Eric The Blue

Natives and usurpers

As American politicians proclaim their support for Israel's right to self defense I've been looking back over the pages I've read so far in Benny Morris's Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001.  Here is British Foreign Secretary Balfour, after the publication in 1917 of the Balfour Declaration supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, on the relative merits of the claims of Jew and Arab, along with Morris's comment:

"Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."  This was to be the Palestinian Arabs' tragedy: They were seen as insignificant "natives" and usurpers, whereas the incoming Jews were viewed both as Europeans and as the rightful owners of Palestine.

That was in 1919.  Four years earlier, Moshe Sharett, chief aide to David Ben-Gurion and later Israel's first foreign minister, had written:

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture. . . . .  Recently, there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about "the mutual misunderstanding" between us and the Arabs, about "common interests" [and] about "the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples." . . .  But we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes. . . for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate--all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise.

No matter what you think of the Arabs it should not be so hard to be somewhat more evenhanded.  Israel's tactics and objectives, about which its spokesmen and supporters have sometimes been quite blunt, are not in the least attractive.

Endorsing Greenwald on the Gaza bombing campaign

Boy, do I get tired of listening to how blameless Israel has a right to defend itself against rocket attacks launched from Gaza.  Is there a federal statute prohibiting any member of the American political or journalistic class from mentioning that Gaza for more than a year has been subjected to a blockade that prevents its people, including its children, from getting needed food and medicine?  What about the illegal forty-year occupation, the expanding settlements, the restrictions on travel and the check points where people suffering under the occupation are routinely humiliated by Israeli soldiers?  Why does the right to defense belong only to Israel?

The bombing campaign against Hamas in Gaza is continuous with Israeli policy through the years and is concisely summed up by the execrable Marty Peretz, who in The New Republic celebrates the destruction and killing before concluding: "don't fuck with the Jews."  There you have it.  No plan, just a posture.  How is it working? 

I wholly endorse the Glenn Greenwald column that brought to my attention Peretz's stupid swagger. 

Yes, Hamas is despicable.  But why does it not matter to anyone that Israel's "strategy" for dealing with its enemies is a manifest failure, an ongoing disaster?

Incident

Riding public transportation back and forth from home to the health club in downtown Minneapolis, I had close encounters with drunks on both rides.  The more dramatic one was on the way home.  A middle-aged fellow sat near the front and asked everyone within earshot, "What's the good word?"  When he got a response from someone, he launched into a Homeric catalogue of his Christmas presents:  Rita and Stephanie and Bridget and Lisa and Katie and Diane and Alexis--had cost him $1500 but it's what he wanted, he announced.  Disembarking a few blocks after downtown begins to blend with a neighborhood less well-heeled, he nudged someone waiting to board and then engaged him in animated conversation.  It seemed to pass, the man boarded, and the bus driver said, "Don't pay him no attention.  He been drinking."  Whereupon the man exited the bus, crossed the street to where the drunk man was standing, wound up, punched him in the face.  The drunk man dropped to a sitting position and waved at the bus as it rolled by.

Happy holidays.

Christmas power outage

I might have mentioned, while advancing the idea that unmanned men are ripe fruit for the right-wing, that John Hinderaker's moniker at Power Line is, or was, "Rocket Man."  What's he been up to lately?  Last I checked, he was Christmas shopping at Barnes & Noble.  His steady hand ever on the pulse of the nation, he draws cheerful (to him) conclusions about the state of public opinion based on a conversation with a book store clerk, who is having a hard time keeping Michael Medved's latest offering in stock.  Never mind the results of the last couple national elections.  Medved is sold out and Rocket Man saw no one browsing Barbara Ehrenreich or Howard Zinn!

Morris Macbeth & Mailer, Ltd

I said in my last post that I feel attracted to the Jews as a people, their gentilesse and love of learning.  These qualities may however be an embarrassment to many Jews, especially the ones who have chosen to live in Palestine.  Anyway, that seems to be the view of historian Benny Morris.  When in Righteous Victims it is time to account in some way for this or that act of aggressive cruelty perpetuated against Arab by Jew, he on more than one occasion mentions the strong desire of Jews to prove that they are not cultivated weaklings. 

