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Friday Random Quote Blogging…

The brilliant quote below comes from Chapter XIX of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book turns 160 this year. For a quick jolt of interest, let’s remember Lincoln’s famous quote: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Ah yes, the power of the fictive pen…

February is also Black History Month. You might not think so given the month was dominated by Charles Murray’s white angst book Coming Apart. If anyone wants proof that the Great White Race is in decay please point them to the Republican Presidential Debates. All the candidates deny science and birth control. Q.E.D.

First, a bit of plot to set up my long Uncle Tom quote:

Uncle Tom, as pure a Christian as Jesus, has been sold downriver by his debt-ridden master who had promised him freedom. While traveling to New Orleans on a Mississippi riverboat Tom befriends a white child. Tom saves this child after the boat lurches and she spills into the river. Tom is purchased by the child’s father, St. Clare who is returning home with Miss Ophelia, his Vermont cousin, who is to be a sort of guardian to his young child.

A female slave named Prue delivers husks to St. Clare’s manor. Shortly afterwards, news comes that Prue has been whipped to death by her hard owner. Prue was a drinker. We are told she drank to escape her pain, and was whipped for bring drunk.

The conversation begins with Miss Ophelia expressing her outrage to St. Clare.

“An abominable business,—perfectly horrible!” she exclaimed, as she entered the room where St. Clare lay reading his paper.

“Pray, what iniquity has turned up now?” said he.

“What now? why, those folks have whipped Prue to death!” said Miss Ophelia, going on, with great strength of detail, into the story, and enlarging on its most shocking particulars.

“I thought it would come to that, some time,” said St. Clare, going on with his paper.

“Thought so!—an’t you going to do anything about it?” said Miss Ophelia. “Haven’t you got any selectmen, or anybody, to interfere and look after such matters?”

“It’s commonly supposed that the property interest is a sufficient guard in these cases. If people choose to ruin their own possessions, I don’t know what’s to be done. It seems the poor creature was a thief and a drunkard; and so there won’t be much hope to get up sympathy for her.”

“It is perfectly outrageous,—it is horrid, Augustine! It will certainly bring down vengeance upon you.”

“My dear cousin, I didn’t do it, and I can’t help it; I would, if I could. If low-minded, brutal people will act like themselves, what am I to do? they have absolute control; they are irresponsible despots. There would be no use in interfering; there is no law that amounts to anything practically, for such a case. The best we can do is to shut our eyes and ears, and let it alone. It’s the only resource left us.”

“How can you shut your eyes and ears? How can you let such things alone?”

“My dear child, what do you expect? Here is a whole class,—debased, uneducated, indolent, provoking,—put, without any sort of terms or conditions, entirely into the hands of such people as the majority in our world are; people who have neither consideration nor self-control, who haven’t even an enlightened regard to their own interest,—for that’s the case with the largest half of mankind. Of course, in a community so organized, what can a man of honorable and humane feelings do, but shut his eyes all he can, and harden his heart? I can’t buy every poor wretch I see. I can’t turn knight-errant, and undertake to redress every individual case of wrong in such a city as this. The most I can do is to try and keep out of the way of it.”

St. Clare’s fine countenance was for a moment overcast; he said, “Come, cousin, don’t stand there looking like one of the Fates; you’ve only seen a peep through the curtain,—a specimen of what is going on, the world over, in some shape or other. If we are to be prying and spying into all the dismals of life, we should have no heart to anything. ‘T is like looking too close into the details of Dinah’s kitchen;” and St. Clare lay back on the sofa, and busied himself with his paper.

Miss Ophelia sat down, and pulled out her knitting-work, and sat there grim with indignation. She knit and knit, but while she mused the fire burned; at last she broke out—”I tell you, Augustine, I can’t get over things so, if you can. It’s a perfect abomination for you to defend such a system,—that’s my mind!”

“What now?” said St. Clare, looking up. “At it again, hey?”

“I say it’s perfectly abominable for you to defend such a system!” said Miss Ophelia, with increasing warmth.

“I defend it, my dear lady? Who ever said I did defend it?” said St. Clare.

“Of course, you defend it,—you all do,—all you Southerners. What do you have slaves for, if you don’t?”

