I'll be voting for Libby Schaaf

I'll be voting for Libby Schaaf for our open City Council seat in Oakland's District 4 this year.  District 4 is where I've lived since 2002, and covers a large geographical area and population, large enough that apparently we're as big just by ourselves as the city of Santa Clara.  So providing us proper representation on the Council is definitely bound to be very hard work as well as big city politics.  Jean Quan was our councilmember before this; now she's running for Mayor of Oakland, and an opportunity has opened up for the next generation of political leaders to take a place at the table. 

Out of the large group of candidates who've put themselves forward (which is in itself an honorable thing), I choose Libby because I know from having worked with her (briefly, maybe fifteen years ago, at a volunteer agency called the Marcus Foster Institute that she was managing) that she's smart and works hard, and because she offers that magical combination we Americans look for in our political leaders: she has a vision of what she thinks Oakland should be and at the same time she listens to her constituents' own visions (which sometimes contradict hers or each others) and is committed to somehow representing them as well.  Also, she knows the ins and outs of the city's political structures (which tend toward the byzantine, because of the overlay of city organizations with transit agencies, school districts, and the Port of Oakland), and has the capability of working with them in working for our district's interests.

Confidence Game

I've been reading a few books about the credit crash recently.  I previously mentioned The Greatest Trade Ever.  Another that I finished in the last couple of weeks was Confidence Game, by Christine Richard.  I headed my Amazon review of it "A superb account of the end of the credit bubble," though of course that should have been "a credit bubble" as it's surely not the last one.  The review itself reads:

Christine Richard has managed to make a story whose end we already know, about a topic that is still arcane to most (bond insurance), a page turner as good as any suspense novel I've read lately. She combines an ability to explain the big picture and the details of the economic story with a timeless David and Goliath pitting Ackman and herself against the monstrous con that was not only MBIA, but all of the multitude interested in preserving MBIA's public image because a downgrade would be so consequential to the corruption of credit: Democratic congressmen who wanted housing for their uncreditworthy constituents, Republicans who wanted to take credit for false prosperity and keep the money coming, and especially the ratings agencies, other bond insurers, and banks. This is one of the books that should endure to tell the story of the "oughts" fifty years from now.

I sent Christine Richard a fan letter, which regrettably reuses that over-used adjective "superb" – but I did mean it:

Ms. Richard --

Your book was superb, not only a clear account of the failures and duplicities of companies most ignorant people (such as myself) thought of a "regulators" rather than financial corporations, but a lesson in how such accounting should be done, how a case should and can be made in spite of the other side's accusations, and a testament to moral courage on your and Bill Ackman's parts.

One seemingly tangential change in my own politico-economic prejudices obtains from reading your book: I'm now convinced that Obama's predecessors were guilty of an artificial economic stimulus that dwarfs those attempted in the past couple of years, and that in the future I'd prefer a straight Keynesian transfer of funds to the corruption of credit, especially if the end result in either case is to give houses to people whether they can afford them or not.

Thanks for your stellar effort!

To which she kindly responded:

Alva,
Thanks so much for writing! I'm glad you enjoyed the book.
I found your comments very insightful. Looking back it does almost seem that some universal decision was made to spread money around the economy through the "corruption of credit." Definitely a very damaging strategy!
All the best,
Christine

There's nothing better for a reader than receiving a note like that from an author one has enjoyed, is there?

Whole Earth Discipline

I've stopped sampling newspapers on the Kindle for the nonce – it was taking too much of my free reading time, I guess.  Instead I've been finishing some of the books I'd bought for the device, some of which, like the wonderful Richard Holmes book I mentioned in my previous post, I'd been reading from the library even before I got them electronically.  Another example of such was Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline, finished a few days after the Holmes.  I've been reading Brand's books for a long time, since The Last Whole Earth Catalog in high school defined every nook and cranny of what "counterculture" could mean in Orange or Simi Valley in 1974.  I'd argue that there was always a kind of "fannish" (as in science-fiction fandom) element to his writing; certainly a sense of wonder has always been communicated, and certain of his speculations, as in The Media Lab, have been as important to my concepts of what the future might hold as a lot of science fiction.  Whole Earth Discipline continues in both the countercultural and futurist veins; most of all, it makes wonderful arguments for the virtues of being willing and able to change one's mind as one looks at the world.  Though I appreciated (and agree with) his "new-found" support for nuclear power, I found his writing on the benefits of global slums and genetic engineering more challenging and stimulating. 

