How did I get here?

Talking Heads |MTV Music

With the apocalypse taking a five minute interregnum break, what better time for the nostalgic waxing involved in the discovery that MTV has just launched a site with a viewable library of essentially every music video they have ever run. You know, back when they played music videos.

You know you want yours.

David Bowie |MTV Music

Everything is improved by the judicious application of primates. Everything.

There’s a better world, somewhere. A world in which presidential campaigns don’t turn toxic, in which men and women can discuss politics rationally and maturely. A world in which literary genres like science fiction aren’t sneered at and disrespected, but instead treated the same way that mainstream books are: each author is happy to sell 300 copies of their novels. A world in which gay men and gay women have the same rights to awful, soul-destroying marriages, credit-wrecking alimony payments, and hideously painful weekend visits to children as heterosexual men and women. A world in which a woman will be judged and condemned not because of her affected Alaskan accent but because she doesn’t have the courage of her convictions and try to practice Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare in Washington, D.C., in front of Congress, on live television. A world in which we judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the way he knots his tie. A world in which I’m not so terrified for my six-month-old son (who is the main reason I’ve been absent from this site for so long) and instead have the luxury of plotting ways that I can embarrass him when he’s a teenager.

A world in which there are more monkeys in movies.

As Chris Roberson, sage under heaven, has written, everything is improved by the judicious application of primates. Which is to say, everything’s better with monkeys. So imagine the world, so much better than our own, in which the following lines were uttered in films, and the changes necessary in those films to make those lines come to pass. Consider how much better certain films would be if these words had been said:

“Pay no attention to that monkey behind the curtain." (I actually, no foolin’, caught myself saying that to my son, which is what inspired this essay).

I’m going to make him a monkey he can’t refuse."

"Klaatu bonobo nicto."

"How do you live?" “I chimp." (It’s a shame there’s no film clip available online for this quote. It’s the last line in the movie, and it’s a killer).

"Chim-chim."

“I’m shocked–shocked!–to find that monkeys are in here."

"That’s no monkey."

"I’m your monkey."

“As God is my witness, I'll never be a monkey again." (Believe me, I wish I could have found a video to match “Lawzy, we got to have a doctor. I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ monkeys.")

"Open the monkey cage doors please, Hal."

"We deal in monkeys, friend." (And, of course, “Nobody throws me my monkey and says run...nobody."

Whatever Koko wants, Koko gets, and little man, little Koko wants you."

Moon Shot

On PBS late last night, Chicago's Grant Park had a million jubilant people and lots of American flags, but no silliness with confetti and pom-poms. It wasn't we-won jubilation so much as we-did-something-impossible jubilation, awestruck and sober.

I noticed the letters USA in white lights in the background of the televised scene. And I felt moved in a way I haven't felt moved by seeing "USA" in decades. The last eight years in particular have been an embarrassing time to be a citizen of this country. Last night was different. I was suddenly and strongly reminded of the "USA" lettered on Apollo 11's Saturn V at liftoff. The plain sans-serif capital letters even looked very much the same.

When the moon rocket lifted off, its destiny was very dangerous but its mission was astoundingly significant. And that, I think, describes the threshold the next presidency of the United States of America crossed last night. Godspeed, Obama.

Stay Classy Texas: Election Edition

Just as you thought it was safe to come out on election day without having to carry an umbrella to avoid streams of bilious spew coming from some wingnut or other, up steps Texas State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar to fill the void with her insightful and well-reasoned thoughts on Barack Obama:

AUSTIN — State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar isn't backing down from her claim that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is plotting with terrorists to attack the U.S.

The Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog group that monitors the board, released a public statement on Monday asking Dunbar to retract the statement.

"I don't have anything in there that would be retractable," said Dunbar, R-Richmond. "Those are my personal opinions and I don't think the language is questionable."

For those of you slow on the uptake, my previous reference to "insightful and well-reasoned thoughts" was sarcasm seasoned with a heavy dose of cynicism. Dunbar, you might know, is a member of Governor Rick Perry's posse. As a member of the powerful State Board of Education, she wants to teach Texas school children that the dinosaurs all drowned when they couldn't fit on Noah's Ark. With folks like her filling this state's high offices, how can Texas not blaze a glorious trail into the 19th century?

I suppose it's too much to hope that Dunbar and Michele Bachmann eventually end up as unemployed drinking buddies, huh?

Dawn of the grackles

On grey November mornings in Austin like today, the boat-tailed grackles gather like the black birds of Mordor in denuded urban habitats — downtown street lamps, the pathetic trees lining the parking lot medians of a run-down old shopping mall, the double decker concrete of the freeway — and cackle en masse, a din that lets you know these hardy adaptable earth-mates of ours are making fun of us.

