Showing newest 38 of 53 posts from January 2009. Show older posts
Showing newest 38 of 53 posts from January 2009. Show older posts
Jan 31, 2009
Space Zombie likes MvC's journalistic leap into the live blogging field so much that he thought he'd try it out himself. This week's installment will be the Steve Jackson masterpiece The Rings of Kether
00:01
Galactic Vice Squad is mad about production from Aleph Cygni of the horrible intergalactic drug Satophil-d. With no one else to turn to, Agent Space Zombie is sent undercover as a traveling fruit salesman to the planet Kether on a mission to cut off the source of the drug.
00:03
Space Zombie decides to check out Kether’s moon: Rispen’s End. Nothing there. What a fucking waste of time.
00:08
Space Zombie lands on the planet and heads straight to a bar. As is his habit, he follows a fat nasty farting bitch home. As he waits outside her apartment, Space Zombie is beaten senseless in the alley.
00:10
Hanging out in alleys is for suckers. After doing some research at the local library, Space Zombie does what any sensible narc would do next: he heads out to a decrepit warehouse on the edge of town.
00:18
A bunch of semi-coherent encounters later, Space Zombie tries to ambush some punk motherfucers at a bar. Unfortunately Space Zombie is a freaking retard. The thugs get the jump on SZ, kick his ass (again), put him in a car, and take him out to an old manner house in the country.
00:24
Space Zombie gets away and decides to head back into space, where he finds a suspicious looking satellite.
00:26
Galactic Vice Squad Agent Space Zombie easily finds out to where the satellite is transmitting and goes down to check it out.
A punk-ass robot
00:33
A robot asks Space Zombie to answer a riddle. Space Zombie doesn’t know the answer, so he kills the robot instead.
00:35
Space Zombie finds that nasty fat bitch from the bar & busts a cap in her fat ass. He also finds out that the drugs are being produced on an asteroid.
00:36
Space Zombie goes back to space.
00:40
Oh look: here’s the drug factory! Space Zombie smashes the motherfucker up.
00:45
The gang leader is pissed. Space Zombie kills him. The End.
Jan 30, 2009
MC Lars, the original Post Punk Laptop Rapper returns with This Giant Robot Kills. The title is from a meeting MC Lars had with his musical idol, the legendary Wesley Willis, who told him "Lars Horris! I like your songs, I'll write a song about you. I'll probably write it on my next rock 'n' roll record, which is called 'This Gigantic Robot Kills'." Willis died soon thereafter, and Lars decided to dedicate his new album to Wesley's memory by naming it after that unfinished album.
To complete “TGRK”, MC Lars also called on Weird Al, members of Wheatus, Simple Plan, Suburban Legends, The Aquabats, Cobra Starship, The Donnas, Parry Gripp, Paul Gilbert, his tour mates MC Frontalot and YT Cracker and more.
Order today and your item will ship to arrive on release date February 24, 2009!
1) Where Ya Been Lars?
2) True Player For Real (Featuring "Weird Al" Yankovic and Wheatus)
3) Hipster Girl
4) It's Not Easy (Being Green) (Featuring Pierre Bouvier of Simple Plan)
5) This Gigantic Robot Kills (Featuring Suburban Legends and The MC Bat Commander of The Aquabats)
6) No Logo (Featuring Jesse Dangerously)
7) 35 Laurel Drive
8) Twenty-Three (Featuring Amie Miriello)
9) Guitar Hero Hero (Beating Guitar Hero Does Not Make You Slash) (Featuring Parry Gripp of Nerf Herder and Paul Gilbert of Mr. Big)
10) O.G. Original Gamer (Featuring MC Frontalot and Jonathan Coulton)
11) We Have Arrived (Featuring K.Flay, YTCracker and The Former Fat Boys)
12) White Kids Aren't Hyphy
13) Hey There Ophelia (Featuring Gabe Saporta of Cobra Starship And Brett Anderson of The Donnas)
14) (Lord It's Hard To Be Happy When You're Not Using) The Metric System
It looks like they've hit Austin already.
Is PDX next?
Jan 29, 2009
I havent tried to sell this to a magazine.
Classical Sociology Confronts the Economic Crisis: Theoretical Lessons for a Novel Recurrence
The global financial crisis that caught us by surprise often seems rather incomprehensible. It threatens to explode many of the beliefs that we had held as scientific law. The sudden collapse seems to present itself in unknown colors and impenetrable terms. Befuddled by the unimaginable stream of events, we seem to have no interpretive framework.
But a closer look reveals that this crisis of capitalism is not a wholly new phenomenon. Indeed, some of the most studied classical sociological theorists offer many useful perspectives to gain leverage on our current economic troubles. This essay attempts to understand the financial crisis through the theoretical frameworks of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Making reference to their writings, it also speculates different responses that each thinker might have proposed to deal with the crisis.
MARX
When the safest of the safe mutual funds actually lose value and mainstream voices dare to question openly our cherished civic religion of unregulated free market capitalism, Karl Marx’s clairvoyant analysis comes to mind: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”.[1] The current financial crisis has made everybody reassess the sturdiness of the material and social relations upon which our society is structured.
Marx foresaw the recurring and increasingly graver crises that the capitalist system inherently engenders; and he noted that the moments of crisis present the possibility of change since they call into question the very solvency of the capitalist mode of production. He wrote that “the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society”.[2] Accordingly, the current crisis creates an opening for systemic transformation, but also is a time in which the elite beneficiaries of capitalism retrench and try to preserve the dominant paradigm and their privileged place in it.
Marx viewed human history, above all the industrial capitalist period, as the struggle between the bourgeoisie controllers of material resources—whose wealth begets wealth—and the proletariat, whose only means of subsistence is selling the promise of their labor. Marx’s thesis claims that the logic of capitalism invariably tends towards conflict between the two “diametrically opposed”[3] classes—and that competition within the classes leads to the contradictions that spawn crises.
