At various protests, including the one pictured above in Jakarta, President elect Obama was treated as if he were outgoing President Bush. The battles in Gaza seem to have shortened the honeymoon for the incoming administration. And it is hard to see any presidential meetings with Iran, such as those suggested by President elect Obama, considering that the Iranians are backing Hamas, and are up to shenanigans like these:

the mullahs have organized raucous demonstrations in front of numerous embassies, including those of Egypt (with chants of “Death to Mubarak”), Jordan, Turkey, Great Britain, Germany and today (imagine!) France. These demonstrations were not mere gestures;

the regime’s seriousness was underlined on Sunday, the 4th, when it offered a million-dollar reward to anyone who killed Mubarak (the Iranians called it a “revolutionary execution”). Significantly, the announcement came at a rally of the Basij, the most radical security force in the country, at which the Revolutionary Guards official Forooz Rejaii spoke. The Egyptians take it seriously; they have been on alert of late, looking for the possibility of a Mumbai-type operation in Cairo or elsewhere.

At the same time, the regime intensified its murderous assault against its own people, most notably hanging nine people on Christmas Eve, and assaulting the headquarters of Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi.

In light of the harsh realities of the world the new President is entering, it is astonishing to continue to read fatuous statements like this from American commentators: “For a brief period, America’s new president will bask in universal goodwill. The Arab world, Muslims generally, and Palestinians in particular, have unprecedented reason to believe they will be heard….Israel must cease fire, respect Palestinian rights, and keep agreements; Palestinians must halt rockets, repudiate terror, and empower moderates toward a new unity. Obama must draw the line with both.” And if the Iranian backed Hamas refuses to respond to the mellifluous tones of our new leader, then what? As someone once said: welcome to the party, pal.

There’s a piece on the financial mess by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn in the NYT. It started off as a recap of the folly of recent years. But then it went a little too far, stretching points that did not need stretching in this tale of greed and perfidy that is fascinating without exaggeration. For example, it criticized the government for using preferred stock in some of the bailouts, characterizing preferred stock as “essentially a loan,” which it is not. A little later the piece said this:

on Nov. 24, the Treasury handed Citigroup another $20 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and then simply guaranteed $306 billion of Citigroup’s assets. The Treasury didn’t ask for its fair share of the action, or management changes, or for that matter anything much at all beyond a teaspoon of warrants and a sliver of preferred stock. The $306 billion guarantee was an undisguised gift. The Treasury didn’t even bother to explain what the crisis was, just that the action was taken in response to Citigroup’s “declining stock price.”…

There are other things the Treasury might do when a major financial firm assumed to be “too big to fail” comes knocking, asking for free money. Here’s one: Let it fail. Not as chaotically as Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. If a failing firm is deemed “too big” for that honor, then it should be explicitly nationalized, both to limit its effect on other firms and to protect the guts of the system. Its shareholders should be wiped out, and its management replaced. Its valuable parts should be sold off as functioning businesses to the highest bidders — perhaps to some bank that was not swept up in the credit bubble. The rest should be liquidated, in calm markets. Do this and, for everyone except the firms that invented the mess, the pain will likely subside. This is more plausible than it may sound.

When a proper history of this crisis is written, September 15, the day Lehman Brothers failed, will probably be seen as the nadir, a brief moment of folly that brought the global banking system to a screeching halt. November 24, on the other hand, with the second bailout of Citibank, represented a recovery from that folly. The reporters from CNBC — the morning team — stood on deathwatch the evening of Sunday the 23rd, with nothing much to do except to watch and wait for the patient to expire. The decision of Paulson and his associates to assist Citibank was the evidence that the government had finally (and appropriately) made the decision that “the systemically important institutions remain viable.”

Lewis’s suggestion that the correct course is to nationalize the TBTF banks is absurd. It would have created a catastrophic market incentive for the short sellers and others. The “vicious hedge funds — media — ratings agency circle” would have forced all the largest banks, one after another, into government ownership. The financial crisis has most likely passed its worst point thanks to the change in policy between September and November, nasty and expensive as it is. Lewis’s suggestion would have created far greater chaos for a far longer time than the current imperfect structure.