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The Squidding of Mitt Romney

Or perhaps a better title for this: Things I didn’t know that I should have known.
From the always brilliant David Brin, Disturbing Trends in the News:

We have the illusion of choice…but six media giants now control a staggering 90% of what we read, watch or listen to, in the U.S. These companies are: CBS, Viacom, Disney, GE, News Corp (which includes Fox and the Wall Street Journal) and Time Warner (which includes CNN, HBO, Time and Warner Bros). The largest owner of radio stations in the U.S., Clear Channel, operates 1,200 stations, airing shows by the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity, with programs syndicated to more than 5,000 stations. And who owns Clear Channel? Bain Capital purchased Clear Channel shortly before Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential bid. One clear reason why conservative talk show hosts support Mitt? And weren’t we supposed to be more independent and broad in in our access to information, by now?

“Squidding” courtesy of Matt Taibbi

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

I went for the jug. A stiff pull. It was good whiskey.

“Have a ding-dang seat, you’re making me nervous.”

I sat on the ground next to him.

“I love to watch the horses,” he said. “You know, all those years back down home, my people were just crazy for the NASCAR. They’d go out to some honking huge oval track at Darlington or Daytona and watch those dadblamed machines go round and round and round, making all that noise. A horrible din. For hours and hours. If I knew how somebody could endure that, I’d die happy. Not to mention calling it recreation! Heck, it’d be more interesting to go out to the freeway overpass and watch traffic. At least the goldurn cars’s go in different directions. Anyway, I’m glad that foolishness is over. The car wrecked the southland. It wrecked Atlanta worse than Sherman ever did. It paved over my Virginia. They made themselves slaves to the car and everything connected with it, and it destroyed them in the end. Well, here’s to the the New South. May it rest in peace.”

He raised his glass and took a good gulp.

Peak Crazy: The Quiz

Have we passed high tide for Peak Crazy? Was it the last Republican debate in which all nine nattering nihilists appeared together? One might argue that American politics has never seen a greater set of goats and monkeys. Well if that was Peak Crazy, we ought not to let it pass without putting down a milestone marker. Thus my quiz below.

Instructions: Nine questions for nine candidates. Everyone has their moment. The questions are drawn from nine Wikipedia entries.

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

“When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out—most of them—that what’s left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway.  

For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men—and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell. My glass is empty.”

“I just had it filled again,” said Finnerty.

“Oh, so you did.” Lasher sipped thoughtfully. “These displaced people need something, and the clergy can’t give it to them—or it’s impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it’s enough, and so does the Bible. The people say it isn’t enough, and I suspect they’re right.”

“If they were so fond of the old system, how come they were so cantankerous about their jobs when they had them?” said Paul.

“Oh, this business we’ve got now—it’s been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war. Maybe the actual jobs weren’t being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was. Go to the library sometime and take a look at magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II. Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production—know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines. And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true. Even then, half the people or more didn’t understand much about the machines they worked at or the things they were making. They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego. And then there was all this let’s-not-shoot-Father-Christmas advertising.”

“How’s that?” said Paul.

“You know—those ads about the American system, meaning managers and engineers, that made America great. When you finished one, you’d think the managers and engineers had given America everything: forests, rivers, minerals, mountains, oil—the works.

“Strange business,” said Lasher. “This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.”

“Well,” said Paul, “you’ll have to admit they did some pretty wonderful things during the war.”

“Of course!” said Lasher. “What they did for the war effort really was something like crusading; but”—he shrugged—“so was what everybody else did for the war effort. Everybody behaved wonderfully. Even I.”

“You keep giving the managers and engineers a bad time,” said Paul. “What about the scientists? It seems to me that—”

“Outside the discussion,” said Lasher impatiently. “They simply add to knowledge. It isn’t knowledge that’s making trouble, but the uses it’s put to.”

Finnerty shook his head admiringly. “So what’s the answer right now?”

“That is a frightening question,” said Lasher, “and also my favorite rationalization for drinking. This is my last drink, incidentally; I don’t like being drunk. I drink because I’m scared—just a little scared, so I don’t have to drink much. Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it’s sure to be a bloody business.”

“Messiah?”

“Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws. But sooner or later someone’s going to keep out of their sight long enough to organize a following.”

Kleptoparasitism, word of the year…

The definition from the Wikipedia:

Kleptoparasitism (literally, parasitism by theft) is a form of feeding in which one animal takes prey or other food from another that has caught, collected, or otherwise prepared the food, including stored food (as in the case of cuckoo bees, which lay their eggs on the pollen masses made by other bees). The term is also used to describe the stealing of nest material or other inanimate objects from one animal by another.

