... from Decca Aitkenhead's interview with Christopher Hitchens, published this weekend in the Guardian:

Where's the point in engaging in a battle of ideas if you have no interest in being persuasive? "That seems like an invitation to soften the tone and be more agreeable." Doesn't he want to win the battle? "Sure." Why, then, did he tell an interviewer in 2001: "I don't really care whether people agree with me?" He looks momentarily surprised. "Oh, that's too bald. What I mean is that I'm not going to soften a case in order to make it more presentable. When I've flung down the pen, I want to be sure that I've made the strongest possible case I can make -- and also," he adds tellingly, "really had fun doing it."
The occasion for the interview is the publication of his new memoir, Hitch-22, which is definitely going on my Amazon Wish List.

I've never been able to work up anything like true hatred for the drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay. Although I frequently (and usually vehemently) disagree with him nobody, and I mean nobody, does polemic better. He's like some kind of mutant bastard child (and child prodigy) of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal.

Multiple conditions in if statement with single return value

Anna Morgenstern at the Center for a Stateless Society:

Libertarians who believe that the government can be used to protect freedom and who believe in the current regime of private property as it has evolved under the state, are indeed caught in a sort of set of contradictions. Where does the money come from to pay the police officer or soldier? How did the current legal boundaries of what is property come to exist?
Speaking of which, I've been lax in self-promotion of my own C4SS columns. My most recent piece is about former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon's campaign for US Senate. Check it out. Maybe you'll like it.

6:05 pm Central: No promises. I may get caught up and forget to blog. I may throw in some spoilers, intentionally or unintentionally. Watching the pre-show now.

6:20 pm Central: I've avoided most of the podcasts and featurettes and such, so this is the first time I'm "meeting" the actors and hearing what they think about the show. Cognitive dissonance listening to Daniel Dae Kim ("Jin Kwon") speak perfect unaccented English. It's been easy to achieve suspension of disbelief vis a vis the characters as "real people" with this show.

6:30 pm Central: My "Lost experience" has been much more compressed than most. I cheated -- I watched the first five seasons for the first time right before Season Six started. Now I'm re-watching them with Tamara.

6:50 pm Central: I've been re-watching on Netflix (streaming) -- all these commercials really crush the buzz. And just as a side note, I still predict that Hurley or Ben will end up as the "guardian." Jack as Da Man is just too predictable.

7:02 pm Central: NOT PENNY'S BOAT. Still the most heartbreaking moment of the show, even given the Jin/Sun exit in Season Six.

7:13 pm Central: And as another side note (they just showed the freigher explosion clip), I think that Yunjin Kim ("Sun Kwon") may be the best ACTOR on the show. Toss-up between her, Michael Emerson ("Benjamin Linus") and Josh Holloway ("James Ford, a/k/a Sawyer").

7:53 pm Central: They just showed the Jin/Sun death scene. I cried. Again.

8:00 pm Central: OK, main event beginning -- "previously on Lost ..."

8:12 pm Central: So, is this concert going to be Charlie Pace at Eloise Hawking's event, Jack's son's piano recital, or Tom Petty live?

8:20 pm Central: Okay, so it's the Hawking soiree. Always good to see Rose and Bernard again. Why so serious, FLocke? Hopefully Sideways Locke's awakening will put some doubt in that bald grape of yours.

8:26 pm Central: Son of a bitch. Jin and Sun got me bawling AGAIN.

8:36 pm Central: Hmm ... FLocke also thinks that Jack as Guardian is too obvious. Will it be Hurley running down FLocke with the Dharma van, or Ben calling up the spirits of Alex and Allison Janney?

8:45 pm Central: Those Target commercials are SOOOOOOO wrong.

9:03 pm Central: Come on, Desmond, the rock isn't that heavy. Used to bullseye womp rats no bigger than that rock all the time back home.

9:14 pm Central: All teary-eyed. Charlie's fully back in the loop again.

9:18 pm Central: Sorry, but the fake-Matrix "Jack and FLocke race toward each other" thing was just ... cheesy. I'm starting to think that Sideways Hurley acting as sort of consigliere in the Desmond Conspiracy is confirmation of my prediction. He becomes the Guardian, Desmond becomes the Island itself.

9:25 pm Central: FLocke is FUBAR. Real Locke is coming out of surgery and feels his legs. Satori! Convergence!

