The Newspaper is Dead?

Soon after Jefferson came to power, he, like Adams, developed doubts about the unbounded liberty of the press. Printers, Jefferson complained, just days after his election, “live by the zeal they can kindle, and the schisms they can create.” In his second Inaugural Address, Jefferson ranted against printers who had assaulted him with “the artillery of the press,” warning that he had given some thought to prosecuting them. During his beleaguered second term, Jefferson suggested that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies. What Jefferson wanted for the nation under his governance was a “union of opinion.” But that, of course, can never be the aspiration of a democracy—a point that newspapers have been very good at making over the two centuries since.

Jill Lepore, "The day the newspaper died," The New Yorker (01.26.09)

I don't have to like or approve of what is written to staunchly defend the medium of the free press. In fact, there's lots that is written that gives me heartburn. I particularly don't like yellow journalism and the personal and political hatchet men that use the press in one form or another to unfairly, often untruthfully, denigrate or undermine those they don't like or whose ideas they find objectionable. I suppose we all feel that way about some elements of the press, don't we? Truth be known, many disapprove of just about anything that fails to approve or applaud who they are, what they do, and what they believe. That's the human condition, our human nature.

And yet, our indignant disapproval of some elements of the press is the best evidence that freedom of speech is alive and vibrantly afoot. For the heart of freedom is found in freedom of speech and, therefore, freedom of the press--no matter how untrue, threatening or harmful, how unseemly or offensive, it may sometimes seem to us to be.

In her New Yorker article, Jill Lepore explores the current preoccupation with the death watch over the American newspaper. And to provide some perspective, she offers an informative, illuminating look at the importance and struggles of the early American press, and how it was at least as opinionated--and often more purposely hurtful or harmful--as anything we might find in print today. In discussing the press in these times, she observes:

Most struggles, like most lives, are mess[y]. Newspapers aren’t always on the side of liberty. Not everyone agrees on what liberty means. Some struggles never end. [But] it’s not the newspaper that’s forever at risk of dying and needing to be raised from the grave. It’s the freedom of the press.

Its only natural to want silenced the liars and purveyors of the absurd, especially those we may consider destructive, even evil. We all have that instinct from time to time. (Although we often have different notions of who those people are, don't we?) If we need an example, the most unlikely might be our second president, John Adams, a strong, consistent advocate for freedom, including especially freedom of speech and of the press. Like Jefferson, he often spoke prominently and with strong opinions about freedom from the pages of the few fledgling newspapers of colonial America. But that same John Adams grew frustrated, angry, and greatly concerned over distorted or untrue allegations directed at him and his presidency by the opposition press.

He finally acceded to the recommendations of the federalists and signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts--which included provisions that effectively made defaming his administration a crime. It was perhaps the greatest mistake of his presidency--and certainly inconsistent with the characteristics of the free country and free speech that he had advocated as strongly as any of the revolutionary leaders. If John Adams can in times of weakness be led there, so can many of us.

Of course, the point is not the near death of newspapers in that fragile colonial period when the printers art withered under the weight of the King's stamp tax, or in the early years of the republic under the Aliens and Sedition Acts--although those are important, instructive examples. The point is that the press, the newspaper--freedom of speech, if you will--will find a way. And if trampled under foot, it will sprout and flourish again as soon as conditions allow. It is a force of human nature and an inseparable adjunct of freedom.

Moving back into the 21st century, if we may, we now engage the technological advances and frontier of the new print media: the internet news outlets and blogging. They further democratize and expand freedom of public speech, to be sure, but also provide an unnerving array of voices, topics and opinions--and with them an unnerving lack of organization, predictability, discipline and regulation. Many would say its all for the good; but predictably, many would say it is not. Lepore in The New Yorker:

"The newspaper is dead, long live the newspaper!” has lately become the incantation of advocates of e-journalism, who argue that the twenty-first-century death of the newspaper hardly merits a moment’s mourning, since it is no death at all but, rather, a rebirth....

The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs!

The truth is that though readers of on-line news venues and blogs have grown exponentially, those on-line newspapers, especially the best reporters of news, have also enjoyed a growing and enthiusiastic readership--even among younger readers. An article in Time magazine, "How to Save Your Newspaper," by Walter Isaacson, makes this point clear, but also the reality that the on-line model has cost newpapers needed revenue, and as a result, many are failing. From the article:

Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.

The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.

This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.

Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new [on-line] business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.

Of course, as the article points out, the only way to save our newspapers--in print or on-line--is to understand we will eventually have to pay the reasonable cost of producing them. And given the choice of paying a modest amount for excellent reporting or accepting poor reporting and unrealiable blogging for free (which includes some of the most unreliable and misleading political writing in our history), most discriminating readers will quickly sign up for the more reliable, better-crafted product.

And many will also continue to prefer the tactile printed paper product--all the time, on Sundays, or occasionally. For some of us, at least some of the time, only the paper product will do.

The compelling ideas that newspapers feel the responsibility to express, the events they feel accountable to report, and the public demand for their presentation in print, will always find a way--whether on-line or on printed paper. And most likely both will find their place and serve their market. The mere issue of necessary adjustments to market pricing, finding their marginal point of pricing viability, is more a question of time than survival. And our personal sense of unease or objection to expanding yellow journalism, objectionable topics, unseemly or pandering reporting, is also just a question of time and discipline--the time it takes us to accept a broader range and more democratic expression of free speech, and the discipline it takes to tolerate expression of the objectionable in order to assure expression of everything that could possibly be true, important, or illuminating.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/01/26/090126crat_atlarge_lepore?currentPage=all
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191,00.html

Irreligious Nations Best Reflect Religous Values?

It is a great socio-religious irony — for lack of a better term — that when we consider the fundamental values and moral imperatives contained within the world's great religions, such as caring for the sick, the infirm, the elderly, the poor, the orphaned, the vulnerable; practicing mercy, charity, and goodwill toward one's fellow human beings; and fostering generosity, humility, honesty, and communal concern over individual egotism — those traditionally religious values are most successfully established, institutionalized, and put into practice at the societal level in the most irreligious nations in the world today.  

--Professor Phil Zuckerman, "The Virtues of Godlessness," The Chronicle Review.

