Bedtime Music: ZZ Top - Sharp Dressed Man

My semi-secret theme is finally over with this video. (Thank God.) I'll announce what the theme was in the comments, insha'allah, for any who hadn't guessed it by this point.

Another 1983 release (that was a very good year for rock music), ZZ Top came out with their album Eliminator, which, as an album, placed ninth on the Billboard 200, and produced four hit singles, of which Sharp Dressed Man placed 56th on the Billboard Hot 100 and #8 on the Mainstream Rock chart. As for the video, the concert was filmed a year ago, November 1, 2007, at the Nokia Theater in Grand Prarie, Texas.

Bedtime Music: Yes - Leave It

This is one of those bands where the choice of music video can be very difficult: so many good songs to choose from! Nevertheless, I decided to feature Leave It, off of Yes's 1983 release, 90125. While the song was occasionally released as a B-side to the much more popular Owner of a Lonely Heart, Leave It was popular in its own right, reaching #24 on Billboard's Hot 100 and #3 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.

The video is very retro by today's standards. What's interesting is that 15 different versions of the video were made at the time, of which only fourteen were ever aired on TV. The fifteenth video is rumored to have been of the band members announcing that Leave It had made it to #1 on the charts, which, of course, didn't happen. (That honor went to the above-mentioned Owner of a Lonely Heart.)

Bedtime Music: X - White Girl

Surprise, surprise! It's time to try to resume (once more) my long-neglected, unlamented series, Bedtime Music. And, yes, in this 50th post of the series, I'm also resuming my semi-secret theme. (For the benefit of those readers who hadn't read the previous posts or have forgotten them, the theme was never announced, but I had left numerous clues (23 so far) to solve the puzzle. This video and the next two will round out the series, where someone may finally figure it out.)

Of all the videos in this theme, I figured today's would be the most difficult to find. (It wasn't.) While I had heard of the American punk rock band X in college, I had no idea what their music sounded like. This song, White Girl (I have no link for it), was off the band's 1981 release, Wild Gift, and it sounds pretty good.

Tampines Traffic Accident

I've been meaning to put these two photos up on the blog for two weeks now. Anyway, Milady and I had gone to a local mall in the Tampines (tam-pih-ness) neighborhood of S'pore; on our way back home, we passed by a really horrific car/bicycle accident. Traffic, of course, was very slow, so I was able to take two photos with my handphone camera when the car had stopped.

The accident happened at the corner of Tampines Avenue 4 (the street we were on) and Tampines Avenue 5, with Tampines Stadium in the background (the Hyundai sign and the red wall in the distance). In this first photo you can see that the car had jumped over the median and completely demolished part of the median fence. Parts of the fence were strewn over the street, as you can see.


In this second photo, we were obviously past the accident scene, but I used the side-view mirror to take a photo of the other side of the car.


Here's what Milady and I think might have happened. As you can see in the first photo, there was an ambulance already at the scene (although, ironically, no police, which is a little strange as the local precinct is just a mile or so down Tampines Avenue 4). What you can't see in the photos is the mangled wreckage of a bicycle. So we suspect that as the light was turning red, a bicyclist may have gone into the intersection early while the car was possibly speeding through the red light. The car may have then hit the bicycle before veering right and going through the fence. Unfortunately, we don't know the full story or how the bicyclist and driver are as the story didn't make the newspaper the next day. We did drive past the accident site today, and the fence has been completely repaired already. Singaporean efficiency.

New York Times Interview with James Galbraith

The New York Times Magazine has a very short interview with James Galbraith, whom I've done several posts about in recent weeks. The interview is interesting for Galbraith's comments on the subject of economics and on several prominent people in the Bush administration, Dick Cheney in particular. BTW, one might be tempted to brand Galbraith's answers as "pithy" as well after reading this interview, but the notes at the bottom of the page mention that Galbraith's answers were "condensed." (And, if you read his recent interview with Bill Moyers, you'd know that this isn't the case.) The entire interview can be read here.

Do you find it odd that so few economists foresaw the current credit disaster? Some did. The person with the most serious claim for seeing it coming is Dean Baker, the Washington economist. I saw it coming in general terms.

But there are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis? Ten or 12 would be closer than two or three.

What does that say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science? It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.

You’re referring to the Washington-based conservative philosophy that rejects government regulation in favor of free-market worship? Reagan’s economists worshiped the market, but Bush didn’t worship the market. Bush simply turned over regulatory authority to his friends. It enabled all the shady operators and card sharks in the system to come to dominate how we finance.

...

What do you think the future holds for Vice President Cheney? I suspect that Cheney will spend much of his life fending off legal challenges, but that is a different area. I’m quite sure that the human rights issues will follow him for the rest of his life.

Any thoughts on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who engineered the bailout? He is clearly not a superman. This is the guy who had the financial crisis on his plate for a year, and when it finally became so pervasive that he couldn’t handle it on a case-by-case basis, the best he could do was send Congress a bill that was three pages long.

What’s wrong with that? Maybe he’s pithy. It shows he wasn’t adequately prepared. The bill did not contain protections for the public that Congress had to put in.

Regulation is the new mantra, and even Alan Greenspan in his mea culpa before Congress seemed to regret he hadn’t used more of it. I would say a day late and a dollar short. Greenspan blotted his copybook disastrously with his support of deregulated finance. This is a follower of Ayn Rand, an old Objectivist. His belief was you can’t really regulate and discipline the market and you shouldn’t try. I think Greenspan bears a high, high degree of responsibility for what has happened.

