Is it time to outlaw spanking?

The Welsh assembly seems to think so. And admittedly, I thought the idea sounded silly—like a bit of overwrought European do-gooderism, until I hit upon this quote:

Christine Chapman, one of the backbenchers who put forward a motion to the assembly to outlaw smacking, said she was delighted that members had backed the principle of a ban. She said: "This is a moral victory, an important step. But in the end we must get legislation against smacking."

Chapman said the UK was "out of step" with many countries around the world that had outlawed slapping. It was against the law to hit adults and it was "nonsensical" that it was deemed acceptable to hit children, she said.

And that's a good point. Generally speaking, it's illegal for me to hit a person not in my care—but it's legal (within parameters) for me to spank a small, mostly defenseless person who depends on me for life?

I haven't spanked my 3-year-old son for while. But. There was a short period of time, after he turned 2, in which he started hitting people when things didn't go his way. We tried everything we could think of in the non-violent spectrum: Time-outs, stern talks, that kind of thing. But he only stopped when I made the decision to respond to his hits with three quick swats to his backside, followed by a time-out. His hitting behavior subsided quickly after that; he doesn't really resort to fists today. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of teaching my son to stop hitting by ... hitting.

I certainly don't think I was abusing my child; and anybody who ever tried reasoning with a toddler will understand the challenges of doing so. What's more, I restricted the swats to a very specific scenario: He doesn't get spanked for other misbehaviors, or because I'm annoyed. For me, limited spanking was effective.

But "effective" is not the same thing as "right," of course, and I find the Chapman's logic about the illegality of hitting adults to be somewhat compelling. On the other hand, if an adult hit me and I responded by flipping him over and delivering three quick swats to the backside, what would the charges be? Would I even be charged? Tough to say.

In the end, I suspect most parents can find a proper route for their families. I think I have—the fact that I haven't spanked my son in a long time suggests to me that my parameters were correctly and effectively deployed. But your mileage may vary. And in any case, we have laws on the books aimed at the abusers among us, people who strike their children out of malice instead of a sense of guiding correction. That system is imperfect, and it obviously doesn't save every child from harm, but I don't think the best response is to make a criminal of every adult to delivers a smack to the butt of an obstinate child. There should be limits, but there shouldn't be a prohibition.

In the age of the Internet, why does it matter than I live in the city?

A friend passes on a link to this interview with Witold Rybczynski, author of "Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville." This passage stood out:

Think of the difference between “town” and “country” one hundred years ago. It was absolute and affected what you ate, how you lived, the amenities to which you had access, and much more. I would argue that today the differences between amenities, resources, etc. available to someone living in an exurb outside Denver or Pittsburgh, and living in downtown Denver or Pittsburgh, while they have not disappeared, are slight. The fact that information, medical care, education, entertainment, and so on have dispersed is significant. I am not aruing that there are no differences at all, but rather that they have, for most people, diminished to the point of being trivial. Nor is the balance weighted to the city, as it once was. Suburban Philadelphians, for example, have more choice in department stores or food stores, than those living in Center City. On the other hand, we all have equal access to Netflix and Amazon.

I've alluded to this phenomenon before. Thanks to the rise of the Internet, my arrival in Philadelphia from Kansas didn't offer as stark a difference as it might've, say, 15 years ago. When I got here, I mostly continued reading the same (online) newspapers and listening to the same (online) radio stations that I did before. As I wrote for Metropolis: "The miracle of the Internet is that it can bring you news, music and video from anywhere on the planet. The curse of the Internet, it turns out, is that it can bring you news, music and video from anywhere on the planet. It's easy to avoid the local culture."

Being cognizant of that dynamic doesn't entirely remove it from the equation. Because of that, I've had to think long and hard over the last couple of years—through unemployment and illness—about why we stay in Philadelphia instead of heading back to Kansas.

What can I say? I've seen the Philadelphia Orchestra live on several occasions. Philadelphia is not as blindingly white as the town I left. Nor as overwhelmingly Christian. And there's a vibrancy to Center City life—Rittenhouse Square buskers, food carts, and the ability to run into an amazing cross-section of people—that doesn't quite exist in rural areas. We don't have to own a car here. The differences are mostly smelled and tasted, and to some people they might seem marginal, but they are real, and they are not unimportant to us.

Professionally, too, there's a difference. There are more media opportunities on the East Coast than in Kansas, obviously, but I do my work on the Internet. Shouldn't matter, right? Wrong. Weirdly, my move to the Big City somehow put me on the radar of more organizations that wanted coverage through my Scripps Howard column than when I was in Kansas and doing it on more of a full-time basis. Go figure.

City life isn't for everybody, and it's not as "exotic" to a rural-raised man like myself as it once would've been, but it's still different enough.

Why so many cops at Occupy Philly?

Juliana Reyes reports police lamentations that they're spending so much of their time and energy on the Occupy Philly protests:

For the first week and a half that Occupy Philly held court in City Hall, the Police Department's entire Neighborhood Services Unit was detailed to the protest to watch over its participants. That means for that week and a half, the roughly 30-officer unit, whose responsibilities include responding to abandoned vehicle complaints, recovering stolen cars and investigating reports of short dumping and graffiti, didn't exist in the rest of the city.