It appears that two of the least religous countries in the world may most broadly and consistently reflect religious--certainly Christian--values in their societal behavior. The two countries are Sweden and Denmark. And this article by NYU's Professor Phil Zuckerman appears to relish the opportunity to advance that observation in all its irony. In support of his conclusion, he offers these three points in particular:

1. Many people assume that religion is what keeps people moral, that a society without God would be hell on earth: rampant with immorality, full of evil, and teeming with depravity. But that doesn't seem to be the case for Scandinavians in those two countries. Although they may have relatively high rates of petty crime and burglary, and although these crime rates have been on the rise in recent decades, their overall rates of violent crime — including murder, aggravated assault, and rape — are among the lowest on earth. Yet the majority of Danes and Swedes do not believe that God is "up there," keeping diligent tabs on their behavior, slating the good for heaven and the wicked for hell. Most Danes and Swedes don't believe that sin permeates the world, and that only Jesus, the Son of God, who died for their sins, can serve as a remedy. In fact, most Danes and Swedes don't even believe in the notion of "sin." 

2. So the typical Dane or Swede doesn't believe all that much in God. And simultaneously, they don't commit much murder. But aren't they a dour, depressed lot, all the same? Not according to Ruut Veenhoven, professor emeritus of social conditions for human happiness at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Veenhoven is a leading authority on worldwide levels of happiness from country to country. He recently ranked 91 nations on an international happiness scale, basing his research on cumulative scores from numerous worldwide surveys. According to his calculations, the country that leads the globe — ranking No. 1 in terms of its residents' overall level of happiness — is little, peaceful, and relatively godless Denmark. 

3. Just to be perfectly clear here: I am not arguing that the admirably high level of societal health in Scandinavia is directly caused by the low levels of religiosity. Although one could certainly make such a case — arguing that a minimal focus on God and the afterlife, and a stronger focus on solving problems of daily life in a rational, secular manner have led to positive, successful societal outcomes in Scandinavia — that is not the argument I wish to develop here. Rather, I simply wish to soberly counter the widely touted assertion that without religion, society is doomed.

In truth, the good professor does offer some valid points and worthy considerations, which should give pause to those of us who are people of faith, whether Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus or other faith traditions. And, while he concedes religion's positive contributions to most societies, his introduction observes that the more zealous and intrusive fundamentalist sects or organizations of all faiths have often been responsible for societal behavior that is least reflective of the highest teachings and expectations of those religions. But his point is broader, of course, incorporating the role and results of religious organizations and their inclination, too often, to reflect the worst qualities of humankind, and also implying that the ultimate responsibility lay at the doorstep of religion itself.

But he is remiss in failing to share more about earlier times when Sweden and Denmark were largely and happily confessing and practicing Christian peoples. And it would be interesting to know whether, in fact, they were any less moral, less happy, less socially responsible, or more violent then. I'm guessing they were not. I'm guessing that the values one sees reflected now are just the same values of their faith still carried on as societies, but without the same outward faith identity and faith community, without the same religious organizations.

Still, the question for reflection for all people of faith--certainly for all Christians--is this: what is it about some faith organizations and people, thier interpretations, applications or uses of faith principles, that causes them to reflect so little of the love, forgiveness, and humility, the compassion, charity and kindness that God calls us to? Why don't they reflect God's priority on serving the poor, the infirm, the unable? And why, instead, do they so often reflect self-righteousness, selfishness, judgment, unwelcome intrusiveness, and hubris, and so often co-opt those faith organizations and faith values to serve political or cultural goals?

The answers to those questions will help us better understand how so-called people of faith and faith institutions so often throughout history have been the authors of some of the least kind, most unforgiving, arrogant, hurtful, even violent and inhumane, behavior in the history of mankind--but also how those who seek identity and relationship in God can better love and serve Him, as they more earnestly love and serve their neighbors, those in need, and all humanity.

Wall Street's Entitlement Culture

But now, the Wall Street wunderkind is gaining similar notoriety. After he became head of Merrill Lynch in late 2007, he sped up bonuses to several executives before Bank of America Corp. bought the investment bank on Jan 1. He also spent $1.2 million decorating his Manhattan office, according to media reports, as Merrill hemorrhaged money — a decision that's invoking particular rage among Americans, including President Barack Obama. Thain left his post at Bank of America on Thursday after unexpectedly big losses at Merrill Lynch; the bonuses were a likely contributing factor in his departure.

Thain's actions exemplify how hard it is for the industry to wean itself off the hefty paychecks and spending the last decade brought — even as financial companies now rely on taxpayer dollars to stay in business.... But analysts say there's still a deeply ingrained culture of entitlement at financial companies. It's a mindset banks will have to work harder at changing as they come to grips with their failures, and as they face more scrutiny after accepting government help.

"You've always had this Wall Street ethic of, I'm going to push the rules as far as I can. That's been part of the culture," said R. Edward Freeman, academic director of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics and Olsson Professor of Business Administration at University of Virginia's Darden School. And, Freeman added, the government for years gave Wall Street carte blanche....

Wall Street employees came to expect big compensation packages as their paychecks kept ballooning year after year. The difference between wages in finance and wages in other private sector industries was "excessively high" from the mid-1990s until 2006, according to a paper by New York University's Thomas Philippon and the University of Virginia's Ariell Reshef published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The last time the difference was similarly excessive was around 1930, they wrote — right after the stock market crash of 1929.

--Wall Street's entitlement culture - Economy in Turmoil (msnbc.com 1.24.09)

This article appeared on msnbc.com today. It shares a glimpse into the sense of presumption and entitlement, hubris and unaccountability, that has defined the professional lives and attitudes of investment bankers and others working on Wall Street for years.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28817800/

Differences in Parenting Don't Matter? Really? (Updated)

The punch line is that, at least within the normal range of parenting styles, how you raise your children has little effect on how your children turn out. You can be strict or permissive, involved or distant, encouraging or critical, religious or secular. In the long run, your kids will resemble you in many ways; but they would have resembled you about as much if they had never met you.

--Professor Bryan Caplan, "Good News and Bad News on Parenting," The Chronicle Review

If you are at all like me, your first reaction to this unqualified statement may be concern with its unlimited breadth and depth, and its implications.

And it's not as if I have failed to keep up with the research and reporting. It's not as if I have been unaccepting or hostile toward the determinism inherent in the genetic prescriptions and probabilistic predispositions that have evolved and been conveyed from generation to generation. I am in fact much persuaded by the deterministic realities of evolution and genetics. But I further accept the deterministic qualities, the shaping processes, of our environments as well: acculturation, education, classical and operant conditioning. These too can and do change our behavioral profile, sometimes markedly. At least that is what other credible research has long indicated. And it has always made empirical sense to me, as well. So, does the evidence adduced in this article challenge those understandings about the role of environment, including parents?

First, it is important to be clear what these research findings say and what they do not say. If I understand them, the findings do not say that the importance of parental roles is negligible, but rather that the differences in approaches to parenting, "within a normal range of parenting styles," is of negligible consequence. Of course, that is still a surprising conclusion, at least for most people.

