From the Wonders-of-Language Beat

As reported in the NYT (Gretchen Morgenson also has a good piece in the Business section) it looks like the government wants to step in and try to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Something it wasn’t supposed to do, even though the companies always operated under the opposite assumption. Both firms (the term seems ironic at the moment) are teetering, and their stocks have taken a nose-dive.

On the same NYT page with the article is a sponsored link (I’m not sure if this instance really qualifies as an advertisement) to a press release from Freddie Mac. The statement insists, as you might imagine, that FM is adequately capitalized and fully solvent; there is nothing to fear and by the way, pay no heed to the bad press they’re getting. 

It’s the second paragraph that got my attention:

Beyond that, there are a number of options to manage our capital position. The average rate of run-off on our retained portfolio is currently about $10 billion per month, and not replacing that run-off would free up approximately $250 million of capital per month. Over the course of a year, this would free up approximately $2.5 to $3 billion of additional capital if this run-off rate remains constant. We also could consider reducing our common stock dividend. Our current annual common stock dividend is approximately $650 million.

I’m a stranger here myself, but I did manage to learn that “portfolio runoff” is a term for a decrease in assets of a mortgage-backed security portfolio, due to the pre-payment of the mortgages. This usually occurs when homeowners refinance when the value of their home goes up, or interest rates go down. This means - if I’m understanding this right -  that the original loans are paid off, and the new loans stand to generate less in interest than the previous one, thus devaluing the securities. That’s part of the risk assumed by buying mortgage-backed securities. I suspect, however, that here the FM people are defining runoff more loosely to include asset losses due to defaults. 

The FM spokespeople are trying very hard paint the situation in a rosy hue. The use of the word “options” makes sense by itself, but there are some key turns of phrase that are just astounding. They write that not “replacing the runoff” - which we can read as “we are unable to generate fresh revenue” - would “free up” $250 million in capital per month. The term “free up” suggests that the situation presents some kind of new opportunity, when what is really happening is Freddie Mac is hemorrhaging money (to the tune of $10 billion per month), and they need to dip into their capital reserves to stay afloat. This gaudy euphemism is designed to deflect attention from the gravity of the situation. 

The other ingredient in this PR spell is the use of repetition. The repetition is not literal, but the invocation of the notions of liquidity are drummed into reader’s minds. Please bear with me as I list instances of this.

 

Freddie Mac is adequately capitalized


highly liquid


we will have a substantial capital cushion


much greater surplus above the statutory minimum capital requirement


we are adequately capitalized


we hold capital well in excess of regulatory minimums


we are adequately capitalized


and have liquidity resources

 

And all this occurs in the first paragraph, which contains a total of just 132 words. Did you get the message? The other repetition that caught my attention was the use of the “free up” phrase, which is invoked twice.

Once the reader sees past the spin, the whole thing becomes a display of spectacular desperation.

Betrayed Again

I figured that by now no degree of lameness from our Congress could surprise me, but Thursday’s Senate vote on the the FISA Amendment bill - yes, I know it was expected, but still… - left me sad and very angry. I read through most of the bill last night. The bulk of the text has to do with procedures the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is supposed to follow when certifying surveillance authorizations, and fol-de-rol the Justice Department’s goes through when submitting authorizations for review. That’s all a lot of hot air, because the court is quite impotent. There are plenty of provisions in the bill that allow the Intelligence people or the Attorney General to get around the FISC, and the bill doesn’t give the court any teeth.

The real nastiness, as we all know, lies in the grant of retroactive immunity to all the telecommunications companies for the Bush administration’s spying when it was illegal - not merely illegal, but unconstitutional. As Senator Russ Feingold and others have noted, we don’t even know the extent of the telecoms’ activities in this mess. We don’t know the extent of the crimes that were committed. Now, without a radical overhaul of the legislation, we’ll never know.

But this needs to be repeated often as bluntly and as publicly as possible. George W. Bush is a felon, many times over: a felon, a crook, a criminal. His violations of the fourth amendment have been public knowledge for several years now.

