To boldly split

Mick cites Mitt:

the Obama administration was wrong to initially defend the bonuses

I hiccupped over this split infinitive and began a post titled "Mitt Romney, you are dead to me", but on reflection it's ok; "was wrong initially to defend" is unclear and "was wrong to defend the bonuses intitially" sounds weaker. Therefore Romney remains my preferred conservative for 2012. Phew!

I don't care about grammar. English doesn't care about grammar. Grammar is a means to an end. The end is clarity with euphony. If infinitive splitting serves that end, well fine, but it rarely does. "To boldly go" well emulates the plonking bathos of Star Trek and works in context, but "boldly to go" is better both for euphony and emphasis. English is not a prescriptive language and Shakespeare is the least prescriptive of writers, yet he split an infinitive but once and that was a special case.

I do not prohibit split infinitives; I prohibit dull language. We use language to think; dull language, dull thought. Keep your tools sharp. I am not that purist of whom the revered Raymond Chandler wrote:

By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split..

''Shard reaches for the sky amid office sector gloom"

FT:

Construction of western Europe's tallest building will begin in London today amid the gloomiest market for commercial building in decades, thanks to backing from a group of Qatari banks.

Designed by Renzo Piano, the Shard of Glass will tower 1,016ft above London Bridge station and stand nearly three times as high as St Paul's Cathedral.

In this flat schematic The Eiffel Tower looks magnificent alongside The Shard and The Chrysler Building, but look at this video (again) for an impression of how the Shard will enhance London. Qudos to the Qataris for appreciating that a trough in the market is a less risky time to build.

The Russia Tower project, the competition for tallest building in 'Europe', is frozen, likely cancelled. London will certainly recover thanks to its diverse advantages, such as distance from capricious dictators, but Moscow is a bigger risk. 

A deeper risk than the economic cycle is 'What is the point of commercial office space anyway?' Virtual office space is cheaper, more malleable, more interconnected, cuts out commuting ('Man was born free but everywhere is in trains'), and is in some ways more 'present', meaning communication is simpler and more configurable.  The argument about energy revolves around questions like 'Is it green?', 'Should we live sparser lives?', ' Will oil run out?', and so on, but the issue may simply become moot by adopting the virtual office as the norm.  Half our journeys would vanish, both local commutes and long-distance business travel. If a flat-screen isn't 'present' enough, well just beam me up in 3d and I'll join you round a virtual conference table in a virtual corporate HQ.

'Turning cod into PhDs'

Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker) has written a long, entertaining, instructive piece on the Icelandic Saga, Boomandbust. This gives me several opportunities:

1. I'll try out Scribd - it seems to work ok below.

Iceland

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

2. It prompts me to publish "What I Learnt In Iceland", doggerel dashed off on my first visit to Iceland in 2007:

Rhubarb's a stem and not a fruit,
Prunes and muesli make you toot,
But snorchestras will drown out wind.
Allegedly (I'm not convinced)
Box jellyfish aren't jellyfish and
Greenland is further east than Iceland.
A Minister of Elvish Matters
Defines the routes of roads and detours.
Dottirs and ssons of Irish slaves
Kill foxes, whales, whatever moves,
And there's a certain charm in grimness,
Tax evasion, drunken primness,
Strapping horses, strapping women.
Real men who smell of fish and semen.
Volcanic science,
Car-mangling giants,
Fire and ice,
I think it's nice.

3. I can link my gallery from Iceland. These days my edits aim for a less sharpened, more 'liquid' image surface than here.

4. I can promote the gallery service called Phanfare. It's free, handles full-screen slideshows, accepts music uploads and is ergonomic. It's hard to find this combo.

5. I can promote the great value trek I took with Sherpa Expeditions:Sherpa

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

Morning rant #6, peak oil = peak technology

The deep reason that oil production has not peaked is that technology has not peaked. It's not just a matter of cutting edge techniques in applied geoscience or directional drilling or high pressure, high temperature operations. With experience costs can be cut dramatically with slimmer engineering and less 'gold-plating'. For example deepwater expro has much further to go, not least in the Western Hemisphere in both the US and non-US Gulf of Mexico and the Santos Basin off Brazil. As well as the giant Tupi and Jupiter finds, today comes news of another "very huge" result on an Exxon operated well. Add the untapped potential on the Alaskan North Slope, offshore California and offshore Florida. Then add the gargantuan shale oil deposits onshore the USA and Canada. Then add middle distillate synthesis of natural gas to very pure heating oil and kero. Natural gas is already available in giga-gargantuan quantities. It's a logistics play more than an an expro play.

