracy

Representative government -- so awfully frustrating. It's as Churchill said

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Citizens complained about the cost of the financial rescue bill, its failure to punish wrongdoers, and the new powers it gave the Treasury Secretary. In consequence the House of Representatives voted it down. The Senate took it up and passed much more expensive package.

Here are some links:

• From the Washington Post: Explainer: How the Senate Rescue Bill Is Different, by Ben Pershing, Oct. 2, 2008
• From Politico: Senate bailout bill keeps growing, by DAVID ROGERS | 10/1/08
• From the Financial Times: Republicans cannot spend their way out of crisis, by Grover Norquist, October 1 2008
• From Steven Pearlstein, who explains some of the complex financial aspects: No Silver Bullets Here, October 2, 2008

Who knows what our Representatives will do now?

• Despite sweetening, measure faces stiff fight in House, Baltimore Sun
• Bail-out bill: Still a bitter pill?, BBC News
• House members being sweet-talked into passing financial rescue bill, WTTE, OH
• Texas House members see opposition to bailout bill weakening, Dallas Morning News

When the bill is taken up in the House there surely will be lots of hold-outs. For some, the legislation is simply unthinkable. During House debate, Jeb Hensarling of Texas said it was "the slippery slope to socialism." Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan said "It was no mistake that, during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the slogan was, 'Peace, land, and bread.' Today, you are being asked to choose between bread and freedom." Paul Broun of Georgia said "Madam Speaker, this is a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle of it, and I'm not going to eat that cow patty." And John Boehner, the Republican minority leader himself, referred to the bill as a "crap sandwich."

Read this opinion piece in the Guardian. It's good.

The US democratic-capitalist model is on trial. No schadenfreude, please, This week the demands of American democracy clashed with those of American capitalism. And China's premier smiled, by Timothy Garton Ash, October 2 2008

Excerpts: A quarter-century ago, near the beginning of what came to be known as the Reagan revolution, the American Catholic social theorist Michael Novak published an influential book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. It argued that capitalism is "compatible only with democracy". "While bastard forms of capitalism do seem able for a time to endure without democracy," wrote Novak, "the natural logic of capitalism leads to democracy." And true capitalism requires moral virtues such as "temperance and prudence, fortitude and justice".

To adapt Churchill, democratic capitalism is the worst possible system, apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time.

The challenge to American democracy today is nothing less than to prove it can reform its whole model of democratic capitalism, and make it better.

Pray that it can.

a book

I saw this blog post and almost let it tempt me to carp about the distortion that ideology can bring to the writing of history. Too often I encounter articles and whole books that are long on imagination and way too short on citations to primary sources, or even citations to good secondary ones. These histories don't usually contain too many PoMo terms with the exception of one that always makes my skin crawl: hermeneutics. It shows up in constructions such as Hermeneutics: "Analytical" and "Dialectical"; Hume, Hermeneutics, and History: A "Sympathetic" Account; Galileo and Spinoza: Heroes, Heretics, and Hermeneutics; and Erasmus and the Hermeneutics of Linguistic Praxis. I know the definition of the word, but I can't see that it's used as much more than BS in the stuff I read.

OK so I did carp a little, but my goal is to celebrate the generosity of some publishers. I've lately been struggling with a stage-setting segment of the thesis I'm drafting and wish to say something about the well-being of certain segments of the population of London in the middle of the seventeenth century. I found reviews of a book that looks like it contains information that would be helpful. It didn't seem so important that I should spend big bucks ordering a copy and then waiting for it to arrive. I couldn't look it over in Google Book Search since it hasn't showed up there yet. Amazon doesn't give snippets in its Search Inside service. I started looking to see what I'd have to pay for a used copy and, on doing an author/title search in Google was very pleasantly surprised to find that that the publisher, U of Calif Press, has made the whole thing available in a very nice format on the eScholarship site.

So ... I'm happily perusing the book, copying bits into my note-taking wiki (wikidpad), and making tactical decisions on how to make use of them in the draft.

financial pundits of the FT

I've got myself a free subscription to the Financial Times courtesy my UK student status. FT is considered to be right-of-center so its comments on the US election might be thought to slant toward the Republican candidate. But as with conservative columnist George Will this does not seem to be the case.

Before last night's debate the FT leader writer assessed the candidates on the financial crisis and gave Obama the edge: "Ordinary economic competence, which Mr McCain particularly appears to lack, may be less important than grace under pressure. Readiness to take charge and ability to inspire some confidence will be the real test. In this, Mr Obama has done better than his rival. Mr McCain’s instinct for decisive action has led him astray: his initial interventions were ill-judged and poorly received. Mr Obama’s tendency to intellectual detachment has been much criticised hitherto, including by many Democrats, but has now come into its own. Whereas Mr McCain has seemed rattled, Mr Obama has seemed calm and methodical. The Democrat’s impeccable taste in advisers – men such as Paul Volcker, whom voters are inclined to trust in an economic emergency – has also served him well."

This morning two FT columnists tip the same way.

Gideon Rachman says McCain showed his age while rambling about the economy but seemed more on top of things when the subject turned to "stuff he actually cares and knows about." He says Obama wasn't much better on the crisis but did have four succinct points to make at the beginning; contrast McCain who "gave the impression that he thought that the source of the problem is excessive spending in Congress."

Clive Crook liked Obama's performance much better than McCain's: "After the last couple of days, McCain badly needed to win Friday’s debate. My immediate feeling was that he didn’t even manage a draw. Obama was on fine form. He did not meander. His responses were calm and focused. He never looked rattled. He seemed comfortable with the issues and unthreatened by his opponent — sufficiently unthreatened to be generous to McCain now and then, an effective Clintonian (Bill) touch. McCain was prickly, rarely looking in Obama’s direction, repeatedly accusing him of failing to understand the issues — a difficult charge to make stick with Obama looking so assured. McCain’s aggression seemed to me at times to betray a lack of confidence. He had his moments; still, I thought it was a comfortable win on points for Obama."

