Noli Irritare Leones

Your brain surfing the Internet.

10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life (via my sister).

The Spam Scam Slam Game.

Britain joins the cyber security race.

Quantum cryptography: Secure cryptography is only as safe as its weakest link.

Conservative blogger Reihan Salam defends Journolist and thinks the right can learn from it.

Taiwan’s computer animated history of Sarah Palin.

The EFF on why people jailbreak their iPhones.

How Facebook is like television. (I’m not sure how far I agree with this one. As happens everywhere else, people do share the most flattering and happy things about themselves on Facebook, but it actually looks more slice of life and less cool-things-I’ve-done than the average news from my classmates in my alumni magazine.)

On the other hand, if you want to follow this advice, you probably don’t want your Facebook feed to be all about your drunken escapades and screw ups: 7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media.

Want to know how to value that charitable donation? Here’s a Salvation Army page that will help.

Predicting the Unpredictable and why worry doesn’t help you much.

Sometimes Aunt Beth wonders where she misplaced her memory. Such were her thoughts last night, as she laid out her medications for the week. She placed the orange pill bottles next to the box, with its slots for morning, noon, and night of each day of the week. Metformin for her diabetes, check. Lovastatin to lower her cholesterol, check. Calcium each day, to keep osteoporosis at bay, check. But where was the Cardizem for her blood pressure? Hadn’t she picked it up from the pharmacy just yesterday? Could she have forgotten to check?

A call to the pharmacy confirmed that they still had it. With half an hour to closing time, Aunt Beth took the back road, the dimly lighted one that winds along steep hills. Aunt Beth always says that she has young eyes, that her night vision is still as sharp as it ever was. She swerved past the Catholic abbey, past the motorcycle bar.

Aunt Beth likes the motorcycle bar. It reminds her of how she used to ride behind Cussin’ Jim, her arms wrapped around his waist, and her hair flying in the wind. Cussin’ Jim abandoned his motorcycle and Aunt Beth, in the end, to find himself at an ashram in India. But Aunt Beth still grins every time she tells the story of her favorite motorcycle rides with him.

Perhaps it was the memory of Cussin’ Jim, or perhaps the canopy of trees under which she drove, but Aunt Beth felt better, calmer, by the time she reached the pharmacy. She stood two yards back from the counter, a spot marked to allow for customer privacy, and glanced around. In front of her, a bald and red-faced man addressed the pharmacist on duty, Fatima Tehrani, brusquely. To his left, a young woman browsed the pregnancy tests. Aunt Beth wondered whether she hoped for a positive result, or feared one. A little behind her hung a chart to help in selecting reading glasses, and directly to her right stood a large picture of an elderly woman on a motorized wheelchair, posed as if racing in the Indianapolis 500 of motorized wheelchairs.

The red-faced man stalked off with his purchases. Aunt Beth approached the counter. She smiled at Fatima, asked after her family, gave her last name, though surely Fatima remembered it.

But as Fatima started to turn toward the bags with the filled orders, a young man pushed up to the counter. Aunt Beth heard a squeak from the young woman browsing the pregnancy tests. She turned and saw the glint of a handgun.

“Freeze,” said the young man to Aunt Beth, and then, to Fatima, “Give me all your cash.”

Aunt Beth could see pregnancy test woman take a couple of slow steps backward, her eyes wide with fear. Fatima remained calm. She walked to the cash register, removed money, and handed it to the man. The man placed his gun on the counter and then reached to take the money. Aunt Beth dashed in and grabbed the gun.

“Stop,” Aunt Beth said, “I’ve got his gun.”

Aunt Beth had never touched a gun before. She held the gun awkwardly, and stared at it. How do I unload this damn thing, she thought. She backed away from the counter a few steps.

The young man turned, and stepped toward her. He reached for the gun.

“Stop,” said Aunt Beth, “Don’t come any closer.”

Her hand shook as she aimed the gun slightly over his shoulder. He continued to approach, as Aunt Beth continued to back away. He knew she would never use the gun. Aunt Beth knew she would never use the gun – right up until the moment she heard it go off.

Pregnancy test woman screamed. The young man fell. Fatima picked up a phone. Only now, as Aunt Beth stared at the fallen man, did she notice just how young he looked, surely not as old as twenty, and how his hair was long and dirty blond like the hair of Cussin’ Jim.

