The Only Winning Move

Well, well. After having its worst day ever, in which it lost 777 points, the Dow is up 485 today. That’s all by itself and with no help from Congress. To put that in perspective, the Dow’s down a net 2.6% or so from opening yesterday. (If it lost 777 and then gained 485 of that back, it’s down 292 points, which is 2.6% of the 11149.66 it must’ve been at at opening yesterday if it closed at 10850.66 today.) And 2.6% is not such an unusual loss. Large to be sure, but what would be weird would be to post no loss at all this early in the correction.

And guess who led the pack? Yup - financials. They’re up 13.1% from yesterday.

The point being that the correction IS happening - just like anyone who’s economically literate and not a corrupt banker or politician knew it would. The biggest gains are in financials because that was also the source of the panic. They fell the furthest and had the most distance to climb back to normalcy. This is natural.

What needs to happen now is for financial gurus to trade these securities back and forth until they settle on prices for them. The whole problem is that no one knows what they’re worth, and the sooner people get back to bidding on them in the normal way, the sooner we’ll know what “the market” in general thinks they’re worth. Then, once prices have adjusted and it’s clear who owns them all and to what extent, the loans they’re based on will either default or not, and cash will flow to the people who predicted correctly and away from those who didn’t. Nothing about this requires Congress’ assistance. In fact, Congress getting involved can only retard the process. If Congress and the holders agree on prices that have nothing to do with anticipated profits and everything to do with “saving the economy,” it’s difficult to see how anyone is going to know what’s a good investment and what’s not. The prices will continue to be “wrong” in the important sense, and since the pressure will generally be in the direction of keeping them higher than they should be, all it seems likely to do on average is continue to attract money - i.e. real value - into money pits to be destroyed. Sure, some of these investments will work out, but it’s an even surer thing that many of them will fail. That’s a bad thing in the short term - but in the long term it’s right that they should do so. Bad investments, after all, are bad investments. It is never a sound financial policy to direct value toward things that don’t return it.

So let’s please, please, please not bail out the financial sector. Let it sort out its own mess. Yes, that means pain for the rest of us. But it’s the kind of pain that you can take in one sharp dose now, or spend the rest of your life working out in smaller fits. Like setting your nose as soon as it’s broken. Hurts like hell, but it does have the advantage of leaving you more or less back where you started. There’s GOING to be a correction, so let’s go ahead and let it happen. The good news is that it seems to be underway.

So the big bailout is on hold. This is WONDERFUL news! I’m just having a little bit of trouble believing it happened.

Forgive me - I know that a 7-percent drop in the Dow (the largest single-day drop in its history, apparently) is never a good sign, but there are cases where it’s a better sign than a typical rise or fall, and this is one of them.

Here’s how I read this situation. The government is proposing to buy securities that no one knows the value of in the hopes of proping up their prices to avoid spillover from the housing meltdown into other sectors of the economy, right? OK - so to hear President Bush talk about it, the government is “investing” our money - beacuse hey, who knows? Some of these bundled securities may actually turn out to be worth something more than we thought. Right - who knows?

The market knows, that’s who. Look - if anyone on Wall Street seriously thought there was a profit to be had from these things, they would buy them themselves, and there wouldn’t be a crisis to speak of. There would be a downturn, granted, and to the extent that people guessed right about the securities being undervalued, those people would make a killing buying cheap and selling high. As for the rest of us, well … we’d have to sit through a mild recession while everything adjusted.

Notice, however, that the Dow FELL 777 points on news that the government wasn’t going to give them free money. That doesn’t say anything like a bunch of people rushed in to buy what they’d just heard the government decided (for now) to pass on, does it? Nope. What that instead means is that the overwhelming majority of traders think these securities are worthless.

Let me put a finer point on it. The NUMBER ONE reason why the government absolutely SHOULD NOT bail out the financial sector right now is because THE MONEY WALL STREET LOST TODAY JUST ISN’T THERE. We’re in what’s called a bubble economy, which is when prices in certain sectors VASTLY overstate what the things they represent are actually worth.

In understanding these things, I think it’s always a good idea to go back to basics. What is money, and where does it come from? “Money” in the literal sense is an exchange medium. Since we’re going back to basics, imagine that we live in a Smurf village of 100 people where everyone has a specialized trade. I make soap, someone else makes bread, yet another person makes wagon wheels, etc. This benefits all of us, because this way I can just concentrate on making soap and let other people cover things like shoes and eggs and so on. When I need eggs, I go to the person who keeps the chickens and trade some soap, right? There’s a problem, of course. What if I need a pair of shoes, which are relatively difficult to make and last a long time, but the guy who makes shoes doesn’t really need the 26 or so cakes of soap that these shoes are worth? How do we trade? Well, the first solution that might occur to us is that I could write him a 26 promisary notes for cakes of soap. And he could take these to the guy who raises chickens and trade them for eggs. Maybe one promisary note buys him 3 dozen eggs, and then the chicken keeper can present it to me for soap when he wants it. So this is an improvement - but the system is still cumbersome. Wouldn’t it be nicer if instead of promisary notes for various goods, what we had instead were just certificates that had generic units of value printed on them? And then maybe my soap is worth two “units of value,” and the shoes are worth 52, and the eggs are 1/18 of a unit each, etc. This gives us a product-neutral medium of exchange, and of course in the United States we call those units “dollars.” How do we know how many dollars there really are in the economy? The answer is that there is no central way to know. This system got built up over a long period of time, and it’s basically based on bank loans. The reason for this is as follows. In the early days, the medium of exchange they agreed on was obviously not going to be pieces of paper with promises written on them. The system is too easy to abuse. So what happened instead is that people agreed to exchange gold. It suggested itself because everyone wanted it, but no one had a practical use for it - and best of all it was rare and difficult to obtain. In Europe it started with merchants from Italy travelling around to local fairs in the north and buying contracts on goods (say, wool sweaters from a merchant in England), which they would return in a year to collect. Typically, payment was in gold. But of course shipping gold from Italy to England is hugely expensive, so it was cheaper just to put the gold in a safe place and have that place issue a piece of paper that certified the shirt-maker’s ownership of x amount of gold. Thus began banks. The Italian merchant puts gold in the bank, and the bank issues certificates promising to pay out the gold to the bearer. The merchant can transport these certificates to England much cheaper. And what’s in it for the bank? Well, there’s a delay between the gold being deposited and redeemed, of course - and in many cases it’s never redeemed at all, but rather the shirt-maker simply takes the certificates and trades them for other things he needs (more sheep, maybe). So the bank is free to fudge a bit - to take the risk that it will never happen that suddenly in a single day everyone redeems their certificates for gold. So what it can do is issue loans to people who are just starting out. Say, someone wants to start a shipbuilding business, but that costs a lot of money - more, in fact, than he has. So he goes to the bank, which has lots of money lying around, and borrows some. To the extent his shipbuilding business succeeds, then bully for the bank - because it collects the money it loaned out plus interest (it has to be paid for taking the risk and providing the opportunity to start a business that wouldn’t otherwise have been there, after all - the man can’t pay his own startup costs, remember). And bully for everyone else too - because now there are more (and probably better) ships in the world, and ships are very useful things that produce more wealth (by allowing import of useful things that we want/need from other places, etc.). Because of this successful shipbuilder, there is now more “value” in the economy than there was before. And there is therefore also more money. Witness: the bank made a profit on its loan, and it has more to lend out to other people as a result. This reflects the added value in the economy from the shipbuilder’s success (as, for that matter, does the fact of the shipbuilder new wealth giving other people around him to make goods he can use and might want to buy from them, thus adding even more value to the economy, etc.).

