blue bile

The child closes his eyes and the world disappears, within this is the world of his parents and their cold stories of marriage, of a 19-hole golf course; and without, this is the world of the Earth engulfed by an immense planet. And then later? A little older, if in grief he faces the ground's fall, the ``de-groundation'' [``des-solation''], he won't even know where to set foot, he will hear the words of black-bile, of melancholia, of self-destruction to the point of 'killing death' as Freud says in \emph{Mourning and Melancholia}... And if he meets History's madness where it's spread, at the movie theater, he will be LVT, with the Destruction that he wants to show us showing his fascination for it to the point of crushing his Palme d’Or in Cannes. Like Benigni, Spielberg, Tarentino, Costa Gavras does he want to give it a shot as director since the attack on humanity carried out in the Shoah, since Lanzman's Shoah? Does he conjure up the effects that he experiences as an artist? Not to prove like the philosopher, but to show images that affect the spectator so that he himself become one to the point of saying he is convinced he accepts the fascination? Fleeting symptom or creation? Desire or folly? A coalescence filmed between the creator and his creation? There, where the desire for the end of the world grips him: the end of the couple, the unattainable feminine, a planet in which nothingness must crush everything, the falling off love at the time of love, the inside of the hut made of branches that are not separated from the outside, the black bile of the world hatred where the inside is fused with the outside. Where the worst of the XX century is not far: the horror and the pleasure of the nameless crimes through the annihilation of Jews disfiguring their lives and deaths. LVT slides in the chaos where limit and support disappear in the face of the Other. Does he shocks us in the theater? ... Melancholia is the wimp of Chaplin's Dictator that gets hard and collapse on a cosmic scale ... and that falls at the end of the feature. Even though they tell him "no, despite yourself you are not a Nazi. Eh, li'l Lars Von Trier, close your eyes and write your film!"

This was J-J Moscovitz's foreword to a screening of Melancholia at the Cinéma La Pagode in Paris (my translation). Given the French elan in the ambition of this film, I thought only a non-conventional French review could do it justice.
I had seen the feature just over a week earlier, but have been hesitating ever since about its significance. Frankly, during my viewing, I was in awe of the prelude, but then slowly slipped into deadly boredom. The initial collage of cinematic metaphors was awesome, but perhaps just as Wagner's ouvertures erect monuments of expectation that later shrivel in long-drawn narrative corridors, similarly the force and novelty of these images and sound could only lead to disappointment.
Lars Von Trier is not new to awkwardness, he's a director of bold ideas, and an artist often pays with bathos when they risk so much. The result in Melancholia is artistic incoherence, unprecedented vision juxtaposed to dead-end oddities: why does John suddenly turns into a Scrooge, what's the point of having Tim chase Justine for the next big thing in marketing at her own wedding? Perhaps, these are just bizarre pieces of a puzzle that pass through my thick mind like neutrinos through Earth.
What did not leave me, and to some extent has grown in me perhaps to the poing of haunting me is Melancholia's essence. Melancholia, the black bile of ancient medicine, in this film turns into the most poignant depiction of clinical depression. The depression that paralyzes Justine before her bath, the depression that makes her flatly deny Earth has a future and assert it will all soon end in utter absurdity, the depression that yet she seems to worship as an otherworldly power, the depression that ridicules its compassionate (Claire) or rationalistic (John) deniers, the depression that inexorably engulfs Earth like the coldest Jupiter-sized planet.

Of Melanie Klein's study of early childhood psychological development I remember this: that in the beginning the distinction between the child and the rest of the world is blurry. To a newborn the Self, if "Self" is the appropriate term, is everything. The universe is a Monad. Starting with the distinction of the mother, the world grows around the child psyche as separate entities. I often see depression as a devolution towards that primordial stage of our lives.

Sweden Occupied

Last week,  Bloomberg News ran a piece singing praises of Sweden's  fiscal health  in these time of systemic financial turmoil.

I got a kick ouf reading the following paragraph:

Sweden’s success lies in part in its focus on income equality, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said in an interview last month. Sweden has the world’s highest tax burden as a percentage of gross domestic product after Denmark. The two countries also boast some of the most equal income distributions in the world, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

While the mayor of the Big Apple had been busy busting Occupy Wall Street, his company was reporting on institutionalized occupation.
And this is all the more telling since as I remarked in a past post a socio-psychological study by Norton and Ariely found that the great majority of Americans, regardless of political orientation, would move to a country with the wealth distribution of Sweden! So why so much crying "income redistribution!" whenever there is a timid attempt to raise marginal income tax and similar legislation?

