Moving On

The time has come to move on to greener pastures, check out the new blog:

Illogical Motion

(Still under construction)

Current State of Me 1-28

Listen: A State of Trance Official Podcast If you're into trance/techno/house/etc. music, check this out. It's put out by Armin van Buuren and has some good tracks. (This is also available for subscription through the iTunes Store podcast section.)

Watch: Most Days 1-26 Towards the end of this edition of Merlin Mann's Most Days series is about the best description of Chinese New Year that I've ever heard (the rest of the video is good too, as usual).

Check out: The Top 10 Risks in 2009 (link to PDF) by the Eurasia Group. Important reading forecasting the political landscape in 2009.

Read: Hezbollah: A Short History This is part of the Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics series. A very academic-toned book, it still does a very good job laying out the beginnings of Hezbollah and providing an overview to the numerous aspects of life in Lebanon that the group has its fingers in. Hezbollah is an important group to know something about, and I've found this book to be informative.

Thought: Why do people in Washington D.C. freak out when there is an inch of snowfall? It's really not that scary...

Current State of Me 1-26

Listen: Afterlife by Avenged Sevenfold. This is a decent song overall, but the pre-chorus is fantastic. It's worth buying the song for the pre-chorus alone.

Watch: Top Gear Airing on BBC America and available on Comcast On Demand, this is the car show for everybody, even those who don't particularly take a special interest in cars (like me). It can get a bit geeky on the cars at times, like adoring details about how a certain part of the engine works, etc. Most of the time, however, it's downright goofy. It's a very funny show. There are the requisite car reviews, but what makes it interesting are the other segments, one of the best recurring ones is the races. Two of the best were London to Oslo and across Japan. In these, one of the hosts drives a car (a McLaren Mercedes and a Nissan GTR were featured in the aforementioned races, respectively) and the other two take several forms of public transportation, including planes, boats, and trains (including the bullet train in Japan). A throughly entertaining show.

Check out: Tim Ferriss' Blog The absolute epitome of "lifehacking," the way he breaks everything down is absolutely fascinating. The method generally boils down to a "ruthless elimination of non-essentials." Especially check out the posts on learning a language.

Read: Just read Tim Ferriss' blog...

Thought: Annoyed with those people who just endlessly email you junk and just don't seem to get the message that you don't want it? Send them a link to this.

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Listen: Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love by Coldplay. I don't know why the version I have is called ".../Reign of Love," none of the versions I could find on Amazon have that. But anyway, it's a good song. It's sort of divided into two parts, I love the first part, but haven't quite gotten my head around the second part yet, it might take some time.

Watch: According to this video by MrChiCity, keeping your refrigerator stocked will get you many women...just watch it, it's pretty funny.

Check out: DropBox An online storage solution, accessible from any web browser on any platform, DropBox is especially convenient on the Mac desktop. What it does on the Mac is put a folder, called DropBox, into your User folder. You can put stuff in there, take it out, whatever, and it's all stored securely online. You get 2GB of storage for free, for a fee you can increase the storage. It works with Windows too, although I haven't tried it.

Read: Through a promotion I was offered subscriptions to a couple magazines. None on the list really got me excited, but I took a flyer on Wired magazine and I've been pretty impressed. It has some interesting stuff in it.

Thought: There needs to be some changes made to the NHL All-Star game. Problems with the game have been documented, but it just wasn't that interesting until the overtime period when people were actually trying and something was on the line. Unless this is already the case and somehow I missed it, they should at least do as they do in baseball where the winning team has home ice in the Stanley Cup finals. Maybe then the Red Wings would actually show up...  

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Listen: Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. Excellent song, excellent lyrics.

Watch: A Disquiet Follows My Soul: The second episode of the last part of the final season of Battlestar Galactica is on the SciFi Channel tonight at 10/9c. This is a great show. I almost wrote it off as just another sci-fi show for geeks. I gave it a chance, however, and it's very very good. It's won numerous awards and was even called the best drama on TV by Time Magazine. Give it a chance.