Suppose you accept, as I do, the psychological phenomenon invoked by Morris to explain the behavior of Zionists in Palestine.  How much does it explain?  I don't think it's only Jews who are affected.  Right-wing political movements find their foot soldiers among men who have suffered some wound to their masculine sensibility.  The strut and swagger, the militarism, the supercilious curl of the lip, the sneer, the contempt for opponents and laws--those who have been in some way unmanned find it all irresistible and want to try their own hand.  Politics is a salve for their injury.  Listen to the way they run down the other side.  They're effete.  They're elitists.  They''re academics and intellectuals.  What could be worse!  Too much like the Jews.

It's nothing new.  One of the most chilling stage directions in drama occurs in the first act of Macbeth, after the protagonist, in a soliloquoy, decides not to kill the king:

                                    I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th' other--

His ruminations are interrupted by "Enter Lady Macbeth."  She is not pleased to hear of the decision:

                                    Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Woulds't thou have that
Which thou esteemest the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' th' adage? [who wants the fish but does not want to get his paws wet].

Macbeth objects--"I dare do all that may become a man;/Who dares do more is none"--and she replies: "When you durst do it, then you were a man."  And so he does it.

One recognizes in Macbeth the kind of psychology Morris ascribes to Zionists.  In "The White Man Unburdened," Norman Mailer speaks of "the ongoing malaise of the white American male," which is really just the same thing imported to our shores.  Mailer argues that the decision to make war in Iraq might be explained by the need of these damaged white guys to finally win a game. 

Eating & reading

Just finished a huge banana bar, with coffee, for lunch.  Reminds me of some Replacesments' lyrics:  "There's popcorn for dinner/Last night it was cheesecake." I watched Amanda mash up the overripe bananas.  Didn't require much mashing, actually; came out of the peel with the consistency of slush.  Not very appetizing.  All credit is due the butter and sugar and cream cheese frosting.  Should go out and shovel some snow to relieve the caloric torpor.

My slow progress through Righteous Victims continues.  Monday to Friday, I read seven pages during my midmorning coffee break at work.  It's 700 pages, so assuming I can keep up the pace on weekends, I'm looking at a hundred-day project.  The subtitle is A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001; since I just finished Morris's account of the events of 1947-48, I'm more than half through the 120 years of the survey, but that leaves me only on page 264 of 694.  Studying the table of contents, I see that a coming chapter is called "The Six Day War, 1967."  It's 45 pages long. 

I find myself attracted to the Jews as a people, their gentilesse and love of learning, and therefore am often dismayed by the tactics of Zionists and of the Israeli government.  Some of the most poignant passages in Righteous Victims occur when historical actors experience a similar sense of horrified exasperation.  Churchill, for example:

Then, on November 6, 1944, Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, was shot dead by LHI terrorists in Cairo.  Moyne had been a close friend of Churchill, who took the murder as a personal affront and told the House of Commons: "If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently in the past."

On the one hand, he was speaking with a heart full of personal grief; on the other, this is the assessment of someone sympathetic to the Zionist project.  I'm not, but perhaps that is because, since 1944, the Zionists have given the world plenty of reasons to "reconsider."

Norm, his friends, and his FAMILY

I don't know whether Al Franken will in the end prevail in Minnesota's US Senate race, but I am beginning to think that if Norm Coleman were smart he'd be in the tank for Franken.  For it would be better for Coleman if the investigation of his rich and sleazy friends, and their extra-legal schemes for funneling money his way, proceeded while he occupied any other space than his seat in the US Senate.

Here is what reporters seem to know so far.

In 2006, Coleman's wife, Laurie, began working for an insurance company owned by multimillionaire Jim Hays, a contributor to Coleman's campaigns.  This raised eyebrows, because Laurie Coleman had not hitherto shown any interest in the insurance industry.  Despite her advancing years, she spent a lot of time in Hollywood pursuing a career as an actress and model.  She's had some small parts, been photographed in lingerie, and invented a device for drying hair that, because it is not hand-held, allows the primping woman to multi-task--it's called the Blo & Go (wink, wink; chortle, chortle.)