At the cost of oversimplifying, I'd say it's a matter of perception. Just like the Norton-Ariely study revealed dramatic misperception in the distribution of wealth in the US, so it is reasonable most on the conservative side believe any policy aimed at fiscally increasing social justice is deleterious to the greater good. Obviously, such misperception has not spontaneously arisen, but is the result of the slogan drumbeat  that can be traced to the trickle-down economics of Reagan. Labels such as "income redistribution," or "communist," or "taxing job creators" have been slung to whoever sought to redress the trend that is starving the government of the resources it needs to maintain a modicum of a social safety net.

When confronted with actual data, such as the near stagnation of real wages since the Reagan years, none of these labels stands the test.
Take for example the "higher taxes" that would result from an expiration of G.W. Bush tax cuts. First of all higher taxes would mean a return to previous marginal tax rates especially for a family filing jointly with yearly taxable income higher than $250000. Secondly, we are talking of reinstating higher marginal rates. That means that such family would pay exactly the same tax as everybody else on all income up to $250000, and 4.9% on the income that exceeds that threshold . For every $1000 in excess of $250000 such family would pay $49 more.
Given significant demand, an entrepreneur whose business is subject to personal income tax would not hire or expand because of such tax increase?  And what about the fact that his costs, including salaries, would not result in any higher tax due?
I have not heard a single convincing explanation on how that increase can have a meaningful impact on any economic choice.

And what is the price of starving the government? The price is that the kind of investment for the "greater good of the country," those infrastructural investment that only a government can afford, are sorely lagging behind. The result is that  so many  Americans had to go deep into debt to simply afford an education or pay medical bills. The result is, if you let me stick a label, too, the demise of the American Dream.

The single most important contribution of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the making of this awareness and the dispelling of the myths that defined the American Dream as a function of income redistribution upward.
Sweden today demonstrates that capitalism with a human face is possible. In the words of  Robert Reich 

Those at the top would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of one that’s almost dead in the water.

the specter of Communism is haunting who?

Communism has been part of the repertoire of muck slung at the current administration and its liberal constituency. "Obama is a communist!" you could hear, even uttered by a few who experienced real socialism.
Really? The exaggeration is patently false (just look up the definition of communist), but for the sake of argument, let's consider its figurative sense and look at the statistics that are likely dearest to the anticommunists, marginal tax rates. With the exception of the first three years since the establishment of the federal income tax, the marginal rate for couples making more than $250,000 (a near top rate that likely identifies the rich) reached bottom at 25% in the mid Twenties, then it grew parabolically to reach a top of 94% in wartime, but after the WWII stayed near those "confiscatory" levels during the Fifties and Sixties, a time of prosperity that included Eisenhower's two terms. Reagan, the anticommunist hero, slashed this rate to 50%, Bush senior brought it down to another local minimum of 28%. We are now at 33%. If we let G.W. Bush's tax cuts expire we would go back to 36%, still well below Reagan's level. I bet the top 1% likes this communism, likes this income redistribution.
The communist epithet crossed the line of hilarity when it was flung at Warren Buffet a few months ago. Remember when he took one page ads and exhorted Congress to raise the top marginal rates? Comrade Buffett is the same who swung a sweet deal with Goldman consisting of a 6 billions equity infusion in exchange for preferreds and warrants.
But it's only the other day that it finally dawned on me what communism in the developed world is these days. Giorgio Napolitano, the president of the Republic of Italy, stepped into the credit crisis that bedevils his country sovereign bonds and issued a statement to calm the financial markets. Mr. Napolitano was a high ranking member of the Italian Communist Party!

When the city that never sleeps sleeps

"Irene," from the ancient Greek "εἰρήνη," meaning "peace." And peace the storm brought to the restless city. An eery, uneasy peace, a mandatory peace, as the cells of the apple battened down the hatches and the circulatory system, aka the MTA, froze well in advance of the buckets of rain and the winds' lashes and kept so well after the fury (thankfully much less intense that initially feared) abated to leave the streets to dogged pet walkers, stray tourists, and boastful runners.