Ten Things You Don't Know About...

I came across an interesting three-part series of blog posts on astronomy over at Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog (the original Bad Astronomy is now hosted by Discovery). Anyhoo... the author, Phil Plait, talks about ten things you may or may not know about the Milky Way, the Earth and Black Holes. All of the posts are done in a humorous, irreverent style for those of you who can't take your astronomy straight. ;) For example:

The biggest is called Cruithne (pronounced MRPH-mmmph-glug, or something similar).

Be sure to check them out.

What Does This Look Like to You?

I took this photo last week with my handphone camera in a car park in Bedok (I won't be more specific as to the location). As you can see, this stuff, whatever it is, looks like a certain word we know. Regardless of what you, my readers, think, I will think of this as an ayah.

Verily in the heavens and the earth, are Signs for those who believe. (45:3)

On the earth are signs for those of assured Faith, (51:20)

A'ishah's First Eid

I've three more pics of A'ishah to share; the first two were taken during Ramadan, while the last was taken on Eid (October 1st). I don't think I have any other pictures of A'ishah that are more current.

This first photo is a continuation of the last two pictures from my last post; here, A'ishah has been burped and is now resting comfortably on Daddy's chest while Mommy takes her picture. This turned out quite nice.


"Eskimo baby." A'ishah being dried with a towel after one of her morning baths.


Finally, A'ishah on Eid over at Grandma's place. We had bought a very nice Eid outfit during Ramadan over at Geylang Serai, but it turned out that the fabric was waaay too rough for her skin. She cried horribly until we took it off her; fortunately, we had another outfit (bought by one of my sisters) that we could use instead. (Yeah, that's me holding her, again.)


Last time, I wrote that A'ishah had started developing a sense of humor; we've also learned that she's developing a temper. ;) A couple nights ago, Milady and I were too late in picking A'ishah up from the crib... at least according to her. ;) And so she threw a temper tantrum (the second of the day). Milady started giving A'ishah her evening bath, but A'ishah screamed throughout. I walked up and said something to the effect of "Good luck on getting her to bed." It frequently takes Milady about 40 minutes to get A'ishah to sleep in the evening. But Milady was unperturbed. "Oh, she'll go right to sleep after all this crying." Sure enough, Milady had A'ishah asleep in only ten-fifteen minutes that night. I wish she would go to sleep that fast every night.

Special note to my parents: Your photo set (of 33 photos) should be in the mail by tomorrow, insha'allah. :)

James Galbraith Interview with Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers recently interviewed economist James Galbraith (whom I wrote about earlier this month). The topic, of course, was on the financial crisis. To a degree, this interview is "$#|+ in your pants"-scary as it outlines not only the current problems we face, but some other potential problems that I haven't heard anyone else talk about (and I read four blogs devoted to economics on my RSS reader). The good news is that Galbraith remains optimistic that the problems can be overcome, although it will take some time (he estimates three years at a minimum). Below is most of the transcript; the video of the interview and the full transcript can be found here.

BILL MOYERS: How perilous is this situation?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Oh, very much so. This is the big one. I have been working on financial crises since the New York City rescue in 1975. And this is, by far and away, the biggest threat to the system as a whole that we've seen in my lifetime and I think the biggest threat since the late 1920s.

BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that the adrenaline of fear could push us over the brink into panic so that we stop acting rationally or deliberately?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Fear is a factor. But we have an enormous advantage over our predecessors in 1929. We have the fact that the New Deal happened. And we have the institutions of the New Deal, though they have been badly damaged in the last decade, they are still with us. We have deposit insurance. We have Social Security. We have a government which is capable of acting as the lender of last resort, which can borrow and spend as needed to deal with this crisis.

So here in the United States the capacity to handle the crisis exists. What we need is a government that's willing to use that capacity, that believes in it. And that's where the collapse of the old objectivism of Alan Greenspan is such a fundamental feature of the present situation, and very timely. With the collapse of that system of ideas perhaps the way will be cleared for thinking afresh and clearly about the problems that we face and how to solve them.

BILL MOYERS: Well, they have been acting as born-again believers in government intervention.

JAMES GALBRAITH: I think, though, that there's still a great deal still to be learned and still be to done. We are going to hear a great deal in the next few weeks about the need for a stimulus package. And a lot of people will be talking about how they will be conceding that the government should get involved short term.

But what needs to be stressed is that we've seen a breakdown of an entire system. The consequence of the failure of regulation, of supervision of the banking system over the past eight years, has been to cause a collapse of trust, a poisoning of the well.

BILL MOYERS: Trust?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Of trust, yes. Banks -

BILL MOYERS: Between?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Banks no longer trust each other because they no longer know whether their counterparties are solvent. Customers no longer trust the banking system. Banks no longer trust the people who would like to borrow from them for commercial purposes. This is a poisoned well. It is going to take a fair amount of time for it to be cleaned up.

BILL MOYERS: Fair amount of time? What do you mean?

JAMES GALBRAITH: My feeling is, if it is done correctly, aggressively, effectively, we could begin to work out of it in three years. But it is not a problem that's going to be solved with a six-month program.

BILL MOYERS: What scares you most right now?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, a week ago or two weeks ago I would have said the possibility that Phil Gramm might become Secretary of the Treasury.