Excerpts of a report by Khaled Abu Toameh in the Jerusalem Post show Hamas at war with Fatah as well as with Israel, which has just bisected Gaza (HT: Powerline):

the Fatah leadership in the West Bank has instructed its followers to be ready to assume power over the Gaza Strip when and if Israel’s military operation results in the removal of Hamas rule…”Hamas is very nervous, because they feel that their end is nearing,” a senior Fatah official said. “They have been waging a brutal campaign against Fatah members in the Gaza Strip.”…

Fatah officials in Ramallah told The Jerusalem Post that Hamas militiamen had been assaulting many Fatah activists since the beginning of the operation last Saturday. They said at least 75 activists were shot in the legs while others had their hands broken…Wisam Abu Jalhoum, a Fatah activist from the Jabalya refugee camp, was shot in the legs by Hamas militiamen for allegedly expressing joy over the IDF air strikes on Hamas targets…

sources close to Hamas revealed over the weekend that the movement had “executed” more than 35 Palestinians who were suspected of collaborating with Israel and were being held in various Hamas security installations…at least half of the victims were killed by relatives of Palestinian militiamen who were killed as a result of information passed on to Israel by the “collaborators.”…

a Hamas official in Gaza City said that his government had received information according to which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had instructed his loyalists in the Strip to start moving toward undermining Hamas…The Hamas official said that his security forces had launched a massive “preemptive” campaign aimed at thwarting Fatah’s attempts to “spread anarchy and chaos.” He confirmed that many Fatah operatives had been shot in the legs over the past few days by Hamas “to make sure that they don’t help Israel.”

Fahmi Za’arir, a Fatah spokesman in the West Bank, accused Hamas of “executing” a number of Fatah detainees. He said the Fatah leadership knew of at least two Fatah men who were shot dead by Hamas after being released from prison. He named them as Nasser Muhana and Saher al-Silawi…several Fatah members who attended funerals of victims of the IAF strikes were severely beaten by Hamas militiamen who accused them of collaboration with Israel…

The decision to place Fatah operatives under house arrest was issued by the much-feared “Internal Security Apparatus,” which reports to the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry in Gaza. The order, which was delivered to the Fatah activists on Thursday, reads: “You are forbidden from leaving your home for 48 hours unless you want to attend Friday prayers. Anyone who violates the order will be punished.”

Meanwhile, there is apparently plenty of support for Hamas in the street, and Al Jazeera is doing its part to feed the flames of rage and protest. JPost:

“Mubarak has become the number one enemy of the Arab masses,” commented a Palestinian newspaper editor in Ramallah. “President Mahmoud Abbas is also in big trouble, because he’s being portrayed as someone who supported the Israeli attack so that he could return to the Gaza Strip.”

The incitement against Mubarak and Abbas in the Arab media is likely to intensify as Al-Jazeera continues to broadcast horrific images of dead women and children in Gaza. As in the past, it is now spearheading a campaign aimed at discrediting “moderate” Arab rulers, by depicting them as pawns in the hands of the Israelis and Americans. The message that Al-Jazeera is sending to the Arab and Islamic masses is: “You must rise against your treacherous leaders, because they are serving the interests of Israel and the US.”

During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Al-Jazeera and many Arab media outlets also waged a campaign against the Arab leaders, accusing them of “collusion” with Israel. Fortunately for those leaders, that war did not last too long…Operation Cast Lead…is likely to boost Hamas’s popularity not only among the Palestinians, but also on the streets of Khartoum, Amman, Cairo and Beirut…Mubarak, Abbas and King Abdullah II tried unsuccessfully over the past week to prevent the protests from spreading…

The Arab street is ready for a third intifada, said Palestinian writer Rashad Abu Shawar. “Those Arabs who are exonerating Israel and blaming Hamas are being regarded as traitors,” he said. “This week, we already saw the spark of the third intifada on the streets of Ramallah, Hebron, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as inside Israel. These Arab regimes want to see Gaza surrender, so that they can eliminate the term ‘resistance’ from their lexicon. The third intifada won’t only finish off the PA; it will also destroy the illusion of peace with the Israeli enemy.”

Meanwhile, the silence of the President elect is being viewed as support for the Israeli operation. AFP: “‘The start is not good,’ said Khaled Meshaal, leader of the Hamas Islamist movement that has ruled Gaza since June 2007. ‘You commented on Mumbai but you say nothing about the crime of the enemy (Israel). This policy of double standards should stop’.”

Bill Gross of PIMCO is pessimistic these days. Forbes:

With stocks down 40% this year, he predicts Americans will shift from risk to thrift for at least a generation. He says higher savings, plus a move away from leverage by businesses and money managers, means the U.S. economy will grow no more than 2% annually for years, a third slower than its 20-year average. Profit margins will narrow, stock gains will slow to a crawl and the government will find itself lending to the private sector for a long time. Gross’ theory is that the government will arrange to get itself paid back and that his investors can safely travel on the government’s coattails.

