The Compulsive Explainer

Events in Honduras

Honduras was taken over by a military coup. The president had gone too far to the left to suit the more conservative elements in the country, and so they simply took over the country. Conservatives in the US applauded; these events in tiny insignificant Honduras had cheered them up.

It has been difficult to tell what was going on down there, reports conflicted - but it was clear that the country had become badly divided between the right and the left. The right bought good lobbyists in Washington, and had good access to the Administration and to Congress. The left was represented by a gaggle of left-wing groups, who also tried to influence Washington, but with much less success.

I am on the mailing list of the Latin American Working Group, whose motto is Action at Home for Just Policies Abroad.  According to them, it promotes the interests of over 60 major religious, humanitarian, grassroots and policy organizations to decision makers in Washington, which you can see here. Their lastest email, about the elections in Honduras, which took place on Nov. 29, quoted the Quixote Center:

A peaceful march of over 500 people was just culminating at the Central Park of San Pedro Sula when a large armored tank with high pressure water cannons mounted on the top pulled up at the rear of the march--along with a large truck full of military troops. The 500 peaceful, unarmed protesters turned around to face the tank and troops--and in unison, they sat down in the middle of the street. The truck retreated 2 blocks. The soldiers got off the truck, and began to put on gas masks. Everything went silent--and suddenly the crowd was attacked with water cannons and gas. People are fleeing. There are wounded and detained.

I have been to San Pedro Sula. Back in the Seventies I decided there must be some good people in Honduras, and I wanted to meet them. What I saw instead was the wreck of a country, where the poverty was horrible. There were lots of nice people there, as there are anywhere, but the people in charge were far from nice.

Jimmy Carter tried to help the country, and they appreciated that. But succeeding administrations have only made the situation worse, and Obama seems to be going down that same rut.

Keepass

Keepass is a free, open-source program for managing your passwords. You can also use it for other things: for example I use it to store my passport info and my Costa Rican residence info.

You should have a separate password for every site you visit on the Net. And these passwords should be secure: which means it would be nearly impossible for you to remember all of them.

Fortunately, most browsers will remember your sign-in information for you and enter this information for you whenever you enter a site that asks for it. Also, many sites, such as Amazon, keep this information in a cookie, and automatically log you in. Firefox does a good job of remembering passwords, but some sites will not let Firefox enter the password for you. When I go to my commercial mailing service, Aerocasillas, for example, I have to enter my password myself - I have to go to Keepass, put my password in the clipboard and paste it into Aerocasillas.

I change the password to my online banking account every month, according to a schedule I set up on Google Calendar. I tried to be clever about this, and made it using every character on the keyboard such as: (.SI!n+>. And I stored them on Just1Key, a neat service on the Web, that encrypts your sign-in info, so you only have to remember one password to access your other user names and passwords.

This was fine until I found out that HushMail was giving the Feds its user's passwords - and Just1Key uses Hushmail's technology. All of a sudden, my security wasn't so secure. So I went to sourceforge to find out what free open source programs they have for storing passwords. They have two: Password Safe and Keepass. I downloaded both and tried them both. I like Keepass the best - although Password Safe is a fine program too.

Keepass has two ways you can access it: a password you remember or a password file - or both. I opted for both, I'm the kind of person who wears both a belt and suspenders: if one fails, you always have a backup. Keepass generated a password file for my USB pen drive, and I came up with a clever phrase that I could remember: not one word, but many.

Also Keepass supports TANs:

These are passwords that can be used only once. These special passwords are used by some banks. This provides additional security, as a spy cannot perform transactions, even if he knows the password of your banking account.

By bank doesn't use TANs yet, but if it does, I am ready for it.

Keepass will generate passwords for you - which are more secure than anything you can dream up for yourself. The next time I change the password for my bank, I am going to let keepass do the job for me. 

Any complaints? Yes, the user documentation on open source projects is not always that helpful. They could really use a good technical writer on their projects, but since they are usually programmers, they overlook this.

The bust in Dubai and exogenous shocks

I have been waiting to find out more about this; to find someone who could explain it to me. The New York Times pointed me to Credit Writedowns. Edward Harrison seems to know what he is talking about - and much better, able to explain what he knows to others.

