Kaphtor

Lady Madonna--Less is More

2011-04-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, you come across a song that you always want to listen two a second time. Or a third. Or a fourth. Today, while I was going into work to grab a pile of grading, I heard 'Lady Madonna' by the Beatles. Which, of course, drove me home to a little time on Wikipedia and YouTube.

As it turns out, Lady Madonna was McCartney's attempt to imitate Fats Domino, one of the inventors of Rock & Roll. Fats was frequently covered by more boring white artists like Pat Boone, who could be played on white radio stations, and who ended up pocketing a lot of the money from Fats Domino's creations. Fats' first hit, "The Fat Man", is here, and you can here how developed his style was already in 1949 (6 years before Bill Haley and the Comets supposedly invented Rock 'N Roll).

Within the same year (while The Beatles were galavanting about India), Fats Domino released his own version, which is, unsurprisingly, quite good.

But it misses the mark. It doesn't have that special sauce that the Beatles' version does. For me, the Beatles' version is so much better because they are unafraid of a thin sound: a single, bare, tinny piano.

In between choruses (actually, throughout, but especially between choruses), the Beatles back off on the guitars to expose the bare piano underneath, which is what gives it that great distinctive sound, and makes it both instantly recognizable and so folksy and accessible. Where there is a lot of guitar, it compliments the piano instead of burying it. In the Fats version, the guitar and piano kind of come together in a big, wet mash of sound. Alas, as the 1950s and 1960s wore on, the trend was always to add more guitar. The Beatles out-Fatsed Fats because they could recognize what a great song you could get out of returning to a barer Boogie-Woogie style from whence Fats had come. Oh, the irony.

All that said, the Fats Domino version is a great one, and I'm glad I found it. It's kinda cool to hear Fats imitating Paul imitating Fats. Our remix culture yields a wealth of creativity, and we're richer for it.

Shirky on The Middle East

2011-02-21T19:40:00.000-08:00

I'm dragging myself out of semi-blogging retirement to post a good interview with Clay Shirky on the events in the Muslim Mediterranean.

Qadaffi Delenda Est

Overdubbing and remix

2010-09-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'll get back to the travellogue. The beginning of classes and moving have sapped my strength....but soon!

Onto something different.

I never fail to be amazed at what people will scoff at as not being "real music" when it involves technology, and how we always prefer "the real thing" because it is somehow more "authentic" when not produced with the aid of any other product of human art and creativity.

This sort of complaint is common today with Lady Gaga and Ke$ha, but it is not new. It's almost as if "electronics" has been the boogeyman for decades.

To illustrate, I thought I'd tell a little story about overdubbing.

Overdubbing was invented by Old Les Paul and Mary Ford. This clip is merely fantastic.

This technique came to be widely used in Rock & Roll. My favorite exemplar is Queen's "Somebody to Love". I heard an interview with the surviving members of Queen who described this as consisting of more than two dozen vocal tracks, all laid down on one another. In this video, they are hearing the recordings all looped on one another. Listen carefully to the fat, choir-like sound of the backups. It sounds like a choir because there are >60 voices singing. In particular, note the part where the guitar backs out and the build the chord at 2:40.

Now here's a live version with no overdubbing. Chord build at 4:40. They do a great job with it, but the centerpiece of what makes this song great just ain't there. (Well, OK, Freddie Mercury is one centerpiece....I mean the other one).

Now, lest you think this is a technique just for old fogeys like Queen, Les Paul, Mary Ford, and me, this is the basis of the mashup. See two lovely versions below.

Of course, this can't be real art. Real art can't use ingenuity and imagination, only soul. If this doesn't make sense to you, you clearly just don't understand.

What is sad to me is the ways in which the internet can promote "horizontal overdubbing", where people can pull tracks from anyone to combine, is being hindered by, you guessed it, copyright. I love intellectual property, and I don't want to lose it. But we seriously need to rethink it. It's Gutenberg technology in a Berners-Lee world.

City of Brotherly Love...unless you cross the street

2010-07-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

So, then I was in Philadelphia. It was late in the day, so I got a hotel. Having recovered fully from my illness of the day before, I was starving, and got a burger and a beer in the Old Town, before heading in to the Independence Hall ward. On arrival, I noticed three buildings. One housed the Visitors’ Center, where I got information for what to visit in the morning. One housed the Liberty Bell. The third was Independence Hall, and it was constantly swarming with park rangers blowing whistles and yelling at tourists. Why, you ask? Because said tourists kept crossing the mother *@!#ing road.

Now, this seems odd. After all, you’d think that tourists would be respectful of this national treasure, and would attend the carefully placed signs and not cross the ropes and chains blocking off the no-go areas, understanding that we live in a post-9-11 world and all that. Why the problem? I hear you cry. Well, there were no signs. There were no chains. There was just an invisible plane, like the one that rises from every goal line on every football field. If you crossed that imaginary plane, you got whistled at. I just stood, dumbfounded, watching this experiment in human psychology gone horribly awry. Tourists hurt, offended, frightened, angered, confused. Park Rangers incredibly pissed off, assuredly suffering blood pressure levels that would cost the tax payer dearly once their pensions kicked in. And invisible planes being crossed willy-nilly. It was horrific. Chaos. Anger. American streets being crossed. A true civic meltdown.