Now it’s the day after. I came to stay with Aunt Beth as soon as she called, and have taken the day off work to fend off the media. I’ve unplugged her landline, and taken charge of her cell phone. I allow her old college roommate through, and tell reporters she’s not available. Then I play a game of solitaire on my own cell phone while Aunt Beth paces the apartment. On the top of the trash can sits the morning’s local paper. Its headline tells of a feisty old woman who fought off a robber. Aunt Beth took one look at it, and tossed it.

“Great,” she said, “Now I’m the new Bernard Goetz.”

Aunt Beth, in times of stress, will straighten and clean. I’ve seen her do this often. When grandfather had his fourth heart attack, Aunt Beth threw herself into the task of dusting his bookshelves and arranging the stacks of books on top of the shelves so that their corners perfectly aligned.

Now she goes to her stove. She takes a spray bottle that holds a cleaning formula she’s made herself, green, earth friendly, of baking soda and vinegar. She sprays the top of the stove, and attacks a grease spot. She attacks it with a sponge. She attacks it with an old toothbrush. She attacks it with a bristly pad. The spot is maybe half an inch in diameter, but in Aunt Beth’s eyes it looms large. She scrubs and scrubs.

Damn. Will that spot never come out?

Ganeida on what unprogrammed Quaker worship is like.

UUA: “Second Person Intimate” Monday morning meditation.

Commonweal on Stanley Hauerwas as a “theologian’s theologian.”

Daisy Deadhead on her growing appreciation of Buddhism.

A Muslim chaplain does interfaith work.

The Economist talks with Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, on proposed eurozone voting sanctions, the European bank stress test, and whether France has an austerity program.

Only seven of the 91 participating European banks failed the stress test. The German (and German language) magazine manager talks about the market’s reaction to the bank stress test results.

Edward Hugh at A Fistful of Euros on the European bank stress test results.

Felix Salmon on the European bank stress test results.

Also from manager: the largest Indian micro-credit financer seeks more money from the stock market, and Brüderle wants to do away with guarantees that pensions will stay at a certain level.

On crowdfunding (in Greek).

Frank Pasquale of Balkanization on Credit Scoring: Faces at the Bottom of the Bell Curve.

Chris Blattman on Development economics: shaped by the data not the question?

Paul Krugman clarifies his views on the Fed and argues that Keynes works in Asia.

Henry at Crooked Timber discusses Keynes and Germany and Keynesianism as an inadequate substitute for social democracy. The latter piece leads with a quote from Martin Wolf at the Financial Times.

Whatever the rhetoric, I have long considered the US the advanced world’s most Keynesian nation – the one in which government (including the Federal Reserve) is most expected to generate healthy demand at all times, largely because jobs are, in the US, the only safety net for those of working age.

A short documentary on experiencing psychosis.

Genes influence the long term effects of being bullied.

Media coverage of race in Obama’s first year.

Noah Milmann on why he changed his mind about same-sex marriage.

Scientists study Antarctic octopus venom.

The real pets of Orange County.

The last talk that I attended was “New Developments in the Research of Balkan Jewish Genealogy,” by Yitchak Kerem. It ran from 5:00PM-6:30PM on Wednesday, July 14th, and there were still things happening when I left; since most of the people attending the conference are staying in the hotel itself, they have sessions going pretty much from first thing in the morning till midnight.

As soon as I stepped in the room, during the few minutes before the talk began, I met someone whose ancestors, like mine, lived in Constantinople. As she and I were talking with Kerem before the talk, I mentioned that, though I didn’t have any source for the family in Constantinople, I had used the LDS microfilms to check out civil records in Thessaloniki; this is when I found out that those microfilms may have gotten lost when sent for duplicating (I’ll have to try ordering some, to find out whether this problem was temporary or still persists, since the time when they were found to be unavailable was several years ago, and the time when I used them several years before that).

Professor Yitchak Kerem is associated with the Foundation for Jewish Diversity, which focuses on the heritage of Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaism.