Dubai is not an oil-rich country. It certainly has the greatest population amongst the United Arab Emirates, but oil and natural gas provide only 6% of income to the country. The country’s oil is expected to be depleted in as little as 20 years. Dubai is now much more dependent on its services like sporting events, trade and entrepôt services, and financial services and especially on property. So, when the Dubai property bubble went spectacularly bust in the credit crisis, Abu Dhabi, a UAE emirate with considerably more oil revenue, stepped into the breech in February.

Now, mind you Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund was rumoured to have lost a 12-figure sum in the financial meltdown in part because sovereign wealth funds from the Mideast recklessly poured capital into the American and European banking sector. Still, its support for Dubai calmed investors. 

He continues:

What does this tell me? First and foremost, it hints at the fragility of this recovery and the real risk exogenous shocks pose.  We are barely recovering now and a lot of debt and unemployment put us at stall speed, making the risk posed by events of this nature that much greater.

More importantly, however, the Dubai World events underline the unpredictability of exogenous shocks. All of these potential crisis situations — dollar carry trade unwind, debt crisis in the Baltics, oil price spike, an unexpected surge in interest rates, war in the Middle East — are still there lurking in the background. We don’t see coverage in the press on them everyday, but they are still there

I have been optimistic about the near-term prospects for the global economy in large part due to the myriad pro-cyclical effects of recovery. Longer-term, however, there are some serious obstacles to a sustainable recovery.  This is not a garden-variety recession and recovery. It is a recession within a longer-term depression.  And while we are in a technical recovery, I believe much of the fundamental problems which triggered this downturn are still there, lurking. The debt troubles at Dubai World bring this point home.

Did you get that? We are in a recession within a longer-term depression. Follow up on some of these links. I like this one about a crisis in 1931 in Austria.

The Return of a Class-Conscious Society

Americans want their rich and powerful to rule over them. They are tired of a classless society, where they are responsible for what goes on, they want them to assume this burden - and take care of them properly, as a ruling class should. Never mind that this has seldom happened, the rulers just take care of themselves - what is important is that the people believe in the illusion of beneficial rulers. They are capable of complete self-deception, and seem to enjoy this - as they have over most of recorded history. To put this another way: the modern era is over.

At one point in the Old Testament history, the Jews decided they wanted a king. God didn't think this was such a good idea, and laid out his objections. The Jews would have none of His sensible reasoning; the other nations had kings and they wanted one too. So God gave in, let them have one, and the Jews were forever thankful - even though this led directly to their conquest by the Babylonians - and then by the Romans. They forgot how to rule themselves, with disastrous consequences.

Meanwhile, in Rome itself, a Republican form of government decayed into rule by series of dictators - with similar consequences. The people were no longer able to rule themselves.

In American, this transition is far along, and constitutes much of our conflicts: who is going to be in charge? The answer is clear: the rich and powerful, who keep getting richer and more powerful all the time. Our previous ideal: a classless, middle-class society, with plenty of help for the poor to make it too, is derided as government intervention in the economy - which steadily increases the gap between the rich and everyone else. This income redistribution is said to be merely the automatic result of a market economy, which must rule our lives. In fact, it is only the rule of the rich. 

It is true that this has been true of American ever since its founding. The Founding Fathers were suspicious of democracy and were careful to guard against it. But during the 19th Century, most of these barriers were removed, starting with the slaves, and then for women.  And we moved much closer to direct rule - with strong efforts to curb our robber barons. All this was lost in the 20th Century. Formally, nothing changed, but fundamentally everything changed. The Robber Barons, in the form of the Financial Industry and the Health industry, and every other industry, including the Defense industry, are now firmly in control. And most importantly: no one seems to mind - this strikes most people as normal: why shouldn't the rich and powerful rule? They have proved their proficiency in the market place.

Democracy has become just another buzz-word, useful for manipulating the people - as during the Iraq war.

The Real Situation in Afghanistan

This can be summarized easily: a total mess - which is not surprising, since it has been devastated by war for decades. Back in the Seventies, when I was a traveler in South-East Asia,  Afghanistan was a favorite place for low-budget travelers. The people treated you wonderfully. The women had to cover themselves up, but they felt secure and stayed for long periods. None of this is left, the country has been taken over by the warlords, who are criminals of the worst sort - who were put in power by the Americans to combat the Taliban. As result, Afghan society has been devastated.