Competition among capitalists is a process of attrition that ruthlessly lowers wages and prices until “the one capitalist can drive the other from the field and carry off his capital”.[4] Thus, capitalism necessarily tends toward monopoly. Takeovers and mergers are “inevitable and natural consequences”.[5] Fittingly, the current crisis has destroyed and consolidated a once vibrant field of investment banks, so that the country now has only a couple of banks. Similarly, the imminent merger of General Motors and Chrysler embodies the type of move towards monopoly that Marx warned of.
Workers also have to compete with each other—for the limited industrial employment available. And workers find themselves in a catch-22, for the more they work, the less their work is worth. In the final analysis, the worker “competes against himself as a member of the working class”.[6] Evidence of this phenomenon is readily seen today in the constant devaluation of real wages. This “immiseration” of workers has—as Marx predicted—funneled greater amounts of wealth to a very small elite, thereby widening the material disparity in the United States. “The modern labourer,” Marx wrote, “sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class”.[7]
Our current crisis stems in part from the asymmetrical distribution of wealth in the country. As working people sank below conditions of existence and did not earn enough to buy houses, schemes were devised—by the state (e.g. Community Reinvestment Act) and by private firms (e.g. “liar’s loans”)—to put people into unaffordable homes in defiance of prudence. Thus, the first step on the path to the mortgage crisis in part derived as an ad hoc solution to the immiseration of workers.
Workers compete with each other, not only within labor markets, but also across international boundaries. Marx posited that, as technological advances further the division of labor and make workers redundant, fewer and fewer jobs are available. As the resultant supplies of labor grow, capitalist bosses can pay less. At the same time, the technological division of labor “supplants skilled laborers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children”.[8] This description could very well apply to the automation and outsourcing of jobs (to the unregulated Third World) that has decimated the productive base of the United States—thereby hurting our trade deficit and metastasizing our foreign debt.
Marx pointed out how it is capitalism’s nature to tend towards globalization; not just in the search for cheaper labor, but also in the basic need to find new consumers upon whom to unload the fruits of overproduction. He wrote:
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere”[9]
The global interconnectedness that capitalism has fostered makes the onset of any once local crisis by definition now a systemic crisis. The chain reaction of loan defaults that occurred in the US housing market had severe repercussions that did not stop at Wall Street; the negative domino effects put small Norwegian towns in the red and threatened to bankrupt all of Iceland. These are the unintended consequences of the worldwide integration required by capitalism’s rampant scouring of the earth for resources and markets.
The mortgage crisis, if supplied debtors by the working poor, was provided loans by what has been idiomatically termed “The Giant Pool of Money”. This pool represents all of the unencumbered money on earth looking for a place to invest—be it monies from central banks, sovereign wealth funds, cash reserves from insurance conglomerates, etc. In the 1990s, much of this money found happy returns in the dot com economy. But once that bubble burst (capitalism’s previous mini-crisis) and investment opportunities were curtailed, the giant pool of money needed another field to flow into. Thus, the mortgage-backed securities became the investment opportunity du jour. Marx may as well have been describing this pattern of modern-day investors hopping from bubble to bubble when he wrote that “to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit…the world market shrink[s] ever more, and ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but superficially exploited market”[10]
When the old productive technologies like manufacturing no longer proved profitable in the US, the bourgeoisie began “revolutionising the instruments of production”[11]—inventing newfangled financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps—“with feverish haste, and upon an ever more gigantic scale.”[12] Thusly, capitalism set itself up for its next big cyclical collapse.
Further aggravating our present pecuniary predicament is that the United States has become a nation of consumers that do not produce value. Marx noted that in the alienating station of wage labor “what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal”[13]. Certainly, our debt-fueled consumption lifestyle can be viewed as an uninhibited animal existence devoid of the creative production that is uniquely human. And it is exacerbating the financial crisis.
Now that the crisis is upon us, Marx’s conception of ideology is useful in understanding how the options for extracting ourselves from the mess are framed by the powers that be.
Marx believed that the dominant ideology was a tool of the bourgeoisie to represent their particular self-interests as the general interests of all of society. A subgroup of the elite are the “active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion…their chief source of livelihood”.[14] This group of spinmeisters includes politicians, media, and pseudo-intellectuals, who Marx would label “vulgar economists”[15]. We recall that it is in the moments of cyclical crisis that most threaten the social order that the bourgeoisie redouble their efforts at maintaining the status quo.
It is fairly easy to apply this framework to interpret the ongoing debate in the public sphere about how to cure the economy. Politicians and the press presented the $700 billion bailout as relief aimed at Main Street (the general interest), even though the funds actually were destined for Wall Street (the particular interest of the elite). The trickle-down theory of growing the economy has been so “idealized”[16] that it is no longer a means to growth, but an end in itself. So steeped in the dominant ideology is the general public that it cannot fathom any method of economic intervention other than dumping lump sums on upper echelons of society. Because that is the way things have been done for so long, it is the only option we consider. Truly, "the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."[17]
Even as we engage in top-down bailouts and see no salutary results, we continue to pursue that tactic. Bailing out insurance companies and banks did not improve our economic prospects, so we now move on to bailout the automobile industrialists; and it is a bill of goods marketed as a helping hand to the proletariat. Indeed, the interests of the bourgeoisie remain cloaked in a veneer of public welfare, and we are presented with only two options: corporate bailouts or doing nothing.
Marxist interpretations of ideology lend themselves to understanding how public agendas are framed in this day and age. But Marx did not fall for false choices. In considering Germany’s status quo, he said “even the negation of our present political situation is a dusty fact in the historical junk room”[18] Marx clearly believed that tinkering at the margins would not substantively effect change in the materially-derived social relations.
So how would Marx have recommended responding to today’s economic crisis?