Twenty years ago almost to the day I was captive of Hurricane Bob, grading summer session final exams. The department was not deserted. One could easily partition the population hurrycanned in that solid university building into two: on the one hand there were those who could not get their fill of weather advisories. On the other, there were the Europeans, who glued their ears to the radio desperately seeking news of the Soviet coup d'état. At that time I squarely belonged in the latter group.

And now? Now I am musing how singular for the first hurricane in a generation to follow on the heels of the first quake in a three generations.

Not my fault!

How not to enjoy a sunny respite from the monsoons of the last few days, an afternoon when even the volatility of the markets was swelling the longs's sails and blowing headwinds into Midas'? But a sudden sensation as if dizziness or involuntary muscle twitching dragged my reality back in check. The most natural explanation was an earthquake. I had actually experienced similar and bigger tremors in Rome, Italy. In the evening of November 23, 1980 (my birthday!), one of the deadliest quakes in Italian history was a frightful experience on the 7th floor where I was living. There were a few more. But this is NYC, not in a seismic region! Had someone badly messed up at one of the nearby construction sites? Or was this the ultimate terrorist attack? (Been seeing too much sci-fi...)
Soon the radio announced it had indeed been a seismic tremor. A modicum of chaos in a region utterly unaccustomed to this force of nature ensued. The epicenter was soon located somewhere in Louisa County, VA, near Mineral. Geologists commented that this was the work of a ancient fault, the remnant of the geological heydays of hundreds of millions years ago when the Appalachian rose, the so called Spotsylvania fault. Admittedly, today was my 3/4 birthday, but not my fault!

S&P, rated R

One day someone will make "Standard & Poor's" the movie, which I doubt will be rated for general audiences, and Louise Story will likely write the treatment. For now, the 63 trillion dollars (CDS gross notional in 2008) question still remains how to rate the raters as to the extent they contributed to the credit cataclysm in whose wake we dwell. According to a story Ms. Story published today in The New York Times, the government is probing S&P. The goal appears to be bringing a civil suit, and the main thesis of the investigators is that the business side influenced the analysts' side not to "kill the golden goose." In other words, Henry Blodget & Co. redux, only with credit gizmos like ABS CDOs rather thatn .com stocks.

The inquest appears to have begun before the recent downgrade of US debt. Given that the rationale for the downgrade was exquisitely political, one cannot wonder whether this time the political and strategic side of S&P talked to the analysts. Knowing they were already under investigation, they may have considered the ploy of the victim of government intimidation to at least try to mitigate the reputational risk that would ensue if the allegations of collusion between the business and rating side were corroborated. As many pointed out, it would be hard to portray the rating failures of the credit crisis as mere ineptitude in such case.

Innuendos, all innuendos, admittedly easy to believe... But this is what you get when you lose credit (from the Latin credere, to believe), and that is what S&P, like his ABS issuing clients, cannot spare enough, "they've got 500 standards, and they are all poor!"

What is Art Today?

Four peoples stare at each other, suddenly one starts running, others seem on the verge of tears, the guy on the left grins satanically, he buffets his own head, a toupee falls, with his right hand he pulls up a gun and shoots perhaps after the man who ran away, then, with the left hand he opens a can of beer and start guzzling.
In another feature, we see the back of a man in a business suit. He pulls a wallet from his back pants pocket. He turns. Suddenly a sprightly and diminutive Japanese dancer decked in full garb springs from behind the man. The man counts banknotes from his wallet with an air of consternation. He's on the verge of pulling out some note, but never does so. Meanwhile, the dancer leaps around and makes the kabukiest of faces ... The man leaves the scene, she seems to do so, too, but then returns with a final face.

These are just memories of two of the 45 ultra-slow motion films that were projected on a huge screen this past July on the south side of of the Josie Robertson Plaza at Lincoln Center. They must be seen, how can one possibly render the action-stretching of slow motion in words? People streaming out of the Metropolitan Opera House, of mere passers by like yours truly found themselves unexpectedly enthralled.
Like modern physics astounding us with the invisible phenomena at molecular and smaller scales, these short films discovered the microscopic nature of performance. That was art shedding light on art. In their thrall, viewers were wondering "What is Art Today?"
And the features before their eyes were answering that Art is precisely the asking of this Question!

