Empty Suit, Empty Words

Regular readers of this blog probably get the feeling that I don't like Barack Obama one bit. Guilty, your honor. Not only don't I like his policies, as I've said before, I think this man who presents himself as something new, as an agent of change, is nothing more than your typical politician, only more so. Since securing the nomination, he has changed his position on virtually every issue that got him the nomination. Now, politicians always move to the center for a general election but the head-spinning speed with which Obama has moved is pretty impressive. Then he tries to shade everything in grays to make it seem like he hasn't changed at all, and anyone who points out that he has is engaging in the politics of destruction. You see, we're not suppose to talk about things like that, and, so far, the mainstream media has not called him on it. Most of his supporters, I suspect, don't really care if he changes his position; except for the netroot radicals, it's the man, not the policies, they're so attracted to.

Well, as with Boss Clinton, I just don't get it. I could never understand the fascination with Bill Clinton - I thought it was pretty clear from the start that he was a snake-oil salesman. But a lot of Americans obviously disagreed. Now, there is a fascination with Obama that is even more intense that the Clinton phenomenon; as I've mentioned before, it borders on the Führerprinzip. And again I'm in the dark. Even many people on the right say they can see the attraction of the man but I apparently am lacking in some vital inner sensibility; all I see is an arrogant gasbag, spewing gusts of hot air. Now, hot air is the norm for politicians, but what separates Obama from the usual crown is his vast abundance of it; he never talks about the substance of his policies, such that they are; he never gives a straight answer; he always talks in shades of gray; he almost always averts attention from what was actually asked to some talking point that has nothing to do with the real issue. And he expects us to fall for it (reasonably so, since so many people are falling for it.) Again, this is the man who claims he is a new type of politician, post-racial, post-partisan.

But how about the condescending arrogance of the man? Have you noticed how he likes to lecture us? When he made the Philadelphia speech in which he was supposed to explain his twenty year relationship with the racist Reverend Wright, he turned it into an opportunity to lecture us about race. Later, he scolded us for driving SUVs, eating what we want, and keeping our homes at a comfortable temperature, apparently because the Europeans might frown upon these behaviors. Last week, he answered the question of whether newly-arrived immigrants should learn English thusly:

Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English—they'll learn English—you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. We should have every child speaking more than one language. It's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup.

My goodness, we've embarrassed Barack Obama in front of all his European friends again. Here is just one more example of the university lounge mentality of Obama. He'd fit right in with all the sophisticated professors having a good laugh at all us plebians.

I wrote the above portion of this post over the weekend but didn't have time to finish it. I rarely post during the week but decided to pick it up here tonight when I saw that they had a discussion about this very aspect of Obama's personality today over on The Corner. Peter Kirsanow's post mentions something I hadn't thought of: the lectures are being delivered by a man who's life experience is rather thin:

The bully pulpit can be a good thing, especially when the speaker addresses something universal (e.g. the need for fathers) or with which he has unique or considerable experience. Nonetheless, while most of us might listen to someone whose judgment is tempered by experience, even paternalistic lectures from wise men can grate after awhile. I often resented lectures from my father who fought in WWII, survived a German POW camp, was tortured by and escaped from the NKVD, labored for 20 years next to the blast furnaces of Cleveland, Ohio and started a small business; but at least he had something to say. Obama's lectures grate in no small part because there's little evidence that he's had any life experiences more grueling or tempering than, say, casting a vote in the senate.

Derb picked up on this a little later:"we have interns round the office with deeper life experience than Obama." How true! Obama loves to lecture but he has done little to earn the right. How many of us would dare scold others for not being able to speak a second language if we didn't speak one ourselves? The audacity indeed.

Tony Snow, RIP

Tony Snow was one of the world's good guys. I loved him for all he did - the Fox News Sunday anchor, the radio show, the press secretary gig with Bush - but most especially I loved his syndicated column, which I read for years before he dropped it to focus on other things. His decency, his humanity, his love of life, family, and country, always shone through. There was a point in the mid-nineties when I withheld judgement on the great moral issues of the day until I read Tony's column and took his views into account. He saw things I didn't see and in ways I couldn't; his deep faith led him to deep wisdom of earthly matters and he delivered his verdicts with a cleared-eyed and joyful optimism. I always learned something from Tony, but mostly I was always reminded of something; what it means to be a truly good person. Tony was.

The world is a poorer place today. Heaven is a little brighter. Rest easy my friend.