It is tempting to say that Marx would not have actively advocated any measures whatsoever since he saw that the natural logic of capitalism would inevitably doom it; that the bourgeoisie’s “fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”.[19] In this view, there is no point agitating for the rise of the workers because it is bound to occur regardless.
A different reading, however, might posit that Marx saw the ascendancy of the proletariat as inevitable precisely because the exploitative conditions of capitalism would doubtlessly provoke activism, advocacy and agitation.
In any event, the revolutionary transformation that Marx envisioned leading away from capitalism involved several processes. First, the proximate placement of the proletariat leads them to identify their common class interests. As occur the contradictions inherent in competitive capitalism—spiraling wages, appearance of monopolies—workers’ actions become militant. This in turn inspires reciprocal reaction from the capitalists. As both sides become more radical and contradictions escalate, “the lower strata of the middle class…sink gradually into the proletariat” and “a portion of the bourgeois ideologists”, seeing the way the winds are blowing, breaks off and joins the proletariat.[20] Finally, the proletariat overthrow their capitalist rulers and seize power.
At this point, it is rather clear that Marx would not recommended a state-led solution to the economic crisis (except as a necessary socialist step to stateless communism). Marx ultimately viewed the modern state as a “concealed deficiency”[21] that fettered individuals’ full self-realization. Beyond this it is difficult to surmise exactly what Marx would propose as a solution to the economic crisis.
DURKHEIM
As Marx detailed and Durkheim concurred, the technological march of society brings about a division of labor in which workers occupy ourselves with ever more specialized tasks in “a sphere of action that is peculiarly our own”.[22] According to Durkheim, industrial society is governed less by the conscience collective and more by material interdependence. The division of labor “brings together [through mutual necessity] those it separates [into differentiated sectors]”[23] Somewhat counterintuitively, division is the key to societal unity.
This organic solidarity can be viewed as a regulatory system, whose “rules emerge automatically from the division of labor”.[24] The increasing interdependence serves as a substitute form of shared morality for industrial society. The threat to the wellbeing of industrial society is when the regulatory system breaks down.
Durkheim notes that moral density depends on physical proximity and tight communication. But in an era of globalization—“the fusion of markets into one single market, which embraces almost all of society”[25]—the divided and dependent laborers become somewhat dislocated from each other and self-regulatory mechanisms malfunction, resulting in a state of anomie.
In the complex field of financial services in 2008, different interdependent actors—realtors, mortgage agencies, security traders, investment banks, etc.—became dangerously disjoined from each other along the chain of production. Information asymmetries and inscrutable financial products (e.g. securities composed of unknowable percentages of bad mortgage tranches) created what Durkheim called a “blocking environment”[26], in which isolated actors lost track of assets’ real value and true measures of risk, testing the furthest boundaries of the system. Durkheim astutely wrote that when producers cannot “figure out…limits” of the market and “the yardstick is wrong”, capitalist society enters “crises that periodically disturb economic functions.”[27]
Durkheim also wrote about how the overbearing nature of society exerts inescapable force on individuals, making us “forgetful of our own interest”.[28] Many individuals on Wall Street could objectively identify the vulnerable contradictions, the systemic externalities, contained in the housing bubble and mortgage industry. They could objectively envision how riding the crashing wave would hurt them financially. Yet the authority of society kept them locked into the game. As Durkheim put it, “at every instant we are obliged to submit ourselves to rules of conduct and of thought which we have neither made nor desired, and which are sometimes even contrary to our most fundamental inclinations and instincts.”[29] The rules of the capitalist game dictated that individuals following personal greed maximized the utility of all—so actors were powerless to defect from the collective action of a momentary bear market.
The current problem in the economy is that credit is unavailable and loans are not readily forthcoming even from banks with a semblance of liquidity; the commercial paper market has seized up, and there is a general crisis in confidence.
Durkheim wrote that contracts could only be credibly entered into within a social context of solidarity and tacit understanding. Without the preexisting society establishing the universally accepted legal framework and bonding individuals under a shared morality, a contract for a transaction would mean very little--or at least it would be way too costly and consuming to establish ad hoc safeguards for each and every transaction. Without preexisting social cohesion, it would be irrational for people to go to such lengths to ensure the terms and outcomes of every individual contract. In short, society makes a contract more than a piece of paper.
In today's market, there is very little trust. Nobody believes the claims of firms' balance sheets. Nobody knows how much of a given security is composed of bad mortgages. People are not even sure they will be able to access their money deposited in banks. Until a routinized and renewed tradition of moralistic regulation can be applied again to the whole system of divided labor, credit will not prove credible.
To solve periodic capitalist crises, Durkheim may have been more amenable to state-led recovery than Marx. He seemed to see an active role for state intervention and regulation (“government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant”[30]), but not the complete disbanding of capitalism (“the role of solidarity is not to abolish competition but to moderate it”[31]). In today’s climate, Durkheim would probably call for a beefed-up state regulatory apparatus, “particularly when we consider the diversity and complexity of the [economic] relationships it is called upon to regulate.”[32]
At the same time, Durkheim would not abnegate in the least the notion of personal responsibility and restraint. He would probably be outraged at our lopsided consumption-to-production ratio, in which “appetites thus excited have become freed of any limiting authority.”[33] Our current age of insatiable consumption habits, Durkheim might say, is dearly in need of a civic morality that can instill restraint and build “a solid foundation of happiness”[34] instead of relying on instant gratification that never fails to leave people in an anomic state of want.
Durkheim’s affinity for both a ‘third way’ politics of socially sensitive state-interventionist capitalism and more than just lip service to personal responsibility seems remarkably similar to the path mapped out by Barack Obama. He has said: “as much as I'm out there to fight to make sure that government's doing its job and the marketplace is doing its job, ... none of it will make a difference -- at least not enough of a difference -- if we also don't at the same time seize more responsibility in our own lives.''