This morning reminds me of a very similar morning in Austin, eight years ago and a day. The morning after election day 2000. I had gone to bed the night before without knowing who won the election, something I could not remember doing in my adult life. When I got up to go to work the next morning, they still didn't know who won. Clouds were gathering as I drove to work through the grackled dawn, after a crisp sunny day before.



My day job office at the time happened to be next door to the Four Seasons Hotel Austin, which was where then-Governor George Bush and his entourage were staying to watch the returns. There was a weird, looming vibe about the whole scene, fundamental grammar school civics class certainties about the infallibility of American democracy already called into question by the absence of a definitive midnight answer, even before the full Constitutional crisis began to bloom that afternoon.

In no time, we were mired in hanging chads and the battle of the partisan lawyers. Dueling CNN spiels by wily statesmen — Bushie James Baker and Clintonian Warren Christopher (who I once rode an elevator with in the Hart Senate Office Building, causing me to conclude there is no human being on Earth who could so completely resemble one of the puppets from Kukla, Fran and Ollie). A month of grim Constitutional limbo, watching the process degenerate into a brazen partisan power struggle completely devoid of any idealism, ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.



The 2000 election exposed for me how much of the vaunted sanctity of the American electoral process is a myth. The process is riddled with errors, always has been, and every cycle there are races that need to be resolved by judges.

Uncounted ballots aside, for me the biggest imperfection of all for me was the fact that so many races are statistical ties, and most remarkably, that the presidential contest could end in what was, basically, a tie. Nothing could better illustrate my emerging sense at the time that political choice in America had become an illusion, a Coke versus Pepsi selection between avatars of converging pseudo-ideologies.

Perhaps 9/11 has changed that, rendering today's election one of more consequence. While I see real difference in the leaders proffered today, I remain unpersuaded that there is much real diversity in the system, believing that the two-party system is a red team-blue team factionalism that would have made the authors of the Federalist Papers cringe at the ossification of their system into a means for a small political class to perpetuate their own careers, using the power of the public fisc, the campaign finance system, and election laws designed to preclude outsiders to make sure that no candidate who represents real change will have an easy time getting in front of the voters.



As I await the unfolding of the day, and wonder if the clouds are going to break or thicken, I share the apprehension of the big-brained open source intelligence analysts down the street at Stratfor, when they remark that another uncertain election result a la November 2000 would be a very bad thing:

There is one critical thing for this coming election: that a president be elected without any ambiguity. The greatest destabilizing threat to the international system would be for the election to end in a complex deadlock as in 2000, with the courts forced to adjudicate. An extended period of uncertainty about the American presidency, considering the range of international issues on the table, would increase international political risk dramatically. It would also create a massive domestic crisis, not only for the usual reasons, but also because the polls have consistently shown Barack Obama ahead. His supporters would view a deadlocked election in the face of these polls with deep suspicion...

This election is bitter on all sides. There is already some emotional expectation among Obama supporters that someone will try to steal the election from their candidate. If there is a massive weekend swing (which may not become apparent until election night) that forces the election into recounts and litigation, the atmosphere surrounding this election could create political chaos in the United States, and that would mean that issues from Bretton Woods II to the status of forces in Iraq, to Russian plans in the former Soviet Union would all be affected. Bush’s ability to govern — as with all lame ducks — would be compromised, no transition would be in place, and the United States would be paralyzed politically. And, we might add, at that point Ralph Nader would again have been the pivot of an election.

I want to say keep your fingers crossed and hope there's a definitive result by the time you go to bed. But then I wonder, if we really want to see real change to the system, is there any better way to bring that on than an even more dramatic crisis that puts maximum pressure on all of the fundamental assumptions of our polis? I am not sure how long the 21st century will tolerate 19th century nation states that practice 18th century republican political citizens, when new networked forms of socio-political organization are aborning. Which science fiction theme are we going to get: war world dystopia or technocratic utopia? I guess we'll see what happens.

If you want a diversion from the returns, at least there's a new issues of the Internet Review of Science Fiction out today.

The Babelian algorithms

If you are reading this blog, chances are you have read Jorges Luis Borges' Library of Babel, which opens its shelves unto the infinite:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.

