International Ranking of Satisfaction

Denmark is number one in SWL —Satisfaction With Life. The USA is 23. Australia is 26 and Bangladesh is 104.

… a nation's level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels (correlation of .62), followed by wealth (.52), and then provision of education (.51).

The three predictor variables of health, wealth and education were also very closely associated with each other, illustrating the interdependence of these factors.

There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people. However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP per captia, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.

Thus spake an English psychologist. See the map.

Big Time

Depressing times can be salved with a due perspective — a large context in which to fit it all. Here's some big time perspective, a new discovery, something really really large:

An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe…

Spider-Man Too

Spider-Man 2 was so-so as a movie, but the two stars made it tolerable. Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst have old souls in their young bodies; both actors, in different ways, look as though the weight of ancient human sorrows is whispering in their ears. Maguire has this fascinating aspect to his demeanor: he appears logy with feeling, just overwhelmed. The special effects weren't my favorite part, not a good sign in a movie that so relies on these artificial flourishes. I would have preferred an Alex Raymond cartoon style in the opening credits to what looked more like 1950's illustration. They were competently done illustrations, but too bland a style for so dark a figure as Spider-Man. The commentary made the lot of them sound as though they thought they had made Richard III.

Media Oasis

As usual Charles Krauthammer nails it:

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is “disproportionate,” as in the universally decried “disproportionate Israeli response.”

Tiger and Earl Woods

…he couldn’t control his emotions. Sobbing and shaking, he hugged his caddie, Steve Williams; then his wife, Elin; his coach, Hank Haney; and several other supporters. The hugs lasted a long time, his tear-dampened face buried in their shoulders.

Tiger Woods' breaking down after the British Open was not the typical jock blubbering — it was truly touching. Earl Woods was clearly an exceptionally gifted father; a man who knew how to nurture the talents and character of his son.

“It just came pouring out, all the things that my father has meant to me and the game of golf, and I just wish he could have seen it one more time…”

The Life, It's Aquatic

If you rent The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou listen to the commentary. It is revealing. Wes Anderson made the commentary in the same NY restaurant he and his co-author wrote the movie — they stayed for both meals. Not a bad life.

The movie is not exactly a parody of Cousteau, but an imaginary excursion based on a jumping off point: a documentarian star, his disintegrating life and his great White Whale. The cast is very good — everyone. I was especially surprised at how good Owen Wilson was — foregoing his comic persona for a Billy Budd character. He almost stole the movie from some terrific actors. It turns out Wilson is an old friend and colleague of Wes Anderson's. Anything with Bill Murray is likely to be good, and once again Murray inexplicably carries the full weight of a movie while seeming to hardly try. He is just a very good actor, very engaging at seeming disengaged.

The real star of course is Wes Anderson, who is an odd duck for a Hollywood type; a Hollywood type who lives in New York apparently. Anderson makes these personal Big Movies — they feel like full blown Hollywood productions, but they have a personal quality. This is distinct from Woody Allen movies, which never feel “big”. Anderson isn't a warm person, but he is positive and interested. Like Altman he has an openness in his movies, although he makes them with much more attention to detail and structure than Altman. Altman is something of a little king, dipping into the talents of those around him. Anderson seems to have great authority with the actors — they say he “likes all sorts of people”. In the commentary Anderson was less interested in promoting his ego than in telling something about the movie. Although he is tenacious in his attention to detail, he isn't a control freak. A very balanced guy, as a director anyway.

The story is not much to speak of, the movie has long flat spots, but it somehow works okay. Anderson understands that creative work is really the work of presenting a world that people can enter. He wants to “bring things to life”. He understands that imagination trumps concept. The world he creates integrates the artificial and the real — very close to the world modern life presents, the movie seeming more real for its artificiality. In this movie he uses stop action animation to great effect — if not quite the fully magical experience for which he might have hoped. He said at one point that he is lucky to be able to make movies. You don't hear that simple recognition from the privileged tots in the entertainment industry very often — and feel they truly grasp their luck, rather than are simply, once again, manipulating.

