Wash Av Huffy Crew

Doing Something with Soul, Creativity, or Love

2010-06-20T19:10:00.003-05:00

The Bloodstained Kleptocracy that Really Keeps on Giving

2010-06-15T16:30:00.003-05:00

Continuing our recurring fascination on this blog with the delightful Obiang family of Equatorial Guinea, I thought I might point your collective attentions (assuming anybody is paying any) to the Times' editorial today discussing the fact that President Obiang has pledged $3m a year to UNESCO to sponsor a prize to honor achievements that "improve the quality of human life," and without a hint of irony! And what's even more ironically unironic, they took the money!

The Paris Review

2010-06-04T11:06:00.002-05:00

.....has a blog now

in case you hadn't heard :)

Words Without English Equivalents

2010-04-30T10:55:00.003-05:00

1. Waldeinsamkeit (German): the feeling of being alone in the woods

2. Ilunga (Tshiluba, Congo): a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time

3. Taarradhin (Arabic): a way of resolving a problem without anyone losing face (not the same as our concept of a compromise – everyone wins)

4. Litost (Czech): a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery

5. Esprit de l’escalier (French): a witty remark that occurs to you too late, literally on the way down the stairs…

6. Meraki (Greek): doing something with soul, creativity, or love

7. Yoko meshi (Japanese): literally ‘a meal eaten sideways’, referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language:

8. Duende (Spanish): a climactic show of spirit in a performance or work of art, which might be fulfilled in flamenco dancing, or bull-fighting, etc.

9. Guanxi (Mandarin): in traditional Chinese society, you would build up good guanxi by giving gifts to people, taking them to dinner, or doing them a favour, but you can also use up your guanxi by asking for a favour to be repaid.

10. Pochemuchka (Russian): a person who asks a lot of questions

11. Tingo (Pascuense language of Easter Island): to borrow objects one by one from a neighbour’s house until there is nothing left

12. Radioukacz (Polish): a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain

13. Selathirupavar (Tamil): a word used to define a certain type of absence without official leave in face of duty

Do you guys have any others?

I was thinking : weltangst, zeitgeist....

There is a word in french "rebrousse-poil" which means to "rub the wrong way," literally to brush hair in the wrong direction.

“Do not forget the US imperialist wolves!”

2010-04-19T10:48:00.004-05:00

“Let’s extensively raise goats in all families!”

“Do not forget the US imperialist wolves!”

VA and MS Take Hot-Tub Time Machine Back to the (18)'80s

2010-04-13T18:58:00.006-05:00

Quite a week for Virginia and Mississippi. First, slavery receives no mention in Governor Robert McDonnel's Confederate History Month. Next, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour defended McDonnel's decision by claiming that Americans angry at the omission were "trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly." Today, we learn that one Mississippi county has received an order from a federal judge to cease and desist its segregationist policies. And, going back to Virginia, the editorial page of the Washington Post (Yes, the editorial page of the Washington Post--not exactly Cornell West) proclaims that Virginia's policy of stripping ex-cons of the right to vote amounts to "Jim Crow by another name." I was surprised when Bill Moyers had Michelle Alexander on his program the other week to discuss her book with the same thesis, thinking she was too radical for public television. Good to see the mainstream media not being shy to call out good ol' fashioned racism for what it is.

How Conservatives See the World; Or, Why Jonathan Kozol Is Worse for Black Schoolchildren than George Wallace

2010-03-25T11:39:00.011-05:00

I'm always astounded by the extent to which conservative-minded folks see the world in a profoundly different way than liberals. One of Matt Yglesias' favorite topics in this vein is on the issue of race and racism in America. For most conservatives, sometime soon after the Voting Rights Act was passed racism ended in America. Suddenly, the problem of reverse-racism (against white people) became a far greater concern. I'm not sure anyone would deny that individual acts of racism against people of color don't happen anymore, but if you listened to conservatives, you'd slowly come to realize that racist acts against whites is the real issue, and that it far outstrips racism against blacks.

I see similar sorts of discussions in debates around "the problem with the modern public university." Liberals tend to want to steer the conversation toward things like the lack of state responsibility to fund it, the privatization of a once public good, the growth of business schools and profit-driven sciences and marketing within it, etc. Conservatives tend to ignore these rather broad, large-scale problems and point to what seems to liberals like me to be rather trivial issues: that some black or Latin@ professor is not teaching enough Shakespeare, and that the humanities have been overrun by relativists. It may be the case that we are not teaching enough of the white, male "classics," for example--just like it may be the case that acts of discrimination against whites do indeed happen in our society--but this seems like a pretty bizarre place to start a conversation about the problem with universities, or the problem with racism.

I was reminded of this liberal vs. conservative divide when I read John McWhorter's recent piece for the New Republic on the ten people black folks could most do without. For the sake of brevity, I'll focus on one person on the list, #9, Jonathan Kozol. Keeping with the Huffy Crew's recent theme of school funding...Kozol has been a famous proponent of changing the way we fund schools so as to equalize funding between city and suburban districts. McWhorter counters that Kozol is wrong, and that equalized funding doesn't really matter when it comes to black children's academic performance. Fine. Fair enough. I'm even willing for the sake of argument to concede that McWhorther might be right on this particular point. But taking a step back for a moment, I'm left wondering who has been worse for black children's academic performance? Is Jonathan Kozel in the top ten? Let me go through some possible scenarios:

- Jonathan Kozol vs. Louise Day Hicks and the dude who soiled Old Glory in the Boston busing crisis

- Jonathan Kozol vs. George Wallace, a governor who refused to desegregate Alabama's schools and universities, and spread his rhetoric of aggrieved white men throughout the country in the two presidential campaigns.

Jonathan Kozol vs. Lester Maddox, the segregationist Atlantan who rose to governor of Georgia.

Jonathan Kozol vs. Bryant Bowles, founder of his local National Association for the Advancement of White People after the Brown v. Board decision. A great demagogue who arose fierce opposition to desegregation in many communities that otherwise would have been compliant

Jonathan Kozol vs. Charles Murray, advocate of the theory that black children aren't as smart as white children.

Jonathan Kozol vs. The Framers and Voters Who Supported California Proposition 13 and Colorado's Tax Payer Bill of Rights. Less tax money to spend on schools can't be very helpful for anyone, but it disproportionately affects the poor.

Jonathan Kozol vs. William Levitt, one of many postwar suburban planners who's idea of community (and suburban schools) intentionally excluded African Americans.

Jonathan Kozol vs. Richard Nixon, the great advocate for suburban whites and great opponent of busing.

And I'm sure we could add many others. I realize that McWhorter is being purposefully provocative and idiosyncratic with his choices here, but I think the tendency here fits in well with the conservative mindset I've outlined: racists and framers of policies that have disproportionately hurt black people are somehow less harmful than a guy who thinks that giving more money to poor schools would help poor black kids in those poor schools.

"What's so great about choice?" A Response

2010-03-23T14:55:00.002-05:00

[My comment exceeded the length limit so I'm just starting a new post.]

There's a lot to unpack here. Ravitch's book is getting a lot of press, and deservedly so. She's capturing an important zeitgeist here: the pushback among public school teachers and schools of education, in particular, against the Bush/Obama reform agendas that promote increased high stakes testing, teacher evaluations, and "school choice." I'm particularly pleased that you framed the question as you do, Scantron, as a more general issue with "choice" itself. I'm very much interested, as you know, in when/how choice became an educational and parental value, one as important--if not more so--than traditional concerns about local/parental control of schools.

I look at this "metaphysical" love of choice (which I think you put nicely) more historically, having arisen from a series of policies, cultural and demographic changes, and ... parental choices ... throughout the 20th century. Choice may be an important philosophical value, but in my mind it was one that arose after the fact. Milton Friedman may have put it in writing, in other words, but for the tens of thousands of Catholic parents who wanted an alternative to the “Protestant” public school system; for the white parents who were calling for greater parental choice to avoid desegregation; and for the tens of thousands of black parents calling for it as the true meaning of desegregated school systems, freeing up choice was simply the only way to achieve their goals. Today, calls for school choice sound very reasonable to black parents stuck in ever-decaying urban cores, as they do to the Fred Hiatts of the world living quite comfortably in suburban areas where the choices are, as you put it, between a pretty good public school and a very good private school. But in places with county-wide school districts as in Wake County, which I’ve blogged about before, school choice can appear rather ominous. If you’re a parent who hates the idea of your kid being bused out of your neighborhood, a discourse surrounding “local control” of the neighborhood school might be a lot more palatable than market-based solutions.

I’ll save the historical discussion for another time. In the meantime, I’d like to push back a bit on your characterization of the conditions that give rise to school choice. The reality is that we don't live in Lake Wobegon, where everyone agrees on a common national curriculum (see Texas), and all students are above average coming from supportive above average families. In that sense, I do see this as a "market of heterogeneous preferences." And, more importantly, I don't see how schools of choice present less of a problem to a common curriculum than have local and state boards of education (again, see Texas). Privatized schools generally don't look drastically different from public schools when it comes to curriculum, the reason being, I suppose, that skills and knowledge are determined by a quasi-marketplace: from colleges and universities, to textbook markets (for the third time, see Texas), to parents. The demand for schools that don't teach important skills and knowledge, however we want to define that, is not very high.

My problem with choice has less to do with curriculum and more to do with the other, intangible things schools can teach. I do think (as does Ravitch) that schools should be places where different kinds of people from different backgrounds are brought together, and I think public schools have the potential to do this better than do privatized schools—though I will note that there are studies that suggest that private schools have far more diverse student bodies than we might assume. I also think, going off on another thing you mentioned, Scantron, that the taint of private interest is real. Competition has its benefits (and, unlike Ravitch, I think that the positives of competition applies to schools as well) but it also has it costs. Literally. Schools that have to compete have to engage in all sorts of ridiculous spending on marketing, not to mention the inevitable corruption (equally inevitable as large public monopolies) that comes with privatization, particularly in job-depleted inner cities where these contracts represent a real bonanza.

Turning from my special interest to yours, I’m wondering, What do the ancients have to say about choice? I can’t recall them extolling the virtues that come with opening up choices, but I might be wrong. Obviously there’s an important emphasis on the kinds of choices we make (moral, immoral), but I’d be curious to hear if anyone you’ve read talks about the importance of choices per se, whether politically, ethically, etc.

It would be a Freudian slip if anyone still cared

2010-03-23T00:38:00.003-05:00

David Brooks today:

Nobody knows how this bill [health care reform] will work out. It is an undertaking exponentially more complex than the Iraq war, for example.

No one but a clueless American chauvinist, a ruling class errand boy whose glib imperialist assumptions are dyed so deep as to be practically reflexes, could say such a thing. I have no idea how this comment made it into Brooks' otherwise anodyne column, perched alongside such banal (yet desperate) acts of projection as, "But to me, [health care reform] feels like the end of something, not the beginning of something." But in fact that's the whole point: it makes sense to the embodiment of conservative "sensibility" to consider a tepid Nixonian bill "more complex" than the near-complete dismantling of a state's infrastructure, institutions, public health, and basic security. It's not merely the obvious absurdity of comparing an outcome of our enfeebled democratic process (imagine that, majorities passing legislation!) to a war of aggression that's on display here, but the callous, unblinking attitude that suggests to its bien-pensant possessor that the massive infliction of violence half a world away can be considered a relatively tidy exercise, a clean-up job that somewhere along the way "tragically" got bogged down with unnecessary complications. Funny how just a few sentences in a Times column can so perfectly exemplify the traditional and (for the foreseeable future) ineradicable rot at the heart of our national political thinking.

Brooks' comments can be construed as expressing this truth, though: unlike the Iraq war, the passage of health care reform did not enjoy bi-partisan support.

What's so great about choice?

2010-03-11T11:45:00.003-06:00

Imagine my surprise when the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed on Tuesday by a certain Diane Ravitch speaking out against charter schools and other market- and profitability-based education reforms. (Ravitch was Assistant Secretary of Education under Bush Sr. and a founding member of the Koret Task Force for education at the Hoover Institution -- i.e., "good conservative credentials.") Read the whole article, but the take-away points are:

But the promise [of charter schools] has not been fulfilled. Most studies of charter schools acknowledge that they vary widely in quality. The only major national evaluation of charter schools was carried out by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond and funded by pro-charter foundations. Her group found that compared to regular public schools, 17% of charters got higher test scores, 46% had gains that were no different than their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse.

[...]
What we need is not a marketplace, but a coherent curriculum that prepares all students. And our government should commit to providing a good school in every neighborhood in the nation, just as we strive to provide a good fire company in every community.
On our present course, we are disrupting communities, dumbing down our schools, giving students false reports of their progress, and creating a private sector that will undermine public education without improving it. Most significantly, we are not producing a generation of students who are more knowledgable, and better prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship. That is why I changed my mind about the current direction of school reform.

I have typically been an opponent of both excessive testing (Ravitch's other target) and charter schools because I believe that education is 1) a matter of forming character, strengthening certain processes of thought and argumentation, and instilling a shared body of knowledge in the citizenry, rather than training for a trade; 2) everyone should receive the same form of this education; and 3) the only way to ensure this universality, and to ensure that curricula won't be tainted by private interests, is to make education a public good. Note that these arguments have nothing to do with what we owe the poor in a capitalistic society; they hold for any kind of social formation.

Today Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post comes along and supplies the only objection he knows, which is that taking away charter schools takes away "choice." And who would want to deprive poor people of choice, since rich people have choice?

But in the meantime, is it right to tell parents stuck in dangerous schools that they just have to wait for, as [Katrina] Vanden Heuvel [editor of the Nation] calls it, that “fundamental change in the way America’s poor are treated in every aspect of their lives?” That they should take heart, because maybe Klein’s and Rhee’s hard work will pay off in time for the next cohort of children? Middle-class parents don’t have to wait; they have options. The evidence is incontrovertible that poor parents want options, too -- today. Why would we take those away?

There are really two points here. One is that it is unfair that wealthier people should have more choices and that we should then take away the few choices poor parents have. The other is that, because "fundamental change" (that we can believe in!) is so far off on the horizon, the few kids within the few kids who are actually better off because of charter schools make it worth it.

The first point casts light on the weird situation we've been reduced to thanks to the touting of "more choices" on the part of the political elite in this country. Part of this mentality is that it's just better overall, whether metaphysically or whatever, to have more choices, even when they're bad. To be more precise, choice is supposed to drive competition and thus improved quality, but that line of thinking is based on a market of heterogeneous preferences. Now, even if most people don't think as stringently as I do about what education should be, most, I think, would agree with Ravitch that kids need a "coherent curriculum that prepares all students." But a market apparently can't do that: it can't deliver a universal curriculum, and it can't even deliver the current curriculum well. So we're left with the absurd situation that greater choices are desirable just because they're psychologically gratifying or something, even when they're incapable of delivering better "products."