Beating the Bear

I'm fairly close to the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac debacle. Since I want to maintain my anonymity on this blog I will no go any further in my explanation than that. However, my main concern during the morning hours yesterday when both GSE's stock prices were plummeting, was not their ultimate fate - there is no way the U.S. government will let them fail - but rather the stock market in general. Or, to put it more bluntly, my own portfolio. As the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P were spilling blood, I carefully watched as my own portfolio ended up actually making money for the day. Why? One reason is I am completely out of financials, which is a broken sector and will remain broken for the foreseeable future. As I've mentioned before, trying to catch the bottom here is a fool's errand. I cashed out of Citigroup the Monday after I posted about it a few weeks back, at a fairly significant loss. I do still own Mastercard, but it's not subject to the same pressures that the banks and investment firms are. I also own some pharmaceutical-related stocks. Everything else in my portfolio consists of energy, commodity, and material-related stocks; steel, coal, copper, oil, deep-water drilling, natural gas, oil sands. These spaces, which have been working for years, looked ready to crack a few weeks ago - they all pulled back significantly. That wasn't really a surprise because in a real bear-market the sectors that had been working are the last to be taken out. I expected the downward trend would continue. But these sectors seem to have stabilized now and may be headed back up. The oil story is a real one folks - we don't have enough, period. Anyone who expects oil to return to the price levels of a few years ago is fooling themselves. The global expansion is for real too: Brazil, China, India, Russia, the Asian economies, while having slowed a bit recently, are all still expanding significantly. I'm staying in these spaces until I see they don't work anymore; but with the market as schizophrenic as it's been lately, it sure is tough on the nerves.

The 68 million acre lie

To follow up on my last post, the main (the only?) Democratic party talking point against new drilling is that the oil companies already have drilling leases on 68 million acres of land but have not touched it, so why should be we allow ANWR and off-shore drilling?

"I want you to think about this," Barack Obama said in Las Vegas last week. "The oil companies have already been given 68 million acres of federal land, both onshore and offshore, to drill. They're allowed to drill it, and yet they haven't touched it – 68 million acres that have the potential to nearly double America's total oil production."

The Wall Street Journal has offered Obama and other Democrats who spew this nonsense some remedial education. Read the whole thing so you're not mislead by politicians who want to keep you ignorant.

More on Speculation

After promising more redistributionist programs designed to take money from the most successful of us and transfer it to the less successful, Barack Obama said again yesterday that he'd go after oil speculators once he's elected. "I'm going to crack down on oil speculators who may be artificially driving up the price of oil."

Sigh. I've got news for Senator Obama. Last I checked, there were more NYMEX oil contracts on the short side than the long side. In other words, more people were speculating that the price of oil would be going down rather than up. If Obama were to curb or end speculating under these circumstances, the short-term price of oil would almost certainly go up.

What about the long-term price? James Hamilton, over at the Econbrowser blog, wrote this excellent analysis of the effects of speculation in the real world back on May 22:

There are individuals who use this physical commodity-- namely, consumers who use the gasoline to drive their cars-- and separate entities that produce it-- most importantly today, the national oil companies of the oil-producing countries. The key question is, How would the behavior of these two parties change as a result of a new higher price for the basic commodity they are consuming or producing?

If your answer is, neither consumers nor producers change anything they do at all in response to the price increase, then I agree you could make a case that speculators by themselves could make that price any old number. But I don't believe it is accurate to assume that both consumers and producers would do exactly the same thing, no matter how high the price goes. At a higher price of gasoline, consumers will use less of the physical commodity. Not much less, I grant you, and that's why I agree that speculators are able to have more of an influence than I might have expected. But I would insist that if you drive the price of gasoline sufficiently high, consumers will respond.

And that's a problem for any "paper oil" theory-- if consumers are buying less of the physical commodity, what's happening on the production side? If production doesn't change, then oil must be piling up somewhere in inventory, possibly some just idling in tankers in the Persian Gulf. But no one has an incentive to keep adding more and more oil to inventory forever. So ultimately, the "paper oil" theory is going to require a reduction in the production of actual physical oil.

And that leads you to the question, Why would producers want to cut production? If the answer is, they make more profits with lower production and higher prices, then they would want to make those same production cutbacks with or without the speculation, and you'd have to blame the whole phenomenon on the operation of those profit calculations themselves, with the speculators just a device that got us to equilibrium between supply and demand more quickly.