Of course, some of these risks go sour, so it’s important that the bank does its job well - lending money to people who will add value to the economy and avoiding lending to people who will simply waste the value they borrow.

The point of going through all this explanation is to stress the point that money doesn’t come from nowhere. It doesn’t come out of thin air. What happens, for example, if the bank lends out much, much more money than it really has? Well, one of two things, really. The obvious problem is that the more of its certificates there are floating around out there, the greater the danger that one day a bunch of people will show up demanding all the gold it has, shutting it down. But there’s a more subtle problem called “inflation.” That is, if there’s more of these certificates floating around than there is real value in the economy, what do you think will happen? Again, because it’s easier on the conceptualization, go back to the 100 person village. What happens if someone (say, a prince) guarantees the bank that no one will come and cash in their certificates for a while. Princes can issue decrees like that, after all. So the prince says “for two years, no gold certificates will be redeemed.” Well, now the bank has no disincentive to lend out money, so it does it recklessly - to everyone who asks. Now - because this is easier on the imagination, let’s think what happens to our 100-person village. Let’s say we’re a smart, or at least a well-connected village, and we know that the prince is going to issue this decree, so all of us go to the bank to get some of this cheap money. Everyone in the village borrows roughly what he makes in a year, each hoping to expand his business, so now we’re (temporarily - and only on paper as we’ll see in a moment) all twice as rich as we were before. Ok, so we’re flush with cash, and we all want to expand our businesses, which means going out and buying the goods that are needed to produce all our new stuff and … ooops. There’s where reality sinks in. Because you see, no matter how many gold certificates we all have, there is only as much “stuff out there” as there was before the bank started issuing all this money. The fact of issuing all the money doesn’t make “stuff we need” magically appear. There’s just as much “stuff we need” as there ever was. We all have twice as much “gold” to spend on shoes as we did before, but the shoemaker hasn’t made any more shoes. We all have twice as much “gold” to spend on eggs as we did before, but the hens haven’t laid any more eggs. So what’s going to happen? By one method or another, prices are going to rise. This happens either because a bunch of people show up at the hen house at the same time wanting eggs, and to make sure everyone gets the eggs they want the henkeeper raises his prices to dampen demand. OR - one person shows up and buys a bunch of eggs, and the other people who need eggs have to somehow persuade him to part with some, which means paying him more than they would have a week ago.

The new money was fun while it lasted, but it soon becomes clear that it was all an illusion: there isn’t any more money than there was before because there isn’t any more “stuff we need” than there was before. We all have twice as much money overnight? Guess what? Prices inflate to twice as much as they were before. Not overnight - so some stuff gets shaken up - but they eventually get there. But it’s actually worse than all of us breaking even, because it means that those of us who were frugal and saved money for times when we would need it now see their savings cut in half. They have just as much sewn into the quilt as they did last week, but everything now costs twice as much as it used to. To quote a cool movie - “a shilling isn’t worth a shilling anymore.”

Of course, back in fabled days of yore, inflation was rarely a problem because there was an actual amount of gold out there measuring how much value was in the economy, and the banks were nervous enough about losing it that they tended (as a class, anyway) not to lend so much out that they would get in trouble. To the extent that there was inflation, no one noticed it.

These days, however, there’s no more gold backing up our money, and so we really can just pull it out of thin air if we want to. On the one hand, this is a good thing, because it’s certainly true that constraints on the gold supply might have kept the world economy from growing as fast as it could have in times past. Furthermore, there was a danger of deflation under the gold standard, where prices just drop as more things are made (and it’s harder to see the point in investing when the general rule is that businesses that rake in less money in nominal terms each year than they did the year before). And probably worst of all, the economy was less flexible. We couldn’t easily pump more cash in when it slowed and take more cash away when times were good like we do now, so the result was that you had bumpier business cycles - bigger booms, but also bigger busts.

On the other hand, it’s a really terrible thing, because there’s a real sense in which there really aren’t constraints on money growth. Without some kind of objective limit of the kind a gold standard offers, people really can just make up numbers and tell people there’s that much “stuff” out there. Sometimes they get it right and everything works out. Sometimes they overestimate and there’s inflation. And sometimes they just downright dirty CHEAT - which is what they’ve been doing for the past 10 years - and the numbers are way off, like they are now.

In a modern economy, thankfully, the numbers being off isn’t the end of the world. There’s still all that “stuff people need” out there in the world, and people still make it and need it and use it. The trouble with times like now is that people aren’t too sure what a lot of it is worth. And in particular, there is less of it accounted for by the housing industry than they thought.

The classic example of a bubble economy is Japan in the late 80s. Japan’s a small place with a lot of people - ergo land is worth a lot in certain places. Traders found out that they could “make” money by just buying land and selling it back and forth between members of their business circles. But of course the problem with this is the same as the problem with my hypothetical prince giving my imaginary banks permission to print a bunch of worthless gold certificates: the nominal prices of the land may be rising to dizzying heights, but there’s no more “stuff out there” than there was before. These numbers are rising with nothing to account for them. It amounts to theft, really. The people doing all this buying and selling of land are claiming that they own a bigger piece of the pie than they really do - that their land accounts for a bigger slice of the economy than it really does.

And that’s exactly what’s now going on in the US. Banks lent money to people they knew probably couldn’t pay it back under political pressure to increase minority home ownership. The banks, unlike the political class, are NOT stupid, and they knew these loans were going to go bad. So they tried to conceal this and profit from it anyway by bundling them with other good loans and selling them. Remember - loans that go bad mean money out there in the world that isn’t accounted for by real value. Compounding the problem this time is no one is sure which loans went bad where, and there’s no easy way of separating them from other loans that are good. In short, we really, really, really just don’t know how much value there is out there in the economy.

The worst possible thing you can do in such a situation is force tax payers like you and me to help everyone collectively pretend that everything is alright. At the end of the day, there really is only so much “stuff people need” - i.e. available good and services - out there in the world. What the government is proposing to do is take money from productive people to prop up the value of assets that financial experts don’t want to touch. President Bush is right that some of these things whose value no one knows will turn out to be valuable. But the performance on Wall Street today suggests that the big picture is that there’s less money out there in reality than there are dollar bills currently floating around - or that at the very least the dollar bills are all in the wrong hands. If the Dow lost 777 points today that’s because a good many of those 777 points were never “really” there to begin with. There are two ways we can respond to that, of course. We can roll with the punch now and start facing reality. Or we can continue to keep imaging things, in which case we’ll just compound our misery.

I’m for taking my medicine now, thanks. The economy is out of whack, and it needs to correct. The market mechanism needs to work to make sure that people who shouldn’t be holding dollars lose them, and people who should get them. Things need to untangle.

