Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Attention conservation notice: 900 or so words of whinging ahead about the MBTA, and about the city generally.

There’s an article in today’s Globe about the continuing MBTA construction delays at Kenmore. I would give a substantial fraction of my salary — seriously — if people could explain to me why MBTA projects are always overdue and wildly over budget, and if those same people could then solve the problem.

It’s been noted many times recently: in an era of expensive gas, a functioning MBTA would jump in and prove to people that mass transit is just what they’re waiting for. It’s not happening: the MBTA is falling even more apart at precisely the time when it ought to be working better.

To add insult to injury, the MBTA’s putative leader, Dan Grabauskas, drives an SUV to work every day from his home in Ipswich. This despite the fact that Ipswich is right on the commuter rail (Newburyport line, a couple stops shy of the end). And also despite the fact that the MBTA is now running a campaign it calls “Dump The Pump” to get people onto its vehicles.

Every time the MBTA could be overdue on a project, it is. The Longfellow Bridge is sort of fixed now, so trains passing over it can now go 25 mph rather than the 10 mph where they’ve been stuck since June; this is still slower than the usual 40+-mph travel speed over that bridge. Several times over the past few months, we’ve heard that the repairs would be completed within a weekend or two.

When an organization screws up this consistently, the press owe it to us to ask why it always screws up. Like Tom Friedman, the MBTA “does not get these things right even by accident.” I wish the MBTA itself had the honesty to explain this: after the hundredth T slowdown because of “signal work,” someone should be asking why signal work so consistently slows down the trains. Do other transit systems have so many signaling problems? Or are “signaling problems” cover for “breakdowns in union negotiation”?

I’m inclined to look at Boston generally. I’m unversed in the Big Dig, and of course I realize the fundamental fact about it: the city and the U.S. were moving an interstate highway under a 400-year-old major metropolis built on landfill. That’s nontrivial. I understand this. But it’s the same issue as with the MBTA: being Boston, the smart money would have bet that the project would go insanely far over its budget.

For a city with so many universities and so many smart people — and especially so many engineers — you’d expect that it would be the greatest city in the world, and that its construction projects would be monuments to man’s technological achievements. It’s not so, unfortunately. (Perhaps I flatter universities.)

The reason this gets to me so much, if it’s not clear, is that I love my city. I moved back here after being away for a year and really missing the place. Every time I flew into Logan, I would say a little something — seriously — to Boston upon first spotting its skyline. It was always something like “Hey Boston. Glad to see you. I missed you.” I still say something to Boston when I’m riding the red line over the Longfellow.

I want only the best for this city. I want it to succeed. When college students graduate, I want them all to stay here. I want the constant influx of new faces and smart people to make this place fun, livable, and dynamic. By all rights it should be the coolest town on earth: lots of young people means lots of restaurants selling good cheap food all night long. Like New York City, I should be able to duck into a diner at 5:00 in the morning. I should be able to buy noodles whenever the urge overtakes me.

Yet it’s not like that. I blame the T for some of that. We should be like Paris: no more than a 10-minute walk from any spot in the city to a T stop. The T should be running 24 hours per day like New York’s subway. And with all the smart people in this city, engineering problems should not grind the place to a halt.

It all smells very much like politics: buried deep within the MBTA and the city government, someone has paid someone else off; or the union won’t fix something because one of its members is pissed at Grabauskas; or there’s a feud going between the Italian wing and the Irish wing of city government. Something. If someone knows the politics, I’m sure that’s 99% of the story; I would love to hear it. And I would love for the Globe to dig down to this next level. When a bridge is effectively running at 25% capacity for a few months, I want my local media to explain the root cause, rather than constantly turning to “MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo.”

What I want to know is: as someone who loves this city very deeply, what can I do to fix what’s broken? I’m not leaving this place. I want to make it better.

Guys keep hitting on my wife, which I can understand, so it doesn’t bother me. She looks pretty good, all’s fair. But please, don’t tell me I’m So Lucky or that I’m A Lucky Man. Brenna could not understand why this would make me angry when them kissing her arm or whatever would not. I let her in on a little man secret. When you tell a guy that he is a Lucky Man, you aren’t saying it because she seems like a really nice person. What you are telling him is that you would so fuck that. You would fuck that to pieces.

–Tycho from Penny Arcade

• Bade my lovely girlfriend farewell at the ungodly hour of five-what-the-hell-o’clock, as she headed for the airport in Manchester on her way to Chicago for a week. (I am now a bachelor. Call if you would like to hang out.) Passed back out into dreamland.

