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All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.

Restructuring, Revisited

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How is that economic recovery going?  It may not feel like much, given that it’s progressing far more slowly and cautiously than after any other postwar recession.  One of the themes we’ve been discussing for over four years is that given that the downturn was of a different kind, the upswing will be different as well.  The term offered was “restructuring”, meaning that the economy we’re evolving towards is going to be very different from the one that spent the 2000s sputtering and failing.  That takes time and effort.

The term is starting to catch on outside of Barataria as investors find opportunity in the new industries that are going to grow and prosper in this new world.  That’s great progress.  But as we’ve noted many times, the real restructuring takes a broader social, political, and legal reformation and agreement that has been woefully slow to develop.  Enter Niall Ferguson, a Harvard History Prof and conservative bad boy to offer some new ways of looking at the growing malaise in the developed world in his forthcoming book, “The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die.”  His points are worth discussing, especially on the left, because they offer some new perspective and potentially more fruitful debates than we’ve been having so far.

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Urbi et Tweeti

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Can twitter save the world?  Probably not.  But when the tweets are “Urbi et Orbi” it’s pretty likely they will be retweeted.

Over the last six weeks Pope Francis (@Pontifex) has delivered 140 characters of worldly homily nearly every day, but none of them have been as noticed as his message for 2 May – “My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost.”  A small firestorm was created on the ‘net … well, the usual internet people behaved in an internet way about it and got their 140 getback.  Whatever.  But what matters is that Pope Francis is emerging as a leader for the rights of the downtrodden at a time when such leaders are needed – and is emphasizing things that reach out to embrace a slightly bigger world of the meek.

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Cheers for the Underground Economy!

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“Since we decided to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have all of course become immensely rich.  But we have run into a small inflation problem owing to high leaf availability. That means the current rate is something like three major deciduous forests buy one ship’s peanut. In order to obviate this problem and revalue the leaf, we’ve decided on an extensive campaign of defoliation and burn down all the forests. I think that’s a sensible move, don’t you?”
– The Management Consultant to Fintlewoodlewix (later called Earth) – “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

It’s good to have a lot of money, assuming that not everyone has a lot.  Inequality is apparently bad when it gets too big, but it also makes the whole economy possible in small doses.  But how much money is really out there, and where is it going?  It turns out that this is more complicated – and hidden – than most thought.

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Cat Talk

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Is there anything cuter than when your cat “talks” to you?  Cat people all love that cheery “Brrrup!” first thing in the morning (ideally after dawn) or the hearty “Ma-row!” when they first get home.  Or when the food dish is empty, depending on your li’l one’s personality.  What does it mean, exactly?  If you are a veterinarian or other expert on cats you’re probably pretty sure it means … nothing.  That’s right, cat people, just about any felinologist will tell you that your furry box dweller is simply meowing and chirping for no real reason at all.

I don’t believe it, either.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that the domestic feline has some limited vocabulary that means something, even if we aren’t smart enough to understand it.  I doubt they are planning to kill us or report back instructions to an invading army back on the cat planet, so perhaps I am a bit naïve after all.  But here’s what I’ve found.

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Pope Francis, the Passionate

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Just under 2,000 years ago, almost three quarters of a million sunsets ago, a Jew named Jesus started the Passover Seder by washing the feet of his followers in an act of humility and passion.  To mark this event, the newly installed Pope Francis repeated the ceremony with a group of young prisoners at a juvenile detention center in Rome – two of whom were women.  It may seem like a stunning sign of contrition from this new Pope, except that this is what we have come to expect from the Argentine Jesuit who has insisted that priests should be “shepherds who have the smell of their sheep.”

Who is Francis?  Why does it matter?  As we learned from the last two Popes, these two questions are closely intertwined because the office is made by the man who holds it – for better or worse.  As we head into Easter it is good to have a closer understanding of this man and why he might make a big difference in faith – both personally and for the institution we know as the Catholic Church.

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