The Age of Wonder

I made my way, always with much pleasure, through Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder over perhaps half a year.  I checked it out at one point or another from both of my fabulous library resources (San Francisco Public and Oakland Public) and in both cases kept the book until the overdue fees started to hurt.  Finally, at something like the halfway point, I bought it for myself on the Kindle.  It's a book perfectly suited to such an occasional approach to reading because, I think, it's a large and fairly incoherent story (the rise of British and modern science in the early nineteenth century) told as a series of marvelous smaller and very coherent stories, namely, short biographies of great men.  Beginning with Joseph Banks took me right back to my first enthrallment with Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.  Banks then becomes a presiding benefactor over the whole period, and the meat of the story, for me, is in the extended biographies of William Herschel and Humphrey Davy, both of whom exemplify that intersection of artistic and scientific practice we've been discussing in incidental comments recently.  Lots of proto-science-fictional speculative thought going on in the minds of all the central figures of the period, too, from Herschel's looking for intelligences on the Moon to Humphrey Davy's final writings about consciousness in the outer planets…

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Another book read on the Kindle: Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which falls like Moorcock's Behold the Man into the category of re-renderings of the Jesus story that appear from the perspective of unbelievers to be ultimately respectful, even devotional, though there's of course a difficulty for believers in seeing that to be the case.  Pullman has presented himself publicly as an atheist, but as in Dark Materials he keeps that case in the background; in both stories there is a requirement for mysterious evil persons that have something to do with institutional religions to also have powers that can't be explained, that in fact have overtones of the Satanic, and therefore to cast the worlds in which they occur as magical in ways that Pullman's real atheism wouldn't allow.  In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ it seems that the Devil is directly involved in the construction of the Christian narrative as we know it, from birth to resurrection through death.

The particular wit of the "Pullman version" of the Gospels is that it makes as much use as possible of the materials of the originals, but split between the stories of Jesus (which amount to the kind of nonbelievers' redaction that has a fairly long history I believe, where claims to divinity are not only discarded by rejected and the "hard sayings" to the rich and hypocritical are brought to the fore) and the back story of Christ, in such a way as to make Pullman's retelling almost credible.  As you might expect, though the character of Jesus is powerfully distilled, the character of Christ, composed shall we say of more contemporary literary glues as well as bits and pieces of the Passion narratives, held equal interest, at least in my reading.

The Possessed

Elif Batuman's The Possessed was a very funny book, with some tinges of real seriousness.  Batuman's vignettes of eccentric academic life, especially among grad students, seemed truer to me than most popular portrayals of that world.  She captures that combination of posturing and intellectual dead seriousness that I always found intimidating at academic conferences and among graduate students in the humanities myself (as an engineering, or pseudo-engineering, grad student in Operations Research at Berkeley).  Batuman interleaves the academic story with an extended account of her stay in Uzbekistan, which I found less successful both because I didn't understand the need for the device of telling the story at such length and in three separate instalments, and also because I didn't trust that the kind of comic exaggeration of events and characters in these segments, though very much like that in the "academic parts," bore much relation to truth.  I don't know that the factualness of the events she writes about is even very important, but I couldn't get rid of the suspicion that I was reading something heavily doctored, something like journalistic stand-up comedy, in the Uzbek parts.  That said, I enjoyed the book and I think Elif Batuman has a lot of potential as a New Yorker writer in the grand manner of my favorites (among whom I count Joseph Mitchell as the absolute pinnacle of both style and content).

