Sticks and Stones

For the last thirty years one of the loudest way to demonstrate wealth was by building a McMansion. These ostentatious homes could be built on a budget while retaining a grand appearance. Building with pre-fabricated materials, not hiring an architect, and skimping on design by only having the face built in stone - or even out of composite that looked like stone, cut costs dramatically, allowing people to build houses that looked more expensive than they were.

The result was ugly, disproportionate homes. They had glamorous faces but sides built with plywood and very few windows. These homes had large heating and cooling bills. They loomed over their diminutive lawns. They were unoriginal; that cost-cutting decision to not have an architect meant many houses looked alike.

What few people predicted was another format growing around the same time: prefab modular houses, would later rise from its roots as trailer-park centerpieces to the sort of thing Silicon Valley billionaires like Phillipe Kahn want to live in. The difference is of course a dramatic change in style and building quality; but two things remain the same: affordability and convenience.

I was drawn to Marmol Radzinger’s designs for a totally different reason. It seems odd to say these homes are beautiful - they are designed to be purely fuctional and completely ignore aesthetics  - but in their drive to lower costs and reduce the amount of energy needed, the designs bear a striking resemblance to the work of the Internationalist architects of the 1930s - 1970s. The homes are not adorned with pediments and columns, they are purely functional, which ironically forms a style of their own.

Firms like Resolution: 4, Marmol Radzinger, and Jeriko House have designed striking model homes. These can be up to 5,000 square feet and include pools, second floors, and garages. These three firms in particular, along with LivingHomes and Michelle Kaufmann design beautiful modern homes for six, sometimes seven figures. Those on a much tighter budget can also build their own brand new, green, modern homes from Rocio Romero, whose LV homes can be bought, built, and completed for $80,000.

Some of the particularly appealing aspects are the modular designs, which allows for easy extendability and customisation: if you choose to add a library, it’s fairly simple to do so, and that library can be built exactly to your specification. Another recent draw is green technology. Marmol Radzinger offers the option of installing solar panels, and all firms use materials and building techniques which limit the impact on the environment. Most firms build to LEED certification.

In these ways, the firms have turned a cheap, efficient, and highly customisable medium into a luxury good. They come with 20 year warranties, are built to a truly impressive standard with high-grade materials, and by being easily customised are usually unique. The only downside is that as a relatively new phenomenon; you can’t just go and buy one on the street. While appealing because you can build exactly what you want, in densely packed, highly urbanised cities and suburbs, the cost of tearing down an existing house is included. Nevertheless, the impressive qualities outweigh these costs, which is why this option is growing in popularity so rapidly.

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We’ve had major surprises in the past few weeks. Politically, the Eliot Spitzer revelation and resignation caught everyone totally unaware. Socially, some of us witnessed a gory geek-led attack on Sarah Lacy for soft-balling an interview with Facebook’s notoriously-shy Mark Zuckerberg. Culturally, France’s foreign minister suggested an EU boycott of the Olympic opening ceremony as a result of China’s repression of Tibet.

But economically, the-tip-of-an-island blew the world into searing chaos. The three firms most heavily involved in the sub-prime mortgage crisis; Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch all teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. While so far only one has collapsed, the other two remain balanced, delicately, on the whims of Wall Street traders.

The collapse of Bear Stearns was only surprising because it seemed Wall Street believed these firms could get away with their incredibly profitable but totally absurd subprime lending. The International Herald Tribune reported yesterday from within Bear Stearns, about the employees’ reaction. Many spoke of total shock, a feeling of betrayal, and ominously; none seemed aware that this sort of collapse was well within the realms of Bear Stearns operations.

Bear Stearns’ operations were so risky because they were bundling valueless loans with some good loans and then sold them to other institutions which were totally unaware of what they had bought (other than seeing the AAA rating on the bundles).

Surely a firm operating in this manner should go bankrupt. It had made risky financial maneuvers, assumed it would not get caught, and when it all fell apart - everyone was surprised. The story should have ended there. Bear Stearns would have collapsed into a smoking heap, other firms would peer at the wreckage and learn some valuable lessons. Although the following year would be fraught with panicking traders feeling insecure about deals, it would be the ultimate culmination of Milton Friedman’s pro-free-market ideals. Leave it to the market, we chanted.

But when the market fell apart because their brash deals collapsed, they called in the Federal Reserve. Although the Fed deserves blame for not reigning in Wall Street during Alan Greenspan’s boom years, it should not be paying for Bear Stearns collapse. Nevertheless, it floated $30 billion to grand old JP Morgan and Bear Stearns was snapped up on Monday for $236 million, massively down from the $3.54 billion it was worth on Friday.

Most impressively, JP Morgan has an option on Bear Stearns World Headquarters (photo above of the Kohn Pederson Fox-designed skyscraper built in 2001) so if Bear Stearns stakeholders vote down the JP Morgan bid, not only will they likely be bankrupt immediately, they could get evicted from their own headquarters; a building which is worth approximately 5 times what JP Morgan bid for the whole company.

Here in England when our government did something very similar: nationalising Northern Rock, our Senior Staff Writer wrote a sarcastic article labeling the Prime Minister a ‘dyed-in-the-wood Commie’. While joking, the point is that the nationalisation of Northern Rock was direct government intervention in the financial system after its collapse. Which is exactly what the Fed did for Bear Stearns. Headlines across the world trumpeted it as JP Morgan saving Bear Stearns, but this was funded by the Fed’s $30 billion.

Government intervention in this ways is like giving candy to the class bully. Bear Stearns was ruthless in its quest to make money from subprime mortgages. For this, Bear Stearns should not be nursed back to life, it should be allowed to collapse because it brought its downfall upon itself. Notice Goldman Sachs, another player in Wall Street, has $21 billion to hand out in bonuses; it was not necessary for Bear Stearns to operate in this way. It chose to, and for that error, it should fall. Saying it is too big to fail should only be a justification for propping up necessities like waterworks, electricity suppliers, and so on.