Few books have been written on Balkan Jewish genealogical sources. Even Jeff Malka’s book on Sephardic Jewish genealogy has very little on the Balkans. In his talk, Kerem focused only on the newer sources, both books and archives, ones that had just become available in the past few years. He covered several countries: Greece, the several countries of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, and Turkey.
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It has hit me, these past couple of years, that a lot of people on the right of the political spectrum respond to charges of racism the way I respond to quite a different sort of suggestion. For me, there’s one kind of criticism that ought to be off limits, unless you can darn well prove it. Namely, all suggestions that someone’s a less real American, or doesn’t love this country the way we do, or just loves our country’s enemies. Part of this is that I have the sense that, once it comes down to deciding who the more real and trustworthy Americans are, people like me will always be on the out side, and that being on the outside of that is something I was born to rather than something I got to choose. I’m as small town a girl as anyone by upbringing, raised in a town with only one grocery store, a volunteer fire department, and a little drug store that we kids could freely walk to and buy candy and comics. There were caves in the woods to explore, and a pond on the street where all the kids gathered to ice skate in the winter, though it belonged to one family in particular. But this very small town was a small town in the shadow of New York City, and good old small town American values, in political rhetoric, never sound as if they’re meant to include people like me, people who have lived their whole lives in either New York or California.
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Having checked out the other resources, in the afternoon and evening I went to talks. I attended three of these: The Captives Return: Descendants of Forced Iberian Converts Find Their Way Back to Judaism, by Jonina Duker, The Lost Tribes of Poland: Apostasy, Intermarriage And Jewish Genealogy, by Yale J Reisner, and New Developments in the Research of Balkan Jewish Genealogy, by Yitzchak Kerem.
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An introduction video to SCRUM in under ten minutes. To those of my readers who don’t know what SCRUM is, it’s an Agile development methodology, and Agile is a way of organizing software development that involves frequent inspection and adaption, as opposed to the slower turnaround of the waterfall methods of handling the software development cycle.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Internet Needs.

Joel and I wound our way around the street barriers – someone was filming something – to reach the parking area for L.A. Live. Our destination, the Jewish genealogy conference being held this year in LA.

I’d signed Joel up for the film only pass, and myself for the conference (but just one day out of the week – taking a whole week off so close to a software release not being a good idea). It was his ID, though, that sported the name people keep taking for Jewish. Sax, in itself, can be either a Jewish or a Gentile name, but add the Old Testament “Joel” in front, and you find yourself in line for a steady stream of Jewish-oriented junk mail. Just the other week, we got mail attempting to sell us a plot at what was advertised as the best Jewish cemetery in LA.

I, though, with my not at all Jewish sounding name, was the one whose ancestor led us to the conference. The ancestor, my father’s mother, belongs to the only Veniamin, or Benjamin, family that I’ve yet found in Thessaloniki (Salonika) that isn’t Jewish. Eleftheria Veniamin was born early in the 20th century, when Thessaloniki was still under Ottoman rule. Growing up in a city so full of Sephardic Jews that I’ve read it was known as “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” she spoke, I’ve been told, fluent Judaeo-Spanish, along with fluent Turkish and Greek. But, beyond the surname, I’ve found no evidence that my own particular family was Jewish. I have a baptismal certificate for my grandmother’s younger brother, her father and his father bear the names of Orthodox saints, and my father, when asked, thought it unlikely they’d ever been Jewish, given what he said were the low intermarriage rates in those days. Still, disentangling my own ancestors, in the civil records microfilmed by the LDS, from all the other Thessaloniki Veniamins, has led me to a Yizkor book commemorating the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, and a Sephardic Jewish genealogy mailing list, and now to this conference. And, who knows, given that Madeleine Albright learned only late in life that her own parents were Jewish, it’s always possible that my family along that line at some point was Jewish and forgot that fact. But it’s also possible that my father’s theory, that they’re a Gentile family that happened to be descended from someone named Benjamin (Dad told me the name was sometimes given to youngest sons in Greece), is the correct one.

We passed a photo display of Jewish pioneers of the old West: gold miners, an optometrist, a judge, the Emperor Norton (the source of Joel’s online nom de plume), Wyatt Earp’s wife. I’ve been to the graves of the last two, when we lived in northern California and Joel used to take me to Colma, the city of graveyards, as he photographed graves for his web site. I dropped Joel off at the room where the films were showing, and assured him that there was plenty to eat around the hotel. Then I set out to check out the conference. The Wednesday talks I had the most interest in were in the afternoon and evening, so, arriving in the late morning, I had some time to check out other parts of the conference.