Check out: A word cloud of the key words used during Barack Obama's inaugural speech.

Read: Going off of yesterday's recommendation of Robert Baer's The Devil We Know, here are three quotes from the book to think about:

Still, Amin believes the United States misunderstands Iran by an unnecessarily wide mark. On one level, Americans are too distant from the Middle East, too naive to understand its complexities and history. On another, it's the people who show up in Washington--Iranian and Arab exiles nursing a grudge, with time on their hands and money to pay for a hotel--who influence U.S. policy by default. They color Washington's view of the world, drawing us into foreign adventures we have no business being in. (15)

...it [Iran] is a country that hides behind appearances. He went on, 'It's not the veil that blinds Iranians. It's the veil that blinds you. Americans see the turban, not the brain.' That's another thing Amin learned to do trying to explain Iran to outsiders: reduce complexities to sound bites we're comfortable with. (16)

The problem is exacerbated, as Amin said, by exiles--usually homesick Iranians who remember an Iran of their dreams. They make themselves indispensable in Washington, in its think tanks, and with Beltway contractors peddling expertise on Iran. But almost invariable the exiles' only service is to promote their own personal interests, which usually come down to changing the regime in Tehran. This is the same malign influence we saw in the fifties when the China lobby convinced us to back Chiang Kai-shek, or today with the Cuban lobby blocking reconciliation with Castro's Cuba. Iraq, though, is the real parable for exiles suckering Washington into a debacle. (17)

Thought: Apparently, I'm on the same page as those watched the inauguration address at the Foreign Policy lunch table. For us both, the highlight of the speech was this statement. Especially the last line:

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you're on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

A statement of supreme rhetorical eloquence, not to mention deeper meaning.

New Motto

I'd just like to introduce and give credit for the new motto for this blog, which you can see up there in the title bar.

I got the idea/phrase from Pseudolectual which is the blog of Dalas Verdugo. He works for Vimeo.com and the phrase was brought to my attention by Merlin Mann (yes, Merlin yet again) in this video. Interesting way to look at the world. I'm not going to expound upon it here, just watch the video.

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Listen: Today I'm going to change it up a bit and do an audiobook. Listen to Seize the Night by Dean Koontz. Excellent book, and even better job by Keith Szarabajka of reading it. This is actually the second book of a trilogy, although I happened to read this one first. The first one in the series is Fear Nothing which is also excellent. The third hasn't been relased yet, but is supposedly going to be titled Ride the Storm. Excellent writing, excellent characters, and incredibly engrossing. The unique group of main characters and their diverse back stories mesh well with a driving plotline. The main character, Christopher Snow, is a man for all seasons, yet one acquainted only with the night.

Watch: One Night in Beijing Shot by a photographer from the UK newspaper The Guardian, this is a phenomenal video of scenes from Beijing at night shot exclusively with a Canon EOS5DmkII camera. It does a lot to capture the true essence of that amazing city. Make sure to watch it in HD.

Check out: Danwei This is a great blog about "Chinese media, advertising, and urban life." If you're interested in China at all, it makes for some interesting reading.

Read: The Devil We Know: Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower by Robert Baer. This book is excellent. A thoroughly realistic approach to the Middle East, it proposes some radical shifts in policy and ideas that challenge the current conventional wisdom regarding the way forward in the region. An unrestrained analysis of the situation right now, not tainted by political obligations or tradition. It's what needs to be done, plain and simple. Baer would know too, having spent years deep in the some of the region's darker corners.

Thought: Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School Interesting food for thought...

The Current State of Me 1-21

I'm going to shamelessly steal this idea from Merlin Mann's Most Days series. He does this in a video format though, so it's not a total rip-off. Anyway, each day (or as close to each day as possible) I'm going to outline several things that I think are worth your time. Here goes:

Listen: Fall Out Boy's new album Folie a Deux. Whether justified or not, I get a lot of stick for liking these guys, but this is another good effort from the Chicagoans.