WEBER
The excessive consumption and slackened production evident in today’s society would have offended the 19th century Protestant sensibilities that Max Weber profiles in his work on the origins of capitalism. Weber talked about how the Protestant capitalists were very industrious but far from decadent, profitable but not profligate.
They worked diligently, for the way to heaven was through dedication to one's "calling". Working hard and earning money were also methods for coping with the existential anxiety wrought by the Calvinist notion of predestination.
And, while these early capitalists produced prodigiously, they did not consume in abundance. Their increased wealth was a danger, as it could lead to a decline in piety. As these worldly ascetics made more money, they needed more self-control to refrain from unholy indulgence.
Once capitalism outgrew its Protestant origins, it no longer needed the religious base to sustain it. As religion receded from the capitalist mentality, it left behind a sense of sustained duty which “prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.”[35] This legacy from Protestantism could be viewed as the so-called “spirit” of capitalism—which is put forth as an ideal-type rather than a necessarily historical descriptor. So just because our mode of production is capitalist does not mean that we still operate according to its spirit.
Weber noted that as capitalism lost its overtly religious aspect, it lost the abiding morality that governed its relations. As a substitute for this guiding force, capitalism became more rational and bureaucratic.
Rationalization is an attempt to insulate organizations from political or personalistic predations. By routinizing operations and restraining actors in an “iron cage”, an enterprise can better ensure it remains on its intended path of progression. However, some characteristics of modern bureaucracy can have the inadvertent consequences of facilitating economic collapse.
Weber noted that office management “presupposes thorough training in a field of specialization.”[36] For private enterprises, these bureaucrats often get trained at business schools that can be as much ideological reorientation camps as training grounds for objective management. Another characteristic of bureaucracies are the predominance of “general rules, which are more or less stable, [and] more or less exhaustive.”[37]
Having professionally trained managers and clear comprehensive organizational norms can greatly facilitate healthy profitability in normal times. However, once situations begin to shift in ambiguous ways, information symmetries become more unbalanced, and so-called laws of economic science get disproved, indoctrinated bureaucrats following rigid guidelines can spell disaster.
In the capitalist world before the present economic crisis, the dominant free market ideology dictated that everyone blindly pursuing their own self-interest would automatically improve the general welfare of all. Professional managers in bureaucratically organized mortgage houses and investment firms followed this dogma without regard for the underlying changes that were occurring in financial structures, investment instruments, and risk assessment models. The ideological rigidity adopted in specialized training and the outdated constraints of their institutional operating procedures did not allow them to adapt their game behavior to the serious changes taking place on the playing field. We can conclude that entrenched and immovable bureaucracies in capitalist enterprises played a role in the economic collapse.
“The most general presupposition for the existence of this present-day capitalism,” Weber wrote, “is that of rational capital accounting as the norm for all large industrial undertakings.”[38] Following this postulate, some of the accounting methods culpable in the economic crisis—such as mark-to-market accounting and obscuring sizeable debt positions off of balance sheets—can be pointed at as performance that by definition contradicts the fundamental requirements for maintenance of a functioning capitalist system.
The task of speculating how Max Weber would have reacted to the financial crisis is a difficult one. Most of Weber’s literature remains descriptive and interpretive—rarely wandering into prescriptive territory. In fact, Weber explicitly maintained that social scientists should remain purely objective (although this view may have been mostly a product of his academic circumstances).
If anything, I would venture that Weber might fault the hyper-rationalization of today’s capitalist system for its inflexible and dogmatic response to changing economic conditions.
Having reviewed important lessons from these three theorists, it now seems clear that the current economic crisis is hardly unprecedented and far from inexplicable. Karl Marx showed that the conflict and contradictions inherent in capitalism lead to cyclical crises that threaten the materially-derived privileged position of the bourgeoisie and offer the proletariat the opportunity to the change the nature of social relations. Emile Durkheim discussed the importance of regulation amid the capitalist division of labor and the need for morality as a restraint on excess. For his part, Max Weber provided an understanding on the attitudinal origins of capitalism and its modern transition toward rational bureaucracy. Digesting the contributions of these classical sociological theorists will allow us to better understand how we arrived at the economic crisis and to prompt reasoned proposals for how to move forward.
[1] Communist Manifesto (CM), 98.
[2] CM, 100.
[3] Wage, Labor & Capital (WL&C)
[4] WL&C
[5] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (EPM), 87.
[6] WL&C
[7] CM, 104.
[8] WL&C
[9] CM, 99.
[10] WL&C
[11] CM, 98.
[12] WL&C
[13] EPM, 89
[14] The German Ideology (GI), 84.
[15] Capital.
[16] See discussion of the German Ideology on p207-209 of “Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideas” by John Torrance (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
[17] The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 112.
[18] Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (CHPR).
[19] CM, 104.
[20] CM, 101-103
[21] CHPR
[22] The Division of Labor in Society (DLS), 170.
[23] DLS, 195 in “Four Sociological Traditions”, edited by Randall Collins (Oxford University Press, 1994).
[24] DLS, 176.
[25] DLS, 178
[26] DLS, 177
[27] DLS, 178
[28] The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 206 in Collins.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Suicide, 199
[31] DLS, 176
[32] DLS, 177
[33] Suicide, 199
[34] Suicide, 200.
[35] The Protestant Ethic and “Spirit” of Capitalism
[36] Bureaucracy, 265
[37] Bureaucracy, 266
[38] The Origin of Modern Capitalism, 37 in Collins.
You will recall that on this blog I recommended two stocks Sherritt International and Sirius XM Radio.
There is fresh news adjudicating my recommendations here and here.
It would be nearly impossible to have chosen two worse stocks. Seriously uncanny. I challenge anybody to make worse predictions.
And also reason 3 1,000,029 that Obama is different than Bush.