So let them untangle already. Prices are going to continue to drop, and things are going to continue to get worse, no mistake about it. We’re in for some scary times. But it WILL correct - and the sooner we start the ball rolling, the sooner things come back to normal and the less pain we have to suffer.

So yes, I get it. A 777 point drop is not a good thing. But all the alternatives are likely to be worse. Bring it on.

I would just like to give a full-bellied “amen!” to Neil Boortz’ latest column, which makes all the same points I did in the recent entry Mike Easley is a Moron (and you can too), but more forcefully. Oh, and for Atlanta rather than North Carolina, where, if news reports are to be believed, the gas shortage is even worse than it is in Charlotte. Mr. Boortz even gives a helpful link to an article explaining what’s causing the problem: over 100 gas stations are being investigated for so-called “price gouging”.

Where does this mass stupidity in the political class come from? I’d really like to know. Because you’d think anyone who went to high school and soaked up some basic Cold War history lessons would’ve heard of a country called the Soviet Union, whose economy collapsed after suffering from chronic shortages of basic goods throughout most of its 70-year history by applying exactly this strategy on goods across the board. You simply cannot set prices based on imaginary levels of supply and demand and expect things to work out. Prices are “correct” only when they accurately reflect “how much of it there is to sell” vs. “how much people want it.” There is NO OTHER WAY to effecively decide what a price should be. Every state governor in the South (well, except of course Phil Bredesen; Tennessee has always been a freer country than the rest of us)needs to hold hands and chant in unison “only the market can set prices accurately” until they believe it. Nashville’s back to normal fellas, despite the fact that it too is only serviced by one gas pipeline from Houston. Difference being - there aren’t any outstanding price gouging investigations there. See if you can put your heads together and conclude something about that.

Some things, like wine, mellow with age, gaining in quality with passing years. Others, like fresh fruit, have a brief blush of usefulness and must thereafter be discarded. I put Steven Spielberg in this latter category.

All my life I’ve been proudly “not impressed” with the man. Which is to say that post-Temple of Doom, there’s not a single movie of his I can remember having enjoyed. And as for Temple of Doom itself - well, I love it, but probably not for reasons of artistic merit.

But recently I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of his early movies, and it turns out that there was a time when Spielberg did some truly fantastic stuff. Alright, so I’m not a big fan of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (truth be told, I can’t stand it) - but Raiders of the Lost Ark is just brilliant, and Jaws, which I saw for the first time ever about a week ago, turns out to be very well done. Maybe best of all is Duel, which I’ve only just seen today. Very impressive indeed.

The plot is straightforward. A man passes a particularly obnoxious truck on a lonely highway, inadvertently sparking a drawn-out - and increasingly bizarre - roadrage incident that lasts for the rest of his trip. There is very little dialogue (and what little there is mostly gets in the way), and we as good as never see the driver of the evil truck. All of which leaves me very little to sink my teeth into by way of explaining what was so great about this movie - it just was, that’s all.

I think if there’s something to say about this movie it’s that it’s easy to miss the skill that went into making it. There’s this popular trope about Hamlet and Othello, whereby Othello is meant to be technically superior … in that it follows to the letter Aristotle’s prescriptions for tragedy, the plot makes solid sense, and the story merely exaggerates a situation we’ve all been in … but that it’s Hamlet that’s somehow, inexplicably but undeniably, better - even though the plot makes little sense and we the audience can’t relate to the situation at all. The idea is that mediocre drama tends toward some ideal that good drama (Othello) achieves - but that great drama is drama like Hamlet, where it doesn’t exactly make sense, but something in it compells us to believe in it anyway. So - the punchline isn’t that Duel is great drama like Hamlet, because it isn’t at all. But as a horror movie, I think it’s an Othello.

I can’t remember who wrote it, but I once read a really convincing essay to the effect that the templatic pattern of the horror genre is one of denial. Characters find themselves in a situation characterized by a sequence of events that are slightly abnormal, suggesting that something truly impossible/supernatural is going on. But of course, impossible things are impossible, and at the outset of the story there’s nothing really compelling anyone to believe that the impossible is occurring. There are all those “perfectly rational explanations” that keep stretching the limits of plausibility the longer the story runs until finally, in the moment that defines a work as part of the genre, they have to face the fact that what’s going on REALLY IS supernatural/”impossible.” And so like with all genre literature the trick to writing masterful horror is largely a technical one: it’s a matter of stretching out the time before the big revelatory moment as much as you can without getting repetitive or boring, and then bringing things to a satisfying end reasonably quickly after the revelation. The worst thing you can do (and what often kills Stephen King novels for me) is letting the story continue too long after the big revelation - because that’s just pointless. The other way you can go wrong is to flub your buildup - whether by uneven pacing, overly credulous characters, whatever.

Duel is a by-the-book horror story. A man comes across a truck on the highway that’s just slightly over-the-line obnoxious. It’s striking the first time you see it, but not so striking as to be unbelievable. He passes it and soon finds himself in a road rage incident that, again, seems to be outside the bounds of normal experience, but isn’t so egregiously so that he can’t write it off. But as the movie rolls on it becomes harder and harder to deny that the situation is extraordinary, and it’s only resolved when our hero finally gives up on trying to get out of it fully intact.

The story alone would carry this movie, and for that reason it’s tempting to look at it and see nothing special. Give X, X a director, a shot at this, and the end result is bound to be acceptably entertaining. And it must be said that this one is not without its flaws. There’s some annoying internal monologue that it really could’ve done without, and one scene of expository dialogue (for those of you who’ve seen it - I’m talking about the bit where Mann reminds us that he was warned about the radiator hose) that would have been completely unforgiveable had it actually mattered to the resolution. But those bruised bits aside, this film is very well done. It’s true that we save most of our admiration for the likes of Stanley Kubirck and his Midas Touch - geniuses who can take second-rate novels like The Shining and rework them into something truly special. Spielberg isn’t Kubrick, and this definitely isn’t that. But it’s very good all the same.

Nowadays I find Spielberg equal parts boring and sentimental. But there was a time in the 70s when he was at the top of his game. I think what we’re in the presence of with Spielberg is someone without a lot of talent but huge amounts of dedication. He’s obsessed with movie-making, and like any dedicated professional he does his job well. There’s no genius here, but there is a lot of technical competence, and that’s good enough. Such people tend to wind down with age, I think, because in their early years they really have to struggle to worm their way in. Once they’re “in,” there’s no longer anything pushing them to greatness, because such skill as they show is never based in inspiration anyway. It’s a lot of sweat and hard work instead, and so take away the obstacles and you take away the mainspring. (A genius, by contrast, will produce brilliant work at his pleasure, whether or not his career is going anywhere as a result.) For an analogy from science fiction, I hold up Robert Silverberg - born without any special writing talent, poor guy, but so diligent and determined to succeed that he became a very good writer all the same. He’s earned a well-deserved place on SciFi’s A-list, Tower of Glass remains one of my favorites, and he’s easily one of the most “readable” of the genre. It isn’t what hand you’re dealt so much as how you play it, as they say.

And so it is with Duel. It’s not a “great” movie, but it’s a damned good one, and it improved my appreciation for Spielberg quite a bit.

