Reduction, Kauffman, and (presumably this is where its going) God

Examining his biographical information it is clear that Dr. Kauffman is an extraordinarily accomplished and widely respected scientist. This suggests his insights are worth considering and, further, that I am well out of my element in critiquing them. And yet, “fools rush in …” There are a number of oddly questionable elements evident in the presentation of his argument in this (apparently) first in a series of essays. Here is a sample:

He at least insinuates that it is appropriate to lump together with no distinction, under the rubric of the aspects of a reductionist approach that he is criticizing, the efforts to identify “natural laws” associated with the Galilean inclined plane experiment, the “biosphere, human economy, human culture and our historicity”. For anyone with an even passing understanding of the utterly divergent methods and analyses applied to understanding the principles in these different areas, such a broad brush representation seems at least disingenuous, applied merely to bolster his position. Indeed, there is a very strong case to be made, of which Dr. Kauffman must surely be aware, that the extraordinary, unparalleled, stunning success of the reductionist approach in some of these areas – e.g., the physical sciences – is what has prompted its incorrect, incomplete and/or inappropriate application in others – e.g., historicity. The failure of the approach in one of these areas does not and should not be used wholesale to indict its application to another as he seems to be doing.

He resorts to a shameless straw man argument and even then his conclusion from it is patently and demonstrably wrong: the physicist who has no mechanism in the tools of the trade to “pick out pumping blood as of special interest” from the properties of the heart. The root of this determination by Dr. Kauffman seems to me to arise from an assumption that our straw physicist is only capable of a completely literal interpretation of an abbreviated three step version of the “scientific method” taught in 7th grade science class. But, of course, there is a vast literature that unequivocally demonstrates that the true practice of (even reductionist) science goes well beyond this limited and ineffective approach. Finally, I hope I really do not need to list the nearly endless litany of advances and insights the reductionist sciences have achieved that lie outside Dr. Kauffman’s tightly circumscribed interpretation of its practice.

Also, I have become extraordinarily skeptical of philosophical arguments that venture into, or worse, rely on appeal to quantum theory. There are, of course, many intriguing and puzzling consequences of quantum theory but I’ve just seen too many appeals to it that are gross misrepresentations and nothing more than quantum woo. In fact, I feel disposed to venture a new principle: Futzinfarb’s corollary to Godwin’s law is that “any general philosophical argument that degenerates into an appeal to quantum theory must be ignored”. I’ll have to give Dr. Kauffman a narrow pass on Futzinfarb’s corollary, as his assertions about the implications of quantum mechanics for evolution are probably fundamentally correct: that its principles (laws) preclude a reproducible time evolution of the universe. The fatally flawed conclusion drawn from this, though, is that since the principles of quantum theory cannot be applied to reproducibly predict the time evolution of various systems, that there is “no law.” This is little more than an a priori assumption, really a prejudice, about what kinds principles are admissible as natural laws. Dr. Kauffman appears simply unwilling to entertain even the possibility that we may inhabit a universe governed by specific reductive principles (laws) that have intrinsically irreproducible consequences. It’s just the icing on the cake that this position contrasts with his critique of an a priori reductionist approach to understanding.

There are other things that deeply bother me about this piece on which I will not elaborate here. Though he may have profound insights about the nature of the universe, this gravely flawed introduction is troubling has left me deeply skeptical.

Economic Best Interest

Background: A recent piece on NPR reported about a woman near Washington, DC, who has decided to walk away from her mortgage in spite of the fact that she was financially capable of continuing payments. Her decision was made, as the piece expressed it, on “business considerations”, on her economic best interests. As you might imagine, some of the commenters excoriated her for this decision. In nearly every case, either explicitly or implicitly, the morality of this decision was given as the reason for this treatment. Ha! Seriously?

Haven’t you people been paying attention?!? For decades now, corporations and their executive elite have been handsomely, handsomely rewarded specifically for exercising an unending litany of immoral actions and breach of contractual obligations, not the least of which is the social contract: socializing risk and privatizing profits, gutting functioning companies for quick profits in leveraged buyouts, creating and selling securities while betting against them, extorting tax breaks, charging usurious interest and fees, engaging in environmental destruction, monopolizing markets, externalizing costs, delaying resolution of judgements against them through endless litigation, creating a casino economy, seeking the cheapest labor at any price, undermining taxpayer and citizen interests through lobbying and funding of transparently mouthpiece “think-tanks” and political organizations, offshoring profits in tax havens, mismanaging and abandoning contractual obligations for worker retirement, and on and on and on, ad nauseum, ad infinitum not to mention plain old walking out on their obligations bankruptcy.