This all started when I was reading an article in the NYT about the economic stimulus bill that was passed last night. It's a good article. And reading through it I kind of got the feeling that the Obama economic stimulus might actually be a good thing. I like that instead of giving a lump sum tax credit that we will be getting what amounts to very small tax breaks in each of our paychecks (500 or so per person divivided up amoung your pay checks for the year or somesuch). Personally, I'm much mroe likely to spend an extra $30 or so than I am to spend a $500 chunk.
Also, I approve of increasing help to the states, schools, and public works. Overall I like how the spending is divided up amoung fast acting and slow acting stimuli. Specifically I think increasing food stamp payments is a great idea (I might be wrong, but it seems to me that a lot of money spent on food stays in the country).
This got me thinking about the Bush economic stimulus package, about which I really knew embarassingly little (though in my defense, I was pretty sick of Bush by that point). What I found surpassed even my already low expectations of the Bush Administration. Here's the transcript of Naomi Klein's apperance on Democracy Now! It's depressing reading. Turns out that none of Bush's handouts have been acountable, and that in addition to the hundreds of billions that were part of TARP, they have also given out some 2 TRILLION to banks in emergency loans. Who has recieved these loans is apparently secret and what they put up as collaterial is also secret. So they most likely put up all those questionable assests we've been hearing about for so long that could in effect be worthless. It is likely that the banks will never pay us back.
To make matters even worse, since the Bush Administration was all about outsourcing, they outsourced this economic stimulus package to the very banks who screwed up so badly as to put us in this situation. I wish I got rewarded as handsomely for my screw ups. I think this quote from Naomi sums it up best:
"...[T]his bailout is really not a bailout at all; it’s a parting gift to the people that the Bush—that George Bush once referred to jokingly as “my base.” You know, in one of my columns recently, I likened it to what European colonial rulers used to do when they finally realized they had to hand over power; they would loot the treasury on the way out the door."
Here's to hoping things improve somehow.
Jan 28, 2009
Barack Obama won the recent presidential election in a landslide, in no small part due to the perceived deficiencies of the previous administration. The Bush administration was so calamitous that even Sarah Palin blamed it for her and her running mate’s defeat. Bush’s regime has been responsible for a shattered economy, decaying international relations, and a host of other ills. It’s probably a bit more complicated than that, but it doesn’t really matter. We’re not here to talk politics; we’re here to acknowledge the Bush administration for the one thing we can all truly appreciate. This is something that Bush and his cronies don’t receive nearly enough credit for.
Music.
It’s a strange corollary that the worse day-to-day life is, the better the music gets. I’m not sure if this is an age-old maxim, but it’s certainly been true for the last 50 years or so. The 50’s were a time of content materialism and the music was a vapid reflection of that.
By the late 60’s, the inverse was true. At the height of the Vietnam War you had not just the Arlo Guthries and Bob Dylans protesting the war, but an explosion of talented music: Cream, The Beatles, Doors, etc. There was still good music in the 70’s, but increasingly pop and disco in the form of the Beegees, Carole King, etc grew more powerful as the country recovered from the drama of the previous decade. The 80’s had its exceptions (Dire Straights, U2, Rush) but overall the tunes came from fun but meaningless bands like Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Devo. This corresponded with another decade, like the 50’s, of materialism and general contentedness
By the late 80’s, popular music had grown absolutely dreadful. 1988 featured the likes of Rick Astley, Tiffany, and George Michael. Bestsellers of ’89 included Bobby Brown, Poison, Paula Abdul, Milli Vanilli, and Richard Marx. The hits of 1990 contained singles from Wilson Philips, Mariah Carey, and Michael Bolton. With this inheritance of sucktitude, what happened in 1991 is nothing short of amazing. Day-to-day life had taken a sudden turn for the worse: Desert Storm had begun in January, tornadoes were tearing up the Midwest, the Soviet Union collapsed, and PeeWee Herman was arrested for spanking it in an adult movie theater in Florida.
It took the first George Bush (89-93), an unpopular war, and a mild recession to create the sea change. Gone were the hairbands of metal and the hair-ties of glam as suddenly new wave was old hat. 1991 was an amazing year for music;—albums like Ten, Out of Time, Nevermind, Achtung Baby, BloodSexSugarMagik, Pretty Hate Machine, Badmotorfinger, Metallica, and Into the Great Wide Open came out. A lot of those albums are on all-time best lists, and deservedly so. (This might be a good place to point out that you might not agree with all the music I've listed as either “good” or “bad” so feel free to mentally substitute your favorite/least favorite when I include band names or songs.)
The music of the 90’s is well-covered and ancient history these days. It’s worth noting, however, that during the Clinton administration we had a return to the good times, bad music paradigm of the late 70’s/early 80’s. The mid-to-late 90’s was musically as abysmal as any epoch ever. Though there were a few artists who managed to stay relevant--Beck is probably the best example of this—things were about to get worse, quickly.
While 1993 had debuts from Blind Melon, Bjork, Stone Temple Pilots, the Gin Blossoms, and the Breeders, 1994 (Bill Clinton’s first full year) featured songs from the likes of Ace of Base, Bryan Adams, and Warren G. Now 1994 also had some great music: Weezer, Tool, Rage Against the Machine, and Alice in Chains released amazing albums. We could all see the cliff face looming before us, but we hadn’t fallen off it just yet. It got worse. Fast. 1995 was Boys II Men and Montell Jordan, 1996 was the year of Macarena and Celine Dion. What had been known as “Grunge” was now called “Alternative” and in those two years it did provide some compensation: singles like “Buddy Holly,” “Heaven Beside You,” and “Better Man” emerged. Good songs were growing few and far between, however; they were just roots we tried to grab onto as we fell further into the chasm of saccharine mediocrity. In retrospect, it’s surprising how short the time span of great music really was—other than the waning years of the Bush administration, the 90’s were a blight upon the history of music.