Watch: The movie Frost/Nixon is excellent. Directed by Ron Howard, it was a limited release in the US, I have no idea where to get it, but I'm sure it can be found on the Internet somewhere.

Check out: Path Finder If you consider yourself a Mac power user, or you just want more out of the Finder, consider this alternative. It's not cheap, it's $40 for a full license, but if you need more power it's worth the upgrade (they have a free 30-day trial as well). It has a positively stunning feature set and is extremely powerful.

Read: Given that Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the historic inauguration yesterday, read the full text of the "I have a Dream Speech." I hadn't read this previously but I think that it's important to know the whole thing, not just the few lines that have become immortalized.

Thought: One of the ideas that I feel was kind of lost in the shuffle during the election campaign was when Obama talked about some sort of program for high-schoolers doing community work in return for government financial aid for college. This is so simple, but so brilliant. It's this sort of reinvesting the dividend of academic success back into our communities that will go so far towards strengthening our neighborhoods.

Easy Money...And the Collapse of the American Economy

With everyone crowing about the financial collapse that we’re experiencing right now, I recently realized that I didn’t know what the real root of the problem was. Pretty much everywhere you look there were passing references to the mortgage and housing markets. Its been widely implied that this is where the crap started to hit the fan. That’s great, but what exactly happened?

So I asked some very smart people (the financial sage that is my father was a primary human source) and did some reading on the causes behind the situation we’re in now. This essay is basically what I’ve been able to synthesize from all the info that I got on the subject. There’s no serious number crunching, no economic jargon or obscure concepts, just the basic concepts explained in layman’s language. This might all be a massive oversimplification, but this is how I understand it. From all indications, it’s a correct outline of what is going on, but then again, who do you really know you can trust in times like these? Anyway, here goes...

It all started with easy money. People, Americans in particular, like to have nice places to live. Those people also, again Americans in particular, sometimes don’t live within their means (or have the slightest grasp as to what those means actually are). So these Americans, who didn’t know what their actual means were and made delusional by easy money, were looking for a place to call home.

Mortgage companies were more than happy to oblige these people looking for places to live. These companies offered extremely lax standards to get a mortgage. Requirement to submit proof of income, a crucial factor in lending because it indicates the likelihood that the loan will actually be paid back, was often one of the glaring omissions in the mortgage application. So it became commonplace that people were given mortgages on homes that were realistically way out of their price range.

The classic example of this, which is outlined in this fantastic article by Michael Lewis, is of the Mexican strawberry picker in California. This man, who spoke little or no English and had an annual income of about $14,000 was happily given a mortgage on a home worth three quarters of a million dollars. Any half-sane person realizes that there is something terribly wrong with that picture. There is an insanely high risk of default on that mortgage and in fact, default was almost a certainty. This, of course, is an extreme example and obviously not all mortgages given out were this high risk. The number that were, however, was unusually high. These types of high-risk mortgages, such as those mentioned thus far, are commonly referred to as “subprime mortgages.”

The banks, who are the ones giving out these mortgages, shuffled them all off to places like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The loans were put into big bundles to be sold. These bundles were known as “collateralized debt obligations” (or CDOs). An important thing to remember here is that the collateral on the mortgages is the property itself, which can be taken in the event of a default. For later buyers, the incentive to buy the CDOs was that there was consistent income, in the form of mortgage payments, and in the event of default the property served as collateral.

The bundles of these loans that Fannie and Freddie had assembled were then rated by a ratings agency, two of the most well known agencies are Moody’s and Standard and Poors. These agencies would assign these bundles with ratings based on the risk associated with that loan. Loans that were most likely to be paid off were rated highly and those that were a greater risk for default were rated low. Loans with a high rating might be safer because they were less likely to default, but they paid a lower interest rate. Low rated loans were riskier investments, so they paid a higher interest rate.