Peak oil is a completely bogus argument for wrecking landscapes with windfarms and destroying the Amazon forest for corn-for-ethanol production. Of course by the time Exxon hits first production in Brazil, its many billions of annual corporation tax may be paid to the Swiss government rather than the USSA government. Does anybody on Planet Obama get it that oil exploration and production in the USA is stimulative? So is building nuclear power stations. When we're borrowing from our children for present spending, shouldn't the spending be on capital projects to benefit the economy which they will inherit, rather than bullshit boondoggles for teachers' unions, Acorn and the other jackal packs that make up the Democratic interest groups gorging on America for as long as China will lend more money?

Trivia: Where was the first discovery of a giant oil field? 'Giant' means > 500 million barrels. Answer - offshore NW Peru. How come? Because The geographic setting for much of the world's oil is the palaeo-deltas of giant river systems like the Mississippi, the Rhine, the Tigris/Euphrates and the Amazon. "The Proto-Amazon delta flowed westwards into the Pacific, before the Andean uplift in the late Tertiary." Stick that in your pipe and fractionate it.

Sanford and more

"What you're doing is buying into the notion that if we just print some more money that we don't have and send it to different states, we'll create jobs," he said. "If that's the case, why isn't Zimbabwe a rich place?"

I'm impressed. Romney/Sanford or Romney/Palin in 2012 works for me. If Sanford has the knack of reducing complex clusterfucks to simple truths, then let's not wait for 2012. Let Romney, Palin, Sanford act together right now like a loyal opposition, loyal to the USA, the City on the Hill, rather than loyal to Harvard Law School. Talk about a toxic asset; Harvard Law School, take a bow. You're in the spotlight riding a unicycle and the wind's blowing.

Afterthought: I'd also be happy with Palin top of the ticket. She is a natural leader. I think of her tonight with the news that her eldest daughter, a new mother, is breaking up with the father. In our multi-choice answer culture marriage is an act of will anyway. It's a little harder with multitudes sneering and gossiping.

Here's an averagely repulsive piece of sociology:

"Within her base, I think this will just increase sympathy and support," said Gary Alan Fine, a Northwestern University professor of sociology who studies political reputations. "It will make her seem more like a person who has to confront the challenges of life, and this is one of them. If you're a fundamentalist or a devout Christian, you don't believe you're living in a world without sin, you don't believe people don't make mistakes."
And for those who love to hate Palin, this is another arrow in their quiver.

"It just adds a kind of frisson of joy, a little pleasure," Fine posited. "It confirms the kind of Beverly Hillbillies aspect, the lower-middle-class qualities that people saw in Sarah Palin."

The professor knows what he's talking about in the latter case, but when he characterizes Palin's support as fundamentalist and devout Christian, he's projecting his own fantasy onto the world outside the academy.

Action, reaction, punchline

Action:

Morning rant #5

Charles Freeman, an anti-Israel Hezbollah apologist with financial ties to the Saudi government and the Chinese government was nominated to head the National Intelligence Council. Obama's not to blame as Freeman was nominated by someone who reports to Obama. Obama is only the ceo. Then Freeman withdrew in the face of Senate opposition, blaming the Israel lobby. The immediate scandal is that Obama's 2nd tier appointments are a disgrace. The long-run scandal is that this Obaman rabble have fubarred everything they've touched. Has anything been well executed? Anything? The head of Britain's civil service says of his US counterparts that:

Downing Street was finding it "unbelievably difficult" to plan for next month's G20 summit in London because of problems tracking down senior figures in the US administration. "There is nobody there. You cannot believe how difficult it is,"

Fifty days after President Obama was sworn in, every senior post in the US Treasury Department remains vacant, with the exception of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary, who should have 17 deputies.