In 1997, Elton John, Puff Daddy, Toni Braxton, and the Spice Girls topped the charts. It was almost as if the early 90’s had never happened, that all that music and meaning were just a blip on the radar of frivolity. Soon the music of the nation was provided by the likes of Hansen, Shakira, countless boybands, and, worst of all, the Dave Matthews Band. (You might like some of this as a guilty pleasure; but it’s a far cry from Hendrix and Pearl Jam, from Alice in Chains and U2.)
Bill Clinton’s last year (2001) represented a reprehensible nadir of music. The top music of the day was from bland, inarticulate groups like Matchbox 20, 3 Doors Down, Creed, and Third Eye Blind. George Bush’s first year changed little, as ilk such as Nickelback, Linkin Park, and Puddle of Mudd still ruled the radio. It was a dark time, and the Renaissance of 1991 was now a full decade behind us. 2002-03 was a slight improvement—for every Godsmack there was a Jet. For every Maroon 5, there was a Jack Johnson. Now Jet and Jack Johnson were, at best, mediocre, but compared to the preceding drivel it was a gradual improvement. Musically, however, we were still pretty far down that cliff.
The warning signs were there, but 2004 was a shock. All of a sudden alternative music (now called “Indy,” as it always had been in the UK) was alive and breathing. Our heads popped over the precipice again as, seemingly from nowhere, The Killers, Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, and Keane emerged or reached wider audiences. Interpol released Antics, The Arcade Fire released Funeral, the Fiery Furnaces released Blueberry Boat. It was a surfeit of exceptional music, and end to our almost decade of freefall. 2005 was just icing on the cake, as Okkervil River, the Decemberists, Bloc Party, Gorillaz, Kaiser Cheifs, and Audioslave released more great music. 2006-2008 has been more of the same. We’ve been so high up that we can’t even see the cliff face below us anymore.
In retrospect, 2004-2008 has, arguably, produced as much good music as 1991-1995. You could make great arguments for either side, and of course people will tend to skew towards the music they listened to in their formative years. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that George W Bush, a man whom most agree has screwed up this country by a series of idiotic blunders, did at least create conditions that allowed great music to thrive.
This is worrisome because if Obama is half as good as expectations have projected, music will suffer drastically. Maybe our lives will be so good that we won’t notice or care, but if you look around in the next two to three years and wonder why boybands are popular again, or why Gwen Stefani is still allowed to have a career, you can blame a certain popular president. Yes you can.
Jan 26, 2009
Cascade Festival of African Films, yo. Admission = tip jar. Brother, can you spare a dime? I'm particularly and obviously interested in this one:
I was almost cast as an extra for the courtroom scene at the end of the trailer. Foshoshili. I was in the capital for something when this kombi pulled up and said they needed white people for the scene, do I have other white friends around? I pointed them toward the cafe I just left, but they said they were already there and my friends were no bueno [dreadlocks, basically: the distinguishing characteristics of an Afrikaaner are short shorts and a copstache]. They told me to wait there and returned ~10 minutes later to say nevermind. Le sigh, I could've made it big.
I hope the movie is much better than the book it's based on entirely, Where Others Wavered. Either Nujoma should have found a ghostwriter with an adequate control of English or I shouldn't have read this directly after Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. Either way, it never occurred to me I'd ever actually get to see this.
Jan 25, 2009
Why Obama is nothing like George Bush (and for that matters, Dems significantly different than GOP). From slate:
This could not be clearer. The new president was calling for a complete reversal of the Bush administration's directives on this matter—and a restoration of the Freedom of Information Act's original purpose.
The Bush era's tone was set in October 2001, when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memo to all federal agencies, assuring them that if they were sued for refusing to release documents under the FOIA, the Justice Department would defend them in court as long as their decision had a "sound legal basis." This reversed a guideline, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, noting that the Justice Department would defend agencies' refusals only if releasing the documents would cause "foreseeable harm."
I'm loving these overturns. Obama stayed classy during the transition even though most of us wanted him to call out Bush's idiocy and failures. What better way to show your disdain than to immediately undo much of what the last administration screwed up, even when its against your own self interest.
And this illustrates my point about the difference among parties:
President Gerald Ford vetoed the '74 expansion, on the advice of Donald Rumsfeld, his chief of staff; Rumsfeld's assistant, Richard Cheney; and the Justice Department's chief counsel, Antonin Scalia. Congress overrode the veto.)
Being the cultured men that we all are, one of our ongoing goals is--of course--to increase our understanding of the finer points of entertaining. It is on this very subject that lankownia and I recently found ourselves engaged in one of our many insightful and deeply reflective conversations. You see, the situation had arisen where Mr. and Ms. lankownia had invited a few guests over for a lovely dinner, myself included.
Culture Bloggers throw the best partiesBeing the savvy culture blogger that I am, and dreading the idea of arriving empty handed, I brought a bottle of wine to present to my esteemed hosts.
Never arrive empty handedThis small gesture, however, put lankownia into a bit of a pickle, as he had already carefully crafted a wine list for the evening's festivities, but did not want to insult his guest by burying the wine on the shelf. As a culture blogger himself, lankownia naturally desired to follow the most appropriate path for the situation. He prevailed upon me to help him in determining the proper course of action as proscribed by entertaining etiquette, but I too was at a loss.
Fortunately we were able to resolve the issue when the rest of the party suggested that we simply drink all of the wine--which we did with great success.
Problem solved! 
WWMD? And yet, my zombie brain could not stop wondering: what would Martha Stewart do?
Well, Martha's web page wasn't much help, but a little google searching did turn up a few results. The consensus seems to be that the host may choose to serve the wine if it compliments the menu and if he has not already prepared his own wine pairings, but the guest should not be surprised or insulted if the host puts the wine away for his own consumption later.