According to George Mason U. economics professor Bryan Caplan, there are now research methodologies employing "high-quality time-diary studies going back about 40 years, which make it possible to fact-check popular perceptions about the evolution of parenting." These studies have shown that despite concerns expressed about this generation of parents and children, parents in 2000--mothers, fathers, and working moms--spend much more time with their children than parents in 1965 and 1975. And sociologists have roundly applauded this as a good thing for families and children. But Caplan sets up that straw man just to introduce evidence that the sociologists are wrong--not that spending more time or better time with children harms them, but that it just doesn't matter.

The good professor then brings to our attention recent studies that have addressed the impact of parenting on children. He reviews how they had to address separating the commingled effects of nature and nurture--genes and environment (including parents)--on the children. They did this by employing the long-recognized approach of seeking out subject families with one or both identical twins (the same genes), fraternal twins (half the same genes), and adopted children (no genetic relationship). They then did a lot of comparisons. Employing and improving these twin children and adopted children methodologies, the researchers believe they have found credible, reliable answers to questions about the relative importance of genetic endowment and parenting approaches in shaping the behavior and characteristics of children as they grow to adulthood. And in the author's view, the findings support the conclusion that, "nature wins."

Heredity alone can account for almost all shared traits among siblings. "Environment" broadly defined has to matter, because even genetically identical twins are never literally identical. But the specific effects of family environment ("nurture") are small to nonexistent. As Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, summarizes the evidence:

"First, adult siblings are equally similar whether they grew up together or apart. Second, adoptive siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. And third, identical twins are no more similar than one would expect from the effects of their shared genes."

...Recent scholarship does highlight some exceptions. For example, while earlier researchers found that divorce runs in families for purely genetic reasons, some new studies find that both nature and nurture play a role. Another study finds that controlling for genes, run-of-the-mill spanking does no lasting harm, but harsh physical punishment can leave lasting psychological scars. But even if many exceptions accumulate, the fact remains that people tend to greatly overestimate the power of nurture.

Of course, I can only surmise from this summary article that what are measured and compared are basic behavioral characteristics. It's not disclosed just which characteristics are deemed defining or how they are defined. But these reported results in this article suggest that genes prescribe all such behavior and characteristics, as opposed to the view that some genes only predispose individuals toward some of that behavior or some of those characteristics--or that some behavior is not explained by genes at all. My clear understanding, however, is that while genetic studies have identified prescribing genes, they have also identified others which only predispose individuals toward certain behavioral characteristics. Often those predispositions are a function of the combined effects of several genes. In those cases, the actual result and probability is determined in part, at least, by a particular environment's triggering, acculturating or conditioning features. Often enough, only environmental factors can account for some behavior or characteristics. And it is the estimable Professor Pinker, cited herein by the author, who has so often made this very point in his books and articles.

What I'm questioning, I suppose, is whether the author--working outside his discipline--has examined carefully the studies he cites, and from which he concludes. Did he consult the original research and the qualifications which are always noted there? Did he review other relevant studies in the area and on the topic? Did he compare these more comparative, deductive studies with the extensive work and results of those studying the human genome and the effects of specific genes studied from a more inductive perspective? You'd think he must have, right? But who knows? Regardless, this article appears more an ad hoc merging of summary, headline results, and just does not have the ring of scientific credibility to it or, at least, a sense of the whole story or complete picture.

It seems likely that the good economics professor formed his summary views, in part at least, from the work of the aforementioned Steven Pinker of Harvard--work like "My Genome, Myself," recently published in the New York Times Magazine (1.11.09). That piece is about "consumer genetics" and the Personal Genome Project, and spends considerable time discussing what a personal genome profile can and cannot tell you. And as I've suggested, Professor Pinker's conclusions are not nearly as simple or clear as Professor Caplan would have us believe:

Nor should the scare word “determinism” get in the way of understanding our genetic roots. For some conditions, like Huntington’s disease, genetic determinism is simply correct: everyone with the defective gene who lives long enough will develop the condition. But for most other traits, any influence of the genes will be probabilistic. Having a version of a gene may change the odds, making you more or less likely to have a trait, all things being equal, but as we shall see, the actual outcome depends on a tangle of other circumstances as well....

With personal genomics in its infancy, we can’t know whether it will deliver usable information about our psychological traits. But evidence from old-fashioned behavioral genetics — studies of twins, adoptees and other kinds of relatives — suggests that those genes are in there somewhere. Though once vilified as fraud-infested crypto-eugenics, behavioral genetics has accumulated sophisticated methodologies and replicable findings, which can tell us how much we can ever expect to learn about ourselves from personal genomics.

...a substantial fraction of the variation among individuals within a culture can be linked to variation in their genes. Whether you measure intelligence or personality, religiosity or political orientation, television watching or cigarette smoking, the outcome is the same. Identical twins (who share all their genes) are more similar than fraternal twins (who share half their genes that vary among people). Biological siblings (who share half those genes too) are more similar than adopted siblings (who share no more genes than do strangers). And identical twins separated at birth and raised in different adoptive homes (who share their genes but not their environments) are uncannily similar.

Behavioral geneticists like Turkheimer are quick to add that many of the differences among people cannot be attributed to their genes. First among these are the effects of culture, which cannot be measured by these studies because all the participants come from the same culture, typically middle-class European or American. The importance of culture is obvious from the study of history and anthropology. The reason that most of us don’t challenge each other to duels or worship our ancestors or chug down a nice warm glass of cow urine has nothing to do with genes and everything to do with the milieu in which we grew up. But this still leaves the question of why people in the same culture differ from one another.

At this point behavioral geneticists will point to data showing that even within a single culture, individuals are shaped by their environments. This is another way of saying that a large fraction of the differences among individuals in any trait you care to measure do not correlate with differences among their genes. But a look at these nongenetic causes of our psychological differences shows that it’s far from clear what this “environment” is.

Behavioral genetics has repeatedly found that the “shared environment” — everything that siblings growing up in the same home have in common, including their parents, their neighborhood, their home, their peer group and their school — has less of an influence on the way they turn out than their genes. In many studies, the shared environment has no measurable influence on the adult at all. Siblings reared together end up no more similar than siblings reared apart, and adoptive siblings reared in the same family end up not similar at all. A large chunk of the variation among people in intelligence and personality is not predictable from any obvious feature of the world of their childhood.