NSU's Sgt. Frank Spires said that all 3-1-1 complaints, as well as direct calls to the unit, were shelved until the detail was over.

It's a shame that neighborhoods will go without the service—but is that necessary? Consider this: The entire Philadelphia Police Department has roughly 6,650 officers to police a city of 1.5 million people—roughly one officer per 225 residents.

The population at Occupy Philadelphia is ever in flux. But let's be generous and say there's as many as 500 people there during the day. (That may be an extremely high estimate: One Twitter observer counted 140 activists at Tuesday night's General Assembly.) That means there is one officer for every 17 protesters on the ground.

Now: Policing a protest is a little different at policing neighborhoods. And City Hall probably deserves a higher level of protection than many spaces. But there hasn't been much in the way of crime or violence at Occupy Philly—I'm certain it would be national news if it had happened—and there's no indication the campers are going to turn into an angry mob.

So why not put, say, half the Neighborhood Services Unit back on the streets doing their regular job? That way the unit can keep performing its duties—even at a reduced rate—and the protesters can enjoy a still-extraordinary level of police protection. As it stands, diverting the entire unit doesn't appear to be a smart use of the city's resources.

Yeah, I like 'Amelie.' What of it? (Or: It's OK if you like the 'Star Wars' prequels.)

This Guardian essay on the 10th anniversary of 'Amelie' has me a little defensive, casting the movie as syrupy and cloying:

Amélie didn't bother to adjust to the 21st century at all. It revelled in its Eurodisneyfication of Montmartre, as Libération's Philippe Lançon put it. At the start of a decade of strife and realpolitik, it was already a film out of time, for the dreamers only. There is a pivotal scene where Audrey Tautou realises there is a banal explanation for the man who appears repeatedly in the album of discarded photobooth headshots: he is a photobooth repairman. This peek-behind-the-curtain feels like a Wizard of Oz homage, but unlike Dorothy, it doesn't liberate Amélie. She still needs someone else to shove her out of clotted fantasia, even when it threatens her happiness.

You know what? I still love 'Amelie," still adore Audrey Tatou's performance in the film. It is charming and winsome—and yeah, more than a bit precious. But so what? It's a movie that delights me every time I see it—makes me feel better, and even sometimes makes me feel more ambitious about my own life. I don't want to subsist on a diet of sugar, no—and 'Amelie' is a movie I can't really watch more than every couple of years—but every once in awhile just the right dessert can be an amazing thing.

We sometimes brandish our tastes—in art, music, and movies—as weapons: Sometimes used defensively, to avoid others thinking poorly of us, and sometimes offensively, to put others in their place. But what's treacle to me might be inspiring to you. I'm not against appraising works of art, putting them in their context, and trying to render some judgement on their quality. But I think I want to be confident and humble about those judgements—I like what I like, but it's OK if you don't. And I like 'Amelie.'

I'm moved to this statement not just because of The Guardian's 'Amelie' essay, but also because of Drew McWeeney's piece at HitFix about watching 'Attack of the Clones' with his young son. I hate the 'Star Wars' prequels, but reading about McWeeney's son proved revelatory:

But amidst the fun, "Clones" introduces some darker notes regarding Anakin's fall, and I was surprised how much Toshi was invested in that particular story thread. Ever since The Moment in "Empire," he's been troubled by the idea of a good guy who becomes a bad guy, and he's watching Anakin closely. When Anakin found his mother just before she died and then went on his killing spree in the Tusken Raiders camp, Toshi actually stood up. He walked closer to the screen, upset, needing to see every detail of what was happening, and when the scene was over, he asked me to pause the movie.

"Daddy, those people took Anakin's mommy, right?"

"That's right."

"And they hurted her, right?"

"They did."

"So then he wanted to kill them all so they can't hurt anybody else, right?"

"Is that the right thing to do?"

"No." The way he said it, though, it was more a question than a statement. "But they shouldn't have killed his mommy."

He was still wrestling with it when Anakin confessed to Padme a few scenes later that he had killed all of the Tuskens, even the women and children. That made him ask me to pause again, and he was upset by what Anakin said. "Jedi are good guys, and they should do good things, and he killed little kids and mommies, and that's bad." We talked about the reasons why and he told me that he was sad for Anakin, but he was also mad at him. He's always thought of Anakin as a hero, and seeing him start his fall and giving in to anger and rage is upsetting him deeply.

This is, when you think about it, sophisticated stuff for a young child to be contemplating: Sometimes good people do bad things, and sometimes those bad things create consequences from which there are no escape.

I'm not an 'Attack of the Clones' fan. I doubt that I ever will be. But in somebody's life, that movie is doing the work of art: Moving a person to contemplate motives and existence beyond their own experience, and offering entertainment in the process. That is no small thing. Recognizing that tempers my own judgements: I don't like 'Attack of the Clones,' but it's OK if you do.

Is Goldman Sachs quarterly loss due to 'regulatory uncertainty?'