And example of kleptoparasitism drawn from Salon’s The theft of the American pension: 

As Ellen E. Schultz, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, reveals in her new book, “Retirement Heist,” it wasn’t the dire economy that led these companies to plunder their own employees’ earnings, it was greed. Over the last decade, some of the biggest companies — including Bank of America, IBM, General Motors, GE and even the NFL — found loopholes, abused ambiguous regulations and used litigation to turn their employees’ hard-earned retirement funds into profits, and in some cases, executive compensation. Schultz’s book offers a relentlessly infuriating look at the mechanisms they used to get away with it. 

Another example drawn from Robert Reich’s Restore the Basic Bargain:

That was then. Now, Ford Motor Company is paying its new hires half what it paid new employees a few years ago.

The basic bargain is over – not only at Ford but all over the American economy. New data from the Commerce Department shows employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929.

Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929.

And yet another from Forbes’s It’s Getting Harder to Defend Goldman Sachs:

Goldman had two choices: discontinue the sale of junk-mortgage securities and alerting the government, media, public, their clients, and investors; or, keep it a secret, sell off junk-mortgage securities to investors, profit from the inevitable bursting of the bubble, and steal and even front-run part of Paulson’s trade.

Here’s the most basic analogy of guilt: Picture Goldman as a used car salesman. When it learned it had an inventory of lemons, rather than return those lemons to the manufacturers (lemon law in most states), it put those cars on promotion with very aggressive sales tactics.

Before the unsuspecting and trusting customer bought the lemon and drove off with it, Goldman purchased “protection” — life and auto insurance policies on the driver that were set to profit when the lemon crashed and burned. Clearly, Goldman’s short (protection) trade was connected to clearing out their long trades (selling the lemons), so ill-gotten profits on all these transactions must be returned with penalties too.

You know I could go on. I’ve got an Instapaper account filled to bursting with articles demonstrating kleptoparasitism. But you get the idea. And if your blood is not boiling now, it never will. 

So let me instead quit this post with a look not backwards at 2011, but forward to a temper and passion that may birth 2012’s word of the year. The quotes below are drawn from Michael Thomas’s The Big Lie. Should just some of this come to flare and fire, it will be a very happy year indeed for all of us:

As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault. This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head—and about time, too.

This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS—I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral—but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands. A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.

Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad electorate’s comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.

But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go!

“Retribution” in 2012!

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

“Stop worrying about whether she loves you. One thing is fundamental; if you give love instead of asking for it, if you love openly, defenselessly discarding forever the proposition ‘I’ll love you if you’ll love me,’ which most people live by, then you will discover a wonderful serenity in your life. Give love, tenderness, affection, warmth, interest. Be unafraid to share your fears and worries, show people that you need them, too, and you will have love in abundance.”

“Sounds Christian to me,” I said. “Turn the other cheek.”

“It was a Jew who said it.” 

She’s wonderfully pneumatic too…

Deep into his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson asks to see what’s on Mr. Job’s iPad. The follow paragraph results:

More revealingly, there was just one book that he downloaded: The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since.

Let’s call this annual idea of a reread: one’s anchor book. And since it is a habit common to both Jobs and I (in the last week of December, for twelve consecutive years, I sat down to Brave New World) surely it must be common to others. I suspect anchor books exist because they hitch us to workable interpretations of our universe. Functioning as drogues they hold us steady in the shifting ocean of time. As such they are life preservers. This idea of preservation cuts both ways. Choose your anchor book carelessly, and you are an etherized insect permanently pinned to parchment. I like to think that Jobs and I, growing up a mile away from each other, have both chosen our anchors well.

But unlike Jobs I drifted; I have not read Brave New World for a decade. The Isaacson quote was a reminder and a spur. We are past the ides of December, tomorrow is the shortest day of the year, and once again I am deep into Brave New World.

The nice thing about a long absence is the mind sees the text anew. In my brave new revival there’s a depth that wouldn’t exist if I’d continued the annual reread. For example, the passage below that ends this post, struck me as profoundly visionary. Eighty years ago Huxley completely captured the Kim Kardashian model that relentlessly flogs our culture. It’s an incredibly stunning feat.

As an extra bonus I grabbed enough of the quote so that you get a taste of another contemporary situation Huxley foresaw: The 1% in charge of everything; the 99% happy to have jobs running the elites’s beautiful whores up and down elevators…

The lift was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms, and Lenina’s entry was greeted by many friendly nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them.

