Mark Byron

Carthago Delenda Est

Well, he didn't fully destroy Carthage, NC, but a gunman did a decent job of ruining its Sunday, killing seven patients and a nurse in a nursing home.

The slain patients ranged in age from 78 to 98, Moore County District Attorney Maureen Krueger said. The man accused of carrying out the attack, 45-year-old Robert Stewart, was in custody, and his condition was unknown Sunday night, McKenzie said.

Stewart was not an employee of the nursing home -- the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center -- and he did not appear to have been related to any of the patients, she said.

Sadly, there will be some that think that Stewart was doing everyone a favor; DirecTV only jokes about euthanizing America, but Stewart did just that in effect.

Horsey-Town

Eileen will be working on Alysheba Way on the east side of Lexington for the next couple weeks. The street's namesake, the 1987 Kentucky Derby winner, passed on yesterday.

The charismatic star, dubbed "America's Horse" by racing fans, Alysheba was euthanized Friday night following a fall in his stall at the Kentucky Horse Park's Hall of Champions, where he was buried Saturday.

We've been here in Lexington just short of two years; I'll be starting up my 8th quarter at Sullivan on Monday. We've yet to be out to the Horse Park on the NE side of town, where they have a number of interesting exhibits and also some free horse-related activities for viewing on most weekends; the major events, like the Rolex Three-Day, will cost a pretty penny, but a garden-variety visit is museum-affordable. They'll be having the World Equestrian Games, with all the horse-related stuff you'd see in the Olympics, out there next spring; it's a every four-year event in the mid-term election year between the Summer Olympic years.

We'll have to see the Horse Park one of these Saturdays, or maybe a Friday afternoon when Eileen's free. Also, we might want to make our way out to Keeneland, where they have the main thoroughbred actions and horse race meets; they have their spring meet there next month, with the Blue Grass Stakes being their signature event, frequently a tune-up for Kentucky Derby horses.

Does the UPS Whiteboard Guy Have Special Drawing Rights?

[Update 10:45PM-I'm getting some Google hits for the UPS Whiteboard guy-his name is Andy Azula, who works for the Martin Agency; he came up with the idea for the ad and his demo as the whiteboard guy worked better than any of the actors they brought in. It reminds me of Crush the turtle from Finding Nemo; it was voiced by director Andrew Stanton, who couldn't find anyone who did a better surfer dude voice for Crush]

One of the stories in finance that has gotten legs the last few weeks is a move to create a global super-currency based loosely on the IMF's Special Drawing Rights; here's a Motley Fool piece in the issue. Right now, an SDR is set to be worth 0.632 US dollars+0.41 Euros+18.4 Yen + 0.0903 British Pounds; they redo the weightings every five years, and this set is good through 2010; the percentages are 44% dollar, 33% Euro and 11% each for pound and yen; the yen's only worth roughly a penny, so they have a relatively big coefficient.

Would an SDR bank account be useful for firms to stash their cash him, if you could have a SDR-based account? Yes, for it would give you decent diversification across the four major players in international finance. You wouldn't need to have actually SDR coins and bills to do that; you had Euro-based bank accounts at the turn of the millennium when the old currencies were locked in to their exchange rates but before actual Euros were printed out in 2002.

The trick would be to have a monetary policy for such a critter. Right now, the IMF doesn't have to do macro monetary policy per se; they help out countries who are short on hard currency, but don't have to manage the supply of SDRs. You'd likely need some other sort of entity to be the central banker for the new currency, which might include a broader basket of currencies that the four in the SDRs.

Would that be a slap in the face of the US? Yes, but if they keep something akin to the current weights, the US dollar would be 40% or so of the new currency. Better that they hang on to 40 cents than zero cents if they opt to go to a Euro or a not-so-free-world alternative; China and Russia are major sponsors of this alternative, which might be the beginnings of some sort of Second World movement.

More on that later.

Razing Arizona

I'm waiting for the MSU-Kansas game to come on, and got an eyeful out of UL (as we call them down this way). They dismantled Arizona 103-64. Is this the same UL club that UK took to the wire in Freedom Hall earlier this season? If they did that to UK in January, he'd be a poster boy for Southwest ("Wanna get away?"), for he wouldn't want to take the bus back down I-64 afterwards. And since Southwest does fly out of Louisville, he'd have been able to take them up on it.

This was my first good look of Arizona's Chase Budinger, and I'm not sure how he fits on the next level. He's a bit slow for an NBA 3 and a bit small for a 4, but he does a lot of things well. One guy he reminds me of is Brian Cardinal, who has had a long but journeyman NBA career.

However, he also reminds me a bit of how Dan Majerle when he was a mobile power forward for Central Michigan (was it already 21 years ago?); he manange to make the switch to the wing at the pro level rather well. Since he's not that far down the road as an assistant coach for the Suns, he might be someone that Chase might want to chase down as he preps for the draft.

Let Your Mouse Fingers do the Walking

We had our local phone books delivered today, which is a waste of paper for my household. With broadband cable, we're far more likely to look something up on-line than thumb through a phone book. Google Maps will do a far better job than a phone book of listing available stores of a certain type and will include phone numbers along with locations.