Perhaps I’ve been slow to start seriously looking at online betting on political events. It’s the sort of thing I might actually be good at - if I weren’t a graduate student and had more time on my hands. Though I should come clean, of course, and admit that I still think McCain is going to win the presidential election, despite pretty robust predictions to the contrary in online betting markets. But then, that’s how you make money on these things, so if I really had the strength of my convictions I suppose I could put my money where my mouth is and start playing, eh?

Another discussion for another day.

In any case, I finally visited Intrade today via a link from fivethirtyeight.com accusing Intrade betting of being suspicious. The idea is that while most online political betting markets have Obama ahead by a comfortable 10-point spread, he’s only up by about 2 points on Intrade. 538 makes the assertion that this kind of thing can’t really happen in a free market. Which is, well, bollocks, actually - Zogby tends to get different poll numbers from the major players, after all. Sometimes the audience is just different. And there is, let’s not forget, the concept of a market leader. Intrade may simply be ahead of the game. But alright, granted that it does look a bit suspicious (I think the specific allegation being made is of concerted tampering by outsiders - but hey, why can’t there be speculators on online betting sites?), I went over and sniffed around myself.

The standout contract for me was one on the Conservative Party’s chances of winning the Canadian election. OH, did I forget to mention? Canada is having an election. And that spike in the contract roughly correlates with the date that Harper announced it. It’s valued at $9.7 at the time of writing - sale price of $9.4 if you own one, buyer’s price of a whopping $9.9. Considering that Intrade contract cap out at $10, that means that something like 99% of everyone buying these things thinks Harper and the Conservatives are headed for another federal win in Canada. Which is, undoubtedly, why you haven’t heard much about Canada’s election in the news. Polls up there say pretty much the same thing. The Conservatives are polling above the Liberals by greater than the margin of error in every major poll. So there seems to be little doubt that they’re headed for a win. The question - as always in these power-brokered Westminister systems - is by how much? It still seems to be just shy of the coveted majority government. Which indicates what I’ve always said about Harper’s standing in Canada: the voting public knows he’s highly competent, but he isn’t their first ideological choice. Once the Liberals find a decent leader, Harper’s honeymoon will be over.

Since Noah hasn’t posted in weeks, I mostly find his blog useful as a way of keeping the excellent Briggs Blog bookmarked. It is a blog which, one might add, Noah recently defaced by alerting the pygmy swine at Pharyngula to its presence. A perfectly interesting internet survey was vandalized by these open-minded people open-mindedly perverting an honest attempt to gain some knowledge about the predicitve power of group gut feeling so that they could pat themselves on the back for being Obama supporters.

OK, I’m kidding about Noah, of course. He was just trying to recruit more ideological diversity to the survey to keep it representative. And I’m also kidding about the goons at Pharyngula being open-minded. I need to point that out because PZ Myres has apparently lost the ability to see the invisible quotation marks of satire.

Yes, you see, I went to Noah’s blog and, finding nothing new as usual, I went on my merry way to Briggs, which also contained nothing new. And having a modicum of time on my hands, I thought I might have a look at Pharyngula, where I haven’t been in months, since that’s also linked from Noah’s blog. And I’m truly sorry, but the low level to which discourse has sunk over there was honestly shocking to me.

Scrolling down the main page I’m treated to:

(1) A link to a site encouraging church pastors to get their flock to vote. I guess I’m not really sure why this is funny to Myers. I should think it’s par for the course that various interest groups encourage people to vote here in this election season. Yes, even those interest groups we find ridiculous, what with this being a democracy with free and fair elections and all.

(2) An assurance that the Discovery Institute’s latest texbook is propaganda and not science. As if anyone needed to crack the book to know that.

(3) A picture from Galapagos. Which is to PZ Myers sort of like Jerusalem is to Jews. And Christians. And Muslims. More on this in a bit. It was a nice picture.

(4) An entry entitled “Chicken” calling John McCain a - you guessed it! - for withdrawing from Friday’s debate. Clever, Myers! ‘Cause I bet McCain’s soooo dumb he really DOES think not showing up for any debates will help him win!

(5) Yet another link to an internet poll for his readers to trash. For someone who claims to find internet polling pointless, Myers certainly does devote a lot of column space to encouraging his readers to trash them.

(6) A bit about Nature’s election science policy poll - which Obama answered and McCain didn’t. Which certainly does make McCain look bad - but I wonder how commentary like this actual quote from Myers contributes to the discussion? “…in an attempt to be fair, Nature dug through McCain’s old speeches to charitably cobble up the kind of answers he might have given if a) he weren’t an incompetent old coot who can’t get his act together, b) he actually cared what the universe outside the right-wing electorate thought, and c) he wasn’t going to heedlessly gut science as quickly as possible if given the opportunity.”

(7) A celebratory bit about a new planetarium in Minneapolis - which is mostly impressed with itself because more is being spent in tax money on this planetarium than the completely privately-funded creationist museum. Which is like giving someone a 2km head start in a 5k and then being honestly impressed he beat you. Oh, and then, for no reason, commenting that John McCain probably doesn’t even know what a 5k is, as if it were somehow relevant to who won.

(8) A comic showing someone killing a pollster. Because who cares what the public thinks?

(9) A link to an atheist site in India. ‘Cause there’s atheists everywhere, apparently. Who knew?

(10) The one actually interesting entry - about a creative funding scheme for getting money to work on primates.

(11) The one in which he apologizes for a bone-headed link. Hey - it happens.

(12) A link to a Dr. Seuss inspired spoof of creationism. ‘Cause we’ve all got lots ‘o time on our hands.

(13) And the one in which he belatedly realizes that Roger Ebert’s latest post on Creationism was, in fact, satire. WHEW - finally here. M-kay - so it goes like this. Roger Ebert (to whom I should really think seriously about devoting a post category, honestly) recently shook up the internets by posting a Creationism Q and A that was - as it turns out - intended as satire. Which really should have been obvious to all but the most obtuse of readers. And of course, maybe it was…

Ebert 1 - 0 Myers is all I have to say. Have a look at the article and see for yourself if there aren’t “invisible quotes” interspersed all through it. Sure, it’s a bit more straight-faced than most satire in that it gives a fairly accurate set of answers from a creationist point of view. But for cryin’ out loud, it contains bits such as this:

Q. Since the earth was completely covered, even to the highest mountains, where did the waters go?

A. This is explained in Psalm 104, verses 6 and 7: “Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.”

A question which contains the archaic phrase “even to the highest mountains” that is answered straight-faced with a quote from the Bible. C’mon - how does anyone miss that this is satire? In their wettest of wet dreams, of course, Creationists would like to see scientific questions answered with authoritative Bible quotes, but for their public face the show they generally put on is that Creationism is a “theory” the way Evolution (which they prefer to call “Darwinism”) is a “theory.” I.e. they pretend that Creationism is an honest and faith-neutral attempt at explanation … meaning that they avoid direct Bible quotes because that would give up the goat.

The question is - how did an intelligent guy like Myers miss this?