For our purposes here, we’ll say that highly rated investments (low risk) would be rated AAA. Mid-rated investments (medium risk) would be BBB and low rated investments (high risk) would be rated CCC. So the ratings agencies slapped these ratings on the bundles that Freddie and Fannie threw their way. In a ploy to increase the number of highly rated investments they were selling, Fannie and Freddie hit upon the idea of further dividing up the original big bundles of loans. They were sliced up based upon rating. Then each piece was rated again. So the top loans in the piece that had been rated CCC in the original bundle were now given an AAA rating. This is despite the fact that in the grand scheme of things they were originally rated as pieces of junk. This skewing of the whole rating system is prime example of one of the major places where it all went wrong.

After being rated, these bundles were sold. They were bought by institutions such as pension funds and big investment banks like Goldman Sachs, etc. Often times, those who bought the bundles took the ratings that were attached to them completely on faith, doing little investigation and analysis of their own. They assumed they were getting a safe investment. The Wall Street and other financial institutions that bought these bundles often bought them with the intention of selling them along to someone else. In addition to selling them along, many of these institutions keep them and hold them in their mutual funds and other areas.

Meanwhile, back on Main Street, trouble was brewing. The result of easy money and lax standards to acquire a mortgage is that pretty much anyone who wanted to could buy a house. Thus, home values started to drop. Then people started to default on their mortgages. This is when the fantasy started to disappear and reality set in. These mortgages that people were never going to be able to actually pay finally caught up with them.

The houses that were purchased with the loans were still acting as collateral on the loan. The only problem was that with home values dropping, no one wanted to buy the houses. So now with people defaulting left and right, and house values dropping, the institutions that purchased the bundles of mortgages (often Wall Street financial institutions) were left holding the bag. That bag was full of rotten subprime mortgages. A great metaphor for this is when the music stopped in the game of musical chairs, Wall Street (or those holding the bundles of mortgages) were left without a chair. The people who took out the loans couldn’t pay them back, and the value of the collateral on the loan (the house) was dropping like a rock.

This is essentially the situation that we find ourselves in now. Like I said previously, this was a very simplified outline of what is going on, but for me at least it’s extremely helpful to get a better idea of what is going on. And to anyone who really does know what’s going on, I apologize for the errors that are most assuredly present here, hopefully they’re not too glaring. I also hope that this shed at least a little light on what everybody is talking about these days and how we got to where we are today. I know it helped me understand it better.

Dark Days at the Emirates

Things are not right in the Arsenal side of North London. Although I still believe in Arsene Wenger's system and way of doing things, I'm beginning to have my doubts. After the loss of Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, and the rest of that team that dominated the English game through the early part of this decade, a rebuilding period is almost inevitable.

The fact that concerns me is that several glaring problems reoccur on a consistent basis. Yes, Arsenal sit 5th in the table, respectable by most standards, but I feel their current position in the league papers over the cracks that are so clearly evident in the team.

They lack any true depth. Sure, they have great young players. Aaron Ramsey, Jack Wilshire, etc. are exciting talents. But these players are prospects for 2, 3, maybe even 4 years down the road. Except for truly special players, a 17 or 18 year old can't be expected to step into an upper-echelon Premier League team and be a focal point of the side. Except for a few debatable holes, when all healthy, Arsenal have an excellent starting 11. Injuries this season, however, to players such as Tomas Rosicky, Eduardo da Silva, and now, Cesc Fabregas, have exposed a worrying lack of depth in the squad.

Going forward, Arsenal need to reassess their midfield. One of the glaring weaknesses that Arsenal have had this season, and really since Vieira left, is a dominating presence in midfield. Although Mathieu Flamini was excellent last season in the role of a holding midfielder, I feel he played it differently and served a different role than Vieira did. The role he played was more of a counterweight to Fabregas playing ahead of him. It was really a two man show in midfield. When Vieira played for the Gunners, he commanded the center of the field nearly on his own, protected the back four, and was also dangerous in his occasional forward runs.