The Dec. Harper's Magazine has an article The Master of Spin Moldak: undercover with Afghanistan's drug-trafficing border police. The writer is a Canadian free-lance journalist who is befriended in Pakistan by some local young Afghan men with good connections back home. They take him across the border and show him around (while showing off their new friend to their old friends). I can relate, this happened to me in Turkey once; in the undeveloped world people like to show of their friends from the outside world, and this gives you a fantastic opportunity to see the people as they are.

The article is long, and I will only share the ending, where he meets the master of Spin Boldak, Colonel Abdul Razik. The Colonel's grandmother had just died and he had shown up for her funeral:
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At last, Samiullah took me by the hand and, picking our way through the seated congregation, we approached the dais. As we got closer, I became aware of a young man sitting amid the whitebeards and knew immediately that this was Colonel Razik. The elders made space for me, and I got down on the dais. “This is Matthieu. He is a Canadian guest,” said Samiullah.

Razik and I contemplated each other for a moment. He looked even younger than his thirty years and had a boyishly handsome, guileless face with a square jaw and clear eyes. It was not at all the face of a fire-breathing warlord. A tuft of short hair poked out from under his hat in what was nearly a widow’s peak. He was dressed simply, in a white cotton shalwar kameez and a gray pinstriped waistcoat. Only his full mouth, with its crop of slightly crooked, strong-looking teeth, gave any hint of his great vigor and violence.

Pausing in his conversation, Razik greeted me with a reserved tone, and we shook hands. I told him I was a friend of Sikander’s, and he said I was welcome here. I thanked him for his men’s hospitality.
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Military officers like General Vance find themselves in a peculiar fix when confronted with characters like Abdul Razik. These entrenched figures hold posts or wear uniforms whose legitimacy must be respected. But many of those who maintain their power through corruption and coercion were originally installed by the U.S. military—a fact not lost on Afghans, who tend to have longer memories than Westerners here on nine- or twelve-month rotations.

I asked General Vance if he was aware that Razik was directly involved in the drug trade. “Yes,” he said. “We are completely aware that there are a number of illicit activities being run out of that border station.” He had few illusions about Razik, with whom he interacts directly. “He runs effective security ops that are designed to make sure that the business end of his life runs smoothly, and there is a collateral effect on public order,” he told me. “Ideally, it should be the other way around. The tragedy of Kandahar is that it’s hard to find that paragon of civic virtue.

”Indeed, honest people in Afghanistan don’t often occupy the halls of power, and they don’t usually have the resources to be the first in line for big development contracts. Should one’s security restrictions allow one to stroll the streets, however, one will find them there, pushing carts of vegetables, positively begging strangers to join them for a cup of tea that might cost them half their day’s salary. If one looks a little harder, one will find them in crumbling little homes in a poor area on the edge of town: places of exile, to which honest men have been marginalized either by force or by choice. In other cases—such as that of Malalai Kakar, Kandahar’s top female police officer, who was shot in September of last year by unknown assailants, or that of Alim Hanif, chief judge of the new Central Narcotics Tribunals Appeals Court, killed outside his house in Kabul by masked men—the honest Afghans will be found in the cemetery.

As for Razik, he remains alive and very much the master of the borderlands. Occasionally, outside forces will annoy him: in July, CNPA teams, working with DEA mentors, raided two caches of hashish in Razik’s territory, arresting one of his commanders in the process. But Razik is hardly at odds with his government. After the first round of national elections closed on August 20, his men forcibly took Spin Boldak’s ballot boxes into his house for “safekeeping” overnight. It was just one of the many reports of electoral fraud in Kandahar Province, which polled overwhelmingly for President Karzai, according to the independent Election Commision of Afghanistan. The count from Spin Boldak’s polling stations: Karzai, 8,341; his main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, 4.

