Where My Mind has Wandered

WordPress Rocks, TypePad ... not so much

I use WordPress professionally, TypePad personally. TypePad is just a quirky nightmare in comparison to WordPress. The latest example? I no longer have tags (called categories in TypePad, WordPress has categories and tags, apparently that is too hard for TypePad). My tags just vanished one day. No reason, just vanished. This is on the heels of several episodes where my style sheets and template bought the farm for no reason; hadn't touched anything. No comparison, use WordPress.

alas, alas

Amy Poehler is the funniest woman in America. If you saw Saturday Night Live when she left on maternity leave, you sensed something was missing. It wasn't the election. It wasn't Tina Fey. That something was Amy Poehler. When she is in play you can see the energy in her face. She is the difference.

I am a huge Amy Poehler fan, a huge fan (big fan). The first episode of Parks & Recreation was terrible. Awful. Miserable. I like The Office. The American version has, in time, found its voice and is every bit as good as the British original. I get the joke, that wasn't the issue. It was just awful. It didn't even have good moments. The closest was possibly catching the canvassers playing Rock Band, but even that was a subtle laugh. It was terrible.

Airing the first episode before The Office may make it worse. The Office is a mature show, it is mid-stride, looking good, has some swagger. The comparison makes Parks and Recreation's debut even worse.

Alas, alas.

Falling Housing Starts are a Good Thing

The news that housing starts fell in March after an unexpected rise in February is considered bad news. Add the fall in new building permits and the analysts are in a funk. I understand this, a lot of our economy over the last decade has been fueled by aggressive home building and sales. But wait, wasn't that what got us into trouble? Hmmm.

Perhaps we should be pleased that new home construction has declined? I'd like to see a revised "normal" level of new home construction, a lower normal. There is plenty of housing stock in the marketplace judging from real estate inventories and foreclosure rates. We don't really need a lot of new housing at this point (we really don't). I'd like to see some home improvement and rehab tax credits. That would stir up some activity in the sector without adding more inventory. The additional inventory only puts more downward pressure on the price of existing homes. The mortgage loan limits -- at $417,000 across much of the country -- have already put a damper on sales of homes costing more than $500,000.

There is also a direct correlation between  construction and unauthorized immigration. Construction became a major source of jobs for workers entering the country illegally. As housing starts declined, so did illegal border crossings. At a time when municipal budgets are being cut by declining tax revenues, the fewer people municipalities need to support with social services the better (please note, this is by no means an anti-immigration rant, just a sliver of economic data to consider).

Home builders are still cranking out 500,000 new homes a month.There are approximately 308 million people in the U.S., and the population is growing at just under one percent. Those 308 million people live in a combined 130 million housing units. Even if every new American needed a new house, just for themselves, we would need approximately 2 million new homes. At the current rate of new home construction we would meet our annual need in 4 months.

Granted, factors like population shift to the Southwest mean less demand in some areas of the country and more demand in others. Housing starts are much more likely in high-growth areas, but they are by no means limited to those areas.Too many jobs have become dependent upon new home construction, and new housing starts seem to have as much to do with keeping those jobs than meeting actual demand (starting to sound like the U.S. auto-industry?) A contracting new home construction industry will be painful, but in the long run those resources would be better utilized creating something we actually need.

Gaining a Perspective: Four Books on Africa

The American media and public, already intrigued by Somali piracy, is now in a full-on lather of interest due to the recent hijacking and rescue of an American ship and crew. Somalia is back in the news, a reprise of the Black Hawk Down period. The same questions are being asked: How could Somalia be so violent? How did it become a failed state? Is this another example of Muslim extremists run amok?

Like most Americans, I know very little about what is happening in Africa or much about African history. I probably know more than the average American (I doubt that is hard) but I don’t know much. Lately I’ve been trying to change that by diving into a number of books. I started with Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present by Michael Oren. Oren traces American involvement in the Middle East back to 1700s. The parallels between today and the early involvement are stunning, particularly the evangelical mindset with which Americans approached both religion and democracy in the Middle East. I’m still working on the book, but as is typical with me I have four going at the same time.

The second book is King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild. The book is not great, but it provides a very solid overview of the exploitation of Congo from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.  Hochschild seems to relish both caricatures and unsupported speculation when describing people, something that I cannot stand when reading a work of history. That has slowed me down, but I am almost through the book and I am learning perhaps more than I’d like to know.

Chief of Station, a memoir by Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief to Congo during the early Cold War period, was a good, quick read and an informative first-person account of the early, post-colonial years in the Congo.  The fourth book is by far the best and most compelling: The Zanzibar Chest by journalist Aiden Hartley. The book contains two stories. The first is of the author’s experiences as a journalist in Kenya, Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and the Balkans. The second story, which is embedded within the first, traces the experience of his own father and another British man named Peter Davey. From the first story you learn a lot about the nature of conflict in modern Africa, from the second you gain a telling perspective on the tragic consequences of European involvement in Africa during the 20th century.  I have a few more chapters to read in the Zanzibar Chest, but as I don’t want it to end I have been finishing up King Leopold’s Ghost.

In concert the four books have been a wonderful, albeit depressing, primer in 20th Century African history. I can sum up what I have learned in a paragraph. During the colonial period forced labor, slavery, sadistic murder and disease decimated African populations and violently disrupted societies. The colonial powers extracted minerals, rubber, oil, and personal glory.  During the post-colonial period the United States, Russia, and China pumped weapons and ammunition into the continent to fight the cold war and meddled with emerging governments and elections (including the funding mercenary armies for warlords). The result, more death and destruction, and the continued fraying of African societies. Then the United States decided Africa represented a battlefield in the war on terror and saw an Al Qaeda threat in numerous countries (something Al-Qaeda has made some effort to live up to, although with little success). Which brings us to the current period of chaos and misery across large swaths of Africa, with little prospect of change as long as the rest of the world continues to use Africa as a battleground for ideological and economic struggles.

The four-book African taster’s menu may not be for everyone, but I do highly recommend the Zanzibar Chest. It too, may not be for everyone. It is at times sad, depicts graphic violence, and chronicles the author’s relationship with drugs, sex, and alcohol.  It is valuable because it provides an interesting first-person source from which you learn a lot about violent conflict that neither a traditional news story or a history book can show you.