Year: 2007

DANIEL GORDIS

Some of you were angry I linked to the Gordis essay and some were pleased.

One of you, anticipating I would post a dissenting view today (below), was preemptively angry – or at least rueful. ‘It’s probably a bunch of people complaining about how wrong Gordis is and how right Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore are,’ he wrote.

It’s important to listen to only one point of view, because that way we can avoid knowing what others think. In that spirit, I urge you not to read this:

David W.: ‘Rather than an ‘affecting reflection,’ the Gordis article would be better characterized as ‘bathos.’ The article contained some terribly misleading and erroneous statements and becomes nothing more than ‘apologetics’ rather than some genuine soul-searching to try to help solve the morass. Your link pretty much gives it instant credibility for many of your readers [not if they remember my Google puts] and that just doesn’t help. Do you really want the U.S. to attack Iran? [No!]

‘The author writes ‘… just seventy years after the world conspired to let Jews be erased …’ That is literally false and metaphorically misleading, and, only serves to ‘set up’ the reader for a standard argument.  And that argument, based on issues most people agree on – i.e., the Holocaust and the need for a Jewish state – has been seriously diminished if not voided in the minds of many people by just that kind of mischaracterization and subsequent acts by the state of Israel which are simply unjustifiable except by virtue of the argument that ‘might makes right,’

“Toward the end of the article he writes that without Israel, American Jewish life ‘… would last a generation, maybe two …’  What an historically odd, deceptive, bathetic and baseless claim for someone to make.  Toward the beginning of the article he writes, ‘No, Israel’s not a failure.  The State is a huge success.’ He then refers to the ‘national funk.’  Now, PLEASE read this brief piece.  I would suggest to you that it is a ‘case study’ which, when put into context, explains most of the funk Daniel Gordis writes about.  Then, let’s talk about the real issues. Not some perhaps well-meaning but deceptive ‘ontological reflections’ but the concrete realities of life in the near Middle-East, their historical sources, and the consequences.”

☞ I stand by my feeling that the Gordis piece was an affecting reflection – to me, anyway.  But I sure would not attack Iran.  That would only strengthen Ahmadinejad.  I thought Tom Friedman’s approach, per his January 31 New York Times column, made a lot of sense:

“Because the U.S. has destroyed Iran’s two biggest enemies – the Taliban and Saddam – ”there is now a debate in Iran as to whether we should continue to act so harshly against the Americans,” Mohammad Hossein Adeli, Iran’s former ambassador to London, told me at Davos. ”There is now more readiness for dialogue with the United States.”

More important, when people say, ”The most important thing America could do today to stabilize the Middle East is solve the Israel-Palestine conflict,” they are wrong. It’s second. The most important thing would be to resolve the Iran-U.S. conflict.

That would change the whole Middle East and open up the way to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict, because Iran is the key backer of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Syria. Iran’s active help could also be critical for stabilizing Iraq.

This is why I oppose war with Iran. I favor negotiations. Isolating Iran like Castro’s Cuba has produced only the same result as in Cuba: strengthening Iran’sCastros. But for talks with Iran to bear fruit, we have to negotiate with Iran with leverage.

How do we get leverage? Make it clear that Iran can’t push us out of the gulf militarily; bring down the price of oil, which is key to the cockiness of Iran’s hard-line leadership; squeeze the hard-liners financially. But all this has to be accompanied with a clear declaration that the U.S. is not seeking regime change in Iran, but a change of behavior, that the U.S. wants to immediately restore its embassy in Tehran and that the first thing it will do is grant 50,000 student visas for young Iranians to study at U.S. universities.

Just do that – and then sit back and watch the most amazing debate explode inside Iran.  You can bet the farm on it.

FREE FOOD

Russell Turpin: “Richard says, ‘I’ve been exhorting our staff for decades on this subject, and yet when they go to trade shows they eschew the “hospitality suites” and instead go to restaurants. What are they thinking?’ That’s easy. They’re thinking that dinner is on a company expense account. Switch your business travel policy from paying for actual food expenses, to paying a per diem allowance. The company will save the accounting time to create and verify expense reports that are mostly small food and restaurant purchases. The staff who have enjoyed wining and dining on the company ticket will bitch. The staff who know how to stretch a dollar will think, ‘I can pocket most of that per diem.’ And they will. And the hospitality suites will get more use. This is economics 102, right?”

☞ There’s no question: people respond to incentives.