Answer - he’s long ago ceased functioning as an intelligent guy on this issue. He’s a child-man, really. And like most child-men, he’s really only able to function in an echo-chamber, where the boyz in his gang spray graffiti all over the locker rooms of the boyz in the other gang. What, indeed, was the point of the the infamous Communion Wafer gag? Was anyone honestly shocked that there were Catholics out there who got irrational about it? People who believe they’re eating Jesus in the form of bread every Sunday? This was surprising? To whom, I wonder… And then to trash the Koran - only not the real Koran (which must be in Arabic for Islamic fundamentalists) but just an English copy of it, thereby disingenuously exploiting a cowardly loophole while publicly claiming to be an equal-opportunity offender.

If all this sounds like kindergarten behavior to you, we’re on the same page. And so it isn’t surprising, really, that Myers would have a child’s sense of humor. Meaning that he can’t abide ambiguity. It’s got to be clear - with we the Good Guys doing the laughing and they the Bad Guys doing the being laughed at - for it to make any sense to him. And so of course Ebert’s Q and A is going to fall flat - because Myers, ultimately, lacks the strength of his convictions.

Here’s Myers on the inevitable comparison to Swift’s classic:

But Ebert is no Jonathan Swift. Imagine if, in 1729, there had been a number of letters to the editor by various authors proposing that Irish children be exterminated and eaten. Imagine that laws of that nature were being seriously debated in Parliament, and that one of the parties had made it a part of their platform. While the laws were being regularly defeated, opponents still had to stand up and seriously debate why it was unethical to eat babies. Imagine that a candidate for prime minister actually solemnly suggested that we ought to at least consider the merits of eating Irish children.

In other words, he’s totally missed the point. The mechanism by which A Modest Proposal operates is by stating something outlandish in reasonable-sounding terms. To us in the 21st century, that’s about where it stops, and we get a good laugh out of it on that level. Because hey, who would seriously endorse cannibalism, eh? Eh? But then, these days who would seriously endorse half of the contemporaneous English Ireland policy? LOTS of things that went on in Ireland then seem outrageous by today’s standards, and Swift’s purpose was to carry the situation just over the line into absurdity. It functions not in the way the Myers takes it (apparently as a bludgeon over the head), but rather by obviously crossing the line but staying withing sight of things that seriously were being proposed. Which is exactly what Ebert’s commentary does, honestly. It takes things over the line by quoting the Bible as scientific authority, and it works BECAUSE we know that there are people out there on local school boards proposing things that aren’t too terribly far from that right now. Swift’s point in 1729 was to say “yeah, you guys aren’t SAYING cannibalism, but lots of what you’re doing isn’t too far off the mark.” Just as Ebert’s bit says “yeah, you guys aren’t SAYING ‘teach the Bible in school’ but the pseudoscience you’re proposing we do teach isn’t too far off the mark.” Swift says something like “look, if you’re going to propose something as inhuman as X, you might as well go all they way and actually eat people.” And Ebert says something like “if you’re going to make up a theory no scientist believes and pretend it’s actually the subject of controversy in Biology Departments, you might as well go all the way and have kids read the Bible in science class.” I admit, I laughed at Swift and not at Ebert - but then, Ebert is primarily a movie reviewer and is a satirist only second.

My point here is simply to say that there was a time when atheists were in a class by themselves on this topic. There was the religious world consisting of all its various flavors of superstition, and then there were atheists, who rejected all that. Recently, one of the favorite tactics of religious fanatics has become classing Atheism as a faith like any other. And those of us who are genuine atheists have to patiently explain to them that it isn’t a faith. I don’t wilfully disbelieve in God - I simply recognize that the burden of proof is on the believer and note their general failure to meet it. It’s the same mechanism by which I disbelieve in the Loch Ness Monster. Sure, it’s logically possible that there is such a creature, it’s just that it seems so hugely unlikely, and in any case no one has been able to show me that it’s there. And surely the onus is on them to show me that, rather than on me to believe in it until someone manages, for the first time in history, to definitively prove a negative. So it is with God. I will modify my worldview and behavior to accomodate such a thing when someone shows me it’s there - not before. That is not “faith” by any definition.

Unfortunately, people like PZ Myers give us all a bad name. They run around acting like religious fanatics, all in the name of supposedly doing away with this sort of behavior. And so it isn’t too much of a stretch for people of faith to accuse them of having a secular faith of their own. Because honestly, what else motivates someone to publicly desecrate a communion wafer? What is it meant to achieve? Because from where I sit it’s about as funny as picking on a retarded guy for slurring his speech. You get one cheap laugh, and then you realize it was a cheap laugh and you feel ashamed of yourself for exploiting another’s misfortune. And honestly, what else motivates someone to respond in such a petulant way when it’s revealed he’s been had by an obvious bit of satire? You get one rush of righteous indignation at Ebert, and it lasts about as long as it takes you to realize that you’ve only been had because you take yourself too seriously, and you laugh at yourself and lighten up a bit.

OR…

Maybe what you do instead is do nothing all day but knock at low-hanging fruit with a sledgehammer. We’re all different.

I spent a good deal of time today figuring out how to deal with Unicode and XML in Python, so I thought I’d post my tribulations in case they’re useful to anyone else.

The basic story is this: I’ve taken over as webmaster for the Linguistics Department here at Indiana University, and mostly what I do now is clean up after the old guy - who must be given credit for having updated the look-n-feel to accomodate IU’s new Visual Identity standards and also for having shouldered the burden of the weekly Linguistics Calendar, neither of which is a small task. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have set up much of a maintenance framework. For example, I have to check for broken links by hand (and there were A LOT of them at the start of the year that needed fixing), and there is neither a database nor a script for automatic generation of the dreaded weekly calendar.

I made writing such a script and database my first priority. I was warned — correctly, as it turns out — that putting out that blast thing weekly would eat up most of my time. I bill the school for 5 hours a week - but I’ve easily put in more time than that since I started, and I’d say at least 45% of that owes to the calendar.

For the database, XML seemed appropriate. I would like to learn SQL (and will over the next month for another project I’m working on) or some other relational database tool, but it seems like overkill for a little thing like keeping conference and talk dates in order for the Linguistics Calendar. And especially in the development stages, it’s good to have a file that you can eyeball. So I made up some fields for common attributes that upcomming conferences and so on have: “deadline,” “officialname,” “venue,” etc. The script simply takes a start date and a volume number, adds 7 days to the start date, goes into the “database” and picks out any entry that has a “begin” date attribute before its start date and an “end” attribute after it and arranges it in the (currently extremely ugly but soon to be prettified) format that you can see by clicking the link - making sure that conferences are arranged by abstract submission date and so on.

The catch, of course, is that some people have these funny characters in their names, and so I need to read them in from XML, process them, and output them into an html file. Sounds simple, right? And of course, it IS simple given the tools that Python provides you - but I found those tools a bit fussy just at first, so here’s the solution.

For reading utf-8 encoded data from an xml file:


import codecs
from xml.dom import minidom

def load(handle):
   source = codecs.open(handle + '.xml', 'r', 'utf-8')
   sourcestring = source.read()
   xmldoc = minidom.parseString(sourcestring.encode('utf-8')).documentElement
   source.close()
   return xmldoc


I don’t think it’s actually necessary to read the file into a string - I added that while tracking down another encoding bug. That is, one could probably get away with:


import codecs
from xml.dom import minidom

def load(handle):
   source = codecs.open(handle + '.xml', 'r', 'utf-8')
   xmldoc = minidom.parse(source).documentElement
   source.close()
   return xmldoc


But in any case, reading the input file into a string and making sure that that sting is utf-8 encoded before parsing it certainly works.