Think of a pair of identical twins you know. They are probably highly similar, but they are certainly not indistinguishable. They clearly have their own personalities, and in some cases one twin can be gay and the other straight, or one schizophrenic and the other not. But where could these differences have come from? Not from their genes, which are identical. And not from their parents or siblings or neighborhood or school either, which were also, in most cases, identical. Behavioral geneticists attribute this mysterious variation to the “nonshared” or “unique” environment, but that is just a fudge factor introduced to make the numbers add up to 100 percent.

No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves. Even in the simplest organisms, genes are not turned on and off like clockwork but are subject to a lot of random noise, which is why genetically identical fruit flies bred in controlled laboratory conditions can end up with unpredictable differences in their anatomy. This genetic roulette must be even more significant in an organism as complex as a human, and it tells us that the two traditional shapers of a person, nature and nurture, must be augmented by a third one, brute chance.

The discoveries of behavioral genetics call for another adjustment to our traditional conception of a nature-nurture cocktail. A common finding is that the effects of being brought up in a given family are sometimes detectable in childhood, but that they tend to peter out by the time the child has grown up. That is, the reach of the genes appears to get stronger as we age, not weaker. Perhaps our genes affect our environments, which in turn affect ourselves. Young children are at the mercy of parents and have to adapt to a world that is not of their choosing. As they get older, however, they can gravitate to the microenvironments that best suit their natures.

To be fair to Professor Caplan, then, I would grant that general conclusions suggesting parenting is often overdone have the ring of validity to them. And don't we often observe and reflect on the resilience of children and how they seem to work past, shake off, or overcome their upbringing to become the people they had to be? For, doubtless, genes do play a significant if not dominant role in shaping the behavioral characteristics of the people children grow up to become. But, to some extent, so does culture, family environment, and other seemingly random factors. There is substantial, credible research evidence to support these conclusions, as the authoritative Professor Pinker attests.

And I am willing to take Professor Caplan's more temperate, more general concluding statement as reasonable, as far as it goes, and as capturing a piece of societal reality as it likely does--even if it doesn't acknowledge the contributing role played by "environment."

Many of us worry that our nation will pay a heavy price in years to come because modern parents are shirking their responsibilities to the next generation. If you combine the results from time diaries and behavioral genetics, however, you get a different picture. It turns out that there is some really good news and some mildly bad news. The really good news is that we can stop worrying about the horrible fate of the next generation. The bad news is that parents today are making large "investments" in their children that are unlikely to pay off.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

A New Season: The Time Has Come

The 44th President of the United States of America: Barack Hussein Obama. Let a new era, a new season, begin. And I pray God's blessing on the man and this season of new leadership, a season of change for the better, I also pray, a season widely claimed, proclaimed and shared together.

Three More Poems, and Jesus

 

 

A Tethered Falcon 1

My heart sits on the Arm of God
Like a tethered falcon
Suddenly unhooded.

I am now blessedly crazed
Because my Master's Astounding Effulgence
Is in constant view.

My piercing eyes,
Which have searched every world
For Tenderness and Love,
Now lock on the Royal Target--
The Wild Holy One
Whose Beauty Illuminates Existence.

My soul endures a magnificent longing.

I am a tethered falcon
With great wings and sharp talons poised,
Every sinew taught, like a sacred bow,
Quivering at the edge of my self
And Eternal Freedom,

Though still held in check
By a miraculous
Divine Golden Cord.

Beloved,
I am waiting for you to free me
Into Your Mind
And Infinite Being.
I am pleading in absolute helplessness
To hear, finally, your Words of Grace:
Fly! Fly into Me!

Who can understand
Your sublime Nearness and Separation?


A Wild, Holy Band 1

Your breath is a sacred clock, my dear--
Why not use it to keep time with God's Name?

And if your feet are ever mobile
Upon this ancient drum, the earth,
O, do not let your precious movements
Come to naught.

Let your steps dance silently
To the rhythm of the Beloved's Name!

My fingers and my hands
Never move through empty space,
For there are
Invisible golden lute strings all around,
Sending Resplendent Chords
Throughout the Universe.

I hear the voice
Of every creature and plant,
Every world and sun and galaxy--
Singing the Beloved's Name!

I have awakened to find violin and cello,
flute, harp and trumpet,
Cymbal, bell and drum--
All within me!
From head to toe, every part of my body
Is chanting and clapping!

...For with constant remembrance of God,
One's whole body will become
A Wonderful and Wild,
Holy Band!


Forever Dance 1

I am happy before I even have a reason.

I am full of Light even before the sky
Can greet the sun and moon.

Dear companions,
We have been in love with God
For so very, very long.

What can Hafiz now do but Forever
Dance!

Jesus

From the Gospel of John, Jesus:

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent Me draws him (John 6:44). My teaching is not mine but His who sent me (John 7:16). I am the good shepherd; I know My own and My own know me...My sheep hear my voice, and they follow me...I and the Father are One [essence, unity] (John 10: 14, 27, 30). I am the light of the world; he who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life (John 8:12). If you abide in my Word, you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free (John 8:31-32).

From his letter to the Philippians, the Apostle Paul:

...work out your salvation with [fear, awe, reverence] and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Phil. 2: 12-13). For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:6).

1 Renderings in English of Hafiz’ poetry by Daniel Ladinsky, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy (1996, 2006).

60 Minutes: Investment Bankers Affected Oil Price Swings More Than Supply And Demand

Last evening's edition of 60 minutes, and correspondent Steve Croft, again turned their attention to market abnormalities and mischief. This time they addressed the extraordinary and inexplicable increase in oil prices last year which was soon followed by an extraordinary and inexplicable decrease in prices. At the center of these abnormal market activities--and the mischief--they again found the trading offices of the already much maligned investment bankers of Wall Street. According to CBS:

As correspondent Steve Kroft reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike the one that caused the housing crisis, and that it had more to do with traders and speculators on Wall Street than with oil company executives or sheiks in Saudi Arabia.

Oil futures are contracts conveying the right to buy or sell barrels of oil in the future at fixed prices. Like all commodities futures, they are traded on exchanges, which were originally instituted to accomodate hedging transactions by producers and companies toiling in the supply chain of the oil business or other commodities businesses. But over time, not surprisingly, high-risk speculators ventured into these markets; and eventually they would even be sold as legitimate investment vehicles for high-income diversified investors.

According to the experts interviewed by Steve Croft, American investment banks--and notably Morgan Stanley--aggressively marketed investments in oil futures, and became major players in oil markets. And while investment bankers were publicly opining that oil prices had shot up from approximately $70 to $150 per barrel based on market supply and demand, experts reveal that during that time, the supply of oil actually went up, and the demand for it went down. According to those experts, the threat of new regulation and investigations, then the failure of investment banker Lehman Brothers and near failure of AIG, also major players in the oil futures market, drove other investment bankers and hedge funds to the exits. Apparently over $70 billion was thereby removed from the oil futures market. The result: a precipitous, $100 a barrel drop in oil prices.