In every case, we’re told of the path of destruction they leave behind: “don’t take it personally, it’s just a business decision, it’s just in the best economic interest of the company.” And yet some of those NPR commenters expect me to be horrified that one middle-class American has learned and is going to apply this all-American ultimate-Randian economic rationale to her own situation? Fergawdsake people, this is what all those Greenspan freemarketeers are always whispering into your ear: “when people act exclusively on the basis of their own economic interest, that provides the best outcome for society.” They are telling her to do this, virtually writing out an instruction manual – to act in her own economic interest. After all, it’s what gave us those wonderful outcomes of Enron traders chortling at their screwing over of granny on her utility bills, and financial executives slopping at the public money trough like so many hogs after being complicit in nearly bringing down the world economy, and the exporting of millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs to China including some under conditions consistent with slave labor, and the willful ignorance of the auto industry to the reality that their business model was unsustainable, and a decade of explosive growth in the incomes of the highest compensated one percent of the population while compensation for the poor and middle class has been stagnant or worse, and, of course, obscene compensation for executives at the companies who engineered the debacle of millions of homeowners in underwater mortgages. I could, of course, go on with examples, but I’ll spare you the gory details.

What could corporations want more – what could warm the greedy little cockles of their hearts more – than for people to listen to and live by the creed of these morality commenters? What could be better for corporations then the asymmetric warfare of consumers following a deep, unshakeable, moral and ethical code of financial responsibility, completely independent of considering what’s in their own best interests, in their interactions with sociopathic, greed-is-good, what’s-in-it-for-me, institutions? It seems pretty clear who will come out on top in that match-up every damned time.

The sad thing, the truly disturbing thing in this story is that this woman is actually likely to suffer more severe consequences than any of the obscene financial “wizards” who engineered the near implosion of the world economy many of whom are currently milking their taxpayer funded TARP bailouts to extract huge bonuses. I’ll take your offense at her actions seriously when you begin to express some real outrage at the sociopathic executives and corporations who have have vaporized tens of trillions (that’s trillions with a T) of dollars and truly undermined the long-term prospects of the nation and the world through their immoral behavior. Until then, meh.

On A Miracle

How can a simple public profession of one's faith in the context of describing an averted tragedy become offensive? When does it become destructive? Let's outline a situation: a warm Christmas-time story in a local newspaper about an energetic and engaging young woman who contracts a life-threatening condition, but who subsequently recovers through intercession, through the fervent prayers of family, friends and strangers. A close-knit family, more secure in their faith than ever, understands that this is nothing less than a miracle and that God has a purpose for the young woman. What kind of cold-hearted reprobate would begrudge these folks their joy, their celebration of this moment of grace? What kind indeed?

Well, let's fill in the outline just a bit. A previously healthy young woman suddenly and unexpectedly suffers a seizure. An MRI reveals she has a brain tumor. Across the country, a neurosurgeon at Mayo Clinic removes the malignant tumor, though the surgery and its aftermath pose life-threatening complications of blood clots and infection. And, finally, her recovery is faster and more complete than any of her medical caregivers anticipate.

The miracle, has in fact been mediated by, among other things, the diagnostics of MRI and radiologists and by access, the many different layers of access, to one of the world's foremost medical facilities, to an extraordinarily accomplished neurosurgeon, and cutting edge pharmaceuticals.

To me, attributing the recovery of this woman to miraculous intervention by a loving God is, frankly, offensive. At its root it insults the long, difficult, rational and deliberate path that led to understanding the principles and developing MRI technology, it overlooks all those who spent long years educating and training those crack medical personnel, it avoids considering the dedication and effort those medical personnel have invested in their careers, it sidesteps the understanding that an experienced neurosurgeon must necessarily have gained from inevitable mistakes and the suffering of others, it elides examination of the economic conditions that make access to medical "miracles" accessible to some but not others, it implies, however mildly, that there is no purpose for those whose outcomes are less fortunate, and on and on.