Growth and Collapse

The world has been growing rapidly for over 50 years, ever since WWII. People now consider unlimited growth inevitable - and resist any other course of action. Growth must go on at all costs. But this is insane: nothing can grow forever - not even our divine race. Eventually an economy runs out of something critical and it collapses. That is why I did not entitle this posting Growth and Decay because decay happens gradually, while collapse happens quickly.

The pattern of boom and bust should be familiar to us, but we have steadfastly refused to recognize it: the most obvious pattern in our economy. The bubble grows and then it pops: suddenly. The reason for this sudden change is sometimes difficult to determine: the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example - or before that: the Great Depression. Some kind of crisis is reached, a tipping point, and once this is reached a collapse cannot be stopped. Fortunately for us, we were able to recognize the late financial crisis before it reached that point, but recovery is proving to be slow - and we may be setting ourselves up for another one. We have yet to learn Ben Franklin's advice: "A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." If we don't control our economy, in other words, we can be sure someone else will control it for us - and we will not be happy with the results.

In some cases, the Fall of the Roman Empire for example, there is no well-defined single crisis, but a complex of situations that feed on each other. The recovery from this kind of broad collapse can take a very long time: over a thousand years. And we seem to be looking at this kind of collapse now, where the whole modern world is self-destructing. The key here is always some kind of moral collapse. It takes a long time for new moral systems to appear - this is the most difficult thing for human societies to construct - so difficult that it is a miracle when it happens - and so fragile it only lasts a short time.

Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum

Harper's Magazine

From earliest childhood, Ayn Rand saw herself as an individual standing bravely against a hostile world. She was born Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in 1905 to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in St. Petersburg. Her father was a pharmacist, and the family employed a retinue of governesses, servants, and cooks. Rand’s mother—a capricious, moody woman who told her three daughters that she had never wanted children—criticized her eldest child for being too serious and intense. The shy young girl retreated from the family, and from the schoolyard social life she found difficult to negotiate, into romantic stories, devouring illustrated adventure novels and falling in love with their swashbuckling heroes. She came to understand fiction as a way to remake the world as it ought to be.

Her big novel was The Fountainhead: 

It was not easy for Rand to complete The Fountainhead. Once Bobbs-Merrill agreed to publish the novel, she began taking doctor-prescribed amphetamines to help her finish it. She would take them for years afterward. The novel was at last published in 1943. It tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect with the mouth of “an executioner or a saint,” who can accept no compromise—no frieze, no Grecian column—that mars the purity of his modernist vision. To realize his genius, Roark must contend with a host of “second-handers”—jealous rivals, callow businessmen, and sinister intellectuals. Roark has certain sociopathic qualities—he rapes the book’s heroine, Dominique Francon (who then falls in love with him), and the book’s climax comes when he dynamites a public-housing project he designed, because the building is not constructed exactly to his specifications. The Fountainhead is an austere presentation of capitalism as a theater for the self: no social world exercises any legitimate claim on Roark’s buildings; no workmen contribute to their grandeur; no tenants have needs that might shape what he designs. His mind alone must shape the world. Surprisingly, some would say absurdly, the novel has a happy ending: a jury votes to acquit Roark, moved by his defense of himself as “a man who does not exist for others.”

In case you missed it: she was probably an amphetamine addict. And antisocial would be a mild label. She worked as a screen writer for Hollywood - which helped her to get out of the USSR.

Yet despite this interest in philosophy, her tastes remained decidedly lowbrow. She loved light operettas and Viennese waltzes, which she called her “tiddly-wink” music. She thrilled to the America she saw in movies. And although her novels would seek to develop her “philosophical” system, they would also borrow heavily from Hollywood’s intricate plots, hard-boiled language, glamorous heroines, risqué sex scenes, and—most of all—passionate, courageous heroes.

The article concludes:

Her work offers a way of making sense of a profoundly unequal society, of making it tolerable, even virtuous. Is the arid world she describes, in which all common creativity and sense of intellectual tradition has been reduced to individuals acting alone, not reflected in the empty nature of our public life? Do we not live in a world divided between winners and losers, between people who seem to live as Supermen and those who are treated as though their lives have no value at all? If societies get the thinkers they deserve, it is troubling to think that Rand is ours.

Why there is so much homosexuality in England

I am now listening to Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. Wikipedia has an entry about it.

