Avatar

So as promised I got the star rating for Avatar up on Saturday. However, I thought that a little more discussion about it was in order.

As far as this film representing the next leap forward technologically in film, I can tell you unequivocally that you can believe the hype. It is hands down the most amazing looking film I've ever seen. Cameron has managed to create a living, breathing world in a way that has never been done before in the history of film. And he has done it, presumably, almost exclusively with CGI. And the fact that I say "presumably" is itself a remarkable statement. Because I simply can't tell. There are things I saw which I have no possible idea how they would have been created without CGI, but there's no "dead giveaway" that makes me able to say for sure that it is. I think that Cameron learned (which, sadly, George Lucas did not) that most of the time where you run into trouble with CGI is when you have CGI characters present with non-CGI ones. He sidesteps this by basically making everything (and everyone) CGI. I counted only a very small handful of scenes where CGI and non-CGI characters were present in the same shot, and the shots were either so brief or they were so laden with other effects that your eyes aren't drawn to the differences. Ccompare this with, for example, the scene near the beginning of The Phantom Menace when we first meet Anakin. Anakin's master is all CGI and we don't believe for a moment that he's actually in the shot with the actors.

It only took me about 20 minutes into the film to realize that it was a guaranteed Oscar winner. Seriously, if it doesn't win Best Visual Effects they should just do away with the award. Sorry Star Trek, looks like you picked a bad year to come out.

Basically the movie looks so amazing that even if everytime a character had opened their mouths to speak chimp noises came out instead it still would have been a 4/5 star movie. So it should have been a no-brainer for it to earn 5 stars. So why only 4.5? Well, the story and dialogue are quite underwhelming. The story (in its largely spoiler-free form) is basically The Last Samurai meets The Secret of Mana. It's a serviceable story and it's never boring but it also abounds with cliches. I can totally forgive that, because the look of the film is so spectacular that in a way it's nice to be in the confines of a familiar story. You can feel free to look around and admire all the little details (and believe me there are a TON) without having to worry about getting lost. The dialogue, however, is another story. There's at least a half dozen examples where one character says to another character something that the other character would obviously already have known and it's clear that the only point is to provide expository dialogue. It just feels very unnatural. Also, there is just no form of subtlety here at all. As just one point that isn't a spoiler of any consequence but just summarizes it perfectly, the humans on the planet are mining for a rare mineral. And rather than just name it something that already exists, the writers decide to invent a new one and the name they choose is "unobtainium". The film is unabashedly pro-environmentalism and anti-war. There's nothing wrong with that but, again, some form of subtlety would be nice. The worst part is that it's unnecessary; the themes would have come through just fine without several characters basically outright stating them. It feels dumbed down, and maybe that's the point. All in all, it's certainly not something that ruins the movie but it is a detraction. I just wish they'd spent maybe $2-3 million less on the effects and invested in a decent rewrite of the dialogue.

Overall, the movie is just what it promises to be: a true cinematic experience. If you are thinking that you will eventually see it, do yourself a favor and see it the way it was meant to be seen: on an IMAX. The 3-D is awesome but not compulsory, in my opinion, but the large screen is. I don't know how the film will hold up once it gets to Blu-Ray but I guarantee you anyone that pops it in for the first time is going to say "wow, this would have been amazing to see on a huge screen." Don't be that guy (or girl).

I Am S-M-R-T

So, I have been playing a lot of online poker recently. And surprisingly enough, I have been doing well for a change. I bought in for $105 over the Thanksgiving week and through last weekend I had cashed out $300. But I started to feel a little bored with it and thought "you know what? For once in my life how about cashing out while you're still doing alright and before you get to the point where you've suffered 12 bad beats in a row and are vowing never to play online again?" So on Wednesday night I cashed out $100 of the $109 left in my account and thought "ok, I'll just screw around with this last $9 and then I'll take a break for a while." So that's what I did. And here's where the smartness comes in. At 10:00 at night on Wednesday I decide to enter a $3.30 tournament with 865 players. And I start doing really well. But at about 11:30 I start doing the math and realizing that with 250 players still left even in the best case scenario I'm going to be there a while. But what can I do? I'm certainly not going to just give up and go to bed. So I keep playing and playing. We get down to 45 players left and I'm actually the chip leader - but it's 1:30. Finally, I lose a couple bad hands and get crippled and then the final blow comes when I flop top pair (Jacks) and push only to run into pocket Aces. I'm out. It's 2:25. Final finish: 20th place. My payout? $8.54. Yep, I missed out on about 4 extra hours of sleep for less than $10. To those of you who are single (or at least don't have kids) that's probably not that big of a deal but let me assure you that when you are the parent of a 3-month-old sleep becomes quite precious indeed. It's sure as hell worth more than $2.14/hour. And of course, I just turned around last night and lost the remaining $14 in my account so really it was all for nothing. Oh well, at least I now really will be done for a while and I still did turn a profit (again, for now).

Leaving work in less than an hour to see Avatar. I'll have at least my star rating of it up by tomorrow (I know you all can't wait). Next week I am in the office on Monday, working from home on Tuesday, and then have the rest of the week off. As much as I will miss Christmas in Texas, it will be nice to just have 5 days off and not have to travel anywhere farther than Aurora and Tinley.

For you sports (and especially Cubs) fans out there, it was just reported that the Cubs finally traded Milton Bradley; and no, it wasn't for The Parker Brothers. It was for Carlos Silva, who is arguably the worst starting pitcher in MLB right now. The worst part about all of it is that I now can no longer make fun of the Sox for trading for Juan Pierre. My only hope is that during the Crosstown Classic next year I get to see Pierre bat against Silva. I'd like to know what happens when a player who specializes in hitting very week ground balls to second meets a pitcher who specializes in giving up towering home runs?

Playing Catch-Up Again

So as you might be able to tell if you look to the right side of this page, I've continued my recent kick of watching lots of movies (or at least lots more than I have in some time). And the result has been rather underwhelming. While I didn't expect the likes of Terminator and Angels & Demons to wow me, I had high hopes for Up in the Air. And while it was "good", I actually despised the ending so much that it seriously crippled my appreciation for the movie as a whole. Without giving anything away, it has one of those endings which make you re-examine earlier events in the film and realize that they don't make a whole lot of sense. Very disappointing. Still, given that as of this morning it got nominated for 6 Golden Globes (including Best Picture) I appear to be in the minority. As a side note, it was nice to see that my 2 favorite films so far this year (Inglorious Basterds and 500 Days of Summer) were also nominated for Best Picture.

I've got tickets to see Avatar in 3-D at the Navy Pier Imax on Friday. I initially bought tickets to it with the idea that it would be a fun, mindless sci-fi action movie. Now, however, after seeing Ebert give it his most glowing review ever, IGN come pretty close to that as well, and it too getting a Best Picture Golden Globe nomination, I would have to say that my expectations have definitely been raised. I can't really argue with the people who say that the previews do not look promising, but my response is this: please name me one feature film James Cameron has directed that isn't good (at least in the last 25 years)?

I'm still following the health care debate closely but I don't even really know where to start with that. Four months ago I wrote (of Democrats) "if you sit there and worry about every opinion poll and detrimentally alter the bill to fit the popular mood of the hour, you've got a good chance of ending up with a spectacularly crappy bill. And that's what'll get you killed in the election next year." Sadly, this looks to be exactly the route that they are following. I've seen the focus since that time shift dramatically from "we need to pass sweeping health reform that will ensure that every American is covered and that costs are kept down" to "we need to do everything in our power to pass something so it doesn't look like we've just wasted an entire year." Other than the actual Senators currently out pushing it, I don't know a single person that likes the current Senate bill (though, since it seems to change almost daily, I'm not even positive what the "current" Senate bill incarnation is).

Ironically, about the only that Republican-leaning and Democrat-leaning voters can agree on these days is that this bill is terrible. If they pass it in its current form, it will basically achieve nothing they set out to do other than (maybe) insuring a few more uninsured. It will do nothing to increase competition or keep costs from sky-rocketing, and they didn't even make an attempt at litigation reform. And even for the extra people who will be covered, with the amount that the bill's going to cost it will almost undoubtedly end up being far cheaper if the government just sent those people a check every year for the rest of their life and told them to buy their own insurance from a private insurer. And that's before they end up adding all the inevitable pork that will go in via the amendments that will be necessary in order to get this thing passed. As low as my expectations always are for the Democrats to be unified when they control Congress, I really stand in awe of their ineptitude right now. It reminds me of watching the Bears this season. You can learn to take the losses. There's no shame in just flat-out getting beat. What is so hard to swallow is when you don't get beat; you beat yourselves. I am constantly reminded of the Lewis Black joke: "The Democratic party is a party of no ideas, and the Republican party is a party of bad ideas. So you got the Republican standing up saying 'I've got a really bad idea' and the Democrat stands up and says 'and I know how to make it even worse'." Or, to paraphrase Lyle Lanley, "Y'know, a Democrat in power is a little like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it."

Back to the Cold

So anyone who has been following Christy's blog knows that we just got back from spending Thanksgiving in Houston. It was a great trip and we did a lot of relaxing but both Christy and I managed to catch a cold on our last day there and combined with the turn in weather it has made the adjustment back a little more difficult than usual.