I read the news today oh boy

Pearlstein says some things that have been on my mind lately. His column today -- Gut Check -- says:

1. It's not a good time for vindictiveness, for revenge, for playing the blame game. He says: "You can try to prevent a financial meltdown or you can teach Wall Street a lesson, but you can't do both at the same time."

2. The US is really close to a massive cascade of bank failures. He says: "All it would take is one more hit to trigger the modern-day equivalent of a nationwide bank run. Financial institutions would fail, part of your savings would be wiped out, jobs would be lost and a lot of economic activity would grind to a halt. Such a debacle would cost us a lot more than $700 billion."

3. The bailout involves sales as well as purchases. He says: "The latest proposal hammered out between the Treasury and Democratic leaders won't cost anywhere near $700 billion unless we get a 1930s-like Depression, in which case we'll have much bigger problems to worry about."

4. Legislators should not pretend they are members of the executive branch. Nor should they use legislative oversight and the power of legislation to hamstring executive branch specialists. He says: "It is important to give the Treasury secretary and the people he hires a good deal of flexibility in designing and experimenting with the mechanics of this rescue."

The head of Bank of America gives weight to point 2. He says banks are hoarding cash, refusing to extend credit, and credit is what makes the economy run. His bank is sound and will benefit from the failure of weak banks (by buying up assets cheaply). Nonetheless he doesn't want banks to fail. There's a serious risk that the current economic pessimism will escalate into panic. He says: "Right now, the flow of funds that makes our economy run is threatened by a lack of confidence in the value of financial assets, particularly mortgage assets. Financial institutions are extremely hesitant to purchase assets or lend money to one another to fund the system. Just as optimism in times of growth encourages an upward trend, pessimism in uncertain times can feed a downward trend. Allowing such a trend to gain strength is our great risk." (Main Street Needs the Treasury Plan)

A Wall Street Journal blog says the political posturing of Southern Republicans in congress -- a populist melange of vindictiveness combined with grasping for a share in the payout -- is being quietly supported by McCain: "McCain didn’t create the House rebellion, but at least temporarily, we are seeing an interesting partnership between House Republicans and John McCain. When I asked one GOP Hill staffer whether McCain was serving as a proxy for House Republicans, I was told that such a claim would be too strong but that McCain is, at the very least, trying to give voice to House Republicans skeptical of the bailout. And if that’s true, McCain will have an opportunity to bring them along–or some of them–to get a deal.” (Political Wisdom: A Wild Day Spawns Questions About McCain)

whom do you trust?

I've been interested in the expansion of commerce in 17th-century England; particularly interested in the importance of credit, and, with regard to credit, particularly interested in the importance of trust. Partly for that reason I recently read Jane Jacobs's Systems of Survival which sets out to explain a pair of competing moral systems: the guardian syndrome and the commerce syndrome. She derives these syndromes from the behaviors two occupational groups: the one evolved from aristocratic moral structures and the other from the moral structures of businessmen. It's a good read. The guardians are those who govern, who run the bureaucracy, and who dispense justice. They trust only their own kind and strictly by the rules of honor (which give plenty of latitude for deception). In contrast, commercial people treasure honesty, not for its own sake but because trading requires trust.

Jacobs isn't saying these moral codes are observed by everyone all the time, but that each group has ways to enforce its own precepts. They both try to minimize deviation from their own specific norms. She also isn't saying that these two competing syndromes comprise all the rules that people strive to follow in their attempts to lead good lives. These are simply the ones that separate the one group from the other. I've put a table showing the two lists at bottom.

Jacobs points out that guardian group must step in when the morals of the commerce group break down. That is to say governments regulate commerce for the good of citizens. Though there are ideologies that regret this intervention, almost everyone regards it as necessary. She also says governments can't actually perform the functions of the commercial group -- government run business operations rarely succeed. (She says they never do). That's because the moral structures are inimicable. It's an interesting way of looking at things; basically an update on a position that Plato has Socrates take. There's a quick summary in this pdf document.

So now we're seeing government debate what to do to correct the mess created by the big New York banks (and others). You can look at the arguments from a Systems-of-Survival point of view.

But I'm more interested in one aspect: the betrayal of trust. Steven Pearlstein writes about the subject today. In an article called The Words Left Unspoken in the Bailout Debate he says:

Political systems, communities, markets all share one common characteristic -- at their core, they all require a level of trust among the participants if they are going to work. In recent years, we have allowed that trust to erode to the point that our political system is paralyzed by partisan bickering and communities are fractured into enclaves of race and class. Now markets are collapsing because investors realize they have been misled by corporate executives, investment banks, ratings agencies and regulators. As a country, there is an urgent need to rebuild that trust. In different ways, that is what both the McCain and Obama campaigns are all about. And it is the same challenge that now faces us in this financial crisis.

Where Pearlstein writes about the trust we should be able to place in large financial institutions, an academic blogger writes, indirectly, about the trust we should be able to place in our military. In a post called Counterinsurgency Comes Home, he writes about an Iraq-seasoned infantry brigade being deployed to "help the people at home" through sophisticated military action to counter civil unrest. The blogger has first-hand knowledge since he's currently serving in the Army in Kuwait. (He writes for Cliopatria, a group blog, and is a historian in graduate school at UCLA.) If you read the whole article from which he quotes, the unit sound more helpful than threatening (Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1). But, in light of the misplaced trust that has produced so many horrors in recent years, including the current financial crisis, you have to wonder. Why do we need Army specialists to do the job the National Guard is tasked to perform? There used to be fears of large standing armies which might subvert the rights of citizens. As James Madison put it in Anti-Federalist Papers No. 10 of 24 January 1788,

The liberties of a people are in danger from a large standing army, not only because the rulers may employ them for the purposes of supporting themselves in any usurpations of power, which they may see proper to exercise, but there is great hazard, that an army will subvert the forms of the government, under whose authority, they are raised, and establish one, according to the pleasure of their leader.

We no longer have quite that fear, but with the drastic undermining of civil liberties in the current war on terror and the embracing of torture as a judicial tool, and all else that increases the power of the state to coerce its citizens, there is very good reason to withhold trust when the Army says its deploying a seasoned combat-ready force on our own territory for our own good.