During this time, the country and most individuals were being yanked up and down, in and out of financial, personal and professional pain. And it appears it was all to accomodate the utterly boundless greed, irresponsibility, and hubris that inheres in the privileged professional ranks of investment banking. Miscreants. Unaccountable, unethical market miscreants.

(To see the video, click below, then click on video screen.)

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/08/60minutes/main4707770.shtml

Darwinism: Publicly Ignored for 150 Years?

Traditionally, the answers to such questions, and many others about modern life, have been sought in philosophy, sociology, even religion. But the answers that have come back are generally unsatisfying. They describe, rather than explain. They do not get to the nitty-gritty of what it truly is to be human. Policy based on them does not work. This is because they ignore the forces that made people what they are: the forces of evolution.

--"Why We Are, As We Are," The Economist (12.20.08)

The 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, is upon us, and articles honoring or at least acknowledging the anniversary are starting to appear in print. And it should be both acknowledged and honored, for Darwin's observations and reflections were so original, so generally right, and so singularly important to advancing our understandings of the origins and development--the evolution--of all life forms on earth. And as far as scientific knowledge has since advanced, his work remains the foundation for understanding evolutionary science and research today. But this article in the Economist laments that the public and public policy makers fail to see what it asserts is the singular relevance of "Darwinism" to solving society's ills and problems.

The article poses examples of questions it suggests Darwinism provides the better answers to, questions alluded to in the opening quote, above:

But why do those who are already well-off feel the need to out-earn other people? And why, contrariwise, is it so hard to abolish poverty?

America executes around 40 people a year for murder. Yet it still has a high murder rate. Why do people murder each other when they are almost always caught and may, in America at least, be killed themselves as a result?

Why, after 80 years of votes for women, and 40 years of the feminist revolution, do men still earn larger incomes? And why do so many people hate others merely for having different coloured skin?

And it goes on to pose and answer other questions as well: Why does a rich or high-status man have more opportunities to mate (or wed)? Is it absolute wealth or relative wealth that matters? How does the range of relative status affect hierarchies and health? Is criminal behavior an evolved response? And how would that explain why murderers are most often disadvantaged, unemployed young men, and why their murders are most often a function of competitive violence against other young men? Could rape be an evolved behavior? What about the murder of children? And what of vengeance, punishment and cheating?

But as ambitious as the claims of Darwinism are, the article, at least, acknowledges that they cannot provide the answers to all questions. And therein lies the issue, the problem, really: the dogmatic belief of many Darwinists, the insistence that, nonetheless, most public issues or problems can be best understood and resolved based on fundamental neo-Darwinian principles or theory. And while the term "Darwinism" does in fact mean different things--both respectful and derisive--when used by different groups of people, I use it here in one sense clearly implied by this article: dismissive of much of the work and research in other scientific fields, sometimes even of nonconforming evolutionary research by mainstream scholars. I refer to the "faithful," because for many it appears a rigid and consuming life philosophy, and for some amounts to a non-deistic "religion."

As the opening quote indicates, they extend but little respect to much of the work of the social sciences and the insights and reflections of the humanities. And for policy makers to rely at all on the findings or views of these other scientists and scholars is viewed by them as ignorance of the truth.

The reasons for that ignorance are complex. Philosophers have preached that there exists between man and beast an unbridgeable distinction. Sociologists have been seduced by Marxist ideas about the perfectibility of mankind. Theologians have feared that the very thought of evolution threatens divine explanations of the world. Even fully paid-up members of the Enlightenment, people who would not for a moment deny humanity’s simian ancestry, are often sceptical. They seem to believe, as Anne Campbell, a psychologist at Durham University, in England, elegantly puts it, that evolution stops at the neck: that human anatomy evolved, but human behaviour is culturally determined.

The corollary to this is the idea that with appropriate education, indoctrination, social conditioning or what have you, people can be made to behave in almost any way imaginable. The evidence, however, is that they cannot. The room for shaping their behaviour is actually quite limited. Unless that is realised, and the underlying biology of the behaviour to be shaped is properly understood, attempts to manipulate it are likely to fail.

Reflecting Darwinism's "true believer" tendencies, the article purposefully and dismissively reduces complex issues and thinking to inadequate simplicities, and misleadingly suggests that yesterday's superannuated academic thinking is still purveyed today. Its reference to the work of sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers is woefully misinformed, for most of them are "fully paid-up members of the Enlightenment." And as such, they know that beyond the Darwinist generalizations, there is much research and many findings that complicate an unequivocal understanding of research in evolutionary science and related fields. Today, geneticists, neuroscientists, and cognitive psychologists labor at understanding the evolution and functioning of the human brain--and how we experience the workings of that brain. There are in fact more and more sociologists whose work embraces evolutionary science, if not "Darwinism." There are philosophers who work at a synthesis of scientific, experiential and phenomenological understandings.

And while evolutionary, genetic prescriptions and probabilities are more powerful than most people can comfortably acknowledge, there is also a significant role played by social learning, acculturation, education, and behavioral conditioning. The research evidence for this is also substantial and credible--more substantial than Darwinists appear willing to acknowledge. So, I must respect and, more, broaden one of the articles central messages: the deterministic context and plight of mankind. But I must reiterate that the environments that acculturate, teach and condition appear nearly as deterministic and uncontrollable as our genetic endowment. I offer much more on this in my 2005 essay "Choices," part of my What God? series.

That unwelcome, deterministic reality is an earnest finger poked in our chest, demanding to be heard, attesting repeatedly to the inherited and conditioned qualities that characterize what we do, what we think, who we are. A more euphemistic sentiment might allude to the limits and conditions on the freedom of man. A more direct and fatalistic disposition might charge that what the genes don't dictate, the environment will. And if the genetic brand of determinism is incomprehensible or unacceptable to you, don't expect to find more comfort in the world of conditioned behaviors and beliefs. Or do you believe that the realities of family and cultural conditioning and learning are any less powerful than your genetic endowment?

But before you conclude that I have given it all over to a hopelessly fatalistic viewpoint of human life, a surrender to the biological and environmental factors that shape who we are, "Choices" continues to search and finds an orientation, an approach, that still offers us some real, if limited, understanding of freedom and exercise of self-determination.

You might well conclude, then, that the natural condition of man is an utter lack of freedom, the absence of real, voluntary personal choices—or, put another way, that any sense of freedom exists only in ignorance....