In short, the claim of a miracle in a case like this, seems to me to be one symptom of a society that has so little understanding of the sacrifice, the investment, the infrastructure, the regulation, the very social contract that has made their lives livable; a society that has so interwoven these "miracles" into the fabric of people's lives that to many of them, the "miracles" and their origins have become transparent; a society that, because of that transparency, is in fact busy betraying their "miracles". "Miracles" like this, then can even be seen as destructive because rather than fully recognizing the investment necessary to make them possible it enhances their transparency. For this reason, and between you and me and the fencepost, I prefer my miracles to be weeping faces of Mary in a pan of bacon drippings than this kind.

Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy.

As a Nobel prize winning and widely respected scientist, a big part of Dr. Chu’s job now is to bring that expertise to bear in collaboration with intelligent and well-informed individuals trying to solve the gravest problems that confront this nation. The other part of his job is to work with congress.

The Intersection of Laffer Curves and Torture Policy

An overly simple and probably substantially wrong understanding of the so-called Laffer curve is that, with low tax rates, increasing tax rates produce more revenue for the government, but with diminishing returns. Upslope. Finally, at some point, an “optimal” tax rate, increasing the rate causes revenues to fall due to disincentives and other impacts on the economy. Downslope. A flawed but easy to grasp analogy is that government revenues follow the trajectory of a thrown softball: as the softball gets further (increasing tax rates) from the hand that flung it, it rises higher and higher (revenues increase), upslope, reaches a highest point (greatest revenue), and then as it continues (tax rates continuing to increase), it comes crashing back to earth (revenues collapse), downslope.

As my understanding of the torture policies instituted by our government has unfolded over the years, I have always, always, deep in my liberal, bleeding-heart gut, known them for what they are: an unmitigated horror. I am now convinced that I did not speak out enough against torture polices, send enough letters to the editor, communicate frequently enough with my legislators with strong enough language opposing the institutionalization of torture. Why?

I blame my godforsaken liberal, knee-jerk willingness to listen to all sides of an argument and to reevaluate my position on an issue, and my rather unusual (for a liberal) personal portfolio of national security experience. I listened carefully to the arguments that “enhanced interrogations, black prisons, extraordinary renditions” and so on, were necessary for national security. I was also somewhat sympathetic that a fearful if not cowardly electorate had, for whatever reason, directly through elected leaders and indirectly through the appointments and approvals of those leaders, chosen to place into policy-making positions a stunning array of those who were demonstrably incompetent, and thus incapable of conceiving how to implement an effective long-term national security policy addressing a complex issue like terrorism without resort to such unsavory and inadvisable backstops.

And I have to admit that the national security arguments bought from me some good part of what their authors probably intended – they left me just unsure enough of the slope of the moral ground on which I was standing. Who am I to express moral outrage over policies that might save a mother from the tragedy of losing a child to a terrorist attack? In retrospect, I suppose I rationalized that as detainee policy and interrogation techniques increase away from a zero point of perfectly and transparently (and anyway unrealizable) idealized humane treatment, there may, in fact, be some national security benefits to be obtained. Upslope.

But as the issue has exploded over the past several weeks, the national security argument has reemerged in full force, with many now arguing that being aware of, considering, and investigating the policies, and perhaps prosecuting those responsible where appropriate, seriously endangers, has already endangered our national security. See, for instance, Porter Goss. Or Dick Fergodssake Cheney.

I simply want those who are pressing this position to understand what its effect on my consideration of this issue has been. Those developing and implementing these policies, if nothing else, had to operate from an understanding that this is a free and democratic country, a country with a constitution and established laws and treaties, and that whatever policies they developed and implemented for national security had to operate and would necessarily succeed or fail within that fundamental structure. Those responsible for the torture policies who are trying to silence their antagonists and who are now arguing that our national security is being compromised, has already been compromised, by the democratic, constitutional, legal processes that are unfolding relating to these policies, rather are, apparently transparently and unselfconciously, compounding with that argument the increasingly compelling evidence that these policies, probably in the short term, and certainly in the long term, undermine our national security.

Here, then, is my point: those who developed and implemented these policies were responsible for one ultimate purpose – to provide for national security. So much of their opposition to investigation and prosecution now rests on the pivot of national security. But they, themselves, are arguing that their misbegotten torture policies and implementation, in the context of a democratic, constitutional, legal, moral nation, went so far that their consequences in that context decrease our national security. Downslope.