The second point misses the dynamics of the situation. The more kids attend charter schools or use vouchers, the more these options will be touted as a superior alternative to the failing public school system, and the more institutional "cling" they will enjoy. It is much easier to allow them to grow now than to try to get rid of them later. Now, proponents of charter schools who think charter schools provide better education want this to happen. But Ravitch claims charter schools don't provide better education. (And there are other reasons, such as those I've stated, why they're undesirable.) In any case, very powerful interests will keep promoting them, because they don't want to see tax money going to a public institution and they want to create an ideology of the free market in general. (More immediately, they might also want to make money off of privatized education or profitably-run charter schools.) So a good reason not to endorse charter schools is because this will lead to worse outcomes than now, even if a tiny minority of kids are currently benefiting from their "wider choices."

Anyway, the "public school/charter school" choice seems like a false one, since the agenda has been set so selectively: public schools at their current crappy levels of funding and performance vs. anything else. If you're devoted to the idea of education being of a certain quality and universal, then you're going to want to make it a viable public good through taxation and social programs. Of course, conservatives will want to say that this option has been exhausted already, since inner-city "culture" and teacher union intransigence has made funding public schools a waste of money. Liberals will say it's about poverty and the effects of US institutional racism, as Ravitch now seems to think. In any case, I'm interested to hear what y'all think of the arguments. I know that Robot, in particular, is considering looking at the idea of school "choice" for his dissertation.

only shallow.

2010-03-04T08:44:00.010-06:00

Lou Doillon in Vaccarello

Gaulthier a/w 10

Andreia Chavez mirrored shoe

Feretti a/w 10 + Sam the Eagle

American Apparel swine flu fashion

Crystal Brass Knuckles

WTF, Philatelic Edition

2009-12-27T00:42:00.002-06:00

My father, an avid stamp collector, suscribes to Linn's Stamp News, a glossy weekly covering all the goings-on (not many) and gripes (many) of the Philatelic world. I was rifling through a recent issues trying to fulfil my urge to hear old white men gripe about the Postal Service when I saw this letter recounting an anecdote about an Old Dead White Guy particularly beloved by seekers of knowledge on the Huffy Crew. Quite the Quiddity.

Balderdash

2009-12-20T01:10:00.002-06:00

British Study Claims "whisky worse than vodka" for hangover symptoms

Poppycock and rot, I say. Teach the debate! I feel much better after drinking whiskey than I do vodka. And although I might just inhabit one small corner of the statistical universe, I hope that in the rhetorical one I can throw more weight around by saying that this is one scenario where we should disavow science in favor of politics.

If you disagree with me here, we can settle it over a nice single malt.

Chronicles of dissent

2009-12-10T16:14:00.003-06:00

Shorter Politico.com Arena "conversation" on the Oslo speech:

Twenty-five boners and Stephen Walt.

More fun with switcheroo

2009-12-09T22:09:00.003-06:00

"You're upset about Obama's betrayal of progressivism, and I'm here to tell you whom to blame for that: Yourself.

Get over it. Seriously. I can't stand the piteous mewling of America when confronted with hypocrisy among the rich and famous and politically talented. How can anyone, in 2009, still be surprised by this type of a behavior?

If you were looking for Barack Obama to be your mentor, your life coach, your investment banker and the shining light by which you live your life, then boy, were you kidding yourself. Do not look to politicians for your value system. To paraphrase: Sycophant, heal thyself."

(It's actually about Tiger Woods.)

Credo quia autobiographicum

2009-12-08T15:35:00.005-06:00

Imagine reading the following:

My assessment of the Exxon report has nothing to do with the accuracy of its accounts. Some news agencies have fact-checkers poring over every sentence, which would be to the point if the report were a scientific study, a genre that is judged by the degree to which the factual claims being made can be verified down to the last assertion. This, however, is an advertisement, and while advertisers certainly insist that they are telling the truth, the truth the genre promises is the truth about themselves — the kind of products they sell — and even when they are being mendacious or self-serving, they are, necessarily, fleshing out that truth. [...] Advertisers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray their product.

[...]

Do I believe any of this? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Exxon does, and that its readers feel they are hearing an authentic voice. I find the voice undeniably authentic.

I should hope that any of us would find this assessment absurd. Whatever weight and importance we might give to the effectiveness of advertising, to the likelihood of its claims being accepted by the public, we would not then abdicate our role as critics simply because the advertisers say the "truth of their genre" is a weird, subjectivist self-truth. (It's highly doubtful that that's even what advertisers think -- they aren't interested in levels of ontological truth but in moving units by convincing people their [oftentimes shabby, useless] product is indispensable.)

Nevertheless, this is the stance Stanley Fish thinks we ought to take towards autobiography, and in particular Sarah Palin's Going Rogue. In the end, he finds Palin's "voice" "undeniably authentic," although he can't say how he would potentially distinguish between this authenticity and a shlock-ridden Hallmark commercial. It just strikes him as being so, presumably because it makes good use of a few autobiographical rhetorical tropes and "fulfills" its generic function. The acceptance of, and pleasure felt at, something merely because it does "its job" ought to strike us as strange: handguns and undersea plankton are effective machines, but I don't desire them. Perhaps Fish is just unquestionably accepting of generic autobiographies because he likes them: de gustibus non est disputandum. But why we should also feel this way is never explained.

Perhaps it's because doing so would require Fish to actually be critical and take a stab at what the content of Palin's vision is: "folk wisdom, regional pride, common sense, distrust of rhetoric, love of country, family, freedom, and the beauties of nature" are basically meaningless without further specification -- I "love my country," but presumably in a way very different from Sarah Palin (or at least from how she presents herself as loving it). Furthermore, do Sarah Palin's words, her beliefs, seem to match up with her actions? Who cares, says Fish: attempting to compare the Sarah Palin of reality with the Sarah Palin of her own lofty words would do violence to the sacred generic laws of autobiography. Never mind that the real purpose of the book may be to sell a pile of horse crap with a bow on it as a political package to dupes. No doubt Fish would tell us that "all" autobiographies aim at this -- who are we to say that Palin's autobiography is any more deceptive than, say, Barack Obama's? (Quick answer: they may both be, which is why we're continually so fucked as a nation.)

An interesting form of review, and a disgraceful one.

Arts and Letters Biannually

2009-11-21T13:08:00.002-06:00

As I've been checking the blog again thanks to some lovely posts by my fellow Huffy-Crewians, I looked just to the left of where the posts go to remember that we're linking to Arts and Letters Daily. I had not checked the site probably in at least two years, not since the last hate fest we had for the site on this blog, so I clicked through to it just to see what they were up to. And just like those people from high school who are woefully the exact same person they were years ago only a little pudgier, AL Daily seems to be in love with the same damn topics. Just among the first few posts we see:

Two bits about religion, from a liberally detached sociological perspective
Something about Jane Austen (Is there a movie coming out that I don't know about?)
A post on Isaiah Berlin
And a post on why public officials have to be so woefully politically correct ("like college diversity deans") when dealing with the fact that it was a Muslim who shot all those people at Ft. Hood
etc.

Not to get too deep into a critique of the whole liberalism blahblahlbah, but all I can think is that I would absolutely hate to have dinner with these people.

The Obiang family of Equatorial Guineau: The bloodstained kleptocracy that keeps on giving

2009-11-16T23:14:00.002-06:00

On the 19th it will be three years to the day that Robot introduced us to the ruling Obiang family of Equatorial Guinea. In case you forgot about them (I also mentioned them here a year and a half ago), the NY Times today reminds us that they remain a deeply corrupt, brutal dictatorship, enabled in large part by the U.S. and its addiction to Guinean oil.

Former U.S. ambassador to Guinea John Bennett explains, yet again, Why Robert Mugabe Would Kill To Be Obiang:

“Of course it’s because of oil,” said John Bennett, the United States ambassador to Equatorial Guinea from 1991 to 1994, adding that Washington has turned a blind eye to the Obiangs’ corruption and repression because of its dependence on the country for natural resources. He noted that officials of Zimbabwe are barred from the United States.
“Both countries are severely repressive,” said Mr. Bennett, who is now a senior foreign affairs officer for the State Department in Baghdad [! -- scantron]. “But if Zimbabwe had Equatorial Guinea’s oil, Zimbabwean officials wouldn’t still be blocked from the U.S.”

But wait -- the younger Obiang's brother, Gabriel Mbega Obiang Lima, files this response in the "ironic but not in any remotely funny way" department:

“This is the problem when a country becomes very successful,” said Gabriel Mbega Obiang Lima, the vice minister of mines, energy and industry and another of the president’s sons. “Everyone assumes us guilty until proven innocent.”

U.S. war criminals can no doubt sympathize with that sentiment. The main difference between them and Obiang is that there's zero likelihood they'll ever actually face repercussions.

Death of the Arabber

2009-11-10T22:31:00.006-06:00

We think of the nineteenth century United States as a land of steel and railroads. Walk down any urban street in 1890, however, and you would see horses. Lots and lots of horses, and lots of horse manure: 3300 tons of shit left on the streets per day in New York City, deposited by more than 12,000 railway horses and thousands more privately used ones. It seems difficult to understand Progressive era municipal reform--efforts to literally and figuratively "clean up" the cities teaming with immigrants and ruled by ward bosses--without understanding these horses and the sights and smells they left behind. There have been two books written on the subject in the last three years, which I'm hoping to read sometime soon...

I was reminded just how distant this urban world is from our own when I read in this morning's Baltimore Sun that city health officials are quickly shutting down the urban horse stables used by the Arabber community. One of the most exotic, nineteenth-century vestige left in Baltimore City, Arabbers sell fruit from horse-drawn carriages. To the health officials--and to the city's suburban population--these Arabbers are nothing more than animal abusers. The Sun has been exposing their code violations for years. This round's violations?

Standing water, mud and unsanitary conditions in the stables.... [R]at infestations, lack of proper bedding for the animals, trash and debris.

Sounds pretty vague and, well, urban-like to me. The urban horse, once such a common sight, is now on the verge of extinction, the result of a century-long campaign to eliminate it and transform the city into something new. Push the horses into the hinterland and out of the city. Cleanse the city of its dirty areas. Clean up the dung. What would a history of the twentieth-century city look like if we looked at the flight of horses from cities alongside the flight of (white) bodies?

Image of Arabbers from the Maryland Historical Society

Knife/Glass

2009-11-09T23:56:00.005-06:00

I once used a knife in the apartment that Robot and I shared back in the day and apologized to him--I hadn't washed dishes in weeks.

He said, "I don't care. What could be easier washing than a knife?".

I don't remember my response, although I think it may have been less incredulous than warranted because of self-interest. But I've been thinking about this for a few years now and I disagree completely.

The virtue of a knife is its cutting edge, not its sides, and nothing is harder to clean. When you clean it, you have to negotiate the Scylla/Charybdis (is this meme old?) of squeezing the sponge too hard and cutting it, or not actually getting the knife clean. This problem is amplified by the fact that you can't really examine this essential part of the object you're cleaning: hopefully, if you've got a good knife, it's very hard to see.

So the truth is that a glass is easier to clean because you can find the biofilm disgustingness that lies upon it by examining it from the exterior. I now wonder how many of the number of times I was sick while I was living with Robot were caused by his inept cleaning of knives.

Jacques Barzun Must Be Getting Nervous Right about Now

2009-11-03T11:36:00.002-06:00

Claude Levi-Strauss is now very much not alive. I will always find it sad that he never lived to see how the end of the Dreyfus Affair played out in 1906.

"You have raised up the giant, and we are asleep no more."

2009-11-02T22:09:00.003-06:00

In the world of educational policy, there are few near-indisputable claims to be made about what makes a good school, or how to better the outcomes of children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds One of them, however, is that children from poorer backgrounds do far better academically when they attend schools with children from wealthier stations. James S. Coleman's 1966 massive study--commissioned by the Office of Civil Rights--of equal educational opportunities of black and white student, in addition to finding that socioeconomic status was the most determinative factor in student achievement (rather than school or curriculum quality, which somewhat ironically spurred a conservative backlash against Johnson era programs that aimed to uplift poor children through increased federal aid to schools), found that poorer (ie. black) children did markedly better when integrated in school with middle class (ie white) children.

Forty years later, Coleman's claim about the benefits of economic diversity remain intact. Earlier this year, the sociologist (and former student of Coleman's) Gerald Grant published a book on the Raleigh, NC school system. Grant argued that the city's policies of consolidating the city schools with suburban schools, and busing students both ways across town, have almost achieved the county's goal of having no school with greater than 40% of children eligible for free or reduced price lunches. More importantly, Grant found, in accomplishing economic integration the county has some of the best schools in the country. A child from a poor background in Raleigh has a far greater chance of succeeding academically than in just about any city in the United States.

As a longtime fan of the 1966 Coleman Report, I was thrilled to learn about the Raleigh case. But as any student of American social history knows, you can always count on the rhetoric of "neighborhood schools" to disappoint.

The Wake County school board election last month saw the Raleigh plan take a beating, as the claims of diversity once again lost out to the claims of "community" and "neighborhood." In other words: Bad news.

The state's NAACP leader promises to fight any attempts to end Raleigh's commitment to diversity and low-income student achievement. Here's hoping they win. Given the Supreme Court's long-string of appalling decisions (the latest one two years ago) regarding the ability of local school districts to carry out the law of the land--you know, that whole Brown v. Board decision--it would be heartbreaking were the courts, or the people for that matter, to strike down Raleigh's bold attempt at achieving educational equality.

Stealing Ahmadinejad's Bicycle

2009-10-13T10:14:00.008-05:00

This past summer, I was walking with my bicycle down a major thoroughfare in Madison whereupon a young man approached me.

"How much are you selling that bike for?" the man asked me.

"I'm not selling it," I replied. "I'm just walking with it."

"But how much would you sell it for if I was willing to buy it," the man responded.

"I'm not sure," I said, hastily trying to end the conversation. "I haven't thought about it because I'm not selling it."

The man paused. "Then I'm going to steal that bike!" he yelled, walking away.

I've thought about that encounter frequently over the past months, puzzling over its meaning. Now, it appears Matt Yglesias has brought his intellectual skills to the task in attempt to uncover the foreign policy implications of an exchange like this :

The idea that the threat of a bombing raid that would partially damage the Iranian nuclear program would inspire the Iranian government to voluntarily give up the nuclear program makes no sense whatsoever. Suppose I wanted Herf to give me $10. I figured maybe I could offer him various incentives in exchange for the $10. But it turns out that Herf is irrational or whatever and hell-bent on holding on to his $10. Reaching into his pocket and stealing $7 might have some merit as a response. But threatening to steal $7 in hopes of persuading him to give me $10 would be ridiculous.