• Woke up around 7:30, wandered around her now-empty house, showered, got out the door by 8:30.

• Walked the 2.7 miles from her house to the train station in Exeter, NH. Did this in 48 minutes. I was all worried that I would miss the train, so I didn’t even stop by Me & Ollie’s as is my wont. I decided to hold off on breakfast and coffee until I got back to Cambridge, at which point I would satisfy both needs at Toscanini’s. Tosci has a killer Sunday brunch; as its owner, Gus Rancatore, described it: “It’s food that people would actually want to eat, and better than the sort of brunch you’d go to with your parents.” Consequently, it is packed on Sundays. I wonder why Tosci doesn’t then serve breakfast every day, like Miracle of Science does. (MoS’s weekday breakfasts, starting at 7 a.m., are to my mind one of Cambridge’s undiscovered treasures. My friend Joe and I are routinely two of three people there at that time of morning.)

• As it happened, the train was 10 or 15 minutes late anyway. Without coffee or adequate sleep, I passed out near-immediately into a very deep slumber from which I didn’t awake until Woburn — a “city” that one Amtrak conductor routinely announces like so: “Next stop, Woburn: the bio-tech ghetto!” You might think, by the way, that “Woburn” is pronounced like the two words “whoa” and “burn.” In that you would be wrong. If you aren’t inclined to adopt the accent, you’ll pronounce the first syllable “woo”; if you want to be a local, the whole word is “woo-bin.” But no one ever pronounces it like it’s spelled. Sort of like “Worcester,” which is not “War-chest-er”; it is “Woost-er.” A little 411 for the non-Massholes in the room.

• Home, Tosci, coffee, breakfast. And a nap on the couch before an open window with a light breeze wafting in.

I have had worse days.

Hands raised if you believe the above-quoted statement is shorthand for the following.

“I have a lot of ill-formed ideas about what god is, and I do believe in a creator. But I don’t want to take the time to think too hard about what I actually believe. If I were reasonably precise about my own thoughts, it might turn out that I’m obviously wrong. So I’m going to cover some uncooked thoughts in metaphysical handwaving; this aura of mystery around essential triteness will make people think I’m deep, or that my god is somehow lodged deep within my soul — when in fact the truth is that there’s no there there, and I don’t really have anything interesting to say on the topic.”

Another possible alternative for this post’s title:

“I don’t believe in god. Yoga’s cool, though.”

I don’t have much time to write about the subject right now, but I’ll ramble at some point soon about the virginity of the Virgin Mary. It seems like a good jumping-off point for some non-vacuous discussion of Christianity. Specifically: my sense is that Aquinas tried to reduce the portion of Christian doctrine that had to be taken on faith to as small a core as possible. My sense further is that Mary’s virginity is part of this irreducible core.

From The Reformation, page 97:

Erasmus faced up to one theological issue dependent on the use of allegory that later proved as troublesome to Protestants as to Catholics: This was the universally held belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity … Much of the traditional case for this belief, which has no direct justification in Scripture, was based on an allegorical use of Ezek. 44:2, which talks about the shutting of a gate that only the Lord could enter. This was then bolstered by a forced Greek and Latin reading of Isaiah’s original Hebrew prophecy that a young woman (not a “virgin” in Hebrew) would conceive a son Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14). Erasmus could not read these texts as Jerome had done. In response to shocked complaints about his comments, he set out a precise position: “We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books.” In other words, Erasmus acknowledged the ancient claim that there were matters of some importance that had to be taken on faith — because the Church said they were true — rather than because they were found in the Bible. Erasmus had begun to discover a problem that would become one of the major issues of the Reformation and that faced all those who called for Christianity to go back ad fontes. Did the Bible contain all sacred truth? Or was there a tradition the Church guarded, independent of it? The issue of Scripture versus tradition became a vital area of debate that had no straightforward outcome for either side, whatever they might claim.

And here’s Aquinas, from the Summa. It’s unconvincing unless you accept some ideas about the perfection of God and of Christ. I don’t accept those ideas, as it happens.

It seems to me that questioning as far as possible the roots of faith could lead just as easily to a deep faith as it could to atheism.

Anyway, more on this later. It seems to me that diving deeply on this one issue would go a long way toward understanding Christianity more broadly.