It's interesting what the Web has done in many areas. Wikipedia and other web resources have made conventional encyclopedia obsolete, or at least not worth the hundreds of dollars to buy. The World Almanac used to be a yearly buy, but most of that information is a Google away these days and up to date at that.

What reference books has the Web banished from your bookshelf (or got them collecting dust) and what books still get used even with the Web?

Right Turn, Billy Clyde

The vultures circling over the UK campus downtown now have pounced on some fresh meat; Billy Gillespie just got fired earlier this afternoon. 22-14 and an NIT quarterfinals run wasn't enough for the UK faithful (and that's not too much of exaggeration; folks bleed UK blue around here more so than anywhere I've lived). Had UK been playing this weekend in the NCAA quarterfinals, we'd likely not be having this conversation.

The other beef on Billy G was that he was a basketball dork ("I just want to coach") who didn't want to do the PR stuff that goes with being the face of the university if not the state; when things are going good for UK, the basketball coach is more Kentucky personified than the governor. IIRC, that was one of the problems that Earle Bruce had at OSU; he was a solid coach but didn't like to do the PR stuff.

Football coach Rich Brooks does a lot of the glad-handing that Gillespie is loathe to do, and now that UK has moved up to being competitive in the SEC and winning three straight (albeit minor) bowl games, he's filled a lot of the void that a normal Rupp Arena boss would fill. UK football is used to being mediocre, so getting up to Music City Bowl and Liberty Bowl level is an improvement. However, UK is more used to being at a BCS bowl level (at least Sweet 16 with frequent Final Fours) in basketball, so a first round NCAA exit and an NIT bid is more like going down to Music City/Liberty levels.

Who fills the shoes of Billy Clyde (as the local hosts like to call him)? They made a major run at Billy Donovan two years ago, but that's unlikely to happen after he wasted some political capital flirting with the Magic. A ESPN guy posited Tom Izzo, but that would be a lateral move for Izzo, coming from a program that is at an elite level to begin with; the Yooper roots of Izzo would play well in rural Kentucky, but getting him out of MSU would be hard to impossible.

Two guys who have been prominently mentioned here are two UK alums, Travis Ford of Oklahoma State and John Pelphrey of Arkansas. Both understand the program and Ford has had some success keeping OSU up at the levels that the Suttons had gotten it to. Other than that, you could look at sucessful major-college coaches who'd like the challange of heading up a marquis job.

It will be an interesting April here in the bluegrass as the new pontif of the UK religion gets named; no white smoke here, since the college of Cardinals is at that other school up I-64.

Scared

I'm having a delayed reaction from last night's press conference, and it isn't pretty. The word "clueless" comes to mind regarding the president and economics.

That's a bit harsh, because he isn't unknowledgeable about economics. However, that knowledge comes with a paradigm that government knows more than the market does. He has faith that clean energy, better education and health care reform will get us out of this economic funk; either that or he's one slick and sick puppy.

None of those goals is bad in and of themselves. In the very long term, we'll need to find alternatives to coal and oil and natural gas, but a short-term crash course might be penny wise and pound foolish. We need to keep improving our education system, but a large part of the problem lies outside of the school walls in the attitudes of communities about education, problems that are ill-suited for a Washington solution. Health care could use some reform, but we may need to resign ourselves to spending more on health care as we get it to do more things for us.

However, none of those is going to be a medium-term growth engine. It's going to be changes in attitudes, not more money from Washington or state capitals, that will turn the education system around; even so, that well-trained workforce will be years away from changing GDP and productivity numbers. Health care reform could be a societal good but an economic wash at best; the lower cost from any reform package will be offset by the added costs of reaching the uninsured. Renewable energy could be a economic winner, but industrial policy is not something that government is generally good at.

What seems to be poised to be doing the damage is not the spending, but the higher taxes that will be needed to fund it. I don't have a dog in the fight personally, as a disgustingly middle class college professor with negative net worth, but those high taxes will tend to discourage further investment.

Keynesian econ looks at business investment as a given, but it isn't. You tax stuff more, you get less of it. You subsidize stuff less, like charitable giving, you get less of it; Obama assumed that the rich won't stop giving to charities if they only get a 20% break rather than a full 30-some-percent break, but that flies in the face of basic human nature.

I'm normally positive about the future. I'm not that way right now, at least not for the next few years. We're going to be OK for the very long term, but we're in for a bumpy ride the next bit if Obama means what he said last night. His heart seems to be in the right place, which is scary, for he'll be earnestly pulling things in the wrong direction.

The Papers are Getting the Last Rites

I'm not sure how many people noticed, but only one garden-variety newspaper reporter got to ask a question at tonight's news conference. A guy from Stars and Stripes got called upon in the middle, but it was the next to last question, where a guy from the Washington Times (not the WaPo, the Times) before a regular newspaper got called upon. ABC got two shots, NBC got one, both Fox and CNN got a shot, as did Ebony, Univision and both the AP and the French AFP, but the major print MSM got bupkis. Politico even got a shot.