BILL MOYERS: Your former Texas soul mate, right?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Yes, exactly. Yeah. We have a contest between a philosophy of deregulation, of de-supervision, a philosophy of anything goes. Gramm himself was the architect, a deep architect of the speculative markets that have just collapsed. And an alternative which says that there really has to be a pragmatic approach to these problems. And that's a choice the American public obviously is going to be making in a few days.

BILL MOYERS: What's the worst-case scenario you think about late at night?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Right now the thing that troubles me most is not the United States. The thing that troubles me most is that the same ideas of deregulation, of free markets, were applied in the construction of modern Europe. And the Europeans don't have the institutions of the New Deal, a central bank that can lend as necessary.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Government that can borrow as necessary; that can take the initiative. They have expanded themselves into Eastern Europe in a way in which Communism was replaced by nothing. And a financial collapse is going on there now is, in many ways, more profound than the one we are experiencing here.

BILL MOYERS: But we've seen Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of Britain, step forward in a way that our own government hasn't and try to orchestrate a European-wide response to this.

JAMES GALBRAITH: That is true. And that is, you know, collection of the finance ministers getting together over the weekend to try and do this on an ad hoc basis. Mercifully, we have the institutions of government in this country that can act. The Europeans are winging it. They have to go against their charter of the Central Bank, against the Maastricht Treaty and its restrictions on government spending, government deficits. They- that problem is a systemic problem. Our problem is a policy problem. We can solve our problem.

BILL MOYERS: Isn't our government winging it, too? I mean, the NEW YORK TIMES this week-

JAMES GALBRAITH: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Had a long story saying that Secretary of Treasury Paulson was behind the curve at almost every turn.

JAMES GALBRAITH: That's no doubt true. First of all, the crisis had been developing for a year. When it broke, he sent up a three-page bill to Congress. Many people said that's a power grab. My view was it was a punt. It said to the Congress, "You take this ball. You write the legislation," which Barney Frank and the other leadership of the Congress actually did do. And they came back. And eventually they passed a bill. And Paulson has been improvising ever since. He's done a number of things that actually I was recommending as early as the 25th of September in the "Washington Post". Guarantee all deposits in the banking system. Support the commercial paper market. Take out equity investment in the banks, effectively partially nationalizing them. All of these things which were unimaginable in mid-September are now policy, even though they were, strictly speaking, part of the bill.

So we are improvising very fast. The next problem is going to be that the economy needs to be dealt with, not just the financial sector. The fact is we have a million homes in foreclosure. That number's going to be rising. It could be two and a half or five million in a few months. We are going to have to take very significant steps to try and keep people in their homes, to try and minimize the amount of abandonment, the amount of blight, the amount of sort of permanent damage to the houses out there and to the people who live in them.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, that's one calamity I wanted to ask you about. You own a home on which the value of it is far less now than the mortgage that you have to pay off. What do we do about that?

JAMES GALBRAITH: You renegotiate the mortgage. And that is something that has to be done on a case-to-case-by-case basis with government help. That is what, in the 1930s, Roosevelt established a Home Owners' Loan Corporation to do. And we're going to need to go back to that model and do something similar. Sheila Bair, the head of the FDIC-

BILL MOYERS: Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

JAMES GALBRAITH: - has proposed something quite similar.

BILL MOYERS: And so has Governor John-

JAMES GALBRAITH: So we're-

BILL MOYERS: -Corzine of New Jersey is coming forward with something like that. Details to follow. But I know he's groping with that. Other governors are, too.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Can they do it on their own at the state level?

JAMES GALBRAITH: No. It is going to require federal organization and federal funds. And the states have another problem, which is states and localities fund themselves from the property tax and the local economies.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Those are collapsing. So they need support and help to maintain their public services, to keep their staff, their civil servants on payroll so that you don't complicate the housing problem, among other things.

BILL MOYERS: And since there's no private capital from that they can borrow now, where do they go?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, they have to - the federal government is going to have to provide both operating revenue and support for capital investment by state and local government.

BILL MOYERS: What about the other calamity? The other calamity is that people nearing retirement and the elderly, have really been hit hard in their pension plans. What happens to them?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, you can't make people whole individually because everybody made different portfolio choices. Some were more in the stock market, some less. Those who were more in the stock market have been hurt harder. What you can do is protect the population as a whole. And we have a system for doing that. It's called Social Security.

It supports today about 40% of the American elderly population has basically no other income. It's more than half of the retirement of maybe 50 or 60% of that population. Social Security benefits, except for inflation adjustment, haven't been raised in a generation. We ought to think about replacing the losses to some degree in the aggregate that have occurred in the markets by raising Social Security benefits and particularly raising them for the poorest and most vulnerable.

BILL MOYERS: For a temporary measure?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, I'm in favor of doing it on a permanent basis.

BILL MOYERS: But, you know, you and everybody else have been reading or talking to or calling for more spending, more spending because that's the only way you say to get capital into the system. But where's that money going to come from, Jamie?

JAMES GALBRAITH: The government has no problem with money. What we're learning, first of all, is that the dollar remains the anchor currency of the world. The euro is the one, is the currency that's collapsing right now, not the dollar.

Uncle Sam's credit is excellent. Uncle Sam can borrow short term for practically nothing these days. Everybody wants to have Treasury Bills and bonds because they're safe. Uncle Sam can borrow for 20 years at 4.3%. That's the same rate that the United States could borrow at for 20 years in the last month of the Eisenhower administration. So from our point of view, we're actually well placed, I mean, as the government of the United States is well placed to take the lead in pulling the country and the world out of this crisis.