Maybe the quickest way to summarize my understanding of the Reformation, now that I’ve finished MacCulloch’s book, is like so: “Christians took some time off from killing Jews and Muslims to kill each other. Eventually the descendants of the original mother Church numbered like grains of sand, all mutually loathing one another. After exhausting themselves with murder, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, some of those descendants decided that it would be better to figure out how to get along with one another. And lo, Toleration was born.”

The somewhat longer story is that the Ottoman Empire was encroaching on Europe’s southern and eastern borders, and actually took over enough land — Granada, for instance — to scare the daylights out of Christians. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others took this opportunity — quite coincidentally, it seems — to fume about the Church’s corruption. The laity saw the Ottomans’ invasion as a warning sign that the last days were coming, and that the Church would have to atone for its sins. This combined with, it seems, increasing literacy and the birth of the printing press to make access to the Bible easier. Hence people could turn to their Scripture, see that doctrine wasn’t always as their priests insisted it was, and maybe even occasionally compare one Church father to another. Origen, for instance, stands uncomfortably beside Augustine. So we begin the sola scriptura movement, justification by faith alone, and a move away from centralized Church hierarchy.

The Church didn’t take this laying down, of course, so they fought back on multiple fronts and eventually reclaimed most of Europe as Catholic territory. Spain never needed this “Counter-Reformation,” as it happens, because Spain never succumbed to the Reformation itself. Spain had already had an Inquisition directed by the infamous Tomás de Torquemada, so it had already weeded out internal resistance. The Church of the eastern tradition, which we today label Greek and Russian Orthodox, never had a Reformation, because it had already been overrun completely by the Ottomans.

Once the gates to questioning were open, people ran off in every conceivable direction from what the Bible said. The Bible actually says nothing about infant baptism, so the Anabaptists (literally rebaptists) picked up on that and insisted on adult baptism. The Bible left it questionable, at the very least, whether Mary was actually a virgin (the Bible apparently said Jesus had brothers — I did not know this), so various people questioned her holiness. There were debates over what seem nowadays like obscure, needless theological disputes, such as whether the physical substance of the wafer is everywhere in the world that people happen to be eating it — whether Christ’s body, that is, magically transports itself into each worshipper’s mouth. This is known as the doctrine of “real presence.” People seem to have died over it. MacCulloch doesn’t convincingly explain for non-believers how a small-scale doctrinal issue translates into large-scale murder.

There’s a fascinating and no doubt endlessly depressing sociological study just waiting to leap out of real presence. Here’s a provisional hypothesis: people often fight with each other more when they agree than when they don’t. I wonder whether more blood has been spilt amongst Christians than between Christians and Muslims.

Somehow Europe changed from millennia under a single church to viewing that same church’s leader, the Pope, as the Antichrist. I would like to explain how this happened, but I don’t really understand it — and unfortunately, I don’t think MacCulloch’s book is the place to go to explain that arc. He covers more or less all of Europe from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries, jumping around from country to country at will. It’s hard to pick out a “moral of the story,” and in fact I think MacCulloch eschews such a moral. He appears to be of the historical school that takes Big Lessons as insults; there’s something to be said for this, if you’d prefer not to see your histories make straightforward what is in fact complicated, contingent, and random. From this reader’s perspective, anyway, MacCulloch’s style is more distracting than helpful. His book would probably work better as a reference — grab it off the shelf and find something relevant to your particular area of interest — than it does as a straight-through narrative.

The theology in MacCulloch’s book is slight — really only enough to put a bit of context around these disputes. Yet the theological questions seem fatal. As I think Augustine was the first to point out: if god is omniscient, then he knows how our lives will play out. If he knows how our lives will play out, then it takes an act of great sophistry to claim that we have free will in any meaningful sense. Predestination might also make you ask what the purpose of prayer is; hasn’t god already made up his mind? If you’re Aquinas, you’re going to argue that god is perfect, therefore unchanging, therefore not in the business of making decisions; his mind was made up long ago. Indeed, this perfect god spends his time contemplating himself. (I honestly forget how Aquinas justifies prayer, under this light.)

Some scholars of the Reformation, most notably Calvin, took this predestination to heart. Here’s where the logic of predestination runs into politics. Time and again throughout MacCulloch’s book, theologians pull their worshippers back from the brink just before those worshippers realize where the logic of their religion is leading them. If all that matters is faith, for instance, and if all the truth one needs is available in books that any of us can read, then self-appointed leaders have much less of a role to fill. This wouldn’t work at all, of course. At the very least, it wouldn’t help the religion to fit well into civil society: political leaders need their people to stay in line.