Here are Jacobs's two syndromes:

Guardian Syndrome's Moral Precepts	Commerce Syndrome's Moral Precepts
Shun trading Exert prowess Be obedient and disciplined Adhere to tradition Respect hierarchy Be loyal Take vengeance Deceive for the sake of the task Make rich use of leisure Be ostentatious Dispense largesse Be exclusive Show fortitude Be fatalistic Treasure honor	Shun force Compete Be efficient Be open to inventiveness and novelty Use initiative and enterprise Come to voluntary agreements Respect contracts Dissent for the sake of the task Be industrious Be thrifty Invest for productive purposes Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens Promote comfort and convenience Be optimistic Be honest

who are we that this happened to us?

Who's to blame for the financial crisis that the US Treasury is now trying to mitigate? Its seriousness is obvious enough. How else explain the restraint our politicians are struggling to achieve? How even comprehend the quantities of money involved -- a trillion dollars or more in Federal payments and guarantees?

Press coverage is, understandably, vast. I note only three: two by a Washington Post business columnist and one by a hedge fund operator. Reading them I wonder what's happened to us? What's happened to US citizens, we who once prided ourselves on thrift and now are overwhelmed with mortgage and credit card debt? What happened between the Depression generation of tightwads and those intervening generations of more and more laid back consumers?

The press writes as if Americans who spend the earnings tomorrow may never bring are simply victims. What does that say about our collective intelligence and integrity, our collective power as voters in this democracy? Many of us seem to have caved in, given up, stopped t_h_i_n_k_i_n_g.

I also wonder about the rest of the world, so intertwined with the US economy that they suffer with us, some even more than us. And the rest of the world, too, who sustain our outrageous debt -- our government, household, and and corporate debt that cannot be funded without this foreign support. Have they become so dependent on the US as the world engine of prosperity that they cannot do otherwise?

I wonder but am unable to predict what will happen.

After my comments on the three commentators, I've put some info on Charles MacKay's old and interesting book.

In the first article, commentator Steven Pearlstein says that "when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game." But he says the bankers wouldn't have been able to work their con if the US economy hadn't been artificially buoyed up by low interest rates over the last decade. And he says Greenspan and the Fed were able to keep interest rates so low because foreigners remained willing to buy American debt instruments, American securities, American real estate and other assets of all sorts. Low interest rates provided Americans with cheap money. Households borrowed heavily "to buy houses, cars and college educations, along with more health care, extra vacations and all manner of consumer goods and governments used the cheap money to pay for services and benefits that citizens were not willing to pay for with higher taxes." When this credit bubble began to frighten foreign investors, the big New York banks found a way to keep these investors happy by inventing new credit instruments and working their con to keep the bubble growing. That meant that the inevitable bursting was a much more serious event than almost any previous meltdown (it's being compared to the 1929 crash of course).

Pearlstein says that the financial restructuring that we're now seeing should "force some financial discipline on the majority of U.S. households that relied on borrowed money to maintain their lifestyles," but he says it probably won't.

In the second article Pearlstein says the scale of the event is mind boggling but not so great that it can't be controlled. This week should show us life being lived normally in most US households and most companies outside Wall Street. The securities markets should return to normal. The main effect will prove to be a new way of looking at free market ideology: "There is little doubt we are witnessing a once-in-a-generation sea change. It will no longer be an easy applause line for a politician to declare that government is the problem and that markets always know better than regulators and politicians. Debates about the competitiveness of U.S. financial markets will focus less on how little regulated they are and more on how much protection and transparency they offer to investors. It will be harder to deny essential government agencies the talent, money and respect they need to do the job right."

He closes by addressing the confidence of foreign investors in the US economy: "No doubt there will be those who see in this crisis further proof of the inevitable decline of the United States as a world economic power. In fact, it may be just the opposite. The wild swings over the past week in financial markets from Moscow to Mumbai, were only the most recent reminder of the increasingly global nature of capital flows and the risks of financial contagion. They also were a reminder that, in times of stress, global investors still seek refuge in the safety of the U.S. dollar, U.S. Treasuries and the skillful crisis management of U.S. policy makers."

The opinion piece by the hedge fund operator is Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis, by Eric D. Hovde. He's an interesting character. A financier who's wealthy enough to own both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, he's not a sleazy character, but rather one who strongly supports charitable activity here and abroad. It's also obvious from this article that he's one who is blunt in his criticisms of his own industry.

Like Pearlstein he says the historically low interest rates put in place by the Greenspan Fed created a toxic environment for the US economy. The New York bankers who took advantage of this environment simple threw away all the internal checks that traditionally kept the banking business sound. He say the price of all this greed is an estimated $1 trillion and more in losses. While giving Greenspan much of the blame, he also says "One has to wonder why Treasury secretaries under Presidents Clinton and Bush -- Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, respectively -- took no action to curb these abuses."

He says we might have gotten some help from congressional oversight if the financial industry hadn't corrupted congress: "The Wall Street investment banking firms, their executives, their families and their political action committees contribute more to U.S. Senate and House campaigns than any other industry in America. By sprinkling some of its massive gains into the pockets of our elected officials, Wall Street bought itself protection from any tough government enforcement."

He leaves us with no prognosis but only a wish: "there has not been a time since the 1920s when Wall Street has enjoyed as much influence over Washington as it has for the last 12 years. Let's hope that this influence fades rapidly -- and that this financial crisis doesn't end the same way as the one of nearly 80 years ago."

Here's the old and ever-popular book I mentioned at top. MacKay was one of the first to notice how easily people get carried away and how dreadful the results can be.

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Prefaces

1. Money Mania.—The Mississippi Scheme

2. The South Sea Bubble

3. The Tulipomania

4. The Alchymists (file a.) 4. (cont.) The Alchymists (file b.)

5. Modern Prophecies

6. Fortune-Telling

7. The Magnetisers

8. Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard

9. The Crusades (file a.) 9. (cont.) The Crusades (file b.)

10. The Witch Mania

11. The Slow Poisoners

12. Haunted Houses

13. Popular Follies of Great Cities

14. Popular Admiration of Great Thieves

15. Duels and Ordeals

16. Relics

Footnotes

About the Book and Author

Illustrations

what a way to earn a living

PezCycling News has some good photos of the climax of yesterday's demanding stage in the Vuelta, Spain's version of the Tour de France.