That doesn't say much for the influence of the newspapers. Well, it didn't matter too much, since Obama played a mean game of dodgeball, ducking questions like his predecessor ducked shoes.

What I found interesting is that Obama almost seemed to have some things scripted, where the Univision gal asked him about Mexican security issues and the Stars and Stripes (a military-centric paper) guy grilled him on cutting the defense budget. In many cases, it seemed that he gave his stock half-page on an issue and ignored the question or practically begged the question by who he asked. I'm not sure that the answer to homelessness that the Ebony guy posed was scripted; that seemed to less a talking-pointer than the others.

Tuesday Musings

It's spring break, and the livin' is easy. Other than a bit of work getting my on-line ECO 510 ready for next term, I'm on an at-home vacation.

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The Tiger's long-time TV announcer, George Kell, passed on at 86. He was an all-star third baseman and Hall of Famer before he hit the booth, but I remember him for his TV work-"After he retired, Kell broadcast Tigers games from 1959 to 1996."

He did the play-by-play, rare for an ex-player. Pat Summeral in football is about the only other guy I can think of who was an ex-player doing play-by-play rather than color. He wasn't the greatest announcer; my grandma would routinely turn down the TV sound and put on Ernie Harwell on the radio broadcast.

My best memory of Kell was in 1979 when he and Al Kaline were (a rare treat for a baseball fan when only 40 or so games were on TV a year) calling both halves of a twi-nighter at the White Sox. At least it was scheduled to be a double-header. Bill Veeck, the owner of the Pale Hose, was the master of the promotion, but that night he had the mother of all promotion blowbacks (with the possible exception of a Cleveland ten-cent-beer night), the now-infamous Disco Demoliton Night.

The idea was that rock fans (who were being primed to hate disco at the time) would get in for a buck and a disco record, which the rock DJs would blow up in center field in between games. Fans started frisbeeing their records onto the field during the first game, much to the consternation of the hopelessly old school TV team of Kell and Kaline. The fans made such a mess of the field between games that the White Sox had to forfeit the second game.

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Billy G may be salvaging his job with a nice NIT run. UK edged Creighton, 65-63 to move on to the NIT quarters at Notre Dame. One of the advantages of just missing the NCAAs is that you have a chance to play quite a few games and get some extra playing time for a young team; all the guys in the rotation are underclassmen, and if Jodie Meeks and Patrick Patterson decide to stay around for another year, UK has the makings of a top-10 team in 09-10.

I didn't see the game; we were on the road during the game. However, the box score has underwhelming small forward Ramon Harris with 8 assists. Point forward for next year?

The current problem with UK is they don't have a good point guard. Starter Michael Porter can shoot and pass but not penetrate (think John Paxson in the Jordan era, but while Meeks is good, he's not Jordan and there is no Pippin), while freshman backup DeAndre Liggins can penetrate but is at a loss for what to do when he gets in the paint. Liggins might be better suited to play either the 2 or 3 (he's 6'7") and let the new recruit at point guard do the job next year.

Google Perplexed

I was thumbing through some old posts this evening, and found this 2004 piece on Google's IPO. Let's get some good Chianti ready, since I'm going to have to eat these words big time.

If Google has net income of $125 million and is expected to have a market capitalization of $20 billion, the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio would be $20,000m/$125m or 160.

To put that into perspective, the average stock these days has a P/E of about 25. Eventually, Google will stop growing faster than the economy and settle in as a normal company. At their current market capitalization, they'd have to raise their net income to $800 million to get to a P/E of 25. How will Google do that? Will they get six times the traffic? Three times the traffic but double the profit margin?

...

No, I'm not dissing Google, it's still my search engine of choice. It's sorta like making Michigan a 60-point favorite over Northwestern; they'll win, yes, but I don't think the Maize and Blue would cover the spread. Google's good, but it's not going to cover that 160 P/E point spread.

Well, fast forward to the 2009, if you will. Google now has a PE of 25, 24.81 as reported by MSN Money. Google blew past that $800M target in 2005 and made $4.2 billion in 2008. It may well have leveled out its growth, but has done so with a market cap of $104 billion. Google's wound up tripling in price since its IPO, even after the tanking market of the last half-year.

Google is the 20th biggest company on the US stock market as we go to press. GE, Coke and Toyota are 21,23 and 24, to show the company they're hanging with. Not bad for some computer geeks going to town with a search engine.

Basketball Tweets

Some random thoughts about the NCAA tourney...

(1) I know I am getting old when I see Ralph Sampson 3.0 playing for Minnesota; his underachieving dad (at least compared to where we was expected to be coming out of Virginia) was a junior. The other feeling-old point was Washington's Isaiah Thomas, who was named after the Pistons star, who only uses one a in his first name; Laker fan dad supposedly lost a bet on the 1989 LA-Detroit series had to name his kid after a Piston.

(2) The computer video feed is much better this year. I'm back in the den on my laptop watching the Michigan-Clemson game while Eileen watches Bones on our only TV. The local CBS station has Texas-Minnesota, given the Tubby Smith connection, so my route to the game was via the video feed.

(3) My bracket got hammered, but only with teams that only were supposed to get to the second round. There's hope yet.