The unkind view of this reality is that theology is so much chin music to support a preconceived conclusion. The more charitable take is that society as a whole takes time to understand the consequences of its own beliefs — much like Copernicus, who died without really understanding what he had wrought; it took Galileo and Newton to push the revolution to its logical end. (Newton, by the way, spent as much time writing about Christian mysticism as he did about the inverse-square law; so MacCulloch tells us.)

No matter how logical all these conclusions might be, the logic still has to start from axioms. If you’re a Christian, those axioms will almost certainly contain something about God’s role in the universe or Christ’s perfection. If you are a non-believer, these axioms need arguing. I’ve not yet found a book on the subject of Christianity that argues in a manner calculated to convince rational, educated nonbelivers. Supposedly Aquinas went as far as anyone to reduce Christianity to a tiny core surrounded by an impenetrable wall of logic, but the core is still unbelievable if you’ve not already bought into some contentions about Christ. I haven’t, so much of the theological debate — over, again, issues such as whether Christ is literally in the wafer — look irremediably silly to me.

The most interesting part of this book, to me, is what happened at the end of centuries of religious murder: societies dipped their toes in the water of “toleration” — i.e., “not killing other people because they think of god differently than you do.” This is what liberal democracy is: it’s the realization that since we’re all going to have to live together, we all need to give up a little something to make it work. Even getting this off the ground is very tricky: if Catholics believe that they will always be in the majority, why should they believe that they need to relent at all in their pursuit of religious monopoly? Here’s where some studies comparing the spread of religious toleration in homogeneous societies to heterogeneous ones would be valuable; for his part, MacCulloch notes that the United States was one of the first places where toleration took off, and was also the destination for immigrants from all over Europe. (Martha Nussbaum published a book recently subtitled “In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality”, which I just couldn’t get into.)

Like Borge’s infinite library, there probably lies within The Reformation the answer to every secret, and the disproof of every answer to every secret. I’d have liked a shorter volume with more clear story arcs — more analysis and less data. With that said, this is probably the sort of book that one returns to over the years, finding bits of goodness each time.

Every article about the recent Turkish crises feels obliged to mention that there’s some sort of battle happening between Islam and secular government. Far be it for me to suggest that this is a way to fit an unfamiliar environment into a convenient Western narrative, but: this is a way to fit an unfamiliar environment into a convenient Western narrative. Take the New York Times story on today’s development:

The case had paralyzed Turkish politics since the indictment was filed in March and had moved Turkey to a final confrontation between religious and secular Turks about who will rule the nation.

The indictment before the court accused the governing party, Justice and Development, known as A.K. for the initials of its Turkish name, of trying to turn Turkey, a secular democracy, into an Islamic state.

I am no expert on Turkey, obviously, so please take everything I say here with ample salt. But it is not our culture. In Istanbul, the most “Westernized” city in all of Turkey (or so I’m told), you hear Muslim calls to prayer five times a day. There are mosques every few blocks.

Maybe the shortest way to get to my point is to ask: wouldn’t it change the Times’s story somewhat if they noted that Turkey is 99.8% Muslim? 99.8%. That is a degree of religious homogeneity that American conservative Christians could only dream of.

It’s nonvacuous, despite that, to say that Turkey is officially secular. It could be that the governing Muslims don’t let their religion influence their governance. Or it could be — the article doesn’t completely make it clear — that the 0.2% of the country that isn’t Muslim are the only people allowed in government. If that second option is true, that doesn’t seem like something we should be cheering; do we really respect “democracy” when it’s democracy of a highly unrepresentative sort?

While in Turkey, I realized two things that I really need to learn about:

1. This unending belief in the West — which seems to have started back when the Ottomans were attacking the Holy Roman Empire — that there is a war between Islam and Christianity. Even if the Islamic warriors are tiny and essentially powerless terrorist groups, with no practical ability to topple the West, this narrative continues.

2. Nationalism. The Ottoman Empire seems to have been a heterogeneous brew of ethnicities that, if you read A Peace to End All Peace, wouldn’t be recognizable as a “nation” in the sense that 21st-century Westerners would understand that word. It tolerated Jews alongside Muslims alongside Armenians alongside Turks. Suddenly there came a point when the “Turks” recognized themselves as such, killed off those who weren’t “Turks,” and booted the rest out of the country. I recall reading in Pamuk’s Istanbul that more Jews left Turkey in the half-century after independence than left it in the half-century after the Ottoman takeover. (This could just be a statistical sleight-of-hand owing to a larger 20th-century population, of course.)