After spending the day contemplating Washington’s Year of Blunders and watching the factotae of Uncle Sam conducting foot traffic in ways that made my eyes bleed, I was thinking that maybe we would have been better off had we stayed under the British. After all, they at least sound really smart with that accent. And they’d be a lot more polite in explaining why they had to shoot you for crossing the street, “Sorry, old chap; it’s the Queen’s Pennsylvania Statehouse, you understand. No hard feelings, Sir, those are the rules, we do it to everyone who crosses the street here. Cheerio! Pip, pip!”

So I went into the Liberty Bell shrine, and began to feel a lot better about Philadelphia, my countrymen, and even the National Park Service. They’ve done a really nice job with it. For one thing, the current display centers around the symbolism of the bell for abolitionists and the later Civil Rights movements. I’m a sucker for hearing Martin Luther King speeches, and juxtaposing that with the writings of abolitionists and with others who have used the bell of a symbol of a standard of what the country should be was incredibly powerful. If the Rangers outside symbolize what the country is, the Bell inside is the standard to which we hold them—the reason I’m offended that those with power would treat ordinary people that way. Of course, blowing whistles at people isn’t slavery, tyranny, or anything like it. But it’s a simple example of why having the ideal matters. It lets you be forgiving of the reality on one hand. Those Rangers were working overtime that night, in a heat wave. It was the 4th of July. They were overwhelmed, overworked, and overheated. It’s OK to accept that they aren’t perfect, because their imperfection doesn’t mar the ideal. That’s just the crack in the bell. The crack is the part you’re always trying to mend, but it’s what gives the rest of the bell meaning. Our society is built on the notion of constant improvement. Without the flaws, there would be nothing to improve. Without the goal of an unmarred bell, the flaws would be accepted as the “way things are”.

A Fourth of Jersey on the Fourth of July

2010-07-09T16:59:00.000-07:00

Well, on the third I’d been quite sick, and it was only late in the day that I got out to Edison’s lab, so after a late start on the fourth, sleeping in, I decided to head down in the direction of Philadelphia, and I cut a swath through a western slice of the state, seeing quite a bit of it that I hadn’t seen in my year there. My first stop was Princeton. I know, I’m an academic. I like campuses. Everything in Princeton is really….orange, thanks to Willem III, Prins van Oranje, after whom the University is colored. It didn’t help that the Dutch elftal had recently won another World Cup match, causing people to wear even more orange than normal, including a nice Dutch family I bumped into in a creamery in town. The campus itself is lovely, done up in some very nice neo-Gothic.

The centerpiece is Nassau Hall (also named after Willem III, who was Count of Nassau in addition to being Prince of Orange, King of England, Ireland, and Scotland, and Stadthouder of the Netherlands). It served as home to the Continental Congress for a time during the Revolution (and took artillery damage during the Battle of Princeton) and was also the State House for a time.

The lions out front (the lion is the symbol of the House of Oranje-Nassau*) had the verdigris worn away from all the kids riding them.

A brief sidebar on Dutch football:

Some of you may have been treated to “Hup, Holland, Hup”, the second most annoying sound of the World Cup (after the vuvuzelas).

It’s the incredibly dated and campy Dutch soccer song. To give you some idea, the last line translates roughly, ‘a lion in football shoes can take on the whole world’. The Dutch, being a creative people, have come up with other very exciting soccer songs, all of which…pretty much suck as bad as the original. Sorry, guys. Your team rocks, but your music sounds like a street organ playing John Phillip Souza through a kazoo accompanied by schoolchildren. And that’s when it’s done well. Take lessons from the English. Jerusalem kicks ass, even when sung by drunken slavering hooligans.

It fills you with English patriotism and makes you want to go out and colonize the country that is about to beat you 3-1 on the field. Or at least insult somebody French. There's something about the Proms I find delightful. It's the one moment when the British can let their hair down and be their old Imperialistic selves in the best tradition of that decidedly mixed history...check out this version of "Rule Britannia" by a cross-dressed Sarah Connely as Lord Admiral Horation Nelson Viscomte Brontee.

At the same time, they can pull off self-effacing like nobody.

Back to New Jersey…
From Princeton, I headed southwest to Washington’s Crossing on the Delaware. As every American schoolchild knows (erm…knew before we improved the elementary history curriculum by taking out the hagiography of deeply flawed dead white men and replaced it with…come to think of it, replacing it with something coherent would have been a good idea, wouldn’t it? Oh, well, too late now…kids these days…don’t know the meaning of the word ‘spinnaker’! Humph!), George Washington crossed the Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey standing up in a rowboat on Christmas Night, 1776 to surprise a bunch of drunken Hessians (who were the wrong kind of dead white people, not being WASPs, so it was OK to depict them as drunken slobs…), gaining the first victory of the Revolution.

Well, OK, not quite. We did kick the British out of Boston in 1775-6, and that was pretty awesome. After all, they occupied the town to make us pay our tab on all that tea, and a bunch of semi-literate farmers besieged the city and sent British regulars packing. Not bad, really. But ever since then, it had been ugly. The British brought a proper army in 1776, not a garrison force this time, and took New York. Whiiiich, must have been an "oh, shit" moment with this kind of mental musical accompaniment.