They were dear boys, she thought, as she returned their salutations. Charming boys! Still, she did wish that George Edzel’s ears weren’t quite so big (perhaps he’d been given just a spot too much parathyroid at Metre 328?). And looking at Benito Hoover, she couldn’t help remembering that he was really too hairy when he took his clothes off.

Turning, with eyes a little saddened by the recollection, of Benito’s curly blackness, she saw in a corner the small thin body, the melancholy face of Bernard Marx.

“Bernard!” she stepped up to him. “I was looking for you.” Her voice rang clear above the hum of the mounting lift. The others looked round curiously. “I wanted to talk to you about our New Mexico plan.” Out of the tail of her eye she could see Benito Hoover gaping with astonishment. The gape annoyed her. “Surprised I shouldn’t be begging to go with him again!” she said to herself. Then aloud, and more warmly than ever, “I’d simply love to come with you for a week in July,” she went on. (Anyhow, she was publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) “That is,” Lenina gave him her most deliciously significant smile, “if you still want to have me.”

Bernard’s pale face flushed. “What on earth for?” she wondered, astonished, but at the same time touched by this strange tribute to her power.

“Hadn’t we better talk about it somewhere else?” he stammered, looking horribly uncomfortable.

“As though I’d been saying something shocking,” thought Lenina. “He couldn’t look more upset if I’d made a dirty joke–asked him who his mother was, or something like that.”

“I mean, with all these people about …” He was choked with confusion.

Lenina’s laugh was frank and wholly unmalicious. “How funny you are!” she said; and she quite genuinely did think him funny. “You’ll give me at least a week’s warning, won’t you,” she went on in another tone. “I suppose we take the Blue Pacific Rocket? Does it start from the Charing-T Tower? Or is it from Hampstead?”

Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill.

“Roof!” called a creaking voice.

The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.

“Roof!”

Friday Random Quote Blogging…

Would it have been better, I wonder, if we had come out into the open, courageously called a spade a phallic symbol and handed one another our quivering entails on a silver platter? Maybe it would. Or maybe it wouldn’t. The truth shall make you free; but on the other hand, let sleeping dogs lie and, above all, let lying dogs sleep. One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things; they’re the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things—in other words, the religious wars. What’s lemonade? Something you make make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses— a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols. ‘What do you read, my lord?’ ‘Words, words, words.’ And what’s in a word? Answer: corpses, millions of corpses. And the moral of that is, Keep your trap shut; or if you must open it, never take what comes out of it too seriously. 

Getting serious about Siri…

In his introduction to “Steve Jobs” Walter Isaacson writes: 

… a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine.

This is lacking. But do not blame Mr. Isaacson. He is a biographer, not a futurist. In my life there have been two massive technological revolutions. And both revolutions have enriched my life nearly as much as FDR’s social policies. Computers and the Internet are the two main movers of the past 40 years.  They subsume everything else. And yes Steve Jobs was sitting barefoot and in the lotus position at the barycenter of both these tectonic shifts.

But another revolution is fast upon us. And to draw the full arc of Mr. Jobs’s life, future biographers will have to include Apple’s purchase of Siri as his most epic entrepreneurial moment. The world now has a moving AI benchmark that forces into being a veritable Roman arena of new markets. Siri thus marks many beginnings, and one massive painful end.

Regarding the pain, consider what Siri — personal AI and robotics— means for Capitalism. There is a ongoing economic debate over this question: Is our current massive unemployment structural or cyclical? The answer here is yes. That is to say it is both. And it is fundamental structural unemployment that is dooming Ayn Rand’s pure Capitalism. More and more white collar jobs will go to AI. We already have AI software that does a better job of diagnosing human diseases than human doctors. How long until I have an app for self-diagnosis in my pocket and a hundred other manifestations of AI engines to do my bidding? How long until AI robots take over most transportation jobs ? 

And that’s the thing that makes this revolution different. Siri and her AI robotic ilk destroy more jobs than they create. That is their purpose. They do physical and mental work more efficiently that humans. And that’s a good thing. Truly smart machines are here. We are on the cusp. Steve Jobs always recruited A-players by saying “let’s put a dent in the universe”. And thanks to Jobs’s last meaningful business moment, the world pirouettes to an entirely new center of gravity. 