A few people have asked me for my opinion on the "climate-gate" scandal. I think that this guy sums it up for me pretty well. If you don't feel like reading that article, the gist is that I think it's an embarrassment and I am a staunch believer that scientific dissent should never be bullied or silenced for political, theological, or ideological purposes. But I think the outrage has been severely misdirected. The ire should be reserved for the individuals involved in the e-mails. Instead it seems to be being used to suggest that the whole case for climate change has now somehow been undermined, and that's just not true. The fundamental evidence behind climate change being real and man-made remains as strong today as it did 2 weeks ago, and nothing I've seen in any of the e-mails changes that one bit. Yes, there are admissions of things that are unknown and unexplained, but that is hardly a smoking gun. Every year scientists find out new pieces of information on evolution and make corrections to prior assumptions, but each revision does nothing to call into question the initial theory put forth by Darwin 150 years ago. Creationists like to leap on every change and reside in the margins of what is still not known to "prove" that evolution is incorrect, but that is just a failure in understanding the scientific process. Something as complex as evolution or climate change is unlikely to ever be modeled to the point of 100% accuracy, but it is not necessary to achieve that level to draw the conclusion that they are correct. Still, again, that does not excuse a lot of the bullying and dismissive tone and tactics in the e-mail. Like it or not, one of the consequences of free speech is allowing others to put forth misinformation and things you don't agree with. History has proven that where science is concerned the facts always win out in the end, even if it takes a lot longer than some people are comfortable with.

Not much else going on right now. I updated my reviews with a few more movies I've seen. I was surprised how much I enjoyed Adventureland; I highly recommend it. The new Christmas Carol, while decent, really just made me want to go home and watch the Muppet version, which I dutifully did on Tuesday. I'm also finally getting around to reading again. Currently, I'm making my way through What the Dog Saw . . . and Other Adventures; the new book by Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers fame). This book is actually just a collection of articles he has written for The New Yorker over the years but it is just as compelling as his other books, even if it doesn't have a single common theme like his other books. At about 20 pages per story, they are long enough to be meaty and substantive but also short enough to be accessible for people who don't like making a commitment to reading 400+ pages.

Aghanistan - Time to Pack It In

Let me start out by stating what I believe should happen in Afghanistan. There should be a truly multinational coalition (say 20-25 countries) committing a total of about half a million troops that all have the understanding that they will likely be there in some form for a decade or more. There has never been a successful counterinsurgency (at least in the last few hundred years) which lasted less than a decade and so that should be the expectation (discounting the 8 years we have already been there since we're now just about back to where we were in early 2002). I believe that if we leave Afghanistan the Taliban will once again take over and all of al Qaeda will move back in and set up camp. The force I've outlined above is what I believe is necessary to achieve a long-lasting stability.

Here's the problem. It's not going to happen. Our "coalition" is essentially us and Britain and about 10-15 other countries who have committed a couple hundred troops each. And most of those countries are now losing their taste for even that level of involvement. So, like it or not, that is going to leave us to do almost all the heavy lifting ourselves. Right now we have approximately 68,000 troops stationed there. Now General McChrystal has reportedly asked for 45,000 more. And I don't blame him. Roughly speaking, 68,000 is one Memorial Stadium-full of soldiers. While that's a lot, it hardly seems like an adequate enough force to secure an entire country. Even with the additional 45,000 (which is by no means guaranteed), we're just talking about upgrading from Memorial Stadium to Michigan Stadium. Again, I am just skeptical that it's enough to get the job done.

So while I think it's going to take a couple hundred thousand troops at a minimum, even if we were capable of it I just can't possibly in good conscience recommend that we supply them all. So if we're not going to have the international support we need, and we're not capable of supplying all the troops ourselves then in my opinion we're just delaying the inevitable and losing more soldiers in the process. This is the epitome of the bad choice/worse choice scenario. From where I'm sitting it seems like the only thing worse than leaving is not leaving.

I think the final straw for me was the election debacle. Before then I could at least somewhat convince myself that we were helping support a legitimate democracy in the Middle East. But instead it appears that we are backing an extremely corrupt regime that seems to only really care about clinging to power and cannot or will not bring about democratic reform. And while it may be better than the Taliban, I don't think it's enough of an improvement to warrant a seemingly endless commitment of blood and treasure.

"Fiscal Conservatism" = Leaving Trillions of Dollars of Debt to Your Children

Another guest blog from our buddy Joe Mays.

The term "starve the beast" is attributed to one of Ronald Reagan's staffers in a Wall Street Journal article from 1985. It refers to cutting taxes on the wealthy in order to destroy the U.S. government, thus crippling it's ability to provide popular social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. This philosophy is not fiscally responsible, though it's been the guiding principle for all of the conservative Republican administrations throughout my lifetime.

I was born in 1979 when we had very little national debt. The WWII generation had been good stewards of our economy. They learned the lessons of the Great Depression - only spending what they could afford, while building a society that was competitive. Since then, Republican administrations have applied for and promptly charged our national credit cards to the limit, leaving us and our children in peril. They hoped that our nation would eventually go bankrupt and leave all but the most-fortunate among us saddled with a national debt we could never repay.

That's the story of the dreaded 1980's. Growing up during the Reagan and Bush I presidencies, I stood helpless as I watched our national debt balloon into a huge threat to the country we love, as well as a massive political issue. As soon as a Democratic administration took power, I remember the Republicans campaigning on deficit reduction - they said we must stop government spending now! Luckily, President Clinton had the courage to stand up to them. Mr. Clinton shut down the government because he knew that debt reduction would take some time - and that debt reduction must happen hand-in-hand with economic growth. Rather than destroy our economy, Mr. Clinton stood with the working families in our country, and we eventually got a balanced budget and began paying off our national debt.




During the Bush II years, I saw irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy, unjustified wars, and the largest expansion of government in recent memory. As a result, our national debt exploded. All of the bullshit that the conservative Republicans spewed during the 1990's was a lie. It is now plain to see. As soon as they took control, they turned our serious debt problem into a grave catastrophe - and got us mired in two wars - and destroyed our economy.

...And now the tea-party crowd wants us to give them another shot. They want us to believe that conservatism is the true solution to our debt problem. Let us not forget history. This is a shameful political ploy. We must rebuild our economy first, and start to make the long-neglected necessary investments in our future. Only after that will we see real debt reduction.

I am a true champion of fiscal responsibility. As someone who was a powerless child when our nation's debt was amassed, I strongly resent past generations for leaving us in this position. Perhaps in the 1950s this was considered a "conservative" stance. But it is no longer. During my lifetime, the conservatives created the national debt as we know it - only a liberal president bothered to balance the budget. Let us not forget this. In the memorable words of The Who: "I get on my knees and pray that we don't get fooled again."

The Long-Awaited Conclusion

So to complete my economic post from last week, I'll take on the 500 lb gorilla in the room head on. Yes I am going to advocate government intervention. No, I don't think that makes me a socialist.

My rationale is based on my belief in Keynesian economics. Until Michael Jackson died, John Maynard Keynes was easily the most talked-about dead guy of the last year. Nevertheless, since there were a lot of people dropping his name in an effort to sound like they knew what they were talking about even if they didn't or if what they were advocating had nothing to do with the Keynesian model, I think a brief and extremely simplistic description is in order.

In a "normal" economy (we'll set aside what the exact definition of this is; just think of an economy humming along at about 2% real growth per year) you have high employment and everyone spends their money "normally". Your "normal" demand is defined as the sum of domestic consumer spending, business investment, and government expenditures. In other words, these are the "inputs" into the economy. Now you hit a recession (for the example, the reason is unimportant). One of the main hallmarks of a recession is higher unemployment. As unemployment rises, those left jobless have less disposable income and thus spend less, which causes aggregate consumer spending to fall. Even those who still hold jobs are now more uncertain (typically measured by consumer confidence) and thus begin to elect to save more of their earnings rather than invest. This further hits consumer demand. The fall in demand causes more companies to layoff more workers which further triggers a fall in consumer confidence and you get a vicious cycle of falling demand to unemployment to falling demand, etc. So the Keynesian argument is that when consumer demand falls the government must step in to plug the gap so that demand as a whole (consumer spending plus business investment plus government expenditures) can be normalized again.

It's important to realize that anything the government does in this situation is technically "government intervention"; even tax cuts. If taxes are at level A, and a Congressmen proposes changing them to level B in order to combat the recession, that's still government intervention! I hear the idea of lowering taxes presented as being synonymous with laissez-faire economics and that's simply not the case. True laissez-faire economics would say change absolutely nothing during a recession. Again, we are talking about specific steps to combat a recession, not changing the tax policies of the country in general (where a reduction in taxes and, presumably, government WOULD be a move towards a more laissez-faire style).