Now, I personally do accept the view that the "paper oil" speculation has made a contribution in recent months to the increase in the price of physical oil. I believe that this speculation has resulted in a slight decrease in the quantity demanded that has required some modest supply reductions or accumulation of inventory by producers. But I expect that producers will find these changes not to be in their best interests as the demand adjustments become more prominent, at which point the price must return to that governed by the underlying physical fundamentals.

Ultimately, the price must be such that the quantity of physical oil demanded at that price is equal to the quantity of physical oil supplied. Any speculator who promises on paper to buy oil for more than the physical stuff is actually selling for will find themselves at that point with a big, fat paper loss.

Read the whole thing here. In a nutshell, Hamilton explains why the price of oil will always fall back to a price that is "governed by the underlying physical fundamentals." It's simple supply and demand. Once consumer behavior changes - i.e, when demand destruction sets in, as we've seen in recent months - producer's behavior will also change on the supply side; they'll produce less oil. If producing less oil for a higher price is more profitable for oil companies, than they would have been doing so all along, profit maximization being the ultimate goal of any money-making endeavor. So speculation may have short-term affects on price but in the end the economic fundamentals will rule; indeed, speculation may well end up bringing the market back into equilibrium sooner than otherwise. And speculators who ignore these facts will get burned.

Hamilton has another terrific post on speculation here, taking some other economists to task for some of their outrageous claims regarding the effects speculation has on the price of oil.

Obama is a demagogue; a slick one, but one nonetheless. He is playing off people's fears and ignorance, looking for bogeymen (i.e. oil executives) and pointing fingers. The energy fix we find ourselves in right now is, to be clear, a shortage of light sweet crude. Everyone knows where the solutions lie; more drilling, in ANWR and off-shore, more nuclear power, the exploitation the oil shale and oil sands territories, the use of more coal and natural gas. But none of these solutions can be found in Obama's so-called energy plan. Rather, he wants to redistribute $50 billion more in rebates and "crack down" on oil speculation. How do either of these "solutions" produce more oil?

Little Children, and Old-Fogies

I've paid little attention to my Netflix queue lately; we've been working our way through episodes of The Wire and of the great BBC crime series Prime Suspect, which have been at the top of the queue for some six months or so. We sent back the last of the Prime Suspect disks last week and a few days later the movie Little Children showed up in the mail. I don't remember why I placed it in my queue but it was certainly on someone's recommendation, or at least because I read something good about it from someone I respect. I wish I could remember who so I can make a point never to follow their advice again.

I am, when it comes to modern culture, completely out of it. I never, and I mean never, listen to modern popular music. I don't even know the names of the bands or singers who are popular these days. If you asked me to name a single song that has been a top-40 hit over the past decade I couldn't do it, so separated I am from that culture. For me, it simply doesn't exist.

My distance from modern movies is not so complete. I still hear about most new-release movies, and read about some of them. On occasion, I am actually intrigued by one of them and desire to see it. But the vast majority of them pass me by with barely a notice. Which is fine; I've seen enough of the dreck that modern Hollywood produces to know that I'm not missing much.

When Little Children arrived, my wife, who handles the mail, was intrigued by the blurb on the Netflix sleeve. This is a major event in itself; rarely does she look forward to watching movies but she usually enjoys the good ones, and we quite often have short conversations afterwards about what worked and what didn't. I enjoy this a lot. We come at things from different perspectives and she'll often point things out that I've missed because we notice different things. A wise and perceptive woman I am married to, and I've learned over the years never to dismiss her take on something, even if it differs completely from mine. She's more often correct than not.

So we watched it. Or, to be more accurate, we watched about thirty minutes of it. By the time one of the characters started to whack off to porn in his office at work, we'd both had enough. Little Children is supposed to be some deep statement about the state of modern marriage and suburban life; but it is puerile, tendentious, and false. The little children here are supposed to be the adults portrayed in the movie but the term could also describe the folks who made this movie and who hold such views about a world they clearly know little about. Besides that, it is a badly made movie. After virtually every scene, a narrator's voice enters to tell us what is was we just saw, what the characters are thinking, and what we're supposed to think about it; in other words, the things most movies convey without the use of narration - part of the art of movie-making. It's as if they're scared we'll miss the point, but there is really no chance of that; each point is driven home with a hammer, then the narrator comes in to drive the nail in a little deeper. Which is not surprising; the filmmakers who have such obvious contempt for the regular people portrayed on the screen seem to have a similar contempt for the audience. They throw subtlety aside, assuming we're too stupid to get the point.