AI and robots means more unemployment and thus a further concentration of wealth. But Capitalism functions best when it has global markets. Global markets demand a smearing out of wealth to the many. The math is simple, mass production = mass consumption. This means one clear thing: Next to global warming, the largest human problem right now is to figure out how to get stipends into the hands of the massively unemployed so that they can buy the stuff capitalism wants to produce.

But in fact Capitalism is showing signs of its failure to understand this fundamental right now. It is creaking, faltering, swooning. Here is Robert Reich in a recent Sunday NYT op-ed putting his finger on its stumbling pulse:

The 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s Analytics. That should come as no surprise. Our society has become more and more unequal.

When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into debt — which, as we’ve seen, ends badly. An economy so dependent on the spending of a few is also prone to great booms and busts. The rich splurge and speculate when their savings are doing well. But when the values of their assets tumble, they pull back. That can lead to wild gyrations. Sound familiar?

Mr. Reich argues that contemporary Capitalism suffers from a long-term structural disease of unemployment. And that its illness is accelerating beyond the will of its oligarchs and their purchased politicians to cure it. Again here is Mr. Reich showing us that all this began 40 years ago with the advent of the first computers:

Starting in the late 1970s, the middle class began to weaken. Although productivity continued to grow and the economy continued to expand, wages began flattening in the 1970s because new technologies — container ships, satellite communications, eventually computers and the Internet — started to undermine any American job that could be automated or done more cheaply abroad. The same technologies bestowed ever larger rewards on people who could use them to innovate and solve problems. Some were product entrepreneurs; a growing number were financial entrepreneurs. The pay of graduates of prestigious colleges and M.B.A. programs — the “talent” who reached the pinnacles of power in executive suites and on Wall Street — soared.

If this current situation is non-sustainable without the advent of AI and robotics, what is it with them? The condensation of wealth in the hands of few is in fact Capitalism’s Achilles’ heel. If our oligarchs were smart, they might figure out to distribute the wealth like the Saudi’s recently did to quell the grumblings of their Arab Spring. Perhaps our oligarchs could be more puritanically shrewd about it to satisfy the political right. For example maybe the could figure out a way to pay people to watch TV or to take care of relatives with Alzheimer’s. But one thing is beyond certain: Our oligarchs are far from wise.

In fact the oligarchy’s greed outpaces their wisdom like IBM’s Watson outpaces you at Jeopardy. Instead of looking to find a way to do “living stipends” our oligarchs and their politicial stooges are actually looking to diminish Social Security and Medicare(!). That is suicidal. It is hard to wrap one’s head around a policy of plunging more people into poverty. By itself, growing the ranks of the poor is antipodean to empire. It is in fact anti-empire; and so stunningly dumb, one is forced to imagine a devilish bastardization of greed and cruelty to explain the behavior of America’s Executive class.

Thus I suspect the future will have to be bloody. Going forward I expect a lot more pepper-spraying of ordinary citizens. The oligarchs control all three branches of government, the media, the army, and the police. This does not predispose them to the sensibilities of accommodation. They have power and the wealth to rule, but not the wisdom to rule well. And History has never suffered the collision of those kinds of collusions with grace…

Notes of a Wikipedia Reader…

It happens a lot. So much so, I know it has happened to you. One is reading the Wikipedia, hop, skip, and linkjumping, when all of a sudden along comes a blast of information that is so outside expectations, one can’t help but gush it aloud to all in the room.

For instance, the oldest tree in New York City. Or the incredible oddball biography of Billy Jack creator Tom Laughlin. What to call these situations? Wiki-serendipity? Wikindipity?

It happened again to me this morning…

I’d just started reading James Michener’s “Legacy.” Haven’t read Michener in decades. Got turned back on to him by this passage in Cronkite’s autobiography:

“One of nature’s real nobleman is the author James Michener. I had the privilege of accompanying him to Papeete on this first trip there since World War II. Jim was a foundling brought up in Pennsylvania with no knowledge of his real family lineage. He became a Quaker and as such lives a nearly spartan existence and gives his fortune away as rapidly as he earns it.”

In “Legacy” Michener very quickly immerses the reader in the Iran-Contra scandal. So I set the novel down and “wikied” it to refresh my memory. The entry gave a bulleted list of the scandal’s main characters. Beneath John Poindexter’s criminality bullet, was this jaw-dropping bit of wikindipity:

In Poindexter’s hometown of Odon, Indiana, a street was renamed to John Poindexter Street. Bill Breeden, a former minister, stole the street’s sign in protest of the Iran-Contra Affair. He claimed that he was holding it for a ransom of $30 million, in reference to the amount of money given to Iran to transfer to the Contras. He was later arrested and confined to prison, making him, as satirically noted by Howard Zinn, “the only person to be imprisoned as a result of the Iran-Contra Scandal.”