The Big Short

I recently finished reading Michael Lewis's The Big Short, another of the books I've been going through having to do with the Crash of 2008.  Lewis is quick and pleasurable reading, not a detail man and not having any major ax to grind as far as I could tell (though he certainly has his prejudices, generally inclining him to the "blame greed" school of economic interpretation as far as I could tell).  The anti-social hedge fund manager Michael Burry is probably the protagonist of the book, though other "heroes" run their stories in parallel with his.  Burry, anti-social and obsessive, got his edge on the rest of the investment community by actually reading through the unreadable prospectuses, or whatever you call them, describing the detailed makeup of collateralized debt obligations and other toxic assets.  Now I believe he's buying up farm properties, according to something I saw on MSNBC a couple of weeks ago…

I'll be voting for Jean Quan

I'll be voting for Jean Quan for Mayor of Oakland this year, 2010.  She has represented the district I live in, District 4, in the Oakland City Council for years, much of it in leadership roles on the Council.  During the most recent period of Ron Dellums' mayoralty, which might be characterized as an absence of formal leadership, she has often served as Vice Mayor and been a crucial constructive force for moving toward a solution to the city's seemingly intractable budgetary problems. 

Jean Quan is an extremely hard worker, an attender to her constituents' retail details as well as to the city's big picture, that is to say its future and its long-term well-being.  Though a reliable liberal and Obama supporter, her approach to the affairs of the city has always been problem by problem, with full disclosure of the potential impacts of both budgetary and tax proposals on the people of the city. 

As a moderate Republican, I feel no hesitation in supporting her nonideological liberalism, which occupies an area of potential agreement and problem solution that might unite people with diverse perspectives.  And Oakland is after all one of the most liberal cities in the country; I have no desire to see someone who matches all of my own opinions elected to the city's highest office, because I don't believe such a person could get the city's varied interests to work together.

Years ago, I wrote a generic letter to Councilmember Quan, opining about this or that local issue, I don't remember exactly what, as part of some e-mail list's letter-writing campaign.  It might have had to do with our continuing need for more traffic controls on the nearby main road, but whatever it was, I do remember that Jean Quan wrote me back with a full explanation of why she wasn't able to follow "my" advice, and that she had no hesitation about explaining why her views differed from mine.  I really liked that forthrightness, and I've seen that continue throughout her term of service to the district.  I've only met her once, in passing at a Montclair Christmas shopping event, and while she seemed likeable, and not at all egotistical or sanctimonious, she wasn't what I would call charismatic.  But charismatic is not what I want in leadership of the city during this period of hardship. 

Nor do I think the kind of attempts at large-scale deal-making that Quan's main competitor, Don Perata, would probably bring to the mayoralty are the ways in which I see our problems being gradually resolved.  We've now got "ranked choice voting" in our local races, so I will put Perata down as my second choice in spite of his less preferred approach; I do think he'd do a better job than Dellums has done, at least.  But Jean Quan offers a mode of big city government that actually does give neighborhoods the power to work on their problems, and taxpayers a say in whether they'll pay more, and for what.  She is a terrific exemplar and practitioner of democratic (small d) politics.

I'll be voting for Jerry Brown

I'll be voting for Jerry Brown to be governor of California in the November election.  I think he was an excellent governor during the late 1970's and early 1980's, and was prescient about the energy and environmental issues that would be central to our state's politics and economics for the thirty years since.  Most importantly, he was always a fiscal conservative, which in my mind is not an ideological label but simply a certificate of public sanity.

Did Jerry Brown "fix" the state of California?  No.  We don't live in a world where "philosopher kings" can do the job that's really up to the rest of us, acting as economic and political agents.  The divisions in California between cultural liberals and cultural conservatives have evidently existed at least since the election of Ronald Reagan, the governor before Brown, and they're not going away anytime soon.  Brown did ride the tiger well, crafted deals that crossed the cultural dividing line, and left a productive legacy that continues to serve us well.

I lived in Oakland for the whole period of his being mayor during the second half of the 1990's and the first half of the 2000's, and think he was the best mayor we've had here in the almost thirty years I've lived in Oakland now.  He supported a variety of approaches to revitalizing the downtown area, some of which came to pass, and was always a political realist in trying to achieve his vision.  The art and military charter high schools in Oakland are positive legacies, I think, and demonstrate his ability to be truly inclusive, as contrasted with the sanitized rhetoric of inclusiveness that prevails among "progressives".

