lebron.

do you think it upsets lebron that he's 50 times better than everyone else on the court? how can anyone even QUESTION if he's the best player in the game? lebron is really the ultimate combination of dominant scorer, passer, and now, defender. when he works an isolation he's like ladanian tomlinson. as a passer he's chris paul's equal. he plays defense like bryan dawkins or ed reed, just trolling around disrupting everything. its absolutely ridiculous.

i was the biggest michael jordan homer anyone's ever seen. so much so that my dad actually used to antagonize me when jordan would have a bad game (probably to teach me not to hero worship so much) and i would actually start CRYING. and i wasn't even that young. and i'm STILL going to go ahead and say it. lebron makes teams better than jordan ever did in his prime, and lebron would leave jordan for dead one-on-one. there's only a few things that jordan's got over lebron at this point.

1) jordan had the greatest killer instinct i've ever seen. it's not even the whole "game winning shot" thing - in the 4th quarter, jordan would just take games over. and not even games in the playoffs - mid season garbage games. you got the sense that he would cheat to win, if he had to. i've never seen anyone in any sport be that level of cold-blooded killer. the only one even close? kobe.

but lebron is getting there. i just saw him get upset that rip hamilton hit him in the face while he was going up for a rebound. he takes the ball down court, backs into a corner to lure hamilton to him, then blows by him and 3 other pistons, takes it to the hole, draws contact, hits the layup plus the foul, then stares hamilton down, giving him a "don't take me on" look. you got the sense that until he went to the olympics and hung out with kobe (who's so one-dimensionally obsessed with winning that it's almost counterproductive, much like jordan early in his career) he cared more about being a 'global icon' and being funny in commercials than about beating the Celtics. Not anymore.

2) i guess this is sort of related - you never thought jordan would miss the last second shot, and he almost never did. of course, that made him valuable at the very end of the game, but it also affected other teams as the game was winding down - they always had it in the back of their head that they had to put the game out of reach. lebron just isn't as good a shooter as jordan was, and that hurts his "end of the game" rep (as I just watched him blow by all 5 pistons, lay it in, and look bored.) BUT. he almost doesn't need to be as good a shooter because a) he gets to the hole virtually whenever he wants, and b) its insane how good a passer he is, and how good court vision he has. if the rest of the cavs could shoot, he's have 20 assists per game. Still, jordan's pull-up jumper was basically a dagger, because it was completely unguardable, and you knew that he would make it virtually whenever he wanted to. lebron isn't quite there yet.

still, as a composite athlete, he's in a different stratosphere from the rest of the world. he may have actually evolved into an entirely separate species. its nothing less than a joy to watch, and i say this even as red sox manager terry francona is stubbornly sticking with hideki okajima as his setup guy even though he's done, and i have to watch him give up 4 baserunner while inducing an amazing 0 outs in the 7th inning of a close game against the hated yankees. time to give okajima the old yeller treatment, tito. fuck.

the quiet coup

Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF and frequent contributor to Planet Money has a fairly distressing article in the Atlantic that's pretty similar to Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on the growth of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, in the pocket of Wall Street, as a new 'shadow government'. Johnson's setup isn't too surprising at this point:

• Production from the financial sector began to dominate GDP (helped by Volcker-induced volatility in interest rates, deregulation under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush, and finally, via generation of complex instruments that rewarded risky behavior - securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps)
• The dominance of the financial sector was transmitted directly to the government, as both the Treasury Department and the SEC became dominated by products of Wall Street. This, combined with the growing complexity of managing risk and debt, led to the prevailing theory that banking institutions were the only ones capable of regulating themselves. This led to unregulated leveraging and assumption of incredibly high levels of debt, such that a small economic failure in a market previously thought of as bulletproof would lead to a collapse (cue: housing).
  

Johnson's assessment for what needs to be done tacitly indicts the current administration's policy of offering unregulated assistance while taking great care not to disturb the natural order. His prescription is somewhat different:

1) temporarily nationalize the banks in order to restore confidence.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer. The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

2) smash these oversized financial behemoths, Hulk-style.