The vendor room: Various tables sold books, T-shirts, jewelry, scarfs, etc. I was naturally most interested in the books. In one of them, a list of the meanings of Russian Jewish surnames, I found several possible meanings for my brother-in-law’s surname, Shostak. It could be either derived from a town named Shostaki, or from a town named Shestaki, or, my favorite, a word for someone with six fingers. True, if it’s the town, the name would give more real information about where his family came from, but I like the image of some long ago six fingered ancestor being commemorated.

The raffle: We each got two raffle tickets with our registration, which could be put in a cup for various genealogical offerings. I put both of mine in for a translation from Hebrew of a Yizkor book necrology, since I am the Yizkor book translation coordinator, for the Yizkor Book Project, for Zikhron Saloniki, a Yizkor book for Thessaloniki. I’m not the best of Yizkor book translation coordinators, since I’ve only managed to get a bit of it translated, and none for a good while, but when I tried to resign in hopes of getting a more effective person in my place, there was no one to replace me, and at least as long as I do it I can answer questions and accept offers if anyone turns up to help.

The resource room: There were several parts to this room. First, there were a bunch of books that you could borrow (within the room, and after presenting ID, with a small suggested donation). I was most interested in books related to Sephardic Jews, and so I noted that they had a couple of well known books about Sephardic genealogy by Mathide Tagger and by Jeff Malka (these particular books were also for sale in the vendor area). You could also look at some more difficult to find books, such as Yizkor books. Second, there was an Internet cafe. Third, there was a lending area for microfilms from a local LDS Family History Center. I checked whether they had the Thessaloniki civil records, where I have in the past found a number of Veniamins (both the Christian ones of my own family, and the Jewish ones who don’t seem to be related to me). They didn’t. I would later hear from the speaker for the talk on Balkan Jews that these microfilms became inaccessible some years after I used them, when the LDS sent them to be copied; I can only hope that they weren’t at the conference only because no one had requested them, and not because they’re still inaccessible, because they were a really good resource when I used them.

But the part of the resource room where I wound up spending my time was a set of computers that had been set up to access a University of Southern California collection of videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors. You could search this location by location, name, language, etc. I started with an interview, in Greek, with a woman in Larissa (who looked rather like my father’s sister). Greek is only my third best language, so I was able to make out some of it, where she described her family, talked about how beautiful the synagogue had been, and some sort of dessert they used to make. But when she got to talking, for example, about a bris, all I could make out was that one repeated word, and not whatever else she was saying about it. So, partway through the interview, I bailed and went to another, in German (my second best language), for the satisfaction of listening to a foreign language where I can understand nearly every word. After that, I checked out an interview in English, but of someone from Thessaloniki, and one in Ladino, just to hear what it sounds like (I know my grandmother could speak it, but no one since her, in our family, has spoken it). Ladino sounded mostly like Spanish, with a touch of French, and I could actually make a bit of it out, from the Spanish that anyone picks up who lives in California for a while (though I understand Spanish rather less well than I understand Greek). By the time I had listened to parts of four interviews (I plan to go back to the site on the net and listen to a couple of them again, this time all the way through), it was time for the talks. But not without being snagged first on the way by …

The blood marrow registry: The people at this table had swabs for your cheeks and a form to fill out, with the usual list of questions about health and how to contact you. They approached Joel separately, but of course he had to decline, because with his multiple health problems and medications, you really don’t want him to donate anything to you, medically speaking. I, though, got listed, and then went on to the talks. I’ll tell you about those in my next post.

Since I Write Like is making the rounds among my blog and Facebook and Twitter friends, I was curious to see how consistent it is in who it says I resemble. So I fed it text from three blog posts, one blog post in progress, eleven short stories, one novel, and two screenplays, for eighteen total different texts. The results are that I write like the following authors once each: Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Anne Rice, J. K. Rowling, James Joyce, Daniel Defoe, and Chuck Palahniuk. I write like the following authors twice each: Stephen King, Dan Brown, Isaac Asimov, David Foster Wallace, and H. P. Lovecraft. I’m sure this analysis says something about my writing style, but I’m not sure what.

Now for the Andre Braugher round up, since my Google feed has had more than the usual amount of stories about him lately.

Andre Braugher talks about his Emmy nomination for “Men of a Certain Age.”