But Congress has voted to cover up a whole bunch of his crimes.

The passage of this bill is a profound betrayal of Americans - and the very idea of America. The irony is that the original FISA of 1978 was enacted in the aftermath of the Nixon administration’s intelligence-gathering abuses (Nixon was of course facing the distinct possibility of criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford pardoned him), in order to regulate such activities. So the laws conceived in the aftermath of Presidential criminality has been tinkered with to cover up more Presidential criminality, and every legislator who voted for it is an accomplice. We voted in all those Democrats in ‘06, and they just cave in every time it counts. Is there a bottom to all this? When will Democrats at last grow so sick of not getting anything done that they get something done. Are they so cozy inside that beltway that they’ve not only lost touch with the American people, and the most basic principles of democracy, but lost any desire to be in touch? Wait, maybe I just answered my own question.

Obama’s ‘yes’ vote was the most serious betrayal of all. Here he had a chance to walk his talk, and he sided with behemoth corporations. I suppose I’ll still vote for him, but I had concerns about his progressive credibility from the beginning. Now he’s starting to look like little more than the lesser of the evils. I’m lowering my expectations of any genuinely progressive action coming out of an Obama administration. Making history by being the first African American President is just not enough.

What the hell are the Democrats afraid of? I think the American people would love to see something real happen: to get at the truth and see some justice done, even if - especially if - it shakes up our politics in a serious way. All these Democrats seem to think that they have something to loose if they so much as mention the elephant in the room. I think the public’s opinion of the Dems would skyrocket if they showed some guts. This unending capitulation is painfully tedious. They could do the right thing, bring some genuine excitement to the theater of politics, and get folks interested. 

On to the next battle, i guess. There are plenty. Let us slog on, and create some theater of our own in the process.

Ups and Downs of Light Construction

This is a Summer of major projects, many of which involve home improvement. Gods help us, we’re installing hardwood floors in the hallway and alcove ourselves. The floor is part of a larger makeover of our apartment which also involves painting, and new carpet in a few rooms. We’ve done nothing to the place besides fill the closets with s t u f f for the past ten years or so. We’ve been talking about the floor, etc. for at least two years. A genuine Spring cleaning did indeed take place, in which we must have given away at least a hundred pounds of clothes, among other accumulations. The contents of one room currently occupy another and force us to do our daily living in a fraction of our usual modest space. I’ve looked forward to this time with equal measures of anticipation and dread.

This is not my favorite kind of work. There, I said it. Over the years my father-in-law (My wife’s folks own a couple of small apartment buildings, including the one we’re in. Yes, it’s a form of subsidized housing. It’s unlikely we could afford to live decently in this town otherwise.) has spent a considerable amount of his time setting tile, installing large appliances, doing drywall, snaking out sewer lines, and spreading countless gallons of off-white paint on many walls. We’ve helped out on quite a few of these jobs, working on every apartment in our building at one time or another. I have enormous respect for his multitude of skills and for how hard he works; still cranking as he approaches eighty. Though I’ve had some experience with all this, It’s just not how I want to spend my time. I’ve got other things on my mind, other ways I would much rather work and contribute. Before you call me a snob, let me reiterate that my respect for anyone who does such work is profound. It all needs to be done, and it requires considerable skill and thought (now call me a snob if you wish). When I have to do such chores, I can’t help feeling that I’m being distracted from other things that also really need doing; writing and composing and practicing and studying. Yes that’s all work I enjoy, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not hard work. This is particularly true this Summer, since I’m preparing to return to school, and the list of things I need to study and review and create before classes start just keeps growing.

