North, to the future: Sarah Palin's Farewell Address

Following is the poetic middle section of Sarah Palin's farewell address, delivered on July 26.

"It is the best road trip in America soaring through nature's finest show. Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it's the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn't it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future."

To really catch Palin's spirit, I recommend watching the recitation of it by The Great Shatner. And for something completely different, here is some fantastic verse by a great American poet, Robert Frost. This is the poem that he recited at Jack Kennedy's inauguration. But I like it anyway.

The Gift Outright
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Liveblogging from the Lehrman American Studies Center's Summer Institute

These days I write from Princeton, New Jersey. I am a fly on the wall of the Lehrman American Studies Center's Summer Institute. The Lehrman American Studies Center (LASC) is connected to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). The Summer Institute is a two-week course which combines substantive discussion and lectures of core texts and ideas from American history, political philosophy, and political science, with sections on professionalization.

Map of Battlestar Galactica

Take a look at this map. Contains spoilers, if you still haven't finished the series.

AFF Chicago round table: Marketing the classical liberal alternative

Went to a great panel discussion by AFF Chicago on Wednesday evening, May 20. It was moderated by John Tillman; the panel consisted of four short presentations suggesting different approaches for libertarians to advance their agenda and candidates. The first discussant, Nikki Sullivan, said that since voters vote irrationally anyway, a movement needs a charismatic leader, whether it's Reagan, Obama or a new libertarian spokesman. By contrast, Marisa Maleck

Tales of the unconscious: Finding out who you really are

The remark by Irad Kimhi I posted the other day is at once creepy and profound. It is also more familiar than it at first appears; think of the stories and narrative methods employed in the following:

In several television shows and films, a character's everyday ego (his I) is unaware of who he really is. He really is a saboteur or a murderer, another person, and so on. Think of "The 4400" (Kyle Baldwin, son of the putz secret agent protagonist); "Angel Heart" (Harry Angel); "Battlestar Galactica" (the false surface consciousness of Sharon "Boomer" Valeri, as in Episode 1x3, "Water"); "Fight Club" (the narrator); "Evil Dead" (Ash's hand, which went bad, so he had to cut it off).

A different kind of thing-beneath-you is the fascinating depiction of the Echo-consciousness in Joss Whedon's current going concern "Doll House." Echo is perhaps a being underneath the surface of Caroline, the woman who semi-voluntarily gave up her body for five years for employment as a doll. In the first season finale,

Rumour of the Hidden King: Irad Kimhi

This is just a short note of a kind of introduction, but not to me. I am not very familiar with academic blogs, though I know they exist. The point here is just to say a few words about Irad Kimhi. Kimhi is an Israeli philosopher who had taught in both the United States and Israel. In the mid-1990's he was an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Yale. He has guest-taught courses on a couple of occasions for the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. As I understand it, his regular gig is to teach courses in Tel Aviv in Israel. His name and reputation are well known among a fairly small group of cognoscenti, including friends, colleagues and former students (like myself). He has a kind of magical reputation to him, unique as far as I know in the academic world: He has not to my knowledge published a book and I don't know that he has published even any articles, but several of his draft manuscripts circulate privately among ravenous devotees of his thought. When he taught courses at the U of C this past Autumn and Winter, established, famous professors sat in on the classes and took notes as eagerly as the attendant graduate students.

Clifford S. Asness: Unafraid In Greenwich Connecticut

[From the Ney York Times' Dealbook: May 5, 2009, 6:07 pm: "Hedge Fund Manager Strikes Back at Obama. Clifford S. Asness is not afraid to defend himself against attacks from the Obama administration. The outspoken managing partner of AQR Capital Management, a $20 billion hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn., has written a scathing letter striking back at President Obama for his harsh words blaming hedge funds for Chrysler’s bankruptcy. The letter is making its way around Wall Street, where it’s being met with cheers from other hedge funds managers, one of whom sent it to DealBook. Among other things, Mr. Asness said he was “aghast at the president’s comments” and called them “backwards and libelous.” I found this through Diana West's blog. While she is quite the American Zionist, I think her angry skepticism of the GOP's post-election strategy is right on. This comes the same day that I noticed Richard Posner's recent renunciation of the GOP or the rump conservative movement as any kind of home for intellectual conservatism. It seems clear to me that the various forces and players on the non-evangelical American right have the tools, the talent and the ideas to recenter the Republican Party, to rebuild from the centrist pussyfootery of the recent McCain-Palin campaign which, despite my measured enthusiasm for the governor of Alaska last fall, I readily agree as a disaster. The party needs to convince disappointed lovers, fellow travelers, moderates, people who work for small business, and all kinds of independents, professionals and other dynamists that the Grand New Party should be and will be the opposite of the waxing Obama Mussolini-style corporate state...]

Unafraid in Greenwich Connecticut
Clifford S. Asness
Managing and Founding Principal
AQR Capital Management, LLC

The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter,” was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders,” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.

I run an approximately twenty billion dollar money management firm

University of Chicago Conference on the Financial Crisis (April 10, 2009), Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis

[What follows is my reportage of the Panel 1 of the conference, which I attended. I took pretty thorough notes, but they are necessarily incomplete. I welcome corrections. In the coming week I will better type up my notes on Panels 2 and 3. I did not attend Panel 4. The impatient can find the rough notes to Panels 2 and 3 in my earlier stub post.]

Conference on the Financial Crisis
Co-sponsored by the Money, Markets and Consumption Workshop, Economica, and other organizations. Held at the Franke Institute in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, April 10, 2009. It was mighty.

Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis

Moderator: Gary Herrigel (Department of Political Science, University of Chicago)

Douglas Diamond (University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business)

Diamond gave a slightly slow-moving but persuasive talk on financial crises in recent historical perspective. He argued that basically such crises are all the same, being caused by runs on short-term debt. Diamond unfortunately did not do a great job dumbing down his talk, so that my sense was that it was difficult for many people in the room to understand it well. (See below my account of the Q&A session at the end of the panel, where I give more detail on Diamond’s ideas. I took bad notes at the beginning and good notes at the end.)

Mark Mizruchi (Sociology Department, University of Michigan)

Mizruchi presented other, perhaps deeper causes

Financial Crisis Conference 2009, University of Chicago (transcript)

[Dear Reader: What follows is a transcript of the conference held today at the University of Chicago on the origins and implications of the current financial crisis. It was enormously stimulating. The panelists were twelve professors of economics, history, sociology and anthropology from the University of Chicago, Rutgers, the New School for Social Research, the University of Michigan, and the University of Missouri at Kansas City. NB This is the raw transcript; I will correct it for spelling and turn it into full Thucydidean prose in the next week or so.]

Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis
(see separate posting, where I have typed these up complete)

[What follow are the rough notes to Panels 2 and 3. I will turn them into prose soon.]

Panel 2: Crisis in Perspective: Historical and International Comparisons