The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs. Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

The only sensible arguments I've ever heard over this issue came (naturally) from This American Life and Planet Money. This American Life had a really insightful piece where they followed the actual mechanics of an FDIC takeover of a small bank, and then wondered if the FDIC would even have the capacity to deal with institutions as large as Citigroup. Of course, Planet Money then followed up on this (below), with an interview with John Bovenzi, the chief operating officer of the FDIC, who insisted that they could in fact handle the load. So. Interesting.

What's so great about In Utero?

My roommate and I listened to In Utero beginning to end today, and it reminded me of all the reasons that it's my favorite Nirvana album, and one of my top...7 favorite albums. Consider the context: Nirvana's previous studio album, Nevermind, had turned the pop landscape on its head by showing that tracks as aggressive as "Lithium" could still be considered pop. Now, with fans and critics looking for the grunge Abbey Road got something quite different. So here's what i love about In Utero.

1. They kick off side 1/track 1 by burning their status as "critical darlings" in effigy. Dear music critics: "Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I'm bored and old/Self-appointed judges judge/more than they have sold." So, basically (and poetically), fuck yourself.

2. If tracks like "In Bloom" and "Drain You" from Nevermind represent the perfect amalgamation of the Beatles and the Sex Pistols, consider those 2 forces to be pitted against each other on this album. Consider that 2 back-to-back pairs include "Milk It"/"Pennyroyal Tea" and "Tourette's"/"All Apologies."

3. The inaccessible wail of some of my favorite Nirvana songs of all time: "Milk It" (featuring the incredible chorus "Doll steak/Test meat") and "Tourette's" (basically 2 minutes of incoherence ending up with Cobain yelling "Mean heart/cold heart/cold heart/cold heart/cold heart" and of course, "Scentless Apprentice," one of the only songs written by the entire band, featuring the chorus, "Get away/go away/go away"

4. On the other hand, they still produce some of the most infectious, affecting songs of their catalog. Give me "Pennyroyal Tea", "Heart-Shaped Box", "Dumb", and "All Apologies" over the Nevermind chart-toppers any day.

5. All Apologies? One of the great album closers of all time. A song that would absolutely not have been out of place on Revolver. And, by the way, who really thinks Kurt Cobain didn't kill himself? "In the sun/In the sun/Married/Buried"...come on.

I do think that, around age 12-14, kids begin to identify with music in a greater way as their own personality develops. So for me, In Utero (and another album by a disaffected artist projecting his dystopian vision on a slightly larger scale - The Downward Spiral) kind of taught me what music could do as more than just music. Maybe I would have ended up a kinder, gentler soul if I felt the same way about...I don't know, Stone Temple Pilots or something.

Todd says he's going to blog about the first Led Zeppelin album. Let's see if he means it.

geithner

Not the most encouraging profile on Geithner from portfolio.com. They basically make 2 major contentions:

1) he doesn't have the policy chops to make any ambitious moves.

It’s old news to people familiar with ­Geithner that he is not an economist and has no private-sector experience in finance, in contrast to pretty much every other Treasury secretary in recent years. For his critics, that says it all. “He may not be that comfortable with the subject matter,” Change author Cohan says. “I think that, in general, people who are good at math are more comfortable with talking about finance and thinking about financial policy and strategies. I think that if you’re going to come up with better strategies and better ideas, you need to have someone who’s a strategist, who understands how to come up with better policies.” Cohan says he’ll be “very surprised if Geithner comes up with any really new, insightful ideas on how to solve the financial problems.”

2) rather, as a beaurocrat, much of his behavior comes down to hedging bets within the established system.

Geithner’s scrupulous care not to promise too much, so as not to be seen as failing if the economic plan falls through, is not merely a reflection of “No Drama Obama.” It’s also a reflection of Geithner’s mind-set. “He’s been in bureaucracy all his life,” Seidman says, “and that’s the way they operate. You don’t get rewarded much for being right, but you take a hell of a beating if you’re wrong.” Still, one man’s bureaucrat is another man’s dedicated, lifelong servant of the commonweal, and that, presumably, is the Geithner who, one assumes, aced his interviews with President Obama.