These people, now even by their own argument, took us so far along the Torture Laffer Curve that our national security is crashing and burning. Their responsibility WAS national security and by their own admission the policies they developed and implemented have failed, impairing our national security. It is time to unravel these policies and to drag us back along the axis of the Torture Laffer Curve. I don’t see any way for us to do this in the long term except to: Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate.

An Open Letter to Jake DeSantis

Dear Mr. DeSantis,

It occurs to me that the experience of betrayal and persecution you described in your AIG resignation letter is qualitatively indistinguishable from that of millions of American workers. According to your account: contractual obligations to you were, in some sense, breached, just like, for instance, the thousands of Delphi retirees who have had their retirement and health benefits eliminated as a consequence of the company’s bankruptcy and the unwillingness of automotive executives to undertake rational changes to their business model; you accepted a significant short-term economic disadvantage in trade for what was presented to you as attractive long-term benefits that will, now, never be realized, just like the millions of manufacturing workers who have had their livelihoods exported so that, for instance, underwear could be fifty cents cheaper at Wal-Mart and inexpensive toxic pet food could be imported from China; you were betrayed and your compensation was sacrificed on the altar of painfully myopic considerations by executives, politicians, pundits, and, ultimately, a fickle and ill-informed public, just like the tens of thousands of competent, dedicated, and hard-working teachers who are expected to single-handedly address all of a consumer society’s ills with less and less resources, yet who are routinely vilified to gain a few precious ideological points; you were compensated at a level that didn’t fully recognize the effort you have invested in preparing for and conducting your career and that amounted to only a tiny fraction of the value of your contribution, just like the thousands of academic, government, and corporate PhD scientists and engineers who are responsible for the technological foundations on which our multi-trillion dollar economy is built; you had to work in a miserably stressful and demanding environment, forgoing any semblance of a healthy family life, just like the thousands of single mothers who work two and three life-draining jobs, trying to make ends meet so that their children might have a remote chance to escape the cycle of poverty; your company’s misfortune was due not to your actions but to the ill-advised, unethical, or outright fraudulent corporate policies of others, just like the thousands of Enron workers who lost their life-savings and their careers.

In this light, your personal experience really is terribly mundane, has been repeated across the country a million times over and for decades and in every variation, is old hat, causing one to wonder why it warranted such central placement in the national media. Forgive me this indulgence, but I can’t help but suspect those who placed your story in the media spotlight, who wanted it there, are an unreflective, incapable-of-recognizing-irony cohort of media, business and political elite who probably misunderstood its ultimate nature, not recognizing the mind-numbingly repetitive themes in it that I have identified above. But I do find it genuinely unusual in several ways. First, it is striking that so many of these economic realities with which the elite have endlessly browbeaten the American public have finally reached into the very boardroom which has for so long been their champions, and that in doing so they have elicited the most bitter remonstrance. Second the quantitative nature of the situation is striking: the admittedly severe imposition of a high special tax on your bonus payment would still have left you with nearly twice the U.S. median household income, something that left you reeling at the injustice and yet which, presumably due to your prior earnings, you were in a position to reject. Even further, the situation has highlighted the paradoxical nature of the astronomical amounts of money at play: to justify the bonuses, it has been correctly, and yet oddly dismissively pointed out that $165,000,000 is only a fraction of a percent of AIG’s taxpayer financed bailout package, a truly tiny amount; yet that amount of money would pay for the operation of a university educating 20,000 students for an entire year, or would purchase health insurance for 10,000 children for a year, or could be used to erect 100 Megawatts of wind turbine capacity, enough to supply electricity for up to 100,000 homes. Why do I find it likely that most of those pointing out the “tiny” aspect of the bonuses would scream bloody murder at the use of those funds for these alternative purposes? Finally, I find your attitude about your education at MIT, quite frankly, ugly. You have every right to be proud of the accomplishment represented by that education, but somewhere along the line you seem to have missed an important point: that education was not provided solely so that you could enrich yourself, Gordon Gekko notwithstanding. A great deal of public money was invested in your education through hundreds of millions of dollars of government grants and loans and tax incentives for charitable giving to MIT and its students over many years. That investment came with an implicit understanding, a social contract if you will, that your education would benefit not just you but the nation as a whole. So where were you when AIG was constructing their financial weapon of mass destruction that would implode not just your company, not just the national economy, but the world economy? Where the hell were you? You were a hell of a lot closer to ground zero than I was, and I had enough sense to recognize something had gone terribly amiss years ago, I had enough information to write to my legislators and ask them to do something to back us out of the impending disaster, fat lot of good that did. Where the hell were you? A very conservative reading of your apparently healthy compensation during those halcyon years at AIG came with, presumably, some level of fiduciary responsibility. How can you argue that you met that responsibility, short of the innocence by incompetence excuse perfected by the Bush adminstration: "nobody could have predicted?" How? Again, forgive me my indulgence, but your protestations of innocence in the events that precipitated this unmitigated disaster sound to me strangely like those of the arsonist who returns to the scene of his crime to help put out the fire and then expects to be treated as a hero.