The Big Salad, er, Discussion

If you subscribe to David Brooks' podcast, this week you can hear a one and a half hour discussion with Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and a NYT editorial page bigwig, along with Brooks. Although this discussion does have a morbid fascination, I was only able to take about ten minutes; even at the beginning it felt unstructured, not in the sense of being free, just slovenly. They really weren't there to discuss issues, with the possible exception of Brooks. That's probably the fault of the host, the editorial writer, I think his name was Andy Rosenthal — must be the son of Abe Rosenthal. He just mighta got his job from his daddy's connections.

Personality was at the fore so let's look at that. Dowd was right into it, with sarcastic, disparaging remarks, which were warmly received with cackles by a segment of the audience. If the subject was changed to “blacks” or “gays” the truly poisonous nature of her cant would be apparent to any audience. But she stays under the radar by solely aiming at PC targets. Cackles are a familiar, denotative response, of certain creatures in the political zoo — you know them by their sound coloring. After Dowd's initial display she blessedly remained quiet for the rest of the segment to which I listened. Dowd, careerist and polemicist, was really waiting for her book signing anyway, which was to follow the fest. The woman presents as twerp pundit — Dowd seems to have nothing to say. Frank Rich was drifty, seemed to quickly want to focus on the horror of the Bush, how it is all over, all over for the George. The only adult in play was Brooks, who as often happens with him, wins by default. He is just a quiet serious guy, but able to laugh and enjoy things — you seldom feel his ego is on the line. He made some considered points, immediately making the venue feel more substantial — but there were no real takers and entropy quickly took over. These were people all on a different wave length, thrown together ineptly, like an overturned gift basket at a hotel. It hardly seemed it could be worth one hour and thirty minutes of your life, but who knows…maybe later on it was really really great.

Dancing Fool

With Iraq on the verge of civil war, India in the thrall of terrorism, or as the New York Times would say, militancy, and Israel desperately trying to protect its citizens to the cries of “disproportionate response”, while the proximate cause is forgotten — a kidnapped Israeli; with Iran, through clients in Lebanon, proving once again it is the most dangerous state in the world, occupying Lebanon in a way few in the press deem worthy of discussion, currently driving the whole region towards war — So You Think You Can Dance was a rousing relief tonight.

These dance shows have a joyous quality that makes you feel you are in another time — one that never existed, but you wish it had. Even the judges have gotten better — more coherent and accurate in evaluating the actual performances. The judges are a study unto themselves. That woman judge has just about everything going wrong. She cries, she squawks, she wants to be liked but tell the truth as she sees it — the woman is disturbing. But she was very accurate in some of her observations nevertheless, and I guess that's why she is there. The choreography is so crucial in evaluating the dancers that it sometimes seems unfair when a couple has a great routine while another is given poor material with which to work. One of the choreographers, a ballroom dance guy who looks like the actor Peter Riegert, provided two great routines last week and the dancers looked all the better for it — it just made you smile.

Yup, dancing is a joy and a relief, but then Fred Astaire was at his peak during the Depression. Dance, it melts away the sorrow, if only temporarily, but you can't miss that the popularity of these dance shows also betrays the zeitgeist.

The New Macs

I can't remember a CEO who has had as significant an impact on a major corporation as Steve Jobs. His tenure at Apple has seen a stream of innovation, shrewdness, an understanding of a complex market that is remarkably canny. The man seems to be a true rarity in the corporate jungle: his confidence is derived from performance not hype.

I've been looking at the current conga line of mac laptops. This MacBook looks like the best of the recent laptop offerings from Apple. (Your needs may vary.) With a $100 rebate it seems to be a good deal now as well.

Mr. Show Me

This discussion with Frederick Crews is worth every second of your full attention. Crews is popularly noted as a critic of Freud. A long time teacher at Berkeley he represents the value of empiricism — of distancing yourself from trends — an approach that is worryingly becoming less common. Our society wants to sell us things and that requires a population that is given to passive consumption, not critical thinking.