OK, so in my previous post I illustrated why I don't believe that personal tax cuts are effective in increasing consumer demand, so that leaves two options: increasing business investment or increasing government expenditures. Most often, you hear only about government expenditures while increased business investment gets short shrift. I think that's a mistake. First of all, anytime you tell Congress to "spend some money" you are just asking for trouble. Not all government expenditures are created equally. Some are just horrifically wasteful and serve no purpose other than to help the sponsoring Congressmen get re-elected. But even if they all are "good" expenses, you still have problems. Any temporary government expenditure has the inherent flaw that once the project is done so is its stimulative effect. Giving a million people a job for 2 months helps them for those 2 months but at the end they're back to being unemployed. A lot of times the government spending amounts to paying people as a temporary stop-gap and hoping (praying) that by the time the project is over the economy has magically recovered and everyone will now be able to find jobs again. Still, I think it's better than just straight tax cuts because here you are giving people that had no income (the unemployed) some income and thus you are more significantly increasing disposable income. Plus, you were going to be paying them unemployment anyway, so you might as well pay them for doing something (we'll leave the discussion of whether or not unemployment payments are a good idea for another day). Again though, you still have the fundamental problem that when these workers spends these wages so little of it is actually getting filtered back to the U.S. economy. If you are going to go this route, the best thing to do is spend it on infrastructure, because that's something that needs to be done anyway and the government will ultimately pay for regardless.

So with all that as a backdrop I think that the most effective way to combat a recession is to increase and encourage business investment. Encourage in the sense of offering more guaranteed loans for entrepreneurs, where the government and the private bank share in the interest for the successful loans and the government bears the brunt of the failed ones. And directly increasing investment by partnering with new or existing companies to establish new entities in cutting-edge industries. The key is that you want to create something that will be self-sufficient when the government involvement is over and thus any employees hired to start-up such an operation will still have the jobs when the government is no longer there. A good example for this would be partnering with someone like GE to build a plant to manufacture solar panels. Now you're providing temporary work to the construction industry, then when the plant is done you're providing permanent employment for the surrounding area, and you're starting to reduce the trade gap by bringing manufacturing back here and (hopefully) helping to keep more of the money spent in the U.S. cycling through the domestic economy. I would structure any such arrangement so that after a specified period of time (depending on the industry) the government will exit the business and retain only a minority, non-voting interest in it, to be divested as soon as it is possible to do so while recovering the initial investment (plus a reasonable amount of interest).

OK, so that's how I feel about the different elements of the Keynesian tools. Best is increasing business investment, worst is personal tax cuts, and straight government expenditures are in the middle. In reality though, I'm not advocating just one approach. I don't think that the government should do all business investment and nothing else. The fact of the matter is that traditional economic models are very sterile. They basically assume that we are all machines. But the truth is that we are emotional beings and economic models designed to address that (behavioral economics) are still in their infancy. The bottom line is that the economy not only has to get better; people have to feel like it's getting better. That's the only way to break the cycle of people feeling increasingly uncertain and spending progressively less. If you're a die-hard from the school of tax cuts and you see the government spending tons of cash, that's going to make you more uneasy about the economy and you're likely to continue to spend more conservatively. Similarly, if you're of the mindset that tax-cuts are worthless you're unlikely to go out and spend more when you receive one. Thus, a calculated balance of all 3 approaches seems to have the best chance of success. This, of course, is completely at odds with the bipolar nature of our government.

And just in case you're not yet utterly sick to death of this, one final note. Notice that you never hear too much about Keynesian economics during the times when the economy is expanding. The flip side to spending during a recession is higher taxes and interest rates during the good times in order to both combat inflation and to run surpluses so that when the inevitable bad times do hit you have money socked away to pay for the spending and reduced tax revenues during the recessions. But think hard about the last time you heard a politician proposing raising taxes during a boom. It seems that somewhere on the road to recovery, all these devout Keynesians jump off the bus.

Busting an Old Economic Myth

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. As I might have imagined, they were pretty much all across the board. That's bad in the sense that it doesn't really help me narrow down what I want to concentrate on but good in the sense that there doesn't seem to be any one thing I do that bores the living crap out of everyone.

As I sit here watching Mythbusters, I've decided that I want to take down a myth myself. In particular, I want to explode the oft-repeated myth that lowering individual taxes or sending people additional tax rebates has a stimulative effect on the economy. And for this I'll be returning to one of my favorite topics: economic theory. I can hear most of your groans from here, but fear not loyal reader! I am not going to use a lot of detailed stats and arcane theories. I'm going to lay this out in pretty simple language.

First of all I am not a communist, socialist, hacky-sack wielding hippy, or a left-wing ideologue. As a general tax policy I believe that the fairest tax would be one that is flat and low. But I am not talking about a good general tax policy, I'm talking about stimulating the economy.

So let's first go through the conventional argument about why lowering taxes has a stimulative effect. A person makes X amount of money per paycheck. This leads them to consume Y amount of goods. Thus if you increase X by 10% (through an income tax reduction or additional income) they should now go out and spend an amount greater than Y. Multiply this a couple million times and overall demand gets stimulated, which causes businesses to produce more goods, which means they need to hire more people, and pretty soon the economy is roaring again.

So what's wrong with this theory? Absolutely nothing, provided that you are reading this on dried, rolled-up parchment by the soft light of a hogs-fat candle. The problem is that this theory is several hundred years old, and it completely discounts the global economy. There's an old expression that the mistake generals always make is trying to fight a current war just like they did the last one. That's what is happening here too. We're trying to solve today's problem with yesterday's solution.

Allow me to illustrate. Back in the day there existed these things called "local businesses". And when the local townspeople received extra money they spent it at these businesses and all the magic of increased demand and stimulus described above really did apply.

But now when consumers get extra money, there's no guarantee that they'll spend it locally. In fact, there's a good chance that the bulk of your purchase may not even be spent in this country. We know this conclusively by the fact that we have a huge trade deficit ($574.7 billion over the last year - sorry; I know I promised no stats). You make a purchase on Amazon or at Wal-Mart, there's a real good chance that whatever you're buying was manufactured elsewhere. And, sure, Wal-Mart or Amazon do get a percentage from each sale but we're talking in the area of 1-5% (depending on the item). And given the scale of both operations it's unlikely that an increase in volume will cause them to make any significant hiring decisions.

So, in a sense, actually everything with this theory still does in fact hold. If all you care about is that the global economy is stimulated, then it absolutely still works. But I seriously doubt that most of the proponents of a tax cut are doing so because they believe it will help China's economy more than ours.

Here's another issue. There is always the assumption that an increase to a consumer's paycheck will automatically lead to an increase in their disposable income. That's simply not true. Someone who is in debt is actually already over-consuming and thus it's far more likely that they will just use the extra income to pay down debt. While that is better for the individual, it doesn't have any direct stimulative effect. Similarly, someone who has a wealth surplus already has the capacity to consumer more than they do and they have chosen not to. It's unlikely that they will decide to consume a great deal more given a small amount of extra income. Far more likely that they will decide to save or invest the extra cash. Now, both that and the consumer who pays down their credit cards will have net positive effects on the economy. Credit card companies getting paid back and savings accounts getting filled means banks can extend more credit to other consumers and increased investment leads to growth in the industrial and business sectors. But, again, these are long-term effects and not short-term boosts.

So what we are indeed looking for is someone whose income currently is in lock-step with their expenses; they have no net debt or wealth. Now this person is quite likely to spend any extra income on additional consumption. But I would hardly call it efficient to throw a lot of money at every consumer just to hit the 5% (max) in this position. It's like putting out a candle with a firehose.

So if tax cuts are not the answer, then what is? Do I have any thoughts on that? Well as a matter of fact I do.

To be continued . . .

Suggestions?

So I have very little today, and that's actually what I want to write about. I feel like no one really wants to read about my day to day activities but then it also seems like when I blog about politics or economics I can hear crickets chirping in the comments section. So, anyone got any suggestions for me on things I should blog about? Mainly I'm looking for things that I can express an opinion on (e.g. not "I've always wondered how maple syrup gets made. Can you explain that to me?"). And even if you don't have an idea for a topic, it'd be nice to know what kind of topics you've liked most/least that I've written about. Right now my only gauge for the interest level is the comments, but I also realize that's not always a good indicator. Should I just do political or economic posts? Should I axe both of them completely and just do humorous ones? Should I accept that no one cares about my thoughts and just post pictures of Anabelle? Any and all suggestions and comments are welcome. I've been pretty much meandering my way through this blog for the past couple years now writing about whatever I felt like, and I'd like to start to get a little more dialed in.

I also have become more open to the idea of having additional guest contributors, so if any of you are interested in writing something for me to post, please let me know.

Busy Everywhere

So a whole slew of things have kept me busy at work (12 meetings this week through Wednesday and 4 more tomorrow) and baby has been keeping Chrity and I busy at home and that has left my blog suffering. Things at work should slow down a bit after this week so hopefully I'll get back in the groove.

I have no doubt that I'll be talking a lot about Anabelle here, but in general I'm going to leave the weekly updates and the multitude of pictures and videos for Christy to post on her blog. Since we have 90% the same readership, I see no reason to post it at both places.