   How do you convince people that they are in this group, those guys are in the other group, their group deserves death, and your group is special because of (inter alia) its language? Certainly some variant of this has been going on forever (I’m thinking of the “shibboleth” story from the book of Judges, 12:4-6), but … something about Turkey is special here. Understanding nationalism means understanding Turkey, and probably understanding the latter would buy you nearly all you need to know about the former.

P.S.: Before anyone mentions it: yes, rereading Hobsbawm wouldn’t hurt.

Paradise Lost was a rough slog for me; I think I got through half or 2/3 of it before abandoning the enterprise. Nowadays I’d do better, because I’ve developed some skills at reading unpleasant books. (Witness my current read, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation.) But still, I’m not inclined to dive back into Paradise Lost; as Dr. Johnson put it,

Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.

But Milton was great for other reasons, I gather. He was an important player, somehow, in the English Civil War, and people still cite Areopagitica. Can anyone out there point me to a good compendium of non-Paradise Lost Milton?

One thing I’ve also realized recently is that reading the original texts without commentary is nearly pointless. This is something people have told me for a while about legal texts: yes, there’s value in reading Court decisions, but you really do need someone to embed that decision in the context that makes it important. Something similar is surely the case for Milton, as it is for any important Christian (Origen, Augustine, Aquinas…).

Has anyone tried the Cambridge Companion to Milton?

If anyone out there has the above-named album in a convenient electronic format, could you please send it my way? Email works well for this: steve@laniels.org.

And yes, if you’re curious: I did try buying it via Amazon MP3s, but it’s not available there. I buy a lot of music that way. It’s gotten to the point where my need for instant music gratification makes buying an actual CD extraordinarily unlikely.

I could also buy through iTunes, which I’ve got to work through Wine. But iTunes files are DRM-encrusted. If anyone out there knows how to strip off the DRM, let me know. Yes, I know that I could burn to a CD and re-rip to MP3. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t work well enough under Wine to allow interaction with hardware. So I can’t do the buy-burn-rip sequence. This is, in fact, one of the reasons that has delayed my buying an iPhone: if I wanted to put any interesting apps on it, I would need a Windows box from which I could run iTunes.

Hence: if anyone has it, I would love to download it from you.

Update (27 July 2008): Done and done, thanks to a generous reader. Hats off to my anonymous friend.

Update (27 July 2008): My library’s computer system asked me tonight, “Did you mean overbite sensation?” No, but I really wish I did.

I dropped my phone on the floor last night (at Toscanini’s, if you’re curious), and now it’s all messed up: without a headset plugged in, I can neither hear anything nor transmit my voice over the wire. With a headset, I can hear but not speak.

So if you need to get in touch with me over the next few days, try text message (6173085571@vtext.com), home email (steve@laniels.org), work email (slaniel@itasoftware.com) or work phone (617-714-2722).

After reading Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, I’m really inspired to read some books in the original Turkish — particularly those by Ahmet Rasim. Pamuk had a lot of good things to say about Rasim’s book City Dispatches, which appears to be unavailable in English. My friend David tells me that it’s known as Şehir Mektupları in Turkish; it’s available for $5.99 plus shipping from tulumba.com. I ordered a copy a while back; it took some time to get to me, but I now have it.

So, with Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar at my side, and the Redhouse Turkish-English/English-Turkish Dictionary, I am going to give translating it a go. Turkish is a beautiful language; I’m really looking forward to this.

It will have to wait a short while, though. Once I finish Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation, the illustrious mrz and I are going to hit up Protestant Thought Before Kant. Somewhere in there, I will also be hopefully reading and reviewing my first book for Bookslut.com, who’ve graciously (foolishly?) decided that I’d be a good match.

But after those books — say, around the beginning of October — I intend to take a month or so to translate City Dispatches. It should be a lot of fun. Anyone who wants to join in should grab a copy off Tulumba and read along with me.

I’ve been looking for my copy of Landes and Posner’s The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law for a few weeks now, ever since some friends and I got in a discussion of trademark law and public health. TESoIPL is a terrific book, which I read a few years back. (My list of previously-read books tells me that I finished it almost exactly four years ago today.)

I can’t find it, though, and I wonder if I lent it to anyone. I highly doubt I would have sold it; it was too good to sell, and in any case I’m pretty sure it’s loaded with margin notes. It’s also not on the list of books I sold off when I was unemployed.

So did I lend it to anyone who reads this blog? If I don’t find it soon, I’ll probably just buy another copy.