Then during this year's Senate campaign Paul McKim, a Republican businessman in Texas who had founded a company called Deep Marine Technology Inc., filed a lawsuit alleging that he had, at the direction of Nasser Kazeminy, who holds a controlling interest in Deep Marine, sent $75,000 to Hays Companies Inc. to be passed along to Laurie Coleman.  Kazeminy is another Coleman contributor.  The suit alleges that no services were rendered and that Kazeminy said Coleman did not earn enough money as a senator and needed help.

McKim says he sent three quarterly payments of $25,000, but then blocked a fourth payment for the same amount and filed suit.  Minority shareholders in Deep Marine have filed a separate suit that makes substantially the same allegations.  McKim is named as a defendant in the shareholders' suit.

Today came news that Hays, Kazeminy, and both Colemans have retained top-flight criminal defense attorneys to represent their interests in the investigations and pending lawsuits.  The Colemans are not named as defendants in either case, but their names are mentioned in the complaints, and the details, as they have been reported so far, make one wonder whether their pricey lawyers will be paid with Deep Marine money.

Laurie Coleman has declined to comment on the suits.  During the campaign, Norm Coleman denounced them as "smears" of himself and, of course, his FAMILY.  He did not take up the question of why Paul McKim would want to smear him and his FAMILY.  In his latest statements, he says he welcomes the investigations.  Right!

A few of the sidelights that have emerged in the reporting of the Star Tribune newspaper are quite delicious.  Laurie Coleman, though employed by the Hays Companies, is an "independent contractor" who can't write insurance policies or close deals herself.  She does not have an office at the company's headquarters in downtown Minneapolis.  It is not at all clear what she does for her salary.

Meanwhile, Jim Hays has had past legal troubles associated with his temper on the golf course.  He is by all accounts a club-thrower and club-breaker.  In 2003, at the exclusive Spring Hill Golf Club in Wayzata, his home course, he abruptly whacked a ball off the green after missing a putt.  The ball struck a caddie in the ankle and inflicted an injury requiring surgery.  The caddie sued and the case ended in "a confidential settlement."

Too bad that, in order to find out more about the lifestyles of Norm and his friends and FAMILY, we need him to be representing us in the Senate for another six years.

A little more poker math

Since a flush is just below a full house in the hierarchy of poker hands, let's see how the probabilities compare.  We determined, here, that the probability of being dealt a full house is 3744/2,598,690, or about 0.00144--slightly better than 1-in-700.  Also, the probability of drawing to a full house from two pair is 4/47, about 8.5%.

You can think of the probability of being dealt a flush in the following manner. You're dealt five cards.  The first one can be anything.  The second one has to be the same suit as the first.  There are twelve of that suit left, and 51 unknown cards, for a probability of 12/51.  And, if that chance is realized, you're down to 11/50 for the third card, then 10/49 on the fourth, and 9/48 on the last card.  The probability of a flush is the product of the probabilities of these separate events, which comes out to 11,880/5,997,600, or very close to 0.00198, which is very close to 1-in-500.  (This represents the probability of all flushes, including "straight flushes," such as the 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 of spades.)  Since a full house beats a flush (except for the very rare straight flush), you'd expect the former to be less likely, and indeed it is: out of every 3500 hands, you'd expect about seven flushes on the deal, and about five full houses.

If you have any doubts about  my method of calculating the probability of a flush, you can check the result against the number of possible combinations that make a flush divided by all possible combinations.  The number of different ways of having a flush is given by "13 choose 5" (the number of ways of choosing five cards from thirteen) times "4 choose 1" (since you can choose five from thirteen in any one of the four suits).  The number of possible five-card hands is given by "52 choose 5."  Grinding the numbers, you get 5148/2,598,960, which is the same as 11,880/5,997,600.

Remember how, starting from two pair, you have about an 8.5% chance of drawing to a full house?  It raises the question: what if you are dealt four cards of the same suit? what is the chance of drawing to a flush?  Well, if you have, say, four hearts and one of something else, then there are 47 unknown cards, of which nine are hearts, and 9/47 is just over 0.19--more than twice the chance of drawing to a full house from two pair.  Of course, if you have two pair, and the 8.5% chance of improving to a full house fails, you still have two pair, which will beat four hearts most of the time.

