As the economy (read: capitalism) falters, almost no one is surprised by learning that the government has used taxpayers’ dollars unwisely.  The level of lack of wisdom can turn such stories into the stuff of farce.  Some imagine Washington, D.C. populated by numerous people with Ivy League educations who work for the federal government.  Perhaps George Bush’s Yale degree undermined a bit the perception of D.C. as a marshland of mental giants.  Readers can doubtless come up with examples from numerous political parties that would demonstrate a deficit of perspicacity in D.C. over the years.

“I was told to shut up,” he told Playboy. “I was saying, ‘This is crazy. This is embarrassing.’. . . I said, ‘Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.’ They wouldn’t even do that. And I was screaming, ‘You gave these people fucking money?’”

Another example has come to light involving U.S. security measures.  The government spent a hefty sum to a man who claimed he was a smarter version of Jack van Impe and Rexella, able to detect hidden messages about terrorist attacks by paying special attention to broadcasts by Al Jazeera.  Reading the tale, you can learn a great deal about what works rhetorically in D.C. when someone wishes to extract money from the government for one’s personal gain.  One rhetorical maneuver involves fashioning the message that what one is offering for payment is exactly what the other party is seeking, except you cannot offer a layperson’s explanation of what is being offered, because “it’s technical.”  This appeal to complexity to turn off an audience’s skepticism can also be used by the victim’s of the rhetorical maneuver as evidenced by the following quotation from one of the D.C. victims quoted in the article:

“It didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility,” she said. “We were relying on technical people to tell us whether or not it was feasible. I don’t regret having acted on it.”

The government giveth (even to crackpots), and the credit card companies taketh away.  You might be unable to locate people who think well of credit card companies, and you will now have more reasons to understand the scarcity of such people.  The credit card companies and their capitalist supporters have justified the high rates, in part, by claiming that the companies take a great credit risk by issuing credit cards to the general population, and especially to those at the lower end of the income spectrum.  That rhetorical move by the credit card companies aims to appeal to common sense notions of financing, and moves most audiences away from a picture of credit that would show that the credit card companies choose to charge astronomical credit rates, because they simply want to make more profit, not because they are protecting themselves from the greater risks attached to offering credit to the poor or to those teetering on financial solvency.  Just as bank executives and Wall Street companies do not want the government to cap bonuses for their CEOs, credit card companies balk at talk of caps on credit card rates.

If you’re currently paying 29.99% on your credit card, that’s not because it’s the minimum level at which you’re profitable for the bank: rather, it’s because it’s the level at which you’re maximally profitable for the bank. Big difference. There’s a very good chance the bank would make money charging you 16%, too — just not as much money.

Screenshot of Blio software

Wired offers a story about the coming of Blio, some software by Mr. Kurzweil that will demonstrate that software has the capacity to make some hardware unnecessary.  Why would you have a separate, dedicated device for e-books when you could have a book-like experience on a device you already have (smart phone, PC, etc.)?  It is interesting that Blio attempts, as far as I can tell, to preserve the book experience while supplementing it, and thus is not innovative on one level.  It does not appear as if Blio wants to transform our notions of what it means to read, say, in the way that the iPhone changed the way people thought about and used telephones.  We also have the model, in both Western and Eastern cultures, of reading scrolls, and scrolling is still part of the digital world.  What will happen when reading jumps a level to an unexpected realm? Is reading waiting to undergo a dimensional shift that technology could provide?

La Belle Dame Sans Merci from David Soden on Vimeo.

You will recall from Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” a story that has received a great deal of theoretical attention the past few decades, including a lengthy piece by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, that the best way to hide something is to place it in plain sight.  That is, many people do not see what is right in front of them, perhaps especially when they imagine that the thing they are looking for would be hidden.

In an experiment that you can watch below, the experimental space is labeled with a big sign, indicating that the experiment is happening where the sign is:  “Experiment here.”  Yet, 75% of the people in the experiment do not notice a few things that we (those who know what is happening) might consider obvious.

Stieg Larsson

Are you itching to read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, the last installment of “The Millennium Trilogy”?  Maybe you read Christopher Hitchens’ recent article about Larsson, and that elevated your curiosity, but you saw that Larsson’s novel would not be available in the U.S. until late spring of 2010. Now, you can have your own copy for free this month (the copy will be mailed to the chosen person on December 28). Here is how to obtain your own copy of Larsson’s novel as part of the effort to bring the masses to TFP.  (1) You produce a comment to this post explaining in stereophonic detail what you like about TFP. (2) Ensure in your comment that the editor of this space will be able to contact you, in case you are the chosen one.  The editor will make a judgment on December 22 about the best post for this topic, and then make an announcement on TFP, so that the lucky person will have a copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest to kick off the new year. Is it a coincidence that 2010 will be the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese calendar?

In an earlier post on TFP about banning the word “robust” from a conference called Internet Librarian, I had imagined the excessive use of the word was a local phenomenon.  It turns out that “robust” constitutes a kind of long-term cultural blip.  Bruce Reed in Slate, for example, provides links to a number of sources where “robust” has become robust, though his focus is “robust” as a buzzword in health care reform.  However, even five years ago, another author grumbled about the overuse of “robust” by researchers in hematology.  This blip in the usage of a particular word deserves study by someone who might be able to provide an explanation, someone like a David Crystal.

Maybe one explanation is that “robust” is blowin’ up:

Andrew Sorkin has been studying the financial meltdown on Wall Street, followed by the epic financial bailout on Wall Street, and Jon Stewart thought erroneously that some lessons might have been learned, and that people might have adjusted their views on capitalism.  Sorkin informs Stewart in the interview that Wall Streeters still think “greed is good.”  Watch the interview.  As further confirmation of the repetition compulsion in the financial sector, Michael Douglas will appear in a 2010 film called Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.  The Sorkin assessment counts as something more than plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, because Obama claimed to be the presidential candidate of change.

In one of my classes, we have been reading about the Roman notion of persona, and the conscious exploitation of appearances among rhetoricians.  The Romans had little problem with masks, and Cicero confirms this in several places, including De Oratore:

A memory for the concrete is the unique possession of the orator; we are able to imprint this memory on our minds when the individual masks [singulis personis] have been well ordered, so that we assimilate ideas by means of images and their sequence by means of places (2.359).

Carlin Barton, the historian, makes this more plain in her book Roman Honor:

As a mortal, what one risked in the contest was one’s ‘face.’ Latin facies (from facere, to be effective, to pose, place, make) was not like our ‘face,’something one was born with; it was something that one made, that one willed into existence. It was the manifestation of one’s being, the thing presented to view, the spectacle (56).

The classicist Maud Gleason in Making Men: Sophists and Their Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome tells us that “Dio Chrysostom, for example, frequently adopted the personae of great persons of the past in his orations and showed a particular fondness for presenting himself in the guise of Diogenes, Socrates, or Odysseus” (151).

In an article from Friday’s Guardian by John Hooper, he explains that Amanda Knox and her legal advisors apparently did not realize that the Italy of Cicero’s time corresponds in some interesting ways to the Italy of the present, especially in terms of attachments to appearances. Hooper puts it this way: “But then she [Amanda Knox] is a daughter of the US west coast, with its laid-back, be-yourself ethos, so very different from that of provincial Italy where the accent is on figura (appearances).”

John Heilemann in New York magazine wins the award for line of the day:

It hasn’t actually been quite that long, of course, but the memory of Obama’s joyous inauguration seems distant indeed—as the lofty image of a candidate with such potential that he seemed to walk on air has given way to the reality of a president neck-deep in a pile of …

Oh, the end of the sentence has these words: “epochal problems.”