Which episodes the various competitors have submitted for that Emmy statue (for Braugher, it’s “Powerless,” where Owen Thoreau has to deal with the city bureaucracy over his house having its electricity cut off).

The first season of “Men of a Certain Age” comes out on DVD.

“Superman Batman: Apocalypse” will be available from Warner Home Video on September 28th; Braugher is playing the villain Darkseid.

Salt, in which Andre Braugher plays a Secretary of Defense, is coming out in just a few days (starring Angelina Jolie and Liev Shrieber).

Next post will be an account of one day at the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies Conference in Los Angeles. But first, just to be self-referential, I’m feeing this post into I Write Like. And, once again, I write like Dan Brown.

Paul Krugman thinks the Fed is feckless for not doing more to fight off the threat of deflation, and lists some things the Fed could still do, when conventional monetary policy reaches its limit.

Neil Irwin, at the Washington Post’s new political economy blog, explains why the Fed won’t be doing any of these things.

Ezra Klein thinks it boils down to the Fed not taking the current situation seriously enough.

Steve Waldman thinks that an emphasis by macroeconomists on containing “sticky prices” has led to an overemphasis on making sure that wages don’t increase.

… If my tone betrays a certain disdain for this account, that is because, in my view, central bankers have used it to harm people and blame the victims. The policy regime that we have crowed over from Volcker through Bernanke and Trichet “naturally” led to the conclusion that (1) central banks should stabilize inflation, so that predictable price adjustments are mostly sufficient to keep things in equilibrium; and (2) that central banks ought to focus especially on stabilizing the stickiest prices, leading to distinctions between overall and “core” inflation. Among the stickiest prices, of course, is the wage rate. In practice, from the mid 1980s right up through 2008, the one thing modern central bankers absolutely positively refused to tolerate was “inflation” of wages. God forbid there be an upcreep in unit labor costs, implying that a shift in the income share away from capital and towards workers. Central banks jack up interest rates right away, because what if the change in relative prices is a mistake? We wouldn’t want that to stick, oh no no no no no. But when the capital’s share of income shifted skyward while deunionization and globalization sapped worker bargaining power? Well, we learned the meaning of an asymmetric policy response.

Even today, now that it has all come apart, economists maintain a laser-like focus on the stickiness of wages. Why can’t Greece compete? Because its “cost structure” has grown too high. In English, that means people expect to be paid too much. The solution is “adjustment”: workers’ real wages must be reduced to restore competitiveness….

Felix Salmon wonders, Can behavioral economics cause real harm?

Brad DeLong quotes Dylan Matthew on the Congressional Deficit Turkey Vultures.

Megan McArdle thinks we should Just Say No to Extending the Bush Tax Cuts.

A link from back in February: Former CBO director Alice Rivlin on Moving to a Fiscally Sustainable Budget.

The Economist writes on Forget it! A study involving children’s car seats suggests that consumers might be better at filtering out bad information than previously thought.

What is Voice of Kibera?

Economist on new online giants, including one in Africa.

A motorbike that runs on dung.

Just a few quick links while I wait for Joel to get ready for us to leave for a conference that has nothing whatsoever to do with liquidity traps or anything else in this post.

Greeks take to social media like Facebook and Twitter to react to the fiscal crisis and austerity measures. Also, the Acropolis is closed in a dispute over unpaid wages.

Hannelore Kraft, the new Minister-President in North Rhine Westphalia, is increasing deficits while her colleagues in other German states look for budget cuts.

Edward Hugh on Oh It’s All Gone Quiet Over In The Eurozone!

We all know that the Federal Reserve raises and lowers interest rates. But what else does it do?

Paul Krugman explains the liquidity trap.

Joseph E. Gagnon, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, on what monetary policy can still be effective in a liquidity trap (written in November 2009, but still seems relevant).

I hope our good Alexandria blog master will forgive my tweaking him a bit with this headline. I don’t, of course, mean it seriously. It’s just that his and Scott’s remarks, on my last post, questioning my argument that federal aid to states in a recession is warranted, reminded me of a certain long ago incident, involving a request by New York City for federal loans.