Pounding the mitt

Amanda and I are renting from Netflix episodes of 30 Rock, which, like a lot of other people, we became curious about after watching Tina Fey do Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.  We've made it through the first season and both of us think it's a riot.  I'm surprised by how overtly political it is.  This notice, from War Room, concerning Mitt Romney's preparations for 2012, put me in mind of the following exchange in an episode toward the end of that first season:

Jack: Those jokes you wrote for my Mitt Romney fund raiser, they were top-notch.
Liz:  Those weren't jokes.  That was an appeal for a return to common sense and decency. 
Jack:  Well, it got big laughs.

By the way, regarding Palin, Camille Paglia says that those who understand what a sorry figure she (Palin) is are sorry figures themselves.  It all has to do with Dick Cavett and something that happened in a Yale seminar Paglia attended in the 1960s.  She (Paglia) is kind of a nut.

Who was Thorstein Veblen?

John Kenneth Galbraith, who died in 2006 at the age of 97, oversaw the publication of his last book, The Essential Galbraith, in 2001.  As its title suggests, the book is a compendium consisting mainly of chapters from such earlier works as The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and Annals of an Abiding Liberal.

Consecutive chapters of this last offering concern fellow practitioners of "the dismal science": "The Founding Faith: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations," "The Massive Dissent of Karl Marx," and "Who Was Thorstein Veblen?"  Perusers of the table of contents may think they discern, in the first two selections, mandatory discussions of famous, if unread, bookends to the library's economics shelf.  But who was Thorstein Veblen?

The question, with its suggestion of former renown now lapsed into tip-of-the-tongue obscurity, is perfectly apt.  Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, his first and best book, was published in 1899, at the height of the period Mark Twain christened "the gilded age."  It is perhaps the only social science treatise that also qualifies as a (largely forgotten) masterpiece of American satiric prose. 

The conceit of Theory of the Leisure Class is that the habits and customs of the wealthy, like those of other exotic tribesmen, require a scientific accounting.  Under the guise of disinterested scholarship, Veblen supplies the analysis.  Long paragraphs proceed, by means of an ornate prose style, to blunt and seemingly caustic conclusions, the satiric import of which the author blandly disavows.

The book's literary qualities did not obscure the attack, implicit but fierce, on orthodox economic creeds.  That the calculating frugality of buyers and sellers should spin a web of perfect social utility did not, in Veblen's estimation, shed much light on monopolistic business practices, robber barons, the power of the large business firm, the rapid accumulation of large fortunes, the ostentatious display of the accoutrements of wealth--everything, in other words, that needed explaining if the observed world was to be comprehended. 

Satire and social analysis merge in the consideration of economic choices made by the well-to-do.  The familiar apparatus--supply and demand, competition, substitutes, equilibrium, financial maximization--cannot account for the purchase of, say, country-club memberships costing several times the annual income of a mid-level manager.  Veblen's solution to this riddle is straightforward: the exorbitant price, which in the realm of theory should drive demand to zero, is actually the source of the demand.

Utility cannot be conceived simply.  Though  Hummers and Toyota Land Cruisers may not be the most efficient way of getting to the office, they do assist in the drawing of what Veblen, in a favorite phrase, calls "invidious comparisons."  His supremely detached exposition develops this idea until the possessions of wealthy people take on the aspect of pelts dangling from the waist bands of primitives--that is, they are tokens of social prestige, the fit objects of (another favorite phrase) "pecuniary emulation."

Galbraith wrote that, as a graduate student at Berkeley, he and his classmates endlessly discussed the works of Veblen, who at the time was teaching at nearby Stanford.  Galbraith eventually would attack the notion, from classical economics, of the sovereign consumer whose every whim is catered to by scrambling sellers.  In his view, these "whims" are created, through advertising and other means, by large firms which then satisfy the artificial desires with attractively packaged products.  It isn't hard to detect in this the influence of Veblen.

But, as Galbraith acknowledges, the conversation has moved on.  In a time that resembles a new gilded age, the man who gave to our language the phrase "conspicuous consumption" has been forgotten.  The index in my college economics textbook has several references to such figures as Milton Friedman and Galbraith himself.  Veblen is absent.