The race narrative on the Pez site gives an indication of just how demanding is the climb to the finish: "Billed as the hardest day on the hardest climb of this year's La Vuelta a España, in fact it’s been billed as the hardest climb anywhere in any stage race." Its winding track of a road is steep, of course. The weather is commonly abominable, thought yesterday it was only cold, not cold, wet, and windy. And the altitude is way up there. The summit is 1,570 metres (5,200 ft) above sea level, from bottom to top, racers had to ascend 1,248 m (4,090 ft), and near the summit the slope is over 20%.

Today, a Pez article by Ed Hood gives some nice photos, including these. Note the helicopter in the background of the first one. The second one shows the race leader coming through on his own.

Angliru seen from Monsacro peak. Click to view full size. Photographer: Alfonso Fernandez - 2003.

those who meddle in the making of marriages

Lately I've been reading -- or at least skimming -- lots of math texts from the 17th-century and occasionally something interesting catches my eye. The books and the culture of technical education in which they nest were both monotonously masculine. There were advocates for teaching math to women but the objective of authors and students alike was mostly the preparation of young men for jobs in merchants' offices and trademen's shops.

This morning I was looking at one of the most popular of all these books, William Mather's Young Man's Companion, a comprehensive work of instruction and reference that went through 24 editions between 1681 and 1775. What caught my eye was a reference to a pamphlet he wrote about the invidious meddling of women in the affairs of men. It's called A Novelty: Or, A Government Of Women Distinct From Men, Erected Amoungst Some Of The People, Call'd Quakers. Published in 1694, it complains about the power held by Quaker women in Bedfordshire at the time.

{The image shows a Quaker woman preaching ca. 1675.}

The worst offense, in Mather's view, was that these women would interview young couples who wished to marry. In the words of one who defended the practice, the women would "enquire and see that things be clear on all parts on so weighty a concern as marriage." Susan Dinan explains the purpose of these interviews in a recent monograph.

Mather devotes a couple dozen pages to his reasons why it was improper for a woman to "meddle in the making of marriages unless of her own children and servants." Likening the meeting to an official court of inquiry, he says "the greatest wonder of all is, that such a government should be practised amonst a people that profess that every individual man and woman should have no other guide besides Christ's inward and spiritual grace," and he says he is proud to have earned the rebuke of George Fox himself: "But if you now say to me, as G.F. [i.e., George Fox] said to me ... in a discourse with him, till near mid-night, about the said arbitrary government, 'you do not deserve to have wives,' (saith he) 'you speak too much against women.' to say the truth, this was the best argument he could give us, for his unscriptual female government."

Mather had become a Quaker nearly 35 years before writing this and was to return to the Church of England the next year. George Fox was of course the founder of the Religious Society of Friends. As bold as he was peaceful, his writings make for very interesting reading. Answering Mather and other critics, he strongly defended the right of women to participate in decision-making via Monthly and Quarterly Meetings and to interview couples who wished to marry.

{The image shows Fox in an engraving taken from a contemporary painting.}

Here is the text of a letter -- which Mather quotes -- which summarizes the immediate object of his displeasure:

Friends in Bedford-shire,

Here came Stephen Scarborrow, to acquaint Friends of his Intention of Marriage with Marry Samm, Daughter of Nathaniel Stamm of Litlington, in Bedford-shire; as also he did to our Quarterly Meeting about a Month ago, and Friends did tenderly advise him to acquaint our Women Friends therewith, who attend Meetings to serve Truth in their Day Age, and Generation, and to enquire and see that things be clear on all parts on so weighty a Concern as Marriage; but he refusing to follow Friend's Advice herein, I know not what the Women-Friends may have to say in this Matter: Now I being one that have had some Exercise and Concern in these our Meetings, I do testifie, That that Spirit that doth oppose the good Order in publishing Marriage in Men and Women's Meetings, is not of God, and am sorry for the Young Man, and desire he may live to see his Weakness, and amend; so with Love to all Friends of Truth, rest a Friend to the same Truth. -- Tobias Hardmeat.

Here is the title page of the pamphlet:


Here is the catalog entry for it:

Mather, W., fl. 1695.

A novelty: or, a government of vvomen distinct from men, erected amoungst some of the people, call'd Quakers. Detected in an epistle, occasionally written to a man-judge, upon a young man's refusing (for good conscience sake) to submit to their authority in marriage, seeing that relations and friends were already satisfied. To which is added, a lamentation for the fall of so many of that people. Published for no other end, but to deter all honest hearts of the said people, from erecting the like unscriptural government. Tho' this may not so far prevail with such women as has a secret command of their husbands purses; together with those preachers that reap profit by such a female government, as to consent to the disanulling the same. Written by William Mather, a dear lover of the said people, who has for several years been much troubled, that some of them should fall from there primitive institution, as to set up women's and men's meetings, as guides in government, ... . , London : printed for Sarah Howkins, in George-yard, Lumbard-street, [1694?]
Date: 1694
Bib name / number: Wing (2nd ed.) / M1284C
Bib name / number: Smith, J. Catalogue of Friends' Books / II, p. 162
No. pages: 23, [1] p.
Copy from: Friends' Library, London, England

unjustice

Today, Sept 12, the Washington Post gives new evidence of perjury used to convict and then execute Ethel Rosenberg some 55 years ago. I was 11 when she was put to death. She was my Mom's age. She and her husband Julius had two sons one of whom later became a college classmate of mine. Her electrocution was ugly, an ugly event at a time when immorally ambitious men put themselves at the head of a mob of frightened citizens not caring what damage they would do to the Constitution and the ideals on which the United States was founded. Our home was only a few miles from Sing Sing Prison. At the time they pulled the switch to kill Ethel Rosenberg we said we could see the lights dim. That is not a literal fact, but -- more powerfully I think -- a metaphorical one.

