Oh House! Not Another Anti-hero

Oh no! Last night on Fox Dr. Gregory House just decided to cop a plea on his forging of prescriptions for the prescription painkiller Vikodin, but when he turned up at the detective’s office, it was no deal.

Why? Because the acerbic House had signed for a dead patient’s prescription for painkiller, and the DA was going to hang him on that instead of the testimony of colleague Dr. James Wilson.

But the next exciting episode of Fox’s hit series House M.D. won’t be aired until January! How are House fans supposed to wait until then?

OK, so this was my first experience of House, on account of visiting my sister in Colorado to celebrate the 90th birthday of our mother. I had no idea, no idea about House at all, until she introduced me to her addiction. Of course, I never watch network TV. Never.

House M.D. is certainly a fully modern TV experience. It has an anti-hero in the title role, a crew of main characters right out of diversity camp, and the eternal chick draw of loved ones with their lives at stake.

Gregory House is said to be modeled on Sherlock Holmes (Holmes, House, get it?) and that raises the interesting idea that Arthur Conan Doyle was a writer before his time. Who thought about anti-heroes in Britland back at the turn of the twentieth century? Well, Conan Doyle did.

But I am underwhelmed by yet another anti-hero. I mean, haven’t we done that already?

Instead I am waiting with baited breath for the end of the anti-hero era. What is it that makes the anti-hero such a necessity in our era? Is it the pervasive power of government, the endless rules, that Gregory House must overturn if he is to get anything done?

And we will leave aside the utterly unbelievable careerist female physicians in the series. Sorry, pal. Women just aren’t like that. Never were, never will be.

Here is the nagging question for me. Why are we lying to ourselves so compulsively, lying about the provenance of anti-heroes in an age of stifling conformism, and lying about women who act and talk just like men—except when the plot requires a dose of tear-jerking emotion?

What is it? And what will it take to break out of the Age of Lies into a new age?

I know. Every age is an age of lies, because life is a lie: the eternal hope that rises irrepressibly every morning against the inescapable fact of death.

But I’m ready for the dawning of the age of the New Hero, whatever that may be, and whoever he may be.

God Bless the Secular Fundamentalists

Did you know that we live in an age when the achievements of science and technology are under attack from religious extremism as never before? Then the Center for Enquiry (CFI) is for you. As CFI’s home page puts it:

Although modern world civilization is based upon the achievements of science and technology, until this time there has been no authoritative and credible voice defending the scientific outlook in examining religion, human values, and the borderlands of science.

Oh dear, writes Father Thomas Berg on NRO. Where do we start? The fact is that religion is not necessarily opposed to science and reason. Catholicism, for instance, is a 2000-year-old effort to develop a reasoned religion. And anyway, Berg writes,

it may come as a surprise to many secularists that their unquestioned faith in the possibility of an objective, “scientific” approach to life, cleansed of “religious ideology”, is itself an ideological hangover from the Enlightenment, one that has been long since de-legitimized by contemporary thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty.

Secularists miss the big point, and make the fundamental category error of conflating the “Is” and the “Ought.” Science can do wonders illuminating the “Is,” but it has little to tell us about the “Ought.” RMC Chappie F.S.C. Northrop has a whole book devoted to this problem. It is called The Complexity of Legal and Ethical Experience. He was a professor of law and philosophy at Yale who flourished in the mid-twentieth century.

We know, as well as we can know, that we live in an amazing universe, and we know how it works, especially in the realm close to our everyday lives. But the big question is: What does it all mean? And closely allied to that question is: How should we live?

The basic problem is that science cannot provide answers to these questions. To know the answers would be to know the destiny of the human race, to have reduced the universe to a deterministic problem. Hence religion; hence “belief systems.” Berg again:

If secularists want to have a meaningful voice in the public square — and not a preposterous one — then we invite them to be attentive students of history, and with intellectual honesty to recognize that Christianity in particular has a lengthy track record of contributing to the very goals that secularists profess to be seeking: beliefs grounded in reason, an ethics sustained by reasonable moral discourse, advances in human knowledge, and the general betterment of human life.

Of course, monstrous things have been done in the name of religion. But then monstrous things have been done in the name of science and reason.

The basic problem with the secularists is that they are utterly unreflective on the basic articles of their faith. (And yes, they do have a faith.) Their faith is so immediate and obvious to them that they aren’t even aware of their assumptions. They bandy about terms like “medical ethics” and “ethical foreign policy” as if these concepts were fully decided and that all reasonable people agreed upon them.