“When you lose half your 401(k) you care more about the return of your money than return on your money,” he says. “The lack of animal spirits will influence investing for years to come. The government will have to play risk taker of last resort.”

Maybe he’s correct; he is one of the more thoughtful investors in the country. It is certainly true that there can be no recovery until the credit markets stop demanding a 40% yield-to-worst for the debt of companies that have already gotten a US government bailout. But all signs are not pessimistic — the IndyMac private equity group that is buying that company from the FDIC includes investors who were both bulls and bears during the previous period of excess.

The AP has a fairly positive piece on President Bush. Who knew such a thing was possible? (Meanwhile, one of our readers has a less than sanguine view of the future.)

We got an email from a couple of regular Joes asking for some dough to prevent “the influence of big money from Washington lobbyists or special interests.” Yeah, right:

Barack and Joe need to ask you for your help. Supporters like you made this possible, and with your help Barack and Joe will run their administration without the influence of big money from Washington lobbyists or special interests. Funding the Inauguration this way is another example of the change you helped bring to Washington. It’s up to you, at this crucial moment, to make the Inauguration a success and give change a strong start. Will you make a donation of $100 or more now for the opportunity to join Barack and Joe…

There were three separate hyperlinks leading to the donation site, by the way. The message concludes with a postscript: “P.S. — You can participate without donating…” Thanks a lot, guys!

We haven’t said much about Gaza because there’s really not much to say. It’s Groundhog Day again. Charles Krauthammer summarizes the situation:

Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis — 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years — deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people…Israel has but a single objective in Gaza — peace: the calm, open, normal relations it offered Gaza when it withdrew in 2005. Doing something never done by the Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers of Palestine, the Israelis gave the Palestinians their first sovereign territory ever in Gaza….

There’s only one grievance and Hamas is open about it. Israel’s very existence. Nor does Hamas conceal its strategy. Provoke conflict. Wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. Bring down the world’s opprobrium on Israel. Force it into an untenable cease-fire — exactly as happened in Lebanon. Then, as in Lebanon, rearm, rebuild and mobilize for the next round. Perpetual war. Since its raison d’etre is the eradication of Israel, there are only two possible outcomes: the defeat of Hamas or the extinction of Israel.

It is hard to envision any happy ending to the war of which these are only the latest skirmishes. It is, on the other hand, relatively easy to imagine cataclysms not too far in the future. This clever example of religious apologetics by Tariq Ramadan, with its implication (at least to us) that Israel should ultimately cease to exist, shows the depth and intractability of the problem. (BTW, the “proportionality” issue is so tiresome and intellectually barren that it is a wonder it still lives.)

California might start issuing IOU’s instead of checks shortly because of its budget crisis. Meanwhile the state government had the time and energy to mandate Global Warming Scores for every car sold in California starting today. Here’s some of the reasoning:

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) The use of fossil fuels in motor vehicles is one of the primary human sources of global warming gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a warming effect on the planet.

(b) Increasing concentrations of global warming gases in the atmosphere are likely to accelerate the rate of climate change in California.

(c) Scientific research indicates that the impact of global warming on our environment will be profound. Global warming will significantly impact the state’s air quality….

(California politicians might do well to listen to some of their counterparts overseas.) One tiny bit of good news is that if California does issue IOU’s, legislators themselves would be the first to receive them in lieu of a paycheck. Of course a modest step to ameliorate the budget crunch would be to get rid of this silly law and fire the bureaucrats who have been hired to draft and monitor the new regulations.

At the end of a year that most people would like to forget, the environment minister of Northern Ireland shared some thoughts about global warming:

“I think in 20 years’ time we will look back at this whole climate change debate and ask ourselves how on earth were we ever conned into spending the billions of pounds which are going into this without any kind of rigorous examination of the background, the science, the implications of it all. Because there is now a degree of hysteria about it, fairly unformed hysteria I’ve got to say as well.

“I mean I get it in the Assembly all the time and most of the people who shout about climate change have not read one article about climate change, not read one book about climate change, if you asked them to explain how they believe there’s a connection between CO2 emission and the effects which they claim there’s going to be, if you ask them to explain the thought process or the modelling that is required and the assumptions behind that and how tenuous all the connections are, they wouldn’t have a clue.

“They simply get letters about it from all these lobby groups, it’s popular and therefore they go along with the flow — and that would be ok if there were no implications for it, but the implications are immense.”