Here is the citation for the WaPo article:
Witness Changed Her Story During Rosenberg Spy Case
By Holly Watt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; Page A04


Link to the Wikipedia article on the Rosenbergs: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg



Ethel Rosenberg's mug shot.

Image source: Wikimedia

Web page on a film about the family.
HEIR TO AN EXECUTION: The Rosenbergs’ Granddaughter Makes a Film about Their Legacy

The son my age, Michael, is on the left.

Emanuel “Manny” Block, the Rosenbergs’ attorney, with Michael & Robbie at Sing Sing. After the Rosenbergs were executed, the boys were adopted by Abel & Anne Meeropol. (Associated Press – 1953)

Picasso, untitled lithograph of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, 1952; souce: www.graphicwitness.org.

The following photos come from http://mujeresriot.webcindario.com/Ethel_Rosenberg.htm

This is Ruth Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's sister in law.


Ethel Rosenberg in 1950






Funeral cortege in Brooklin

the transformational power of abundance

This is a brief follow-up to yesterday's post.

The betrayal of public trust which is a main topic of that post seems ordinarily to lead to re-establishment of public trust via government regulation. This happened in the case of the South Sea Bubble, the Crash of '29, and the abuses of which G.B.S. wrote. It's happening as government agencies work to mitigate the damage of the sub-prime loans crisis and it's happening in an outfall of that crisis: the near collapse of the two largest US mortgage organizations, Freddie and Fannie.

Steven Paulson, author of the piece on pin-stripe immorality I wrote about yesterday, has today a good summary of the F&F takeover. Notice that he makes connection to the New Deal policies of FDR. (There's an indirect connection here with the founding of the Greenbelt community in Maryland, part of the context of yesterday's post.) Notice also that he tells us market regulation is not only necessary to correct problems created by the workings of the market, but also that regulation is needed to prevent future crises of a like nature.

In Crisis, Paulson's Stunning Use of Federal Power
By Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 8, 2008; Page A01

Extracts:

Fannie and then Freddie began promising Wall Street double-digit earnings growth, which required them to grow their balance sheets well beyond what was necessary to assure liquidity in the mortgage market. Instead of just buying mortgages, insuring them and selling them in packages to investors, they bought more of them for their own portfolios, using ever-increasing amounts of borrowed money. Buying their own securities was profitable, but it left them highly exposed if anything went really wrong with the housing market, which is exactly what has happened.

Not since the early days of the Roosevelt administration, at the depth of the Great Depression, has the government taken such a direct role in the workings of the financial system.

Paulson only implicitly notices something that's the subject of another post that caught my attention this morning: people do not generally respond well when some resource that has been scarce suddenly becomes abundant. In the case of the South Sea Bubble, the industrial expansion of he late 19th-century, the stock market expansion that ended in 1929, and other economic excesses, governments stepped in to correct abuses and restore order.

In the following blog post Chris Anderson writes about other sorts of over-abundance and their consequences:

The Long Tail; Clay Shirky on the weird things that happen when things suddenly become abundant.

Extracts:

It takes a generation or two to figure out how to properly use some resource that used to be scarce but is now abundant. [For example the resource of] time, which we got more of in the prosperous decades after the Second World War. For the first few generations, we chose to fill that time with television. Only now are we learning to fill it more productively, and to greater satisfaction. To use Clay's term, it took fifty years for us to learn how to tap the cognitive surplus that came after the five-day work week.

[Chris quotes Clay: Another example is the 18th-century rush of agricultural populations to cities. In that case] "the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

"And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset."

[Chris says:] This is the same phenomena that I described earlier, using a computer science analogy rather than an economic one, as the "awesome power of spare cycles."

A commenter adds: "Now consider this from the perspective of the developing world and especially China/India. What happens when the majority of the population shifts from spending 24 hours a day just surviving to having spare cycles to do something else?"

I find this very perceptive. We're seeing the consequences of that abundance with increasing frequency: huge increases in energy consumption, corresponding huge increases in pressure on the environment, acceleration of global warming, an agricultural crisis partly spawned by changes in the daily diet of Asians,.... And probably also an eventual shift in cultural dominance accompanying the shift in economic and political dominance from West to East.

credit and discredit, trust and mistrust

I apologize for the length of this. I'm too lazy to break it into bite-size pieces.

The thesis research I'm doing these days deals indirectly with the development of a credit-based economy in 17th century England. I'm studying ways of calculating interest received or paid and it's apparent that promises written out on pieces of paper served for money with growing frequency. Although shortages of coins, the dangers of carrying lots of coins, and the difficulties of calculating the true value of coins made credit transactions necessary, people were coming to see lots of other advantages.

At first the word "credit" carried all the weight of its multiple meanings. In particular it connoted trust, the assurance that both parties were committed and fully able to do exactly what they promised one another in the paper documents they signed. In time, merchants' courts evolved to enforce these promises making it unnecessary for one party to personally acquainted with the other. However, these courts came to have little influence over the speculative trading of some forms of credit transactions, in particular the buying and selling of securities -- the bonds that the government used to borrow from citizens and the stock issued by the East India Company and other trading ventures. Securities were a different form of credit, one much more subject to abuse than merchants' credit.

My research isn't concerned with the emerging stock exchanges in European cities of the time, but as it happens I'm reading a book that deals with the subject: David Liss's Conspiracy of Paper. It's an excellent amalgam of mystery story, historical novel, adventure tale, and exploration of chicanery on a huge scale. It is set in London at the time the South Sea Bubble and its hero takes us into the intricacies of that vast web of intrigue. Bit by bit the author unfolds the conspiracies, manipulations, and crimes of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men of the time -- men whose place in society and its institutions was one of public trust. The story thus concerns, in part, the abuse of trust.

If you know the story of the South Sea Bubble at all, you know that this massive abuse of trust led to the ruin of many English men and women from all walks of life.

{One of many images depicting the bubble mania, this comes from Harvard Business School's Baker Library}

{This is a detail from a contemporary print warning of the dangers of the mania.}

As it happens, too, we ate out last night at the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt Maryland.