9:37 pm Central: Kate and Jack last kiss time. Meh. Kate always belonged with Sawyer.

9:42 pm Central: Miles: "I don't believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in duct tape."

9:47 pm Central: Okay, I take that back about Kate and Sawyer. Never saw the Juliet connection as so permanent before. Sweet.

10:06 pm Central: Told you it would be Hurley! Ha! Next prediction: Jack becomes White Smokey.

10:30 pm Central: They give us that for finis? Weak, dudes. I want some more Hurley and Ben Island-Guarding Action! I want Jack as White Smokey, a la Gandalf!

OK, OK, not so bad, I guess. But I didn't expect them to turn it into What Dreams May Come redux, and it grates. Well, that wraps up the liveblog. Niters, and I'm back to the day job.

Update, after sleeping on it, watching part of the Kimmel take, etc.: There was no way the producers were going to make everyone happy with the ending, or even come close. There was also no damn way I could be fair to them a minute after the screen went black for the final time. Good job, guys. Sorry I didn't say that last night. I'm sure my rudeness left you crying. Hopefully, crying all the way to First National Dharma Initiative Bank.

They managed a nice symmetry. IIRC, the pilot began with Jack's eye opening as he came to consciousness in the jungle with Vincent (the dog) looking at him; got up, walked past a tennis shoe hanging from a tree. The series finale ended with him packing past the now-decayed tennis shoe, lying down, the dog coming up and nuzzling and lying down with him, his eye closing.

They did change it up some -- faked left with Jack accepting the guardianship, then ran right, gave him a different job and left Hurley in charge, with Ben as consigliere. The "redemption of Ben" bit was particularly nice.

The more I think about my comments vis a vis the actors, the more I think I gave a bunch of them short shrift because I didn't particularly like their characters (the fact that Kate and Jack tended to piss me off doesn't mean Evangeline Lilly and Matthew Fox didn't do a great job), or because their characters were no longer at the forefront screentime-wise (I'll gladly watch Dominic Monaghan in anything), or just maybe because their portrayals were so well done and I was so involved with the characters that it never occurred to me that they were, um, acting (maybe the highest compliment you can pay an actor, and I'm thinking in particular of Terry O'Quinn and Jorge Garcia).

Bottom line on the actors: There's not a single cast member of Lost whose name on a movie or show won't at least make me give it a look. Thinking that over, I'm thinking that this is especially true of Jorge Garcia and Michael Emerson.

Biggest disappointment which I can only reveal now that it's over (except, hopefully, for a Hurley/Linus big screen movie: Lost: Return of Smokey): I kind of hoped the show would end with God walking out of the Island Light Cave ... in the form of Bob Denver.

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Q: You purchase a house for $400,000. Four years later, the appraised value of that house has fallen to $200,000. How much money have you lost?

A: Not a red cent.

At least that's the way I see it, as I explain in comments on this post by Jonathan Wilde at the Distributed Republic. My most recent comment there either got eaten or is still in an approval queue, so I'm going to reproduce the key points here:

You bought the house for $400k. Maybe you paid cash for it, maybe you took out a mortgage. That's not especially relevant to my point, as I'm not arguing for or against "strategic default" just this instant.

You have the house.

If the price at which the house will sell has gone down from $400k to $200k, you've lost nothing -- unless you sell the house.

Even then, your loss is mitigated by the equivalent rent you'd have paid if you hadn't bought a house, less the expenses you pay that a landlord would have paid if you were a renter. The "Bruce Williams Standard Rent Formula" is 1% of the purchase price of the house per month (that's what Williams tells landlords to charge). So, four years at $4000 per month (this assumes you'd have rented something equivalent to what you bought). That's $192,000 you've saved, less property taxes and improvements/repairs that you'd have expected the landlord to make. Call it $100k, which reduces your purely hypothetical (unless you sell the house) loss by half.

If the price at which the house will sell has gone down from $400k to $200k, something else has gone down, too: Your property taxes. (Assuming that your local government appraises with reasonable frequency and accuracy; not a safe assumption, of course, but anyhoo ...)

Now, about "strategic default" ... even if you consider the house an "investment" rather than a "domicile," and even if you take a bath on that investment, the bank didn't sign on to be your co-investor and take your loss with you. They just lent you the money to make the investment yourself. Your obligation to repay the loan is, it seems to me, independent of whether or not the investment turns out to have been wise.