That was a lot of whining just now. Please accept my apologies. I’m not a huge whiner, I swear. I just had to get that off my chest, as they say. As usual I’m feeling at least a couple of things at once. Even as I wish I was playing music instead of painting or nailing boards, I’m glad to have a clue about how to do this stuff, we are saving quite a bit of money, and it’s good to watch the place slowly transform into something quite a bit spiffier. There are certainly interesting things about working on an old building. Our building is nearly a hundred years old, and everything is just a bit crooked. We constantly have to cajole and bend and shove things into place. The old floor undulates, and we must occasionally stand on boards to get them to fit. There’s archaeological aspect to the project. The original (1917) wood floor has been temporarily exposed, We take more notice of evidence of past construction, which sometimes takes the form of quirks and flubs. There are also remnant layers of paint which you don’t see unless you take up the carpet or remove moldings. It’s hard to understand what drove previous occupants to paint the wood trim a slightly-brighter-than-olive green.

I realize that a certain amount of DIY light construction and handypersonage is inevitable. In spite of myself I’ve become semi-proficient at using a nail gun and several types of powered saws; cutting floor boards to length and making notches in them in order to make them fit around ancient moldings just so. All the little conflicting emotions balance out, and I know I’ll be happy with the end result, part of which will include a much nicer space in which to attend to all that other work.

Go Read This, Please

Last week I started drafting a post about how the Hillary Clinton’s campaign was profoundly historic whether or not she won the nomination and the great good it did for womankind in general and how I hoped her die-hard supporters didn’t give up on the Democrats because an Obama presidency can also be a vehicle for moving the feminist agenda forward and because a McCain presidency would just be no damn good, but one of my favorite Nation columnists, Katha Pollitt, wrote a piece that I think just nails it. So just go to the link and read it please.

Technology in Moderation

There is a refreshingly level-headed piece in the N.Y. Times today about kids and technology. The question of when it is appropriate to introduce certain gizmos to your child is now a basic parenting issue that simply did not exist twenty years ago. Author Warren Buckleitner did his homework and consults the literature on child development. While he focuses exclusively on the concepts of Piaget, he successfully conveys the notion that cognitive development proceeds in stages which must be allowed to play out if an individual is to achieve anything like her or his full potential. Infants and toddlers, for instance, do just about all their learning through their senses and their bodies. They need to push, pull, grasp and poke. They need to put things in their mouths (that’s the most sensitive place; you get more information that way. It’s not all about whether something’s edible.). Most electronic or digital gadgetry is pretty useless at this juncture. Three and four-year-olds love to pretend to talk on telephones, just as they pretend to use other tools grownups use, but they’re not likely to do much more with a functioning telephone than pretend just the way they do with their toys. Many technologies will be useless to children before they’re ready for them.

There are of course electronic and computer-based devices designed and marketed for children in different age ranges. Toys with buttons to push and wheels to turn that also make recorded sounds have their place, and I know my nephew has has done some solid early reading work by playing games on his Leapster. But such things are no substitute for tapping a bell and hearing it ring, or spinning a top with one’s own fingers, or finding out how high a structure one can build with simple blocks. A child’s play constitutes a vital set of physics/social science/biology experiments, and they need to experience the mechanical and living world directly. We live with all manner of technology around us, and children should certainly be exposed to those realities, but it’s more important for them to know about earth, sky, water, sun, leaves, bugs, and friends.

As with most of these ideas, this applies to adults every bit as much as to children.

So turn the damn thing off, whatever it is. It’ll be there when you come back.

The Thing About Scott McClellan Writing a Book

It sounds like a confession, but Washington Week is one of the only television shows I watch on a regular basis; call me a nerd or whatever. It’s such a rare treat to hear civil, reasoned discussion on TV - even if the ideas are often pretty tame - it’s almost like getting a massage.

One of the topics on last Friday’s show was ex-White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s new book. Of course it attracted derision from his former employers at the White House, sometimes disguised in smug , aloof rhetoric: “…we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.” That should be good for sales, which, I’ve heard, are quite robust.