BILL MOYERS: But even Barack Obama's website calls the deficit America's "Domestic Enemy." Even he's aware of the fact that the deficit's beyond sight.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, the deficit isn't beyond sight. The deficits in the Bush administration in relation to the size of the economy were never all that large. They were certainly larger than they were under Clinton, but that was in part necessary because of the changed economic situation, the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000.

The United States government's credit is good. The deficit is a financial number that people are going to have to get used to because there is no way in these circumstances of avoiding an increase in the deficit. One of two things can happen. The government can take action and help stabilize the economy in which case we will have more spending but also more employment.

Or the government cannot take action and let the economy collapse in which case we will have much less tax revenue. The deficit is going to be larger either way. There is no way of avoiding that. The only question is do you work to have a good economy or do you accept a terrible economy?

BILL MOYERS: What are the negative effects of a soaring deficit?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, the one thing I would have worried about is that we might not find lenders who are willing to provide funds to the U.S. government, that the Chinese or the Japanese might decide that they would rather be in some other currency and that we'd then have trouble with inflation. But that's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen because, as it turns out, the major alternative, the euro, simply isn't viable as a reserve asset for the rest of the world. It's the dollar or nothing. So the United States basically can finance itself to the extent necessary to deal with this crisis. And I'm right now quite sanguine about that, quite confident that we won't face a problem.

BILL MOYERS: You call your book THE PREDATOR STATE, what do you mean predator?

JAMES GALBRAITH: What I mean is the people who took over the government were not interested in reducing the government and having a small government, the conservative principle. They were interested in using these great institutions for private benefit, to place them in the control of their friends and to put them to the use of their clients. They wanted to privatize Social Security. They created a Medicare drug benefit in such a way as to create the maximum profit for pharmaceutical companies.

They used trade agreements to extend patent protections for various interests or to promote the expansion of the corporate agriculture's markets in the third world. A whole range of things that were basically political and clientelistic. That's the predator state.

BILL MOYERS: You call it a corporate republic.

JAMES GALBRAITH: It is a corporate republic.

BILL MOYERS: Which means that the purpose of government is to divert funds from the public sector to the private sector?

JAMES GALBRAITH: I think it's very clear. They also turned over the regulatory apparatus to the regulated industries. They turned over the henhouse to the foxes in every single case. And that is the source of the decline in, the abandonment of environmental responsibility, the source of the collapse of consumer protection, and the source of the collapse of the financial system, all trace back to a common root, which is the failure to maintain a public sector that works in the public interest, that provides discipline and standards, a framework within which the private sector can operate and compete. That's been abandoned.

BILL MOYERS: We saw what Alan Greenspan said yesterday. But did you see what the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, said? I mean, it was one of the great recantings in modern American history. Quote, "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work."

Now, we all know that the government can screw up, too. We all know that government can make serious mistakes. What kind of regulation do you think we should have that doesn't poison and punish entrepreneurial talent but protects the public interest?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, first of all, anyone who thought, up until six months ago, that voluntary regulation could work was either being dishonest or delusional. Voluntary regulation is regulation that, by its nature, you can evade. And what happens is that the people, who are most intent on evading it, on not respecting the standards, come to take over the process. Their profits are better. And so they drive the complying firms and businesses to the wall. They out-compete them.

You need to have a mandatory system so that the firms which are more technologically progressive, which are safer, which are more complaint, which provide, which are prudent in the financial sector, which maintain credit standards so that those firms have a competitive chance. That's the first purpose of regulation.

It is a framework which it favors, when it's done properly, it's a framework which favors the more efficient, the more progressive, the elements that are prepared to work within the guidelines set by a larger public purpose.

BILL MOYERS: What kind of regulation do you think might be most effective?

JAMES GALBRAITH: The, well first of all, we need to clean up the mess that's there. And that's going to include a fair amount of legal intervention, criminal prosecution, malfeasance. There was a lot of fraud in the housing sector, in the, amongst the loan originators, amongst the appraisers. This all needs to be investigated. And people need to be moved out of positions in the financial industry that they have abused.

The regulatory system going forward is going to have to be basically like a utility. It's going to have to treat banking like a utility with limitations on growth, on rate of return, and on credit in such a way as to be much more transparent, to make it much easier to evaluate financial products that are traded. None of this over-the-counter, occult, too complex to value stuff.

We need to end the offshore tax havens and other ways in which institutions have hid out from their responsibility to the country to pay their share of taxes. And we need to have a set of prudential standards that are reasonable and that basically can put the business of finance on a sustainable footing. It'll be a much less glamorous business going forward. But it will be more reliable for the country as a whole.

BILL MOYERS: You are such an experienced economist in your own right. But I hesitate to bring the spirit of your father to this table. He would have been 100 last week had he not died two years ago, right? And his classic book, of course, one of his classic books is "The Great Crash of 1929". Is the situation today comparable to what happened when your father was a young economist?

JAMES GALBRAITH: It is. The situation today is very similar to the moment of panic and collapse that we saw in 1929. And for very similar reasons. An abandonment of the supervisory responsibility that should have been applied to keep the speculation and the fraud and the abuse from getting out of control. So there's going to be a major period of correction. And dad, in writing this in 1955, talks about how memory fades and how eventually, although so long as people remembered '29 it wouldn't be repeated, eventually it would be forgotten and the underlying speculative impulse would come back. So the book, in addition to being a great read, is really prescient in a very balanced way. But I will say that we're not going to go back to 1929 because in 1929 we hadn't had Roosevelt. We hadn't had Kennedy and Johnson. We had had them now. So we have a body of history to work with.