[But] In a real sense, you can enjoy and exercise more real freedom. Your freedom is first in knowing what has made you who you are, the way you are—and how. It is also in knowing what has made others who they are, the way they are. You can learn more about real alternatives, and the potential effect on you of different places and people, different thinking and ways of doing things. Your freedom is in that knowledge. You can also read what different people are reading, listen for what they are saying, watch for what they are doing. You can learn what you need to know, and better understand.

You can, then, see yourself and others in a different, more interdependent way, a more understanding and sympathetic way. And to the extent you know the ways you and others are a product of your circumstances—family, culture, your time and place, the box you are in—you have a blueprint for personal change.

If you protest that my comments are addressed to the plight of individuals and the notions, the challenges, of existential identity, experience and potential, I would remind you that society is the aggregation of individuals, and public policy addresses the aggregate of individual behaviors in community interrelationship. They involve the same complicated determinates of behavior--whether individual behavior, interpersonal behavior, or collective behavior--and understandings of what control or direction can be effectively, wisely exerted over them.

I would also offer another viewpoint: if public policy makers don't often consult Darwinists, it is in part because the work of most other scientists today, including social, biological, and physical scientists--even many of those who labor in the humanities--is in fact well informed of the findings of evolutionary research science. And when public policy makers consult those other researchers or scholars, they are in that process often accessing what is most important about applied evolutionary science in its most practical and useful form.

Let's also bear in mind that, notwithstanding the article's declarations, most evolutionary and cognitive scientists have concluded that there was a notable leap in the evolution of the human brain: the human cognitive ability to think about thinking, identity and experience, to exercise intellectual functions and skills well beyond our closest evolutionary forebears. And regardless of how much we know about evolution, genetics, learning or acculturation, we understandably see and experience our lives as more than the cold, deterministic genetics of evolutionary history, more too than the social forces that have influenced and shaped us. We do have a sense of unique identity, of choice and self-determination, however limited in fact. Our thinking and analysis about our sense of identity and our experience is more subjective, more phenomenological. And doesn't that reflect more closely our personal experience of "what it truly is to be human"?

So we understandably demand that our individual and public issues be framed in terms that address our sense of individual and collective identity, and the subjective meaningfulness of our experiences. There is in fact so much more than a narrow Darwinism necessary to effectively inform our individual and public understandings, and our public policy decisions.

[For my views on the compatibility of faith and science see my 2005 essay, "What God"?]

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12795581

What Adolescent Girls Want: Vampires

At a dinner gathering this New Year's Eve--thank you, Denny and Tanya--a wide-ranging discussion turned to what middle-aged (and older) people were reading to stay current with what young people were doing and thinking. One participant, a radiologist named Cathy, challenged us all, I think--and took some of us out of our comfort zone, I'm sure--with a discussion of a book she is reading, a book that is all the rage with adolescent girls. It is titled Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, and Cathy was fascinated with it. It is a story of physical and emotional dislocation, marginalization and refuge--common adolescent topics--but also the unlikely story of forbidden love between an adolescent girl and...a vampire.

In the December 2008 issue of The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan provides a sympathetic review, complete with her giddy joy at the experience of adolescence revisited. But it is also informative, interesting, even compelling, as she offers story background and analysis of the book series, its meaning for the girls who apparently love it and, possibly, some underestanding for the rest of us, too.

TWILIGHT IS THE FIRST in a series of four books that are contenders for the most popular teen-girl novels of all time. (The movie based on the first book was released in November.) From the opening passage of the first volume, the harbingers of trouble loom: 17-year-old Bella Swan is en route to the Phoenix airport, where she will be whisked away from her beloved, sunny hometown and relocated to the much-hated Forks, Washington, a nearly aquatic hamlet of deep fogs and constant rains. The reason for the move is that Mom (a self-absorbed, childlike character) has taken up with a minor-league baseball player, and traveling with him has become more appealing than staying home with her only child.

Bella will now be raised by her father, an agreeable-enough cipher, who seems mildly pleased to have his daughter come to live with him, but who evinces no especial interest in getting to know her; they begin a cohabitation as politely distant and mutually beneficial as a particularly successful roommate matchup off Craigslist. Bella's first day at her new school is a misery: the weather is worse than she could ever have imagined, and the one silvery lining to the disaster is the mystery and intrigue presented by a small group of students—adopted and foster children of the same household—who eat lunch together, speak to no one else, are mesmerizingly attractive, and (as we come rather quickly to discover) are vampires. Bella falls in love with one of them, and the novel—as well as the three that follow it—concerns the dangers and dramatic consequences of that forbidden love.

* * *

Twilight is fantastic. It's a page-turner that pops out a lurching, frightening ending I never saw coming. It's also the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me. In fact, there were times when the novel—no work of literature, to be sure, no school for style; hugged mainly to the slender chests of very young teenage girls, whose regard for it is on a par with the regard with which just yesterday they held Hannah Montana—stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it. Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life's fortunes, I thought I had subdued. The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one.

Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven't seen that tale in a girls' book in a very long time. And it's selling through the roof.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/twilight-vampires

Fiddling with Words as the World Melts

This article in The Economist paints a troubling picture. But this is where we are. This is what we are doing, and what we have done for some time: very little. This is what passes for environmental responsibility, commitment and leadership in the world today. Blinkered eyes and myopic, short-term self interest continue to frustrate the compelling need for timely and comprehensive world-wide planning and action.

At least in theory, most of the world’s governments now accept that climate change, if left unchecked, could become the equivalent of a deadly asteroid. But to judge by the latest, tortuous moves in climate-change diplomacy—at a two-week gathering in western Poland, which ended on December 13th—there is little sign of any mind-concentrating effect.

To be fair to the 10,000-odd people (diplomats, UN bureaucrats, NGO types) who assembled in Poznan, a semicolon was removed. At a similar meeting in Bali a year earlier, governments had vowed to consider ways of cutting emissions from “deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; and the role of conservation [and forest management]”. After much haggling, delegates in Poland decided to upgrade conservation by replacing the offending punctuation mark with a comma.

At this pace, it seems hard to believe that a global deal on emissions targets (reconciling new emitters with older ones) can be reached next December at a meeting in Copenhagen, seen as a make-or-break time for UN efforts to cool the world.

My own views on the global warming threat are expressed in my essay Cassandra's Tears (2006), and unfortunately remain relevant today.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12815686

WaMu: An Empire Built on Bad Loans

At WaMu, getting the job done meant lending money to nearly anyone who asked for it — the force behind the bank's meteoric rise and its precipitous collapse this year in the biggest bank failure in American history.