Fine Multi-Aged Cannibals

We've got a long-standing mythic relationship between missionaries ministering to cannibals in the dark jungles of the Third World. In the dark jungles of inner-city Saginaw (my birthplace and a short drive from my home town of Midland), we see the missionaries from Habitat for Humanity resorting to cannibalism.. of old houses.

As part of an agreement with the city, and with at least $500,000 from the state and federal governments, the Habitat for Humanity volunteers and paid workers plan to demolish two vacant, dilapidated houses here a week, every week, over the next two years. As for creating homes, they will build or refurbish eight houses this year.

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In recent years, about 100 of the organization’s affiliates around the country have done the same, removing recyclable items, like cabinets, floorboards, plaster and light fixtures, from condemned houses and, in a few cities, even razing some structures.

In Saginaw, city leaders acknowledge that some people have been skeptical, or at least puzzled, by the notion that Habitat for Humanity would tear down houses. But these leaders contend that the move makes sense: workers will remove (and resell) reusable housing material rather than send it to landfills, some homeless or unemployed people will be paid to work on the program, and money earned through the demolitions will go toward the organization’s longtime goal of getting poor families into new or rehabbed homes.

One of the interesting developments in the last few years is Habitat's entry into the retail business; it now has ReStore shops around the country, doing for old housing hardware what Goodwill and Salvation Army stores do for clothes and other rummage-sale-bait items.

I'm not sure what effect these ReStores are having, except that it seems to put Habitat on more of a cash basis and less of a volunteer basis. It seems to be something of a mission creep from their mission of getting people into affordable housing, a task that has endeared them to both the religious right and left. The demolitions are a cash cow that only indirectly helps the needy.

That being said, tearing down old eyesore homes in run-down neighborhoods is a ministry in itself, just not one that I'm sure will help Habitat's mission in the long run.

Creation Wars: Hiding a Bigger Issue?

A bit of a flap is happening north of the border, as science minster Gary Goodyear is under fire for not whole-heartedly backing evolutionary theory. Damian Penny has some bloggage on the issue from his secular-libertarian standpoint. The general gist, which we've seen south of the border as well, is that religious conservatives are anti-science if they don't buy into evolution.

One thing that crossed my mind this afternoon is that scientists might have a different reason to shout out any doubts on evolution is that it brings the prospect of a personal God into the mix. Whether a boss goes with a literal young earth creation stance or buys into Darwin hook, line and sinker is actually secondary; it is more of a marker of whether you're going to bring a tighter set of ethical standards to the mix that will give a researcher a bit less freedom to maneuver. Interestingly, it would most likely not be in the realm of evolutionary biological research.

I've yet to hear anyone state that theologically conservative folks in authority have vetoed research on the grounds that it's advancing evolutionary theory. A creationist would probably like to see more research, for it will (if they are right) find more holes in naturalistic evolutionary theory that only a Creator can fill. It may cast doubts on young-earth creationism, that things seemed to take longer than six literal days to do, but it should settle the issue eventually.

What I think (warning-very broad brush) scientists are more worried about with a creationist is that the creationist, by definition, will generally believe in a capital G God that has moral standards. That's going to make some research problematic, if it runs afoul of a naturalistic utilitarian paradigm. Embryonic stem cell research is one area that this shows up, but it also extends to various end-of-life issues, where utilitarians are quick to want to pull the plug on negative NPV projects people.

A creationist boss will have tighter ethical standards on research than on average, at least one that buys into the idea of a hands-on God. That, rather than the debate on how life got started and came to be in its present form, seems to be what worries the naturalistic side of the aisle.

At least that's what's floating through my head at present. Is there something to that idea?

March Musings

We have a hoopster in the White House. We've known that President Obama has a good pickup game, but he seems to have been following college basketball fairly well; maybe if he studied finance a little more and basketball a little less, he'd have lit into the AIG folks a bit less. At least he didn't invite them to commit hari kari like Grassley did.

Anyways, this is a time where you enjoy having the head of state being a regular guy enough to sit down and do his own bracket in the Map Room with ESPN's Andy Katz. Obama has a North Carolina-Louisville final on his bracket.
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Me? Here's my picks. I'll only list the upsets

First Round
East      Wisconsin (12) over Florida State(5)
            Minnesota(10) over Texas(7) Tubby advances, UK fans grumble
South    Butler(9) over LSU(8)
            Michigan(10) over Clemson (7)
Midwest Arizona(12) over Utah (5)
            USC(10) over Boston College (7)-BC is lucky to be a seven seed
West     Mississippi State (13) over Washington(4)

Second Round
East          Wisconsin(12) over Xavier(4)
                UCLA(6) over Villanova(3)
South        Arizona State(6) over Syracuse(3)-The slipper falls off
Midwest     West Virginia(6) over Kansas(3)
West         Marqueete(6) over Missouri(3)

Sweet 16
East        None
South      Arizona State(6) over Oklahoma(2)
              Gonzaga(4) over North Carolina(1)
Midwest    None
West        None

Regional Winners
East-Duke(2)
South-Gonzaga(4)
Midwest-Michigan State(2)
West-Uconn(1)

Finals-UConn 75-Gonzaga 69.