BILL MOYERS: There's a precedent, you're saying, that there are tools there if people want to use them.

JAMES GALBRAITH: Tools, not only precedent, there are institutions. There's a government structure. And if we use them, we can avoid, we can't avoid '29. But we can avoid 1930 and 1931, 1932, when-

BILL MOYERS: When-

JAMES GALBRAITH: -output fell by a third, unemployment rose to 25 percent of the labor force and a third or more of the banks in the country closed and people lost their savings. In fact, we are already in a position of moving to take steps to prevent that from happening. We need to recognize, though, that we can never go back to a system of this kind of buccaneering finance driven, Wall Street-led economy in which a group of people who are profoundly unqualified to run the country are, in fact, dictating policy from perches here in Manhattan.

BILL MOYERS: But there are capitalists like Steve Forbes, I just read a long article by him in the current issue of "Forbes Magazine," who argue that people like you are going to go too far and that it was actually the government's excesses and failures in the '80s and '90s that contributed to what began to happen in 2007 with the meltdown. And that if you have your way, people like you have your way, you will criminalize business. You will raise taxes and dry up the economy. You will take government unchecked into the same kind of catastrophe that unchecked Wall Street has carried us. How do you answer a Steve Forbes?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, first of all, I very much agree with him, that it was failures of government that were responsible for this. It was the actual failure, the abandonment, the neglect of the supervisory regulatory responsibility. That's at the root of this.

Just as you cannot prosper without a private economy, you cannot prosper without an effective autonomous government capable of thinking for itself, capable of balancing things out, of standing for other interests, of standing for labor and consumers and for the public interest as a whole. If you don't have that, you're going to get these pyramids, these bubbles, these epidemics of fraud and abuse, and ultimately the collapse of trust and the collapse of the economy itself. That's what's happened in the predator state.

BILL MOYERS: I wrote down something you wrote elsewhere, that struck me. You wrote that after World War II our American system wasn't imperial. Quote, "We spoke instead of community, of freedom, of common purposes and common values. And the world took us seriously because we had paid our dues." What's happened to those values?

JAMES GALBRAITH: Well, it's clear that world has lost its confidence in the responsible role of the United States. Iraq is viewed by the world as reckless and self-serving rather than being a necessary step to protect the mutual security.

In the financial sector, the world viewed us as a safe haven because they believed we had effective systems for legality, transparency and security. That's taken a hard knock. But we are rescued for the moment by the fact that other people's systems turn out to be even worse. I believe that you can turn a page and that you can rebuild the position of the country in the world community if you do so in a way which is fully credible. New people, new philosophies, new policies.

8 Years Later

Vote!

The Economist: McCain's Last Stand

There's an interesting, short article on John McCain's campaign in the state of Pennsylvania over at The Economist. What really struck me about this article was two sections near the end. Based on these two paragraphs, is there any reason to think that McCain has any hope of winning Pennsylvania, let alone the country? Not in my mind.

Mr Obama also has an overwhelming advantage with his ground game. The Obama campaign has not just been content to produce huge turnouts in the big cities. It is fighting for every vote. Mr Obama has 81 field offices across the state, many in places where Democrats have never competed before, compared with Mr McCain’s three dozen. Mr Obama is also making clever use of affinity groups—getting nurses to organise meetings with other nurses and Catholics (a vital group in Pennsylvania, accounting for almost 25% of people) to organize meetings with other Catholics.

...

The McCain office only had a couple of people working the phones when The Economist visited. The young man who was in charge had no idea that Mr McCain was in the state that day. The Obama office, by contrast, was crammed to the brim and hyper-organized. There were plenty of older people sporting “Hillary sent me” badges as well as younger Obamaphiles. The walls were covered with charts telling people where they had to be and when. After dark, it was still buzzing with volunteers. The McCain office was closed.

Terry Tate vs. Sarah Palin

Make sure you don't have any drinks in your mouth as you watch these. ;)

Sarah Palin, Secret Democrat

This woman really is clueless.


"Oh, look! It has little donkeys on it and, see? It says 'Vote!' Nothing but the best for me at Neiman Marcus!"
Photo credit: Newsweek

A'ishah during Ramadan

Back in mid September, I had a post about A'ishah's BFF (Best Friend Forever), a bright, sunny cloth flower that we had bought from Toys "R" Us. A few days after I wrote that post, Milady took a picture of A'ishah smiling at the flower:


Since that time, we've also added a musical mobile and a small fan to the crib, the fan having several LED lights that makes colorful patterns as the blades spin. Those have attracted A'ishah's attention in recent weeks far better than the flower, which is more or less ignored now despite it still having a prominent space on the crib.

This next photo was taken by Milady with her brother Du@n holding A'ishah. The "glow" is due to the photo being taken in front of Arcadia doors on a bright day.


Finally, we have two more photos of A'ishah in all her "chipmunk cheek" glory. Both pictures were taken during Ramadan, very early in the morning, when everyone was eating breakfast before the start of fasting. The hand in both photos is mine. :)


"Daddy, I'm so tired!"

"Yeaah! Who keeps flashing that bright light in my face?"