IBD observed: “The first seven months averaged a sunspot count of only three and in August there were no sunspots at all — zero — something that has not occurred since 1913…in the past 1,000 years, three previous such events — what are called the Dalton, Maunder and Sporer Minimums — have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called the Little Ice Age (1500-1750).”

News from the Church of England:

The Church of England’s Church Commissioners have gone green, investing £150 million with former US Vice-President Al Gore’s environmentally minded investment firm, Generation Investment Management…Generation Investment Management was founded in 2004 by Mr Gore and David Blood, former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and had almost £5 billion under management before the market collapse. The firm invests in companies that follow “socially responsible” business model…”Those looking for a quick hit in the market place, to skim the cream and go somewhere else, those are not the investors attracted to this strategy,” Mr Gore said…

We wonder if there is any overlap among investors in this strategy and those in another fund of recent note. Question: does the trendy investing of the Anglican Church indicate that the global warming bubble has finally burst?

Reuters:

Barack Obama may be the first U.S. president who can successfully pull off the shaka, a Hawaiian greeting Hawaiians say has various meanings, from “hang loose” and “cool” to “thanks.” The hand gesture, also a common greeting in surfer culture, consists of curling the three middle fingers and extending the thumb and little finger. The president-elect, looking uber-cool with his White Sox baseball cap on backwards, flipped the shaka to a crowd of about 30 people as he left a gym on a Marine Corps base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu…

Oh, he also played golf — which caused a certain commentator’s head to explode when it was done by his predecessor (starts at 1:47).

We started off with Roger Simon’s wondering if his new book would be reviewed in the NYT. That led us to the feud between Simon’s publisher and the NYT book review. The Roger Kimball piece mentioned Harvey Mansfield’s bad treatment at the hands of the Times, and we recalled mentioning Mansfield at one point ourselves. This led us to a review by Mansfield of a book by Richard Brookhiser, and finally to an interview of Brookhiser about George Washington that included this:

Washington is a little hard to figure out, although I do not think impossible. He was an Episcopalian-an Anglican or an Episcopalian-all his life. He was a vestryman. His attendance at church was fairly regular, although not by any means “every Sunday.”

He never took Communion, although Martha always did. I don’t know what to make of that and I don’t know any historian who has figured it out. There was a case in Philadelphia where an Episcopalian minister gave a sermon, when Washington was in church, criticizing people who did not take Communion. And Washington apparently never went back to that church, seeing the sermon as perhaps directed at him.

Washington makes a few references, in public and private writings, to Christ-very few, although some of them are important. The 1783 Circular to the States I just read from ends with an exhortation that Americans should imitate Christ, that that will lead to their political happiness.

But the word that comes up a lot in his writing, both public and private, is “Providence.” He seems to have felt that Providence was an active force, that it was the disposer of events. He speaks of the interpositions of Providence throughout the Revolutionary War. My hunch, my biographical hunch, is it that the moment when this was fixed in his mind was probably Braddock’s defeat in 1755, when Washington is a 23-year-old colonel, Virginia militia colonel, on General Edward Braddock’s staff. Braddock is taking an army into Western Pennsylvania to try to capture Fort Duquesne, what is now Pittsburgh, which the French hold. They’re set upon and more than decimated, one of the greatest debacles of British imperial war.

Washington is one of the few senior officers who survive. Braddock is killed. Most of Washington’s peers in the officer corps are killed. He has two horses shot out from under him. He has bullets shot through his coat. And after this, Washington writes a friend a letter in which he says “See the mysterious works of Providence, the transience of human things.” So I think that was a very sobering experience to him as a 23-year-old. That’s my hunch.

Interesting, and not something we recall reading previously. Finally, that bit on Washington puts us in mind of Fouad Ajami’s fond remembrance of Samuel Huntington, and his “argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture” in American history. All in all, a couple of hours well spent. Thanks, Roger.

It is said that “the global economy experienced a sudden stop after September 15.” That was the day that Lehman Brothers was forced to file for bankruptcy, which shut down the flow of funds among banks around the world, the very lifeblood of modern economies. The WSJ has a lengthy article on the Lehman failure and related events, which includes this vignette from the afternoon of September 14:

Mr. Fuld told his board of directors to gather at the firm’s offices. By noon, he expected, the board would be able to approve Lehman’s sale to Barclays. One hurdle remained: To ink a Lehman deal, Barclays needed a shareholder vote. There was no way to get one on a Sunday. Barclays would need the U.S. or British government to back Lehman’s trading balances until a vote could be held.