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One of the intersting factoids from yesterday's NIT opener for Kentucky is that they had to play the game at Memorial Colliseum for the first game their since 1976; they beat UNLV 70-60 to advance and avoid having Billy Gillespie getting run out of town on a rail along with the Sullivan IT department, who have yet to get a fubared faculty e-mail up after it went down on Monday. UK looked like the team that could make some noise in the NCAA if given a chance, pulling out to a 20-point lead early in the second half before the Rebels rallied and made it close.

Why were they at Memorial Colliseum; Rupp Arena downtown (depsite being named for the vintage UK coach, it's a all-purpose downtown arena that gets used for everything from basketball to Arena football to Hanna Montana) is booked for the boys Sweet 16.

Our Indiana contingent in the Peanut gallery will groan with appreciation here; Kentucky doesn't have any classes in their basketball tournement, so the small private schools and the small rural schools up in hillbilly country all get in the same master bracket. Not only that, but the round of 16 on gets held in Rupp Arena. Four games today and four games tomorrow to get the first round done, then quarterfinals in Friday, semis on Saturday midday and finals on Saturday night.

So, the quintesential Applilacian berg of Hazard goes up against Lexington suburban West Jessamine in one first-rounder, and Lexington Catholic gets Bowling Green in another. It's a tradition that dates back to 1916. It's not quite as revered in national legend like the old Indiana tourney that was immortalized in Hoosiers, but it draws a massive crowd to Lexington for this week; you don't want to eat out here in town this week unless you're willing to be in long lines.

One irony that is fixing to happen. Bowling Green U (in Ohio; Kevin's alma mater) could be UK's second round foe in the NIT; they're an underdog against Creighton tonight.  If Bowling Green U gets through to the NIT quarters and LCU gets through to the state quarters, we will have the line that "Lexington Catholic could beat Bowling Green but UK couldn't."

              

Funky Worms

Eileen and I had lunch out at Olive Garden this afternoon, with Eillen having chicken Alfredo. That always brings me back to a classic Far Side cartoon where (if memory serves) the bird at the restaurant exclaims "This is pasta! Who got my Worms Alfredo?"

It also brought me to the quip that Catholics used to get by on a Diet of Worms. I remembered the term and vaguely recalled that it was of the counter-Reformation era holding a mental placeholder close to the Council of Trent, but had to look up the details. As it turns out, it was where the Catholic establishment in Germany officially declared Martin Luther heretical after calling him in and having him stand by his heterodox (at least by 16th century Catholic standards) writings.

One interesting note is that the German origional per Wikipedia is the Reichstag zu Worms. History buffs will note at Reichstag was the term for the German legislature in the early 1900s; it was the Reichstag fire of 1933 that was used an excuse for the Nazis to start taking dictatorial control.

I hadn't thought that Diet in that context was a synonym for congress, even though we hear about the Japanese Diet as their legislative branch.

Oh, in case the title gave you an earwig, here's the Ohio Player's classic.

Populist Reactionaries

I'm not sure what to do with this paragraph from William Kristol; I'm not the most rabid supply-sider in the Peanut Gallery by far, but Neocon Junior is joining the anti-AIG crowd in the worst pile-on since my last junior-high game of Smear the Queer.

Can capitalism survive the behavior of some capitalists? It's always been an open question. But if capitalism is to survive, shouldn't the Republican party, the party that defends democratic capitalism, be particularly vehement in denouncing its excesses? Isn't this a pretty spectacular one?

Yes, but you're not going to out demgogue a liberal on this issue. You need to be particularly smart, not just vehement. Bill Kristol getting jiggy with his inner Lou Dobbs is like me trying to do gansta rap; it doesn't work, sir.

And isn’t this a moment for the GOP to separate itself from the Bush administration as well as the Obama administration, who together have been responsible for an incompetent and improvident bailout? Figuring out the right policy going forward with respect to toxic assets and the rest is, of course, a major intellectual task. But being on the side of a healthy populist reaction to the AIG situation is at least a good political start.

"Healthy populist reaction." Think twice, blog once...take that lynching metaphor and slooowly walk away, Mark.

There is a faction on the right side of the aisle that majors in a hearty (if not always healthy) populism; they are generally blood rivals of Kristol's style of politics and geopolitics. It's more Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo that major in populism of that sort, folks that are an accident waiting to happen if in charge of the party, more so than Rush's free market myopia.

Is Kristol trying to come up with a neocon-paleocon fusion that tries to go up against the Cudgel for Growth crowd in the GOP? Either that, or he's had one dose too many of the WaPo Koolaid.

FIN 498-Derivatives for Executives

It's interesting that President Obama is more than willing to give bonus pay for high-performing teachers but dead set against giving such pay for high-performing finance folks.

"It's hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay," Obama said at the outset of an appearance to announce help for small businesses hurt by the deep recession.

"How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat," the president said.

Well, it might be understandable if you studied a bit. A Harvard JD has to have something on the ball. As I tell my students, there's a difference between dumb and ignorant. Dumb means you can't learn and ignorant means you've yet to learn; ignorance is curable.  