The idea of the story is persistently appropriated and repurposed, some even postulating a VHS version. But I suspect most take it as a given that the fantastic realm envisioned by this fiction is a logical impossibility, a metaphysical experiment that no earthly physic could realize, created by an author who viewed mathematics as a branch of fantastic literature. Now, an American math professor has released a tome which extrapolates the rules articulated into the story to provide an actual plan for the library. From Alberto Manguel's review in the New York Sun:

In 1939, employed in a small municipal library of Buenos Aires where the oafishness of his colleagues made him weep with daily frustration, the 40-year-old (and still largely unknown) Jorge Luis Borges collected a few of the reading notes he had made on the streetcar to and from work, and pieced together a short text which, under the title "The Total Library," he sent to the magazine Sur, where it appeared in the August issue. The essay, which links the names of Democritus, Lewis Carroll, Cicero, and the forgotten German fantasy writer Kurd Lasswitz, was developed a couple of years later into another, slightly longer one, "The Library of Babel," which Borges eventually included in his collection "The Garden of Forking Paths" (later expanded under the title of "Ficciones"). The end-paper pages of William Goldbloom Bloch's "The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel" (Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $19.95) reproduce the first and last pages of Borges's manuscript, showing that it was written (in what Borges called "the handwriting of a dwarf") on accounting sheets with the heading Haber, or "Credit," in Gothic letters that magically make the "H" look like a "B" and the "r" like an "l."



(I have always reveled in those images of Borges the branch librarian writing his ficciones on the streetcar, elucidating the mysterious epic wonder latent in the most mundande and tranquil everyday as the wheels slowly trundle through the leafy avenues. Perhaps an anachronism on my part, but I consider that commute to the fantastic the bookend to Che's motorcycle road trip.)

Manguel summarizes Bloch's approach to the problem:

In Borges's imagining, the Library of Babel itself is a building composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries. A ventilation shaft in the center of each allows the visitor to see the floors above and below, in endless sequence. Each wall of each hexagon holds 32 books of identical size; each book has 410 pages; each page, 40 lines; each line, approximately 80 letters. All possible combinations of the 25 orthographic symbols make up the books; therefore, every conceivable book must exist in the monstrous library. In his story, Borges gives just a few examples of what might be found here: "the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of the true catalogue ..."

The numbers he chose for the shelves and books in his story, Borges later confessed, were simply those of the municipal library in which he worked — and which he himself found so horrible. "Learned critics," he noted later, with some evident pleasure, "studied these figures and generously lent them a mystical significance." Mr. Bloch, with similar generosity, and in an exercise he himself describes as "tedious, uninspired, but straightforward" if carried out in full, asks whether our entire universe could in fact contain this dizzying number of books. Even if it could (if the size of the library, as Borges suggests, coincided with that of the universe), the inconceivably vast space would make it impossible for a human librarian to even barely begin its exploration. Walking 60 miles a day for 100 years, notes Mr. Bloch, our vigorous librarian would only travel a distance slightly less than that which light covers in two minutes. "To cross our universe, which is incomprehensibly dwarfed by the Library, light would need to travel for a least 15 billion years." It would take a librarian, moving at the leisurely pace of a connoisseur, considerably longer — a mathematical certainty that mirrors the nightmarish vision Borges said he wished to convey.




That would make a hell of a next generation module of Myst.

A Universe of Books: Borges's 'Library of Babel', Alberto Manguel, The New York Sun, September 24, 2008

Amazon: The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, by William Goldbloom Bloch

Chaos, Porsches, and speculative poetry

At Get Your War On, the last installment before the election, on the consequences of being imprisoned in a PF Chang's and the entertainment value of an unhinged prez.

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

For an antidote, check out some of the beautiful readings just online at the virtual home of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Science fiction poetry is a neglected intersection of genres, but the emergence of forums like Strange Horizons has provided an opportunity for reliable commercial markets that has helped promote the field in the past few years. I love the good stuff, which better than most contemporary prose SF shows how the science fictional sensibility is really about shining a flashlight inside the cavern of contemporary consciousness. Among my favorites from this selection are Karen Romanko's "The Biology Building," Deborah Kolodji's "A Canoe in Night Waters," and "The Quince Bedroom" by the consistently great David Kopaska-Merkel. And yes, I share your impression that the members of the SFPA make up those power names under which they write.




And in the economic news, a wonderful NYT analysis of how the Teutonic automotive engineers at Porsche (a private company) brilliantly out-cornered the hedge funds. Having run into one distressed hedge fund manager friend at lunch yesterday, I am assured the pain is very real. For some reason I found this story wonderfully riddled with cyberpunk shivers.



October 31, 2008
HIGH & LOW FINANCE
A Clever Move by Porsche on VW’s Stock

By FLOYD NORRIS
On Wall Street, a corner is not just an intersection of two streets. It is also a way to extract huge profits from speculators who had the temerity to sell a stock short.

Now the question is whether Porsche has pulled off a brilliant new-fashioned corner in Volkswagen stock, using derivatives in clever ways that no one had thought of before, or whether it was too clever for its own good.