Besides having a wonderfully resonant clarity as a speaker, the points Crews makes are like the sharp hammer blows of an expert carpenter. He knows what of he speaks. Some points Crews makes in this interview:

• Students of the arts often come to schools feeling they have things to say. They don't understand that openness is the gold standard; that they have to allow the process of exploration of what they thought they wanted to say be open to contradictions — which is manifested as multiple drafts in the literary arts. Experiencing something new, with no help from received notions, is the way of the arts, for both artist and audience. He mentions the way current criticism so often defers to the narcotic of theory rather than facing the daunting prospect of thinking and feeling for oneself.

• He noted that at Berkeley as theoreticians (postmodernists) began to take over that the mindset changed from demonstrable value in a work of art to one of power and cliquishness. You were supposed to make fashionable references and defer to authority rather than allowing the authority of the work of art itself to determine your reactions. A more difficult, if more rewarding course.

• He discussed the way Melville refused to toady to anyone's values, but followed his own vision. But the misperception of his writing as popular travel pieces left Melville with writer's block, mute until near the end, when he wrote Billy Budd.

Balanced between science and the arts — Crews' parental inheritance, a mother involved in literature and a father with science — Crews is that nearly extinct species: the person of integrity.

Orwell Knows About the NYT

The recently kidnapped Israeli has been continually described in the New York Times as having been captured. You could say “captured” is taking something by force. That's accurate, a dictionary definition, but it is also the word of choice of the criminals. It has that POW ring to it. That's the NYT, using the language of, the thinking of terrorists — callous to the idea that from words deeds are enabled. Words, for those who care about them, have connotative force. Seeming to be deadened to connotative drift allows journalists easy deniability if they are charged with tendentiousness.

Before this depraved use of “captured” there has been long use of the words “militant” or “fighter” for terrorist. This Orwellian mangling of language usually starts with large organizations, finally infecting the thinking of those considering the issues. I first saw AP use the word capture, then a CBS TV correspondent, then the NYT. Journalists are often lazy, looking up what has come before, finding ways not to think — hiding like guilty teenagers who make believe they didn't know, that they aren't to blame for their depraved enabling.

Experts

In Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman he recounts the way he figured out a law of nature. The actual discovery was about the behavior of subatomic particles. He didn't explain enough about the actual content to make it coherent. He was more interested in explaining the process — a creative process that crosses all fields.

The aspect of creative thinking which he focused upon was the need to discard convention. He had relied on data that was flawed and later realized that “the sensible thing to do” was to trust his initial skeptical reaction to the data where he had “noticed it wasn't satisfactorily proved.”

Since then I never pay attention to anything by “experts”. I calculate everything myself…I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes….

Received notions and the experts regurgitating them are, if taken to heart, death to the creative act.

Prestowitz @ MIT

This talk by Clyde Prestowitz @ MIT covers the same ground, with the same dire warnings, as Tom Friedman — the world, it's flat. The world is a-changin' and it may not be what we want it to be, unless, he says, we play our cards right, and all the other players do as well. Lots of evidence from past experience that that is going to happen. The specialty of the human race is lurching from crisis to crisis, a stumbling comedy that often results in tragedy.

Prestowitz notes, as Friedman has, the low savings/high consumption of the US and the mirror images of such behavior in countries like Japan and China where they save to a point of protectionism. Prestowitz feels we should raise taxes, modify the financial system so there is a unified world currency — a suggestion made decades ago. This would give us a sense of our true circumstances, our true financial context, which might spur us to daunting structural changes — the inertia of large systems never easily maneuvered.

Prestowitz offers as a suggestion Japanese land reform which he feels would have a big impact. It sounds surprising, but he explains that with small houses Japanese can't consume the way Americans do even though they have the spare change — there is no place to put the stuff — the second car and several stereo systems won't fit in a Japanese house. So the Japanese save rather than buy — American companies can't make the sale and import/export imbalance is exacerbated.

Although it sounds depressing, Prestowitz is fundamentally very American — he's got that can-do attitude and finally you feel hopeful that things can be worked out.