Those of us of a certain age will remember the incident, and the rest of you may have heard of it. It happened while Ford was president, that New York City ran into financial trouble, and asked the US government for loans to bail it out. Ford expressed some reluctance to supply the loans, and the New York Daily News related this reluctance with a headline surely more colorful than what Ford actually said: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”
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Here’s where I try, with my limited understanding of economics, to work out my thoughts on two distinct matters: protectionism, and debt.
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I’m working offline on a post on trade deficits and debt, but that’s taking a while. So, in the meantime, here are some links so you don’t think I’ve dropped off the net.

Fun links:

18 Geekiest Cake Designs.

Emmy Award nominees this year. (Go, Andre Braugher! He’s been nominated for his role in Men of a Certain Age.)

Serious links:

Our aging infrastructure.

Vaccination rate lags as an epidemic spreads ImmunizeCOKids, from whom I got the link, remarks, “Consequences of not vaccinating are not strictly personal.”

And, where I’m going to be the day after tomorrow:

The 30th IAGJS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, going on right now in Los Angeles. This will be happening all week, but I just picked one day to attend, because we’re getting a software release out, so taking more than one day off in July seems like a bad idea. Eventually, I’ll blog about whatever I see there.

I have simple tastes, here. One is that I don’t go watch a movie that everyone I know seems to be giving a bad review to. For this reason, I haven’t yet watched, or read, any of the Twilight franchise, and so am not really qualified to declare a team.

On the other hand, I have simple tastes, here. Number one, I like to look at shirtless men more than I like to look at men wearing shirts. Number two, you can either be fair or dark – it’s truly OK if you’re naturally blond like Brad Pitt and, like Brad Pitt, have the complexion to go with it. But if your skin looks paler to me than the skin I’d expect to go with your hair and eyes, or if your skin looks paler to me than the skin I’d expect to go with an actual human being, I don’t find that sexy.

So, since Twilight’s mythos apparently involves applying make up to vampires to make them even whiter than they otherwise would be, and getting werewolves to take off their shirts at every opportunity, I’m weighing in for Team Jacob, on looks alone.

From my sister: Phys Ed: What Exercise Science Doesn’t Know About Women.

Also from my sister: Overcoming the Mental Barriers to Equal Pay (Harvard Business Review).

Matrix: Building and Managing Your Online Career Reputation (Unvarnished, LinkedIn, Blogs, and More).

Bruce Schneier: The Threat of Cyberwar Has Been Grossly Exaggerated.

In one corner: James Fallow had a piece called “How Not to Be a Bully Coward,”

When I was in college I worked on a project for Ralph Nader, long before his days as a presidential candidate. One evening he gave me his own graybeard lecture, from his venerable position as a man who had reached his mid-30s. (A picture from those days at left, though not by me.) He said that a really unattractive personality type was the journalistic bully-coward. That is, the person who breathes absolute fire when sitting at the keyboard, but skulks away nervously if he catches sight of someone he’d so fearlessly denounced from the writer’s chair.

Yes, this kind of person existed even before the blog age! This obvious part of the message was: think about how you write. But the other part was: think about how you are. Nader very definitely did not mean that you should never criticize people harshly or in writing. He meant (to shift ethnic registers—his background is Lebanese) that you should be a mensch about it. Minimize the gap between “to your face” versus “behind your back” discourse. Be willing to encounter people you’ve criticized.

No one fully eliminates the gap. Not many normal people enjoy the face-to-face meetings with those they’ve said harsh things about—Andrew Sullivan’s account of House of Commons-style verbal-combat kabuki notwithstanding. But I think both halves of that Nader recommendation are useful. Write as if you might run into the person afterwards. And when you run into people, be comfortable owning up to what you’ve said and where you disagree.

Ta-Nehisi Coates agrees with Fallows, referencing the rap slang “Shook One,” for “a coward who can be caught pretending to be braver than they actually are.”

The point here isn’t to not hold people you write about accountable, or to lapse into mealy-mouthed “on the other hand”-ism. It is as, Jim says, to minimize the gap. If you know something is right and your find yourself shrinking from saying it when in the presence of certain company, then you should speak louder—though your voice may shake. If you find yourself hurling epithets behind the keyboard, but meek in the presence of your subjects, then you should reconsider your faith in those epithets.

In the other corner: Michael Kinsley disagrees with Fallows’ ideal.

