From a fascinating discussion of the moral dimension of our economic collapse, Steve Randy Waldman:

One group of people who did not violate traditional norms during the course of the credit bubble is the ordinary homebuyer who bought at the top of the market without forming an opinion on valuation, trusting market prices and professional advisors. Most homebuyers are not market timers: they purchase when the circumstances of their own lives make homeownership attractive, and take regional prices as given. Certainly the momentum of home prices affected Joe Sixpack’s (or G.I. Joe’s) buy vs. rent decision. Nevertheless, this group had the least culpability for the malfunctions of the credit market yet they are bearing a disproportionate share of the costs. McArdle thinks it would be desirable, from a social perspective, to reinforce norms under which borrowers have a moral obligation to pay. I would rather lenders ensure that loans where it would not be mutually advantageous for the borrower to pay are rare. To uphold McArdle’s norms on the backs of people who were drawn into a speculative bubble not of their making, whose “banking relationship” consists of a note that has been sold and resold multiple times, and whose risks are legally shared with other parties that have not hewn to any standard of good behavior, is simply unjust. Even if they could bear the cost. Even if they buy new furniture with the savings.

via The Browser.

It’s no Prime Minister’s Questions but, edited, the following performance is pretty entertaining. Senator Al Franken arguing on behalf of the reality-based community:

I know Franken as a comedian (I’m old enough to remember “Doggone it, people like me.”) so I’m primed to experience what he says as entertainment. That prejudice or, in marketing terms, consideration, is a significant advantage in our highly competitive media marketplace.

Priming has bolstered the careers of Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan. It’s also key to understanding the role that talk radio and now Glenn Beck plays for the right wing. It’s nice to see that psychological “shortcut” working for a Democrat.

Hybrids are difficult. Perhaps, even impossible.

Take, for instance, President Barack Obama. He is a white man and a black man. But to his detractors on the far right, he is all Black – indeed, the grossest caricature of an African-American, an exotic African from the distant past.

Because President Obama is quite literally neither black nor white, a mere photograph of his face is already a challenge to long-standing racial hierarchies. More disturbing still for the many Americans coddled by the previous administration’s mania for black and white absolutes, President Obama’s politics are also, well, complicated.

As the comedian Jon Stewart observed in describing the president’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “Obama forcing us to live in area between absolutes. Brain hurts! Complicated!”

The fear of the in-between, of that which is neither one nor the other, is both ancient and universal because it is essential to the way our brains make sense of the world.

On Friday, the Pew Hispanic Center released a report that confirms just how entrenched the fear of a hybrid identity is, even among the hybrid:

“The melting pot is dead. Long live the salad bowl,” when it comes to how young Latinos and others perceive their place in America.

When asked how they first described themselves, 52 percent said their preference was for their family’s country of origin — Dominican, Mexican, Cuban, etc. — over American, which 24 percent favored. Even fewer, 20 percent, responded Hispanic or Latino.

More than three in four say they are “some other race” or identify Hispanic or Latino, even though, according to the Census Bureau, that is an ethnic designation. Sixteen percent of young Latinos identify themselves as white, compared with 30 percent of adult Latinos.

We experience cognitive dissonance – say, the paradox of being both one thing and another – as painful. We seek refuge from ambiguity in categories that are perceived to be whole (e.g., “Dominican, Mexican, Cuban”), and even in categories that are as ill-defined as “some other race.”

That last possibility strikes me as the most pregnant: it’s a placeholder. It implies: “we don’t know yet, we’ll figure it out later.”

The Riddle of the Sphinx reminds us that our identity is fluid: what creature walks on four legs, then two legs and finally three legs? As we mature, who we are and, more importantly, how we perceive ourselves changes.

If there is any one trait that applies to hybrids at any point in their process of emerging, it’s just that: they are defined by their becoming. They are always what they will be.

postscript
It’s a wonderful coincidence that the only character in Blade Runner who knows the protagonist’s true identity is played by Edward James Olmos. And that his tell is an origami unicorn.

From an excellent interview:

SPIEGEL: The US has not yet instituted any kind of reform policy. What we see is the government and the Federal Reserve pouring money into the economy. If one looks beyond that money, one sees that the economy is in fact still shrinking.

Volcker: What should I say? That’s right. We have not yet achieved self-reinforcing recovery. We are heavily dependent upon government support so far. We are on a government support system, both in the financial markets and in the economy.

SPIEGEL: To get the recovery to the point where it is right now has cost a lot of money. National debt will probably reach $12 trillion in 2019. Just serving the debt costs $17 billion a year — at least according to this year’s forecast. That’s difficult to sustain.

Volcker: You’ve got to deal with the deficit and you’ve got to deal with it in a timely way. Right now, with the unemployment rate still very high, excess capacity is still evident, and the economy is dependent on government money as we said. We are not going to successfully attack the deficit right now but we have got to prepare for attacking it.

SPIEGEL: Should Americans prepare themselves for a tax increase?

Volcker: Not at the moment, but I think we would have to think about it. The present tax system historically has transferred about 18 to 19 percent of the GNP to the government. And we are going to come out of all this with an expenditure relationship to GNP very substantially above that. We either have to cut expenditures and that means reducing entitlements and certainly defense expenditures by an amount that may not be possible. If you can do it, fine. If we can’t do it, then we have to think about taxes.

SPIEGEL: What kind of taxes do you have in mind?

Volcker: Maybe we should talk about energy taxes, which could be a big revenue producer.

Also, this:

Volcker: I must say, I admire Germany in this situation even with its high costs. In some ways, I think the labor cost is higher in Germany than it is in the United States but you can somehow maintain that export edge. You are dedicated to exporting, we are dedicated to financial engineering and it hasn’t worked out too well. I wish we had fewer financial engineers and more mechanical engineers. Tell me the secret of how the Germans keep this going.

via Yves Smith, once more.

Also: Paul Volcker on Wikipedia.

Writer Charlie Stross asks his readers to design a society that could survive a thousand year journey across space. Many of the responses are intriguing, especially those that are pregnant with possibilities. For example:

Chop it up into 5 or 10 distinct physically societies and do everything you can to make sure they don’t have the means to access one another. Have a computer controlled system allowing extremely unwieldy travel between adjacent areas once every ten years, e.g. a tunnel you have to crawl through which is open for 30 minutes.

How long before one or more of those societies makes it their primary objective to circumvent these artificial borders? And does that focus make the passage of time bearable?

I mention this exchange here because it’s an exercise in political science fiction, the intellectual backbone of my life for the last 20 years.

For what is Stross’ question about a society that can withstand a thousand year journey through space but a novel rephrasing of the question that has defined us all for millennia?

A spaceship in solar orbit, photographed from its satellite.

How should we live?

Ask Moses, Aristotle, Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, St. Augustine, etc., etc., etc.

An almost technical, brief, eye-opening account of how Sharia law affects financial deals in Dubai in the Financial Times.

From a slow-burning diatribe in the Independent: “The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems,” Karen says at last. “Nothing. This isn’t a city, it’s a con-job. They lure you in telling you it’s one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it’s a medieval dictatorship.”

David Rock’s lecture (video) Your Brain at Work is wonderful. No one, not one of us, really wants to think and being asked to do so is experienced as a threat. Apply this to art, politics, relationships, etc. (via MeFi)