According to Yglesias, the man's threat of stealing my bike was not an effective way to get me to voluntarily sell the him the bike. But is this really true? Isn't the real reason I didn't sell him the bike because I didn't find his threat to be credible? If I was certain that his threat to steal my bike was backed up with a good chance that he would actually steal my bike, I would probably have been more inclined to sell it to him. Am I missing something here?

Robert Gates: Missile Defender, and then Opponent

2009-09-17T10:16:00.004-05:00

Years ago I wrote a couple of blog posts about Bush administration plans to build long-range missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. It now appears that the Obama administration is throwing these plans in the waste-receptacle, which for anyone who has been following this story, should come as great news.

More than anything, I think this whole saga tells us quite a lot about our current Defense Secretary, Robert Gates. Where only two years ago he was telling the American people that this missile-defense plan was indispensable for the "indivisible security for the United States our NATO allies," he now alerts us that no threat is imminent, and that such plans now would be silly. Some might interpret this change of position as an acknowledgment of recent findings on Iranian and North Korean missile capacities, as well as of our change in policy vis-a-vis Russia. I interpret it as yet another episode in the long-running series of, "Robert Gates will tell the President whatever the President wants to hear."

Genocidal bigot paid with U.S. taxpayer money to load the bombs that indiscriminately kill Muslim civilians

2009-08-22T20:17:00.006-05:00

From "Blackwater accused of murder in 'crusade to eliminate Muslims'", The Times UK Aug. 6, 2009:

A series of allegations including murder, weapons smuggling and the deliberate slaughter of civilians have been levelled against the founder of Blackwater, the security company being investigated for shooting deaths in Iraq.

[...]

In one of the statements, John Doe 2, who worked for Blackwater for four years, alleged that Mr [Erik] Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe” and that his companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life”.

From "C.I.A. said to use outsiders to put bombs on drones," New York Times Aug. 20, 2009:

From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders [sic], according to government officials and current and former employees.

The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.

From "Do targeted killings work?", by Daniel L. Bynum, Brookings Institute, Jul. 14, 2009:

Killing terrorist leaders is difficult, is often ineffective, and can easily backfire. Yet it is one of the United States' few options for managing the threat posed by al Qaeda from its base in tribal Pakistan. By some accounts, U.S. drone activity in Pakistan has killed dozens of lower-ranking and at least 10 mid- and high-ranking leaders from al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Critics correctly find many problems with this program, most of all the number of civilian casualties the strikes have incurred. Sourcing on civilian deaths is weak and the numbers are often exaggerated, but more than 600 civilians are likely to have died from the attacks. That number suggests that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died.

Say what you will about the "good war" in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the use of Predator drones, the fact remains that we are funding the fulfillment of this asshole's racist fantasies. They gave Erik Prince his dream job.

Obscure singer, cash cow for super-star "Weird" Al Yankovic, dead at 50

2009-06-28T01:19:00.003-05:00

"Eat It." "Fat." Songs that defined a generation, and propelled Alfred Yankovic, better known as "Weird Al," to international superstardom and pop iconhood.

For the screaming, millions-strong hordes of "Weird" Al fans worldwide, from Baton Rouge to Brussels to Beijing, the name "Michael Jackson" means little or nothing. Yet the case can be made that Yankovic owes his immense success, including the revered title of "King of Comedy/Parody/Spoken Word/Misc.," to this humble singer from Gary, Indiana, now dead at age 50, whose time in the spotlight never came.

Yankovic, now an eccentric recluse long tormented by the ravages of stardom and public pressure, could not be reached for comment about Jackson's death. (Yankovic has not been photographed outside of his specially built "Balogna-Land Ranch" for years and only appears before cameras there wearing surgical masks and dark glasses.) But his publicist released a statement saying that "Mr. Yankovic has always respected the hard work and unappreciated talent that Mr. Jackson displayed throughout his simple, honest career. Mr. Jackson is known to have provided Mr. Yankovic with a few rough, embryonic ideas on which he conducted his dance of artistic genius."

Not much is known about Jackson's early beginnings. As a young boy he was a member of the family group "the Jackson Five," an ensemble specializing in traditional Negro spirituals. They scored a minor hit on the little-known "Motown" label (so-called because of its city of origin, the so-called"Motor City" of Detroit, Michigan) with "I Want You Back," a song on the secular charts that was nevertheless a call for the second coming of Jesus Christ.

After several years working as an undervalued session musician, Jackson finally convinced music producers to allow him solo time in the studio. The resulting track, "Thriller," spent a few weeks on the pop charts as a Halloween novelty hit before fading into oblivion. (The inexplicably long music video for the song ran over ten minutes and cost the studio a fortune, raising the threat of bankruptcy and forcing Jackson to retreat from ever producing a music video again.)

Jackson's next failed endeavor was a duet entitled "The Girl is Mine" with one Paul McCartney, ironically himself also a chronically unsuccessful performer from the group "the Beat-les." (This time-forgotten quartet of Liverpudlians provided the inspiration for the actually world-famous, multi-platinum Rutles.) Hard times fell on Jackson thereafter, and his meager paychecks, culled from TV jingle session work and even street performances, went mainly towards pills, dice, and easy women.

And that is how the proprietor of Jackson's halfway house found him the night of Thursday, June 25: his hand around a bottle, his liver swollen to the size of a football, the soiled results of a night of paid-for coitus strewn about his shabby lodgings. "This guy had it coming," said the proprietor, who requested that his name be withheld. "He was some sort of singer, as far as I could tell, but the way this loser lived you could tell he couldn't write a lick. That bum left me without last month's rent!"

Meanwhile, Yankovic, a celebrity who earns (and squanders) the total income of Jackson's lifetime several times over on a weekly basis, has used his immense influence to once again stifle the investigations of prosecutors who wish to indict him for foul play. According to plaintiffs, Yankovic has engaged in inappropriate behavior with young children on the premises of his Balogna-Land Ranch, including forcing them to polka-dance and to play with his pet hamster.

Yankovic is planning a 50-show string of comeback concerts starting in London.

Can Cosmic Ray Muons and High-Energy X-Rays Detect Gaylords?

2009-06-21T20:39:00.003-05:00

I was pleased to open the New York Times' letters section to see that one of my physics professor in college--and author of the cleverly titled piece, "In Defense of Homophobia"--has gotten a letter in the the paper published. The topic? Nuclear weapons smuggling and detection. Glad to see you're using that tenure position to talk about things you actually know something about, Dr. Katz!

I See Dead Pit Bulls

2009-06-12T21:40:00.002-05:00

Animal lovers poured their emotions and their wallets into this week's story that a Pit Bull in Baltimore City had been purposefully set on fire, and as a result, euthanized. They protested. They raised $26,000 as a bounty on the killers' head. The Baltimore Sun ran headlines for days about the story. Who did it? (Two teenagers.) Was the pit bull (name: Pheonix) previously used for dog fights? (Duh.) For humanists like myself, things were looking rough for a few days. And then the Sun published a much appreciated little story about Veda Allen, whose son was pointlessly shot in the head and killed almost twenty years. Long story short: nobody gave a shit. Nor do I remember people spontaneously raising $26,000 for any of the dozens of motivationless murders that happen every year in Baltimore. Hats off to the Sun, then, for putting some context on this story.

The Newest Jams from Run RNC

2009-05-22T09:10:00.002-05:00

Last week the Republican National Committee's plans to call the Democrats the "Democratic Socialist Party" sadly failed. In the wake of a president who plans on drastically ramping up federal spending, ratcheting up at least one inherited war, tackling racial issues, and expressing empathy for the worst-off in society, the GOP has rightly called out this 21st century Lyndon Johnson for who he is: a socialist!

I was surprised, then, to wake up this morning and find that the Republicans are emulating the lowest moments of Johnson's tenure. No, I'm not talking about any of the entitlement payments, or the signing of the Civil Rights Act, or even those aspects of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that forever eroded the sovereignty of great educating states like Mississippi to determine educational outcomes. I'm talking about the Daisy Ad. The Republicans have copied it (below):

In a way I think that maybe Democrats should be happy about this. The Johnson ad always kind of ushers in creepy feelings about a moment (and there were many others, and will continue to be others) when the Democrats out-Republicaned the Republicans. At least now I feel like the GOP has decided to take ownership over this ad--which, for the record, only ran once due to its controversial nature.

Now is the time for the Democrats to copy that Willy Horton ad, replacing Horton with a white corporate executive, but keeping the kidnapping, stabbing, and raping lines.

Because Dubya is Gone, and Need be Forgotten

2009-05-12T19:18:00.005-05:00

I'm posting a series of images from NASA's Landsat 7 satellite that are not particularly spectacular, just so that I don't have to stare at our former electoral aberration every time I refresh this page.

Disturbing Picture of the Day

2009-05-04T12:11:00.001-05:00

Go fuck yourself

2009-05-02T23:17:00.002-05:00

Today, a New York Times op-ed argues that the recent SCOTUS decision regarding the FCC's no-swearin-on-TV-cuz-the-kids-r-gonna-b-harmed-help-yall-rule is bullshit. While discussing the word "fuck" (a verb meaning "to fuck") the author, Adam Freedman, cites an "expert in swearing" who claims that "fuck" can be used nonsexually. Freedman gives the following example:

The nonsexual use of the word can be seen in countless contemporary examples, as when Vice President Dick Cheney used it in 2004 to recommend that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that is, strictly speaking, anatomically impossible.

Although I agree with the substance of the article, I cannot agree that this use is nonsexual. I believe the impossibility of the act is what makes it sexual: one is forced to imagine (NSFW, disgusting) the contortions through which the object of the command would attempt to obey it. Although this would not be "sexual" in the sense that it would not involve reproduction by two members of opposite sexes, it does partake of the idea of sexuality insofar as it would replicate sexual feelings in the actor.

All of that being said, I do believe that "fuck" can be used non-sexually, and even if it couldn't, I would want it on television because I like the dirty, funky side of life (and children growing up in clean households have all sorts of problems). It's just that I'd like to keep the Grey Lady honest as she enjoys her last years of existence.

Deep Thought...

2009-04-30T19:36:00.003-05:00

... I wish all "failed states" could be like Mexico.

Drill Baby, Drill!

2009-04-30T13:43:00.007-05:00

Many nineteenth century educational proponents of a common curricula for all grounded their arguments in a conception called "mental discipline." The notion was that the mind could be exercised like the body, and that practicing certain skills rigorously (ancient languages, poetry, mathematics, etc.) would not only help one master a given subject, but--just as lifting weights helps you carry boxes--would be transferable to other subjects as well. Memorizing Latin vocabulary would, in a sense, expand someone's capacity to remember things in general. Such a view about human learning, not surprisingly, led to a particular kind of pedagogy, based on drilling, memorization, and recitation.

In the Progressive Era, this view came under attack. Psychologists like E.L. Thorndike argued that subjects were not "transferable" in any meaningful sense, and that, consequently, in order to learn a particular skill/body of knowledge, one had to be taught it directly. This kind of thinking would come to dominate schooling, leading to what eventually would be called "life adjustment curriculum," where students deemed less intelligent would be taught basic skills (like hygiene, cooking, child-rearing) that the mental disciplinarians had thought absurd.

I'm certainly not up on contemporary educational psychology, but I always thought the basic Thorndike theory still dominated the field. Not surprisingly, then, I was pretty struck to read a book review today that suggested the sciences is pointing to a return to mental discipline:

Elsewhere Mr. Willingham has his curious teacher ask: "Is drilling worth it?" The answer is yes, because research shows that practice not only makes a skill perfect but also makes it permanent, automatic and transferable to new situations, enabling more complex work that relies on the basics.

While the mental disciplinarians were harangued by many progressive educators as being old-fashioned, I think the idea that different subjects are intimately related is quite a progressive, Deweyan idea. Indeed, while John Dewey was no mental disciplinarian himself, he certainly thought they had something right about the drive to master subject matter, to approach learning rigorously, and to transfer skills from one activity to the next. Maybe Giuliani was right after all, and we do need to drill more.

A Specter is haunting the Democratic party...

2009-04-28T21:12:00.002-05:00

A few thoughts on today's volte-face by He of the Dangling Jowls:

* Specter's justification: "I am not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate — not prepared to have that record decided by that jury." Ergo, he will dissolve the people and elect a new one!

* I hope the Democrats of Pennsylvania are happy with having their political rights taken away from them, because Washington is going to serve them up a big, heaping helping of Arlen on the primary ticket, whether they like it or not. My heart goes out to actual progressives in PA who imagine they can win this thing.

* The idea that the Republican Party as an institution is "less welcoming" to a moderate now than in 1966 is an interesting one. Standing liver-spotted cheek-to-waddle-throated jowl with Jesse Helms for 40 years is apparently not that hard, while ~~almost losing your Senate seat to Pat Toomey~~ getting into trouble with your party over voting on a stimulus bill is.

* On the other hand, it may perfectly well be true that the Republican base is now willing to vote only for bat-shit crazy people. While it is their right to do so, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for such a strategy to succeed.

* It would have been nice if, in the wake of an enormous Democratic win and a progressive upsurge, the left of the Democratic Party had been strengthened to the point of scaring away an Arlen Specter. But perhaps that day will still come, after the Democrats have availed themselves of their new 60-seat majority, and I can look back on this period as a distasteful but useful stepping stone.

What We Can Learn about the History of Education, Race Relations, and the South with the Baltimore Ravens Draft of Michael Oher

2009-04-25T23:37:00.005-05:00

There's much to be said about the Ravens's first-round pick of Michael Oher. They had valued him as a top-15 selection, so when he slid to the 20s, the team--always looking for the best value--snatched him up. The team's logic in picking Oher rather than, say, a much needed wide receiver, would probably sound something like: without a solid offensive line, a first class wide receiver (like the QB who throws to him) is a wasted commodity.

But there's a lot more to this pick than simply shoring up the left side of the offensive line. Oher was the subject of a long 2006 article by Michael Lewis in the New York Times magazine, which was subsequently turned into a book, which is subsequently being turned into a movie starring Sandra Bullock(!) and Tim McGraw(!!). Given that Lewis is probably the best narrative craftsman in journalism today, it's no surprise that the story comes off incredibly engrossing. But it probably would be without Lewis. Little is known about Oher's childhood other than that his mother was a crack addict, that his father ended up shot dead and thrown over a bridge, and that he probably didn't attend the Memphis Public Schools for more than 1/3 or so of the time he should have been there. He was the kind of kid Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society was worried about: someone in desparate need of early childhood intervention. He didn't get it. As a result, his intellectual skills atrophied. He scored abysmally low on intelligence tests. He was a homeless teenager.