Greenbelt was created as part of the New Deal in the aftermath of the bursting of another financial bubble -- the the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It's cooperative approach to commerce and civic life has made it a conscious antidote to the greed and betrayals of trust that foment financial bubbles.

After the meal, we attended a performance of G. B. Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession at the Greenbelt Arts Center


The play is about Mrs. Warren's profession, of course, but also about women's rights, the generational gap between a mother and daughter, the conflicting impulses of career and romance and of business and the arts. But it's also about people with wealth and social position who maintain an aura of probity while earning money in anti-social ways. In this sense, it compliments the Conspiracy of Paper and the betrayal of public trust. In fact, Shaw makes this connection fairly plain in speeches by two characters: the mother, Mrs. Warren herself, and her partner, Crofts. The latter, a Baronet, speaks of the financial dealings men of his class, including for example his brother the M.P. who "gets his 22 per cent out of a factory with 600 girls in it, and not one of them getting wages enough to live on." He says, "As long as you don't fly openly in the face of society, society doesn't ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses." Later Mrs. Warren puts the matter a little more bluntly: "You think that people are what they pretend to be: that the way you were taught at school and college to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it's not: it's all only a pretense, to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people quiet. It's truth, gospel truth Vivie: the big people, the clever people, the managing people, all know it. They do as I do, and think what I think. I know plenty of them."

This tirade brought to mind this: A Con Game In Pinstripes

Extracts:

What is so telling about these stories [of financiers lying to their clients, regulators, and the public] -- and, rest assured, there will be many more before we're finished -- is that they come only a few years after these same companies reached similar settlements for defrauding many of the same investors during the telecom and dot-com boom. While the fraud back then had more to do with bogus research and accounting and manipulation of initial public offerings, it is clear that they sprang from the same slimy ethical culture that has produced the current credit crisis. Wall Street has become a fundamentally corrupt enterprise in which the motto is: "We'll do anything for a fee."

I refer not to the narrow legal definition of "corrupt," but to the general instinct to mislead clients, double-cross and collude with counterparties, and pull the wool over the eyes of investors. It is the kind of corruption grounded in the attitude that it's all just a game in which the only rules are "buyer beware" and "heads I win, tails you lose." In a corrupt business culture like that of modern-day Wall Street, cynicism is rampant, candor and accountability are first casualties, and a man is measured by the size of his bonus rather than the depth of his integrity. It's not so much immoral as amoral.

The tell-tale signs of this endemic corruption now litter the financial landscape.

To find it, look no farther than the televised bleatings of research directors and equity strategists who, until the last few weeks, were still talking about a stock market rebound in the second half of the year and have never once forecast a losing year for the S&P 500.

You can find it in the spectacularly misguided mergers and acquisitions that were conceived, negotiated, blessed and underwritten by investment bankers who are paid enormous fees no matter how things turn out for investors. Their latest bright idea: the merger of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It's right there in the Wall Street Journal, where it is reported without a trace of irony, that some master of the universe who was forced out of Citi for overseeing the loss of billions of dollars has been snatched up by Morgan Stanley while another is staked for a couple of billion dollars to start his own hedge fund.

Addendum:

I hadn't been to Greenbelt in years. Back then I would occasionally join in the Greenbelt National Park Training Race Series

of hedgehogs and foxes

Isaiah Berlin warned against sweeping generalizations. He inoculated whole populations of readers against abuse of the golden rule of historians and journalists: "simplify and then exaggerate." But the temptation concoct a coherent but somewhat fictitious story out of a body of messy facts is a powerful one. I'm one thus afflicted. I love history on a grand scale, the stories that answer big questions, and resent intrusion of nuancing details that detract from the push of narrative. For example I want to know about Hitlerism -- how it came about, why it succeeded so long as it did, how a modern state could become and sustain itself as a killing machine, why it was that a coalition dominated by another tyranny finally overcame it -- and though I want good answers, I suspect that none are as simple as I'd like.

And so,...

It intrigued me that two authors cite Berlin in essays which are

1. broad and sweeping, close to excessive in their simplifying and exaggerating
2. on topics that really matter
3. pleasingly scattered with paradoxical facts
4. bold in asserting their main points.

And which, as essays should, work through the simplifications and exaggerations to conclusions that are more thought provoking than imperative. What's more, they're both by Yale professors who teach modern history with an emphasis on the Second World and Cold Wars.

Ending Tyranny , by John Lewis Gaddis in The American Interest, subtitled Jefferson’s eternal hostility to tyranny should be our guiding light today. On reading this I thought back to my high school years when I took pride in the idealism of American foreign policy (e.g., the Monroe Doctrine), and then to my college years when I came to realize that the facts didn't quite fit this comforting view (e.g., Manifest Destiny, gun boat diplomacy, and the Spanish-American War). Now, I think first that Gaddis both warns against single-mindedness in forming policies and urges a single-minded attack on tyrannical regimes. And I think second, that economic policies matter at least as much as diplomatic ones; a fact he glosses over.



Nazism's dialectic of death, by Timothy Snyder in the Times (UK), subtitled How Hitler tried to form an empire by killing rather than converting. This essay left me perplexed. He seems to be saying that as Hitler's idealism (kill all Jews and -- one way or another -- eliminate everyone else in conquered territories to the East) gave way to pragmatism (make slaves out of conquered people) when his plan quickly to carve out a huge new German state in the East began to fall apart. He says he expected the West to go along with his plan (Britain and the US accepting -- practically welcoming -- an Central and Eastern Europe ruled by Germany. But it's my understanding that Hitler wasn't nearly so consistent in his thinking. He certainly viewed Churchill as the devil, no way a potential ally. And, as I recall, he didn't really know where to stop once he sent the German armies East. Snyder's imaging of Hitler a (20th-century anti-) Napoleon doesn't seem to fit the facts. It also seems to make victims of the Eastern populations (including those that welcomed Germans as Russian killers) in the way that the Jewish populations were victims. Not so, I think.

Endnote:

Regarding my subject line, see Bill Keller's blog post in the NYT Sunday Book Review Reading Room: Ich Bin Ein Berliner.