Did Jerry Brown "fix" the city of Oakland?  No.  But he set the tone for a rejuvenation of the city that continues today in spite of "bumps in the road" like conflict between youth and the police, or the severe recession we're in today.  (In contrast, I think Ron Dellums has done absolutely nothing for the city during his term – and that contrasts with Dellums' having done plenty of good for the area, despite his ideological reputation, during his long tenure in Congress.)

Brown has kept his feet in the water by serving ably as the state's Attorney General over the past four years.  Now he's offering his services as governor once again, and I think he'll do a good job with the slim pickings offered by the still-conflicted polity.  Unlike Meg Whitman, he's not in hock to his political party – in fact, he's made no promises as to how he'll work with the Legislature on solving California's intractable budget problems.  I expect creative deal-making and principled defence of education spending and anything that would bring capital, venture or otherwise, to the state.  Maybe that's what a Republican like Schwarzenegger would also bring to the process, were he running, and maybe Whitman would be led to the same trough were she (if she should be) elected.  But right now Meg is promising tax cuts to the Republican faithful that are completely politically infeasible unless there's a Tea Party firestorm in California (and I'd be praying for that not to happen every bedtime if I prayed at all), and that and her undoubted executive abilities aren't enough to sway me to consider voting for her.

Brown is the man of the hour, again.  I'm voting for him.

Against the Fall of Night

After many years, I re-read Against the Fall of Night recently, with the "alternate version" of The City and the Stars waiting in reserve. I hadn't remembered much about the (shared) plot of these works, even though I have at least the memory of a memory of one or both of these being among my favorite science-fiction stories read at the age of eleven or twelve. I was interested in a friend's remark, itself incompletely recalled now, about one of Clarke's versions of the story telling more than showing, and I determined to read them one at a time and react without refreshing my memory of his specific judgment, to see whether I'd notice anything similar ab nihilo. I'm guessing now that the shorter, earlier (earliest) work is the more "telling" version – one must in a matter of course "show" more in longer works – but I don't know yet whether I'll agree with my friend's judgment. I loved the short version, and marvel at how much more elegant Clarke's prose is than the run of the mill of the period. I know I'm over-reaching a little, but for me the speculative tone in this beginning of Clarke's writing career is reminiscent of Borges. While simply moving a fairly uneventful narrative forward (in the sense that conflict is not the dominant mode of creating interest in what's going to happen), he wrestles with the philosophical themes that entranced me as a boy: could a human society be created stable enough to last millions rather than thousands of years? How might the equilibrium of such stability be upset? Would we characterize the upset as inevitable, a matter of infinitesimal probabilities finally catching up with the best-laid plans, or as a wonderful matter of human initiative re-emerging – in which case, how could it possibly have taken hundreds of millions for someone like Alvin, merely requiring a stronger will than the prevalent, to be born and act?

Back from the greatest camp ever

     Back from a week in the mountains (Sierras, near Sonora) at the Lair of the Bear, the UC Berkeley alumni camp. We all had a fine time, having made allowances for living with dirt and not sleeping well at night. Jenny turned three single cots into a king-size bed, with the help of our traveling mattresses and her own ingenuity, and our tent cabin became a very comfortable hideaway. The girls painted their faces, played and swam. The college-age staff kept us well fed, and I didn't even try the Wi-Fi connection for the first four days – after which, I limited myself to an hour a day on the laptop, which seemed to strike the right balance between wanting to keep up and not wanting to work.