So just a couple thoughts I've had over the last week. First of all, the Olympics. Even before the announcement on Friday I was fairly indifferent to whether it came to Chicago or not. Although I have no immediate plans to change jobs or move, it would be a bit naive to just assume that they'll both be unchanged 7 years from now. Thus I found myself unable to get excited about getting to experience the Olympics firsthand nor could I muster any dread about how it would inconvenience my commute for a couple months. As for the decision itself, in my opinion it was always going to be Rio and, given that South America has never hosted the games, that's exactly where it should be going.

Given that, I frankly don't care that Chicago was eliminated first. The 2010 winter games will be held in Vancouver. Quick, can someone tell me the runner-up location? Didn't think so. There's no prize for 2nd or 3rd, so who cares? Plus, I was working from home on Friday and saw all the news coverage leading up to the announcement and on several occasions it was reported that the 1st round of voting often has a lot of surprises. Supposedly there are a lot of voters who say "ok, I'll vote for your city after mine's eliminated" so you can actually end up doing far better in subsequent votes than initial ones (similar to a run-off election reversing the popular vote from the initial election). Thus we were told that the 1st round was actually the most dangerous and that nothing would be a surprise. Well, apparently either the press didn't really believe that or they just meant that the acceptable surprise would be Rio getting eliminated, because suddenly once the vote was announced it was "an absolute shocker" and "something no one expected." I was sitting there going "I just sat here 5 minutes ago when you told me that anything could happen and nothing would surprise you." Gotta love spin.

In any case, I am also predictably displeased at the spinning of this into an Obama failure, but I'm not even going to waste much of my breath on that. Since he went to Copenhagen to pitch for it, it was his failure, and if he hadn't gone the knock would have been that he didn't try hard enough for it. For some people, the sun never shines during a Democratic presidency and every little thing is just further evidence that he's working hard every day to destroy our country.

To continue the happy topics, I am once again sounding an alarm bell on the economy. Actually, just on the stock market. I do believe that the recession is over and we will see overall positive GDP growth this year and next. The trouble is that the stock market seems to have priced in a very aggressive V-shaped turnaround whereas it's far more likely that we're going to see a more messy U-shaped one.

If you have a minute and care at all about financial stats, take a look at this chart. It show the price to earnings (P/E) ratio for the S&P 500. For the laymen, that's the ratio of a company's stock price to their latest earnings per share. Historically, a P/E of between 8 and 10 is a sign of a fairly stable economy. A level below that usually indicates that people are irrationally gloomy on the market, and once we get above 15 people are starting to get a little slap-happy (and the almost 45 we hit at the height of the dotcom boom was euphoria of a kind usually only acheived via high quality street drugs and proved to be just as fleeting). If we are truly just starting to pull out of one of the worst financial crises ever, why in the world are we sitting at almost 19 right now? That's the kind of number you should only see during a period of robust growth. It's an indicator that we are once again trying to buy our way out of the problem. People buy a stock today not because they believe it's actually worth what they're paying but because they believe that someone else will decide it's worth more tomorrow (the so-called "greater fools" theory). That's not creating value or rewarding profitable companies, it's just gambling. Not that there's anything wrong with that; the trouble is that eventually you run out of greater fools. Anyway, I'm just saying don't be surprised when we see another big slump in stock prices over the next year to 18 months. Of course, if we really do start seeing signs of strong GDP growth between now and then, then maybe these optimistic expectations will be justified. But I have a feeling that if that in fact does happen, we're going to see this P/E ratio get pushed even higher into silly territory again. Finally, I'd like to state once again that I am not a believer in trying to time the market so I wouldn't advise anyone to touch their 401ks and start unloading their stocks. The market deserves to be at this level; it just doesn't deserve to be there right now.

Negotiating with the ACLD

So on Saturday at around 1:30 A.M., having endured my daughter’s relentless screaming for the past 6 hours I began, for the first time, to really come to grips with how powerless we are as parents right now. And this is pretty new to me. No matter how powerless I have been in the past I have at least felt like I had some negotiating power. Some wiggle room. Some possible way to lessen the pain. But not now. We are confronted with a force that is utterly decisive and completely uncompromising. And it was in this spirit that I began to liken my daughter to a labor union. Only instead of layoffs, we attempt to negotiate laydowns. Here now a transcript of what the negotiations would look like if both parties could speak.

Us: Thank you for meeting with us today Anabelle. As your parents we feel like there have been some miscommunications recently and we want to clear these up so that hopefully we can all live together more peacefully.

ACLD: No problem. I came here straight from my nap.

Us: OK. First of all, the screaming. What’s the deal with that? Are we upsetting you? Is there something we’re not doing right?

ACLD: No; you’re doing just fine. I just choose to scream. It’s my right.

Us: But when you scream is it because you’re unhappy? Do you need to be changed? Are you hungry? Are you too hot? Too cold? Do you want your back rubbed? Do you want us to stop rubbing your back?

ACLD: I’d rather not say. My advice to you is to assume that it’s all of the above and try each solution 4-5 times because I also reserve the right to change my mind about what’s bothering me at any given time.

Us: OK, well let’s move on. As you may be able to tell from our disheveled and slightly crazy appearance sleeping has been something of an issue. Especially for your mother.

ACLD: Oh, really? I’m sleeping fine.

Us: Yes, we know. But we’d like a little more consistency. We’re going to need a minimum of 5 laydowns per day, for a minimum duration of 2 hours each, with the longest one occurring between the hours of midnight and 5 AM.

ACLD: Hmm; how about this? I’ll give you 4 laydowns per day, at random times, and of indeterminate length.

Us: OK, but can you try to make the one in the middle of the night the longest one?

ACLD: Well, I can’t promise I’ll try. But I’ll try to try.

Us: Fair enough. So what guarantees do we have that you’ll stick to this agreement?

ACLD: None whatsoever. In fact, I’ve already changed most of the rules we’ve already agreed to. Don’t worry though, I’ll change them back again. Maybe. Now if you don’t mind, I’m getting hungry, or sleepy, or cold. In any case, I’m about to start screaming so I’d advise you to start trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.

Back at Home

So Miss Anabelle had her homecoming yesterday, and now her and I are relaxing and watching the Bears game. Christy and my mom left about an hour ago to do some grocery shopping, which doesn't sound like much but is actually two landmarks. It's the first time I've been alone with Anabelle and the first time Christy has left her (not counting the times when the nurses took her to the nursery at the hospital). Not that she requires a whole lot of effort at the moment. It appears that at the moment she's got day-night confusion, so she pretty much does non-stop sleeping during the day and then the last 2 nights she has been wide awake from about 10 P.M. to 5 A.M. Last night Christy and I took 1.5-2 hour shifts keeping her occupied during that time so that the other one could get some sleep. Hopefully this is something that we can remedy pretty quickly; I'm back in the office tomorrow so it's gonna fall more on Christy to keep her quiet at night and I'll have a pretty exhausted wife on my hands if she decides that's the schedule she wants to keep long-term. And you'd think that it would be an easy problem to correct. Just wake her up more during the day. Well, let me tell you, as hard as it is to get her to fall asleep in the middle of the night, that's how hard it is to get her to wake up during the day. We've tried moving her arms and legs, changing her diaper, and even undressing her and blowing on her to give her a little bit of a chill (which sounds mean but is what they recommend) but she can pretty much sleep through anything when she's determined.

So it's back to the office and an attempt at some level of normalcy tomorrow. Hopefully I can get a decent night's sleep tonight and get some work done tomorrow. Although I expect people at work to be very understanding over the next couple of weeks, I really don't want to fall too far behind in my work. As time goes by I'm likely to just get more and more sleep deprived (at least for the next 6 months) so I've got to do my best to stay on top of things while I'm still functioning at something close to 100%.

As I type this now the Bears just fell behind 14-7 in the 3rd quarter. Anabelle is still sleeping straight through it but now daddy's crying. And like her at 3 in the morning, he's inconsolable.

Parenthood: Day 2

So, unsurprisingly, the last 28 hours have flown by in a blur. After the birth, we had to play the waiting game for a while. Apparently there are a lot of other babies in Evanston that share Anabelle's birthday (or the preceding couple days) because there were no recovery rooms available to us right away. Probably the biggest issue with this was that in the labor and delivery rooms there are no sleeping apparatuses for people other than the mother, and at that point I had been up for about 30 hours straight. So when Christy took a nap at 1:30 while Anabelle was up in the nursery getting her first bath I left Christy's mom to watch over her and headed home to get a few hours sleep (another big benefit to living 2 blocks away from the hospital). Never have 2 hours of sleep passed so quickly or felt so good.


By the time I got back to the hospital Christy had been moved to our recovery room and Anabelle had joined us again. That's pretty much where we've bee since, doing our best to please Miss Anabelle and keep her happy when she's awake and comfortable when she's asleep. We all tried to go to sleep at around 9:30 with varying degrees of success. At about 11:00 Anabelle started fussing so mommy fed her and she went back to sleep. Then at 12:30 the nursery came and took her away to get her Hepatitis immunization shot. At 4:30 she woke up again and after mom fed her it was dad's turn to get her to go back to sleep. Then at around 8:30 we all woke up for the day.