I wish your expertise could be applied to unwind the AIG catastrophe, to save this country the billions of dollars we desperately need to invest in other places than the now worthless financial instruments assembled by your company. I wish you no ill will and genuinely hope you can rebuild your life and your career in a way that is productive for both you and your family and for the nation. But in the end, sir, in your story to this point, I see not only the depth of your betrayal, but the height of your hubris.

Trapped Squirming Vermin

Watching the exchanges suggests to me trapped squirming vermin - evidence that Jon Stewart has these racketeers dead to rights. Dead to rights.

The Michelle Obama Cell-Phone Portrait Session

It seems to me that many commentators are missing the broader meaning of the brouhaha over the photo of a soup kitchen cell-phone portrait session with Michelle Obama. Those who read into that photo either a contradiction or the irresponsibility self-evident in owning a cell phone while accepting help in a soup kitchen and food pantry, who saw a confirmation of their disdain for the poor and for programs that minister to them, are simply participating in a wide-ranging long term American campaign. Some various elements of the campaign with which you may be familiar include pointing out the obesity of the poor, John Galt, Rick Santelli and his Chicago Mercantile cohorts’ tirade against “losers”, the justification of obscene CEO compensation packages, the welfare cadillac, and NY Times stories about the tragedy of a former executive working as a janitor. At its root, that campaign advances the understanding that economic well-being is perfectly correlated with personal worth, that being poor, should, in and of itself, be a source of shame, is due solely to irreducible personal failings. In order to accomplish this, though, those who pick up the threads of the campaign need to ignore any countervailing evidence: structural elements of the economy, prejudice, inequality of opportunity and education. It must ruthlessly ignore that the predominant CEO compensation mechanisms are subject to positive feedback distortions, that the businesses operating in poor neighborhoods, agricultural and corporate policies, and rational decisions about how to convert money into calories conspire in determining the diet of the impoverished, that wealth can be built with activities that are not only unproductive but counterproductive to social welfare, and the role and economics of cell-phones in 2009 (not to mention a lack of any semblance of reportorial due diligence in examining the context of a particular photograph). And with this as a backdrop, it is trivial to look over the shoulder of a young black man, scornful of how he has (apparently) chosen to spend his money, secure in the superiority of our own money management, our own net worth, the content of our character.

Ya know what I'd like to see...

...purely as a dispassionate scientific inquiry, is Rick Santelli and Elizabeth Warren along with three commodity brokers, three investment bankers, three mortgage officers, three bankrupt former autoworkers, three defrauded sub-prime mortgage holders, and three workers with gutted retirement accounts, locked in a room with a stack of economic data and a rack of Louisville Sluggers. Just to, you know, verify which way the outrage pendulum is swinging right now.

Payscales and Pitchforks

Shocked, disappointed, disgusted. See e.g., Claire McCaskill and President Obama. Those are the responses to news of exhorbitant bonuses and astronomical compensation packages, for CEO’s, executives, and others in anti-government, anti-tax, anti-regulation corporations that are gorging mind-numbing amounts of taxpayer funds from the bailout trough. Wronged, self-exculpatory, defensive. See e.g., John Thain and Rudy Giuliani. Those are the responses to the criticisms of the McCaskills and Obamas.

And yet, in retrospect, none of this is surprising. The principal fiction underlying the obscene compensation of those “masters of the universe” is that the market determines their compensation based purely and irreducibly on their value. This fiction becomes, has become, deeply rooted and self-fulfilling (for a time). In their minds, the cause-effect relationship between value and compensation has been conveniently stripped of every other factor: externalities, structural effects, market inefficiencies, morality, finite resources, personal biases, etc., etc. Stripped of these considerations the compensation logic is unassailable, albeit circular.

