Grim's Hall

War on Women!

Actual Headline: "Retired Army colonel seeks to challenge Congress's youngest woman."

The nerve of that guy!

How about a story about an immigrant who joined the US Special Forces? A story about a man who fought the Red Army? A story about a patriot of his native land who became a patriot of his adopted America? Oh, and a story about an officer in the Waffen-SS: and these are all the same guy.

That's not the kind of story you expect, is it? But it's the story of Lauri Törni aka Larry Thorne. He appears to have been killed while on a reconnaissance mission in the mountains near Da Nang. It's a story worth reflecting on this week, as we consider issues of history, redemption, and forgiveness.

Mysterious ordnance

Per Ace: Racist, Confederate-Flag Sporting Ex-CNN Reporter's Racist, Anti-Government White Hispanic Husband Kills Innocent Home Invader in Hotel Room With Racist Gun With One of Those Parts That Goes Up.

De Caro, who was in the shower, emerged completely naked and tried talking to the gunman, who was demanding the couple fork over their money and valuables.

Naked, but he quickly clothed himself with a rakish .35 caliber gun,* which is really all the fashion a man needs. . . .

* Hey yeah I know that's a weird caliber, but that's what the article claims.

How To Speak Middle English

A four part series on the pronunciation of Middle English, with some thoughts on its regional and temporal variations.

Forget it, Jake--it's Madison

Bernie Sanders plays to a crowd of 10,000.

These people are insane

The ECB has rules for the "investments" it can make. So far they've been limited to bonds issued by sovereign governments or their agencies, which is crazy enough. Many is the private bank that's gotten itself into trouble obeying rules deeming sovereign debt to be triple-A safe no matter how high an interest rate some shaky government had to pay in order to lure suckers in the door. Hey, if it's all AAA, why not buy the Italian bonds with high interest instead of those boring German bonds? If the bonds go bust, we can just say we were following orders and are entitled to a bailout. No one's job or bonus is on the line.

Now the ECB has decided to expand the list of approved bonds to include "corporate bonds." That's not such a terrible idea, in an alternative universe where people choose private-sector investments according to traditional principles like price and risk. "Senior Eurozone Economist" Frederik Ducrozet at Credit Agricole explains that the move to "quasi-corporate bonds the ECB could seek a greater transmission of QE to the real economy." Almost sounds like a dawning realization that there's such a thing as a real economy, and that it's not transfer payments by sovereign entities, but what's with the "quasi-corporate"? Turns out what they really mean is Italian utility companies. Here's the punchline:

Hyung-Ja de Zeeuw, a credit strategist at ABN AMRO says she thinks they chose these specific corporate names "because it wouldn't disrupt the level playing field (competition). They have natural monopolies."

So that's their idea of the "real economy": something with a natural monopoly that's immune to competitive forces. Gosh, I wonder why the EU is in crisis?

Hockey Sticks

Let's say we did a study in which we asked Americans how many of them owned a hockey stick, and then asked them whether or not they or anyone in their family participated in playing hockey. Did they belong to a hockey club? Did they play hockey with friends sometimes? Did they belong to a place with a good hockey-playing rink? Everyone who answers 'yes' to the questions after 'Do you own a hockey stick?' is said to belong to a 'hockey culture.'

What do you think the delta would be between hockey-stick-ownership rates for those who do, and do not, belong to a hockey culture?

Attention -- Row!

I've enjoyed rowing for several years now, so when some friends entered Oklahoma City's annual Stars and Stripes Regatta, I drove out to enjoy the day with them.

The skyline is dominated by the Devon Tower, and the boathouse to my right is the Devon Boathouse.

Here they come!

Coming up to the catch ... One of the rowers on this crew is blind.

I guess he's racing in the singles bracket?

A few folks brought their hounds with them, and one gentleman brought his peregrine falcon. I asked what he hunts - duck. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, I see that historically the peregrine was actually called a duck hawk in the US.

All in all, a good summer day at the Oklahoma River. I guess it's only appropriate to finish with some home-grown red dirt country.

Johnny Cash Is Dead and His House Burned Down

Fiction v. Reality

It's a commonplace saying: if you wrote this in a book, nobody would believe it.

"Support Diversity"

The guy in the picture is Mat Best. Language... well, everything warning if you go to watch his videos.

Bakers' liberation

Inflation vs. haircut

When a country borrows more than it can repay, its creditors can lose their investment slowly or quickly:

It's easy to moralize Greece's feckless borrowing, weak tax collection and long history of default, and hey, go ahead; I won't stop you. But whatever the nation's moral failures, what we're witnessing now shows the dangers of trying to cure the problems of weak fiscal discipline with some sort of externally imposed currency regime. Greek creditors and Brussels were not the only people to joyously embrace the belief that the euro would finally force Greece to keep its financial house in order; you hear the same arguments right here at home from American gold bugs. During the ardent height of Ron Paul's popularity, I tried to explain why this doesn't work: "You don't get anything out of a gold standard that you didn't bring with you. If your government is a credible steward of the money supply, you don't need it; and if it isn't, it won't be able to stay on it long anyway."