(The smartest thing I did a hundred years ago when I was writing for New York Magazine, earning $18,000 a year in salary, was to ask to be paid by the article instead. “It will work out to the same $18,000, give or take,” I explained, “but instead of feeling constantly guilty that I’m not doing enough, and being motivated, in effect, by the stick, I’ll be free of all that, and happy, and motivated by the carrot.” And sure enough, I earned the same money, give or take (maybe a little more), produced the same output, more or less (maybe a little more) – but was happier. Much happier.)

THE STUPOR BOWL

Mike: ‘I started to watch, got bored and returned to an activity that has obsessed me for the past few weeks: listening to presidential phone and meeting tapes from FDR through Nixon. I discovered a website where ALL of them can be accessed. It’s operated by the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia. This stuff is fascinating – the Cuban Missile Crisis tapes alone are absorbing. I’ve heard snippets and excerpts of these recordings before, but to hear them in their entirety is just riveting. I highly recommend it.’

☞ Go Gators!

THE OTHER BOX

We’re in a horrific box in Iraq. But we’re also in a tightening fiscal box. We’re paying $406 billion in interest on the national debt (most of it racked up under Reagan, Bush, and Bush), which is more than 40% of all the $998 billion in personal income tax we pay.

More than 40 percent!

What if interest rates go up?

The Republican solution is, of course, more tax cuts for the very wealthy. (They still want to abolish the state tax on billionheirs.) But will that really get us out of the box?

A better solution may be to roll back the tax cuts on income above $100,000 or $200,000, so that everything you earned in excess of $100,000 or $200,000 each year would be taxed as it was in the Clinton/Gore era (aka ‘the good old days’) . . . and to spend somewhat less than we now do on the military, on the theory that we could make up for that simply by spending it more wisely. (Might we not be better off, for example, if we had spent hundreds of billions of dollars less by not invading Iraq?) Check out Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities for some ideas on that.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL

And if you think we face problems, take five minutes to read this affecting reflection from Israel.

A BOOK FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

I totally loved Blink – which the author, Malcolm Gladwell, was kind enough to read to me.

Ironically – fancying myself something of a quick study, I failed to read it when it first came out. I had assumed I’d more or less ‘gotten’ it in a blink – namely, that first impressions count for a whole lot. And, well, yes, that’s the simple idea. But its real-world ramifications turn out to be fascinating: everything from predicting divorce to predicting the surgeons most likely to be sued (often the very best ones), to understanding autism to understanding the subliminal power of ‘priming’ and the intractability of racial prejudice.

GLDD

A brokerage firm called Morgan Joseph issued an extensive research report on our dredging stock (and, by extension, its warrants) a few weeks ago, setting a ‘target price’ of $8 (which would give the warrants we paid 70 cents and 38 cents for last year an intrinsic value of $3). I didn’t mention it at the time because, first, there’s no way to link to it; second, Morgan Joseph was I think involved somehow in putting the deal together, which is always a reason to grab the nearest grain of salt; and third, well, who the heck is Morgan Joseph?

A few days ago Motley Fool ran this, answering at least that last question:

One savvy pro ranked high atop the CAPS charts is Morgan Joseph, a full-service brokerage headquartered in New York City. As of this writing, Morgan Joseph is ranked 194th overall in CAPS (and 10th among professional analysts), having crushed the market since last September with 63% accuracy.

A ranking of 194 won’t get you into Wimbledon on the professional tennis tour, but with nearly 21,000 participants in CAPS, Joseph’s score puts it ahead of 99% of other investment portfolios. Pretty impressive.

It’s important to stress that this by no means guarantees any further success with GLDD. But it’s still better than a kick in the head (unless you have a tarantula sitting on your head) . . . and one more reason I suggest that (so long as you have bet only with money you can truly afford to lose, because you might) you not sell your warrants, which still have two years to run yet carry a premium of less than 15 cents. (Though if you have a tarantula on your head, you probably have more to worry about than whether or not to sell your warrants.)

MOLLY

Colin Ramsey: ‘Poor Texas? Yes, but poor all of us. She will be greatly, greatly missed.’

☞ But she would have wanted you to listen to this, from Keith Olbermann, if you’ve not already tubed* it:

KEITH OLBERMANN ON THOSE 96 WORDS

Click here.

*I Xerox, you Xerox, he Xeroxes. I tube, YouTube, he tubes. Amo, amas, amat.