Why is their compensation so high? Because of their value! How do we know they are so valuable? Because they require such high compensation! Such simple positive feedback systems eventually consume all available resources destroying themselves in the process. But from their vantage, and applying this impeccable logic, it appears to the masters, for the time being, that the excesses are those of the mere rabble. How dare they question the value of their economic aristocracy?! The unfortunate history of the world has repeatedly demonstrated that when aristrocracy becomes insensitive to the rabble in this way, their breakthrough understanding is delivered through pitchforks, either real or metaphorical. My advice? Invest in pitchforks.

The "Obama Effect"

The study has not yet completed peer review, BUT...

Take a look at the plot that is shown as evidence here. (Vanderbilt University press release on Ray Friedman research.)

Then review the critique of graphical analysis here. (Taibbi critique of Thomas Friedman.)

Finally consider the rich irony that both plotters are Friedmans.

I propose a new phenomenon: "Friedman napkin" - a plot of arbitrarily selected parameters with either real or imaginary data used to reach a wildly inappropriate conclusion.

(Note: Both "Friedman plot" and "Friedman graph" already have specific meanings in math and science, hence the slightly more pejorative term "Friedman napkin." On the other hand, the number of syllables is nicely consistent with "Friedman unit."

You heard it here first.

The trouble with global warming skeptics

In a NOVA piece on global climate change, “What’s up with the weather?”, James Trefil observed:

If you sat down and said, "I'm going to design a public issue that is the absolute worst nightmare of every scientist, of every communicator in the world," you couldn't do better than the greenhouse effect. You're dealing with something that's very complicated. You're dealing with something where there's legitimate uncertainty in the science. It's not that people are trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There's legitimate uncertainty. You're dealingwith something that has enormous consequences for people. And you're dealing with something whose effects will happen 30 years down the road, you know, when they happen. And then you say- you give people this and say, "Okay, do something about it."

For context.

The Crystal Vase: A one act play in three scenes.

Cast, in order of appearance:
Futzinfarb
Futzinfarb’s spouse
Millie, an orbital forcing cat
Trouble, an AGW monkey
Antimarx, a pet store clerk


Scene 1: A cozy living room, two chairs arranged around a fireplace

Futzinfarb: I sure do like that expensive crystal vase you gave me.
Fuzinfarb’s spouse: You’re welcome dear.
Futzinfarb: And it looks so nice on the mantelpiece.
Futzinfarb’s spouse: Indeed.
Millie: Meow!
Futzinfarb: Oh look, isn’t that cute? Millie likes the vase also. She’s rubbing against it….. Oh, oh no, it’s starting to tip! Millie! Stop! No! Bad cat!
Futzinfarb’s spouse: Oops, there it goes!
(Sound of vase smashing to bits.)
Futzinfarb: Fudge.
Futzinfarb’s spouse: Double fudge.
Millie: Meow!

Scene 2: The same living room, the next morning.

Futzinfarb: Oh look, honey – we won the ebay auction for the vase! It will be a perfect replacement for the one that Millie tipped off the mantel last night.
Futzinfarb’s spouse: I’ll go get my credit card. You’d better figure out what to do about Millie before the replacement vase gets here.
Millie: Meow!

Scene 3: A pet store, later that afternoon.

Futzinfarb: I want to complain about Millie, this cat that you sold me last week.
Millie: Meow!
Trouble: Ee, ee, ee. Ooh, ooh!
Futzinfarb: She rubbed up against an expensive crystal vase that we had on our mantel last night. It rocked and then tipped off the mantel and smashed to bits.
Futzinfarb’s spouse (wandering away, distracted): Cool! A tarantula!
Millie: Meow!
Trouble: Ee, ee, ee. Ooh, ooh!
Futzinfarb (ignoring Futzinfarb’s spouse, who is sticking one hand into a tarantula cage): We bought a replacement vase, but what do you suggest we should we do about Millie’s bad behavior?
Antimarx: No problem! We’ll happily trade in your cat Millie for this monkey, Trouble. Since Millie is the one that tipped your vase off the mantel last night, you’ll have nothing to worry about with Trouble.
Millie: Meow!
Futzinfarb’s spouse: Ouch!
Trouble: Ee, ee, ee. Ooh, ooh!

Curtain falls.

Update: It has a name.