I'm also pleased to say that A'ishah is developing a sense of humor. A couple of days ago, Milady was holding A'ishah in front of a mirror and making faces at her. Every few seconds A'ishah would then giggle ("ha ha"), which was really cute to watch. Later that day, we bought a small swing for A'ishah to sit in. As soon as she was placed in it and the swing began to rock, she giggled once more. Very cute!

Zakat vs. Sadaqah

There seems to be some confusion among non-Muslims about who's eligible to receive charity from Muslims. The quotation in question is from Al-Maqasid, the book on fiqh by Imam Nawawi (631 - 676 A.H. / 1234 - 1278 CE), who wrote:

"It is not permissible to give zakat to a non-Muslim." (Al-Maqasid, 4:13)

Not surprisingly, the quotation is being misused by Islamophobes such as Bobby Spencer and others. Their problem seems to be that they focus solely on zakat while ignoring the fact that there's also sadaqah, the voluntary charity that can be given by Muslims to anyone. What follows below is the thread of a conversation over at Daily Kos where this issue came up. The first comment was written by a person calling themselves "Berkeley Moon":

Do you know, for example, that Islam compares wealth in a society to blood in the body? It must be circulated in a healthy society/body. If too much blood is congealed in one place in the body, the body dies. The body also dies if there is too little blood in a part. It is the same with a society. Too little or too much wealth in a part of the society means the society sickens and may die.

To which "Old Man Mountain" wrote:

Interesting... Can you please quote the verse(s) that outline this concept? Thanks.

I responded:

There is no specific verse in the Qur'an... that mentions this concept; there may be some ahadith that do, although I couldn't find anything through an online search of the best of the hadith databases (USC's MSA website). However, you can find the concept fleshed out in The Secret of Islam, pp. 17-18.

To which "Old Man Mountain" replied:

That link appears to outline... the justification for zakat tax. Now I've done some reading up on this in the meantime, and it seems that although there are some exceptions (like if there is potential to make a convert), by and large...

"It is not permissible to give zakat to a non-Muslim" (Al-Maqasid, 4:13).

I'm just an old guy, sometimes grumpy, but I just don't see what is so "beautiful" about that - unless of course one is a Muslim. I must say the teacher above sure makes it sound flowery.

And here is my latest (and, insha'allah, last) response:

I think part of the problem... is that there's a lot more to this topic than what you've read. First, the passage I linked to used the analogy of wealth in a society to blood within one's body with respect to zakat; however, the passages where I'm familiar with this analogy are normally on the topic of Islamic business practices. The use of this analogy is applicable to both areas.

Next, the quotation you used, "It is not permissible to give zakat to a non-Muslim." (Al-Maqasid, 4:13), is from a book on fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence. It's not a quotation from the Qur'an, if that's what you were thinking.

In Googling the quotation (because I was unfamiliar with it off-hand), I see that it's used in a negative manner by Islamophobes; what I don't see is that these same people don't have a more full understanding about charity within Islam. Zakat is merely one form of charity within Islam. Zakat is the compulsory charity that is required of Muslims; non-Muslims are not expected to pay any zakat whatsoever. In this regard, I don't have any problems with the idea that "it is not permissible to give zakat to a non-Muslim." It is a charity raised by and distributed back to the Muslim community.

However, zakat is only one type of charity in Islam; the voluntary, non-compulsory form of charity in Islam is known as sadaqah. Sadaqah can be given to anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim. Whereas zakat is a prescribed amount (2.5% of one's wealth), sadaqah is limitless. In Islam, even a smile is sadaqah. :) So there's more to Islamic charity than just zakat.

Note to Self: Keep Mouth Closed When Looking Up!

Presumably it's good luck if a bird shits upon you. So how much good luck does this guy have?

Watch Your Step!

Well, they'll never forget their wedding day. ;)

Caddying

I'm not quite sure what my first job was, although I'd guess that it was my time as a caddy. "Job" isn't really the right word for being a caddy; I wasn't there because I had filled out an application or was hired by the country club. (They could have cared less.) Caddying was more like being an independent contractor: I'd show up, sit around the scoreboard (used for the occasional golf tournament), and hope that someone would ask me to carry their bag for them. Usually someone did; occasionally I went home having done nothing.

I don't know who first suggested I caddy; my mom, I think. I like golf, and my parents had given me some lessons on how to play the game. The country club where I caddied was located on the west side of town, but because I was too young to drive, I'd ride my bicycle over. I'd go to the caddymaster's room, tell them I was there to caddy, and then I'd sit at the scoreboard and chat with any other caddy who happened to be there. Caddies at that country club were almost all high school students. For the most part we were too young to get better jobs, which explains why, over two summers, I only met one college-aged caddy. So we'd sit and wait. Most club members didn't bother with caddies, using golf carts instead. (Bastards.) Most days I did get to carry someone's bags but, as I said above, not always. Those were the depressing days. Sitting around for a couple hours, getting a glimmer of hope when club members showed up to play golf, getting depressed when they took a cart. The one alternative to caddying was that occasionally we'd be hired to shag balls. Most members had a bunch of practice balls they kept in some type of bag or container, maybe fifty or so. Instead of your typical driving range where some vehicle runs around sweeping up balls, the caddy runs around chasing after the balls his golfer hits into the field. It wasn't terribly difficult work, but it wasn't always easy to see the ball in the sky as it came at you. Not that I ever got hit by a ball, thank God. It was relatively easy money. Twenty minutes worth of running around for $3.