Since then it's been a bit of a circus here. Our pediatrician, Dr. Bernstein (who goes by Dr. Andy) came by and took a look at her at 9:30 and said that everything looks good and she is definitely on track to go home tomorrow. At about 9:30 she started to get cranky and we were joking that it was because she had just turned 1 day old and was depressed about how old she's getting. Between 10 and 11 we had visits from the food service people with our breakfast, the on-duty nurse to check on Christy and the baby, one housekeeper to attend to the trash and a different housekeeper to change the linens, and Christy's doctor. Finally, a lactation consultant came by to help Christy with breastfeeding and just left a few minutes ago. In between all that I also got to change my first of many, many diapers. Now we are just awaiting a circus of a different sort as various friends and family stop by to visit.

Tomorrow my mom is flying in from Texas so it will be nice to have an extra set of hands around the house to help out during the first week and I'm so glad she was able to make it up to visit her new granddaughter!

Think that's all for now. Here's a few more pictures from Anabelle's first day of life!

Baby Time!

Update #2: And she's here! After 51 minutes of pushing she arrived screaming her little head off at 9:06 A.M. She's quite a horse at 8 pounds, 11 oz. Mama and baby are currently getting to know one another. Here's the first of many, many pictures:

Update #1: As of 5:30 she is 7 cm dilated on her way up to 10 at ~1 cm per hour. Once she gets there, they tell us that we can expect between 1 and 3 hours of pushing till we're done. Do the math and it means a baby by noon and maybe as early as 10.

It's currently 4:41 A.M. and we're in the labor and delivery room at Evanston Hospital awaiting Anabelle's arrival. I was finishing up playing some online poker (where, shockingly enough, I actually won some money) and heading off to bed at a little before 12:30 when Christy came out of the bathroom and said "I'm not sure, but I think my water might have just broken." Unsure of what to do with this uncertain information, I just said "well, lay back down and try to sleep. If it's something, then we'll know soon enough and if it's nothing well then I guess we'll know that soon too." Not more than 4 minutes later she sat up and said "yep; that was definitely my water." Before I could even get her a towel from the linen closet she'd already had her first *real* contraction and immediately knew that they were different from the preparation ones she'd been feeling over the last couple weeks. So we got up and immediately started making all the last minute preparations. The contractions started coming every 4-5 minutes and after about a half hour we called the doctor to see if we should head over to the hospital. He said that we should so at about 1:30 we did just that.

After getting relatively settled and a few more contractions any lingering doubts Christy had about getting an epidural went out the window. They administered it to her at around 3:00 and since then she has been resting comfortably. She can still feel her legs and move them around but all the pain from the contractions are gone. It's funny because she can watch the little monitor and see the point where the contraction is at its peak and used to cause her absolutely excruciating pain but now she might as well be watching a video game.

She has been advised to try to get some sleep if she can and given that I got to lay down for a whopping 4 minutes so far tonight (I know, poor me) I am going to try and do the same. My completely non-medical opinion predicts that we'll have a daughter at 10:04 this morning. So far everything is going smoothly and everyone at the hospital, especially our nurse Amy, has been wonderful. I'll update more when I have a chance.

This is the monitor Christy is hooked up to. The upper left number is Anabelle's heart rate. It fluctuates between about 130 and 155. The upper right number measures the contractions. When it hits about 30, the contraction is starting (so you can see that she was in the middle of one when we took this). The highest number we've seen so far has been 118. Not sure how high they go.

This is the actual machine that does the monitoring. The monitor from the picture before is really just the screen on the left blown up. The paper on the right tracks the heartbeat and contractions so the doctors can see what is happening over time.

Have no idea what this is. Possibly the machine that goes "Bing!"

Relatively Quick Hits

First of all, still no baby. We've got an appointment set up for Friday to induce if she doesn't come before then, so at least there's an end in sight. We're still hoping that she comes on her own in the next 48 hours though. Since we've started telling people about the Friday plan, it seems as though everyone has an opinion on inducement. Let me put this as delicately as I can. Your opinion is valid, but we don't wish to hear it.

Today Max Baucus unveiled a summary of his health care bill. It's the most moderate of the current bills and carries with it an estimated price tag of $856 billion over the next ten years. It has no "public option" but would create insurance exchanges and bar insurers from dropping policyholders in the event of illness or from excluding people on the basis of pre-existing conditions. It specifically addresses that it will not provide coverage to illegal immigrants and no federal dollars will be used for abortions (though there are a couple caveats to this that will surely be more than enough ammo for the extremists to continue to rage). I'll reserve final judgment until the complete bill is released and analysed but my initial impression is that it addresses most of what Obama wanted and represents a step in the right direction. I'm firmly convinced that if a bill is to be passed this year that this will be the one. The more progressive bills from the House just don't have a chance in the Senate.

Tangentially related, former President Carter has made some comments indicating that he believes racism played a part in Rep Wilson's outburst-heard-round-the-world last week. While I don't necessarily disagree with him, I think it's counterproductive to talk about it right now. Playing the race card in any form just causes people to dig in their heels. It's not conducive to reconciliation. That comment, like the original outburst itself, just serves as a distraction which quickly dominates the debate. Suddenly we're talking about race relations in America. That's a worthy topic but not one that has any place in a health care debate, and it's going to take immense focus to get something done in the next couple months.

Finally, I've been following the debacle that has been the Afghanistan elections and I'm beginning to think along the same lines as George Will. It might be time to start packing it in. I understand that if we leave the Taliban will just set up shop again and it will once again become a training ground for terrorists. I'm starting to think that's the "better" of our options though. Mainly, I just don't think anyone has the stomach to do what really needs to be done: a probable decade-long commitment from an international force totalling half a million or more troops. After our surge, we'll have a total of 65,000 troops there. That may sound like a lot (and it is) but think about it this way: the football stadium in Champaign holds 70,000 people. Do you really think a football-stadium worth of troops can control a country the size of Texas? And these "elections" have proven to basically be the final straw with me. It's obvious that those in power have no desire to establish a flourishing democracy; they (like all bad leaders) just want to cling to power. So now we are spilling our blood and spending our money to support an illegitimate government while achieving little more than forcing the Taliban and the terrorists to move their camps across the border into Pakistan. I just don't know what we're actually accomplishing anymore.

Bears Hangover

If you have absolutely no interest in Bears football, you'll probably just want to skip this post.

So in the matter of about 4 hours Jay Cutler went from Bears savior to pariah. It will be interesting to see what kind of a reception he gets next week during his first home game. My prediction is that he'll get cheered but god help him if he doesn't get off to a good start or throws an early pick. As bad as his performance was (and it was pretty bad), I'd urge my fellow Bears fans not to overreact. It's still just one game. Not that I'm comparing the two, but Favre once threw 6 INTs in a playoff game, and also threw 5 in a regular season game. The point being that even the great QBs can look absolutely terrible on occasion. It's actually a good thing that the 4 INTs were a career high; it would be much worse if he'd already done that 3-4 times. Still, the wrap on Cutler was that he can't win a big game and folds in pressure situations and this certainly didn't do him any favors in that regard.

If you break down the 4 picks, one was an absolutely atrocious throw (the first one), one was actually a sensational defensive play (the 2nd one), and the other two (while still absolutely Cutler's fault) had as much to do with the receiver and the QB not being on the same page as the throw itself. For the 3rd pick, Cutler is scrambling and he sees Knox cutting across the middle but then almost simultaneously as Cutler releases the ball Knox abruptly cuts back. As a receiver, that's what you're supposed to do. When you see your QB out of the pocket, you run to that side of the field so that he doesn't have to throw across the field away from his momentum. But Knox worked mainly with the 2nd and 3rd team during preseason, so Cutler and him likely don't have a good rapport yet but that should change (and hopefully soon). Finally, on the last pick (although again an ill-advised throw) Knox really needs to help his QB out and doesn't. It's a quick out route towards the sidelines and Cutler throws it to where both his receiver and the corner are (which is why it was ill-advised; there was no separation). Both the receiver and defender turn and see the ball coming, but rather than come to the ball Knox inexplicably decides to move backwards and gives Al Harris an easy pick. If he makes a move towards the ball, 8 times out of ten they both fight for it and it drops incomplete.

As for positives from the game, the defense (apart from one Nathan Vasher slip) actually played spectacularly. Although you rarely say that about a game where the D gives up 21 points, considering the 4 turnovers (which doesn't even include the idiotic "fake" punt) it really was. Of course, as I sit here and write this it looks like Urlacher is now done for the season and 2 other defenders went down with injuries, so it could be that this is the best effort we'll get from the Bears D the whole year. If so, it's a shame to waste it.

In the end, this doesn't change my season win prediction. In reviewing the schedule, I already had this game marked down as an L when I came up with the 11-5 mark. That still doesn't stop me from being disappointed about yesterday (and force me to repeat my mantra: it's not THAT they lose, it's HOW they lose). I also have them losing this week at home to the Steelers, before winning 7 of their next 8. This is how I see the rest of the season:

Pitt L
@ Seattle W
Detroit W
@ Atlanta L
@ Cinncy W
Cleveland W
Arizona W
@ San Fran W
Philadelphia W
@ Minnesota L
St. Louis W
Green Bay W
@ Baltimore L
Minnesota W
@ Detroit W

That's 7-1 at home this year, and 4-4 on the road. I still think that's doable. Assuming, of course, that we are spared any more Rex Grossman impersonations from Mr. Cutler.