What do you call a faith like that? How about “secular fundamentalism?”

The Hydra-headed Diversity Monster

Maybe it would help if the United States Supreme Court would make up its mind one way or another. And maybe it will in the next few years.
Unfortunately, right now, diversity is metastasizing like cancer, as articles in NRO by Frederick M. Hess make only too clear.

It’s an irony, if you like, that back in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that it was unjust for a little black girl to be bussed across town instead of attending the school near her home. Now the highly advanced educationists of the twenty-first century are doing the same as the segregationists of the Old South. They are bussing little kids around in accordance with their race theories. Writes Thomas Sowell:

The racial dogmas have changed since 1954 but they are still dogmas. And flesh-and-blood children are still being sacrificed on the altar to those dogmas.

In the Solid South, the dogma was that little white children shouldn’t be soiled with black children in their class. Now the dogma is racial “diversity,” that children benefit from a critical mass of racial diversity in their class.

What are those “compelling” benefits of “diversity”? They are as invisible as the proverbial emperor’s new clothes. Yet everyone has to pretend to believe in those benefits, as they pretended to admire the naked emperor’s wardrobe.

The trouble is that diversity is digging deep roots in the educational bureaucracy. In Washington State, where voters passed a law forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, diversity is big business.

In 2004, Washington State University created an office of the “vice president for equity and diversity” that has an annual budget of $3 million and a full-time staff of 55.

...

Washington State’s equal-employment office (called the Center for Human Rights) coordinates with faculty committees to encourage minority hiring.

To show how big all this is, there is now a National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

Well, call it what you will, diversity or a racial spoils system, it isn’t going to improve relations between the races. What encourages amity between the races is the knowledge that race will not be a factor in hiring and promotion, that people will be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character.

The only good thing is that the people of the United States of America hate racial preferences, even if their lords and master love them.

And why wouldn’t they? When you run a government bureaucracy it is too much like hard work to be held accountable for the quality of your hires. Much better to be required to hire women and minorities according to quotas or diversity criteria. Then, so long as you keep your quotas up, nobody can blame you if your little fiefdom doesn’t actually do anything useful.

Home Mortgage Market: Crash or Bounce?

Perhaps the most radical change in the financial markets in the last generation has been the securitizing of home mortgages, the bundling of home mortgage obligations into mortgage bonds which are then sold to investors.

But Lewis Ranieri, the Wall Street guy who is credited with creating the market is worried that risky mortgages are creating a problem, according to Patrice Hill.

Banks and mortgage brokers have been passing along to unwary investors as much as $600 billion a year in risky mortgages they made through untested channels in the junk-bond market. That raises the threat of a financial crisis beyond the ability of the Federal Reserve to remedy.

Now the point here is that this is not the same as banks holding risky mortgages. Banks are uniquely vulnerable financial institutions because they inherently make promises they cannot keep. They promise to pay to their lenders (depositors) on demand monies that they have lent out long term. They cannot pay back all their creditors at once. If mortgages held by a bank go bad then there is a risk of systemic financial failure, like in the Great Depression.

But mortgage bonds are different. If the mortgages behind an issue of mortgage bonds go bad then only the bondholders suffer the losses. There just isn’t the same level of systemic risk.

Obviously, there is still risk.

Bank regulators told the National Housing Forum here yesterday that they have found major banks punting to investors questionable mortgages they could not legally keep in their own loan portfolios. Mr. Ranieri said brokers on Wall Street have raised the risks by repackaging the mortgages in deceptive and opaque ways so that the small investors and foreigners who buy them are unable to understand the risks.



"No securities market can stand if we do not have true disclosure, and we do not have true disclosure" of the growing risks of exotic mortgages whose payments can double overnight and force buyers into default, said Mr. Ranieri.

The financial markets are in the business of selling paper. And they do what it takes to get the paper out there. No doubt, stuff “gets sold to the public and to foreign investors who don't have a clue what to look for.” Happens all the time. And willy-nilly, the fact that a mortgage bond has junk-bond status should be telling the investor something.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, seems unconcerns about the risks. “If a few speculators get burned, that's just icing on the cake.”

Probably the big take-away is that

Some banks are selling the questionable loans to investors to avoid keeping them in their portfolios, where they would be unacceptable to regulators.

That is exactly what bank regulation is supposed to do. The systemic risk of bank default is due to the concentration of risk in a few financial insstitutions. But when the risky mortgages are sold to investors then the systemic risk is removed. The concentrated risk proposition is diluted as the risk is allocated to thousands of bond holders.

Of course, the question: is how many public employee pension funds have picked up the risky mortgage bonds? And then there are Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae, the government sponsored mortgage-bond issuers, who are already in trouble with their financial shenanigans. But then in the worst case taxpayers would have to pick up the shortfall. And who cares about them?

The real risk is that if the sub-prime mortage market contracts sharply then the reduced supply of mortages will be reflected in further house price declines. That would turn off the home equity ATMS. And that could spread to the whole economy.

Bush Pulls Iraqi Puppet-strings

Is this the light at the end of the tunnel, or too little too late?

The New York Times reports that the Iraqi political parties are in talks to limit the power of militia leader Moktada al-Sadr.

According to Edward Wong, the US is “working hard to help build the coalition” to dislodge al-Sadr.

This is not good news. What we would like to hear is that the Iraqi politicians are fed up to the back teeth with al-Sadr and are determined to put him out of the magic circle of power in Iraq. Instead, reading between the lines, we are led to believe that the Iraqis would be doing nothing without the prodding of the US. The puppet does not move until the puppet-master pulls the strings. Writes Wong:

President Bush met last week in the White House with the leader of the Iranian-backed Shiite party, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and is to meet this week with the head of the Sunni Arab party, Tariq al-Hashemi.

The problem is that a lasting political solution in Iraq must come from the Iraqis, not from American politicians who want a solution, any solution, so they can get the troops out.

And the nasty truth is that most successful political arrangements issue from the victory of a successful insurgency, not the manipulations of a foreign power. It is unfortunate but true that al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army sounds like the most likely candidate to win the right to rule Iraq.

Auguste Pinochet, Chile's Departed Embarrassment

Who was Auguste Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile who died last week? Was he a fascist dictator, as the left believes, or a man who rescued his nation from a Marxist maelstrom?

The facts are that Pinochet, after violently suppressing the socialist Allende government in a 1973 coup, slowly rebuilt Chile economically, and returned the nation to democratic rule, while carefully maintaining immunity for any improper acts committed while he was in power.

But, as the Economist reminds us, even his most fervent supporters are turning away from him, especially after revelations that he “had secretly stuffed $27m in a number of foreign bank accounts.”

Probably we would not care a whit about Pinochet were it not that the left had appointed him as their global fascist monster-in-chief. In 1973 Salvador Allende was the Great Red Hope, combining socialism and revolution in an intoxicating mixture that had lefties worked up into a fever of excitement worldwide. But in reality Allende was trampling on the political and economic rights of Chileans, wrecking the economy, and salting every institution in the country with political activists. So the army felt obliged to put a stop to it.

But now everyone wants to forget Pinochet and put him behind them.

[C]onservative opposition parties which largely supported his dictatorship realised soon after his arrest in London that he had become an electoral liability. Neither they nor the centre-left Concertacion coalition, which has governed Chile since 1990, have any intention of changing the free-market policies which have underpinned Chile’s economic growth for the past 16 years. But nor do they wish to remember that the policies had their origin in his regime’s structural reforms.

So was Pinochet an evil monster or the savior of his nation? Who knows. Today he is just an embarrassment.

Men Are Funnier Than Women. Discuss

Why are men funnier than women? Christopher Hitchens wants to know.

Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex.

He means, no doubt, im-pressing that into the opposite sex. And the most effective way of dissolving the natural reticence and modesty of women into passionate acceptance is by making them laugh, with

that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth

which is so rewarding to the eyes and ears of a man cherchant la femme.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift.

The fact is that women are more serious than men. A study of TV commercials has found that commercials aimed at women are much more serious than commercials aimed at men. And we know why women are more serious. Rudyard Kipling put it to rhyme in “The Female of the Species”:

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame

Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,

And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,

The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

Stirring stuff, eh? It all leads to the central fact of the War between the Sexes:

Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates.

The trouble is that some gullible people actually believe all this pretence, women like Simone de Beauvoir who wrote in The Second Sex that the “female is the victim of the species.” She meant that females had to be birthing and suckling, an imperative that really cuts into the opportunity to create orginal works of intellect like The Second Sex.

But Beauvoir should have understood, as the student of Hegel she was, that there is always a question in the relationship between Master and Slave as to who really is the Master and who is the Slave.

Still, there is a nagging question about all this. Men may be funnier than women, but it is a fact that women laugh more than men. Is this because they are provoked to laugh by the funny men in their lives, or because, deadlier than the male, they are laughing at the men in their lives?