In some cases, the bonuses are built into the contract. For instance, you got paid more for The Audacity of Hope than guys who only sold a few copies because that was what was in the contract. If your publisher was in Chapter 11, they'd still be on the hook for those royalties.

In other cases, they are rewarding good work; you don't cancel performance bonuses if the team has a bad year. Let say that Derrick Rose from your Bulls is having a great rookie year on a mediocre club; if he had performance bonuses in his contract based on assists and points scored and games started, he'd still get those even though the Bulls would be back in the lottery if the season ended today.

Even bad firms can have good workers. It's easy to pick on derivatives since they scare the bejeebers out of most folks, especially if you work at making them scary. That's how modern finance rolls, with derivatives being used both to hedge stuff and take risks.

If you want to go back to the days of yore where prairie populists railed about big city banks, feel free. But don't plead ignorance unless you're trying to look dumber than you are; that works for some folks like Dubya, but you're not equipped to play that card.

It's an MSU Year

I'm a Michigan State alum, and I think MSU is a good bet to make it into the Finals. Of course, that's something of a field bet, since there are at least 4 MSUs in the field. Morehead State won the Ohio Valley, Morgan State won the MEAC and Mississippi State just got done beating Tennessee for the SEC title. Michigan State lost in the Big 10 semis, but as a top-10 team, is a lock for an at-large bid and a three-seed at worst.

That's a notch ahead of a trio of ASU's (Arizona State, Arkansas State and Alabama State).

Grow a Brain, Not a Pair

"Avery's pair helps Rangers continue East climb." That's one way to describe hockey's bad boy, but one would like him to show some maturity instead.

Oh, he scored two goals? One short of a hat trick instead of a cheap trick?

"Everyone has the right to think about politics."

It isn't often that I'm going to agree with something Hugo Chavez says. This is one of them. Tiger right fielder Magglio Ordonez is a Chavez-supporter, who was getting ripped by anti-Chavez fans in Miami where Venezuela is through to the second round winner's bracket title game against a hot Puerto Rico team who mercied the US 11-1 yesterday.

"Everyone has the right to think about politics," Chavez said after reading an article about the incident from The Associated Press. "This is shameful.

"Viva Magglio, and all our patriots!" Chavez added.

Well, Chavez is half right. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if it's wrong. That doesn't mean that they're immune to criticism. I'm not a fan of booing players in the first place,  but I can see where someone who has been exiled to Miami to avoid the downsides of the Bolivarians would want to give Ordonez both rhetorical barrels.

Here's a question; are those ex-pat Venezuelans booing Ordonez/Chavez or Cuban-American hot-heads? There are a lot of Cubans in Little Havana who may well see Chavez as Fidel 2.0 and may be taking their long-standing dislike of Castro out on Chavez and his fans.

This article notes that there were 17,000 ex-pats in the Southeast eligable to vote in the 2004 presidential election. This piece on an 80K strong anti-Chavez rally in 2002 notes that was "staged by the mostly business- and professionally oriented Venezuelan community in South Florida." How much of that group are people who would naturally gravitate to the de facto capital of Latin America and how many have moved to steer clear of Chavez is a good question.

Carying things to the point of firing people for backing the wrong candidate (or wrong issue, as some CA Prop-8 backers have found) or terrorizing them is wrong, but booing someone for their politics is within the realm of political discourse. Booing them off the stage, as some leftists are want to do, is bad form, but expressing your displeasure is still everyone's right.

At least in the US, it is.

Category Killer Churches-Part II-Gypsies, Tramps and Stealth Congregants

My dad has always called college teaching a "gypsy profession;" it has taken me from Michigan to Florida to Indiana to Kentucky and had interviews in Ohio and Louisiana to boot. People who move a lot will have to find new churches when they move, and it is often easier to settle into a larger church than a smaller one.

The large churches will catch your eye and often have major concerts and speakers into town. Thus, people will know more about the megachurches in town than the smaller ones. If people know churches outside of their own or ones in their neighborhood, they'll know the big ones in town, so newcomers will tend to gravitate to the big churches.

Many big churches have focused on having small group ministries that help people connect on a personal level. That can be helpful if you're looking for more than just a Sunday School class and looking to quickly make friends; for instance, the small groups at the Vineyards in Lakeland and Indy (neither were that big, about 300 each) gave us some quick inroads into fellowship, faster than Sunday School classes do.

If you're not planning on laying down roots, trying to become part of a smaller, more insular church culture might be difficult. A larger church will have a large block of newcomers to interact with, people who don't have their friends and networks set yet and can fit you into their lives more easily.

Also, some people have hectic lives and don't really want to be deeply involved in the workings of a church. For them, a good Sunday service is all they're looking for. Those people may not fit into a smaller church where more is expected of the members; a larger church will be used to having a large number of what I call "stealth congregants" who sneak in, take in the service, and sneak out without becoming part of the church culture.

Our American culture and job market lends itself to being mobile and changing towns. I think this feeds into people gravitating towards larger churches. It isn't healthy in a lot of ways, but is hard to reverse. For instance, Dan Edelin's small-town agrarian ethos resonates, but I find it hard to figure out how I would fit into such a small town with a business skill set; it was impossible for me to find work in my home town in three years of trying, so I can't easily see myself fitting into that universe.