… Fallows has a simple solution. He says that you shouldn’t write anything about anybody that you would be reluctant to say to their face. He says he was taught this by Ralph Nader. But it’s an impossibly high standard. It requires either too much tact or too much courage.

Social interaction depends crucially on people not saying what’s on their minds. (God, you’re ugly. Where did you get that hideous tie? I hate your last book/new husband/lasagna.) People who insist on telling the truth about these things are jerks and boors. People who routinely lie about them are slick and oily. The only sensible thing is to avoid the subject. But if you’ve written about it, your mere presence in the room brings the subject up. Yet not to write about these subjects is no solution. There are important things that need to be said but don’t need to be said in the presence of those who might not care for them.

Therefore, young writers, ignore Fallows’s advice….

My heart is with Fallows and Coates, on this. But Kinsley’s piece reminded me of something else. Just a little before I’d read Fallows, I’d been reading quite a different argument, this one about the common tendency to have two online personas, a more buttoned down, professional, Linked In sort of online persona, and a more social, Facebook sort of online persona. The article (and I didn’t preserve it, but you can find this kind of advice in lots of places) was pushing for removing the gap between those two personas. The argument, in this case, wasn’t a moral one, like Fallows’ argument about not being a bully coward, but a practical one: employers are going to Google you and find everything about you anyway. But, reading it, I had a similar reaction to this professional advice to Kinsley’s reaction to Fallows. That it’s unrealistic. That no one can live that way. That I can’t confine my whole online social and public life to what’s appropriate to a certain kind of occasion.

I’m not thinking, here, about the drunken photos that I could theoretically be posting on Facebook (they’re not really an issue, since I don’t drink). I’m thinking of, for example, politics. There’s no way I’d show up at a job interview wearing an Obama/Biden button. I’d expect it to be found inappropriate. But there’s no way I’m going to stop talking publically, on my blog, on Twitter, and on Facebook, about my political views, just because sometime or other in the future some prospective employer might Google me, and like me a little less on finding out what my politics are.

Similarly, I do tell personal stories, not especially racy ones, but ones that reference what I actually did in college, when talking about, say, sex or drugs. (What I did in college: slept with more than one person, smoked a little pot, tried cocaine once and don’t recommend it, tried magic mushrooms once, tried nitrous oxide once, listed all of this that was required after I got out of college on my security clearance application at my first job and still got the clearance, but saw one coworker fail to get a clearance because, he said, he looked at his watch when asked when he had last smoked pot.) There’s a limit to how dry I’m going to make the blog, in fear of some hypothetical future employment prospect.

Still, the way I see it, everything I say is under the same name, most of what I say is either public or shared with enough people that it could become public at some point, and I’m not about to say things that I’m not willing to own up to. I say plenty online that I wouldn’t say in a purely professional setting, and plenty that I wouldn’t say on a particular occasion (I’m not obliged, for instance, to only say about a public figure what I’d say if I were a guest at his or her wedding). But I don’t think I should say something about someone else that I would be too embarrassed to own up to to his or her face, and I don’t think I should fear to acknowledge, in person, something that I’ve already said (and quite openly, at that) online.

The first thing to say is that, if Mom is reading this post, the one of the two movies that she wants is Butterfly (or Papillon), the French movie with the upbeat ending about the crusty old man who collects butterflies getting conned by an eight-year-old girl into taking him on his collecting trip to Switzerland. The one she does not want is Primal Fear, the blood-spattered twisty thriller about the murder of a Chicago archbishop.

The second thing is that both movies pass the Bechdel Test. Butterfly passes the test for conversations between the eight-year-old girl and her mother, and Primal Fear passes it for a female district attorney cross-examining a female psychiatrist.

Beyond that …

Butterfly: The plot of the movie is driven by two things: the crusty old man’s need to collect one particular rare butterfly during the only three days a year within which it flies, and the mother’s hunt for her missing daughter, whom she believes to be kidnapped (the crusty older man thinks he’s taking care of his neighbor’s daughter while she’s away). The larger theme is parent-child relationships: the man’s with his dead son, the girl’s with her mother, and the grandparent/grandchild-like relationship of the man and the girl. The tone is generally light and comic, despite the dead son and the threat of arrest.