The Whitey and the Billy

My American I was born in Boston, and in those early years I would glue my ears to the radio for clues on both the language and the culture that makes e pluribus unum.
One surname was the source of deep confusion: Bulger. I would sometimes hear it in the crime section, at other times in politics. The given name did not help much, and it took me a long while to distinguish two. Little I knew that one, William Michael "Billy" Bulger was the president of the Massachusetts Senate, and the other, James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger, was the "president" of the Irish mob (in fairness to my sticky ears, such names were never enunciated at full length). It took me even longer, and I still find it hard to believe that these two do not share a surname by coincidence, but are related, and in fact brothers.
These memories lay dormant until today, when I heard of the capture of the Whitey. Hearing that the FBI is still after the mob and that nabbing its fugitives still makes news is a salve for a mind somewhat chafed in the times of Bin Laden and cyberwar. 
That two scions of the same stock can grow so contrary to each other, like faces of a family Janus, like William Wilson, is yet another reminder that human nature is still manifold and irreducible as ever.

eG8

A couple of weeks ago, the worlds Internet moguls met their political counterparts in Paris. The event was an unusual prelude to the customary G8 affair to be held in further "from the madding crowd" in the resort of Dauville.
The meeting unfolded as expected, advocates of net freedom upbraiding politicians for even thinking of regulating, It was fun to see the incurably T-shirted Zuck wearing a suit for once  and shaking hands with überbureaucrat  Sarkozy. He did not miss a beat, once interviewed in his habitual accoutrements, to stress that politicians cannot have it both ways: regulate the channels that brought about the Arab spring thanks to being unregulated.
That was a good point, but like any potent line there is more to it beneath the veneer of rhetorical efficacy.
One of the most worrisome points is that the Internet is in fact already quite regulated, be it by governments, ICANN, or, more powerfully, the de facto gatekeepers such as Google and Zuck's own baby.

On the other hand, the internet is quite anarchic, or better hackocratic. I always considered SecureID's
 the entry point of professional-grade security, but it too got hacked, hacked at the source, namely its manufacturer, RSA.
Once again, a powerful reminder that no system can be completely secured. If your trusted security token is no longer trusted, how secure are the data mines that Big Buy Brother hoards on us are?

Grimsvötn takes a smoke

It's not very well known that volcanic plumes disrupt climate locally (as well as globally, as we know
from Eyjafjallajökull last year, or further back Krakatau and Tambora).

This spectacular video demonstrates how Grimsvötn is doing the job
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmoaoOg8MQ8



(Smoking and lighting at the same time, try and say that to Mayor Bloomberg ...)

unraptured

The time has come and gone, and Mother Nature has not served as God's scourge, but instead regaled us with a beautiful Plinian could out of a pronouncable, and more importantly, benign Icelandic volcano.

It was easy to poke fun at the followers of Harold Camping who, the day after, found themselves still subject to mundane gravity. Today, it would be cruel.

The psycho-sociological implications that the question of how such gullibility can arise in the age when science and technology appear in firm control of reality are fodder for many a PhD theses.

However, some observations can be made with little dissertation. This prophecy, like many of its predecessors, was based on biblical numerology. Mankind has been fascinated with numerical codes recondite within the fabric of reality at least since Pythagoras. Perhaps because of their abstract and seemingly atemporal nature numbers, and more generally mathematical structures, appear to encode the fabric of reality. Plato conferred a hyper-real status to mathematical objects well before hypertext ....

For millennia, arcane numerology coexisted in the same minds that argued in terms of Euclid's Elements. However, with few practical exceptions (e.g., accounting) mathematics remained the topic of philosophical thought just as what we call now science was Natural Philosophy. Eventually, the scientific method sanctioned math as the language to analyze and quantify Nature.
Scientific and technological advances likely reinforced the fundamental equivocation that math is the language of reality, if not reality itself rather than a human tool to investigate reality (as well as itself).

Curiously, some of the most formidable advances in technology (computer science's reduction of information to bits) and math (the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem) can be considered as going in the opposite directions: transforming language to numbers.