Many of us are stuck in a more national if not global economy, and wind up having to move due to being over-specialized for a regional job market. In those settings, there's a severe temptation to be a stealth congregant in a big church rather than try to plant roots that will likely need to be uprooted if you need to find a different job. Right now, I'm not in that boat, going to a nice, medium-sized Baptist church, but that might not always be the case.

AAA

I wind up teaching about bond ratings most every semester, but until now, I didn't know how many companies have a top-drawer AAA rating. GE just lost its AAA rating from S&P and second-tier rater Fitch dropped Berkshire Hathaway down a peg; BH does a lot of insurance and re-insurance, so that will cost them some business. Welcome to Wall Street's Wild Kingdom, Sir Sage of Omaha.

Here's an interesting paragraph-

Following GE's downgrade by S&P, only four companies other than Berkshire retain the highest ratings from Moody's and S&P: American Data Processing, Johnson & Johnson, Exxon Mobil and Toyota.

ADP is the one surprise there; however, they seem to have a near-corner on the payroll processing market. Toyota is somewhat reassuring for the Lexington area, since their big Georgetown plant just north of Lexington is a big employer and magnet for parts suppliers.

Ms. Car Loan Will Be His Assistant

"Van Loan mulling Ontario PC leadership bid." Of course the provincial Liberals will consider this Van Loan sub-prime.

Mr. Van Loan declined to comment yesterday, and instead expressed his disappointment that Mr. Tory is leaving politics.

Hey, the Conservatives literally had Mr. Tory (John Tory leading the Tories, straight up), now they can get the personification of modern consumer culture. Had he come a couple of generations sooner, you could have seen Social Credit headed by Mr. Van Loan.

Category Killer Churches-Part I-The Dating Courting Game

I haven't had a good chance to talk one two items that are making the rounds; the Trinity College ARIS study and Michael Spencer's Coming Evangelical Collapse series that was excerpted at the Christian Science Monitor this week; even Drudge linked to the CSM piece. There is plenty of food for thought in both that I'll be commenting on these for weeks to come.

I'm currently going to a Southern Baptist church, and the ARIS study has Baptists broadly defined as the oldest religion; Of adult Baptists, only 11% are 18-29 and 20% are 70+. On the flip side of that, ARIS' "generic Christian" bucket, which includes a lot of non-denominational megachurhces, has 25% youngsters and only 9% old-timers.

That sounds about right, and the trends will probably not change much. Smaller churches are not great places for young singles if they are looking to make friends or find a mate.

I recall facing that when I was at Kent State during grad school; there was a nice Baptist church just down the road from my apartment, but there were no single adults of post-college. In order to try and find fellowship, I would up going to the Chapel in Akron, a Baptist-flavored evangelical megachurch; they were large enough to have four different singles groups of various age brackets.

A similar issue happened when I moved back to Midland; the Baptist church I was baptized in had a single's group that skewed a decade younger than me. I wound up switching over to an mini-Mega Evangelical Free church in Midland who had a nice singles ministry; I indirectly found Eileen at that church.

Here in Lexington, a lot of young people wind up going to the two generically Christian megachurches, Quest Community and Southland Christian. More than one adult child of Victory members goes to those churches, as do (or did before they moved) the single gals we know in our apartment complex.

If there isn't a critical mass of your demographic, you either have to meet people your own age online or at another church; at least two couples from Victory are products of on-line dating/matchmaking services. If the widows outnumber the singles, you're not going to recruit too many young newcomers. You may get married couples or seniors both married and single, but not too many young people.

Here's an odd analogy; think of the megachurches as your big-box "category killer" retailer; say Lowes or Home Depot as opposed to your corner hardware store. You get better service at the small store, but selection is better and prices are cheaper at the big store.

Likewise, you won't be on a first-name basis with the pastor of a 3000 member megachurch, but they'll have ministry opportunities to both serve and be served that your smaller churches might not have. People who aren't in the husband-wife-and-2.5 kids mode often fit in better at a larger church, while families will fit in most anywhere.

Smaller denominational churches have a lot to offer, especially in getting to know the leadership and being able to network quicker, but in a society that's often focused on meeting felt needs, people will drawn to the big-box church if they don't get their niche ministered to at the smaller church.

Shoe Carnival

I've been getting a steady dribble of Googleadge for Jaime "Shoes" Huffman the last few weeks; I just realized we've come up on the 30th anniversary of his 15 minutes of fame on Michigan State's 1979 title team. Tempus doth Fugit big time.

Meanwhile, over in Iraq, Muntazer "Shoes" al-Zaidi got three years in jail for his protest efforts; I don't think we'd be as harsh with the guy were he to have done that here stateside, especially when he went 0-for-2.

It's not fair to the FPOTUS, but I'm reminded of the old Soviet era joke about poor Sergei, who got 12 years in the gulag for calling the general an idiot. It seems harsh, but he only got six months for insulting a superior officer; the rest was for revealing a state secret.