Good-bye to All That is the autobiography of Robert Graves.^[1] First published in 1929, the work is a landmark anti-war memoir of life in the trenches during World War I. The title expresses Graves' disillusionment in the existence of traditional, stable values in European and English society. Graves first wrote the work in his thirties, when he had a long and eventful life ahead of him, and the book deals mainly with his childhood, youth and military service.

He devotes a large part of the book to his experiences of the First World War, where he gives a detailed description of trench warfare, including the tragic incompetence of the Battle of Loos. Many readers will be interested in his secondhand description of the killing of German prisoners of war by British, Canadian and Australian troops. Although he had not witnessed any incidents himself and knew of no large-scale massacres, he knew of a number of incidents where prisoners had been killed individually or in small groups, and he believed that a large proportion of Germans who surrendered never made it to prisoner-of-war camps.

Although this is an abridged version, it still spends ample time describing the horrible experiences of upper-class British schoolboys, who were taken from their families at a young age and sent to public schools, where conditions were brutal and the only escape was romantic relationships with other boys. This was encouraged by the headmasters, as long as it did not become too physical. As a glimpse into upper-class British life, it makes it clear how brittle it was: relationships with women, especially sexual relationships, were mostly formal. 

As a visitor to England in the Seventies, I was amazed at the amount of homosexuality. According to Graves, most of this homosexuality was learned, not innate.

My Wal-Mart Food Processor

My life was incomplete: I did not have a food processor. I spend a lot of time chopping up veggies for stews and stir-fries, and I thought one of these would make the work go faster.

I shop at a Wal-Mart supermarket in Cartago. It's called Hypermas down here, but it is just an extension of Wal-Mart, which seems to be everywhere. Shopping is a relief there, compared to the usual Tico supermarket, which is usually a mess: crowded isles, with management standing around doing nothing. 

I looked at their food processors this morning, intending only to price them. A mid-sized model was a little over forty dollars - but they had a little one for only a little over ten dollars! A grabbed it, thinking at least I would find out how they work. 

At home, I assembled it eagerly - but it didn't work, the little motor wouldn't run. As an engineer, this challenged me. I spent 20 minutes figuring out why it didn't work, then carefully cut a little plastic tab that appeared out of place. It ran!

I decided right then, although it was getting late, to give it a test run using a big carrot I had in the frig. I ended up with a lot of pulverized carrot, that might be useful for some kind of carrot salad, but I can't think what else. And I enjoy eating raw carrots, and using my teeth to do the job.

Net result: a complete waste of time and money.

Just to make sure, I did some quick research on Google. I found a real food processor, a Cuisinart or KitchenAid cost $160 - $ 200, and has lots of attachments to do specific things. That seems to be the trick: lots of attachments. The S-shaped blade -- also known as a sabatier blade, is useless by itself. It can cut your finger easily enough - I found that out the hard way.

Understanding Obamacare

Harper's Magazine

What follows is an extreme condensation, it is true. But you can easily read the whole thing for yourself.
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The idea that there is a competitive “private sector” in America is appealing, but generally false... smart managers know they must forsake whatever personal beliefs they may hold about the redemptive power of creative destruction for the more immediate balm of government intervention. This wisdom is expressed most precisely in an underutilized phrase from economics: regulatory capture.

The story of capture is repeated again and again, in industry after industry, whether it is the agricultural combinations creating an impenetrable system of subsidies, or television and radio broadcasters monopolizing public airwaves for private profit, or the entire financial sector conjuring perilous fortunes from the legislative void. The real battle in Washington is seldom between conservatives and liberals or the right and the left or “red America” and “blue America.” It is nearly always a more local contest, over which politicians will enjoy the privilege of representing the interests of the rich.

And so it is with health-care reform. The debate in Washington this fall ought to have been about why the United States has the worst health-care system in the developed world...But Democrats rendered those questions academic when they decided the first principle of reform would be, as Barack Obama has so often explained, that “nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

The health-care industry has captured the regulatory process, and it has used that capture to eliminate any real competition, whether from the government, in the form of a single-payer system, or from new and more efficient competitors in the private sector who might have the audacity to offer a better product at a better price.