I can understand defaulting on a mortgage if you just have no other choice -- you're broke, busted, can't make the payments -- and if that happens, then the bank's recourse is to take the house from you, make as much of their money back as they can from it, and put a king-hell dent in your credit score.

But walking away from a mortgage that you voluntarily entered into, that you can pay, on a house that you decided to buy and that you do in fact do have possession and use of? Guys, that's just bullshit.

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[Guest post by Vincenzo Desroches. I'm not as enthusiastic as Vincenzo about gold and other commodity-based currencies as stores of value, some such commodity basis would be suitable as a measure of value in a credit-clearing network.]

During tough economic times, alternative currencies have sprung up from as near as small U.S. communities to as far away as tiny South African townships. The onset of the global recession back in 2008 became the catalyst for spawning an entire series of these barter-like systems all over the globe. An alternative currency is a term that refers to any currency used as an alternative to the dominant national or multinational currency system. Alternative currencies can be created by an individual, corporation, or organization, they can be created by national, state, or local governments, or they can arise naturally as people begin to use a certain commodity as a currency. They have a long history based on their popularity and ability to facilitate local commerce.

Although the origin of alternative currencies is uncertain, recent examples abound that emphasize their importance in dealing with a protracted crisis. During the Great Depression, U.S. and European governments issued “scrips” to keep commerce flowing when cash was in short supply. Massive barter exchanges were utilized in Argentina during runaway inflation to keep people from starving. And lastly, the city of Ithaca, New York, owes its existence today to the use of “hours” as legal tender to sustain its local economy during the 1991 recession.

The appeal of such networks can be found in the impoverished, the elderly, the disabled or the underemployed since they are a means of empowerment for those barely getting by on the economic fringes. Alternative currencies come in many forms, both high and low-tech, but in each case an attempt is made to assign value to an individual’s ability to perform a task or service. There are no forex charts online to follow the trends in these currencies. However, there are records kept and software developed to support these activities as if they were online. Mutual credit systems have been around for some time and keep track of a person’s account while allowing for various exchanges or trades to take place. The debits and credits are posted to accounts as with most any other recordkeeping system.

Establishing an alternative currency can at times be a last resort to hold a community together, particularly in small farming areas where services or actual product are more plentiful than paper money. As accommodating as these systems might be, a Nevada politician, Sue Lowden, recently lost ground in her race when she claimed that the way to cut medical costs was to barter with your doctor. Her remarks were roundly ridiculed. However, mutual co-ops spring up in time of need to keep the wheels rolling and mouths fed until harvest time. The CES website points to more than 100 exchanges in 15 countries. Convenience and necessity are the “Mothers” of these inventions.

The world of high-tech is not immune to these needs either. In the early days of Internet commerce, banks were totally unwilling to guarantee merchants for Internet sales where their plastic cards, another form of alternative currency, were utilized. Their unwillingness created an enormous opportunity for anyone clever enough to design an electronic currency complete with tight risk management controls. The “breach” was filled with many suitors, from “beenz” to “flooz” to “digicash” and a host of others. The only survivor of the lot was PayPal, not because they were better, but because eBay saw the long-term value potential of their service and acquired them for $1.4 billion. Today PayPal accounts are all over the world, enabling payments and remittances where the banking system options are notoriously expensive. Power to the People, and down with the banks!

The events in Europe over the past few weeks have helped to remind us of the key role that fundamentals play in determining the value of foreign currencies. The European debt crisis caused an expected rush of capital away from the Euro and into safe havens like the Dollar and the Yen. An old adage in the world of foreign exchange is that everything is relative. You trade in currency pairs, not in the single currency itself. Its value is relative, since it depends on the stability of the nation’s economy behind it. However, the greatest benefactor of the recent capital flight was the precious metals sector, more specifically Gold. Gold has actually become the “alternative currency” of the moment, whose value is not tarnished by deficit mismanagement or the unintelligible edicts of a central banker.

The following chart demonstrates this current phenomenon.

As the Euro has weakened relative to the Dollar, Gold has continued to appreciate in value, ignoring whatever vagaries in the market might be signaling an impending economic crisis. As the original hypothesis states, tough economic times do have a way of spawning alternative currencies. However, a corollary may be that in addition to nominal script or interest-free mutual list loans, Gold, that precious metal that even King Tut took to his grave, is today’s alternative currency of choice.