Bill Breeden’s saga jogged my memory. Wasn’t there a similar story about the Watergate guard who nabbed the burglars? Didn’t he go to jail for stealing a pair of tennis shoes? Aha, it is in the Wikipedia! Turns out the story of Frank Wills is even more fascinating than that. And just so, another wikindipity moment is born:

Wills played himself in the film version of the book All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s account of their reporting work on the Watergate scandal, but never recovered from his moments of fame. After his part in history, he quit his job as a security guard because he did not receive a raise for his role in discovering the burglary. In 1973, the topical song magazine Broadside published the song “The Ballad of Frank Wills”, written by Ron Turner. Mr. Turner later recorded the song for Broadside/Folkways album, Broadside Seven. Wills worked for the comedian/activist Dick Gregory, lived in the Bahamas, and had a Harry Nilsson album dedicated to him. He made some money on the talk show circuit, but was unable to hold down a steady job. He returned home to South Carolina in the mid 1970s and cared for his stroke victim mother for several years. He was convicted of shoplifting in 1983. After her death in 1993, he was so destitute that he was washing his clothes in a bucket until James Kilby founded an organization, Treat Every American Right (TEAR) to raise money for Wills. Frank Wills died nearly penniless from a brain tumor on September 27, 2000, at University Hospital in Augusta, Georgia, having lived in poverty most of his life.

And off I go again, following wiki links into hyperspace. Never sure what shoutable bit of queerness will next appear on the screen. So stunning are these explorations that I feel compelled to modernize a famous Haldane quote: ”The wiki universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine”. Naturally I had to next wiki  J. B. S. Haldane. And naturally, I had more wikindipity moments. And since you are in the room with me, let me shout the lode aloud:

In 1923, in a talk given in Cambridge, Haldane, foreseeing the exhaustion of coal for power generation in Britain, proposed a network of hydrogen-generating windmills. This is the first proposal of the hydrogen-based renewable energy economy.

And this:

Haldane was a friend of the author Aldous Huxley, who parodied him in the novel Antic Hay (1923) as Shearwater, “the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife”. Haldane’s discourse in Daedalus on ectogenesis was an influence on Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) which features a eugenic society.

And so on and on…
Into ever widening elliptical orbit of wikindipity ellipsis…

Side note 1: In an interview with Boing Boing, neuroscientist David Eagleman asked to advise smart high school kids gave this answer : “Watch TED talks: smart people will distill their life’s work down to 20 minutes for you. Follow links through infinite trajectories of Wikipedia. Watch educational videos on topics that resonate with you. There are a million ways to waste time on the net; reject those in favor of ways that teach you exactly what you want to know. Never before have we enjoyed such an opportunity for tailored, individualized education.” How absolutely true. Of course it seems like only yesterday when every college professor was playing down the Wikipedia. What is really getting played down now of course is academia itself.

Side note 2: I used to call it the “Encyclopedia number.” That is, the number of bytes of information contained in the Encyclopedia Britannia. And if you are older than 30 and a reader, you have a strong mental image of those volumes spanning a library shelf. Here is what the English Wikipedia currently looks like: 

Side note 3: Bill Breeden as of this moment does not have his own wikipedia page. He does appear in two separate entries. Via a google search, I discovered he is no longer living in a tepee.

Saturdays Are For Optimism

In my first Saturdays Are For Optimism I asked this question:

If it is impossibly difficult to think clearly about the future when one is stone-cold wise; how much more so is it, when one squats hip deep in the muck of a major recession?

It turns out that “temporal chauvinism” was the phrase I lacked back then. From the New Scientist’s CultureLab blog, Marcus Chown puts us in the know:

… beware of what Carl Sagan called “temporal chauvinism”. This is exemplified by the Victorians, who, living in the steam-powered world, thought the sun was a giant lump of coal, and even today’s scientists, immersed in an information-processing world, sometimes think of the universe as a giant computer.

Our minds are contaminated by the age in which we swim. The Great Recession infects us with its doom and gloom. That’s why Saturdays are for optimism around here. 