Boston is a harbor surrounded by land. New York is an archipelago, trivially dominated by the world’s most powerful navy. This is where I have to explain (yes, I know, this is supposed to be a patriotic 4th of July post…too bad) that Washington was a pretty crappy strategist. He was a peerless political general, had more character than almost any commander in history, and had a keen sense of grand strategy. But his strategic sense was sorry. When the British landed on Staten Island, he stayed in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is on Long Island, which is a pretty stupid place to park the whole army when you don’t have a navy. Worse, it’s not adjacent to the mainland. Well, sure enough, the British cut off his retreat, and then pummeled him on Brooklyn Heights. Fortunately, fog covered the harbor that night, and he snuck across the East River (which isn’t really a river, but never mind) to Manhattan (another island…smart, George, smart). The British woke up, ferried their troops to Manhattan, and dope-slapped Washington again. He ran away to the Bronx, and up the peninsula to White Plains. The British pounded him. He ran away, this time back to Manhattan, in Harlem. The British beat him again. Finally, Washington retreated to New Jersey, and promptly ran like hell all the way to Pennsylvania, stopping only briefly at Rutgers (then Queens College) to let his young artillery captain, Alexander Hamilton, take some artillery potshots to cover his crossing of the Raritan river.

In other words, following Washington’s trail in 1776 involves visiting a lot of plaques that say, “George Washington got his ass kicked here, largely because he seemed to not understand that land animals shouldn’t fight amphibious animals in the water”. You fight them on the land, where at least your people know the terrain, and theirs don’t, and your supply lines are secure, and theirs aren’t. So by Christmas night, Washington’s army was lucky to be in existence, but was thoroughly demoralized. The British had already asked the waiter for the check for the year’s party, and had hunkered down in winter quarters, spreading out all over metropolitan New York and the state of New Jersey. Washington’s crossing, which was not done standing up in a rowboat, was a raid on one of these small camps. The Hessians were not drunk. They were outgunned, their powder was too wet, and they were surrounded. From there, Washington knew he had to run away again, since all the other troops in New Jersey were now breaking winter quarters to hunt him. He ran away via Princeton, defeating another small garrison, and scurried all the way to Morristown, New Jersey, to form his own winter camp.

So what happened there was critical in terms of morale, it did show once again that the Continentals were capable of beating European armies when the conditions were right. The local ranger read aloud the Declaration, it being the 4th and all, and fired off a flintlock musket a few times.

It did misfire once, and he showed us how such a “flash in the pan” could result if the touch hole wasn’t clean. There were early rifles in the museum there, and I talked with him about why it was that rifles remained a curiosity until the Civil War, but he didn’t have good answers, and neither do I. Sure, they were more expensive and slower, but not by enough to make their 300m range so superior to the flintlock musket’s 80m, that I don’t really understand why they were used only by auxiliaries in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

I also got a chance to talk with a food historian as she made ice cream in the 18th century fashion (it involves about 25 pounds of ice per half-gallon of ice cream, and a huge amount of labor-a treat for the Washingtons and Jeffersons of the 1770s, not common folk).

The flavorings (in this case, cardamom, cinnamon, and candied orange and lemon peels) were sieved out, which I found interesting.

There was also a toymaker, who wasn’t making toys, but had some interesting toys to display.

He was also a font of information on 1760s and 1770s colonial politics, and indentured servitude. He argued (persuasively), that indentured servitude was a better deal then than a college education now. In this part of New Jersey the deal was:

The bad part:
4 years service at low (but not zero) pay.

The good part:
A roof over your head, clothing, and the same for any offspring. At the end of your time, you got 50 acres, a beast of burden, a new set of clothes, an axe, a shovel, and seed corn.

Not a bad deal, really, especially if you were a tenant farmer in Europe. From there, I crossed the river myself into Pennsylvania to head for Philadelphia.

Thomas Edison and Models of Research

2010-07-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

On the third of July, I went out to West Orange to visit Thomas Edison’s laboratory there (he had others, most famously in what is now Edison, New Jersey, and what was then called Menlo Park). The West Orange facility was his largest, was his home for much of his later career, and is now preserved by the National Park Service.

The chemistry lab was fascinating, of course,

filled with old school retorts

Balances

Microscopes

Soxhlet farms

And the like.

What interested me the most, and what I whish I could find more about, was Edison’s research model. First of all, he employed about 250 people, far more than I ever imagined. Second, he had them organized into small teams, the size of which Fred Brooks could love:

“The way to do it is to organize a gang of one good experimenter and two or three assistants, appropriate a definite sum yearly to keep it going…have every patent sent to them, and let them experiment continuously.” –Thomas Alva Edison

But it also seemed that these teams were far more autonomous than Fred Brooks imagined. Groups had a great deal of freedom to work on a variety of patents. He did invent the time clock to keep track of who was working on what.

And had a well-stocked library.

Of course, there were many other nice bits that one associates with Edison…like light bulbs

Phonographs

Cameras

And the Black Maria (or, rather, a replica thereof), a tarpaper shack he designed as the world’s first motion picture studio. It had to rotate to take advantage of the sun’s position as a light source, much like an observatory dome.

Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty

2010-07-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm on the road again. I got a late start yesterday, and today I seem to have come down with the flu, so I'm a little behind my "plan", but I'm not overly worried. So, anyway, I thought I'd blog a bit about yesterday's adventure, as I try to get down some OJ and a bagel. (OK, that was written three days ago, on the third. It's now the sixth...I'm now in Scranton, PA. I'm behind. Sue me.)

Yesterday (2nd) I drove up to Liberty State Park on the Hudson River, where you can catch a ferry that goes out to both Ellis Island and the Big Green Lady. I went to Ellis Island first, and was completely blown away. I was in tears multiple times going through the restored facility that is now an excellent museum.

The Statue of Liberty is, of course, something that was worth seeing (and I was particularly intrigued to see the way that the iron supports has acted as a sacrificial anode to the copper. You see, copper naturally coats with verdigris, a patina of copper hydroxide and copper carbonate--chemically identical to malachite copper ore. That's the stuff that makes the statue green. It's a passivating coating, which means that once it forms, the coating atoms take up more space than the interior metal atoms, so it swells the surface, keeping out more water and moisture. But...when iron metal contacts verdigris, it reduces it to copper metal, and the iron is oxidized to rust. In a way, you can think of this as the iron taking a bullet for your copper statue. Only two problems: 1) the copper statue didn't need the help-copper is passivated. It's fine green, with apologies to Kermit the Frog, and 2) the copper statue does need iron supports. So...those had to be replaced recently.

The Ellis Island facility was open from 1892-1954, but stopped being used for mass immigration in 1924 with the immigrant "reform" that dramatically restricted access to the United States. The building itself reminds me of a lot of other New York civic architecture from that period (Especially Grand Central), but the atmosphere of Ellis Island is completely different. The best that I can do to describe it is that you get the feeling simultaneously of overwhelming hope and abject terror. The life-sized photographs of immigrants and artifacts preserve all that in a haunting way. What brought me to tears was the mixture of the hope that so many people found and the tragedy of how awfully they were often treated, juxtaposed.

Of course, another thing it brings home is how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same with regards to immigration. The arguments are the same (the BLAHs are a criminal element, the BLAHs are a radical element that doesn't support America, but seeks to undermine it, the BLAHs are a non-Anglo-Saxon force and lack our traditions of government and culture, the BLAHs are tribal and focus on group loyalty, not all of America, the BLAHs send all their money home instead of keeping it here, the BLAHs drive down the cost of labor, making it harder for honest Americans to earn a decent living). One difference, of course, is that now that we have a social welfare state, we also attract sponges, not hard workers (don't buy it...not held up by the evidence), now the immigrants don't learn English like they used to (definitely false--the evidence is utterly the reverse), and that we're "full" in a way that we weren't in 1870-1925 (not *really* true, but it's the only one of the arguments that has some basis in truth--we don't have the hideous labor *shortages* we had then). The other argument that has raised its head is that "I don't have a problem with immigrants, just illegal immigrants". To that one, I respond, "could we go back to Ellis Island and open the border? That's how we prevented "illegals" then....we made them all legal" I've yet to have someone take me up on that. Personally, I'd like to experiment with raising the cap dramatically in stages. Maybe it's a disaster...maybe not. If not, problem solved, and millions have a better life. If so? Well, we have another generation with a lot of immigrants...which is different from what we have now and what we've had in the past...how?

July 6:
In a series of discussions over the last few days, the Daniel Defoe poem "The True Born Englishman" has come up multiple times. What strikes me is that, if you believe, as I do, and as Walter Russel Mead has argued, that the story of the modern open society runs from "U.P. to U.K. to U.S." (United Provinces to United Kingdom to United States), that all three in their heyday were immigrant cultures. This is greatly celebrated in our own culture, of course, thanks to, among others,the ridiculously whitewashed Schoolhouse Rock version and that of Israel Zangwill, himself a New York immigrant from England whose parents were Jewish refugees from Tsarist Russia. We forget that this was also true of the 17th century Dutch and 18th and 19th century British. My favorite example is that of the great economist David Ricardo. His ancestors were Sephardim who fled Portugal for Antwerp in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition. They then fled Antwerp to flee the Inquisition there, and settled in Amsterdam. After some time, they moved to London, where Ricardo was born.

This is, of course, anecdotal, but this is not: in the 17th century, half of the population of Holland was foreign born. Half. Of course, "foreign" included a lot of what we would now call Belgians and Germans from the Rhineland, who spoke something approximating the language, and in a time when nation-states were ill-formed might not have felt (or been considered) all that foreign. Amsterdam was a teeming mass of Huguenots, Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs, Flemings, and Brits. So was its little colony on the Hudson River.

As for the English? Well, it really became a huge immigration hub in the late 17th, early 18th century. Daniel Defoe, the True-Born Englishman:

From the Preface:
But when I see the town full of lampoons and invectives against Dutchmen only because they are foreigners, and the King reproached and insulted by insolent pedants, and ballad-making poets for employing foreigners, and for being a foreigner himself, I confess myself moved by it to remind our nation of their own original, thereby to let them see what a banter is put upon ourselves in it, since, speaking of Englishmen ab origine, we are really all foreigners ourselves.