In a corner, a buyer or group of buyers buys a lot of stock. As the price goes up, short-sellers appear. They borrow stock — perhaps from the very same group — and sell it, hoping to make a profit when the price declines.

Then comes the squeeze. The group, which now owns more shares than exist, demands the return of the borrowed stock. The only way the short-sellers can comply with that request is to purchase shares, and the only one who has shares to sell is the corner group. The group can set its own price, and make a fortune.

One reason you don’t see many corners these days is that they are illegal in most countries. But another is that almost everybody involved tends to lose in the end, with the exception of lucky investors who happened to own the stock before the fun started and can sell into the big run-up in prices.

Those who execute corners usually make lots of money from the short-sellers. But they end up owning a company for which they paid too much. The stock is delisted from the stock exchange, since there no longer are enough public shareholders, so there is no ready market for the stock. If the group that executed the corner used borrowed money, they may be in big trouble.

In the 1920s, the most famous corner in the United States was in stock in Piggly Wiggly, a grocery store chain. The corner was successful, but the man who executed it eventually went broke.

But there have been successful corners. Cornelius Vanderbilt once pulled one off, with members of the New York City Council as the victims. They had tried to profit by shorting a railroad company Vanderbilt controlled, and then revoking the company’s principal asset, a license to operate a street railway. Vanderbilt bought shares, and kept the price from falling. Owning more shares than there were outstanding, he offered to let the council members cover their short positions with only small losses, if they reinstated the license. They did.

The big loser in that corner was a legendary speculator, Daniel Drew, who had proposed the idea to the council members. He was forced to purchase shares at very high prices.

It is Drew who is credited with the saying “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must buy it back or go to pris’n.”

For the cornerer, there is also the risk that rules will change when powerful people get in trouble. That was one of the things that broke the Hunt brothers’ attempted corner in silver back in 1980. The authorities made it almost impossible to bet on silver prices rising, and the Hunts went broke.

Now, from Germany we have a new version of the corner, using derivatives in a way that may have removed much of the risk for the people planning the corner.

Briefly, here are the relevant facts: Porsche, for some reason, wants to control Volkswagen, and has been building up its stake, thereby driving up the price. Hedge funds, figuring the share price would fall as soon as Porsche got control and stopped buying, sold a lot of VW shares short.

Then last weekend, Porsche revealed that it owned 42.6 percent of the stock, and had acquired options for another 31.5 percent. It said it wanted to go to 75 percent.

The result: instant short-squeeze. The German state of Lower Saxony owns a 20 percent stake in VW, which it said it would not sell. That left precious few shares available for anyone else. The shorts scrambled to cover, and the price leaped from about 200 euros to a high of over 1,000 euros. VW became the world’s most valuable company, if you believed that market price.

It appears that Porsche put one over on whoever wrote that option, or options. The options are said to be cash-settled, although we do not know much more about them than that. That means Porsche does not have to buy the shares — which it might have a lot of trouble paying for. Instead, at settlement it merely has to accept the cash difference between the market price and the price it has agreed to pay. The result could be tens of billions of euros in profits, without the headache of owning shares no one else wants to buy.

There has been a lot of speculation about who is on the hook for those options. Of course, those people may have used other derivatives to lay off some of their risk on who-knows-who-else. That is one result of having opaque markets, which Wall Street used to love because it made for higher profit margins. Now it may be one more loss for some already reeling bank or banks.

After all this is done, the VW share price will fall to some more reasonable level. And there are rumors that Porsche has purchased put options, presumably with later exercise dates, to profit from that fall.

By Tuesday night, the establishment was fighting back. Germany’s premier stock index, the DAX, was changed to cut VW’s proportion in it. That allowed index funds to sell stock, adding to the supply of shares, and VW’s shares are back to about 500 euros.

In the United States, there are numerous laws and regulations to stop corners. But Porsche insists it broke no German laws, adding that “allegations of price manipulation by Porsche are therefore without any foundation whatsoever.” It placed the blame on — you guessed it — “speculative short sellers.”

If this works, Porsche will have made billions from a car company at a time when cars are not selling very well. It will not have done that by selling cars, but a profit is a profit.

Of course, rules can be changed, as Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt learned. The brothers angrily protested that it was unfair to change the rules in the middle of the game, but the rules were changed and the brothers went from billionaires to bankrupts.

If it comes to a question of whether regulators step in, Porsche has the advantage of facing off against short-selling hedge funds. There may not be a less popular group of investors, and their losses would provoke little sympathy.

But banks now have friends in high places. If Porsche’s option coup threatens a major bank, the bank might ask for help. Will governments step in to protect their investments? Stay tuned.

Vroom.