Polity Wanna Cracker?

I got an e-mail on this issue earlier today, and I thought it was urban legend, but it seems to be legit, as it has hit as far as Hot Air and The Corner; there's a proposed bill in the Connecticut legislature designed to give Catholic (and only Catholic) churches in the state a congregational polity, with churches run by a lay church board with pastors and bishops out of the loop.

Given that one of the core concepts of the Catholic church is that authority flows from Rome outward, that's telling Catholics that they can't be Catholic, or at least that each parish is free to give Rome the finger if they want to, which is likely what the sponsors of the bill would hope for. If each church is independent of both Rome and it's bishop, there's no way to enforce doctrine or to discipline a wayward priest, which might create a number of renegade parishes that want a more Episcopal-like theology and praxis.

There are a number of reasons not to like the bill. For one, it's a bill of attainder, addressing only one denomination. If they wanted to say that all religious institutions that incorporate have to meet those specs, it would have a better shot at passing constitutional muster. That's before we bring in the free-exercise of religious clause of the First Amendment; it's not government's job to rewrite church polity.

Commie Edge

I'm expanding my intellectual horizons by helping out in the nursery area; Eileen and I have been looking after the two-year-olds during the Sunday School (a.k.a. Life Groups in Victoryese) hour this month (we get to help during the SS hour one month than the church hour the other) and have gotten reschooled in the fine art of PlayDoh.

One of the shapes we have at our disposal is some left-over cookie cutters from Arctic Edge VBS; that was Lifeway's summer critter of 2006, before we got their in 2007. It's out of stock now, but they did have a cookie-cutter set-

Arctic Edge cookies are sure to be a hit for VBS promotion, training, and kick-off events. Each set includes three cookie cutter shapes:

• moose
• polar bear
• tree

$3.99 (pkg. of 3)

The AE trees got used as we talked about God creating all the plants today; cookie cutters do well with PlayDoh as well as cookie dough.

However, I had some time on my hands last week and gave the cutters a once-over. They had a "made in China" sticker on them.

That's ironic, since it's unlikely that the powers that be in Beijing would be unlikely to let the Southern Baptists put on a Arctic Edge VBS in China, but are more than happy to make some not-so-holy hardware for them.

What does that say about Lifeway and the Southern Baptists? A lack of attention to detail, possibly? A tin ear about what their supply sourcing might mean to religous freedoms around the world?

"Center-Right" Sighting

Here's an interesting sentence from a piece on former Israeli president Moshe Katsav going up on charges of rape and sexual assault; he makes Bill Clinton sound like a choir boy.

Katsav, of the center-right Likud Party, was president from 2000 to 2007

It is rare for any conservative party to get a "center-right" label from the media. A quick Google has "center right Likud" with 2980 references and "right-wing Likud" with 77,100. Compare that with "'center left Labor' Israel" and you get 18800 hits; I had to add the Israel modifier, for I'd get references for various Labor parties elsewhere.

However, when you consider that Likud is now the political center, where there is no workable coalition to the left of them, that they are now center-right.

Have they changed? I don't think so. However, the Israeli electorate has, puttling Likud towards the center of Israeli thought. The grinding sound you hear are the foreign diplomats wearing down their teeth.

Front Page Haiku, 3-8-09

Dallas dumps TO
North America's Head Case
Buffalo Shuffle

He's christened his new border-straddling club "North America's Team;" the Bills have started to play some home games in Toronto. If the good TO shows up, he'll be a nice addition, but the locker room cancer doesn't always show up right away.

One year contract. That's about right, for year two is generally when he starts to wear out his welcome. The wag on Billy Martin was that he was "the best manager in baseball on a one-year contract." Might that be said of Owens?

UK 8-and-8
Long Knives Out For Billy G
NIT ain't it

Kentucky finished it's regular season 19-12 and 8-8 in the SEC after losing to Florida yesterday. If you finish the regular season in a major conference at .500, you'd better have some bragging rights in your out-conference schedule in order to get a Big Dance invite; a neutral-site win over West Virginia was the best UK could trot out. Michigan went 19-12 and 9-9 Big Ten, but they have wins over Duke and UCLA on their resume.

Kentucky doesn't have a legit point guard. It has two NBA first rounders in Jody Meeks and Patrick Patterson and a solid role playing power forward in Perry Stevenson who may well make a living at the sport, albeit at a European or NBA backup level. However, Meeks is their only outside threat, so defenses can play a box-and-one on Meeks and clog the paint. Give Gillespie a point guard and this team is a title contender.

 

Edifier du Jour-Malachi 3:1-4(NIV)

¹ "See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty.

² But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap. ³ He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, ⁴ and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.

I was thinking about the refiner's fire here in verse 2 and thinking of the two meanings of the word forge. There is the non-pejorative sense of creating something via a fire-melting process and there's the pejorative sense of creating a fake.

God wants to forge us into something useful for His kingdom, but we often want to forge ourselves, giving us a Christianized veneer without changing our core nature. Going through a full-scale forging will require a melt-down, both figuratively and literally.

Malachi ask "Who can stand when he appears?" Not the people who want sanctification on the cheap.