From the Poem: (The following passages are not contiguous)
These are the heroes that despise the Dutch,
And rail at new-come foreigners so much,
Forgetting that themselves are all derived
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived;
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns,
The Pict and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains,
Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed
From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed.
And lest by Length of time it be pretended
The climate may this modern breed ha' mended,
Wise Providence, to keep us where we are,
Mixes us daily with exceeding care.
We have been Europe's sink, the jakes where she
Voids all her offal outcast progeny.

Dutch, Walloons, Flemings, Irishmen, and Scots,
Vaudois and Valtelins, and Hugonots,
In good Queen Bess's charitable reign,
Supplied us with three hundred thousand men.

To get a race of true-born Englishmen;
Whose children will, when riper years they see,
Be as ill-natured and as proud as we;
Call themselves English, foreigners despise,
Be surly like us all, and just as wise.

'Tis well that virtue gives nobility,
How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply?
Since scarce one family is left alive
Which does not from some foreigner derive.
Of sixty thousand English gentlemen,
Whose names and arms in registers remain,
We challenge all our heralds to declare
Ten families which English-Saxons are.

But England, modern to the last degree,
Borrows or makes her own nobility,
And yet she boldly boasts of pedigree;
Repines that foreigners are put upon her,
And talks of her antiquity and honour;
Her Sackvilles, Saviles, Capels, De la Meres,
Mohuns, and Montagues, Darcys, and Veres,
Not one have English names, yet all are English peers.
Your Hermans, Papillons, and Lavalliers,
Pass now for true-born English knights and squires,
And make good senate members or Lord Mayors.

And, finally:

Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes
Lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes:
Antiquity and birth are needless here;
'Tis impudence and money makes a peer.

This was the great secret of British Modernity: they figured out how to make the new, open society function in ways that seemed to preserve the form of the old, closed society, while in reality, left nothing of the substance.

Both Bergson and Popper, the people most associated with the notion of the "Open Society", emphasize the centrality of the individual setting out on their own to follow their own destiny without having to follow in their father and mother's house, career, church, town, or even nation. Migration and Immigration are at the heart of what it is to be an Open Society, and on this long Fourth of July weekend, I hope we remember both the reasons we revolted against the Crown...

...and those values we shared with the British against whom we revolted. There was so much we didn't try to change in the American Revolution. One of those things was the very core of what we are-a free society. Part of what that means is that we are an immigrant society. Not because of our history...it's not that "we're all immigrants", though that's true. Because that's what it means to be the kind of people we are. A respect for our fellow human beings as human beings requires it. I'm not saying that there can be no strictures on immigrants across political boundaries. I'm saying that we should value immigration, emigration, and migration for their own sake. They are part of what it is to be free.

JFK's Geographic Confusions

2010-06-21T08:41:00.001-07:00

Sometimes xkcd is so good...

You just gotta share it.

How to Best Use the Corporate Tax?

2010-06-15T05:02:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum has a bold post up (which, given the name of A Modest Tax Proposal, may be somewhat tongue in cheek), in which he suggests a package bill that would:

1. Eliminate the Corporate Tax

2. Create a Financial Services Tax to reduce volatility

3. Create a Carbon Tax

You work it to make the whole thing revenue neutral. Of course I like this, because all three are things I'm in favor of individually, but the argument here is that 1. will being enough GOP votes in to get them to support 2. and 3. and vice versa for the Dems. Since it's revenue neutral, it's politically easy to support.

I'd much rather bundle eliminating the Corporate Tax with eliminating special low Capital Gains rates so that we all pay the same percentages on our income at a given income level, regardless of whether it's salary or cap gains. I just don't think we have a shortage of investment capital in this world, and this is such an obviously unfair "rich get richer" provision in our tax code that it needs to go. Similarly, the corporate income tax, as Drum argues, is a tax on consumers, and inhibits American businesses in their attempts to compete with companies with little or no corporate tax (like most of Europe).

But all in all, I think Drum has a good idea. Here's the BIG question, though.

If we can build enough support on the Left for putting the Corporate Tax on the table....what Really Big Thing do we want from the Right in exchange?

Eliminating cap gains? Carbon tax? There are many other possibilities. We haven't thought about it, because nobody on the left has been willing to talk. But if we can mumble about it in Mother Jones, we ought to be asking ourselves, "What would we trade this for?"

Yes, Even Sam Brownback Can Have Good Ideas

2010-06-15T04:57:00.000-07:00

Specifically, the idea of an “Office of the Repealer” (h/t Sullivan) is an excellent one:

"[T]asked with seeking out bad or repetitive laws, wasteful programs, and archaic state agencies for elimination"

In fact, why do we not already have this? Sure, the person you put in that post is a sacrificial lamb (if you eliminate something that turns out in retrospect to be useful, it's your head on the block), but there's a serious up side. If you actually do manage to make a lot of cuts, you can brag about the money that you've saved taxpayers, and you can use the most ridiculous examples of what Your Government was Paying For Before I Came Along on the stump when you go for your next job.

Down They Sink in the Deep of Abyss, to Endless Night

2010-06-15T04:45:00.000-07:00

A wicked cool graphic from the Committee of Public Safety, originally from The Scholars' Stage.