I haven’t read the book. I’m not inclined to give Mr. McClellan any of my money. Perhaps I’ll skim it at the library (I know that remark sounds really arrogant. I don’t intend it to be so. I just have tons of other more compelling reading demanding my attention.) What I did do was spend about an hour reading transcripts of his old press briefings to refresh my recollection of those heady days at the start of the war, and the emergence of the Valerie Plame scandal. I was reminded that the job of the White House Press Secretary is to not answer questions. The Press Secretary is there to stonewall and obfuscate, as he or she performs a ritual dance with the press corps which is designed to make the fourth estate look like a pack of fools. It’s pretty effective. The reporters ask pointed questions that they know will not be answered, then resort to asking silly questions and receive equally silly answers in return

Back to the Washington Week gang. When they got to talking about McClellan’s book, they all spoke in non-confrontational language about how “extraordinary” his disingenuous claims were about soul-searching and a “higher loyalty to the truth”. How did he suddenly come to understand the depth of the lying and conniving of his bosses after the fact, and be so blind to it at the time? Several such rhetorical questions were posed and left to hang in the air, the way in-the-know folks tend to do.

Is McClellan cynically opportunistic and disingenuous? Of course. The whole gesture reeks of disingenuousness and opportunism. If you watch and read his performances as Press Secretary, it’s difficult to imagine him as an ingenue who was led astray. Sure he was following orders - just doing his job - but he knew who he was riding with.

So the elite of mainstream journalism essentially got to dwell on the cynicism of the situation and momentarily deflect attention from the fact that the press is deeply complicit in the whole sordid, deadly mess. It almost doesn’t matter if what he says in the book is true. After all, everyone who marched in protest of the war five years ago knew full well that the Executive Branch is currently run by a bunch of mean, greedy liars. McClellan has added another book to the stack of expose’s and tell-alls to confirm what is painfully obvious to most. But given who McClellan is, what he did for a living, and the timing of his latest venture, he becomes an enabler of a sort, inadvertently allowing the spin to keep on spinning - even among those who are charged with looking beyond spin. He places himself in a position to be easily discredited even when he’s telling the truth, while that nasty truth continues to be glossed over.

Will I still watch Washington Week? You bet.

Fingers Crossed

I must say I’m a little nervous about the Phoenix spacecraft landing on Mars later today. The thing looks pretty delicate to me.

I really want this to go well, and I really, really want us to find fossilized bacteria on Mars. It would be a very healthy shock to humanity to learn beyond doubt that Earth is not the only place where life exists. We could definitely use the kind of perspective such a discovery would provide.

And what better way to make such a discovery than to dig up harmless fossils on the planet right next door. It would give us plenty of room to ponder the implications; so much easier to digest than an “Independence Day” type of scenario, don’t you agree?

The Mission website has a countdown clock. Let’s all count down together.

Fingers crossed.

Appreciating A Child’s Insight

Children’s perceptions - and expressions thereof - are valid, and often insightful. Most caregivers understand this, but we can still sometimes be dismissive when we certainly should not be. To illustrate the point, I want to quote a lengthy bit from as recent review in The Nation by Arthur Danto of an art exhibit at the Whitney Museum.

I stopped at (Ruben Ochoa’s) piece An Ideal Disjuncture. It looks like bits of a wrecked building, picked over by the artist to make an ephemeral piece of art before it was all carted off to a landfill. As I was pondering its meaning, a troop of private school students, all girls, were led in by their teacher. They circled the piece and then, all in white blouses and black skirts, settled on the floor to discuss it. What could it be, and what was its meaning? Eavesdropping, I heard one of the girls answer that maybe it was a grasshopper. The teacher responded by repeating the word as a doubtful question: “A grasshopper?” I immediately saw what the girl meant: the chain-link fencing did look like a gauzy wing, the rebar like antennas, and another fragment took its place as the monumental insect’s thorax: a gigantic grasshopper made of urban detritus! What a lovely thought! It lifted my spirits immediately–here was art transfiguring commonplace junk into something rare and strange! And here was a young mind struggling to give form and meaning to unprepossessing matter. She somehow expressed the spirit of many of the artists in the show.