Image source: Project Gutenberg

pig food

We encountered lots of algae on Petenwell Lake while vacationing in central Wisconsin this summer. The guy who handled our boat rental had just come from a meeting in which people whose livelihoods depend on the health of the lake were pitted against the powerful agricultural commmunity, source of much harmful runoff.

The sea of green reminded us of China's problems with the same. An account in the International Herald Tribune summarizes:

Olympic nightmare: A red tide in the Yellow Sea

By Jim Yardley
Published: June 30, 2008

source: IHT, caption: Residents clearing the coastline of Qingdao, Shandong province on Monday. (Stringer/Reuters)

Extracts:

Many coastal Chinese cities dump untreated sewage into the sea. At the same time, rivers and tributaries emptying into coastal waters are often contaminated with high levels of nitrates from agricultural and industrial runoff. These nitrates contribute to the red tides of algae that often bloom along sections of China's coastline.

But officials in Qingdao said pollution and poor water quality did not have a "substantial link" to the current outbreak. Instead, scientists blamed the bloom on increased rainfall and warmer waters in the Yellow Sea. Algae are now blooming over more than 12,900 square kilometers, or 5,000 square miles, of the sea, according to Xinhua.

State media reported that 100,000 tons of the algae had already been taken out of the water. Much of it was being transported to farms as feed for pigs and other animals, according to news reports.

Today, there's an AFP report on the problem:

Ocean 'dead zones' expanding worldwide: study
by Virginie Montet Fri Aug 15, 4:33 PM ET

Extracts:

"The formation of dead zones has been exacerbated by the increase in (pollution) ... fueled by riverine runoff of fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels," the study said.

The phenomenon, called eutrophication, is caused by industrial pollution as well as runoff of water containing phosphates and nitrates into the oceans.

Oceans react to the boost in pollution by growing more algae and vegetation in coastal areas.

When the algae dies and sinks to the bottom, it decreases the amount of oxygen available in the bottom waters, a process called hypoxia, eventually wiping out fish and crustaceans that live there, as well as the foods they eat.

Dead zones tend to creep up in calm waters that see lower water exchange, but have more recently been affecting major fishery areas in the Baltic, Kattegat, and Black Seas as well as the Gulf of Mexico and East China Sea, the study said.

The researchers said the expansion of dead zones in these areas threatens commercial fishing and shrimping near the coastlines.

The phenomenon was first noted along the Adriatic Coast in the 1950s.

Seasonal dead zones affect the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and Scandinavian waters.

Here are some photos I took on Lake Petenwell:


The lake is clear at its north end, where the Wisconsin River flows into it.

---

At that point, you can fish, swim, and idle an afternoon away drifting on clear waters.

---

On the eastern shore things are very different. The surface is green.

---

In protected areas of the eastern shore, like the marina where we rented the boat, the problem is acute. The smell is ugly.

---

The surface is so deeply green that in places it's blue.

---

And lies thick enough on the surface to support a cast-off soda bottle.

seal stories

I was intrigued by the following story in Agence France Presse. It interested me that elephant seals swim under the Antarctic ice floes and I appreciated the immaginative use of this behavior pattern. I was also surprised they didn't include a photo of these huge animals. Looking for a photo, I found another story, also cited below. I wasn't surprised that the current story didn't reference the earlier one, but wouldn't it be a good thing for reporters to do a little research so as to provide some additional background, and not just re-write what they're given in press releases?

Seals give scientists unique glimpse under Antarctic ice, by Lawrence Bartlett Tue Aug 12, 10:35 AM ET

extracts:

SYDNEY (AFP) - Huge elephant seals have been recruited to help scientists break through a critical blind spot and chart climate change under the Antarctic sea ice in winter, researchers said Tuesday.

The seals, which can weigh up to three tonnes, are fitted with sensors that transmit previously unavailable data to satellites when they surface to breathe.

The seals measure temperature, salinity and depth as they dive up to nearly two kilometres (1.25 miles) and cover distances of up to 65 kilometres a day.

They have provided a 30-fold increase in data over conventional methods.

The polar regions play an important role in the Earth's climate system and are changing more rapidly than any other part of the world, with the potential to accelerate the rate of change elsewhere, scientists say.

The sensors, about the size of a mobile phone, are fitted when the seals return to sub-Antarctic islands to breed and to moult during the summer.

Once they have grown the next season's fur, the sensors are glued to the fur on the back of the animal's head, so when it surfaces to breathe the sensor is out of the water and the antennae can transmit the data to satellite.

Though the seals are not particularly concerned about humans and scientists can approach them quite close, the animals are sedated with a syringe on the end of a pole to ensure the sensors can be attached safely.

The sensors stay on through the winter season and fall off when the seals return to the islands and shed their fur for the summer.

A quick search of Google Images turned up a large number of good photos. The most interesting was part of a NASA release which tells the story from a different viewpoint:

Mission News Satellites and Sea Lions: Working Together to Improve Ocean Models, by Rosemary Sullivant, 02.06.07

extracts:

The best oceanographers in the world never studied at a university. Yet they know how to navigate expertly along oceanic fronts, the invisible boundaries between waters of different temperatures and densities. These ocean experts can find rich fishing in places and at depths that others would assume are barren. They regularly visit the most interesting and dynamic parts of the sea.

Sea lions, seals, sharks, tuna and other top ocean predators share some of their experiences with human researchers, thanks to electronic tags. Besides tracking the animals, these sensors also collect oceanographic data, such as temperature and salinity. Scientists are beginning to incorporate this rich store of information into ocean models providing new insights into the inner workings of the ocean and the lives of its creatures.

"Our goal is to produce a three-dimensional model of the ocean," says JPL oceanographer Dr. Yi Chao. Chao uses data from satellites, ships, buoys and floats to map the currents, heat content and different water densities beneath the ocean surface.

"Satellites provide a two-dimensional view of the ocean," says Chao. "Animals give us a slice of the ocean. They're like weather balloons in reverse."