Unfortunately, I can't post it here, 'cause it's too darned big, and I can't reduce it enough without making it unreadable. But it shows the vasty deep in an awesome way.

Gather Your Functioning Brains

2010-06-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

As much as I love historical analogy, this is just bat-shit.

Guys...just...oh, dear heavens. Unless you object to the Commerce Clause interpretation that gives the Federal Government a lot of powers, you're full of crap. That income tax against which you rail was specifically incorporated into the Constitution by an Amendment. Health care, unconstitutional? Really? Really?. Seriously, if Auto Insurance is legal, so is this. "Gather Your Armies?"

If you gather your armies over this, Alabama, this man's a Tory.

It's all about the Burgerij

2010-06-14T05:47:00.000-07:00

Russia has long had a troubled history with liberal modernity (Minoan modernity). Like many continental nations, it has used modern technology more to create a stronger centralized state rather than a more decentralized, divided government beholden to a broad middle class, or burgerij. It has traditionally taken German Romanticism and turned it up to 11, becoming obsessed with its own "soul" (the soul of a nation is a very potent form of "state-as-living-being-of-which-we-are-but-cells, indeed).

But this is particularly interesting, suggesting that there is a particular legacy piled on top of the Marxist one in Russia:

We document a statistical association between the severity of the persecution and mass murder of Jews (the Holocaust) by the Nazis during World War II and long-run economic and political outcomes within Russia....We provide evidence on one possible mechanism that we hypothesize may link the Holocaust to the present -- the change it induced in the social structure, in particular the size of the middle class, across different regions of Russia....[T]he Holocaust appears to have had a large negative effect on the size of the middle class after the war.

Every dictator from Louis XIV on has managed to find different ways to undermine the contribution of the metics.

My Tummy Hurts

2010-05-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

Funniest *(#$)% thing I've read in a long time.

I never knew color could be so fun.

Only in America

2010-05-25T06:40:00.000-07:00

I....what the effing crap is....oh fer heaven's sake.

Rand Paul awakens me from blogging laziness

2010-05-21T16:53:00.001-07:00

What? What's that you say? That time of year again? An extremely prominent libertarian is talking out of his ass, causing everyone to the left of Olympia Snowe to conclude that we're all a pack of crazed weasels?

Oh, *o-kay*....I'll nibble. There was a time, early in the life of this blog, when Paul the Elder turned out to have some crazy racist friends who were bat shit insane. I blogged about it and the various flavors of libertarians here.

Now the old man's son was being interviewed on Maddow, since he's a candidate for the Senate, and got a tough series of questions. Maddow wanted to know if he was a supporter of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Well, OK, we know what he's supposed to say, so I'm annoyed by all those claiming that he's dissembling or avoiding a straight answer. He's trying to argue a point that he knows is extremely out of the mainstream. And yet, though I disagree with him (see below), give the guy half a chance. He's trying to justify a nuanced position that is considered heretical in our society. So don't jump on him for speaking in paragraphs when Maddow wanted a sentence. Don't blame him for insisting on an answer that couldn't be quipped, clipped, and whipped into a 15-second news spot. We need diversity of thought in our public discourse, and Maddow, an unusually wise interviewer, understood that and gave him the opportunity to say his piece.

First, I thought Matt Yglesias had a smart comment that:

I think this is relevant to what I’ve been saying in my recent posts on conservative freedom rhetoric. A lot of intellectuals conceptualize debates about freedom as debates about positive versus negative liberty, but when a lot of people talk about freedom they’re really talking about freedom from the Other or, per Wilkinson, “community self-government.”

Yes. If, like most on the Ron/Rand Paul libertarian "right" you are primarily concerned with local community self-government, that is, liberty from Uncle Sam, then you'll view the Civil Rights Act, Immigration, and a host of other issues differently than if you're primarily concerned about individual liberty.

Further, as Damon Root points out, a whole lotta "private" discrimination was actually a matter of law, including many segregated businesses. Even more was the result of sub rosa threats of violence. Clearly Paul advocates (and says as much) any intervention needed to shield patrons and businesses from violence.

And Paul is certainly right that Title II (the bit dealing with private business) is playing with fire. You don't allow the government to start messing with how people run their own businesses, run their own homes, or live their own lives unless you really, really have to. You need a strong justification for the CRA. You can't just say "it would be nice to desegregate". You need a strong argument as to why the Federal government needs that power.

So here it is. This was not the occasional stray business owner who had some crackpot idea about not serving blacks. It was a system wide cultural apartheid. It was ancient. It ran deep. The erosion of private discrimination in an open market requires people to be free to take "option A or option B", whichever makes more financial sense, with a low barrier to crossover. That situation simply didn't exist in the South in 1964. As Brink Lindsay (a son of the South of that era, and much more my kind of libertarian) puts it in the delightfully titled "Cato Scholar Scolds Rand Paul, Gives OK to Soup Nazi
":

"I think Rand Paul is wrong about the Civil Rights Act," libertarian Cato Institute scholar Brink Lindsey wrote in an e-mail. "As a general matter, people should be free to deal or not deal with others as they choose. And that means we discriminate against those we choose not to deal with. In marrying one person, we discriminate against all others. Businesses can discriminate against potential employees who don't meet hiring qualifications, and they can discriminate against potential customers who don't observe a dress code (no shirt, no shoes, no service). Rand Paul is appealing to the general principle of freedom of association, and that general principle is a good one.