     I spent afternoons at camp engrossed in a book called The Greatest Trade Ever, about John Paulson and his short-trading of credit derivative swaps against collateralized debt obligations during the crash of 2007-2008. The author, Gregory Zuckerman, writes for the Wall Street Journal and is an excellent story-teller, to the point of drawing out the action perhaps more than needed to be done to make a book of adequate length. The main points of "suspense" in the book, given that we as readers already knew that the protagonists' biggest uncertainty (whether there'd be a crash) had been resolved by ensuing events known to all, was whether they'd figure out how to make money off of their analysis and expectations. The three elements that needed to conjoin for that to happen were the design of an instrument (the product that would allow investors to profit if housing crashed), finding lots of counterparties (which turned out to be banks who wanted to maintain the apparent value of their investment portfolios on their books), and timing (not getting in too early, but getting in earlier than others). All in all, a book to restore my faith in markets in the face of their most egregious failures,

The Rational Optimist

I really enjoyed listening to Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist as an audio-book. It seemed perfectly suited to the format. The reader, L.j. Ganser, had just the tone of jaunty buoyancy to carry me through the whole set of 11 CDs in just a couple of weeks of listening in the car, which is the only place I find conducive to working through audio-books. The book itself could perhaps be considered a kind of libertarian manifesto, though Ridley is a lot less concerned about the corrosive effects of "statism" and government abuse of power than most libertarians, as long as property rights are reliably protected. I'd call him a Madisonian liberal: he's all in favor of political forms that weaken and factionalize, but have the authority to defend the processes of exchange he finds magical in determining the (almost) inevitability of human progress. There's also an ingredient of engagement with science in Ridley's writing and thinking here that I find quite admirable, though it has drawn what I think is criticism of the wrong sort from professional scientists, predictably, in the area of climate change. I say the wrong sort because I see the criticism as simply an attempt to shut his argument down point by point rather than addressing it overall, and overall I think he remains convincing, as an "amateur" thinking about the implications of even the "scientific consensus" on climate change issues: namely, that there is uncertainty about the magnitude and meaning of effects of climate change, and very little uncertainty about the magnitude of the costs of simply trying to stop carbon emissions on the living standards of the world, developed and developing. To categorize him as a climate change denier is I believe dishonest.

Slayer of Gods

     Lynda Robinson's Slayer of Gods is a mystery set in ancient Egypt, and follows her Drinker of Blood in the "Lord Meren" series. The mystery which provided the narrative drive and structure for both books, the death of Nefertiti, was resolved in this one. The structure of the "case" allowed Robinson to imagine two distinct Egyptian regimes, that of Akhenaten and that of Tutankhamen, quite interestingly. Slayer of Gods is apparently the sixth book in the Lord Meren series. I'd have to say that I really see these two in particular as one long novel, despite their being part of a perhaps continuing series.

The Soros Lectures

     I've been meaning to note that I read The Soros Lectures, by the financier George Soros, several weeks ago… It seemed an interesting mix of views emerging from different bits of his life and not necessarily finding themselves consistent with one another. First, a description of some philosophical views on the "reflexivity" of economic systems that boil down to the importance of self-fulfilling but false expectations in creating extended failures in markets to behave correctly (i.e., to process information objectively), failures that Soros himself has been able to take advantage of in some of his most profitable investing activities. All good, and anything someone makes a billion dollars off of and is willing to divulge to the world, I'm at least interested in hearing – though he didn't seem quite as original a thinker as he sees himself being. Second, a critique of what he sees as a similar form of cognitive dissonance characterizing the recent Bush administration in both the economic and political spheres – that is, his claim that the fundamental mode of that administration was deception, of itself and others. Most of this put in the kind of "isn't it obvious" terms that infuriate me in the arguments of my left-liberal Berkeley friends. Weak stuff, this, unless much better argued. Third, and perhaps most interesting, statements that the structural problems that caused the recession from 2008 on aren't even close to being resolved, that it's possible the worst of the "correction" is yet to come. He seems to be basing this third argument on a combination of solid knowledge of the degree to which bad investment positions around the world haven't yet completed their "unwinding," and the additional effects of government debt and doubts about creditworthiness. Soros' prescribed solution seems to be a combination of continued short selling of private and government securities, of the sort that has made him rich, and strong government intervention in the economy of the sort that Paul Krugman's been advocating in the New York Times, threatening a depression if his advice isn't followed (as it probably won't be). I found myself much more inclined to trust the short selling than the proposed solutions, not that I'd put any money on it myself.

Recipe - Chicken and Vegetable Cobbler - NYTimes.com

Jenny made us a wonderful dinner tonight:

Recipe - Chicken and Vegetable Cobbler - NYTimes.com