Maybe. But the New York Times doesn't offer any evidence to back up this assertion:

To improve their profitability, banks have three main options: increase revenues, cut expenses and reduce the shareholder base. But the first method is not working at a time when earnings have been crimped by regulatory uncertainty and economic woes.

The reason I ask the question is that "regulatory uncertainty" is one of those Luntzian phrases—like "death tax," say—that Republicans toss around cavalierly. And it's true that Dodd-Frank regulations are altering the investment banking landscape. But is that the reason Goldman Sachs lost $428 million during the quarter?

Consider the very next paragraph in the Times' article:

Goldman reported a loss of $428 million during the third quarter, compared with a $1.74 billion profit a year ago. The firm was punished by its holdings in stocks and bonds, losing $1.05 billion on its holdings in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a strategic investment the firm made in 2006. I.C.B.C. stock fell about 35 percent in the quarter, a paper loss that flowed through to Goldman’s results.

Well, wait. Why is I.C.B.C.'s stock falling so far, so fast? The Times doesn't explain. Fortunately, Bloomberg reported on the story in February:

Chinese banks’ loans to local governments are about 3.5 trillion yuan ($540 billion) more than the national auditor’s estimate, and the industry’s credit outlook could decline, Moody’s Investors Service said.

“The Chinese audit agency could be understating banks’ exposure to local governments,” Yvonne Zhang, a Moody’s analyst in Beijing, said in the report today. The “apparent absence of a clear master plan to deal with this issue” is likely to exacerbate problems and lenders may be left to manage a portion of the souring loans on their own, it said.

The nation’s first assessment of local government debt showed that 79 percent of the liabilities are bank loans and 8 billion yuan is overdue, Auditor General Liu Jiayi said June 27.

The additional 3.5 trillion yuan of loans, which account for about 7 percent of China’s 50.8 trillion yuan in outstanding local-currency loans, aren’t considered by the audit office as real claims on local governments, Moody’s said. That indicates the debt may be poorly documented and at greater risk for defaults, it said.

In other words, Chinese banks like I.C.B.C.—and it's not the only one faced with this problem—got a little credit crazy, made too many loans that may not get repaid and documented the whole process poorly. This is starting to sound familiar, isn't it?

In this scenario, Goldman Sachs is the late-50s woman on the verge of retirement who plans to live off her nest egg—only to find the nest egg has been wiped out because of bad investments. I'll leave it to others to engage in schadenfreude—except to say this: Maybe Goldman Sachs is part of the 99 percent after all!

Instead, I'll note this: Goldman's loss on I.C.B.C. is more than double its overall quarterly loss. Take that off the books, and the bank turns a profit of more than a half-a-billion dollars—not as huge as it's used to doing, no, but still considered a tidy sum in most parts. That Goldman took a loss, in other words, isn't due to "regulatory uncertainty," but to the breaks of the business—and, perhaps, it's own failure to do due diligence. But why blame your own bad business acumen when you can blame the government instead?

Commenter's Corner: Andrew on Starbucks and small-biz credit

This is in the comments on my Starbucks post, but I think Andrew S. offers some good and interesting commentary that I want to highlight:

It really doesn't reduce new and small businesses to charity cases. It treats CDFIs--and the services they provide in the form of technical assistance and low-cost credit--as charity cases which almost all of them have always been. That's the innovation. I think this effort does a good service by recognizing that not all sources of credit are the same and that getting a loan as a small business is not merely a matter of declaring your interest in getting one. If you have a sexy internet company with high growth potential, money can be easy to come by. If you want to start a lawncare business, not so much. The "technical assistance" part of the picture is important as well. There are lots of people with great ideas for starting their own businesses who don't really know how to use debt effectively. Coupling loans with that kind of education has proven extremely effective in the CDFI community. Kickstarter is great for some things, but it has high labor costs and it's an all-or-nothing payoff which is a terrible structure for a long term sustainable business to work with. Anyway, recognizing that the market has failed small business borrowers is a good thing, and recognizing that lenders who serve those borrowers will need subsidies to do so is also a good thing.

Michael Gerson on Uganda and the president's conscience

Michael Gerson offers what I think is the best defense of the president's decision to send 100 American soldiers to Africa to aid in the fight against the Lord's Resistance Army, but I think he makes a slight misstep at the end:

Some critics insist that military force should be used only to secure the narrowest definition of national interests. But it is the president, not his critics, who must live with the ethical consequences of inaction. And most presidents conclude, as Obama has done, that a broader national interest is advanced when America aids its friends and shows its decency.

I think most of us want our president to have a conscience. But the presidency isn't about the president's conscience—few men or women who hold the office will leave the White House with their souls unbruised, I suspect. The president, to some extent, is required to get away from the mushiness of his own feelings and make cold, clear-eyed decisions based on A) what is allowed and permitted by the Constitution and B) what best advances and defends the interests of the American people. There's a cost-benefit calculation involved in the latter decision, and Gerson may have convinced me it's worth it in this case, as long as the American footprint remains very small and limited. But I don't really much care about the president's feelings about this. It's the national interest that should matter, no matter how narrowly or broadly defined. The president's gut is not the same thing.