Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
Last week Claire and Judith told me to calm down. I was happy to comply. All around her in Israel, Judith explained, life was going on normally. Nobody displayed any dread. Nobody betrayed any sense of impending catastrophe. The same, Claire said, went for Turkey. Nobody in Istanbul appeared to be tensing for a crisis—or at least not for any more of a crisis than life in Istanbul already represented. Claire and Judith are sensitive to cultural and political signals—you just couldn’t ask for two more minutely observant or completely alert correspondents. Iran? Nukes? If Claire and Judith were telling me to calm down, I figured, everything in the Middle East was somehow going to be okay.
This worked for about three days. Then a couple of unwelcome thoughts began to intrude on my serenity.
First I recalled a conversation a few years ago with a friend on Wall Street. What separated successful investors from everybody else, he told me—and he had the millions of dollars to prove he knew what he was talking about—was their ability to rid themselves of a nearly universal failing: the tendency to assume that whatever happened today would happen again tomorrow. If markets rise, typical investors assume, they’ll continue rising indefinitely; if they fall, that they’ll continue falling forever. The exceptional investor, my friend explained, sees not stasis but dynamism. By their very nature, he recognizes, markets prove contingent and open-ended. Valuations shift. Trends reverse themselves. The exceptional investor—the investor who is truly good at what he does—never, ever assumes that tomorrow will look like today.
“It’s as easy as that?” I asked. “You can make money just by recognizing that the future is a lot more open-ended than most people think?”
“’Easy?’” my friend replied. “Who said ridding yourself of a turn of mind that’s natural to every human being is ‘easy’?”
Next I made an error. I permitted my mind to wander, free associating. Before I knew it, I had applied my friend’s lesson about Wall Street to a few historical events. During the October Revolution, I recalled, life in most of St. Petersburg went on as normal--or at least as normally as wartime conditions permitted—all but unaffected by the Communist coup. Most residents of the Russian capital remained, simply, clueless.
In Germany during the nineteen-thirties, I remembered, many Jews continued to lead normal lives. From WikiAnswers:
[T]he great majority of German Jews were highly assimilated into German society….They were thoroughly German and many were tragically in love with Germany. This only changed as persecution intensified and especially when they were subjected to widespread physical violence in the 'Night of the Broken Glass'.
Hitler become chancellor in 1933. Kristallnacht took place in 1938. For a full five years, then, many Jews in Nazi Germany remained just as clueless as the residents of St. Petersburg during the Communist takeover—or, for that matter, as the management of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers during the collapse of the housing market.
I invite Claire and Judith to tell me once again to calm down—really I do. But does it tell us all that much that life in Israel and Turkey still looks normal? Now I'm not so sure.
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Comments :
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
You know, the thing that helps me most in all this is to focus on the one-to-one, quotidian interactions I have here with Arabs, which -- though I admit they are infrequent -- are almost always warm, open, natural and friendly. The truth is that none of us have any control over what is or is not going to happen; we have to hope for the best and continue to behave like human beings to each other. Israelis -- both Jews and Arabs -- for the most part do quite well on that score. "Don't grudge us a smile"; it might be all we've got. (With a tip of the hat and my thanks to Aaron.)
Jul '10
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
Peter, buck up. There is every possibilty that Iran will deploy promiscuous women, for the earthquakes. Don't forget:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-case-for-calling-them-nitwits/8130/
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
George Savage Can we at least all agree that, great fun as they are, we should all avoid motorcycles, which make cars look like airliners from a comparative safety standpoint? · Jul 28 at 2:58pm
George, you're so right. And today I will take my safety into my own hands and stay off every motorcycle I see. It's important to change the things I can and accept the things I can't and have the wisdom to know the difference and all that. I find it's very helpful, when I get fretful, to do empowering things. Since I doubt I'll have much luck with the Iranian nuclear program today, I am going to completely shun the motorcycles--a step in the direction of personal safety that's entirely under my control. Why, just this morning, I chose not to ride a motorcycle no less than fifty times. Felt great, making that sensible choice. I also refrained from inhaling glue, going for a swim in the piranha tank, or setting my apartment on fire. It really made me feel better--I'm no leaf buffeted about in a windstorm, I'm in control!
May '10
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
Judith Levy: I usually have to restrain the impulse to whack him upside the head with a rolled up Haaretz, but he does have a point.
Hmm... If you ask me, there are better things to do with Haaretz [almost wrote "The Haaretz - but then remembered the trivia question about an English phrase that has three definite articles in a row: any guesses?]. Aren't [most of] the people who write for that paper a part of the problem, not the solution - considering that they so much want to be post-Zionist that they would prefer an Israeli government that does not offer the psychological support you so correctly and eloquently describe?
Feb '10
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
This may be a bit off topic, but the volatility and extremest ideologies in the Middle East is one of the primary reasons I am an anti-oil "crunchy" conservative.
Think about how much bolder we could be with, say, Saudi Arabia, if we weren't begging on hands and knees every year for them to continue to send us their precious oil. It's almost literally a chain around our necks that they can yank whenever they want to, and we are the ones who have put ourselves in this position by becoming so dependent on oil.
And before you start with the standard "drill baby drill" and "why can't we just use our own resources?" lines, think about the sheer scale involved. Even if we drilled as much as possible, we'd only put a small dent in our oil imports. Worse, we'd use up our own resources that much faster, and put ourselves more at the mercy of foreign countries later when our own resources are tapped out.
No. It's time to kick the oil habit. It won't happen overnight, but it is a matter of urgent national security, not just economic policy.
Ask yourself: is the chart below going in the right direction?
U.S. Oil Imports
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
Busy System Admin, yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Go Shai Agassi! Go Better Place! It's time to kick the oil habit, folks. Listen to Shai. He might be about to change the world.
Sergei, you're perfectly correct about Haaretz. Fine as it is in some ways, I always hesitate a few seconds before opening it because I'm so put off and disheartened by the self-flagellation all over its pages. Two Haaretz columnists come to mind who are so filled with disgust for Israel that I wonder that they don't emigrate.
What's the English phrase with three definite articles in a row? If you tell me, I'll tell you which commonplace English word contains three consecutive sets of double letters.
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
I know it, I know it, Judith! I know the word! But I want to hear Sergei's answer, so I won't give away our leverage.
May '10
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
BSA, since I am the original anti-Jerry Taylor/Robert Bryce/Jim Woolsey nut here, have you explored Robert Zubrin's ideas at all?
That is by far the simplest, most market-oriented route to getting off of the petroleum IV line. Once you have pure fuel flexibility, you can use any approach- CTL, you name it.
Oil extortion only works when the underlying market is tight or questionable, so that you are dependent on all sources. If the marginal source of supply is made even more marginal, the underlying demand drops and speculation is no longer worthwhile.
What makes biomass less useful is the fact that its transportation to central processing facilities is more costly and energy-intensive than the relative value of the feedstock. If instead, every person could pre-process any type of carbon, the way a few years ago every Target or Wal-Mart had its own 1 hour photo-developing machine instead of just central labs, the resultant crude (from grass clippings, newspapers, etc.) would be processable at any refinery. And almost anything can work with basic pyrolisis, let alone advanced methods of cracking the carbon.
May '10
Re: Claire and Judith, Now I'm Not So Sure
Oops- bad sentence structure. Adm Woolsey is on our side:
http://www.setamericafree.org/