In Buffett's phrase this is America's economic Pearl Harbour and the metaphorical war is being commanded by a Harvard Law Graduate who has never run anything. What will happen when He and his tenured turnips face a non-metaphorical war? America has the finest military it's ever had run by a matinée idol without so much as a cub scout's badge. Whoops, there goes Tel Aviv. Whoops, there goes Delhi. Whoops, there goes Seoul. Whoops Apocalypse. It's hard to credit the nightmare and farce we're living thru. Obama makes Biden look presidential. Et tu, Newsweek ?

Caption your own Obama poster here.

The Manchurian Candidate

You are what you do, not what you think of yourself while you are doing it. 'His motives were good' may excuse a child who lights a match from curiosity. The fault that the house burnt down belongs to the adult who allowed the unqualified child access to matches. So, yes, if you never grow up, how you feel about yourself trumps all outcomes other than dying in the fire.

Kevin Hassett:

Obama is giving us the War on Business. Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a “Manchurian Candidate” to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue?

The column continues by fleshing out how a sophisticated enemy might wreck America:

He might discourage private capital from entering the financial sector by instructing his Treasury secretary to repeatedly promise a brilliant rescue plan, but never actually have one. Private firms, spooked by the thought of what government might do, would shy away from transactions altogether. If the secretary were smooth and played rope-a-dope long enough, the whole financial sector would be gone before voters could demand action.
...
you need to initiate entitlement programs that are difficult to change once enacted. These programs should transfer assets away from productive areas of the economy as efficiently as possible. Ideally, the government will have no choice but to increase taxes sharply in the future to pay for new entitlements.

A leader who pulled off all that might be able to finish off the country.
...
No More Deferral

On the tax hike, Obama’s proposed 2010 budget quite ominously signaled that he intends to end or significantly amend the U.S. practice of allowing U.S. multinationals to defer U.S. taxes on income that they earn abroad.

Currently, the U.S. has the second-highest corporate tax on Earth. U.S. firms can compete in Europe by opening a subsidiary in a low-tax country and locating the profits there. Since the high U.S. tax applies only when the money is mailed home, and firms can let the money sit abroad for as long as they want, the big disadvantage of the high rate is muted significantly.

End that deferral opportunity and U.S. firms will no longer be able to compete, given their huge tax disadvantage. With foreign tax rates so low now, it is even possible that the end of deferral could lead to the extinction of the U.S. corporation.

If any firms are to remain, they will be festooned with massive carbon-permit expenses because of Obama’s new cap-and- trade program.

But it's ok, his motives are good:

It’s clear that President Obama wants the best for our country. That makes it all the more puzzling that he would legislate like a Manchurian Candidate.

Actually it's not clear that Obaman motives are good. 'Feel good', yes; 'save the world at others' expense', certainly; 'look cool', tick; 'bring in a Brave New World', uh huh. But in the Obaman mind these are good motives, a magic mix of pseudo-science, group-identification, superstition and Robin Hood. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the signs on the road are 'hope' and 'change' and 'look at me.'

Amen, sister!

The New York Times interviews Ann Coulter:

Do you consider yourself as speaking for the conservative movement, or just someone who has attracted many conservative fans? Something else?

I THINK I SPEAK FOR ALL AMERICANS WHO THINK NEWSPAPER EDITORS WHO PRINT THE DETAILS OF TOP-SECRET ANTI-TERRORIST INTELLIGENCE GATHERING PROGRAMS ON PAGE ONE IN WARTIME SHOULD BE EXECUTED FOR TREASON.

"The Reader"

I'd gleaned that this movie had sex and Auschwitz, so, despite the say-so of a liberal Jewish acquaintance, I didn't see it. This Powerline post - The Oscar For The Worst Excuse For Sex In A Film - reinforces my instinct that leveraging the emotional power of atrocities into jejune books, films and politics is one of the more disgusting traits of those who lead wholly protected lives.

I put up a quick slideshow from Auschwitz for this post.

Sinister and foggy

Venice pix:

I rented an apartment from a lady from Ohio on VRBO.com .