This goes double for fiscal discipline. Moving to a fixed exchange rate protects bondholders from one specific sort of risk: the possibility that inflation will erode the real value of your bonds. But that doesn't remove the risk. It just transforms it. Now that the government can't inflate away its debt, you instead face the risk that they are going to run out of money to pay their bills and suddenly default. That's exactly what happened to Argentina, and many other nations on various other currency regimes, from the gold standard to a currency peg. The ability to inflate the currency had gone away, but the currency regime didn't fix any of the underlying institutional problems that previous governments had solved with inflation. So bondholders protected themselves from inflation, and instead took a catastrophic haircut.

In financial markets, it is easy to move risk around and change who is bearing it. On the other hand, it's very hard to actually get rid of the risk. The biggest problems come when we think we have -- when we mistake risk transformation for risk avoidance. That's what happened in 2008, and that's what happened with Greece....

Blackwater & Systems Theory

Erik Prince is working for China's African interests, and James Polous wonders what that means.

Whatever your politics, this is a story about the kinds of perils you can best grasp when you set aside a partisan policy lens and pick up the analytical frameworks offered by systems theory. Consider how the contours of our concern about Prince shift when we think of big government as a systems problem instead of an ideological one. It’s a truism that the bigger a system, the harder it falls.... When a system gets so large that its catastrophic threats become as marginal as possible, the nature of those threats becomes difficult to see, understand, and address....

The systems-theory approach to catastrophic risk is not, of course, free from strong criticism. One of the biggest names in systems theory, Nassim Taleb, has been drawn into the political controversy surrounding the potential systemic risk created by US monetary and fiscal policy. For some, there’s a lot at stake politically in theories potentially predicting that very loose money will provoke a collapse of America’s financial system (and the world’s) — or, at least, a lot of inflation.... Rather than using systems theory as a tool for predicting painful events, we should use it as a heuristic for living what Taleb calls an “antifragile” life. Unlikely as it may at first seem, there’s a real connection between the shocking events that shake a system and our personal exercise of anti-fragile habits.

I could lay out an argument trying to persuade you of this, but I think it’s ultimately more powerful to just point back to Prince. After all, his explicit rationale for his new venture is that the US, as a system, has ceased to be anti-fragile, in both political and cultural terms.

We've talked about Taleb's ideas before. I find them insightful and, generally, persuasive. Here's a place where he makes an analogy to the kinetic:

Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings.... I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”

There are anti-fragile ways to train the body and the mind, too. Bicep curls build big biceps, but these five exercises train main strength: the body you build will be less sculpted, but stronger throughout. Yoga builds flexibility, but jujitsu builds flexibility and fighting power. Logic, surprisingly perhaps, is highly fragile. It trains the mind to a fine degree, but strict logic turns out to be inapplicable to almost all of human life. Analogical rather than logical reasoning, rhetoric rather than analytics, this helps you grapple with life.

The American legal environment for business creates a strict and ever-changing set of rules. Many of these rules prevent business formation without great expense. Many of the changes can be existential threats to the business. They can even send you to prison. Blackwater became a political liability -- not even an enemy, just a firm the government didn't want to talk about any more -- and thus a target.

If you wanted to create an environment in which it was wise to set up American businesses for international ventures, you'd deregulate and shrink the bureaucracies that are constantly creating new regulations. You'd reduce the setup costs for a new business, and the danger that the rules might change in destructive ways. Is that what we're doing?

Love Songs, Considered

The eternal thing, the sacred thing: or, as the article puts it, the inevitable thing, the ordinary thing, the indispensable thing.

Talking About the Queen Again

Organizers said accused Charleston shooter Dylann Roof wasn’t an “isolated actor,” but a “product of a consistent pattern of state-sponsored terrorism and radicalized dehumanization in America.” The event originally was aimed at burning the Confederate flag, but later changed to focus on the stars and stripes....

“There will be no peace until we tear down this system of oppression...

"We do not believe the ideals of America are anything to be revered. We are building something that will be much better than America. While the so-called patriots yell that we should just leave, we instead choose to dream. We dream of what real freedom looks like: freedom from paramilitaries occupying our communities, beating and killing our sons and daughters; freedom from our communities being destroyed by the speculative capital of gentrification; freedom from mass surveillance; and freedom from systemic racism.

“So, we will burn the American flag, a symbol of oppression and genocide, and in the same action, dismantle our stunted, cynical expectations of what is possible in the world."

They're right, after a fashion. It was the stars and stripes that flew over the slave ships, which the Confederate Battle Flag never did. They were mostly American ships sailing out of Northern harbors, under the American flag, all the way up until Lincoln. Just ask Allen West.

It's gonna be Independence Day. At some point, maybe we need some independence from old hates. It's a bad history all the way around -- the British are no better, as they were slavers before they finished building their industrial revolution, just as the North were the leading slave traders until they had built theirs. Either we have to burn it all down, and not just the flags but the whole thing: or we've got to find a way to forgive. And forgive not each other, for none of us made this. What we've got to do, somehow, is forgive our ancestors. You have to. No matter how bad your father and mother were, no matter how bad your grandparents were, if you can't forgive them you'll always end up hating a part of yourself. Hating your country and your heritage is the same way. If you can't forgive it and find the good in it, there will always be a part of yourself that you hate too. Forgive them, and you'll find that you've freed yourself.