"We are at the forefront of knowing how animals use the ocean," says [Chao's collaborator] Costa. "But we want to understand the environment better. We still see the ocean primarily as deep or shallow or near-shore or offshore. But just as there are different habitats on land, the ocean has fine-scale features that are very important to animals," he explains. "We want to be able to look at the ocean and say the equivalent of "this is a grassland" or "this is a forest."

In late January, Costa and his research group headed up the California coast to begin tagging elephant seals and collecting tags that were deployed last spring. The work is strictly regulated to ensure that the animals are protected from harm, and it requires a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service.

"Marine scientists have been tracking marine animals for years," says Chao. "It's an interesting challenge, though, to use the data. There are all sorts-- from tuna, sharks, seals--you name it. Some of these data sets have small errors, others much larger errors. Figuring out how to put these in our system is a challenge, "he says. "But five years from now, we should be able to see the ocean the way a turtle sees it."

What is most important about using marine animals as ocean sensors is that the work benefits the animals, Costa explains. "Collaborations between biologists and physical oceanographers are critical for understanding why the animals go where they go," he says, "as we need to know and understand the ocean physics and its relationship to climate processes. Further, the ability to understand how climate change is affecting the world oceans is not only of benefit to humans, but is vital for trying figure out what is going to happen to habitat of marine animals."

Here are a couple of images from the NASA site:

The field team attaches a tag to the fur of a sedated male elephant seal. Special permits are required for this work to ensure the animal's protection. Image credit: Daniel Costa

A male sea lion shares his intimate knowledge of the ocean with researchers via an electronic tag. Image credit: Mike Weise

And here are a couple more from Cathy Webster on her own web site.

South Georgia, St. Andrew's Bay, adult male elephant seal
12/16/2005

South Georgia, St. Andrew's Bay, me talking to a young elephant seal
12/17/2005

opinionated women

I used to think that journalism was somewhat behind other writing professions in attaining gender balance, but I'm having a rethink about that. Today I just happened to notice that many of the best columnists are women and their articles are hardly restricted to issues that are traditionally considered to be feminine. Take for example:

(1) Washington Post writer, Anne Applebaum, writes about a weighty study that is being widely read in its Chinese original but not (yet anyway) available in English.

When China Starved, by Anne Applebaum, Tuesday, August 12, 2008; Page A13.

extracts:

"Tombstone" -- in two volumes and 1,100 pages -- establishes beyond any doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialization -- Mao's "Great Leap Forward" -- was an utter disaster.

[The author] is not a dissident but a longtime Communist Party member. For more than three decades, he was a reporter for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. As a result, he had access to party documents that no one else has ever had.

Like the communist legacy, the famine exists in a kind of limbo: undiscussed in public, unacknowledged by the state, yet a vivid part of popular memory. Because China is no longer a totalitarian country, merely an authoritarian one, a journalist like Yang could spend 10 years working on the history of the famine, openly soliciting interviews and documents. But because the Chinese Communist Party neither openly embraces nor rejects the legacy of Mao, there is no public discussion or debate.

Why does a nominally Marxist party, one whose economic theories proved utterly bankrupt in the past, still preside over an explosively capitalist society?

(2) Or Chrystia Freeland in the Financial Times:

The new age of authoritarianism, by Chrystia Freeland, Published: August 11 2008 19:48

{image credit: FT}

extracts:

Today, in much of the world, the spread of freedom is being checked by an authoritarian revanche. That shift has been most obvious in the petro-states, where oil is casting its usual curse. From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, the black-gold bonanza has given authoritarian regimes the currency to buy off or to repress their subjects. In Russia, oil has fuelled an economic boom that prime minister Vladimir Putin, and some of his foreign admirers, mistakenly attribute to his careful demolition of the chaotic democracy of the 1990s.

The Chinese Communist Party studied the collapse of Soviet communism with great care. And rather than seeing it as proof of the inevitable, global triumph of western liberalism, the Chinese comrades treated the Russian example as a textbook case of what a ruling Communist party ought not to do.

The west has been remarkably sanguine about this resurgence of authoritarianism, and one reason is that, this time, the comrades have money. Even as the Kremlin repeatedly confiscates the assets not just of its own businesspeople, but of foreign ones, too, investment bankers, and plain old investors, are flocking to a Moscow flush with petro-roubles. The same is true of the Gulf states. China, on a path to become the world’s largest economy, is the most attractive of all.

Russia’s expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century’s monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.

(3) Or the Post's Ruth Marcus, on a topic that might once have seemed appropriate for the Style Section (which evolved from the old women's pages), but is now Politics with a capital P:

A Tad Short Of 99%, by Ruth Marcus, Tuesday, August 12, 2008; Page A13

extracts:

There are two especially creepy aspects to [the Edwards infidelity] story. The first is the reverential, almost messianic way Elizabeth Edwards spoke about "this fine man" during the interview with Couric. This was disconcerting at the time; excruciating, in retrospect.

Even creepier part is John Edwards's resort to the exculpatory language of pop psychology to explain his behavior. "I went from being a senator, a young senator to being considered for vice president, running for president, being a vice presidential candidate and becoming a national public figure. All of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want."

Right. The adulation made him do it.

He was the one who told us that character counted. As in these remarks about Bill Clinton in 1999: "I think this president has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen."

a girl and her father

While vacationing in Madison I spent a quarter to buy a copy of Neil Gaiman's Coraline at Saint Vinnie's on Willy Street. As the book comes to a close the title character heroically takes on a final Herculean challenge and in doing so uses trickery worthy of Odysseus himself to rid the world of the witch's disembodied hand which pursues her. She has learned about bravery from her sweet-natured, absent-minded dad and she thinks of him while she tries to keep up her nerve. Gaiman writes:

She tried to whistle, but nothing happened, so she sang out loud instead, a song her father had made up for her when she was a little baby and which had always made her laugh. It went,

Oh --- my twitchy witchy girl
I think you are so nice,
I give you bowls of porridge
And I give you bowls of ice
Cream.
I give you lots of kisses,
And I give you lots of hugs,
But I never give you sandwiches
With bugs
In.

That was what she sang as she sauntered through the woods, and her voice hardly trembled at all. (pp. 156-57)