Wine + Parties = A Winning Combination!
Jan 24, 2009
In continuation of the recent Men vs. Culture trend, I did some googling of my own and came across a nice little list of The 12 most evil robots of all time and how to thwart them. There are a lot of robot lists out there, but this one seems to be the most accurate and features useful insight into how to defeat these cunning cybernetic killers.
The two questions human roboticists are most commonly asked about their creations are, first, "When is it going to become evil and try to kill all humans?" and, second, "Can I have sex with it?"
--Jonathan Shikes, Westword.com
Jan 23, 2009
While looking through the list posted by A Joker I saw this little link: Top 50 Hottest Sci-Fi Girls.
Well now, I thought, if we are going to debate the merits of Sci-Fi then it is only right that we debate all of its merits. And what merits this are (note for those at work, the pictures are at worst (or best depending on how you look at it) are racy. Shouldn't get you fired, but might get you some unappreciative looks).
Here are a few of my thoughts to get the discussion started:
Denise Richards at 17? Bah. If I wanted implants I'd put Pam Anderson on the list.
Kristie Alley at 16? She maybe could sneak in in the high 40s, but did you see some of the women ranked worse than her? Come on.
Tricia Helfer at 6? (for those who don't watch Battlestar Gallactica [the new one that is], first you should, second she plays cylon #6) I do think she's hot, it's just that Lucy Lawless is hotter on that show and she got ranked 21.
I won't tell you who got #1, don't want to ruin the surprise, but I will say I think there might have been some childhood bias involved. Definitely argueable.
Once again, Men vs. Culture is on the cutting edge.
The Guardian has listed their top books in fantasy and sci-fi. Though more comprehensive than ours, they have included just about every work we've mentioned. (Space Zombie will be glad to note that they include two works of his boy HG).
Plagiarism? Perhaps; they also include the "literary" spec fic authors such as Bulgakov, Chabon, Hesse, Burgess, Palahnuik and Nabakov.
To perhaps avoid controversy, the books are listed in alphabetical order rather than any rating based on merit. It's a good list, and I think only one book clearly does not belong. And I'm not referring to American Gods.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Jan 22, 2009
This one comes from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which Lank wrote about a while back and i am just now getting around to reading. It's a bit a monster. The copy I have is 981 pages with 388 footnotes, and 43 lines per page. I think it weighs something like 10 pounds. So far i am enjoying it, though it's a bit slow going. I'm curious to see where he takes the story.
As to the quote, he is talking about drug addictions (so far a very prevalent theme) and in specific drug addicts. He says that drug addicts who turn to crime to support their habits rarely turn to violent crime, since the prefer to spend their energy on their addiction. Instead, robbery is there crime of choice, which led to this gem of a line:
"One reason why the home of someone whose home has been burglarized feels violated and unclean is that there have probably been drug addicts in there."
Maybe not the best line in the book, but it struck me.
Jan 21, 2009
All right, I feel I must add my own list to the mix, since that's what the readers demand. Here are my favorite Sci-fi novels of all time (of course this is off the top of my head and so surely I will forget some). Some of them will be rather pedestrian picks, others maybe not. I am trying to stick to a fairly strict definition of Sci-Fi, so no fantasy or any of that. Anyway, without beating a dead horse too much:
Dune, Frank Herbert:
Well duh.
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein:
I've heard SZ dis this one for being dated, and thats true but that happens a lot with Sci-fi. Personally I love the 60's group-love stuff. And the ideals of self realization are always good.
The Road, Cormack McCarthy:
A surprisingly good little book in which almost nothing happens and yet you want to cry by the end of it (but being a man of course you don't). A good message of always keeping on and doing your best to be a good human.
Oryx and Crake, Margret Atwood:
Similarities to A Handmaid's Tale but less targeted towards women, and therefore as I am not a woman a better book in my opinion. A post-apocalyptic joy ride with good imagery.
A Scanner Darkly, Phillip K Dick:
I think I might be in the minority here, but this one is great. To me this book marks the transition of Dick from a pulp sci-fi author into someone worth reading. I also see this as the first book in the Valis Trilogy (a great semi-autobiographical set that chronicles Dick's decent into craziness. Also some of the most powerful and beautiful books I've read), so let's call it the Valis Quartet.
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin:
As I mentioned, this is the book that both 1984 and Brave New World are based on, and as such it is a better book than either of those. Living in a super controlling society and finding freedom through love, sound familiar? If it weren't written by a soviet Russian this would be the book that was known and not 1984 (though Orwell did have a flair for words: double-speak, big brother, etc).
Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card:
Again i already mentioned this book. I find it much more interesting and striking than Ender's Game, which falls more in the action adventure mold. Reading this one helps you understand humanity just a little better, which makes it worth the read (and in fact this is the only OSC book I recommended to Mrs. Tramp, and it is also the one she brought up when I mentioned this discussion we've been having).
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin:
Truly a classic and a great read, also one of the best titles of all time. An exploration of gender identity and prejudice, and well told to boot.
A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Buroughs:
SZ has been pimping this book for years and when I finally read it I was shocked. Most old sci-fi (say pre-1940) tends to be so monotonous that it puts you to sleep (think Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, etc), but this one was surprisingly good. Also kudos for blatant sexism and racism and all that good stuff.
Futurological Congress, Stanisaw Lem:
Who doesn't love whacked out Pollocks? Also another great title, and what about that name? Actually this might not be Lem's best, but he is consistently imaginative and enjoyable to read, plus some humor thrown in as well.
Well shoot, that's hardly exhaustive, but it's all I can think of for now.
Jan 20, 2009
I was still so worked up over Joker's erroneous claims to the superiority of the Foundation trilogy that I had to do a little research to back my claim up. After a somewhat brief search I came up with two lists that were based on more than one persons opinion.