I just got a mailing from the ACLU, announcing that Michael Mukasey had proposed one or another new way to gut the Constitution. As is my wont, I googled for Mukasey and intended to click on the News link. But among the links returned by Google was this excerpt:

The fundamental problem here is that the media give Mukasey’s words automatic credence because he is Mukasey. But it actually goes a bit deeper than that: not only should the media not give him that credence; they should obviously give him less because he is a public figure. Mukasey’s utterances on the subject of terrorism are as suspect as Steve Jobs’s on the awesomeness of the iPod, say. “Jobs Asserts That New iPod Is Best Ever” would not be a headline, for obvious reasons. Why does Mukasey deserve any more credibility here than Jobs does there?

WordPress 2.5 or 2.6 — I don’t exactly remember which — incorporated support for Google Gears. This was an extremely excellent idea. If you’re someone like me whose WordPress blog contains many categories — I have a category for books, subcategories for each author, and subsubcategories for each book — WordPress was getting slow: every time you refreshed most any page, WP was reloading the full category list. Now the Gears backend stores all those categories — along with, I’m sure, lots of caches of other data structures — on the local disk. If I say that WordPress is now 20 times faster than it was pre-Gears, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. Every aspect of it is now faster.

If I understand the way these things work, bits of HTML 5 are now rolling into people’s browsers. One part of HTML 5 will be more-sophisticated client-side storage; this may in fact be the first innovation in web-standard client side storage since cookies. I believe there will be both a lightweight backend database (à la sqlite?) and an associative array.

Each browser will no doubt implement its own client-side storage. Perhaps they’ll use Gears? They could, given that its license is the New BSD License. I don’t know enough about such things to explain why, say, Firefox would pick Gears over some alternative. And in fact I don’t know what the alternatives are, beyond what Firefox itself might be developing internally.

If Google isn’t locking anyone into its code, then what’s in it for them? Maybe people will get used to programming against Google APIs and won’t want to switch to other APIs? That seems like a rather … polite form of lock-in.

This is something I’ve dreamt of for a long while: getting Google Maps directions if you’re on foot, rather than in a car. Awesome.

One thing I’ve always done to approximate foot distance is to compute the driving distance from A to B, then the driving distance from B to A, and take the smallest. That accommodates somewhat for one-way streets. This new Google innovation is far cooler.

I’ve wondered for a while whether rewriting everything to give foot directions is difficult. The way I’ve envisioned Google Maps internally is as a giant adjacency matrix, with distances as the matrix entries. Most of those distances need to change if one-way streets go away. So internally, does Google Maps switch from one adjacency matrix to another in order to handle pedestrians? Not that that’s a huge deal for them — what’s another few hundred gigs of memory between friends? – but I do wonder if I’m on the right track.

Thanks to Adam Rosi-Kessel for discovering this.

I relistened to Woody Allen’s “I shot a moose…” standup routine yesterday. It is quite brilliant. I felt a bit sad listening to it, though, because I’ll never be able to reproduce the hilarious shock that I felt upon hearing it for the first time. I wish I could return to that state of childlike glee.

If you’ve not listened to it, please download it from my cache in Ogg Vorbis format, or MP3. It’s about 3 minutes long. Those are 3 well-spent minutes.

If you happen to hate Woody Allen, by the way, I should note here that a friend listened to the sketch today after asking me, “Will I still find this funny if I’ve found every single Allen movie I’ve tried to watch completely unbearable?” He ended up loving it, so I have hope for the rest of humanity.

Could people stop using the phrase “déjà vu all over again”? It was a Yogi Berraism. It was supposed to be silly and redundant, like all Yogi Berraisms: “déjà vu” obviously already means “once again.” Yet I could count the number of times that journalistic institutions have used “déjà vu” without “all over again” on two hands.

A review of Jane Mayer’s terrific-sounding new book, for instance, contains this bit:

In 1919, government-stoked paranoia about radicalism produced the Red Scare. After Pearl Harbor, hysteria mixed with racism led to the confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. The onset of the Cold War triggered another panic, anxieties about a new communist threat giving rise to McCarthyism. In this sense, the response evoked by 9/11 looks a bit like déjà vu all over again: Frightened Americans, more worried about their own safety than someone else’s civil liberties, allowed senior government officials to exploit a climate of fear.

Drop the “all over again,” people. It will make you feel better.