When one looks for comparisons to the team makeup that Arsenal have right now, Barcelona comes to mind. Yes, there are many differences. Barcelona is probably the consensus best team in Europe right now and are in scintillating form that Arsenal hasn't even begun to approach this season. But, as was recently mentioned by the Spanish correspondent on the ESPNSoccernet podcast, you look at their midfield and forwards and a possible problem you could see is too many artists and not enough workers. The reality, however, is that Barcelona have Seydou Keita (as well as Yaya Toure) to anchor that midfield and provide a bit of muscle. Paraphrased from one of my favorite quotes from the commentary on Euro 2008, these two provide the steel in the silk factory that is the Barcelona midfield.

Unfortunately, Arsenal don't have that steel. They don't have that rock-solid ball winner and defensive midfielder to provide that backbone. They do, however, have plenty of silk: Fabregas, Samir Nasri, Theo Walcott, Robin Van Persie, etc. They have players like Denilson and Abou Diaby, who have shown glimpses of being able to provide that steel, but thus far they haven't been able to maintain any sort of consistency.

Aside from their personnel problems, they also have a leadership problem. William Gallas is not, and never was as far as I'm concerned, the man the lead this team. Fabregas might be, although he's still young and unfortunately got himself injured before he was really able to settle into his role as captain. What Arsenal needs is a player who can step up and take control of a game. When the team isn't playing well, or their attention seems elsewhere, they need a player who can refocus that for them. Someone cut from the Vieira or Roy Keane cloth would fit nicely into Arsenal's squad at the moment. Someone who isn't afraid to throw in a hard tackle, show a little fire and emotion, or simply stand up in the dressing room and make players accountable. There are many things that Arsenal need right now to right the ship, but in my opinion, changes are definitely in order.

Leon Panetta at CIA

Dianne Feinstein, the incoming chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a statement saying that "my position has consistently been that I believe the agency [the CIA] is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time." An aide to John D. Rockefeller IV, the current chairman of the Committee, said that his boss believes that "He [Rockefeller] has also had the long-held belief that the director of the CIA and senior intelligence officials in general need to not be from the political world." ("Democrats Cool to Panetta at CIA," The Washington Times, 1/6/09).

The ideal is always that intelligence not be mixed with politics. When these two come together in any meaningful way, it is nearly always a very dangerous combination. The reality, however, is that the CIA cannot be naive to the political scene in Washington. While the Agency studies politics in nearly every locale across the world, it cannot overlook the political scene which it serves: Washington D.C. For better or for worse if the CIA is going to do its job of providing policy makers with accurate, unbiased information successfully, the CIA has to deal with the political landscape of Washington.

To this end, the choice of Leon Panetta is a good one. As an intelligence outsider and an experienced politician, Panetta could provide a successful contrast to the career intelligence personnel he leads. Traditionally, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) has been a political appointment and the real power in intelligence matters lies with the deputy directors. It's the DCI that represents the CIA within the circles of high-ranking politicians and other figures within Washington. As someone who knows this political world, Panetta will be a good representative.

In terms of defending the Agency against its critics within the Congress and elsewhere, Panetta will also be a good choice. What really got me thinking about this topic was this article by Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer. In the article, Mr. Baer makes the excellent point that:

"The CIA will need Panetta to hold off the Senate and House intelligence committees, which are gearing up to rip into the CIA for the past eight years of renditions, secret prisons and bad intelligence on Iraq. Mistakes aside, the last thing the CIA needs is another round of overly intrusive congressional hearings like those that so badly damaged the agency in the 1970s. If today's Congress were to deliver a coup de grâce to the CIA, the Pentagon would effectively be the nation's only intelligence agency."

The way the CIA was muzzled and ostracized during the 1970s was devastating and the effects of which are still felt so many years later. Despite mistakes made, the CIA can't go through another humbling like that, an impotent foreign intelligence service is exactly what we don't need in times like these.