And so I introduce you to the Optibike:

Made in America. Designed in America. Incredibly sexy. At long last, a gorgeous electric bike whose pedaling capabilities aren’t a wobbly afterthought. The world needs a gazillion of these. The only problem? They can cost as much as a used Harley. They’ve got to figure out a way to lower the costs and scale up the production. If they do, you’ll want stock in this company…

Does the Vice President have legal standing?

If you been paying attention to the country’s drift, you know the new default is the Senate’s sixty vote majority. Journalists report with blase glibness, as if the supermajority were written into the Constitution, that a particular bill “failed to get sixty votes”.  And then move on to the next story. I’ve even seen this cowed capitulation to sixty votes above the fold of the NYT. In short, the Fourth Estate has accepted, without remonstration or whimper, the supermajority as the new norm.

Now while one cannot expect our glam reporters to read the Constitution (their coifs and DC cocktail party plans are more important) you and I can. Of course there is no mention of a sixty vote majority as being de rigueur. In fact, I argue that there is built in evidence for just the opposite. In Article 1 Section 3, the Constitution contains this sentence:

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

So built into the Constitution is not only the Vice President’s succession to the Presidency in case of death, resignation, etc., (Article 1 Section 1), but also the Vice President’s power to cast the deciding vote in a tie. 

This is an explicitly given power. It is part of the job. It is a reason for pursing the office of the Vice Presidency. The Founders expected there to be ties. But the sixty vote super majority now in effect eliminates the possibilities of all ties. By allowing rampant filibustering, the Senate has diminished the office of the Vice Presidency.

So can the Vice President sue the U.S. Senate? It is an interesting idea that appears to be  not specifically prohibited:

The talismanic “a person cannot sue herself” collapses, however, when the “person” is the United States government. In practice, different parts of the government often end up on opposing sides of the same lawsuit. Although a caption as frank as United States v. United States is uncommon, courts have rarely hesitated to hear intragovernmental disputes. 

Lagging indicators…

Ezra Klein’s piece Could this time have been different?  got a ton of link love. As well it should. It is a masterful essay. And you know you are in like Flynn when Mr. Krugman blogs: “Ezra Klein has a generally reasonable analysis of the Obama administration’s failure to respond with sufficient force to the economic crisis.” On the rigorous Krugman scale of ten, that muted response measures as an eight.

Yet for all the counterpoints generated by the essay, no one seems to have noticed a delicious dangling Newton’s apple in Klein’s paragraph space. Perhaps because to see the apple in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle? Maybe. Admittedly I was hungry for the pome. I’d seen its gravid outline on many different economic blogs. And it helped that Mr. Klein’s essay made this apple its core point. Of all the things that have happened since the crash, this Klein paragraph contains one of the most vital observations:

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the agency charged with measuring the size and growth of the U.S. economy, initially projected that the economy shrank at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the last quarter of 2008. Months later, the bureau almost doubled that estimate, saying the number was 6.2 percent. Then it was revised to 6.3 percent. But it wasn’t until this year that the actual number was revealed: 8.9 percent. That makes it one of the worst quarters in American history. Bernstein and Romer knew in 2008 that the economy had sustained a tough blow; they didn’t know that it had been run over by a truck.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis took months to get the wrong answer. And then got it hugely wrong, not once but twice. In a world full of networks, computers, statisticians, instant information, that is simply unacceptable. It’s intolerable. It wants fixing…

Can you imagine Steve Jobs running Apple this way? Waiting months for wrong information to be updated in error again? And yet I hear no calls for modernization. No shouts to advance the science of economic data into real time. Why aren’t econbloggers screaming for upgrades? Don’t tell me it can’t be made faster. Fix it.

Compare the lumbering acceptance of bad and slow economic information with the quick, world-straddling work of those in the ChokePoint Project. After Egyptian authorities pulled the plug on the net to chill dissidents:

The outage inspired James Burke and Chris Pinchen - both members of the P2P Foundation, a group that monitors how data is shared online - to begin work on the ChokePoint Project. The idea is to compile a real-time interactive map of the entire internet and identify potential choke points - the physical and virtual locations where internet access could be easily compromised - and who has the power to strangle them. 

These guys can measure the entire internet in real time. They can gird the planet in an eye blink. And we got a government that can’t get economic data correct until three years after the fact? That’s just lame. Fix it. 

Most. Heartless punchline. Ever.

And yes it is worth the 15 second commercial and the nearly 6 minute wait: