Howard Marks starts to get aggressive

Howard Marks, co-founder and Chairman of Oaktree, writes:

For the last 3 1/2 years, Oaktree's mantra has been "Move forward, but with caution." For the first time in that span, with the arrival of some disarray and risk aversion, events tell us it's appropriate to drop some of our caution, and substitute a degree of aggressiveness.

Maybe it's time to buy a few shares of Oaktree.

Where is the consistency?

The LA Times reported in September of 2012:

Internet video giant YouTube has found itself drawn into a global drama being played out in violent Mideast protests over a 14-minute video trailer for Innocence of Muslims, raising questions about the website's responsibilities as the Internet's preeminent distributor of video.

The trailer has been blamed for inciting violence in Libya, Egypt and Yemen. Obama administration officials said Thursday that they have asked YouTube to review the video and determine whether it violates the site's terms of service, according to people close to the situation but not authorized to comment.

Later, UN Ambassador Susan Rice characterized the video as "hateful, offensive, and heinous" and again blamed the video (absurdly) as causing the attacks on our Benghazi embassy:

Rice told Fox’s Chris Wallace “what sparked the recent violence was the airing on the internet of a very hateful, very offensive video.” She told CNN’s Candy Crowley, “There was a hateful video that was disseminated on the internet… That sparked violence in various parts of the world…” She told ABC’s Jake Tapper, “What happened this week in Cairo, in Benghazi and many other parts of the region… was a result, a direct result, of a heinous and offensive video that was widely disseminated…” She gave similar answers to NBC’s David Gregory and CBS’s Bob Schieffer.

Subsequently, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the writer, producer, and promoter of Innocence of Muslims, was jailed:

On 27 September 2012, U.S. federal authorities arrested Nakoula in Los Angeles charging eight counts of probation violation. Prosecutors alleged that some of the violations included making false statements regarding his role in the film ... None of the charges relate to his use of the Internet [that's rich!]. Following a hearing before a judge, Nakoula was ordered to jail without bail, with the judge citing probation violations including lying to probation officials, "danger to the community" and "lack of trust in the defendant."

Today, President Obama took quite a different tone when speaking of the movie The Interview, a fictional portrayal of Americans assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jong Un:

We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like. Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. ... I wish they had spoken to me first. I would have told them do not get into a pattern in which you're intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.

So, it is an exercise of freedom of speech for Americans to make movies about assassinating a foreign leader and we should not be intimidated by parties who are offended by and respond violently against such movies, but videos disparaging Muhammad are hateful, offensive, and heinous and should be removed from YouTube?

Where is the consistency? Obama is correct to insist that Sony has the right to make whatever satirical movie it wants and to urge Sony not to be intimidated by Kim Jong Un. Why, then, did Obama and Susan Rice not come to the defense of Nakoula in the wake of Benghazi and insist on his right to make whatever movie he wanted to make about Muhammad?

Steven Pinker should stick with linguistics

MIT linguist Steven Pinker recently wrote a piece in the New Republic entitled Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians, in which he argues not only that the scientific method can enhance our understanding of the humanities, but that scientific facts should serve as the basis for all human morality. Pinker writes:

[T]he worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. ... And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions — that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct — the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.[emphasis added]

Pinker, whose writings on linguistics and cognitive science I have found very enlightening over the years, here appears to be completely unacquainted with world history over the last several centuries. Does Pinker have any idea how dangerous that phrase "the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality" is? The Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution, and the Maoists in China were well acquainted with this kind of thinking: they, too, were convinced that the "scientific facts" as they understood them "militated towards a defensible morality." They ended up almost "militating" their nations out of existence.

Furthermore, how are we to implement the "maximization of the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings?" Cows, for example, are sentient beings. How is an effort to maximize the flourishing of cows consistent with the fact that we slaughter them every day for our consumption? What's more, if, on the one hand, we can justify the slaughter of cows for the sake of maximizing the flourishing of a larger group of sentient beings (thankfully, including us humans), and yet, on the other hand, science cannot distinguish between the worth of a cow and the worth of a human being (after all, as Pinker says, "scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values"), then, what is to prevent society from slaughtering the occasional human if it can be shown based on "scientific facts" that his death will maximize the flourishing of all the other humans and sentient beings in aggregate. In fact, this was precisely the logic that Lenin and Mao applied: certain segments of the Russian and Chinese nations had to be sacrificed to promote the general welfare of the Proletariat. Pinker does allow for the "unexceptionable conviction that all of us value our own welfare," but, exactly how he proposes to pursue the one principle of maximizing the welfare of all while preserving the welfare of the individual, he does not venture to say.

Steven, better stick with linguistics.

Disparate impact realism

I have written repeatedly (for example, here, here, and here) about the contradictions and pernicious effects of disparate impact theory in all walks of life. My attention was recently drawn to an interesting paper on the subject by Amy Wax, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania, entitled Disparate Impact Realism. The final sentence from the abstract states:

Disparate impact litigation, which does nothing to correct existing disparities and distracts from the task of addressing them, represents a cumbersome, misplaced effort that could better be directed at the root causes of workforce racial imbalance.

Here is a link to the abstract, from which you can download and read the entire article.

My current favorite movement from a Bach cantata

My current favorite movement from a Bach cantata is the opening aria duetto from Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn.

I have to listen to a Bach cantata at least several times before I become familiar with the melodies and the structure of the music and can begin to make sense of it. And then, all of a sudden, I find the pathway through the music, understand how the music relates to the words, and it becomes a work of incomparable genius and ineffable beauty, one that makes me realize that there is a fundamental difference between me, a mere human, and Bach, who operated on an entirely different, a divine, plane, endowed as he was with incomprehensibly rich and complex creative powers. And this is just one of his works.

The text is:

Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn,
Der du von Ewigkeit in der Entfernung schon
Mein Herzeleid und meine Leibespein
Umständlich angesehn, erbarm dich mein!
    Und lass durch deine Wunderhand,
    Die so viel Böses abgewandt,
    Mir gleichfalls Hilf und Trost geschehen.


You true God and Son of David,
you who from your eternal seat far off in the distance
have seen all my heart's woe and body's pain,
have mercy on me.
    And through your miracle-working hand,
    that has turned aside so much evil,
    let help and comfort come to me too.

This is one of Bach's cantatas from the Quinquagesima, the Sunday before Lent, when the Gospel tells the story of Jesus healing the blind man. In other words, as your miraculous touch healed the blind man, Jesus, let it heal me too. The way the oboes intertwine with the duet of female voices...

Torture versus drone strikes and atomic bombs

We are being asked to believe that for Democrats to launch drone attacks and special forces raids against terrorists on the sovereign territory of foreign nations, sometimes killing innocent bystanders in the process, is morally defensible, but for Republicans to torture a handful of the most extreme terrorists in order to obtain useful information in time of war is not.

In 1945, a Democratic President, Harry Truman, authorized the dropping of atomic bombs on the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombs killed in excess of 200,000 people, many of them non-combatants. Mr Truman considered this action regrettable, but necessary to crush Japanese resistance and put an end to the war.

In 1945, American planes also firebombed Tokyo, killing in excess of 100,000 people, many of them non-combatants. American and British bombers also firebombed Dresden, killing at least 25,000 people. Here is an eyewitness account from a Dresden survivor:

We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from. I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them. — Lothar Metzger.

Again, these firebombings were undertaken to crush Japanese and Nazi resistance.

It is time for Americans to put off their sense of moral outrage and acknowledge that sometimes such actions as all those listed above are undertaken in time of total war, by realistic American Democrats and Republicans alike, to achieve victory and preserve the nation.

Hobamaspeak vs Barkleyspeak

WSJ reports:

A New York City grand jury on Wednesday declined to indict a police officer in the death of an unarmed African-American, sparking a federal investigation and renewing a wave of protests that swept the country after another black man was fatally shot by an officer in Missouri.

The grand jury’s decision outraged many New York elected officials, and city leaders called for calm as protesters marched through Manhattan, denouncing the death of Eric Garner, 43 years old, who died after being held in an apparent police chokehold on July 17 in the borough of Staten Island.

The decision also elicited a quick reaction from President Barack Obama , who said Mr. Garner’s death “speaks to the larger issues” of trust between police and civilians. He renewed a vow to repair police-community relations.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday night that the Justice Department would launch an “independent, thorough, fair, and expeditious” civil rights probe into Mr. Garner’s death. The department had been monitoring the local investigation of the case.

“His death of course was a tragedy. All lives must be valued,” the attorney general said, acknowledging that some are “disappointed and frustrated” by the grand jury decision. He added that “we must seek to heal the breakdown in trust that we have seen” between law enforcement and minority communities.

Just as George Orwell invented the term Newspeak in his novel 1984, we need to invent a new term: Hobamaspeak.

The definition of Hobamaspeak is: to speak as Attorney General Holder and President Obama do; to speak in banal platitudes and truisms that convey the message that the irrational inability of some blacks to accept the findings of grand juries and to act out lawlessly and riot in reaction to them will be "understood" and tolerated, and that local police forces, in particular, police forces with a majority of white officers, will be blocked by the Federal government through investigations and other coercive means from enforcing the law against blacks who break it.

Antonym: Barkleyspeak. Barkleyspeak is defined as: to speak as Charles Barkley does; to speak bluntly, but honestly about how certain black "scumbags" must (as most "real black people" do) face facts, refrain from rioting, assume responsibility for their own success or failure, be judged by the same standards as all other citizens, and be grateful for the police forces that preserve the peace in their communities.

When Obama and Holder speak of the "breakdown in trust between the police and communities of color" or state that blacks are "frustrated and disappointed" by grand jury decisions, they suggest that such mistrust, frustration, and disappointment are warranted. But, this frustration, disappointment, and mistrust are warranted only insofar as the police have done something wrong. So, Obama and Holder are, in effect, implying that the police (and the grand juries that have refused to indict them) are, in fact, doing something wrong. But, if the police, the enforcers of the law, are behaving unjustly, then what reason is there for blacks to obey the law? Obama and Holder are actually speaking in such a way as to erode the trust between police and blacks even further. Instead of discouraging riots, Hobamaspeak foments them.