"But it has exceptions. In particular, after three-plus centuries of slavery and another century of institutionalized, state-sponsored racism (which included state toleration of private racist violence), the exclusion of blacks from public accommodations wasn't just a series of uncoordinated private decisions by individuals exercising their freedom of association. It was part and parcel of an overall social system of racial oppression," Lindsey said.

"Paul's grievous error is to ignore the larger context in which individual private decisions to exclude blacks were made. In my view, at least, truly individual, idiosyncratic discrimination ought to be legally permitted; for example, the "Soup Nazi" from Seinfeld ought to be free to deny soup to anybody no matter how crazy his reasons (they didn't ask nicely, they mispronounced the soup, etc.). But the exclusion of blacks from public accommodations wasn't like that -- not even close."

Yeah. What he said. I should add that the gender divide was, if anything more entrenched than the racial divide, and so the same medicine was clearly called for. In the case of disabilities, the justification is different. Here you're talking about a massive expense to companies that choose to do the right thing by not discriminating against those who need extra facilities. So you have to level the playing field, so that those who do discriminate don't get a financial advantage.

So what does that mean today? Now that we have squishier prejudices, can we eliminate Title II?

I honestly don't know. Clearly we have a lot of discrimination now that the law doesn't prevent. Clearly we'd get more discrimination if we repealed it. How much? Don't know. I honestly think that most of what we have left is so squishy that the law doesn't constrain it much. But I could be wrong. I guess I'd come down on the Burkean side and say, "We've build 46 years of history on that pillar. I wouldn't remove it to see if it's really load-bearing".

The danger, however, is this. If you think everything you fight about politically is the Civil Rights Movement Part XXXIV, then you'll use the state in ways that were justified in a thoroughly segregated South and home life that just aren't in dealing with much more tolerant sectors of society. Civil Rights taught the Left that there really isn't a problem that can't best be solved with a really freaking big rubber government mallet.

I think I can say, "That was a good mallet for Jim Crow. Let's put that away and use a ball peen hammer on this one, OK?" without being tarred as a crazed racist weasel, can't I?

You gotta problem widdat?

2010-05-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

So, many bad things can be (and believe you me, are...mostly unfairly) said about New Jersey, and many bad things can be (and believe you me, are...mostly fairly) said about Governor Christie, but I gotta hand it to him. He understands what fiscal austerity means (whether this is wise in a recession is an interesting economic question (it's not)), and I really have to say, he's spot on here. If you don't like the man's policies, that's legit. But to complain about his "tone" is a little silly.

Update: I should be clear that I don't remotely think the guy is any good. It's just that I got 99 problems with him, but his tone ain't one.

The Tax Man

2010-05-15T05:10:00.000-07:00

So, it turns out, the problem in Greece is less that they like to spend (at least, they're in line with most Europeans on that score). It's that they can't effectively collect taxes.

It's interesting, but the Kaphtor nations have all been born in revolutions that were at least, in part, tax revolts (Dutch revolt, English Civil War/Glorious Revolution, American Revolution), and yet at the end of these revolutions, the state became a much more efficient gatherer of taxes.

The deal that has ultimately been struck in each of these cases is that a merchant middle class has given up cash for political power. They get to set the taxes, but they get to pay them, too. I've often been puzzled why it is that these states are usually so willing to raise their own taxes.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that merchants may not know many things, but they do know this:

You have to take in more than you spend.

So...what do you do when your democracy grows faster than your merchant class?

Default.

Mead on the Futility of Magic Bullets to Save the Environment

2010-05-15T05:01:00.001-07:00

As is often the case, I find myself in agreement with Walter Russell Mead on where we are on climate change.

A technocratic solution won't work. Not America's form of governance, never has been. While many countries are in love with technocrats, they don't like foreign technocrats. Mead is particularly on the ball with this paragraph, in which he describes technocracy as "Gnostocracy", or, if you will, rule by Plato's Philosopher Kings:

In practice it has only five little flaws. Gnostocrats even at their best are prone to mistakes because scientific knowledge is by its nature evolving; the social sciences and the science of extremely complicated systems (think economics) most vital to politics like economics are the most error prone and the least capable of achieving accurate knowledge; political choices involve matters of morals and personal preference which cannot be decided by scientific procedures; no process of selection can be designed which promotes only ‘good’ and ‘honest’ gnostocrats to power and keeps out the charlatans, and the frauds; and finally as a group scientists have interests other than pure science and knowledge (such as promoting gnostocracy thereby gaining power and wealth for themselves).

Even if that could work, a Rousseauean series of austerity measures in which we cut CO2 to save the planet so that we can all live in grass huts will never work. The advanced countries will never let their standards of livings suffer, and the developed countries will never give up their drive to live like rich countries. The only way out is forward.

We're in a race to develop new, larger energy sources (I'm lookin' at you, Sun!) that don't emit CO2 before we doink up the planet. In the mean time, promote everything, over coal, gas over oil, boost wind as much as you can, because that buys us time, but trying to cap CO2 is a fool's errand. I think there's real merit in a carbon tax, and would support a rather large one--it provides financial motivation for just this kind of innovation. But Cap and Trade will be a corporate give-away, and I don't expect it to crate much market for better energy.