But the "real" money to be made was in walking around the course ($9 for a round, IIRC). Those bags were freakin' humongous, but if you carried the bag with the center of the strap on your shoulder, instead of the end nearest the bag's mouth, you could balance the bag quite easily. The course itself was partially located on a hill. The first hole was flat, but holes Two and Three were uphill. Four was a short, level par three about two-thirds of the way up the hill, but Five was a long, steep monster. On hot, humid days, climbing up that hill was a bear. Everyone, golfers and caddies, would drink a couple of paper cups of water each at the dispenser at the sixth tee. Six through Nine went back downhill, which was nice. One incident at the sixth tee remains in my mind. One of the caddy's jobs is to help track the ball when the golfer hits it so that we can get to the ball as quickly as possible. This guy hit the ball and, just as he did, out soars this beautiful hawk. Magnificent! Of course, everyone lost sight of the ball. :)

At the bottom of the hill, at the ninth green, was a small refreshment stand. Golfers always had to buy their caddy a drink. We were lucky if they bought us a hot dog. The back nine was much easier than the front nine. Although Ten and Eleven went back up the hill, you never got as high up as on the front nine. By Fourteen you were back down on the plain, and then we'd start walking past the rich people's homes, those whose backyards bordered the golf course. By Fifteen, you were starting to feel good as you knew your job was almost over. Once you got back to the clubhouse, you'd give the bag back to the caddymaster who would clean and polish the clubs before putting everything into its slot. The members' clubs were stored in the caddymaster's room, each bag being stored in a cylinder with the member's name attached. I remember walking around one day looking at the names and realizing that my optometrist was a member.

For me, caddying wasn't anything like the movie Caddyshack. Most of the other caddy's were OK guys; one in particular became a friend that summer. He asked me once if I wanted to play golf at the course on a Tuesday morning (when caddies were allowed to play). He asked the caddymaster if he and I could play one week, and the caddymaster was like, "Who?" Obviously, I hadn't made much of an impression. I never did play golf there; I'm not sure how I would have gotten my own bag and clubs there while riding the three miles or so on my bicycle.

One of the more interesting jobs I had was caddying for a woman; every other round I did was with a man (and the appropriately macho humongo bag), but this one woman asked me one morning if I'd pull her bag around for her. (Most womens' bags at the time were squarish contraptions on wheels.) I'm not sure why she asked me to go with her. Pity? A status symbol? Someone to talk to on the course? Turns out she was the mother of one of the girls we caddies knew. The girl was slightly older than us, by a year or two, and was going to attend Duke that fall. But the girl ignored us caddies, and we resented that. None of us had parents who were members, and we felt she was being snobbish. Still, the mother was a nice woman, and the other caddies thought I was very lucky for having such an easy round. (It also helped soothe my ego when she asked me how old I was; she thought I was in college when I was still in high school, having just finished (I think) my sophomore year.)

The very last time I caddied was late in the summer of '77. I hadn't realized that there was a big golf tournament going on at the local college's golf course (where I learned to play golf). So I had been sitting at the scoreboard, very morose about the lack of work when the caddymaster called out, was I doing anything? Did I want to caddy up at the tournament? One of the members decided he needed a caddy, and I was the only one at the country club. So they drove me up to the course, and I did my round with him that day. In fact, he asked me if I would caddy for him the next day (this was a two-day tournament), but I had a prior commitment.

Caddying wasn't a great job; it was rather erratic and very dependent upon the whim of the golfer. Most club members were OK, and one guy I caddied for was a real character. But it provided a little bit of spending money that I earned for myself, and a lot of fresh air and exercise. And that made it nice.

"Spare Me the Sermon on Muslim Women"

Nice essay at the Washington Post on the benefits of being a Muslim woman, written by Mohja Kahf, author of the novel "The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf." Below are a couple of brief excerpts; the entire essay can be read at the above link.

It irks me that I even have to say this: Being a Muslim woman is a joyful thing.

...

Blessings abound for me as a Muslim woman: The freshness of ablution is mine, and the daily meditation zone of five prayers that involve graceful, yoga-like movements, performed in prayer attire. Prayer scarves are a chapter in themselves, cool and comforting as bedsheets. They lie folded in the velveteen prayer rug when not in use: two lightweight muslin pieces, the long drapey headcover and the roomy gathered skirt. I fling open the top piece, and it billows like summer laundry, a lace-edged meadow. I slip into the bottom piece to cover my legs for prayer time because I am wearing shorts around the house today.

These create a tent of tranquility. The serene spirit sent from God is called by a feminine name, "sakinah," in the Quran, and I understand why some Muslim women like to wear their prayer clothes for more than prayer, to take that sakinah into the world with them. I, too, wear a (smaller) version of the veil when I go out. What a loss it would be for me not to have in my life this alternating structure, of covering outdoors and uncovering indoors. I take pleasure in preparing a clean, folded set for a houseguest, the way home-decor mavens lay elegant plump towels around a bathroom to give it a relaxing feel.

...

As beautiful as veils are, they are not the best part of being a Muslim woman -- and many Muslim women in Islamic countries don't veil. The central blessing of Islam to women is that it affirms their spiritual equality with men, a principle stated over and over in the Quran, on a plane believers hold to be untouched by the social or legalistic "women in Islam" concerns raised by other parts of the Scripture, in verses parsed endlessly by patriarchal interpreters as well as Muslim feminists and used by Islamophobes to "prove" Islam's sexism. This is how most believing Muslim women experience God: as the Friend who is beyond gender, not as the Father, not as the Son, not inhabiting a male form, or any form.