I’ve been trying to figure out for a while exactly where the tax law says that employers can deduct more for parking fringe benefits than they can for mass-transit fringe benefits. A bit of digging just answered my question, thanks to the IRS’s guide to fringe benefits for employers. That guide points us to Cornell’s law archive, oddly enough; why can’t the IRS archive the laws that govern it?

Specifically, employer fringe benefits are defined within Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Subchapter , Part III, Section 132, Subsection (f), Subsubsection (2), to wit:

(2) Limitation on exclusion

The amount of the fringe benefits which are provided by an employer to any employee and which may be excluded from gross income under subsection (a)(5) shall not exceed—

(A) $100 per month in the case of the aggregate of the benefits described in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of paragraph (1), and

(B) $175 per month in the case of qualified parking.

I would still like to figure out why the parking benefit is higher than the mass-transit benefit. It’s not as though mass transit always costs less than $100 per month: I could very easily spend $250 per month shuttling back and forth to Newburyport or Providence. In any case, the tax-law documentation itself doesn’t explain the reason behind the policy.

At work, they asked us what fringe benefits would be useful to us. I suggested that perhaps they spend some money to equalize the parking and mass-transit benefits: pay us $75, or the excess of our mass-transit expense over $100, whichever is smaller.

Which is a nice teachable math moment, for those who are interested. Suppose I incur $200 in mass-transit expenses in a month, so my company reimburses me $175. I owe taxes on $75 of that, because the government only lets my company deduct $100. Suppose I’m in the 28% tax bracket; that means I owe $21 in taxes on the $75. But the people who receive the parking benefit don’t need to pay $21 in taxes. So a company committed to fairness would also reimburse me for that $21. That’s $21 in additional income, on which I would then be taxed. I’d owe $5.88 in taxes, specifically (again, 28%). So my fairness-minded company would reimburse me $5.88.

And so forth, ad infinitum. In total, the company would reimburse me

$75 + $21 + $5.88 + $1.6464 + $0.460992 + $0.12907776 + …

This is known as a geometric series, with ratio .28. It has a finite sum, namely $75/(1-.28) = $75/.72 = $104.17. My company needs to reimburse me $104.17 to give me the same benefit that car drivers already get.

An easier way to arrive at the same conclusion is like so: my company needs to pay me $x to equal the parking benefit. I will be taxed 28% on those $x. So after taxes, I will have $(1-.28)x in the bank. I want my after-tax benefit to equal the $75 that parking users get. So I want (1-.28)x = 75, whence x = 75/(1-.28). Different route, same answer.

My company didn’t think quite as much of my idea as I did. Nice geometric series, though.

I’ve gotten in dozens of discussions with people about health insurance in recent years. For some reason the phrase “adverse selection” rarely pops up. I don’t know why. As far as I can tell, it is the important issue in health insurance — it is the reason why universal health insurance is the only conceivable solution to the problem. But few people have heard of it. So here goes. Very simple.

Suppose health insurance isn’t mandatory — that is, you can choose not to be insured. If it’s too expensive, you won’t participate. In particular, if you’re a healthy person, you might rationally decide that you won’t need to be covered.

To make it concrete: suppose premiums are $100 a month, and that you — as a healthy person — decide that you’ll incur less than $100 per month in health-care expenses. So you don’t get insured. All your healthy countrymen do likewise.

So now the only people left in the insurance pool are those who think they’ll need more than $100 per month in health care. Since $100 is the minimum, the average person in the insurance pool needs more than $100 in care. So let’s say that now the average patient who’s left in the insurance pool needs $150 in care per month. The premium has to go up to at least $150 so that the insurance company can break even. Now some more people are priced out of insurance: they think that insurance costs too much, so they don’t get covered. Premiums rise again. And so forth.

Eventually, the only people left in the insured pool are those who need the most care. Premiums are too high for everyone else.

Mandatory health insurance is the only conceivable solution to this problem. If people can’t leave insurance, then the healthy people stay in and help subsidize the less-healthy. Then when the healthy folks turn old and are themselves less healthy, their countrymen can subsidize them.

The U.S. recognized adverse selection as the problem years and years ago. This is why Medicare exists: old folks are not insurable at any price. Older folks will necessarily have higher premiums to start with, and adverse selection drives them still higher.

Which is to say that we’ve known about the failures of the health-insurance market for decades. There is no mystery to the problem, or to its solution. The problem is adverse selection; the only solution is universal coverage.