This is perfectly in line with a great piece from Simon Johnson (former head of the IMF) in the May 2009 Atlantic that I am currently reading, so I don't want to talk about it (yet).

AMAZING

McSweeney's, on universal health care according to Dr. Mario. I'll just quote part of the awesomeness:

MYTH THREE: A government-run plan sounds
a lot like what Bowser wants

The king of all Koopas would love to take over every hospital in Mushroom Kingdom, to use them to extract Peach's DNA or create a horrific suit that looks like me to trick the princess. But government-funded doesn't mean government-run. I propose that we set up an oversight committee that would reside on Star World, a place linked to all of our lands. This committee would keep watch over the providers. It would see that free Megavitamins were distributed. Finally, it would research new health innovations, such as the powers of the rare Super Mushrooms.

And, just for fun, more McSweeney's!

dating, the internet and aligning incentives

So that I don't start to sound too morbid, I thought I'd also post about an interesting piece in the Times from last week about a somewhat unconventional dating website. SeekingArrangement.com is designed to set up wealthier 'benefactors' with younger 'companions' (aka a sugar daddy/sugar baby relationship, or, if you read Memoirs of a Geisha, a danna/geisha relationship). My initial response was to be grossed out, and see this website as a means for exploitation. But then I thought, well, it's all consenting adults involved in these interactions, right? I mean, isn't this just an example of the internet fostering free markets, and aligning buyers and sellers with like incentives? It might be kind of sketchy, but...heck, not everyone in the world subscribes to conventional relationship constructs. In fact, according to the article, only 30% of arrangements involve a monetary transaction. Alot of, well, call them geishas, aren't as interested in money so much as attention. So maybe this is just a small, crystallized, effective free market of, granted, questionable taste. Or am I wrong?

torture, ad nauseum

The New York Times headline says it all:
In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use

At the risk of being unbearably repetitive, the article goes to the heart of the issue, and shows what defenders of the CIA and 'harsh interrogation tactics' are missing. The CIA complains, "they're letting the enemy know what techniques we might use" and supporters indignantly ask "doesn't the mastermind of 9/11 deserve this kind of harsh treatment?"

Well, forget the moral quandaries of using techniques that, more than likely, result in extreme, permanent physical damage or even death. Whether prisoners in custody are 'deserving' of extreme techniques is completely irrelevant. Tipping terrorists off to these techniques is equivalently unimportant. Why? Because they don't work, of course. Morality is one issue, of possible debate, I suppose. But efficacy simply is not. And as the Times clearly delineates, no one implementing these techniques bothered to investigate their efficacy:

Overwhelmed with reports of potential threats and anguished that the agency had failed to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet and his top aides did not probe deeply into the prescription Dr. Mitchell so confidently presented: using the SERE tactics on Qaeda prisoners.

A little research on the origin of those methods would have given reason for doubt. Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.

“The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” one 1956 study concluded. “But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

In late 2001, about a half-dozen SERE trainers, according to a report released Tuesday night by the Senate Armed Services Committee, began raising stark warning about plans by both the military and the C.I.A. to use the SERE methods in interrogations.

In December 2001, Lt. Col. Daniel J. Baumgartner of the Air Force, who oversaw SERE training, cautioned in one memo that physical pressure was “less reliable” than other interrogation methods, could backfire by increasing a prisoner’s resistance and would have an “intolerable public and political backlash when discovered.” But his memo went to the Defense Department, not the C.I.A.

Remember (again) that, in the midst of this firestorm about interrogation techniques, we still haven't heard about a single actionable piece of information that resulted from these interrogations. Most likely because such information was simply never obtained:

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions.

Look. Obama is no saint. His decision on Bagram reeks of Bush administration rationalization. He's depressingly willing to compromise habeas corpus when it comes to overseas prisoners. What we know about him is that he's relentlessly pragmatic. So to me, this decision is more about high-yield pragmatism than moral grandstanding. Eliminate a poorly-researched, highly unpopular, ineffective set of techniques, and improve America's perception globally at the same time. So...am I just taking crazy pills or something?