pig risk

Early this year a fellow mathematician and I started collaborating on a research project that aimed at applying the theory of dynamical systems to the present sovereign credit crisis in the Eurozone. I soon dubbed this project PIIGS Risk, after the acronym that encapsulate the countries currently on the black list of bond vigilantes (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain).
Little I knew that he who rescues the PIIGS was to become, allegedly, a pig.
I am of course alluding to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the now former head of the IMF, who was embroiled in a sexual assault affair just as all international monetary authorities were priming their resources for a second Greek bailout. 
Little I knew that the next chapter in this crisis would spring out of a suite in an almost inconspicuous (boy, the French may take it personally! Sofitel having originated in France and now part of the much larger Accor. But being conspicuous near Times Square is a tall order) hotel I have been walking by for years. Such is the nature of risk, it pops up unforeseen. And yet pig risk was not totally unpredictable, since DSK, as the person of interest has been quickly dubbed, had some troubles containing his sexual exuberance within the confines of ethical and professional standards.
Interesting curio: DSK rhymes with JFK, also a notorious womanizer who, thanks to the ease of cover-up afforded by different mores, was able to continue his momentous career. DSK's, at least for now, appears to have ground to a screeching halt at ... JFK airport.

He's Bin

On Sunday night the fi rst two headlines on Wikipedia front page read

U.S. o cials report that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead. 

Pope John Paul II is beatifi ed at a ceremony in Vatican City.

The two ends of the moral spectrum. While I was reading this, crowds assembled in front of the White House and at Ground Zero chanting USA! in a state of elation similar to stadium cheering.

I belong to the few  whom those chants reminded of the Palestinians who danced and rejoiced on September 12, 2001. To be sure, I am not making a moral equivalence. I am making a socio-political one. Now we understand, or are reminded why one behaves so: revenge.

Revenge is precisely the dynamics of destruction that legal systems of organized nations set out to supplant. From Hammurabi to today's constitutions, the Law charges the State with the responsibility of punishing crimes with appropriate penalties. An eye for an eye belongs to the secular as well as religious Old Testament.

Absent the Law, there rules the Feud. The Greeks understood this archetypal transition best and represented it in the Oresteia.

In the XXI century we, Westerners, deem ourselves superior to the Palestinian who danced on September 12, and one of the main reasons is that we honor the Rule of Law. However we believe no less in revenge. And alas, I am afraid that while only few chanted for the death of Bin Laden, many demand an eye for an eye

in their daily lives. 

I found the reaction of all survivors of the victims of September 11 most digni fied and exemplary. They pointed out that no additional death could bring back the beloved they had lost. The death of Bin Laden a fforded them some incremental closure, but no satisfaction. Justice had been served. At a high price. And Justice comforts the human spirit.

The Greek Tragedy's maxim that through suff ering you attain wisdom (πάθει µάθος), how true!

Swedish meatballs

A while ago, a friend of mine told me of an anecdote that brought back  memory of the Pomperipossa Effect. In short, back in the 90's my friend had met a Swede who had come to this country to escape income equality, whereby she, a dentist, would be making as much as a bus driver in her native Sweden. My friend inserted this in his argument that there are strong forces that are pushing America toward the Swedish flattening of wealth distribution.

I fi nd this particularly ironic, since it came in the wake of new studies that show how wealth inequality is growing sharper, and we are now being compared to banana republics. On the other hand, this is not surprising at all, given the conservative play to depict any attempt to return to previous taxation as class warfare or income redistribution (as though the current tax policy, which has greatly bene fited the very rich, were not income redistribution ... any tax policy, for that matter, can be regarded as income redistribution).

As it often happens, it boils down to perception, and the "doctors of facts" eventually win the battle of public opinion. Perception of wealth in/equality has been the subject of a recent study of Dan Ariely and Michael Norton The underlying survey demonstrates that Americans deem the current wealth distribution much more equitable than it actually is. Even more surprising are the answers to a second set of questions: the ideal wealth distribution is even flatter than the perceived (let alone the actual) one, and in fact much closer to the wealth distribution of ... Sweden!

The Book of Madisoniah

Today, for the fi rst time, the United States Constitution was read aloud in the House of Representative. This was touted as a return to the origins, to the ethical bedrock on which the Founding Fathers laid the foundation of our republic. What was read was the amended version of the Constitution, namely the document as is in force today.

I love the United States Constitution precisely for its essential interpretive nature, for its intention of being the genotype and not the phenotype of American polity. Alas, this reading of the amended Constitution as the "original" smacks of political gambit. Returning to the origins is a favorite of politicians of all colors and stripes. When I rst visited the Soviet Union in the summer of 1988, our party-sanctioned guide was touting the need to return to Lenin's teaching ... The reading of the amended Constitution as "original" abstracts it from its evolution and seems to imply that Constitutional Law is moot. It parallels the literalist reading of the Bible of so many supporters of the Tea Party!