To fill in how Oher went from this to being a NFL millionaire, read the Lewis piece in full. While the story is rightly about Oher, what caught my eye was the school where he eventually landed: Briarcrest Christian School, in E. Memphis. Lewis mentions that Briarcrest is almost exclusively white and that the woman who eventually took Oher in and raised him was herself an alumnus of the school, having been sent there by her racist father in 1973 after the courts ordered the Memphis public schools to desegregate.

It's implicit in the article, but Lewis never outrightly says it (perhaps because he established a certain relationship with the school): Briarcrest was almost certainly a "segregation academy." It, like many other private (largely Christian) schools in the South, was founded in the early 1970s as a response to the inevitability of desegreation. As a bit of background: from the moment of the Brown decision, many Southern politicians drew up plans to create state-sponsored ("voucher") private schools for whites to enroll in en masse that could enforce segregation in ways that the public schools could not. For a variety of reasons, these plans in state after state fell through, leaving it to local communities to form private academies where, just like a country club, they could exclude blacks.

But the interesting story here is not that oh my God the South was really racist, though that certainly was the case. The story, I think, is about how the South is trying desparately to change. That, in some sense, is what Lewis's article is about: a white, upper class southern family (driving pick-up trucks, voting Republican, sending their kid to a private Christian school) who is actively trying to get poor black kids from Memphis into the Briarcrests of the world. My understanding is that the number of African Americans attending these former "segregation academies" in the south is rising rather dramatically. At the History of Education conference I attended this past Fall, a couple of African American graduate students presented on the history of these institutions, and at least one of them was an alumnus of them. Private schools can be very exclusive or very inclusive, depending on the time and place. If Oher's story (and the movie, set to come out in two years) continues to grab attention, I imagine this won't be the last time we hear about Briarcrest and what it represents. I'm wondering if my understanding of this seems somewhat accurate to those who share a more intimate relationship with this world than do I.

An allegory...

2009-04-24T20:26:00.003-05:00

"Torture tape implicates UAE royal sheikh."

Everyone loves to kill pirates

2009-04-13T22:14:00.004-05:00

I submit that pirates have now overtaken terrorists in the race for "most killable conceivable American enemy." While pirates cannot (for the moment!) lay claim to an all-embracing ideology like "Islamofascism," and thus properly inhabit their bogeyman role in the way that Communists and terrorists did, they still have a number of things going for them:

1. They're anachronisms.
2. They're stateless.
3. They're pesky.
4. They're the most primordial incarnation of property theft and instability (see Thucydides!!).
5. There's a much slimmer chance of a strike against pirates killing innocent children (bad PR).
6. It's in their nature to be killed, so that others can take up their mantle (cf. "the Dread Pirate Roberts").
7. The combination of sniper rifles + waterborne targets gives such an opportunity for using the phrases "like bobbing for apples" and "like fish in a barrel" that the Navy will be unable to resist.

These factors combine, I propose, to make pirates even more slaughterable than South American leftists, Pakistani border-town families, the nation of Iraq, and other illustrious victims of U.S. violence. Think about it: Who would ever propose a truth and reconciliation commission for disappeared pirates? What anti-war group could be bothered to add "pirates" to the various factions now encompassed by the umbrella of "resistance"? (Pirates will never get a spot at the World Social Forum.) And who doesn't enjoy a good pirate offing?

The Washington Post certainly does. Today's editorial whines about Europe not having the stomach to kill more pirates (my favorite part: the Post glosses "ignoring the chaos there" with "targeting its worst elements with airstrikes" -- an interesting, perhaps unique form of "ignoring"!) and offers some suitably vague advice about selling guns to warlords. David Ignatius, following the liberal inclination to practice imperialism quietly and creatively, suggests substituting for "big, direct deployment of military power" ("It's just so messy!" the Democrat is imagined to squeal) the good, old-fashioned targeted killing of private individuals:

This is the kind of problem for which U.S. Special Forces and the covert operators of the Central Intelligence Agency were created. They can move quickly and quietly to alter the balance of power on the ground, just as they have done at sea. They should be subject to close congressional oversight, in secret. The less the rest of the world sees the American footprint in Somalia, the better.

Each of these sentences has something uniquely vicious and uniquely American about it. I especially love the contrast between Ignatius' earlier statement, that "the United States as a nation tends to favor big, direct deployment of military power," with his opinion here that, well, perhaps the hushed secrecy of elites is in fact the best policy.

Someone named Fred Ikle also has an article titled simply "Kill the Pirates," in case you missed the message.

Terrorism : piracy :: tragedy : farce, etc etc.

The Business of College Kids Is Business!

2009-04-12T21:18:00.006-05:00

When the New York Times wants to highlight a trend, it will highlight a trend. This morning we receive word in at least three different articles that perhaps the children won't be flocking into business as they did during those booming 2000s.

In the "Week and Review" section, it's

For the highest-paid fields, the outlooks is for a tempering correction instead of an all-out exodus. At Harvard, for example, about 40 percent of undergraduates in recent years went into the most lucrative corporate arenas like finance and consulting, based on surveys at the school year’s end.

In Frank Rich's column, it's

In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors. The Harvard Crimson reported that in the class of 2007, 58 percent of the men and 43 percent of the women entering the work force took jobs in the finance and consulting industries. The figures were similar everywhere, from Duke to the University of Pennsylvania. Dan Rather, on his HDNet television program in December, reported that at Penn this was even true of “over half the students who graduated with engineering degrees — not a field commonly associated with Wall Street.

And in the "Sunday Styles Section," it's College students flocking to community organizing rather than a life of riches.

But alas, tis nothing new. In the 1890s, forty percent (the same number mentioned in the first Times article about today's numbers) of Harvard graduates went in business. One might be appalled and shocked by this high percentage, proclaiming that the university is not to train men in the pecuniary arts, as Thorstein Veblen argued in The Higher Learning in America. Indeed, it would be hard not applaud this development. Going into community organizing really is a more noble vocation.

But such moralizing may be misplaced. I think it was Harvard's longtime president Charles W. Eliot who, commenting on the propensity of his students to go into business, got it right:

For some reasons one could wish that the University did not offer the same contrast between the rich man's mode of life and the poor man's that the outer world offers; but it does.... In this respect, as in many others, the University is an epitome of the modern world.

As Eliot suggests, it shouldn't come as a surprise when these trends reverse themselves if/when the economy improves.

[NB: Statistic and Eliot quotation taken from Kim Townsend's Manhood at Harvard (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1996), 25.]

YAY IOWA!

2009-04-05T16:25:00.002-05:00

With One Hand He Condems the Right to Damnation, with the Other to Eternal Life

2009-04-04T18:03:00.006-05:00

Doing research on my master's thesis (which focuses on educational developments within American Protestantism, 1900-1930) has forced me to reconsider many of my previously held positions regarding the role of Protestantism (and religion more generally) in a democracy. While my thesis deals with the more sympathetic adherents of left-wing Protestant thought (the "Social Gospel") I've found it's not easy to simply lop this group off from their right-wing (Fundamentalist) bretheren, given that they both arise out of evangelical traditions.

It was with this history in mind that I grew rather shocked at my own reaction, recently, to seeing a big group of anti-abortion protesters from all over Wisconsin descend upon Madison. While I remain--fundamentally--opposed to their position, I was nonetheless, for the first time, struck by their activism and by the grassroots nature of their campaign. I found myself envious of their organization, though not in the traditional way that liberals formerly envied the right-- for its ideological cohesion, its loyal "base," and its slick use of framing issues. Instead, I was impressed by their committment to democracy and peaceful protest at a grassroots level.

I am reminded of this story now that I see that Princeton University Press has just published a book with a rather shocking title: The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right. It's quite possible that my views here come from the background of a naive Jew who never really had to interact with any of these people--and if that's the case, let me know--but at least now I can be that naive Jew while citing political science!

Eerie Stuff...

2009-04-04T17:01:00.002-05:00

Charles Blow, this morning in the New York Times, on all the revolutionary/fear-mongering currently engaged in by the right:

As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.) At the same time, the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota. Coincidence? Maybe. Just posturing? Hopefully. But it all gives me a really bad feeling.

Now, we get this report from this afternoon's Rambo-esque massacre in Pittsburgh:

Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn't clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.... Poplawski feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon," said Edward Perkovic, his best friend.... Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said Poplawski feared that President Barack Obama was going to take away his rights, though he said he "wasn't violently against Obama." Vire, 23, said Poplawski once had an Internet talk show but that it wasn't successful. He said Poplawski owned an AK-47 rifle and several powerful handguns, including a .357 Magnum.

Poplawski is obviously a wacko, but I can't help but be troubled by the timing...

what a world....

2009-03-28T20:24:00.001-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, Let Me Reintroduce You to the Radical Right

2009-03-27T18:55:00.003-05:00

Dear Radical Right,
You've been in power so long that now, beaten, bruised, and marginalized, you can finally return to your true roots as an ideology of truly revolutionary ideals. I once thought that aspects of your worldview were quarantined in the hinterland of Texas radio. But now, finally, your time has come. On Fox News, your Eye of Sauron has uncovered the plot to place American citizens in Concentration Camps. In the halls of Congress, your representatives have asked the globalist conspirators (ahem...Bernanke and Geithner) whether (or perhaps, when) they will implement the Global Currency. But as any John Bircher will tell you, you can trust a globalist as far as you can throw one. These Jews are heavy after all! So you look critically upon their "categorical rejections" of such a move, and bring a bill before Congress making sure that the People will reject the economic tenets of globalism.

Yet, these two are only half-measures. It's time to get serious. It's time, ladies and gentlemen, to put the "radical" back in the right. Let me read you some of the recent words of someone who is willing to speak truth to power. "At this point the American people - it's like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing," this right-wing-freedom-fighter-channeling-the-Symbionese-Liberation-Army tells us. What you, the radical right see, and the rest of us don't, is that lurking under that dark complexion lies a King George, a Caesar. "Where freedom is tried, the people rejoice," we are reminded, citing the great maxim perhaps attributable to Thomas Paine. "But where tyranny is enforced upon the people, as Barack Obama is doing, the people suffer and mourn." "Reporting from enemy lines," you the radical right assure us that this Hussein won't be the one to break our "230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation."

But why not? Why not let the globalist Marxists take over and go somewhere else? Why not go retire to the sweet lands of liberty in, say Nicaragua, as other great freedom fighters have done? Well, it's because Nicaragua, like every other fucking country is also taken over by fucking globalists!

Do we get into an inner tube and float 90 miles to some free country? There is no free country for us to repair to!

There is no free country for us to repair to, indeed! Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sad to report that as of today you, the radical right, can no longer claim my current state of Wisconsin as the great cradle of liberty. That honor has moved to our neighbor to the left. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Rep. Michelle Bachmann and urge you to cling to her every word, for therein lies a real t(h)reat.

kiss the rings, bitch!

2009-03-24T12:27:00.002-05:00

look at their faces! what a bunch of supplicants.

On Revered Humanitarians Entertaining Colonialism

2009-03-20T13:41:00.002-05:00

This clip from Tyler Cowen's interview with Peter Singer strikes me as a bit unsettling. It's a terrific blogginheads.tv episode and I recommend people watch/listen to the program in its entirety. In this particular moment, however, I think we see the worst of the Cowen-esque economics-profession "imagination" as well as the narrowness of Singer's utilitarianism.

In this brief exchange, the fearless Cowen asks whether the best way to solve Africa's problems would be to go back in time and make sure European colonialism never lost its grip. The argument is simply that regardless of the occasional hurt feelings ("humiliation," as Singer puts it) and bloody resistance movement, the total amount of suffering pales in comparison to places like today's Congo, or Somalia, or Zimbabwe. While Singer is at first hesitant to go along with Cowen, in the end you'll find he comes remarkably close to fully accepting the truth of the premise.

A few thoughts are in order here. First, if only it weren't for those hurt feelings...

Second, I think that a Deweyan (or even Socratic) ethical theory, while sometimes inadequate, might be helpful in problematizing the utilitarians: just means can only produce just ends. Colonialism might not have directly led to suffering on the scale of modern Congo or Darfur, but it's just shocking to me that Singer failed to mention that these bad consequences were in large part the result of colonial practices themselves. Why not, we might ask, turn the clock back to pre-colonial times?

Is Man is to Woman as Sustainability is to Nature?

2009-03-20T00:08:00.002-05:00

Just a quick speculation here, punning off of everyone's favorite Sherry B. Ortner essay. Being so deeply and at times dreadfully inured in the language of sustainability these days, I'm wondering if anyone has charted a lot of the gender consequences of the discourse. Seeing it mostly from the perspectives of planners and architects on the one hand and media punditry on the other, there is an emphasis on sustainability as being strongly related to technology, building, and construction. Not come on too strong with the Freud (because sometimes a LEED certified building is just a LEED certified building), but this seems a very masculine if not phallic approach to the idea of change in society. Which is, of course, what sustainability will ahve to be, change in our society and the habits and means of production and consumption that we currently enjoy (/suffer from).

Maybe this is overreaching, but maybe it might be useful to think about what it might mean for sustainability discourse to 'become woman'. I'm not saying that we should all start thinking of home ec. and thriftiness in the family (which, now that I think about it, is a big part of the mainstream discourse on the topic and at the same time very neatly seems to coincide with traditional gender roles as well), but maybe there are large gaps in the way we conceive of what need be done to achieve more sustainable futures.

Only in the "Commercial Republic" (tm David Brooks), pt. 1

2009-03-18T13:37:00.002-05:00

(This is part one of what will be an ongoing series where I investigate statements and actions that would normally entail public shaming and/or mob violence and which seem to be possible only in a world of insulated elite superciliousness.)

Perhaps you noticed NY Times "Dealbook" columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin's "offensive and painful" defense of AIG bonuses:

"Imagine what it would look like if the business community started to worry that the government would start to abrogate contracts left and right."

"Here is the second, perhaps more sobering thought: A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it."

"You can bet that someone would scoop up the talent from A.I.G. and, quite possibly, put it to work — against taxpayers’ interests."

Ah, yes, the "sanctity of contracts," the destroyer/savior paradox, and the threat of talent flight. It's a tough world we live in. No one said it was fair. But while we have to live with these outrageous imbalances of power, privilege, and profits, we can at least do our best to help out those at the bottom of the ladder, right?