This eclipse seems a particular shame where I live, in Minnesota, for Veblen is a native son.  He was raised in Rice County, at a settlement of Norwegian immigrant farmers near present day Nerstrand, and was an early graduate of Carleton College, in Northfield.  He went east for graduate school, first Johns Hopkins and then Yale, where he did not fit in with a student body drawn from the eastern aristocracy.  Veblen's biographer Joseph Dorfman has advanced the legend of the young Minnesotan taking it all in, keeping his own counsel, while regarding what was for him a new world of wealth and privilege with  bemused contempt.

My wife's geeky husband

Her geeky husband looking over her shoulder, my wife Amanda prepares for her final exam in Discrete Mathematics.  More than one of the exercises my eye falls on seem to rebut the familiar complaint, "This is so impractical and will never help me in real life!"  For example:  What is the probability of being dealt a full house in five-card poker?

Well, that would be the ratio of the number of different ways there are to have a full house to the number of unique hands one might be dealt in five-card poker.  Since there are 52 cards in the deck, the latter is the number of different ways of selecting five from 52.  "Fifty-two choose five" is given by 52 factorial divided by the product of 47 factorial and 5 factorial, denoted

52!/(47!)(5!) = 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48/5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 2,598,960.

Now, how many ways are there of having a full house?  In one denomination, you need three of the four cards--three of the four aces, say.  There are four ways to choose three from four.  You need two of the four cards in a second denomination, and there are six ways of choosing two from four (4!/2! x 2! equals 6).  So the product of four and six--24--represents the number of ways there are of having a particular full house, like "tens over queens."  Since there are thirteen denominations (ace through king), there are thirteen choices for one denomination and only twelve for the other--obviously, if you have three tens, ten is not a possibility for the pair.  Putting this all together, we have 24 x 13 x 12 ways of having a full house: 3744.

And 3744 divided by 2,598,960 is about 0.00144, or 1-in-694.

A full house is two pair plus a good draw, so a poker player should know the probabilities along this line.  Turns out you are 33 times more likely to be dealt two pair than a full house.  If you are dealt two pair, the probability of drawing to a full house is given by 4 (the number of remaining cards that will improve your hand)/47 (the number of unknown cards).  Four divided by 47 is 0.0851, or between 8 and 9 percent.

We geeks have a hard time understanding why more people aren't interested in this kind of stuff.  Surely they don't think poker is remote from "real life"?

Local weather

In a review of Susan Sontag's Journal Deborah Eisenberg writes,

Early in September 1957, she leaves for Oxford to continue her studies, effectively ending her marriage--as we understand sooner than she does. In Europe, where she continues to travel and study, she has several protracted and generally unhappy love affairs with women, and in 1959 she returns to New York. By the summer of 1963, when this volume leaves off, Sontag is trying to sort through another difficult love affair or two, is working on fiction, and, as always, is devouring great quantities of philosophy, social theory, music, theater, and, above all, literature. . . .

[Snip]

"Pain" is a word Rieff uses in his introduction, and it is the right one--there is so much pain here! And the dream of disclosure and revenge that is pain's index.  We have been dared to read.  Sontag did not destroy her journals nor did she restrict them. The wounds feel fresh, though the author--still amply capable of inflicting pain, herself--is beyond comfort.

Which put me in mind of a letter of condolence Einstein wrote, in the last year of his life, to the widow of his friend Michele Besso:

The gift of leading a harmonious life is rarely joined to such a keen intelligence, especially to the degree one found in him. But what I admired most about Michele was the fact that he was able to live so many years with one woman, not only in peace but also in constant unity, something I have lamentably failed at twice.

The largest share of misery comes from life at home, and the Sontags and Einsteins among us are not exempt.  The objects of adulation and envy, their names virtually synonymous with "genius," yet unhappy on account of an inability to form satisfactory human attachments--laid low by the prevailing weather, a cold gray drizzle of domestic regret.   

Wouldn't be surprised if Einstein was idealizing the Bessos' life together.  When the whole story is known, what everyone deserves is pity.