HT: Alajnabiya's Climbing Walls

The Great Arab Conquests: Why People Reverted to Islam

This is the ninth post in my series about Hugh Kennedy's book, The Great Arab Conquests. Here, Kennedy examines, at the very end of the book (pages 374-76), why people in the conquered lands chose to revert to Islam. His answer is that it was to their material benefit, that this was a way for people to become part of the new, dominant culture of the day. What's interesting is what Kennedy doesn't say, that the mass reversion of the native populations to Islam was not "by the sword," as Islamophobes mistakenly believe. Instead, the reversion to Islam was a very slow, gradual process that took centuries to complete.

Note: While this topic was originally set to be the last post in this series on Kennedy's book, I've decided to continue on, insha'allah, with a related series, focusing on some of the leaders and other people mentioned in The Great Arab Conquests, and descriptions about places, geographical and architectural, in Muslim lands. While I plan on using Kennedy's book in the future, I hope to use other research materials for these new posts.

As we have repeatedly seen, the Muslim conquerors put little or no pressure on the recently subjected populations to convert to Islam. Any attempt at compulsory conversion would probably have provoked widespread outrage and open hostility. As it was, the Muslim authorities established working relationships with the heads of the churches and other religious institutions that were now in their power. Conversion when it came was partly the result of fiscal pressures, the desire to escape the hated poll tax, but also because conversion provided an opportunity to escape from existing social constraints and to become a part of the new ruling class. Being a Muslim had always been essential for anyone who wanted a career in the military. By the tenth century, and before in some areas, it had become very difficult to have a successful career in the civil bureaucracy without becoming a Muslim. Attraction, not coercion, was the key to the appeal of the new faith.

During the first century, the Muslim Empire was a fairly open society. The elite of the new empire were the Muslims and Islam claimed to be a religion for all mankind. No would-be convert could be denied membership of this new elite. In contrast, Roman citizenship or membership of Persian aristocratic families was an exclusive, privileged position to be defended by those who enjoyed it. By converting to the new religion of Islam, conquered people could move to being conquerors, members of the new ruling class and, at least theoretically, equal to all other Muslims. Of course, problems soon arose and there were prolonged and violent clashes between old Muslims and new Arab and non-Arab Muslims, but this could not undermine the fact that Islam was open to all.

This is the other side of the collapse of the old social order and class boundaries lamented in aristocratic Persian sources of the period. There were some spectacular examples of this mobility. Nusayr was a prisoner of war, probably of humble Aramaean origin, captured in one of the early Arab campaigns in Iraq. He converted to Islam and his son Mūsā went on to become governor of North Africa and supreme commander of the Muslim forces in the conquest of Spain. At a humbler level, the peasants who refused to obey the orders of the Persian landowner in Iraq, the Copts who chose to stay in North Africa rather than being forced to return to their native Egypt, or the local men who served with the Arab armies in Transoxania may all have seen the coming of the Muslims as an opportunity to better themselves, taking advantage of the freedom and opportunities offered by the new order.

The early Muslims brought with them a great cultural self-confidence. God had spoken to them through His Prophet, in Arabic, and they were the bearers of true religion and God's own language. It is interesting to compare this with the Germanic invaders of western Europe in the fifth century. When they occupied the lands of the Roman Empire, they abandoned their old gods and converted to Christianity, the religion of the empire they had just conquered, and, as far as we know, no one claimed that God spoke German. This cultural self-confidence meant that Arabic became the language of administration and the language of the new high culture. Anyone who wished to participate fully in government or intellectual activity had to be literate in Arabic and preferably a Muslim. Again the contrast with the Germanic west is revealing. Here Latin remained the language of administration and high culture until at least the twelfth century, the new ruling class adopted Latin titles like duke (dux) and count (comes), and the Germanic languages survived only as vernaculars. The Muslim titles, caliph (khalīfa), amīr and wālī (governor) were all Arabic in origin.

Nonetheless, conquest was the prelude to conversion. It established the political and social framework within which the much slower, incremental processes of changing to Islam could take place. By the year 1000, it is likely that the majority of the population in all the different areas that had been conquered by 750 were Muslim. The conquest did not cause conversion but it was a major prerequisite: without it Islam would not have become the dominant faith in these areas.

The success of the Muslim conquests was the product of a unique set of circumstances and the preaching of a simple new monotheistic faith. There were many features of Islam that would have made it approachable to Christians and Jews. It had a Prophet, a Holy Book, established forms of prayer, dietary and family laws. Abraham and Jesus were both great prophets in the Muslim tradition. From the very beginning Islam established itself as a new faith, but it was one that claimed to perfect rather than destroy the older monotheistic ones. It had none of the strangeness of, say, Buddhism. These similarities, this common tradition, must have aided and encouraged conversion.

In many ways acceptance of Muslim rule was the result of Muslim policy toward the enemy: it was almost always preferable to surrender to the invaders and to make terms and pay the taxes rather than to resist to the last. The Islamization and Arabization that followed conquest over the next two or three centuries would not have occurred if political conquest had not already succeeded, but they were not a direct and inevitable consequence of that conquest. Instead, it was a gradual, almost entirely peaceful result of the fact that more and more people wanted to identify with and participate in the dominant culture of their time.

Photo credit: Wikipedia/Tawelsensei. La Mezquita, the former masjid of Cordoba, Spain. The architecture is notable for its giant arches, with over 1,000 columns of jasper, onyx, marble, and granite.