Here's what the hot young wunderkind said last November about the automaker bailouts, and the "gold-plated," "off-the-charts" union benefits:

Part of the problem is summed up by comments like this one in The Detroit Free Press, made by Kandy O’Neill, 39, an assembler at G.M.’s plant in Lake Orion, Mich., where she builds the Chevy Malibu and Pontiac G6. “I think we’ve given enough,” she said about the cuts to her salary and pension plan.
“Everybody wants to come down hard on the workers,” she said. “Nobody knows what we do inside there but the people who work there. It’s hard. It is not an easy job.”
When you read a line like that you might sympathize with her, but then you realize that nothing can be accomplished without bankruptcy. Ms. O’Neill: your company is asking the taxpayers — many of whom don’t have health care coverage — to pay your salary and health insurance.

You tell that parasite, Andrew!

In a statement that should elicit either laughter or tears, or both, Sorkin in his AIG column notes as an aside that "(The auto industry unions are facing a similar issue — but the big difference is that there is a negotiation; no one is unilaterally tearing up contracts.)"

Pity the poor AIG executives, who don't get the luxury of a negotiation! Are we to assume that but for their "renegotiations," signed at virtual gunpoint from a chorus of labor-busting big interests, the unions would have gotten a worse deal than they already did? Even with the strongest possible comparison scenario -- full union benefits vs. no AIG bonuses this year -- are we really supposed to think that financial executives would be overall worse off? Oh, but it's not about well-being, it's about the sanctity of the contract (which somehow always seems to redound to the benefit of the already better-off).

The world is full of people who would normally be tarred and feathered.

BONUS: Ruth Marcus drops some economic science on us:

But, you ask, what about autoworkers who are being squeezed to renegotiate their contracts? Those renegotiations mostly involve the future terms of employment, though, it is true, they also could affect retiree health benefits. If an autoworker doesn't want to show up on the assembly line under the terms of a new deal, he or she doesn't have to. That's different from telling AIG employees they're not getting the amount on which they agreed for work they've already performed.

Ha-HA! You silly people forget that in the land of free labor, you can always walk away, even when your contract was renogiated in a moment of crisis by manipulative elites and governmental pressure. Whereas the freedom fighters at AIG are just trying to secure their basic rights, by damn!

2009-03-17T23:06:00.002-05:00

Can I throw stones at AIG since 80% of the building is mine?

P0-M0-1$-B@K

2009-03-14T15:46:00.002-05:00

Very glad to see postmodern academics still up to their usual shenanigans.

Kennedy Knighted, Dodd laughs at Constitution

2009-03-11T09:25:00.002-05:00

Well, hello lovers. I haven't posted on here in so long I almost forgot how blogger works. Anyway, I'm sure all of you have heard about Senator Kennedy's recent knighting by the crossdressing relic of feudalism that is Queen Elizabeth II.
Since I don't watch TV I have no idea if the mainstream media has cared to report that this knighthood is a violation of Article I Section 9 of the Consitution, which states:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.

When asked about this discrepancy, Senator Dodd laughed in the face of a reporter, clearly indicating that they have no intention of taking this violation seriously. My questions : Does it matter that the knighthood is 'honorary?' (I mean, aren't all knighthood honorary? Do we really expect Sir Paul McCartney or Elton John to don chainmail and ride out on their trusty steeds to defend the British Kingdom?) But more importantly, should we not uphold our elected officials to a very strict interpretation of the Constitution? Should Kennedy be removed from office or at least have to explain why 200+ years after we supposedly fought for our freedom and our rights he is supplicating to the throne? The Brits still do not have a constitution, and if our so-called 'leaders' are laughing in the face of ours we might as well not have one either. While we're at it why don't we turn in our guns, put up some more security cameras, start eating bangers and mash for breakfast and scream GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!

Praising with faint damning

2009-02-18T00:22:00.003-06:00

I'm coming a bit late to this particular party, but I see that Juan Williams has been duly defrocked by NPR for his "Stokely-Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress" comment. There was a lot of protesting in the liberal blogosphere over this on the grounds that it was either a) sexist, b) red/"militant"/Black Nationalist-baiting, or c) further evidence of Williams' penchant for rimming Bill O'Reilly and Fox News to their hearts' content (okay, on that count he may be guilty), but no one has yet answered the question of why comparing the First Lady to one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is such a terrible, awful thing in the first place.

Now granted, the guy went to his grave claiming that American Imperialism had given him prostate cancer (perhaps not outside the bounds of realism), and it's debatable whether his later militancy helped or hurt the black American cause. However, my inclination is to divide Civil Rights Leaders into "ones who died before they could be forsaken by liberals as too radical" (as King's Poor People's Campaign no doubt would have been) and "ones who lived through injustice and oppression only to become embarrassing pariahs to the mainstream" (current title holder: Al Sharpton). So I think the Carmichael tag is perhaps one of the finest labelings a media hack could bestow.

Super Bowl Consipracy?

2009-02-02T01:44:00.010-06:00

WARNING: only read this if you like football and watched the Super Bowl, or if you are bored and like conspiracies.

Tonight the Steelers beat the Cardinals in Superbowl XLIII, 27-23. There was an obvious bias against the Cardinals by the officials.

First I will recount the bad/questionable actions by the refs:

1. In the final play of the game, Kurt Warner (QB, Cardinals) made a questionable fumble, giving the ball, and the victory, to the Steelers. The play was not reviewed by the officials. Such a play, as questionable as this, in the final seconds of the Super Bowl, not being even reviewed (let alone overtuned) is shocking in and of itself.
This fumble prevented the Cardinals from having one last shot at going for a TD and the win. Keep in mind that the Cardinals have one of the league's best QBs, and two of the league's best WRs.
Btw, everyone that I was watching with thought this was an incomplete pass and not a fumble. The refs didn't even think to review it.

2. "The Cardinals also had to challenge two blown calls by the refs — one on a Ben Roethlisberger run that was initially ruled a touchdown, the other on an earlier incompletion that was initially ruled a fumble." Luckily Cards coach Ken Whisenhunt decided to risk his precious timeouts and challenge those calls. He got both calls overturned, and both were on huge plays. This left him with only 1 challenge, even though he made no mistakes and the burden of mis-calls was on the officials.

3. "On one Steelers drive that ended with a field goal, Arizona was called for three personal fouls." I can recall at least two if these that were questionable (a roughing the passer, and an unneccesary roughness on the first field goal attempt).

So there was obviously a bias, whether it was conscious or not.

Now here's where I'm gonna lose most of you. Here are the reasons someone in the NFL might have wanted the Steelers to win:

1. The Steelers have a stronger fan base than the Cardinals, and the NFL could make make more money from celebratory Steelers fans.

2. The Cardinals were widely described as the worst playoff team in the history of the NFL. They won a shitty division and made the playoffs with an unimpressive record of 9-7. During the course of their season they experienced many crushing losses to teams that didn't even make the playoffs. Perhaps a win by the Cards would dampen the meaning of winning the Superbowl...?

3. The Cards have always sucked, and no one would care if they were the Superbowl champs. But if the Steelers won a record SIXTH Superbowl, that's a $tory!

4. NFL commish Roger Goodell has done some sketchy things during his tenure, like destroying all evidence in Spygate and essentially ending all discussion on the issue. Personally, I don't trust the guy.

5. It was the Government and they're all in on it!!! shhh... they might be listening...

Before you discount this conspiracy theory, please recall that the NBA has had it's share of biased refs, and also realize that many Cardinals players/coaches/fans feel cheated: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/28971640/

This Blog Sucks

2009-01-21T21:37:00.003-06:00

William James once wrote that ideas have a cash value. Now, we learn that vaginas and clitorises value cash. Talk amongst yourselves.

Never Forget

2009-01-15T14:30:00.003-06:00

The blog's been slow, recently, so out of a bit of insecurity, and a bit of nostalgia, I thought I'd engage in a bit of parochial boosterism.

Matt Yglesias notes that there's an "odd convergence of beliefs between neocons and the far left about how to understand the history of American foreign policy making." To that, I say you heard it here first, two years ago. Scantron from beyond the arc: "In point of fact, [Neocon A] is more like bizarro-[Far-Left B]: they agree on basically all the historical material (which conservative and mainstream historians are often loathe to admit), yet reach polar opposite conclusions."

Jim Cramer, Eliot Spitzer

2008-12-31T21:14:00.003-06:00

Merry Belated Xmas/Early Album Listen

2008-12-27T15:58:00.003-06:00

Merriweather Post Pavillion (ripped from two vinyls so the tracks aren't split up correctly, but the sound quality is good).

Just sharing the <3

Merry xmas!
D'Mardree

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-26T15:08:00.005-06:00

If tolerance requires saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” then I submit it is better to say nothing at all. Saying “Happy Holidays” supposedly enables us to spread the holiday cheer without making implicit assumptions about another person’s religion or background. Offering such a wish, however, does assume that the person is celebrating some holiday this time of year. While this may be a safe assumption for Christians, Jews, Muslims, and some blacks, there are many individuals (Hindus, atheists etc.) for whom this is not a holiday season. Those who don’t celebrate any major holidays this time of year are equally likely to be offended at being wished happy holidays as a Jew to whom one mistakenly says “Merry Christmas.” These non-holiday celebrators deserve just as much consideration as non-Christmas holiday celebrators. Therefore, if cultural sensitivity demands that we wish those people whose faiths we are unsure about “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” it even more strongly requires that we say nothing at all.

What do we do to a punk-ass white collar criminal?

2008-12-25T00:56:00.003-06:00

Arguing that Bernard Madoff probably deserves not decades, but years in prison, Harlan J. Protass (a professor at Cardozo Law), says:

Remember Jeffrey Skilling? Losses to Enron shareholders of more than $1 billion largely determined his 24-year-plus sentence. Or consider WorldCom's former chief, Bernard J. Ebbers. He got 25 years based principally on the $2.2 billion loss suffered by his company's shareholders. Sure, these men destroyed enormous shareholder value, just as the targets of today's criminal cases allegedly did. But it's hard to contend that they deserved prison terms longer than the average sentence for murder (22 years), kidnapping (14) and sexual abuse (eight).

Horseshit. Think about how many lives you could save with $1 billion, $2 billion, or $50 billion, the amount that Madoff alleges he stole. The amount that our government values a human life at when doing benefit-cost analyses is typically less than $10 million, although some risk regulation, such as that for airlines, spends a lot more per statistical life saved (see this article for an explanation of the basic concept).

Basically, $1 billion spent on extra car safety mechanisms or improved air quality will lead to somewhere around 100 statistical lives saved. If it were spent on something beneficial in the underdeveloped word, like iodine, it could save even more. Granted, Madoff's clients were not going to go spend their money on improving car safety, but the principle stands: this man has taken the equivalent of thousands of lives. If others have to pay a high cost for that, so should he (of course, I'm not sure if I believe in retributive justice, and even then, it depends, of course, on his level of culpability for the crime).

Blagojevich Agonistesvich

2008-12-19T17:21:00.002-06:00

"Now I know there are some powerful forces arrayed against me. It's kind of lonely right now. But I have on my side the most powerful ally there is, and it's the truth."

A moving speech. The Kipling quotation was beautiful. I will join you, Rod, in taking up the White Man's Burden against your accusers. You are a modern day Socrates, for whom the will to truth is valued over the pastry chefs out there who wish to destroy you by feeding the People sweet, delicious lies. You are a modern day Willie Stark, a Huey Long from the Land of Lincoln, for whom no amount of support from the People can dissuade those upwardly mobile Irish Romanists from destroying you. You are also, as the scholar Josh Marshall elegantly and aptly puts it, quite possibly insane.

Unintentional neocon irony award, pt. 234,104

2008-12-02T11:22:00.005-06:00

Robert Kagan today:

"Would such an action [the "international community" establishing an "international force" to invade Kashmir] violate Pakistan's sovereignty? Yes, but nations should not be able to claim sovereign rights when they cannot control territory from which terrorist attacks are launched. If there is such a thing as a 'responsibility to protect,' which justifies international intervention to prevent humanitarian catastrophe either caused or allowed by a nation's government, there must also be a responsibility to protect one's neighbors from attacks from one's own territory, even when the attacks are carried out by 'non-state actors.'"

Bonus:

"Either way, it would be useful for the United States, Europe and other nations to begin establishing the principle that Pakistan and other states that harbor terrorists should not take their sovereignty for granted."

Um, what? Where can I get my hands on Kagan's magical elixir of forgetting?

The Bastard Did It.

2008-11-30T22:15:00.002-06:00

Claude Levi Strauss just celebrated his hundredth birthday. Our weapons are useless against him, he cannot be stopped.

Is there really any such thing as an event in America "unrelated to capitalism"?

2008-11-29T00:05:00.003-06:00

I'm sure you have all heard about yesterday's Wal-Mart trampling by now, the one which will keep New York Times-reading libruls conversing in hushed tones for weeks. But have you heard about the shootings at a Toys 'R Us in California? No?

Well that's good, actually, because these particular deaths have NOTHING TO DO with capitalism, consumerism, or capitaloconsumerfascism, as Toys 'R Us reps assure us:

Toys "R" Us released a statement late Friday, noting that "our understanding is that this act seems to have been the result of a personal dispute between the individuals involved. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to associate the events of today with Black Friday."

Thank fuckin god.

Cory Booker: Closet Dewey Fan

2008-11-22T00:33:00.003-06:00

Mayor of Newark Cory Booker, about 4:00 through the segment on the Colbert Report posted below, makes a rather striking metaphor. "I think we make a mistake if we ignore the wonderful differences that's America," he said. "We're like a concert. It shouldn't be just one instrument. It should be a number of different instruments playing to one powerful song. That's America."

I wonder if Booker, a former Stanford grad and Rhodes scholar, was aware that he was using a metaphor that became quite poignant in a debate between Horace Kallen and John Dewey over the direction for cultural pluralism in America. It was Kallen who, in 1915, wrote that America needed a model beyond the melting pot. It needed an orchestra, he argued: "As in an orchestra, every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality, founded in its substance and form ... so in society each ethnic group is the natural instrument, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody."

Dewey liked the orchestra metaphor but, as Robert Westbrook has noted, added an important addendum. "I quite agree with your orchestra idea," he wrote to Kallen. "But upon [the] condition we really get a symphony and not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously."

Compare this last sentence with Booker's--"It shouldn't be just one instrument. It should be a number of different instruments playing to one powerful song"--and we might have an reason to believe John Dewey is directly influencing policy in Newark. Dewey! Influence! Jonah Goldberg is peeing his pants right now in terror.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Racism Is Over - Cory Booker

Ron Paul Interview
Bob Barr Interview

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Random Thoughts

2008-11-20T23:05:00.003-06:00

1. The news that Afghanistan is now attempting to market pomegranates instead of poppy is simply terrific news. My own personal relationship with pomegranates is deeply intertwined with other Huffy Crew bloggers: I was introduced to the juicy snack by the Sheriff, and was convinced of their incredible antioxidant potential by austin5000.