Still the Proud Parents of a Fetus

So, as of about 13 hours ago Miss Anabelle is officially late and her parents (and especially her mother) are not too pleased about it. Actually, it turned out to be a blessing that she didn't come yesterday. For some unknown reason (possibly Jimmy John's poisoning) I suddenly got extremely sick yesterday afternoon around 1:00. I spent the next 3 hours in bed with the shakes and then started feeling extremely hot and got a splitting headache. All I could think about was "please don't let Christy go into labor right now." Luckily she didn't and, happily, though I am still not 100% I am feeling much better today. So now Anabelle is once again welcome to come at any time now (though I wouldn't be terribly upset if she waited till after the Bears game tonight).

Christy and I walked into downtown Evanston on Friday night, had dinner a really good BBQ joint, and then went and saw a movie (Extract). As you can probably see by my review to the right, I didn't think too much of it. Definitely my least favorite of Mike Judges' movies (the best of course being Office Space, then Idiocracy, and even Beavis and Butthead Do America was better). It's not that the film was terrible; it's more that there weren't any truly hysterical parts and none of the characters were all that likeable. Still, at this point we have to treat every night out as potentially our last for a while so it was still a good time.

Today I am just trying to rest up and get ready to watch the Bears tonight (pending fetal escape plans)! Call it Cutler fever, but I am actually quite optimistic about the Bears this year. Their early schedule is pretty tough, but I'm predicting 11-5 and a 1st round bye in the playoffs.

Slacking Again

So I didn't really intend to not post anything for 2 and a half weeks. Ironically, it's not for lack of anything to say. I actually have a whole bunch that I want to write about but haven't found the time. Well, that's not quite true. I haven't found the time to do it while I've been at work, and I'm not accustomed to blogging on my own time. For once I find myself working pretty much from the time I get to work all the way till I leave (a truly novel approach, I know). And not because I have tons and tons of work to do; it's just that from now on every day when I leave I have to think that I might not be coming in for the next 4-5 days so I am trying to get as much done as possible so I don't fall too far behind when Anabelle finally comes.

Speaking of Anabelle, she continues to make us wait. The first week of September came and went, thus proving me wrong (not for the first and surely not for the last time). Christy had a doctor's appointment today and she told us (for the second week in a row) that she could go into labor at any point now. She also told us that Christy is 4cms dillated and almost 100% effaced. For those uninitiated with that terminology . . .um, google it. But just to give a frame of reference, if you are in the hospital and in labor they won't allow you to get an epidural until you are at 4cm, so it's usually an indicator that you're pretty far along in the process.

As you can imagine this past weekend was rather uneventful, as we pretty much just sat around waiting for a baby that decided she's not ready to come out yet. It was nice to have one last relaxing 3-day weekend but the trouble was we couldn't ever fully relax knowing that at any moment we might have to spring into action. So instead I geeked out and played about 20 hours of Final Fantasy III and watched a lot of mediocre movies as well as the entire first season of 30 Rock.

OK, I'm just getting set to watch Obama's speech to Congress. I'm hoping to have a blog on that as well as a couple of other random topics in the next couple days.

Getting Close . . .

Anabelle's due date is exactly 3 weeks from tomorrow. That means that tomorrow she will be officially at 37 weeks and thus considered to be at full term. That means that from this point on it could pretty much be at any time. We went to the doctor on Wednesday and she's actually a little ahead of schedule but of course they don't push up the due date or anything because they don't want you blaming them when it doesn't happen. Personally, I just have this feeling that she's going to come the first week of September and be a few days early. But of course if my "feelings" were always correct my Vegas experiences would be a lot different so who knows.

We had the joy of attending Lamaze class all last weekend. And I mean ALL weekend; 9-4 on Saturday and 9-2 on Sunday. Actually, while not the most exciting of experiences I found it to be a lot more worthwhile than I expected and I'm glad that we went. It's funny because going into the class you think of giving birth as the most painful,traumatic experience in the world but then the way they talk about it and explain it with the various models/videos/diagrams it makes it seem like it's this really easy process that basically takes care of itself. So it's like going from one extreme to the other. Christy is still pretty positive that she's going to get the epidural but she's going to try to go up till that point without pain medication. We'll see how that works out. All in all though I've never been more glad to be a guy and not have to worry about going through this. I think that the most surprising thing about the whole class was that I thought that it would be at some point during it that everything would "hit me" and I'd start freaking out about how close it all was to happening. But it actually was just the opposite. I ended up being far more reassured because now I know the logistics of where I need to go to drop her off, where we'll be staying before she has the baby and after and what's going to happen to Anabelle between birth and when we leave. Of course, I'm sure there will still be plenty of opportunity for freaking out.

As you may be able to tell from looking to the right of this post, this week has been dominated by movies ('cause the Cubs certainly haven't given me any reason to follow them dilligently). In general, the 2 movies I saw in the theatre were excellent and the two on DVD . . . not so much. For sure anyone that likes sci-fi at all needs to see District 9 immediately and all Tarantino fans will enjoy Inglorious Basterds. I had heard very bipolar things about The Reader: people seemed to either love it or hate it and now after seeing it I can see why (of course, after saying that I gave it a firmly middle rating). Without giving too much away, there's a plot device that the whole movie hinges on which some people will just accept and other people will think is just horribly, horribly stupid. You can put me closer to the latter category. Other than that it is well written and acted, and it certainly wasn't boring, but I just don't think it had any business being anywhere near the Best Picture category. And Winslet's performance, while solid, wasn't really Oscar-worthy either in my opinion. Meryl Streep gave a much better performance in Doubt, but I think the Academy just expects great performances from her so it doesn't get the attention it should. Finally, there's not a lot to say about Rachel Getting Married. I struggled with how exactly to rate it because . . .well, the best way I can describe it is that this movie was not meant for me. If you love you some melodrama and the idea of basically being a fly on the wall during the wedding weekend of a fairly dysfunctional family appeals to you, then by all means see it. Probably the best way I can sum it up is that it's probably a 4-Star movie that I had a 1-Star reaction to; hence the 2.5 Stars.

What the Health?!?!

So, even though we still don't have just one official health care reform bill (we have 6) I'm ready to weigh in a little bit with some of my thoughts.

Above all, as per usual I have to express my extreme disapointment at how quickly the quality of the discourse has deteriorated on this issue. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am a little bit. A year ago it seemed like it was generally acknowledged that health care reform was needed and almost everyone I spoke with seemed fully capable of discussing it in a rational manner. Even at my work meetings at BCBS the consensus among the VPs was "something is going to happen and it needs to happen, because the status quo is going to quickly get out of hand."

Now, somehow over the course of the last year we've gone from that to a bunch of people being convinced that a government-run health care plan is basically a harbinger of the apocalypse.

Look, there are plenty of reasons to be against a government plan. There's a lot of valid points to be made. In general, the government doesn't do as efficient a job as the private sector in most industries. You practically cannot throw a stone without hitting a government-run bureauacracy that's rife with either corruption or crippling inefficiency (or a healthy blend of both). What's completely not valid, however, are the outlandish accusations of "death panels" and comparisons between Obama and the Democratic majority to Hitler and Nazi Germany. These are baseless fear-mongering attacks used as justification by people who already hate Obama and the Democratic party and are looking for any thinly-veiled excuse to try and legitimize their feelings in their own mind and the mind of other easily-led individuals.

This whole death panel furor (not to be confused with Fuhrer) began with a seemingly inocuous amendment in the House bill which would allow Medicare to provide for voluntary counseling on end-of-life decisions (i.e. living wills, learning about hospice, making a family member a health proxy). How this has been distorted into people claiming that the elderly would be subjected to mandatory reviews in front of government bureaucrats who would then determine if they should live or die is almost beyond me. This is not a leap in logic; it's an interstellar voyage to another plane of reality. Guess what? I'm willing to bet that 90% of you out their with a private insurance plan are currently covered for end-of-life counseling. And although I haven't been to every room in my building, I'm pretty sure that I would have noticed any signs that said "Death Panel Tribunal" or "The Killing Floor" around here.

Perhaps the most amusing of the criticisms came from the Investor's Business Daily who, in comparing the Democratic plan to Britain's current health care, said "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Duly informed that scientist Stephen Hawking is both British and living, they then amended the article. Stephen Hawking's response: "I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." You know, you'd like to think that even the most pedestrian of journalists would do a real quick fact check just to make sure that one of your main points does not in fact completely contradict your entire premise.

Alright, while since I've ragged on the right-wing attacks of the health care bill I'll switch gears and take aim at the Democratic party. My question to them is this: why are they so petrified of public opinion on this issue? It seems to me that they're spending way too much time trying to deflect all the ridiculous and outlandish criticism. There is still 15 months to go before the next election, so it would seem that by the time it rolls around you're going to be judged by the results of the bill you pass and not on the debate that surrounds it now. As such, it seems like the most prudent option is to spend as much time as you can on crafting the best possible bill. Let the Republicans and other nuts say as many crazy and ridiculous things as they want to; in fact the crazier the better. When legislation passes and none of their apocalyptic scenarios come to pass it will just serve as another hit to their credibility. But if you sit there and worry about every opinion poll and detrimentally alter the bill to fit the popular mood of the hour, you've got a good chance of ending up with a spectacularly crappy bill. And that's what'll get you killed in the election next year.