Government approval never came, though there are diverging views on why. Some blame the U.S. government for refusing to commit resources. Others say the British government refused to entertain a deal they worried would expose England to unnecessary risk.

Lehman’s president, Mr. McDade, and Mr. Cohen, the attorney, called Mr. Fuld from the New York Fed. Passing Mr. McDade’s cellphone back and forth, they broke the Barclays news. Mr. Fuld postponed his board meeting.

It appears from the WSJ article that the US and British governments could indeed have prevented a Lehman failure by facilitating the Barclays merger, though the Fed Chairman denies this. In its way, the decision to let Lehman fail was as bad as the decision to let the Bank of the United States fail in 1930 — arguably the event that turned the recession of 1929 into the Great Depression.

All the scurrying around, creating TARP and other makeshift solutions, has been an attempt to recover from this calamitous decision. And today we are told that the chaotic nature of Lehman’s Chapter 11 filing wiped out $75 billion that would have been available to creditors, another ridiculous footnote to this sad tale.

2008 has been a notable year in the global warming debate. For starters, there’s now evidence of global cooling. Also, some of the scientists creating the computer models of global warming have now found the evidence wanting. Christopher Booker in the Telegraph thinks that the tide may have definitively turned in the debate this year:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flattening, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century…

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent.

(The controversial mathematical physicist from Tulane Frank Tipler recently commented to William Katz: “Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a scam, with no basis in science…a scientific theory makes non-obvious predictions which are then compared with observations that the average person can check for himself. As we both know from our own observations, AGW theory has spectacularly failed to do this…The AGW people are trying to do a disappearing act on these observations. Some are trying to deny the existence of the Maunder Minimum.” As one reader noted, a Tipler/Gore debate might be very amusing to watch. HT: Powerline)

We agree with the Booker piece above. Global Warming is finished, done, dead (at least for the moment). But that doesn’t mean the foolishness is going away. It’s just that the name has changed. The New Planetary Emergency and Religion of the Trendy will be Climate Change, cleverly fashioned so that we’re doing something wrong both when it gets hotter and when it gets colder. The name of the naughty thing that mankind is doing to the planet may have changed, but the cast of characters remains the same — as well as their many plans to separate you from your money.

It’s not just man made global warming that has celebrities and politicians atwitter. Apparently it’s every superstition passing itself off as science. The Independent:

Mr Obama and John McCain blundered into the MMR vaccine row during their presidential campaigns. “We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate,” said President-elect Obama. “Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it,” he said. His words were echoed by Mr McCain. “It’s indisputable that [autism] is on the rise among children, the question is what’s causing it,” he said. “There’s strong evidence that indicates it’s got to do with a preservative in the vaccines.” Exhaustive research has failed to substantiate any link to vaccines or any preservatives. The rise in autism is thought to be due to an increased awareness of the condition…

Hollywood did not escape the critical analysis of the scientific reviewers, who lambasted Tom Cruise, for his comments on psychiatry being a crime against humanity, and Julianne Moore, who warned against using products full of unnatural chemicals…In answer to Moore, the science author and chemist John Emsley said that natural chemicals are not automatically safer than man-made chemicals, which undergo rigorous testing.

One of the few good things about the current economic downturn is that some trendy pseudo-science has become a little too expensive at present and is going on the back burner. The rich and fatuous like to spend their time “obsessing on phantom threats rather than real ones.” Now there are just as many of the fatuous, but far fewer of the rich — we’ll just have to see how that plays in Congress next year.

Alan Greenspan in the Economist says that banks need twice as much capital as the government has already invested into the system:

The three-month LIBOR/Overnight Index Swap (OIS) spread, a measure of market perceptions of potential bank insolvency and thus of extra capital needs, rose from a long-standing ten basis points in the summer of 2007 to 90 points by that autumn. Though elevated, the LIBOR/OIS spread appeared range-bound for about a year up to mid-September 2008. The Lehman default, however, drove LIBOR/OIS up markedly. It reached a riveting 364 basis points on October 10th…

The insertion, last month, of $250 billion of equity into American banks through TARP (a two-percentage-point addition to capital-asset ratios) halved the post-Lehman surge of the LIBOR/OIS spread. Assuming modest further write-offs, simple linear extrapolation would suggest that another $250 billion would bring the spread back to near its pre-crisis norm. This arithmetic would imply that investors now require 14% capital rather than the 10% of mid-2006. Such linear calculations, of course, can only be very rough approximations. But recent data do suggest that, while helpful, the Treasury’s $250 billion goes only partway towards the levels required to support renewed lending.