2. The English language completely lacks a good antonym for privatize. Nationalize just doesn't cut it, as there are plenty of instances when things are un-privatized but not nationalized: municipal ownership of utilities, transportation, etc. being one clear example.

3. The breaking news of Mukasey collapsing while giving a speech is unfortunate. That said, have you ever heard of such a thing happening outside of the movies?

Here is one of my favorites. (Phillip Baker Hall's collapse in Magnolia also is up there...)

Nose Dive

2008-11-19T19:42:00.003-06:00

"Washington University is blessed with financial strength. However, the value of the invested assets of the University has declined considerably during the months since the start of this fiscal year (FY09) that began on July 1, 2008. Since July 1, the value of the endowment has declined approximately 25%."
-Mark S. Wrighton

Just got this email today, but the (abjected) shit is hitting the academic fan all over. For the graduate students out there, consider a union: http://www.yaleunions.org/geso/reports/BlackboardBlues.pdf

They Carried Signs

2008-11-15T19:45:00.003-06:00

Andrew Sullivan has been posting photos from today's anti-prop 8 marches. Some of the signs are just so unbelievably awesome that I have to relay their content.

- "Some of my best friends are Mormons"

-"Against gay marriage? Then don't have one."

- [Man's sign that reads] "Do you really want me to marry your daughter?"

-"A gay marriage is just as important as my first, second, and third straight marriage!"

Not quite the understated beauty and simplicity of "I am a man" from the civil rights era, but they get the point across effectively in my view. What seems clear, however, is that these protests are in many ways linked to Obama's win. The hope is that these very real and important (largely) cultural rights become part of a wave of a broader discussion of economic rights.

Things to do Tuesday: prepare Plato lesson, study German, research Aeschylus paper...

2008-11-03T23:56:00.004-06:00

...oh yeah, vote.

And you bet your ass I will bet at St. Paul's Lutheran bright and early tomorrow, voting no on Prop 8, yes on 2, no on 10 (the one basically written by T. Boone Pickens), etc.

But what about that Presidential race...?

Fivethirtyeight.com (which has the likelihood of an Obama win at 98.1% -- no October surprise there) shows California heavily swinging Obama roughly 60-40, so what me worry, right? That basically guaranteed bloc of electoral votes should make the "rational voter" reconsider his vote. My vote never had much weight to begin with, and now a "symbolic vote" for a third party candidate looms large -- symbolic in the sense that that vote will actually show up on a piece of paper somewhere as a statistic ("Oh, another strange person voting for a third party candidate!"), not just "symbolically" in my mind.

But what if every Dem-disaffected left-leaning democrat did that, the argument goes. Yes, it would be quite interesting, but likely? Nah. I can't turn my vote into a categorical imperative -- not only is that sort of generalizing scenario just not going to happen, but a slight expansion of the hypothetical would, of course, usher in a third party candidate in the general election itself, which is precisely what I would desire (well, I really desire proportional representation but we'll leave that out of the equation).

So, you're darn tootin' I'll be in the voting booth because of the propositions -- what should I do then? I could just not vote for either candidate, since I really don't like either party, and no one would ever be the wiser. But oughtn't I go ahead and do something? Why not just vote for Obama? It won't mark my 'soul' one way or the other, and it'll be one more (highly insignificant) vote for the man. And not voting for him, what sort of letter would that brand on my flesh? Is he not the "best" that "we" could ask for? Isn't it all so historic and milestone-like and a fucking long time coming? Why not just channel all that anger from the past eight years into an anti-Republican vote? That indeed might entail a certain level of utility.

But what about the idea that after all of one's bloviating and fulminating on the grievous faults of the two-party system, on the basic agreement among the nation's elite on an imperialistic policy, on the need for a truly democratic force in American political life, after all that, to be dutifully counted within the "yes" column bringing to power another leader who is destined not to take the country in the direction one honestly believes it needs to go? The political scientists will have their moment of knowing recognition: "Yes, yes, people talk about change, they talk about the ability, however small and disadvantaged, within this system to try to introduce bottom-up legitimation for a fundamentally new politics, but at the end of the day they will bite the bullet and cast their vote for what they claim needs overhauling. And that vote, in the final analysis, is what counts. There is your revealed preference."

That's a disturbing thought, and one that I hope will continue to trouble me as much as it does now. I don't know what it will be like tomorrow morning, and surely it will -- on preemptive reflection here -- all seem much less momentous than this, but mostly it feels bad.

ALTBRO or ALTBAG

2008-11-02T23:40:00.000-06:00

Obama Finally Secures White Aryan Leftist Vote

2008-11-02T10:54:00.005-06:00

One of my favorite subjects is the anti-capitalist right or, as the estimable Jonah Goldberg might call it, the "liberal fascists." In the 1930s we look to the syndicalist Spanish Falange party and their contemporaries, the German socialists of the nationalist variety. From the 1960s to today, aspects of George Wallace Southern populism and Jean-Marie Le Pen's French version contained various redistributionist (or anti-redistributionist dimensions depending on whether the tax money could plausibly go to non-whites) measures.

I was reminded of this tradition while reading this interesting article from Esquire on the 2008 voting preferences of America's most extremist racists. (Spolier alert: they love Obama.) From Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance and former Klan head (and one of the characters in this must-see 1988 Geraldo Rivera brawl), we learn that

The corporations are running things now, so it’s not going to make much difference who's in there, but McCain would be much worse. He’s a warmonger. He’s a scary, scary person--more dangerous than Bush. Obama, according to his book, Dreams Of My Father, is a racist and I have no problem with black racists. I’ve got the quote right here: 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s white race.' The problem with Obama is he’s being dishonest about his racial views. I’d respect him if he’d just come out and say, 'Yeah, I’m a black racist.' I don’t hate black people. I just think it’s in the best interest of the races to be separated as much as possible. See, I’m a leftist. I’m not a rightist. I hate the transnational corporations far more than any black person.

Those of you with access to odd Texas radio stations, or who grew up in the foothills of anti-government Michigan, may not be so shocked by these kind of statements. I would be willing to bet, however, that most histories of the KKK (and like-minded groups), written mostly by leftists, avoid mentioning this anti-capitalist rhetoric. Thoughts?

Why do we have these things?

2008-10-31T02:48:00.001-05:00

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by blinkered liberalism

2008-10-28T20:03:00.003-05:00

Here is one of the leading liberal bloggers of our day:

It seems to me that any talk of the end of conservatism is not only premature, but fundamentally misguided. It’s in the nature of things that politicians and intellectuals whose ideas tend toward the preservation of existing wealth and privilege are going to manage to find money and institutions to support them. The right sequence of events could push such a movement out of power for a while, but any incumbent regime is bound to be tripped up by bad luck or mistakes soon enough. And when it does, people turn to the alternative.

This is what I'd like to call "silly-ass" on several levels. The first thing to say is that it doesn't make any sense by Yglesias' logic to say that conservatives are and always will be defenders of "the preservation of existing wealth" if the very idea of "existing wealth" should (theoretically at least) be dependent upon the type of government in place. In other words, if "progressives" manage to take over come November and redistribute or do whatever it is they do, won't "existing wealth" then become an outcome of their own policies? And won't "progressives" then de facto be "defending" that existing wealth regime?

The real point is that all of this begs the question of Democrats' actual commitment to challenging existing wealth and privilege. Yglesias doesn't even say what's wrong with existing wealth and privilege. It can't be (for him) that wealth and privilege are per se wrong, or that all currently existing wealth and privilege was acquired unjustly.

He should specify what he means, because of course Democrats are comfortable with -- in fact, they have a long history of -- allowing extreme inequalities of wealth and privilege, so long, hypothetically, as the government provides some minimum of social insurance to people. Yglesias makes it sound as though the opposition, once in power, will effect a liquidation of existing wealth and privilege and an equalization of opportunity, but of course those currently wealthy and powerful will by and large remain so.

The final point is that this is an absurdly sanguine view of democratic electoral politics. He seems to assume that coalitions of popular movements that challenge wealth and privilege will be the default parties in power, with plutocratic "alternatives" sneaking in when the former are "tripped up by bad luck and mistakes." (But again, where will this cadre of fatcats come from if progressives have so far leveled wealth and privilege?)

Politicians and intellectuals don't have to search for money and institutions. Money and institutions find them, and the Democrats are certainly no exception. The idea that all of the righteous and just elements of American society are not only represented by, but actually spearhead, the Democratic party is ludicrous and Manichean.

Yes, yes, he's in the seating

2008-10-28T01:58:00.003-05:00

My friend's mother received this in a chain email from a coworker in rural Ohio:

This will make you re-think: A Trivia question in Sunday School :
How long is the beast allowed to have authority in Revelations?

Revelations Chapter 13 tells us it is 42 months, and you know what that is.
Almost a four-year term of a Presidency .

All I can say is 'Lord, Have mercy on us!'

According to The Book of Revelations the anti-Christ is: The anti-Christ will
be a man, in his 40's, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with
persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal....the prophecy says
that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace,
and when he is in power, will destroy everything..

Do we recognize this description??

I STRONGLY URGE each one of you to post this as many times as
you can! Each opportunity that you have to send it to a friend or media outlet..do it!
I refuse to take a chance on this unknown candidate who came out of nowhere.

My question is, wouldn't this be a pretty good incentive to vote for Obama, since it accelerates your chances of seeing the return of Jesus during your lifetime?

My friend also noted that the Book of Revelations apparently did a pretty good job predicting the "Muslim" character of the anti-Christ, considering the fact that it predates Muhammad by about 400 years.

Life imitates parody of life

2008-10-27T23:04:00.002-05:00

"Original": "Republicans urge minorities to get out and vote Nov. 3."

"Copy" of "original": "Phony flier says Virginians vote on different days."

2008-10-23T18:39:00.002-05:00

I think the fundamental problem here is the attempt to put structure on what is ultimately an unstructured world. The structure itself must be as nimble and flexible as the changing world in which we live. Otherwise, when change comes, it will fail. More intelligent processes, intelligent structures, are in order.

By "here", I literally mean most places in which symbolic structure exists.

Attempted Citizen's Arrest of Rove

2008-10-23T07:43:00.003-05:00

"Turdblossom" almost gets what's coming to him....

Hugjh Hendry

2008-10-19T21:59:00.001-05:00

Q: Today, liquidity is being pumped in by Greenspan, then?
A: Yes. The mechanism is the government-sponsored enterprise sector in America, the Fannie Maes and the Freddie Macs. The U.S. has nationalized the credit-creating process, previously the preserve of the banking sector. Freddie and Fannie can borrow money at almost the risk-free rate. At times of anxiety, they are profit-motivated to expand their balance sheets because government bond yields, the risk-free rate, fall during times of risk aversion. The spread widens between riskier assets like mortgage-backed securities, which Fannie and Freddie buy, and Treasury bonds. The combined balance sheet of Fannie and Freddie is $3 trillion, 30% of the U.S. economy. The annualized growth rate in September and October of their balance sheets was 50%. Now when people talk about M2 or the old monetarism, it hasn't kept pace with the disintermediation, which has gone on in the economy. It doesn't include agency paper. The money supply looks as if it's waning. It's not. There's enormous dollar creation. You can control the domestic price of money. Short-term interest rates have not gone up in America because of this economic Frankenstein. But you can't control the external price: The dollar is weakening versus everything, even versus the ruble.

The response to the crash since March 2000 has been to create even more money. Just as it was 300 years ago. We've created a tidal wave of liquidity, with the Dow back at 10,000. But in doing so, strange things have happened. Gold has broken its 25-year downtrend and has now established an uptrend. The CRB index is at a nine-year high. Oil prices didn't come down after the Iraq war concluded. Strange things are going on in the world at large. But not strange to a citizen of Paris in 1720.

Q: And this suggests?
A: The authorities have broken their trust with us. Middle-class society preserves its wealth in paper assets and the honesty of the paper asset is that the central banks will not dilute your financial assets by printing too much money. We're having to go to extreme measures to preserve our wealth by owning gold, a barbarous relic. Greenspan is the smartest guy on the planet, but you know what? Wise guys make mistakes. That's what LTCM [the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund] was all about. In 1998, the Fed made the same mistake it did in 1927, used an overseas agenda to determine its interest rates. The Asian economies are on their backs. Russia does the unthinkable and defaults. LTCM defaults. And Greenspan, acting like James Bond, saves the world by cutting interest rates when the U.S. economy is expanding at 7½%. In doing so, he throws petrol on the flames. Nasdaq goes exponential. He unlocks a bubble in domestic stock markets and we've been paying for it ever since. He knows the consequences are a period of prolonged economic weakness and that terrifies him because he's got so much debt in the economy. Debt today is 360% of GDP. Not just in America but elsewhere. We're ill-prepared for a rise in savings. And so he's done everything to prevent a rise in savings.

If the Fed succeeds in re-inflation, then the good news is that the Dow is going to be at 10,500... in 2020.

Table: Hendry's Picks and Pans1

Q: That's the good scenario?
A: The other scenario is that we can envisage a situation where it becomes possible that the tail can wag the dog. The stock market today is capitalized at 100% of GDP and debt is 360%. Here we are with the U.S. gross domestic product recently having shown 8.2% growth, a classic economic recovery. But history suggests that if growth continues, then 10-year bond yields will have to go to 6%-7%. But that debt level -- i.e., mortgage refinance-based consumer spending -- can't accommodate such high interest rates. That's why the Fed keeps saying that it will be putting the short rate up; it's desperate to control the long rate. This is a bear-market rally. They have never lasted more than 12 or 13 months in any asset class. This market bottomed on the ninth of October last year, so we're [generally] in that 12-month period. At this point, I feel very much like Jesus in the desert. I haven't eaten for 40 days, and I'm getting fed up with the juniper berries. The devil is saying to me: 'Look what I've done to the Nasdaq. Up 80% or so. Russian equities were up 100% a few weeks ago. All of this, this could be yours if you would give up on your disciplines.' If it rolls over, if all the bears are converted back into bulls, concluding it's a natural cycle, then this market will test last year's lows. If those are breached, then I believe you could lose 80% of the value of the S&P and the Dow from their peaks.

On Being Modern

2008-10-14T22:45:00.002-05:00

My breakfast this morning struck a fantastic chord in me. I had two slices of (excellent) toast and a cup of coffee. I felt thoroughly modern, like 1950's engineer modern. In the pursuit of being a better student of planning, I will attempt to eat this breakfast more often--despite my love of the breakfast taco.

However, I was also reminded of Fillipo Marinetti's excellent manifesto "Against Pasta". The futurists captured some of the most exciting and best sides of the undead horrors we call modernity and modernism, though in their case it lead them on the road of fascism. I hope my toast emboldens me to seek the heights of iconoclastic egalitarianism, and not the establishment of some master toast-race.

Hi.

Congrats!