On a financial landscape littered with wreckage, WaMu, a Seattle-based bank that opened branches at a clip worthy of a fast-food chain, stands out as a singularly brazen case of lax lending. By the first half of this year, the value of its bad loans had reached $11.5 billion, nearly tripling from $4.2 billion a year earlier.

--"Saying Yes, WaMu...," NYT (12.29.08)

Just to cover the ground, just to be sure I've alloted a fair share of the blame for the financial crisis to particularly guilty banks, I give you the case of WaMu (Washington Mutual). Yes, I still feel that early blame and outrage was rightly directed at the Investment banking community, first, and then at the federal government, that this was an appropriate ordering of culpability. But with the opportunity afoot, with the doors of accomodation wide open, the mindless, wrecklessly aggressive example of WaMu's massive attempt to exploit the mortgage market stands out as especially deserving of universal contempt.

It's also true that, in September, the federal government quickly and effectively engineered a shotgun wedding between WaMu and acquirer JPMorgan Chase--and a short time later provided $25b of bailout money under the TARP program. And I wish JPMorgan Chase well in managing their way out from under the mess they've accepted. But the WaMu example remains as instructive as it is unbelievable. We need to understand that his kind of management insanity can happen, and did.

This past Sunday's NYT article, "Saying Yes, WaMu Built Empire on Shaky Loans," provides a stunning look into the down-the-rabbit-hole craziness of what passed for business-as-usual at WaMu during that period.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/business/28wamu.html?em

Walking with God: Two Poems, a Saying, and Jesus

My Sweet, Crushed Angel1

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.

You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet, crushed angel,
To have ever neared God’s Heart at all.

Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
And even His best musicians are not always easy
To hear.

So what if the music has stopped for awhile.

So what
If the price of admission to the Divine
Is out of reach tonight.

So what, my dear,
If you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.

The mind and the body are famous
For holding the heart ransom,
But Hafiz knows the Beloved’s eternal habits.

Have patience,

For He will not be able to resist your longing
For long.

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.

You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet,
O my sweet, crushed angel.


Skinning Your Knees on God1

Little by little,
You will turn into stars.

Even then, my dear,
You will only be
A crawling infant,
Still skinning your knees on God.

Little by little,
You will become like
The whole sweet, amorous Universe
In Love
On a wild spring night.

And become so free
In a wonderful, secret
And pure Love
That flows
From a conscious,
One-pointed,
Infinite need for Light.

Even then, my dear,
The Beloved will have fulfilled
Just a fraction,
Just a fraction!
Of a promise
He wrote upon your heart.

When your soul begins
To ever bloom and laugh
And spin in Eternal Ecstacy—

O little by little,
You will lose yourself in God.


Love Is No Game2

[But] Love is no game
For the faint hearted or weak;
It is born of strength and understanding.
[and quoting Hafiz:]
“Only a person with his life up his sleeve
Dares cross the threshold of Love.”


Walking with Jesus

From Jesus:

If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life [or soul] shall lose it; but whoever loses his life [or soul] for My sake shall find it. For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul. (Mat. 16:24)

I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their words, that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us...(John 17:20)

From 1John 4:16:

And we have come to know and have believed the Love which God has for us.God is Love, and the one who abides in Love abides in God, and God abides in Him.

From the Apostle Paul:

For through the law I died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. (Gal. 2:19)

Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Col. 3:2)

1 Renderings in English of Hafiz’ poetry by Daniel Ladinsky, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy (1996, 2006).
2 Saying of Meher Baba, in part quoting Hafiz.

What Greenspan Thinks: Banks Need More Capital (No Kidding! From Where?)

The passage by Congress of the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Programm (TARP) on October 3rd eased, but did not erase, the post-Lehman surge in LIBOR/OIS. The spread apparently stalled in mid-November and remains worryingly high.

How much extra capital, both private and sovereign, will investors require of banks and other intermediaries to conclude that they are not at significant risk in holding financial institutions' deposits or debt, a precondition to solving the crisis?

--Alan Greenspan, The Economist (12.19.08)

There are many who believe that the lax monetary policies of Alan Greenspan in his last term of service contributed significantly to the housing bubble and the financial crisis we now find ourselves in. Some would suggest he was either asleep at the switches (which would be rather extraordinary), doing the bidding of the White House or congress (which would be rather out of character), or too ideologically myopic to recognize the extreme danger and likely outcome of the situation developing. He appeared to be in denial for some time after the scope and threat of the problem became evident. But, in this article for The Economist, he now appears to implicitly accept the realities of the past as he assesses where we are and what is needed to move us forward:

The insertion, last month, of $250 billion of equity into American banks through TARP (a two-percentage-point addition to capital-asset ratios) halved the post-Lehman surge of the LIBOR/OIS spread. Assuming modest further write-offs, simple linear extrapolation would suggest that another $250 billion would bring the spread back to near its pre-crisis norm. This arithmetic would imply that investors now require 14% capital rather than the 10% of mid-2006. Such linear calculations, of course, can only be very rough approximations. But recent data do suggest that, while helpful, the Treasury's $250 billion goes only partway towards the levels required to support renewed lending.

But while recognizing that higher levels of capital will now be required of American Banks (whether it is 14% of assets or higher), and that another $250B of capital is still needed, he looks past the remaining $350B of TARP funds still available and looks to a recovery in the stock market! And his overabundant optimism and ideological faithfulness lead him to assume the market will recover soon enough to be relied upon to do the job.

Eventually, the most credible source is a partial restoration of the $30 trillion of global stockmarket value wiped out this year, which would enable banks to raise the needed equity. Markets are being suppressed by a degree of fear not experienced since the early 20th century (1907 and 1932 come to mind). Human nature being what it is, we can count on a market reversal, hopefully, within six months to a year.

Still, he does appear to recognize that recovery of the stock market will likely require stabilization and recovery of the housing market--something a continually unfolding mortgage crisis makes unlikely in the immediate future. And while he more than once admonishes us to timely remove our public capital support to the private sector, he also acknowledges that the temporary infusion of TARP funds was and is important, and the most efficient means of initially addressing the financial crisis and the capital needs of troubled financial institutions.

Another critical price for the return of global financial stability is that of American homes. Those prices are likely to stabilise next year and with them the levels of home equity—the ultimate collateral for global holdings of American mortgage-backed securities, some toxic. Home-price stabilisation will help clarify the market value of financial institutions' assets and therefore more closely equate the size of their book capital with the realities of market pricing. That should help stabilise their stock prices. The eventual partial recovery of global equities, as fear inevitably dissipates, should do the rest. Temporary public capital injections into banks would facilitate this process and arguably provide far more benefit per dollar than conventional fiscal stimulus.