The blame remains at the feet of Alan Greenspan. Bear Stearns, Citicorp, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide, and the rest should be free to operate and make vast profits. Their activities fuel economic growth and generate wealth across the world. However, regulation should have been in place to ensure those worthless loans were not ‘mislabeled’ AAA. These firms should be free to invest, invent, foster entrepreneurship, and make trillions of dollars; but not by swindling others.

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Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based international non-governmental organization which advocates freedom of the press, has today launched a one-day protest against Internet censorship in the nine worst offending nations. While they include obvious ones like China and Cuba, RSF also shines a light on the offenses of Turkmenistan and Eritrea, both nations which cripple Internet access as a means of controlling what the public knows, thinks, and understands of their government and global events.

The protests are very easy to join; you click on a country - perhaps the one that offends you most, or as I did, the one with the fewest protesters - and fill out 4 text fields; name, surname, city, and country. Then you pick the slogan you wish to hoist above your virtual head and join in with thousands of others who right now are protesting in virtual representations of famous plazas around the world, including the infamous Tienanmen Square in Beijing.

Join in (French)
Join in (English)

The graphic above, from the Wikimedia Foundation, is the Reporters Without Borders 2006 press freedom ranking map, showing from blue to red the severity of Internet restraints across the world.

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Some Palestinian “journalists” have responded to the recent murders in Jerusalem with something less than condemnation. One article in particular, by “Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem”, left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. The title, which fairly sums up the piece, reads “Soldiers (not innocent students) killed at settler center”.

It seems that the writer wishes to enter a discussion as to who is a civilian. According to his logic – that all Israeli citizens are legitimate targets due to compulsory military service – a citizen of any society that has conscription is a viable military target. Such as, say, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Tunisia. We’ll bear that in mind next time we’re engaged in hostilities with those nations, Khalid.

But let us not forget that this yeshiva was (apparently) the headquarters of the Jewish settlement movement. Aha! They therefore deserved to die. That clears that one up. Except civilised people do not condone acts of violence – or, in this case, murder – in response to political beliefs. If we did then, presumably, retribution against the Palestinians who, in a 77% voter turnout, elected Hamas to 76 out of 132 parliamentary seats, would be equally justified. Or who were seen dancing in the streets, cheering and distributing bon-bons (yes, bon-bons), in celebration of cold-blooded murder.

Amaryeh, in the interests of journalism, moreover seems to deem it relevant that “Yitzhak Rabin’s killer, Yigal Amir, is reportedly to have studied at the Merkaz Ha’rav”. One wonders: is he sure he wants to go down that route? Unsurprisingly, he does not pursue this line of thought.

Of course, as was to be expected, the “Zionist-influenced or Zionist-controlled American media” did not stray from the official Zionist “propaganda”, shallowly portraying the innocent civilian victims as…well, as innocent civilians. But our mate Khalid knows better. They were, as “paramilitaries” (though not engaged in hostilities), anything but innocent. But, if that applies, then how much more was the assassination of Imad Mugniyah justified? And if we take this to its logical conclusion, then the attack, which was “probably to avenge [his] murder”, was in fact unjustified, as the original killing was justified. No?

Amaryeh also dismisses the claim that the IDF “doesn’t murder Palestinian civilians deliberately”, forgetting to note the fact that while the Israeli Army, in the interests of clarity, wears full military uniform when engaged in hostility (I hardly need mention that neither the victims of the shooting, nor the shooter himself, was wearing any such thing) – militants, if they are in an obliging mood, may deign to wear towels on their heads. But let us not forget that the murderer was a civilian himself until he decided to pick up a rifle and kill other civilians. This episode, if anything, perfectly demonstrates the dilemma facing Israel in terms of knowing who the enemy is.

After the horrific Baruch Goldstein massacre of almost exactly 14 years ago, Rabin described it as a “loathsome, criminal act of murder”, and the Israeli media unanimously condemned it in similar terms. Hamas have taken a slightly different approach, being so proud of the attack that they even claimed responsibility for it. In my view, that pretty much tells you all you need to know.

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In Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, a religious school for Torah study, a group of terrorists opened fire with an automatic weapon, murdering in cold blood 8 civilians and injuring many more besides, before thankfully being killed by an Israeli paratrooper on the scene.

Rabbi David Simchon, director of the yeshiva, bravely declared that “No terrorist will succeed in stopping our faith, our values, the justice of our cause or what we teach here at the yeshiva.” Whilst the moderate Mahmoud Abbas rightly condemned the attack due to its targetting of innocent civilians, in Gaza, Hamas asserted that they “bless the operation. It will not be the last.”

Hamas ask the world to give them financial aid. They ask to be considered at the negotiation table for a future peace settlement. They demand that they are taken to be serious political players due to their democratic mandate. Yet they practice the mantras of their charter; their unwillingness to recognise Israel’s right to exist and in so doing support the most heinous of crimes against the most innocent of young religious Jewish men who have dedicated their life to Torah study. They are terrorists since the only bargaining chip they use is the tool of coercion, through which innocent lives are needlessly lost.

If Hamas want peace, if they want a Palestinian state, if they want to be taken seriously as politicians and not criminals, and above all, if they want to continue to exist they must rapidly change. Terrorism will only cause more deaths, not least their own. I guess we can hope.

Editor: The world continues to be full of ignorant prejudice, and unjust hatred. Sticks and Stones does not lay claim to educating the world on all that must be highlighted, but we endeavour to shine our spotlight on what we can. Today marks 100 posts at Sticks and Stones but we will not be celebrating, because we are in mourning. 8 innocent people died today.

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