But back to the Republicans (sorry). Again I lament the lack of a viable, rational opposition. By the Republican ideals that I grew up with, they should be against government health care for two reasons: 1) the cost, and 2) the private sector is more efficient. We would be far better served as a nation if they stuck to those points of contention instead of branching off into some of these ridiculous tangents. I absolutely do not like the idea of unchecked power. I believe that the goal of an opposition party is to compromise so that they get as many of their ideas as possible represented in legislation while they are the minority party. Simply fighting everything tooth and nail doesn't serve anyone. If a bill is bad; make it less bad and then support it. Then you can go back and tell your constituency "this is a horrible bill, but at least I was able to get this silver lining in it." Otherwise, simply refusing to support an opposition bill under any circumstances just removes and incentive for the majority party to work with you at all. As long as they can keep their party together, you're obsolete.

One final note, and yes it's another shot at Republicans. Above all, the thing that kills me about this party is the hypocrisy. They don't govern according to the things they claim to believe in. They are unwavering in their support for the Constitution when it comes to the 2nd amendment, yet when it comes to immigration they like to conveniently overlook the 14th amendment ("All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States"). Everytime any politician proposes the idea of raising the tax rates on any group, "that's socialism!" is the rallying cry. But I don't hear any of them making the proposal to move to a flat tax or abolish income tax altogether. Finally, and as it relates to health care, it seems to me that if you're going to take the position that the government is an inferior insurer to the private sector that you ought to be proposing an abolishment of all existing government health insurance. That means no more Medicare and no more city or state supported health insurance either. If the private sector is so much better, then let the government buy their employee's insurance from them.

All of this hit home for me this week. On Monday rumors began swirling that Blue Cross was going to be laying off a substantial number of employees sometime soon. Well yesterday the shoe dropped and 650 employees were let go. Fortunately, I was not one of them. But as I was thinking on Monday about the possibility, I realized that even if I got laid off and couldn't find another job, although it would be tough, we would be OK. Even if we got foreclosed on and had to beg family to take us in, I think that we could get by. Well, in every respect but one: our health care would be gone. And what if the worst happened and Anabelle needed some very expensive surgeries in her first couple years of life. What are we going to do? Not getting it done will not be an option. And the worst part is that there's nothing I can do right now to better prepare myself. No job = no health insurance; it's that simple right now. This actually has nothing to do with government vs. private insurance; I just think the whole tie-in between your health insurance and your employer is sheer lunacy. Whether it's a government-run plan or just my employer giving me the equivalent of what they pay on my behalf so I can go out and get my own coverage, either one is better than what we have now. And that realization that doing almost anything is better than doing nothing is a perspective that deserves more prominence in this ongoing debate.

A Picture's Worth . . .Well at Least a Caption

Just a few pictures I've taken with my G1 over the last couple weeks which have struck me as humorous.

First up, from the basement of our condo I present you with possibly the world's most useless sign:

Apparently it is designed for the .01% of the population who knows how to read but doesn't know what a fire extinguisher looks like. I also have to wonder if the arrow is at all necessary.

Next up, I took this one at IKEA this weekend. Apparently they do not have a very high opinion of the quality of their merchandise (those are rugs BTW):

And finally, I'd like to present you with what I like to call "The Ultimate in Short-Term Solutions":

Guaranteed to completely solve your problem for upwards of 30-45 seconds!

In other news, I finally saw The Watchmen this past weekend. Overall after watching it I became convinced that the graphic novel must be pretty good but I think there were just some things that didn't translate very well into film. Still, it was entertaining and I'm glad I saw it. For once I thought that the "twist" at the end was actually pretty decent, which is a rarity in super-hero movies.

This weekend we are seeing a play on Friday night (a new play called Spring Awakening) and then heading up to the Wisconsin State Fair on Saturday to get our annual cream-puff fix, take in some pig races, watching a mooing contest, and undoubtedly spend a bunch of money on some useless crap at the expo. Might be the last "normal" outing we get to do before baby-time.

Decelarating

So not too much new going on. That's actually a good thing, since we've been pretty busy since early May. This weekend we've got a Cubs game (possibly our last of the year) and then just relaxing on the agenda. Not too bad.

Christy and I went to the Elton John/Billy Joel concert on Tuesday. Overall it was OK, but I just was not in the right mood for it. I was still tired from the weekend and really would have rather just gone home, watched the Cubs game, and went to bed early. I have been trying to be healthier of late and decided not to drink. I find that I can enjoy a concert sober only if I am really, really into the music and that's only true of a handful of artists for me at this point. And of course with that in mind this concert decided to be the longest one I have ever attended - over 3 and a half hours. Good for getting your money's worth but bad when you're looking at the setlist online and just counting down till it's over. But we mainly went for Christy and she seemed to have a good time so that's all that matters. I have seen Billy Joel before and would see him again but I most definitely will not be going to any future Elton John concerts. Musically, he was fine but man he is just not exciting at all. He's sitting for every song. Obviously he has to do that since he's playing the piano, but it doesn't make it any more exciting for the audience. Then after each song he would stand up, wave his arms a little bit, clap for himself, then sit back down. Repeat. No banter with the crowd at all. By comparison, Billy Joel had the energy of a teenager.

I've been following the health care debate pretty closely. Being a Blue Cross employee, obviously it will affect me more than just about anyone else other than the people currently uninsured that will get insurance. I'm going to refrain from going in depth on it right now because it's still such a work in progress. Suffice to say that on one hand I'm very glad that it's being pushed off till the fall because it still needs a lot of work, and on the other hand I'd be a lot happier to see Republicans take a more constructive approach to the debate instead of continuing to play the socialist card again and again and again.

The only other interesting thing I came upon is a story about the CIA and LSD tests. My brother turned me on to the "Stuff You Should Know" podcasts from howstuffworks.com and one of them was on the CIA's testing of LSD on unsuspecting Americans in the 50s and 60s. This story would seem to be the stuff of conspiracy theories but thanks to the Freedom of Information Act it's now all been verified. I'd advise you to either read the article or listen to the podcast the next time you have 20 minutes free. Frankly (as mentioned in the podcast) I'm absolutely stunned they haven't made a Hollywood biopic about George White (one of the main ringleaders). Of particular interest is that the second stage of their experiments occurred in San Francisco and was one of the main contributing factors to the birth of the counter-culture revolution there.

Moving On

So, a quick scorecard for the last couple posts:

Post (largely) on a book about the Iraq War - 1 comment (unrelated to Iraq)
Post on retirement - 1 comment
Post on Michael Jackson - 21 comments

Seems about right. I'll have to remind myself of this the next time I find myself complaining that Hollywood makes too many mainstream popcorn movies. Does my writing completely suck or do you guys really not have any opinions on these things? Or has Weir become my sole readership? That's a distinct possibility. Weir, maybe I should just start e-mailing you directly. Although, ironically, your commenting frequency is better than your e-mail response rate.

Moving on . . .

I got the quarterly results of my 401(k) in the mail the other day and was astonished to see that it actually made money! Wow, who knew that they could do that?

Moving on . . .

So tomorrow is Christy's shower at our place and I will be . . . elsewhere. I had orginally planned to go out of town somewhere but seeing as we have traveled 3 of the last 4 weekends that doesn't seem too appealing to me any more. So instead I'm going to be hibernating at the movie theatre in downtown Evanston. As of right now I'm planning to see 3 movies: The Hurt Locker, Harry Potter, and Transformers 2. I look at that list and immediately think about the law of diminishing returns.

Moving on . . .

We finally got a Wii and I've been doing the Wii Fit for about a week now. Overall I like it but it is definitely a blow to the ego the first time you step on and a high-pitched, chirpy little voice cheerfully informs you "that's overweight" as your on-screen representation balloons in the mid-section. I really like the Yoga stuff even though it massively exposes how horribly inflexible I am. But I was never gonna go to a class on my own so I suppose this is the only way it was ever going to happen. I also just got Punch-Out last night and it is everything I thought it could be and more. Call me crazy but I've always thought that Punch-Out would make a great movie. Certainly it would have to be campy and cartoony (I'm thinking something in the vein of Hellboy 2) but can you tell me that Soda Popinski, Bald Bull, and Super Macho Man wouldn't make great characters? 10 years ago Matt LeBlanc would have been a good Mac; not sure who would play him now. Forrest Whitaker would definitely have to play Doc.

As we head into the weekend, I think we've gone 10 days now without a celebrity death. Let's hope that streak is still alive come Monday. Also, I'm thinking of doing another roundtable, so either comment or send me an e-mail if you'd like to be a part of it. Better yet, regardless of whether or not you'd like to participate in it I'd love to get some ideas for questions so that I don't have to come up with them all myself and force people to write about things that no one cares about. I'll still be the one selecting the question (this is still a blogtatorship) but I think it'll be more interesting that way.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Happy Non-Sports Day!