Now “universal coverage” can mean lots of things. It can mean

• Government-provided insurance.
• The government mandating that everyone have insurance through a private insurer. Massachusetts has done this.
• Public/private competition: everyone has insurance, either through a private insurer or the government. Americans are free to choose whichever insurance they like, and are free to switch between insurance providers. Competition selects the best insurer. This is the system that President Clinton proposed.
• Everyone is entitled to a minimum standard of care, and can pay for anything they want above that. This is how I’m told the French system works.
• etc.

When people imagine universal health care, I think they have the first bullet in mind.

Naturally there’s the concern that if you insure people against something, they’re more likely to do it. If you guarantee people treatment for drug abuse, they’re … more likely to abuse drugs? It’s not exactly clear what people might mean here. The general term is “moral hazard” (quaintly Victorian, that), and Malcolm Gladwell smacked it down nicely back in 2005:

A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.

Granted, there may be some justice to the moral-hazard idea. If my car is insured, I’ll maybe be more reckless when I’m out on the road. But there’s a distinction in there that it’s important to clarify: I should be punished for risks that I bring on myself, and should not be punished for risks I was born with. If you were born with Down’s syndrome, a just society won’t let you suffer because your parents can’t afford to pay. If you routinely get high and crash your car, society shouldn’t pay for your car or your bad behavior. This much is common sense.

At the same time, it may cost more to monitor people’s bad behavior than it would to just cover them no matter what they do. Looking at the actual costs and benefits would go a long way. Surely we have a lot of data, both from U.S. car-insurance statistics and from foreign health care.

One other thing to note: before you mention that “people in Canada/England/France complain about the quality of their health care” or “people in those countries have to wait a long time to get care,” consider the 15% of Americans who can’t get care at all. Or rather, they can get care by going to the emergency room — typically, after waiting for their health to become a crisis and, as Gladwell says, removing their teeth with pliers.

FISA was eviscerated today. I’m not happy about this. I’m not happy that Obama voted to end debate on the FISA bill. But what I want to mention here is that I’m sad we couldn’t get forty Democrats with spines to filibuster it.

How hard is that? 40. 40. We are the majority party, are we not? I called Senator Dodd’s office to ask why he didn’t filibuster it this time around. One of his aides told me that he couldn’t get 40 votes, so his filibuster would have been clotured immediately. I asked whether Dodd could have tried filibustering even symbolically; his aide repeated that, no, in fact that wouldn’t have even got off the ground.

I called the office of Senator Kerry, who to his credit voted for all the right amendments. His aide told me that the senator did all he could to fight it. I asked why he didn’t filibuster. He gave me the same answer as Senator Dodd’s aide. I replied that if I called 40 Democratic senators, I would most likely get 40 copies of the same answer. Kerry’s aide told me that this was probably right. I replied that I felt as though I were shaking my fist at the sea. Kerry’s aide didn’t know what to do with that information.

Why in god’s name can’t my party ever get its act together? And by this point, they can’t claim ignorance. Practically the whole world is telling them that they continue to get played on the national-security card. This has been going on since Joe McCarthy. I would retort with “they know politics more than I do” if they had shown any evidence of knowing anything about politics.

At least Republicans know how to kowtow to their base. Who’s the Democratic base? Ostensibly the poor, labor unions, and civil libertarians (who are somehow supposed to be part of the GOP; if you can square that particular circle, go win a million dollars with your mathematical ability). They’re doing a bang-up job with that.

The Democrats won in 2006 by not being Republicans; I didn’t think then, and I don’t think now, that they actually did anything to deserve it. They may well win in 2008 on that basis as well. Americans may be so fed up with Republicans that Democrats win by default. Shouldn’t we aspire to more than that?

Even if that is how we win, we need to do more than squeak by. We need a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, because at least the people we’re playing against know how to use the tools at their disposal. And once we get that filibuster-proof majority, we need to figure out what we stand for. That way we can stand together as one bloc when it comes time to vote — just like the Republicans do.

I’ve often heard it said, here, that the Democrats — liberals generally — are the party of questioning, which explains why we can’t get together around a single ideology. That is the purest form of self-flattering bullshit. I would enjoy comparing our ideological cohesiveness to liberals in other countries — say, the British Labour Party. There are a lot of reasons for our lack of cohesion; many of them probably reduce to abandoning our base. If Democrats knew they were the party of rectifying capitalism’s evils, or the party of the poor, or the party of the downtrodden, a lot of people could get behind that. The party doesn’t stand for any of those things, though. Read Joan Didion: what the party stands for, and has stood for since just after the 1968 DNC, is a particular kind of milquetoast packaging — a smaller-than-life median voter theorem that knows how to lose elections.