2008-10-13T11:39:00.003-05:00

UPDATE: BUT SRSLY, if you really want to figure out what this award is all about (instead of listening to Liberty's ramblings), you might want to start here and here.

How did I miss this?

2008-10-09T20:48:00.002-05:00

Just wanted to let everyone know how surprised and excited I am to see a socialist ticket poised to win the election so handily.

Lehman CDS: Friday

2008-10-09T15:26:00.004-05:00

Well, we'll see what the market will be like in the coming months a short while after Friday, when up to $400B payouts on Lehman's bankruptcy has to be settled in the CDS market. Will there be bankrupticies from the payouts? Bilateral agreements halting payout?

The expected payouts on Lehman bankruptices, and others like it, is why there is no lending going on. Banks have to use all the cash they get from the Fed in order to maintain these CDS commitments. There will be more CDS settlements so while tomorrow is a big test, it does not mean we are out of the woods yet in terms of the CDS market's vulnerabilities. If it goes badly tomorrow, however, we can be sure it gets tougher for all markets, for the rest of the year.

To Grasp Reality

2008-10-06T16:37:00.001-05:00

For over a year now, I have been warning of a complete systemic collapse of the U.S. Banking System. I was a bit biased towards the downside to begin with, as I started working in finance as a trader during the month of August in 2007. This was when the world found out that the seemingly impenetrable, multinational banking institutions, the symbols of American might that turned regular college students into Pavlov's drooling dog, were susceptible to reality. 120k earnings your first year out of school? Maserati at 28? It was, it turned out, just a dream.

I posted graphs from the Federal Reserve which I thought would illustrate why I believed this could turn into a depression. I made many timley macroeconomic predictions, and some individual stock predictions, and I routinely warned about an esoteric but sixty-two trillion dollar market called CDS.

The only one of my predictions from late 2007 to early 2008 that has not panned out(I never claimed with certainty we would go into a depression) is the complete collapse of the CDS market - the market Warren Buffet labeled as a "financial time bomb" whose architects were "mad men." I never really used the term depression to describe the events that would follow a CDS market implosion, but internally and in my discussions with others, I think it was clear that if this market were to fail, then "that would be it." Bernake and Paulson also seem to think so(AIG, Bear Stearns).

But these predictions were all made on paper - through research and diligence, technical analysis and fundamental calculations. I never really knew what it would feel like to actually live through this nightmare - through "hard times" - indeed, I think many kids our age forgot that the economy can have a seizure. The last twenty years have been an age of incredible wealth creation.

Main St. has not had hard times yet. But I think anyone with a grasp of reality can see where this is headed. Things will be very hard - and if the CDS market implodes - as I have said in early January and many other times - get ready for an outright catastrophe - massive instability will ensue. This is by god the only market we should care about right now - not the subprime bonds, not the bad loans that Hank Paulson wants to buy up and remove from the balance sheets of institutions, but the Credit Default Swaps market - whose purpose was to protect against the defaulting of corporate debt held by one party in the form of a one time payment if that debt ever defaulted. The payments are huge - like in the billions. No one has this money now. And no one had it to begin with - CDS is a legal contract but the capital commitments outlined in the contracts were not checked by any party. Now the total outstanding value of the CDS market is 62 trillion dollars - 4 times the size of the American economy. Parties have legally binding commitments to payup when a credit event occurs, but no one has the money now to pay, and some people never had the money to begin with!

So for example, if Bank Fish promises to protect Bank Huffy for James' TShirt Store, and the store goes plooie, then Bank Fish has to pay Bank Huffy a certain amount of money. Many of these payments are in the billions of the dollars - in fact I would say a billion dollars is the average. The bankruptcy rate prior to October 2007 was about .26 percent....way out of historical norms of a 1.25 percent default rate. Since we are in a financial tsunami, that rate is going to be much higher than this 1.25 percent normal average. Now, the geniuses of these CDS contracts didn't realize that their selfish interests would also create widespread risk - if James' T Shirt Shop goes bankrupt, and Bank Fish has to pay 1 billion, and Bank Fish is impaired, then Bank Fish is gonna go bankrupt, and now Bank Huffy, who promised to pay Bank Lick if Bank Fish went bankrupt, has to have 1 billion in capital outflows during a severe recession, and is gonna go plooie.

What got me thinking about this again was Yves latest post on nakedcap saying that the first settlement(when money changes hands) for the Fannie, Freddie, Wamu, and Lehman bankruptcies is this month. Granted, I don't think there are going to be major problems with this month's CDS contracts because many people hedged their risks - people have known that these institutions were in trouble for quite some time . However, according to today's FT, the contract value on Fannie and Freddie is 400B, with 35B of that 400B expected to be paid out by sellers. Who has this kind of money to spare nowadays? Do you see the problem?

The reality to grasp here is that it will be difficult to stop the CDS market from imploding. In fact, as long as the federal government bails out institutions and prevents any of the markets from clearing, the longer they continue to intervene(to a point), the worse shape companies will be in for the CDS tsunami...and the less likely they will be able to pay what their contracts say they must.

The Fed is again having an emergency meeting on Tuesday with the banks to set up a clearing house of some sort which will allow the CDS market to be organized better. In the future such an agency will verify capital commitments made by the paries, and right now, it will be primarily used for 'net-settlement', which is a way of hedging your risk on a specific CDS contract..basically nuetraling it out.

The Fed is preparing for the CDS storm and so should you. The CDS situation is more than just an economic issue for the parties involved, it goes right into the heart of trust in the system(62 trillion? are you kidding), the financial system, the legal system, and of course the regulators - who allowed such a monstrosity to occur. They only mandated paperwork be kept for such things in 2004. Before that, you need not even have a record.

As more entities go bankrupt, more contracts with be triggered. Then, more people will not be able to pay their obligations and will go bankrupt. Rinse and repeat. Or you might just want to take a shower after the bloodbath.

Good Article on Bailout

2008-10-03T23:55:00.000-05:00

Mish: www.globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/10/bailout-bill-passed-so-what-happens-now.html

Are stocks in a bubble?

2008-10-03T23:38:00.004-05:00

Either the credit market is right and this is a real disaster, or the equity market is correct and there will be a future.

One of these markets will reprice themselves. The farther divergence between the two means the one that is wrong is going to reprice itself at an accelerated pace.

The first of many?

2008-09-29T01:16:00.002-05:00

Fareed Zakaria calls for Palin to bow out. Will there be a cascade effect? I don't think McCain could survive it.

Lessons from this week's Friedman column

2008-09-28T17:47:00.004-05:00

When Thomas Friedman needs "reminding of the real foundations of the American Dream," he turns to -- surprise! -- fellow seven-plus-figure entrepreneurs with ponderous extended metaphors:

Our economy is like a car, added Sridhar, and the financial institutions are the transmission system that keeps the wheels turning and the car moving forward. Real production of goods that create absolute value and jobs, though, are the engine.
“I cannot help but ponder about how quickly we are ready to act on fixing the transmission, by pumping in almost one trillion dollars in a fortnight,” said Sridhar. “On the other hand, the engine, which is slowly dying, is not even getting an oil change or a tuneup with the same urgency, let alone a trillion dollars to get ourselves a new engine. Just imagine what a trillion-dollar investment would return to the economy, including the ‘transmission,’ if we committed at that level to green jobs and technologies.”

So just in case you were worried, there is a vast reserve army of Friedmans which the punditry can draw upon to depress intelligence levels.

But that's not really what this post is about. Rather, I was struck by this passage:

“Infants and the elderly who are disabled obsess about survival,” said Sridhar. “As a nation, if we just focus on survival, the demise of our leadership is imminent. We are thrivers. Thrivers are constantly looking for new opportunities to seize and lead and be No. 1.” That is what America is about.

I personally always derive satisfaction from seeing the helpless and disabled used as a foil for the dynamism of capitalism. But there's a more general point here as well. While the first thing I was reminded of here was Aristotle's comment in the Politics that states exist, not for the sake of mere life, but for living well , I realized that that was merely a superficial similarity. In fact, there were few Greeks who would have spoken in Sridhar's terms. It may be an irreconcilable difference between the ancient and modern worlds that the ancients could not extricate themselves from the web of communal and familial obligations (to their children, to their elders) which shaped and largely directed their way of life. Sure, "thriving" was a goal to be pursued beyond mere "surviving," as Aristotle saw, but there was a set of pretty clearly defined and delimited qualities that entailed thriving: self-sufficiency, territorial autonomy, the ability to participate in politics, freedom (inasmuch as this was possible) from menial labor.

This relatively conservative outlook, and the social structure that enabled it (i.e. slavery, even/especially in the case of democracy), ensured that there would be no constant drive to "succeed and lead and be No.1" in "new" ways, particularly in the realm of "economics" (if we can speak of such a thing). We owe our modern existence in large part -- I'm not discounting technology -- to the Sridharian attitude of willful disregard for the ties that bind. In the face of tradition, the entrepreneur must set at nought all its counsel, and would none of its reproof.

Closet Intellectual or Unable to Get Her Anti-Intellectual Talking Points Straight: Or, the Passion of Sarah Palin II

2008-09-26T09:39:00.010-05:00

As a good American citizen living in America's heartland, I thought Sarah Palin's response to Katie Couric's question about her foreign policy credentials (never having traveled abroad, never having received a passport until recently) was predictable and even somewhat justified:

I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world. No, I've worked all my life.... I was not part of, I guess, that culture.

Fair enough. The Republican Party, from country-bumpkin Mitt Romney to born-in-a-canal-zone John McCain, has attacked the Democrats as foreign-language speaking, rich, snobbish, and bookish elitists.

(To be clear, I have no problem with Sarah Palin. She's right that a background of having traveled abroad might require things like wealth, which she did not have. Fortunately, non-privileged people can one day grow up to become presidents (she being an excellent case in point) and the reason that they can talk about foreign affairs and traveling the world is in large part because ... they have foreign policy experience. They've been in government for long enough that they've gained this experience. They, like most politicians, are eventually sent abroad a dozen times, or five dozen times. Sarah Palin, if she continued on as governor, would presumably acquire this kind of experience in the coming years. I have no problem with Sarah Palin. I have a problem with Sarah Palin as Vice President of the United States of America.)

But because Palin lacks experience and longevity in the White House, her only legitimate talking point is to refer back to the culture wars. Knowing about the ins and outs of foreign countries is what that other culture does. We real Americans trust our gut about such things. We believe in freedom and democracy and if you're a foreign country you either believe these things or you don't. That's all I need to know.

Except, this is not what Palin went onto say at all. In the most shocking move of her campaign she admitted that

the way I have understood the world is through education, through books, through mediums that have provided me a lot of perspective on the world

Wait. What? Here we have a woman who in one sentence conjures up the idea of a liberal, latte drinking, college educated, backpacking culture and in the very next acknowledges she understands the world through ... education and books. Now, either she's emphasizing the old, Will Hunting belief in auto-didacticism over formal education, or she's broken with Republican rhetoric--that which takes pride in not reading economic plans, or books in general. Here, she admits that reading and thinking about world problems (intellectualizing them, if you will) should be a qualification for president. Indeed, the only qualification for president at least vis-a-vis foreign policy views.

University professors, bookworms, and Barack Obama: Rejoice! Sarah Palin knows what it's like to be accused of not knowing about "real world" but only studying it in books. She understands that no matter how much time you've spent abroad, you'll never fully understand that experience without surrounding yourself with that country's literature and history. Indeed, she understands that reading itself is a form of travel, an escape from the narrow confines of the Alaskan frontier or of suburban malaise. Here, finally, is the intellectual's candidate. That, or she just got talking points mixed up.

(Update: Not sure why the formatting came out all weird. Sawry.)

Frozen

2008-09-25T20:45:00.001-05:00

Tony Scott on DFW

2008-09-22T14:58:00.004-05:00

The best sentence I've read in recent memory:

He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.

Update: This is appropriately absurd and hilarious.

Thoughts on the Mother of All Bailouts

2008-09-21T15:36:00.003-05:00

I just realized that no one is talking about a critical issue regarding this rescue package. There is a possibility the program will not work. Here's why:

The banks are allowed to, right now, swap the same bad assets that the Fed would be buying in the bailout, for cash from the Federal Reserve. So why aren't they doing it and unloading this shit off their books?

Well, the reason is because no one wants to reveal the actual "market" price of the bad bonds(CDOs, subprime securitized bonds, other securitized assets). Because as of now, the valuations of these bonds are insanley high - citigroup has valued them at 61 cents on the dollar, but Lehman valued theirs at 39 cents on the dollar, even though everyone is holding similar packaged bonds. The fact of the matter is that the banks don't want to swap the stuff to the Fed for cash because then they would have to reveal the reality - the bonds are worth next to nothing - and if they had to face up to reality, then every banking institution would be bankrupt.

So now Paulson is establishing this fund that is supposed to buy them up. At what prices? If the price is too high, like the absurd 61 cent valuation by Citigroup, then there wont be enough of the 700 billion to go around because there is a lot of this stuff out there - citigroup has over 1 trillion in off balance sheet shit, Wachovia alone has 122 billion in problem securitized shit.

So, while the bailout will obviously help, it may not be the cure and there may be much more turmoil to face. It all depends on the price the Treasury is willing to buy them at - and if the price is too high then there wont be enough of the money to go around for it to be a cure persay, but will definitely help, especailly if they are willing to pay ridiculously high prices.

And I hope they aren't, cause that would just be a total screwing of our money and our government for these corporations. In short, and I am surprised to say this, I do not think the plan is big enough to cure the problem and quell the issues of solvency for many of the bigger banks.

MEND Destroys Elem-Kalabari Oil Pipeline

2008-09-20T12:32:00.002-05:00

Elem-Kalabari is a sigificant area for the Kalabari, an Ijo-speaking people, who have inhabited the area for over 500 years. The Kalabari were major players in the transatlantic trade along the western african coast from the 15th to 19th centuries, acting as crucial middlemen. Their competetiveness came from the establishment of giant canoe houses which provided the boasts for the trade and for war purposes and were organized like a modern day corporation with managers and all. Thus, the Ijo culture became more developed and ingrained in the area.

So you see their problem with oil companies taking over their land for their own personal profit and simultaneously exerting outside economic and cultural influence on their geography.

Debt

2008-09-20T11:14:00.000-05:00

"Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting in lieu thereof $11,315,000,000,000."

Title 31 referes to the debt ceiling. The United States is now raising our debt ceiling to 11.3 trillion from 10.5 trillion. Under Bush, the national debt has risen from 5 trillion to 11.3 trillion.