The chart above does not appear to prove Mr. Greenspan’s argument, but perhaps we’re missing something. Capital appears to be nearly adequate right now by historical standards. Perhaps the issue is that the assets of the banks are in fact understated because of the way that the $60 trillion in credit default swaps and other murky assets are booked.

Matthew Parris, a British atheist who grew up in Nyasaland, now Malawi, returned there after 45 years to find himself marveling at the power of Christianity as a transforming agent in Africa. In the London Times, Parris comments on the missionaries he knew as a boy and some of the most effective people in the NGOs today:

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man’s place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There’s long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don’t follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it’s there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It’s… well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary’s further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described.

Parris says: “Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.” (We wonder if the “post-Reformation” qualifier above was in part included because the vile Robert Mugabe was raised as a Roman Catholic.)

Apparently beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Eli Saslow of the Washington Post has a crush on someone, or so it seems from this disturbingly over-the-top page one story on our new Adonis:

Obama has gone to the gym, for about 90 minutes a day, for at least 48 days in a row. He always has treated exercise less as recreation than requirement, but his devotion has intensified during the past few months. Between workouts during his Hawaii vacation this week, he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.

Meanwhile, you will recall Jonathan Chait’s saying that President Bush’s similar exercise regimen “shows how out of touch he is. It’s nice for Bush that he can take an hour or two out of every day to run, bike or pump iron. Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does.” HT: MM

Bloomberg reports on the BCRA devouring its father (who once said he’d rather have “clean government” than the first amendment):

Obama, 47, became the first major-party nominee to reject federal funding for the general election. He spent $740.6 million, eclipsing the combined $646.7 million that Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry spent four years earlier…

McCain spent $227.7 million…McCain, unlike Obama, accepted $84.1 million in public financing for the general election, a decision that barred him from raising money privately. Obama outspent him by a 4-to-1 margin from Sept. 1 through Nov. 24

Question: how would this story be reported if it was the other way round?

It’s annoying to watch the Cassandras on CNBC tell us just how awful things are going to be in 2009. Some of these folks, after all, are the same ones who said that the sky’s the limit on oil and other commodities just half a year ago. How wrong can you get? Zachary Karabell in the WSJ makes the case that perhaps the Feiler Faster Thesis might be at work in the economy:

this global halt is the dark side of the information technologies and globalization that have created so much wealth and generated so much activity in the past 20 years. The frictionless, instantaneous flow of capital is possible only because of the Internet and electronic exchanges. The supply chain for industrial metals, from copper to iron ore, has gone from being regional and fragmented to global and unified. Semiconductors have become one global industry with pricing and inventories determined based on aggregate world-wide demand. Few industries are local, and almost everything is linked.

In good times, that meant credit expanded and activity magnified geometrically. China for one has undergone more transformation in 20 years than most countries have seen in 100. But when the system was infected with toxic assets, the effects spread everywhere and fast. The collapse of Lehman led to fewer cars being sold in China in a matter of weeks, and the decline of Dubai real-estate prices to boot.

And yet, if things came to a halt more quickly than ever before, they could also restart more quickly than ever before. This is not to say they will, only that the possibility is more than marginal. And there are signs things are not everywhere as bad as conventional wisdom suggests.

First, we haven’t seen war, revolution, the collapse of states and governments or massive demonstrations…Second, consumers in many parts of the world are in relatively good shape. That statement might strike many as absurd, given the mantra of “consumers have been living beyond their means.” But it’s not just the third of American households that have no mortgage, or the 50% savings rate in China, or the still massive wealth accumulation in the Gulf region, Brazil and Russia.

It’s that the credit system, even at its most promiscuous, didn’t allow consumers to take on the obscene leverage that financial institutions did. Millions of people who shouldn’t have been lent money were, either in mortgages or through credit cards. But they couldn’t be levered 40-to-1 as investment banks and funds were. People have also reacted swiftly to the current problems, paying down debt and paring back purchases…

We certainly pay attention to the economic gloomsters in the current environment, particularly those who have been analyzing the problems for quite a while and have well thought out theses as to why we’re going to be in a mess for some time. But who knows? Our own view is that growth will be subdued for several years (because home equity increases powered 46% of consumer spending increases during this decade), but it is a mistake to bet against the efforts of every government and central bank on earth to increase liquidity and economic activity over the intermediate term.