And what are the points? Suburban life kills the soul. Modern marriage is a lie. We'd all be happier if we acted on our secret desires. We're all hypocrites. Sigh. Aren't we all tired of this by now? The cynical, hipster, ultra-cool attitudes held by pop-culture mavens? In the fake world of Little Children, who are the sympathetic characters? Why, the bad mother who has affairs and the man she is having the affair with, a stay-at-home dad who has failed the bar exam multiple times. The stay-at-home moms don't fare so well. They are portrayed as lifeless, soulless, Stepford moms, who have no life beyond their children. The out-of-work policeman is portrayed as a slight lunatic, obsessed with making life hell for a recently released flasher who lives in the neighborhood. You're supposed to feel for the flasher. The wanker in his office, the husband of the woman having the affair, I'm not sure what we were supposed to think of him because we turned it off at that moment - it's really not something I've ever desired to see on film. Right before this we learn that there are others in the neighborhood who also have secrets obsessions - one likes to dress up as a woman behind closed doors, the other is a closet homosexual who has anonymous sex in seedy men's restrooms. You see? It's when we act on our shocking desires that we come closest to being real. Even the robotic women who take their children to the park each day, they too have these desires - they all lust after the guy who can't pass the bar - but they are too repressed to act on them. Suburban bigotry and intolerance are keeping us down, folks.

I for one have had enough of this type of 'art.' Now, I never intended this blog to be a constant rant and I will try in the near future to think of things to write about that are light and happy. Still, after watching a movie like this, it becomes all the more clear to me that I am out of step with the opinion-setters of the world. Call me old-fogy. I checked the reviews of Little Children on Rotten Tomatoes this morning and was not surprised that it was well-received. The people who write the reviews accept the attitudes of the pop-culture that emanates from Hollywood. I don't. I'll have to look backwards, as is my wont, to find art - movies, music, books - that speak to me. And that's not a problem; I've been doing it for years. I'm not dropping out. I'll still seek out the good in what's new. I'll endeavor not to become one of those tiresome bores who insists everything was wonderful back in his day and the world has gone to hell-in-a-hand-basket. I am an optimist, who looks forward to the future. But it will be a future without movies like Little Children.

Finally, to prove that I am not some prudish bore who is threatened when presented with uncomfortable material, I'll make a recommendation. If you are truly interested in stories that deal with adultery, the stifling aspects of marriage, the secret lives of others, read Chekhov's short story Lady With a Lapdog. It is brilliant. The protagonist Gurov also believes "that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night." There is more understanding of human nature in a single paragraph here than in the whole of Little Children. Chekhov was a master of course, and an adult, unlike the makers of Little Children. He tells a real truth here; not the whole truth, or even close it, but a universal truth that all of us - the adults in the audience anyway - can understand.

The Sick-Souled Religion

Hat tip to Jay Nordlinger over at NRO for directing me to this excellent Wall Street Journal article by Bret Stephens, in which Stephens discusses the motives for the rigidly held beliefs of the global warming crowd even in the face of mounting evidence that the world has entered into a cooling phase. The global warming movement has often been likened to a religion in which one must suspend credulity, analysis and rational thinking in order to adhere to a higher truth, a higher purpose. Read the whole thing but let me highlight a couple of excerpts from the column which jibe perfectly with my own view that a distrust of capitalism and its success is imbedded deep into the souls of the global warming hysterics:

Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification.

The column ends with this brilliant insight:

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.

Of course, Al Gore is the unquestioned leader of this movement to drastically alter how we live, but others in high-places have drunk the kool-aid, including the execrable Harry Reid, whose comments this week can fairly be described as sick-souled:

“Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country, it’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.”

Watch the video and get Captain Ed's comments on this nonsense here. We now have two nationally-elected Democrats coming out in favor of nationalizing the U.S. oil industry. We have the Senate majority leader claiming that "we’ve got to stop using fossil fuel." We have attempts from the Democratic Congress to sue OPEC and to curb speculation in crude markets. The same Congress is hauling oil executives up to Capital Hill to defend themselves and their industry, and calling for windfall profits taxes. We have Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi insisting that "we can't drill our way out of this."

These are the people who will be the making the decisions come November.