We’re all working to understand our world using the equipment we’ve got. That’s as true of four-year-olds as it is of fifty-four-year-olds. The young child’s understanding can only be fully appreciated when taken on it’s own terms. When we really give proper attention to the perceptions of folks with different viewpoints, our own understanding of the world is necessarily enriched. That is of course true irrespective of where we are developmentally. The teacher probably wasn’t at a vantage point to see the grasshopper in the artwork, but one hopes s/he gave the girl’s insight due consideration.

Spring Shows

My academic year is winding down (though my daughter’s is already over; we moved her out of the dorms this afternoon). In the preschools, it’s all about getting ready for the end-of-the-year performances for the families. For the EC music specialist, that means making sure everyone’s singing out, knows the words, and does the movements together. Suddenly all the work we’ve done in music time takes on the feel of an actual rehearsal. We stop in the middle of songs to go over tricky lyrics. I cajole them to sing out - without shouting - more than I would in a regular class, and we the atmosphere is one of greater concentration.

I always choose songs that the kids already know well, but are sufficiently demanding that they effectively show off their new level of sophistication. One thing I’m doing this year with the graduating classes, who will go on to kindergarten, is use a fingerplay song called “Little Fish” to let the kids show off their solfege chops.

In addition to the finger play, which involves resting one hand on top of the other, wiggling the extended thumbs to show fins, and clapping the fingers of both hands together to make a mouth that opens and shuts, the children have learned to sing the entire song using solfege syllables and the Curwen hand signs, which we’ve been using on and off all year. The kids will perform the song both ways as part of their graduation festivities.

This serious music theory for four and five-year-olds. By learning the solfege syllables and the hand signs, the children learn three different representations of a “note”. Through the use of the solfege, and particularly the hand signs, which can be shown higher or lower in space, melodic contour, and the relationships between individual pitches (step vs. skip) is shown. The kids are manipulating several interrelated symbol systems to create multiple representations of the melody. Without realizing it, the kids are engaging in analysis.

And they dig it. They love showing off their knowledge of the signs and solfege, and it’s pretty amusing to compare those with the original fingerplay and lyrics. From where I sit, these kids are ready for kindergarten.

We’ll also be belting out some oldies, like “Rattling Bog” and “Mole in the Ground”.

Observation

One of the good things about the speed with which children grow and change is that you can see the growth and the learning happen right before your eyes. The breadth and boldness of a child’s learning, however, are often manifested with fleeting subtlety. In our classes, a child’s early attempts to sing out with the group may consist of no more than the first syllable of a song lyric. A look of extra concentration on a child’s face might be an initial sign that she’s getting ready to make a leap in performing a rhythm pattern or playing out on the drums. Little sparks like these are great rewards for an attentive adult. That attentive observation is key

Then there are also times when the demonstrations are a bit more dramatic. This past week, a little boy of seven months was exploring the rhythm sticks for the first time. The sticks we use are six-inch wooden dowels about half an inch in diameter. The adults and the older children (13 months or so) were tapping the sticks together, playing along with a song and playing patterns (the adults were playing the patterns. The kids played). After spending some time with the sticks in his mouth, he suddenly took one stick in each hand and, holding them out in front of his body, began shaking them up and down and at the same time rolling his hands over and downward at the wrists. His eyes were wide with excitement, and his movements became quite animated. He kept this up for the remaining five or seven minutes of our rhythm-stick play. It was pretty clear that the boy was motivated by what he saw and heard as the rest of us made music with the sticks. According to his nanny, the wrist-rolling motion was a sign for “milk” which he had learned. If that is the case, then he was adapting a motion he already knew to a new purpose. If not, then he had invented a new movement that got him a step closer to tapping the rhythm sticks together.

It required a bit of inference to interpret this behavior – as is often the case with such observations. In my experience the safest presumption, while observing infant and toddler behavior, is that there is both intent and a desire to learn behind nearly every action. As any attentive parent of caregiver can attest, young children know and are aware of quite a bit more than they let on. This can yield some of the great delights of spending time with young children.

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