3 MONTH TREASURY YIELD - AT ALMOST 0 PERCENT - LOWEST SINCE GREAT DEPRESSION.

2008-09-18T02:30:00.003-05:00

BYE BYE LEHMAN

2008-09-13T16:36:00.002-05:00

Lehman is going bye bye in the next 7 days. Next up is WaMu. FDIC doesnt have enough money to support the deposits at WamU. Lehman will default on its debt if it doesnt find a buyer. Say Hello to the beginnings of the CDS meltdown, the crisis that will put this country into a severe recession or depression.

Schooling Obama

2008-09-10T20:19:00.003-05:00

A couple of thoughts on the occasion of Barack Obama's major speech on education. For one, I thought the speech was disappointing. In the world of education policy makers there are two camps:

- First, those who think that improving student outcomes will come about chiefly through reforming schools (getting better teachers, improving curricula and pedagogical techniques, etc.), and
- Second, those who think that student outcomes will come about chiefly through improving factors outside of schools that affect children (their health, their parents, their activity choices before and after school, etc.).

I unashamedly stand in this latter camp, more or less signing onto what has been touted as the "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education". Coming from these sets of concerns and policy ideas, I found Obama's speech excessively wonkish and school focused. There were no bad ideas, of course--it's not like those in the second camp are opposed to reforms internal to the schools. Far from it. But it was disappointing that Obama didn't even really address the concerns of those who believe educational performance can be improved mainly through more holistic and comprehensive approaches.

Fortunately, there's much to suggest that Obama is a bit more of a second-camper than
he may lead on. Nevermind how the right is obsessed with linking Obama to Bill Ayers when the two sat on a board overseeing a school reform experiment. That project, too, was rather school focused, as a quick browse of the project's own report. As the New York Times Magazine reports, Obama has quietly allied himself with a number of advisers who emphasize human capital development, increased intervention into early childhood and parenting, medical care, and expanded after-school options. This, coupled with more substantial (and ultimately more important) policies that will hopefully raise the income of the poorest in society, will make a far greater difference in not leaving children behind than anything else.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has opinions on where they stand vis-a-vis these two camps. I'm typically one interested in building syntheses out of oppositions, but I can't seem to dialectically break these bricks. The evidence (and I'd be happy to go further into this) and my intuition just seem incontrovertible.

Inequality, the Federal Government, and the Republican Party: Or, the Passion of Sarah Palin

2008-09-08T18:38:00.003-05:00

Having temporarily stoppoed fawning over Satyam, Matt Yglesias has linked to an interesting article indeed by David Frum in the NYT Magazine about income inequality and the Republican Pa rty. Frum, a conservative, joins the ranks of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam as Republicans concerned that they might lose a generation of voters if they don't address issues of income inequality soon.

Frum, Douthat, and Salam are no fools. Unlike 98% of conservative intellectuals, they understand that Republicans doing well in politics is rather well correlated with low rates of inequality and white middle class to upper-middle class incomes. What they don't seem to understand is that they're exposing the very foundations that is the Big Lie of Republican politics, opening the pandora's box to the hypocrisy and sleight of hand that has kept the GOP in control for the last half century. Here, friends, is a story that begins in the South and Southwest and takes us all the way north to the very edge of the American West. Let's look at some stuff!

The picture is a bit blurry and small, but what's important are those little red dots that seem strangely conspicuous in the Deep South and Southwest. These are what are commonly called "massive military bases" and their locations are not accidental. They are just one of the many ways the Federal Government has historically provided large subsidies to traditionally poor and environmentally hostile places. These two regions in particular, along with Alaska (more on that later), owe a great deal of their development into modern states to the federal government: the South for aiding it in transforming itself from a slave-based, agrarian, and by 1864 war-devastated place to a place of more or less equal prosperity as anywhere else in the U.S.; and the Southwest for turning a rather inhospitable land (through defense dollars and federal works projects) into the fastest-growing area of the United States.

Kevin Phillips, who we owe a great deal to both explaining and realizing this reality, understands the relationship between federal dollars and Republican politics perfectly. As the former Nixon strategist/right-wing prophet wrote two years ago, referring to his 1968 book The Emerging Republican Majority:

I coined the term "Sun Belt" to describe the oil, military, aerospace and retirement country stretching from Florida to California.... If any new alignment had the potential to nurture a fusion of oil interests and the military-industrial complex, it was the Sun Belt, which helped draw them into commercial and political proximity and collaboration.

The Sun Belt is a big and complicated place. Beside the oil rig and the defense industry mandarin stands the evangelical, the geriatric, and the immigrant. To get a clearer picture of what's going on let's turn to a simpler place that I think shares many of the same characteristics.

Where else but Alaska do we get such an odd cauldron of federal intervention, welfare-state benefits, and steadfast Republicanism? I'm hoping the Palin rise to power and the attention on Alaska manages to shed some light on the curious paradox I'm referring to, because in many ways there's no better place to look than this absolute folly of a state.

Nowhere, we are told, do people so distrust big government (feds or not) as in Alaska, which has voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election in its existence with the exception of Johnson's '64 landslide.

Yet nowhere do we find citizens benefiting more from federal tax coffers and largess than Alaska. Alaskans enjoy the lowest taxes in the nation along with the highest federal expenditures (and earmarks) per capita. For every year that an Alaskan spends thanking their lucky stars they've avoided the tyranny of big government and the welfare-dependent inner cities of continental America, they receive a check from the government for $3200 for...living in Alaska. To put it simply, as Time Magazine's Michael Kinsley observes, "Alaska's government spends money on its own citizens and taxes the rest of us to pay for it."

With Alaska in mind, we return to Frum. The GOP's two-step secret to success is as follows:
1) Raise all ships and reduce inequality among Sun Belt (and Alaskan) white folks through huge (often Democratically initiated) federal subsidies and welfare checks, and then
2) Persuade these beneficiaries that any redistributionist/government subsidized economic activity is dangerous, liberal, socialist, and contrary to American values.

The beauty, of course, is that you can't have the ideology (2) without the redistribution (1) in the first place. The Republican Party simply wouldn't have the votes to survive if it weren't for the massive federal intervention necessary to raise people to a certain income level that they can no longer care about people worse off than them receiving the same sorts of benefits they did. Here, I think, is an explanation for Republican political domination that includes race as a factor, and yet doesn't overestimate it as an explanatory tool in the way Paul Krugman, for example, does.

What's alarming about seeing the Republican rise through this prism is that--as the Sheriff and I were discussing the other day--it sort of ruins the liberal fantasy world of "if we can only educate people and make them wealthier, they'll be like us!" It seems to me that a lot of wealth and education have been going to a lot of people I've been talking about in this post. Probably, I presume, a lot of these people can proudly call themselves one of the 150,000,000 Americans who say today that they intend to vote for the Republican Party. The party of Sarah Palin. She, who in one sentence, "thanks, but no thanks [to the Bridge to Nowhere]," manages to capture all of the wonder of standing principally against something after they were for it, and while they use its funds to distribute to Alaska's healthy Republican citizens. Here's to hoping that the media exposes these lies for what they are and continues to untangle this rather unbecoming web of GOP ideology.

Notes on the Convention

2008-09-04T21:12:00.002-05:00

* When Mitt Romney says, "It's time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother!", I wonder if the words "self awareness" continue to have meaning. Romney also said early on his speech, "Is government spending - excluding inflation - liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? It's liberal!" This is certainly an interesting point, although Republicans, of course, have governed for 20 of those 28 years. The entire beginning of the speech is a bizarre exercise in purist ideology -- the past quarter century is made to be a slow, steady creep of "liberalism," while the conservatism which has undoubtedly reigned is but a mere shadowy "becoming" of an Ideal conservative "being."

* I'm still trying to figure out the role of Joe Lieberman and his speech. It's not like I don't despise him, but there was really nothing very offensive about the speech itself -- and that's the weird part. Just consider some of the other speakers who have "stepped across the aisle" for a convention, as well as their motives: Zell Miller, whose 2004 speech seems to have consisted of a strand of thinking somewhat along the lines of "BLEEAARRRGHHH," was essentially saying that Democrats were blaming America first and not supporting the troops. His purpose was thus mainly to give a typical Republican speech, but have a little "(D)" next to his name. Former Iowa Republican Representative Jim Leach spoke Monday the 25th in Denver, basically to say that, while he held substantial policy differences with the Democratic party, he considered the Bush administration -- and McCain by extension -- dangerous, as well as betrayers of conservative principle. This speech's meaning was, roughly, "I don't agree with you, but God save us from the alternative." Douglas Kmiec is another example of this.

Lieberman wasn't doing either of these things. He was actually saying, "John McCain is the choice for bipartisanship, and not only that, but the choice for liberals, too!" Even Charles Krauthammer found this weird. Why would a bunch of bloodthirsty RNC delegates want to hear about McCain cooperating with Democrats? Lieberman even said, "If John McCain was another go-along partisan politician, he never would have led the fight to fix our broken immigration system or actually do something about global warming. But he did." But the Republican base hates immigration reform. Rush Limbaugh led a "populist" call-in to halt the very legislation John McCain worked on. And Palin is a goddamn denialist when it comes to global warming! I think the bipartisanship meme must actually have some substance behind it. Marked, even substantial, compromise to hardcore right-wing principles is probably one of the only ways the G.O.P. thinks it can reach enough swing voters. If true, this is a good thing, because they've acknowledged a "leftward" trend in the electorate.

* Giuliani's accusation that Democrats were too cowardly to call terrorists "Islamic terrorists" made me realize that the whole "un-PC" movement is for conservatives the structural and functional equivalent of "speaking truth to power" for liberals. And that is quite sad. Orwell once said that "if you want a vision of the [totalitarian] future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever." Now I realize that we're supposed to treat Orwell super reverently, but I've always sort of thought that the boot-on-face treatment would be a pretty fitting reserved circle of hell for Rudy.

* Because I had nothing else to do, I listened to Lindsey Graham's speech on the radio. The most interesting bit was his statement that "those who predicted failure, voted to cut off funding for our troops, and played politics with our national security will be footnotes in history." This strangely echoed Trotsky's jab at the Mensheviks that they would end up in the "dustbin of history." Graham's biggest rhetorical sticking point was the troop surge, which has come up time and again. However, does anyone know how well this point works? With the Presidential race underway polls have shied away from Iraq, but the last I understood, people want out of it. If the surge has not delivered an exit, and it hasn't, what good is it? The importance of the surge hinges on the way it can be tied to a hypothetical defeat that the US would have suffered otherwise. As long as the picture can be painted that, had not the surge been executed, al Qaeda/Iran would have "won," then we can continue to live in the "best of all possible worlds," and the war can proceed indefinitely. I don't know how well this will work, honestly. It's not for nothing that the Democrats have nominated a consistently anti-war candidate out of the dozens of authorizers, flip-floppers, hawks, and just plain crazies who inhabit the Democratic party. (It's equally not for nothing that one of those is also the Vice President.) That might be the fault of the Democratic base or it might reflect wider preferences.

* The 400-odd people who have been beaten and arrested this year, including journalists, represent a vicious authoritarian trend, but let's not forget that the 2004 RNC saw 1800 people arrested by the authorities, which perhaps D'Mardree can elaborate for us.

* Well, I've now had the chance to read McCain's speech (this is a real-time post!), and, as per my comments on the Lieberman speech, I think this is what we should expect: a tone of "civility" (perfectly calculated, of course), "reasonableness," and "modesty" from a political party now realizing that it can't win elections on the "I'm the biggest asshole in this room" platform anymore. Normally I'd say that this should be standard operating procedure for electoral politics, but considering everything that has happened in the past 8 years, and thus acknowledging the absolute sham nature of this pose on McCain's part, I don't have anything nice to say. It's not even gratifying, because you know that there will still be plenty of attack dogs in the Republican party who will lash out at Obama at the same time as gentle old Grandpappy John bounces America on his knee.

It's my belief that both parties, faced with what might be called an actual crisis moment in the economy (or prelude to a crisis), want to bring everything down a few notches. The Republican party no longer feels it can do as easily or ruthlessly what it is used to doing, i.e. massively redistributing wealth upwards, because the Democrats can actually successfully attack such behavior this election season. In fact, the Democrats will almost certainly win anyway, so the Republicans are desperately trying to regain some "common ground" with swing voters (or at least, their Presidential nominee is). Furthermore, if societal and economic ills can be blamed on "Washington" (viz. Romney and McCain's speeches) then McCain/Palin can still (perversely) run on a "change" ticket, based on solid "common sense."

The Democrats are not using this unusually conciliatory stance by the Republicans to push the party to the left. I believe that the party is fully confident in Obama's ability to secure and placate the base, as well as bring out new voting blocs, especially people of color. The excitement of defeating Bush and ushering in change (which means, in part, a black president) means that the party base won't ask too many questions or demand too much. Thus, although Obama is not substantially different from previous Democratic candidates, he seems that way, and that is somewhat of a salve, or sop as the case may be. His economics are basically Clintonomics adjusted for new circumstances, with a few differences in weight and emphasis, as one would expect: when you use a formula with a different set of variables, you get a different set of outcomes. The prospect of four or eight more years of Clintonism may excite some people, but it will leave others feeling underwhelmed. Obviously the opportunities for progressive pressure will be greater with an Obama presidency, but rest assured, this party will not give an inch if it thinks it has elections in the bag. The Democratic vision is to give people enough to be manageable; the Republicans want to fool people into demanding even less.

Tzipi Livni: Pay No Attention to These Settlements Behind the Curtain!

2008-08-27T08:24:00.002-05:00

Let's hope this is a mis-translation because this is pretty disappointing:

Ms. Livni said that settlement building should not influence the negotiations because the goal should be “not to let any kind of noises that relate to the situation on the ground these days enter the negotiation room.”

Reality, like, totally bites.

Moving Images Projected onto a Big Screen

2008-08-22T00:07:00.003-05:00

VCB is hands down Woody Allen's best picture (of those I have seen) of the last twenty years. What's particularly remarkable is that, unlike the also impressive 'Match Point,' it isn't simply a rehashing of one of his previous movies in a non-New York setting. In other news, I'm a partisan of 'Tropic Thunder' over 'Pineapple Express' but would be willing to entertain alternative interpretations.

OMG Have You Heard McCain Has Like a Gazillion Houses!

2008-08-21T20:01:00.004-05:00

Note to liberal bloggers: please talk more about the quantity of John (or Cindy) McCain's real estate hold estate holdings. This topic is totally awesome and substantive! It's not like McCain will be able to muster a defensive narrative having to do with Obama not being so poor himself and not having been imprisoned and tortured for a good while. It's not like the two most renowned Democratic presidents of the 20th century were, like, inheritors of a lot of money and real estate. I am quite confident that the GOP will be as docile as was Kerry when similar attacks were made against the latter in 2004, despite Kerry having served his country honorably. Carry on you nervous Democrats!