As we sit here the day after the MLB All-Star game, we are in the midst of the only day in the entire calendar year with no televised event from any of the four major pro sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL). That means that today is a particularly difficult today for husbands across the U.S. to get out of doing the umpteen number of projects around the house they've been promising their wives they would do this last year or so, and bachelors will need to find some other thinly-veiled excuse to drink on a Wednesday. I will be "celebrating" by going to Home Depot (to get what will hopefully be the last supplies to put the finishing touches on the nursery) and Sam's Club (to get supplies for Christy's baby shower on Saturday). Seems pretty fitting.

I saw this article on Yahoo the other day. You don't really need to click on the link (not that you were going to anyway). The title is "Swearing Makes Pain More Tolerable" but in a Freudian slip moment I initially read it as "Swearing Makes Palin More Tolerable." Indeed it does . . .

Last week saw the passing of Robert McNamara (former Secretary of State) at the age of 93. Few people took a break from the Michael Jackson coverage to notice. I'd just like to take this opportunity to recommend (again) that everyone see the 2003 McNamara documentary The Fog of War about the lessons learned from Vietnam. It is an absolutely fascinating film and gives you some great insight into how things that seemed so certain at the time turned out to be dead wrong. There are obvious parallels to the Iraq War (and really just about any war) and it makes you wonder if 20 years from now we'll be seeing anyone from the Bush administration being as forthright as McNamara is here. Regardless what you think of him, he is definitely worth listening to.

Speaking of passings that no one noticed, how about poor Bill Mays? My brother gets the award for funniest joke in bad taste that I've heard this year. Written to me via e-mail: "Ed, Michael, and Farrah; it always comes in 3s. But wait! Billy Mays will throw in one for free! Only if you act RIGHT NOW."

Anyone who might be keeping tabs on my movie and book lists on the right may have noticed that I finally finished another book: The Gamble by Thomas Ricks. It's only the 2nd book I've finished this year, which is way down from my average of 1/month the last couple years. I blame 1) my obsession with playing Donkey Kong on the el; 2) my Kindle New York Times subscription; and 3) my Economist subscription. In any case, The Gamble is a "sequel" to his 2006 book Fiasco. That book covered the events of the Iraq War from 2003-2005 while the new one covers 2006-2008. The first question most people ask about the books is "Are they partisan?" In my opinion I don't think that they are. Sure, Fiasco was extremely critical about the handling of the war and that was controversial in 2006 but at this point you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who holds the position that the war was run well during that time. This book is definitely more optimistic but that's not saying all that much. You get a lot of great details into how the idea for the "surge" came about, how Petraeus came to be in charge of it, and how the tide slowly started to turn. However, you aren't left with a whole lot of optimism that the situation is not going to start deteriorating quickly after we've pulled out of the major cities (i.e. as of 6/30/09).

The conventional wisdom about the Surge is that it worked because we finally had enough troops there to do the job. That's true, but it's misleading. The real change was one of strategy: we moved from having a small number of large forward operating bases (FOBs) just outside the city limits to engaging in classic counter-insurgency strategy by having lots of small bases located within the cities in neighborhoods. Once it was decided to adopt that strategy, the generals (namely Odierno and retired Gen Keane) estimated how many troops would be needed to accomplish it and discovered that they needed 30,000 more.

In military speak, the "center of gravity" changed from seeking out and destroying insurgent and terrorist cells to protecting the local population with the hope being that once trust was gained with the people and local tribal leaders that they would assist the military in helping apprehend "unfriendlies". And indeed that is exactly what happened. After an initial spike in violence as the troops moved into hostile areas, casualties dropped dramatically and the focus of attacks increasingly became U.S. forces instead of locals.

So why the pessimism? Well, one of the least publicized aspects of the Surge is that one of the principle reasons for the decline in violence (at least initially) was due to the U.S. military deciding to put members of the Sunni insurgency on the payroll to get them to stop fighting. From the book:

This may have been the biggest gamble Petraeus took as the commander of the war in Iraq. He was going behind the back of the Baghdad government to put its enemies on the American payroll. Strikingly, he didn't seem to think he needed to get clearance from the American government, either. When asked about how he had gotten the president to agree to the program, he indicated that he hadn't asked Bush about it. "I don't think it was something that we needed to ask permission for. We had the authority to conduct what are called security contracts, and that was how we saw these."

In other words, the insurgents (particularly those not religiously motivated) were happy to lay down there arms as long as they were being paid to do so. They were paid ostensibly to keep security in their own neighborhoods, but of course the truth of the matter was that with them no longer creating the violence there was not a lot of security forces needed.

All of the strategic steps taken during the Surge were with one goal in mind: creating enough temporary stability to allow the political process to move forward. And quite simply that has not happened. 5 years since the first Iraqi elections and there is still not an agreement in place for territories to share oil revenue; an item that was one of their top priorities. Maddeningly, as the violence got better the politics have actually gotten worse. With the situation not as dire, a lot of the politicians have decided that instead of forging compromises they can afford to take harder lines and be more demanding. The bottom line is that right now Iraq is not a melting pot so much as it is oil and water. As a group the Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds simply don't like each other much, and it's just very hard imagining them co-existing peacefully without the U.S. acting as constant mediators.

And in case you are not utterly sick of me rambling on about this subject, here are some other quotes from the book that I found interesting:

“The surge may have bought transitory successes . . . but it has done so by stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism.”

"One of the lessons of the twentieth century, noted David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency expert, was that “there has never been a successful counterinsurgency that took less than 10 years.”

"A senior intelligence officer in Iraq described the long-term American goal as 'a stable Iraq that is unified, at peace with its neighbors, and is able to police its internal affairs, so it isn’t a sanctuary for al Qaeda. Preferably a friend to us, but it doesn’t have to be.' He paused, then pointedly noted that his list doesn’t include democracy or the observation of human rights."

"The Americans have imposed power sharing on Iraq’s factions, he said, and that should worry us for several reasons. First, it produces what looks like peace but isn’t. Second, in such situations eventually one of the factions seeks to break out of the arrangement. 'Thus,' McCreary wrote, 'power sharing is always a prelude to violence,' usually after the force imposing it withdraws."

"'I don’t think the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet,' he said. 'I suspect Sadr is recruiting and amassing weapons and resources for that day we pull down our troop levels to the point where he can make a grab for the seat of power in Baghdad. I’m sure his boys are infiltrating all levels of the Iraqi army and police, and he is smart enough to wait until he realizes we are drawn down to a point where we can’t effectively stop him without a massive rebuild of troops, . . . a point where the American public will not stomach another buildup.'"

"The less the Iraqi generals need American support, the more they might be inclined to take control of the government, so one reason to keep a substantial number of troops there, said Biddle, was to deter them from launching a coup. One nightmare scenario, he noted, leads eventually to a Shiite general who takes over explicitly as a Shiite out to suppress the Sunnis—and who has at his disposal a military and an economy more effective and efficient than Saddam Hussein’s ever were. 'Imagine an Iraq-Iran axis with their oil wealth, a modern equipped army, in cahoots with each other,' he said."

"The role of Iran remains problematic. At this point it appears to be the biggest winner in the Iraq war, and perhaps in the region—both in the short term and long term. As former Iranian president Muhammed Khatami boasted to the scholar Vali Nasr, 'regardless of where the United States changes regimes, it is our friends who will come to power.' In other words, all Iran really has to do is stand back and collect its winnings as Iraqi Shiites take power and realize they have few allies in the region aside from Iran."

"Iraqi counterparts would candidly say they were just waiting for the Americans to depart so they could revert to their old methods of population suppression. Older officers 'would sit and tell us they wanted to go back to the old way underneath Saddam and were just waiting for the U.S. to leave,' reported Maj. William Arnold, who in 2007 advised a battalion of the Iraqi 9th Division (Mechanized), a particularly significant unit because it was part of the only armored brigade in the Iraqi army and so would be key to launching a military coup d’état. 'We felt that those guys would listen to us just because they were using us as a checkbook.'”

"Gen. Odierno said in my last interview with him in November 2008 that he thinks Iraqi commanders have improved and that they no longer will automatically revert to Saddam-era viciousness. 'I think two years ago that was true. I think maybe even a year and a half ago it was true. I think a year ago it was a little less true. I think today it’s less true.'”

"When you got to know them and they’d be honest with you, every single one of them thought that the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq was absolutely ludicrous.”

"'We’re thinking in terms of Reconstruction after the Civil War,' Miller added. That may be a historically insightful way to think about the duration of the American presence in Iraq, but it probably is not a good sign politically, given that Reconstruction was a failure, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization that for the next century violently intimidated American blacks and any whites who might seek to help them exercise their civil rights. Nor have Americans signed up for a century-long mission in Iraq."

"The heart of the Iraq matter still lies before us, Crocker maintained in both my interviews with him in Baghdad in 2008, and he likely is correct. 'What the world ultimately thinks about us and what we think about ourselves,' he said, 'I think is going to be determined much more by what happens from now on than what’s happened up to now.' In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."