But for whatever reasons--his general uneasiness with public capital injections, perhaps?-- he again seems to take a pollyannaish view of the scope and depth of the crisis, and the time and means necessary to remedy it. From the facts available, it would seem quite unlikely that the continuing unfolding of the mortgage crisis, its effect on the housing market, and the recovery of the stock market will accomodate his optimism and turn the corner in six months to a year. I'm more comforted than ever to know that the pragmatic, non-ideological Ben Bernanke is at the wheel.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12813430

Ben Bernanke: The Man Managing the Meltdown

Until the middle of last week, there were signs that the credit crisis was easing: some banks were lending to each other again, the interest rates that they charge each other have come down, and no major financial institution has failed since the passage of the bailout bill. "It was a very important step," Bernanke told me last week, referring to the bailout. "It greatly diminished the threat of a global financial meltdown. But, as Hank Paulson said publicly, 'you don't get much credit for averting a disaster.' "

--"Anatomy of a Meltdown," The New Yorker (12.1.08)

Ben Bernanke is a most unlikely historic figure in the middle of this historic financial crisis. He has a quiet, conservative disposition. He has a pragmatic, resilient orientation to problem solving, and a consultative approach to decision making. And however you may assess what he has done so far--and we are not yet near the other side of this crisis--he may well be the best Federal Reserve leader we could have hoped for during this critical time.

I certainly felt we had no choice but to trust him in managing the meltdown of some our most important financial institutions and the financial network essential to the functioning of our market economy. And I felt reasonably comfortable doing so--based on those characterisitics noted, to be sure, but also on his first-rate intellect, his extensive, expert background in the economics of financial markets and market failures, and his prior experience as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board. He also benefited from the extensive practical experience and support of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. (Although Paulson--Goldman, Sach's prior CEO--had arguably once been a responsible, complicit party in managing the culture and climate that spawned and developed the mortgage crisis and resulting financial failures. He certainly understood the background of the problem.)

A The New Yorker article, "Anatomy of a Meltdown," by John Cassidy, provides a succinct but useful biography of Bernanke, and then a comprehensive and balanced chronology of Bernanke's and the Fed's thinking and decisions during this singularly challenging crisis played out in unchartered territory. If he wasn't first to the line in recognizing the threat and scope of the problem, if his first instincts and choices for bold, creative solutions may not have been the best or the ones he would ultimately decide on and pursue, he was open minded, resilient and strong in pursuit of the best answers. And he showed resolve in carrying them out. That is, he showed strong leadership in the most challenging of circumstances. That, at least, is my view, my take on it.

Looking back on this period, Bernanke told me, "I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict."

...Paul Krugman, the Times columnist, a former colleague of Bernanke's at Princeton, and the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics, said, "I don't think any other central banker in the world would have done as much by way of expanding credit, putting the Fed into unconventional assets, and so on. Now, you might say that it all hasn't been enough. But I guess I think that's more a reflection of the limits to the Fed's power than of Bernanke getting it wrong. And things could have been much worse."

Of course, there are many among his critics who would also assert that the right course was to let these financial institutions fail, and that somehow the financial system would muddle through, then right itself in time, without serious risk of a 1930's-era depression. Others were narrowly concerned with the example being set and "moral hazard." I don't subscribe to those opinions; I think there was far more risk in failing to act. I find common ground with Bernanke's explanation of his thinking at the time:

There is now wide agreement that Bernanke and his colleagues made the correct decision about Bear Stearns. If they had allowed the firm to file for bankruptcy, the financial panic that developed this fall would almost certainly have begun six months earlier. Instead, the markets settled for a while. "I think we did the right thing to try to preserve financial stability," Bernanke said. "That's our job. Yes, it's moral-hazard-inducing, but the right way to address this question is not to let institutions fail and have a financial meltdown. When the economy has recovered, or is on the way to recovery, that's the time to say, 'How can we fix the system so it doesn't happen again?' You want to put the fire out first and then worry about the fire code."

But Bernanke understands that these are times of great danger, great risk in whatever choices are made, and of highly charged emotions. Many critical and hurtful things have been said and will be said. But Bernanke, undaunted, continues to pursue bold solutions: recently cutting the Fed funds rate to zero (actually, 0-25 basis points), setting out plans to make large purchases of agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and considering the potential benefits to the mortgage markets of buying long-term Treasury securities. As I quoted Henry Paulson earlier, even if he is successful, "you don't get much credit for averting a disaster." To provide an assuring, strengthening reference point and inspiration, Bernanke keeps this Civil-War era quotation from Abraham Lincoln on his desk:

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right will make no difference."

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/01/081201fa_fact_cassidy?currentPage=all

60-Minutes: A Second Mortgage Crisis; Paulson: No More Failed Financials

The trouble now is that the insanity didn't end with sub-primes. There were two other kinds of exotic mortgages that became popular, called "Alt-A" and "option ARM." The option ARMs, in particular, lured borrowers in with low initial interest rates - so-called teaser rates - sometimes as low as one percent. But after two, three or five years those rates "reset." They went up. And so did the monthly payment. A mortgage of $800 dollars a month could easily jump to $1,500.

--60-Minutes (12/14/08)

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Tuesday that he does not expect any more major financial institutions to fail during the current credit crisis.

--AP/MSNBC (12/16/08)

60-Minutes has again scooped the nightly news. Again they are first to present us the bad news, this time about a second wave of mortgage failures and foreclosures coming at us. Resetting now and in the near future are rates for two other groups of risky mortgages called "Alt-A" and "option ARMs." Why didn't someone tell us? The financial institutions knew, of course, and so did the government financial team of Paulson and Bernanke.

The experts interviewed on 60-minutes see the impact as continuing an unsettled, bottom-seeking housing and mortgage market through 2009, into 2010, and possibly longer. And, according to most experts, the economy will likely not recover until the housing market stabilizes. If you haven't seen the 60-Minutes piece, take a few minutes and view it now. It's not pretty.

The closest thing to good news is that two days after the 60-Minutes story Henry Paulson nonetheless tells CNBC he "does not expect any more major financial institutions to fail during the current credit crisis." I mean, the fear is that things could always get worse again, right? And there have been so many who have second-guessed the government recapitalization of some major financial institutions that in Bernanke's and Paulson's view could and should be saved. And while the discouraging news about new dimensions to the mortgage debacle is dispiriting, and so is the potential impact on the economy, at least there is reason to believe that the financial institutions that are the foundation of our market economy likely will not experience major new failures. Let's hope Paulson is right.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/12/60minutes/main4666112.shtml

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28269485/