Where I ran into trouble, actually, was outputting to an html file. So the rest of the script does all the processing and formatting, and then it comes time to write it out. In my particular case, most of the code is encapsulated in an object (for dispatching purposes using getattr), so once it’s done you get the data by calling a showPage() method. In theory, the following should therefore work:


import codecs

outputfile = codecs.open(outputfilename, mode='w', encoding='utf-8')
outputfile.write(CalendarGenerator.showPage())


After all, I have been operating on utf-8 encoded data. It should simply be a matter of writing it to a file with a utf-8 aware stream. But frustratingly it didn’t work. So I tried everything I could think of - taking care to encode all the template strings as utf-8 along the way, etc. Simply printing out CalendarGenerator.showPage() to standard output confirmed that the program handled the characters correctly. It was a ü that was the culprit - and the terminal displayed it just fine. So it was something to do with writing it to file. I still don’t understand it - but here’s the solution:


import codecs

outputfile = codecs.open(outputfilename, mode='w', encoding='utf-8')
page = unicode(CalendarGenerator.showPage(), 'utf-8')
outputfile.write(page)


For whatever reason, you have to return the information to be written to the file separately - specifically encode it in utf-8 (even though, to all outward appearances, it already is so encoded), and then write it to a file object that has been opened specifically to receive utf-8 encoded data.

Well, it works, so no complaints, I guess. I would just like to know why the middle step is necessary? Or perhaps it isn’t, and there is some cleaner way to do this that I’ve missed?

Reading for pleasure last night, I came across Ben Bova’s essay Isaac was Right: N equals one in the April 2003 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact (which he used to edit in the 70s). The basic premise is this: there is no other intelligent life in the universe, and the idea that there might be is based on a false premise. That false premise is that evolution, given time, invariably produces intelligence. And the reference to “Isaac” is of course to Isaac Asimov, whose stories about the future never contained aliens.

Bova is certainly correct that smart money is against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Scientist that he is, of course he doesn’t deny the possibility. But scientist that he is, the lack of evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life after decades of looking certainly strongly suggests that there’s none to be found. And I agree: my main reason for disbelieving in aliens personally is not that I believe they can’t exist (they can), but because no one has been able to show me that they do. It’s the same reason I don’t believe in God (though not the same reason I reject organized religion - which is in most cases a priori silly).

Bova is also correct about the falsity of the false premise - and correct that a sizeable number of believers in aliens hold it, as far as I can tell - but he is incorrect that it is a necessary foundation for belief in intelligent aliens. Bova writes:

We tacitly assume that whereever life exists, intelligence will eventually arise, given enough time. But is that true? … Intelligence is merely one evolutionary tactic, an adaptation that helps a species to survive, little different from developing a shaggy coat of fur, or sharp-focusing eyes, or wings or gills or any myriad of adaptations.

Well, right, but what about this means that it can only be successful this once in this one place? I should think that if shaggy fur works for shielding against cold here on Earth it might on other planets as well - just as intelligence might work as an adaptive tool elsewhere. That isn’t to say it has happened, of course, just to point out that there is no need for it to be an inevitable consquence of life for anyone to find it likely that other planets have hosted it. All that is required is for there to be enough planets out there suitable for genesis of life that intelligence happens “now and then,” and for intelligence itself to be robust enough a survival technique that it tends to succeed.

And Bova is also correct that “Isaac was right” - but about aliens in science fiction, NOT about the existence of aliens in general.

In fact, Asimov’s stubborn refusal to write about aliens is one of the more redeeming qualities of his fiction for me - which I generally give an A+ for intelligence and a D+ on character and thematic development (making me appreciative, but definitely not a fan). But I don’t view the lack of aliens as a scientific hypothesis, and I hope that’s not how Asimov meant it, because I don’t think it is the job of the science fiction writer to accurately predict the future. I think it is merely his job, so far as he is writing about the future at all, to create a future plausible enough that we can believe in it for the duration of the story. Much the same way that it is not the job of a fantasy writer to describe fairies and dragons to us as he personally believes in them. He doesn’t have to believe in dragons at all (and we prefer it if he doesn’t, in fact). He merely has to give us a consistent one, one detailed enough to support the story. Nor does a romance writer have to describe real romances. He merely has to create romances that are plausible enough that they don’t distract from his reader’s wish-fulfillment. Indeed, get too plausible and the fun goes out of it! And so on. The future is a fictional vehicle typical of the genre - nothing more. Science fiction isn’t “about” the future any more than romance novels are how-to guides for getting laid. It’s true enough that couples may find sexual inspiration in romance novels, but if that’s the only reason you’re reading them you’re missing the point and using your time inefficiently: there are guidebooks for that in a different section of the bookstore. And if you’re reading science fiction to collect guesses about the future - well, again, you’re probably not using your time as wisely as you could be. There is a whole profession of non-fiction writers who do their best to make informed predictions about the future. Science fiction authors are, like authors in general, primarily employed to tell stories.

The reason I think Asimov is right to leave aliens out of his stories is that aliens are not human and his readers are. Aliens are not just unknown, but unknowable. Not only do we have no concrete examples to build on, I’m not sure there’s even a point to trying to build one. When you consider what passes for “aliens” in most space opera, you realize that they’re essentially (if not as blatantly) the “rubber foreheads” from Star Trek. They are humans with human motivations and concerns whittled down to a few easy generalizations in rubber costumes. The idea that Klingons are “alien” is laughable. They are no such thing. They’re Native Americans, only less so. And so it is with many so-called “aliens” in science fiction. They’re (insert name of random foreign culture) only less so. Take any human culture, exaggerate some stereotypical feature of it and fill in the rest with New York, and you have an “alien” species for all most science fiction readers care. This isn’t to say that writers can’t, and don’t, go to the trouble to create species that are plausibly alien, of course, merely to say that it isn’t the general rule and that in any case it doesn’t seem to be what readers want. And that’s because science fiction readers are humans themselves - with human concerns and motivations. They can’t relate to realistic aliens, and there doesn’t seem to be much point in trying.

Whatever his other literary flaws, Asimov got that much right. Spending time designing plausible aliens - while perhaps an interesting exercise in its own right - is a distraction from the main purpose of literature, even science fiction literature. Aliens work when they’re in the service of the “sense of wonder” that is at the core of what I and so many other fans love so deeply about science fiction. But they are silly at worst and pointless at best as regular characters. And so I like to believe that the lack of aliens in Asimov’s books are not an intentional scientific implicature so much as an intentional literary decision. Isaac got “it” right alright - but “it” is not “that N equals one.” “It” is that what N equals is irrelevant and uninteresting to writers and readers of serious literature.

Let me tell you about my trip home to North Carolina this weekend.