Primal Fear: More plot driven that character driven, this is the kind of movie where you’re not supposed to give away the end, or the several twists that get you there. It shares with Adam’s Rib the twist of having the DA and defense attorney share a romantic past (though in this case they’re ex-lovers who had a non-too-friendly breakup, not spouses), but definitely doesn’t share that movie’s screwball comedy nature. Though it’s mainly a twisty thriller, two characters in particular raise questions that the movie needs to settle: Just how innocent really is the accused altar boy (played by Edward Norton)? And just how unscrupulous is the arrogant defense attorney (played by Richard Gere)?

Since I rented this one for Andre Braugher, I’ll add that he plays a second tier character, Richard Gere’s assistant, and kind of a foil to the Gere character, in that he’s the one to point out, in the internal defense attorney office discussions, all the reasons why the altar boy may be guilty, while Gere gets to argue all the reasons why he may be innocent. He also gets to wrestle a prospective witness a couple of times.

Since I linked that piece in the Economist on austerity, the one that was arguing that the Keynesian side of the argument and the austerity side of the argument were sort of equally wrong, I feel bound to link Brad DeLong’s and Paul Krugman’s responses:

Brad DeLong argues that the Economist’s suggestion that

For example, firms across the rich world are hoarding cash. Their reluctance to invest may have more to do with regulatory, financial and fiscal uncertainty than weak consumer demand…. If governments address those worries, businesspeople may start spending.

is readily proven wrong.

If businessmen fear regulatory, financial, and fiscal uncertainty, then–since businessmen are also investors–investors fear regulatory, financial, and fiscal uncertainty. Fiscal uncertainty raises interest rates on government debt: you don’t know how depreciated the currency you will be paid back in is, or what the tax rate on your interest and principal will be, and so you demand a high interest rate before you lend to the government. Similarly with regulatory and financial uncertainty: they both make moving purchasing power from the present in the future by lending to the government risky.

and then quotes the Economist’s Buttonwood blogger to show that interest rates on government bonds are pretty darn low.

Paul Krugman, meanwhile, responds to the Economist’s suggestion that he is a “crude Keynesian” with a post titled I’m Gonna Haul Out The Next Guy Who Calls Me “Crude” And Punch Him In The Kisser. But I still say my favorite recent post title from him is In The Long Run, We Are Still All Dead.

For any of you who may be interested in reading Keynes himself, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is available as an eBook.

And I’ve just learned through development blogger Chris Blattman that the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which he says is really spiffy, is now free on the web.

My Alexandria co-blogger Steve asked if Nollywood films had made it to the US, so I checked Netflix. I have good news and bad news on that front. The bad news is that, for all that I keep seeing articles at AllAfrica.com about the rise of Nollywood, the Nigerian movie industry, there really don’t seem to be a lot of Nigerian films available on Netflix. In fact, I have yet to find any. The good news is that Netflix does have “Africa” as a genre, and you can find a bunch of African movies there, including movies from South Africa, Senegal, and Mali, among other countries. Three of them I’ve actually rented and watched.

Tsotsi: A ruthless thug finds himself in the position of taking care of an infant whom he has accidentally kidnapped, after shooting the mother to escape in her car. The baby care proves redemptive. (South African movie.)

Yesterday: The first Zulu language movie to be released internationally, this South African movie concerns a woman in a small village who finds out that she is HIV positive. With her husband in denial, and the town now fearful of both of them, Yesterday finds courage to continue her struggle by resolving that she will survive at least long enough to see her daughter start school.

Abouna: Two boys from a small village in Chad set out to find their absent father, and wind up in trouble.

I liked all of these movies, and would recommend any of them.

I also found a Nollywood movie web site that sells DVDs of Nollywood movies, and an African film web site which lists screenings of African films, including African diaspora film events this month in New York City and Washington, DC.

On a totally unrelated note, I give you the latest on Vanessa Williams and Andre Braugher, just because. Vanessa Williams, in case you haven’t already heard, has landed on her feet after the end of Ugly Betty, and is soon to become a Desperate Housewife. And Andre Braugher will be playing Darkseid in Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. Braugher will also be playing the Secretary of Defense in Salt. (I’ve been seeing, for months, announcements that he would be in Salt, but till now I wasn’t sure whether to believe them, since the IMDB listing initially didn’t seem to show him. But I checked IMDB today, and there he is, so I guess it was just a glitch when I didn’t see him earlier.)