It's time to Save the Planet with an army of Headless Chickens.

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, Magic Bullets, and Headless Chickens

2010-05-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

Joseph Fouche [Note, I originally mis-attributed this to Adam Elkus], over at the Committee on Public Safety, has an epic essay up that contrasts "top down" hierarchical solutions (The Magic Bullet) to "bottom up", crowd-network solutions (The Headless Chickens). It's very much a retelling of Eric Raymond's classic essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but with the emphasis on the military-political rather than on open-source. It's quite long, and quite good, if abstract, and mirrors much of the thinking I outlined here, in much greater detail.

I've recently expanded the idea of that blogpost into an 8500 word essay, but because it will be under copyright, I can't post it here.

The most interesting aspect to the essay is that, unlike in my own thinking, he posits four, rather than three types. He references a very long Rand Corporation essay by Dave Ronfeldt I haven't read yet. Ronfeldt's theory, TIMN, involves not the "Village, Cathedral, and Bazaar" but four organization modes, "tribe, hierarchical institution, market, and network", largely splitting "Bazaar" into the last two. I'm still unclear on the distinction. As far as I can tell, his "market" is a "free market plus corporations and government", floating, as the expression goes, like lumps of hierarchical butter in a sea of free-market buttermilk, whereas the network is a truly free market with people cooperating without hierarchical middle-men. Before saying what I think of that (other than to say that it sounds utopian), I want to read the essay, but I wanted to get those ideas out there.

Taiwan being assimilated by the Borg?

2010-05-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

Dan Drezner has a post making me wonder if this is the new plan for pulling Taiwan into the Chinese orbit--fusing it into a "natural" part of "economic" China so that the fusion into "political China" becomes inevitable.

Just like the Euro....except....well, here the core is fusing in a more fiscally responsible periphery....

Epic Government Fail

2010-05-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

Say you work for the Government (in this case, Pennsylvania). And say you kind of like the Government, 'cause, you know, it signs your checks. Let's say your job is to get as much as you can in taxes out of Pennsylvania's citizens. Might it not be a bit short-sighted to use ads for this purpose that are going to creep the ever loving $#!% out of every American who worries just a teeeensy bit about the reach of government, and the importance of keeping Leviathan in chains?

Apparently not. (From Alex Tabarrok)

Wisdom from John Cleese

2010-04-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

...on Extremism.

Reach out, reach out and touch someone

2010-04-09T14:56:00.000-07:00

Bill Easterly has an awesome series of maps on cell phone penetration here, with thanks to Tom Barnett for the link.

I look at those pictures, and I see children who aren't gonna die of starvation.

A Tale of Four Civilizations

2010-04-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

This video from Steven Davies got me thinking (you don't have to watch it to get what I'm saying here, but if you have time, it's a great talk.

He argues that we don't live in "The West" anymore, and I think he's right. The old grand narrative was that "The West" runs from Plato to NATO in a continuous line. He outlines two reasons this is wrong:

1. You can't really join Classical Civilization to The West. There's too big a break, the ways of looking at the world are too different, and so on. The West is really a new civilization built on the ruins of the old, that begins with the horse-riding nobility of Europe of Charlemagne's time, which we can date from 800AD.

2. You can't really say we live in The West anymore. Our world has changed too much--our wealth, our health, our power, our relative equality and social mobility would seem a totally alien civilization to even an educated 14th century cleric. We live in something new--let's call it Modernity.

I think this makes sense, and I think there's an important conclusion or two to be drawn. While Modernity came out of The West, it's a different Civilization than The West. The old vision of The West as Plato to NATO was that Modernization was the same thing as Westernization. For any non-Western culture, you had a choice: get Western, or stay backward. Not surprisingly, many non-Western cultures tried some "Third Way", mostly ending in failure (Turkey is a rare case where a culture decided to go for full-on Westernization, alphabet and all). Once we realized that "Modern Westerners" had a Modern Civilization grafted onto a Western substratum, it became much easier for non-Western cultures to accept Modernity--you only had to figure out how to graft Modernity onto, for example, a Chinese substratum. Once you see the Japanese do it (then the Hong Kong Chinese and Taiwanese), it looks more possible. This may be why the "development" (transformation to Modernity) is now sweeping the non-Western world.

The second thought I has was that the original European grafting has many lessons for other cultures trying to pull this off today. "The West" was too monolithic. Yes, by the time of NATO, all of The West was thoroughly modern, but this dated, at best, from 1848, and more realistically, from 1945. Prior to 1848, I think it's fair to say that Europe had successful modernizers (The United Provinces and United Kingdom), unsuccessful modernizers with tragic results (France, Germany), and those who didn't really budge at all (Spain, Italy).

Thinking of "The West" as a block is really unhelpful for developing countries. First, it makes it seem like the Europeans were good at modernization. They weren't. They sucked. Most failed. This should be comforting to nations who find this hard. Second, it means there are examples in history which can be used of good, bad, and ugly schemes. If you regard Britain and France as being the same, you won't figure out how to have a Glorious Revolution instead of a French Revolution. China especially should be investigating that question.