It takes me 7 hours to get from Bloomington to the Asheville area, and since I’m in the habit of filling up on half a tank I generally fill up just outside of Lexington, KY - 3 hours in to the trip - and then again in Black Mountain, NC. So I filled up in Lexington at a “reasonable” $3.99/gallon for premium. When I got to NC, they wanted $4.51/gallon for premium when they had it at all. Yup - my home state is experiencing what hasn’t been seen since the 1970s: gas shortages.

The official explanation for this is that 13 refineries in Texas shut down for inspection in the wake of Hurricane Ike. That, coupled with the fact that North Carolina was already having gas supply disruptions in the wake of Hurricane Hanna, is meant to account for the shortages. But I have a different theory. It seems that Governor Easley decided to enforce the state’s anti-gouging laws:

Gov. Mike Easley declared a state of “abnormal market disruption” and allowed N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper to enforce the state’s anti-gouging law.

Brilliant move, there, mate.

I don’t for a minute believe (nor does anyone else with half a brain) that ordinary supply disruptions are still causing problems in North Carolina 9 days after Ike made landfall and 16 days after Hanna. Especially not considering that, after relucantly buying $30 (because that was the limit) of a lower grade (because they were out of premium) of gas at a whopping $4.40/gallon just to get me to Kentucky, I was then able to buy premium just inside the Tennessee border at $3.99/gallon again. This is clearly a manufactured problem - and I blame Easley’s decision to enforce price gouging laws.

When are people going to learn that there is no such thing as price gouging. There are people who want to sell goods and people who want to buy them, and in a free market prices tend toward a level that facilitates that exchange. They’re high enough to make it worth the seller’s while to supply them, but not so high as to chase off potential buyers. So long as the amount available for sale is about the same as the amount people traditionally consume, then prices will only rise to account for inflation (or maybe fall if there is innovation of some kind - say, a more efficient refining or shipping method is discovered). But of course in the wake of two hurricanes, both of which disrupted the supply, there is no reason to expect prices to hold steady. The supply has been disrupted, meaning that there is less of the stuff to go around. Prices will have to rise.

Ah, but by how much? Here is one interesting opinion from AAA Carolinas:

AAA Carolinas said that since North Carolina continues under a state of emergency from Hurricane Hanna, stations should not charge more for gasoline than what the gasoline in the ground cost the station plus the margin of profit that existed 60 days before the state of emergency was declared.

In other words, if all gas station owners get together and imagine real hard that they have as much gas as they used to before the hurricane hit, it’ll be just like it never happened. Yeah - the thing is, I don’t need any imagination at all to know that this isn’t gonna work.

By AAA Carolinas’ logic, consumers should also get together and imagine real hard that it’s 60 days ago and they can fill up their tanks at the same rate they would have back then. Which works about as long as it takes the diminished supply to run out, and then there’s just no more available. Well, consumers aren’t stupid, and they know that after a hurricane gas might run out, so they’re not going to buy “just as much as they would have 60 days ago.” People who normally run on half a tank are gonna run on a full tank. People who normally don’t fill up until they’re at a quarter of a tank will do it now on 3/4. And that’s because however robust the powers of AAA Carolinas’ imagination, the reality that there is less gas around to be had stubbornly refuses to go away (meaning that even if by some miracle everyone played by AAA Carolinas’ rules and pretended that nothing abnormal had happened, there STILL wouldn’t be enough gas to go around…).

What we need is a mechanism for getting people to buy less gas… Hmmmm… Now ONE way you could accomplish that is by charging more for the gas. You know - people hear there’s a hurricane, and they think “well, I’m on half a tank and can make it through the rest of the week, but I’m nervous about the future, what with this hurricane and all. Why don’t I go fill up early this week?” And so they go to fill up early only to find that gas is going for a whopping $5.30/gallon. And so they decide that maybe they can wait out the week after all. That is, that at $5.30/gallon it’s worth it to them to risk hoping that the supply problems will ease before the week is out. People who really need the gas (say, to get to work, or to drive their son with the broken leg to the hospital, or whatever) will have to suck it up and pay, of course, but that’s better than finding out there’s no gas at all. And with supply down and prices up, consumption goes down too. Gas stations make enough on the increased price to make it worth their while to stay open until supply comes back to normal, and since there’s no run on gas, supply soon does come back to normal. And everyone’s - well, not exactly “happy,” but the fuel economy continues to function, and that’s what matters.

What’s more amusing than AAA Carolinas urging everyone to hold hands and imagine a price is that anyone is listening to them at all. AAA Carolinas is neither a driver wanting to fill up nor a gas station owner wanting to sell gas. As far as I’m concerned, that puts them out of the loop on deciding what gas prices “ought to be.” If there is someone offering gas at a price and someone willing to pay that price, an exchange can take place. If the price is too high, the buyer will decline. If the price is too low, the seller will decline. There’s really not much more to it than that.

I understand that there are concerns that people who “really need” the gas won’t be able to get it in the wake of a supply disruption. But I don’t see how guaranteeing a supply crisis by charging in the $4 range for something that is now scarce enough to be worth in the $5 or $6 range addresses this concern. All undercharging for things accomplishes is encouraging people to buy more of it than they normally would. It’s exactly the same principle that induces me to buy more Barilla pasta sauce than I really need when it’s on special. I go into the store intending to spend only $10 on steak and broccoli for lunch, but I notice that spaghetti sauce is $0.50 cheaper than normal for a limited time. So I intelligently stock up on it - because hey, I’m gonna buy it in this quantity eventually (albeit spread out over a couple of weeks). I wasn’t planning on buying 5 jars today, but I definitely would have before the month was out, and so this way I’m $2.50 richer (by spending $2.50 less than I would have buying the sauce only on those days when I planned to eat it, you see). The same goes for gas. Now, granted that there’re always gonna be people who panic and overstock on things that they fear might be in short supply - it seems to me that the higher price is a way of punishing them for hoarding something they don’t really need. Sure - it’s a free country - you can hoard if you want to. What I object to is the government playing accomplice here by guaranteeing, as Easley’s moronic decision to enforce price gouging laws guarantees, that they can get the stuff they’re hoarding at everyday prices.

Yes, I stand by the word “moronic,” and my evidence comes from Gov. Easley’s official statement:

As a result of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, oil refineries in Texas and Louisiana have temporarily interrupted some gasoline supplies to the pipelines that serve North Carolina. Therefore, there may be temporary limitations on our gas supply. However, wholesale gas prices are up less than 20 cents a gallon over the last few days. Therefore, consumers should not see prices rise substantially more than this rise in the wholesale price.

Apparently Gov. Easley isn’t sharp enough to realize that the “wholesale gas prices” number he’s quoting is a number for the whole country, and that it’s an average. Sorta like how I can say that cheesburgers cost $6 in England and still pay $9 for one in London. If the oil supply pipelines that come into North Carolina are affected, and those that go to California are not, then gee, I think it might maybe become a bit more expensive to get oil to North Carolina than to get it to California, and that one of the side effects of that fact might be that, you know, people who supply gas in North Carolina might want to raise their prices a bit to cover their trouble, whereas those in California will continue selling as though everything were normal. We in North Carolina are sort of responsible for making it worth people’s while to get gas to us, eh? I mean, if they can just as easily pipe it to California, we’re gonna need to do a bit of persuading to get them to truck it in to us instead. And charging more for it at the pump and passing some of that on is a damn good way to do so.  And even if the number that Easley is quoting were a wholesale number for North Carolina (which it isn’t), the fact would still remain that people in North Carolina were jittery on account of the supply disruption and thus (temporarily) value gas more than people in other parts of the country and are therefore likely to buy more of it.

It’s so frustrating. You can’t just imagine your problems away. If something is scarce or unusually in demand, its price goes up. And no one is in a better position to decide “by how much” than that guy running the corner shop who has to compete with that other guy on the other corner who is selling the same thing.

There is no such thing as price gouging. There are just prices. Prices can be too high, so that not enough people buy, or they can be too low, so that supply dries up … or they can be just right, so that there’s a steady stream of goods from supplier to seller resulting in a profitable, job-creating industry with comensurate utility for consumers. The beauty of a market economy is that it keeps the decision about what prices should be in the hands of the people who have a real stake in seeing that everything works out: the sellers who are earning a living and the buyers who want the goods. What Gov. Easley and AAA Carolinas have to do with this is anyone’s guess, but the fact that North Carolina is STILL experiencing gas shortages 13 days after all this started is proof positive that they’re doing a pretty crappy job with their guessing and imagining.

Since I doubt Pat McCrory or Beverly Perdue know any more economics than Mike Easley, I would like to encourage any readers voting in North Carolina to cast your ballot for Mike Munger instead.

Today’s “if you don’t vote for Obama you’re racist” poll comes from Standford University via Yahoo! News. Apparently some white Democrats harbor negative attitudes about blacks, and this might hurt Obama in the election.

Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He’s an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation’s oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.

Yeah - but here’s the crucial question we’re leaving out: do those views extend to each and every black, or do these white Democrats and Independents make exceptions for - well, exceptional blacks? You know, like the kind that goes to Harvard Law School, wins a seat in the Senate and then goes on to come out on top of a well-qualified field of applicants for the Democratic nomination for president, one of whom was actually next in line by party tradition. I’m just asking, because I seem to remember growing up in the 80s that the number one show on TV for most of that decade was The Cosby Show, and that a lot of its fans could be described as whites who harbor “negative views about blacks.” In fact, if I’m not mistaken, that show continues to hold the record for largest number of consecutive seasons at #1 (5 - a record it shares with All in the Family). The catch was that Cosby studiously avoided all of their stereotypes. You know, kinda like Barack Obama is doing now.

So what are these “at least partly negative” views that “40 percent of all white Americans hold?”

More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can’t win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey…

That’s racism, is it? This is the kind of thing that keeps people from voting for presidential candidates? Really? Because I can think of several negative adjectives I associate with white people, and I don’t really consider myself a self-hating white. Hell, I can think of several negative adjectives that accurately apply to me personally, and I’m one of those happy people who generally likes himself. In fact, I can promise you with a great deal of certainty that more than a third of all black Democrats and Independents also “agree with at least one negative adjective about blacks.” Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that by this standard everyone pretty much hates everyone.

The poll sought to measure latent prejudices among whites by asking about factors contributing to the state of black America. One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that “if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Those who agreed with that statement were much less likely to back Obama than those who didn’t.

Try harder like Obama tried harder, you mean? Be just as well of as whites like Obama is, you mean? And since when is it a “latent prejudice” to have this opinion? Something explains the disparity between black and white income levels (and Asian income levels - which are higher than white income levels - for that matter) - and the idea that blacks don’t try hard enough is as plausible an explanation as any of the others, as far as I can tell. Certainly it’s more plausible than “blacks continue to be the victims of racism” in a nation which, in addition to constantly bombarding its citizens with anti-racism lectures and prohibting racial discrimination in hiring by law, bends over backward to see that minorities are admitted to and can afford university. In any case, the fact that people who agree with that statement are less likely to back Obama (by an unstated and probably statistically insignificant amount, but never mind) is hardly proof of racism. All it means is that the other group - the people who think there is some other explanation (almost certainly SYSTEMIC RASICM) for the income disparity - will feel more obligated to vote for the black candidate to “give him a chance.” Because really, we can look at the support discrepancy with either spin, you know. If the one group is “less likely” to vote for Obama then the other group is ipso facto more likely to do so, and we might as well ask what explains their eagerness as what explains the former’s reluctance. So all this really tells us is that the people who designed this survey don’t consider this kind of pro-black discrimination to be “latent prejudice.”

On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks, the poll shows, though that probably wouldn’t be enough to counter the negative effect of some whites’ views.

This is an issue I would really like to see discussed more, in fact. To put it in perspective, I am an atheist, and polls show that atheists are the group that faces the most voter prejudice - much more so than blacks (who, according to this poll, are more acceptable than Jews and women, actually). Even knowing that, I am a long way from knee-jerk supporting any atheist who gets a major party nomination. Far from it - while I admit it would favorably dispose me toward the candidate, he would still have to have basic economic competence, real knowledge of the Constituion and passable leadership skills to get my vote. I would support a Muslim capitalist over an atheist socialist any day of the year. And on that basis, I can say without hypocrisy that it’s racist of blacks to vote for Obama just ’cause he’s black. And of course, it is racist - and I would really appreciate a more prominent mention of that fact in the press, given that the press apparently considers it “racist” when as many as 40% of white Democrats can find some negative English adjective in their vast English vocabularly that might just apply to blacks. Instead, we get a one-sentence nod, and that only in the context of making an excuse for it.

Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.

In fact, I doubt race is even a measurable factor “driving Democrats and Independents away from Obama.” Probably what is driving Democrats and Independents from Obama is some combination of (a) he’s an inexperienced, say-nothing gasbag without a single fresh idea, and they feel their intelligence has been insulted watching this by-the-book social democrat make speeches under a “Change” banner and (b) McCain just so happens to be the least by-the-book Republican candidate in living memory. So you have an unusually weak Democratic candidate coming out of a bruising primary running against a highly qualified Republican who also happens to be the one Republican who most appeals to Independents and Democrats. I’m really not seeing the big mystery here.

Even if we did buy that simply believing that blacks need to work harder and complain less amounted to racism - which I do not for a minute believe - it’s hard to imagine that this attitude among whites would be a problem for Obama. For a racial rabble-rouser like Jesse Jackson who made a career out of complaining, sure. But for Obama? Obama is the Cosby Show candidate. He’s a black whom whites can relate to. The presidential candidate who happens to be black, rather than the black presidential candidate, if you take my meaning.

No, the only reason Obama isn’t currently crushing McCain is because he sucks. Because whatever he says about being for “Change,” his platform is run-of-the-mill vintage 1970s Democrat, and the fact that the press can’t see through that doesn’t mean the rest of us are so easily fooled. Because whatever his supposed speech-making skills, it isn’t too hard to see that he’s mostly talking to the already-converted. And because even McCain’s hugely inexperienced and reckless VP pick is more experienced and a less reckless choice than Obama and his 2 years of non-attendance in the Senate. From where I sit, the more interesting question is why McCain isn’t crushing Obama. Given the article I’m quoting, I don’t think it would be impertinent to suggest that maybe one of the reasons is because Obama is young and black.