The First: Sci-Fi List's Top 100 Sci-Fi Books. Is based on 20 awards, 38 published critics, 15 popular polls, and 53 other lists.
The Second: The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List. Is a poll of 3316 people.
The ranks?
Dune = #s 1 and 6
Foundation = #s 3 and 55 (yes, 55th)
Some notes on the polls:
Note that the poll in which Dune was #6, Foundation was #55.
In the 2nd poll that Dune did not win, it was ranked second (when fantasy titles are excluded) behind Ender's Game. How is that possible when Ender's Game isn't even the best book in the Ender's Game series (Speaker for the Dead is actually better)?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is #12 on the first list. Have they even read that book? It sucks. It's only good because they made Bladerunner out of it. If you want a Phillip K Dick book, go with Scanner Darkly or the Valis Trilogy.
Brave New World is awful, and 1984 is good. The problem with both books is they are blatently ripped off from We, which is a Russian novel and not even on the list even though it is way better. If you have to have some Huxley do his nonfiction like The Doors of Perception which is way more intersting.
An L. Ron Hubbard novel made the list? That just might make this list meaningless. And so I'll stop my analysis (which could just keep going on, though I'm sure I'm boring the crap out of you) here.
Just to recap: Herbert is better than Asimov.
Jan 18, 2009
While other posters might well push Herbert or Gibson as the best science fiction has to offer, real fans know that Asimov is the true grandmaster. His Foundation series, in particular, reached a pinnacle that later generations could not hope to achieve.
Thus it is great to hear that Foundation is being developed now into a feature-length film.
Jan 15, 2009
All the other blogs use liveblogging. I think it's time we start. Oh wait, there was that lifeblog of the draft on MvS. Well, uh, freedom.
0.10 - I can't believe I got to take a literal poopie all over your faces. For eight years!!!
1.29 - Trust is my nickname for bending over.
1.38 - It was courageous of y'all not to slit your wrists or move to another country.
2.32 - Cops and Robbers, bitches!
2.36 - 1950 was before 9.11, and that's when J. Edgar Hoover was spying on everyone. Also, I think we won some sort of war in 1248 or something. That was before 2001, non? You see, even the troops were allowed a return to innoncence. Hooray!
2.42 - I gave up GOLF, dicks!
2.59 - Into the Gestapo.
3.13 - This dood in Estonia can bench press 115 kgs five times! I think that's like 1000 lbs. Unfortunately, he isn't one of the 40 Estonians actually deployed.
3.47 - "There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results." Uhh....
3.54 - Seven years without an attack, yo. Cookies! Huh, what, America had gone 60 years without an attack before that 2nd-grader taught me to read?
4.34 - Thus all the crocodile tears.
4.45 - After my POTUS gig I'm going to retire to an amusement park to sell caricatures for $10 a policy.
5.09 - Also responsible for the birth of our nation: rich people who didn't want to be taxed so they could make even more money taxing others instead.
5.32 - Around the World was such a boring game. I much preferred Knockout or 21. Also, imperialism.
5.58 - Except for those headed by dictators who let us sell Coke or pick fruit.
6.09 - OMG, some students are passing tests written with questions designed so that one-half of students answer incorrectly! I are good.
6.36 - If your tools of measurement include a dirty sock, leftover pizza from four days ago, and an enema.
7.02 - Hardworking families, SIKE! There are no hardworking families. There aren't even jobs, suckas!
7.18 - Once we run this mixed-economy thing for a little while since the free-enterprise one didn't work too well. Whoops.
7.43 - Whoa, Whoa, Whoa! Back that shit up! WTF? "You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made. But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions." JFC, that's like saying, "You might not think it was kosher for me to steal my grandma's crack rock, but I hope you can agree with the fact I woke up this morning."
8.13 - Can you tell Paco to pick more bananas? And make sure Ahmed understands I don't want to pay anything over $40 for a barrel of crude. America spelled backwards is Peace.
8.44 - Because those are the two things that allowed for the incubation of the American economy.
9.03 - I am the only man who owns a penis I was born with.
OMFG, this is getting long. I don't want to listen to the rest of the speech. G'night.
... They keep pulling me back in (side note: a needed thank you the the Sexegenarian for teaching me the ellipse title-to-first-sentence intro method)
"The decisions that were made by a prior administration were difficult ones. It is an easy thing for somebody to look back in hindsight and be critical of the decisions that were made," Holder said. "Having said that, the president-elect and I are both disturbed by what we have seen and what we have heard."
That would be Eric Holder, Obama's nominee for Attorney General. Is it just me, or every time I start thinking that the Obama administration is going to start sucking like all the other administrations I hear something from them that just makes me shake my head?
Or maybe it's just the contrast with the out going Worst President Ever?
As noted by our colleagues at Geek in the City. :(
Jan 14, 2009
More Diet Tips From mVc.
Eating varmints is even in vogue these days, at least in Britain. The New York Times reported last week that Brits are eating squirrels with wild abandon.
Here in Kansas City, you won't see many, if any, squirrel ads in the papers. But that's where Brownsberger was advertising his raccoons last week.
"Raccoon meat is some of the healthiest meat you can eat," says Jeff Beringer, a furbearer resource biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation.
"During grad school, my roommate and I ate 32 coons one winter. It was all free, and it was really good. If you think about being green and eating organically, raccoon meat is the ultimate organic food," with no steroids, no antibiotics, no growth hormones.
And when people eat wild meat, Beringer says, "it reminds the modernized society — people who usually eat food from a plastic wrapper — where food comes from."
Raccoons go for $3 to $7 — each, not per pound — and will feed about five adults. Four, if they’re really hungry.
"The best way to describe it is a rich, slow-roasted, dark meat,"
This is the strange part:
Although its head, innards and three paws have been removed, it still has one. That’s the law.
"They leave the paw on to prove it's not a cat or a dog," Washington says.
And apparently we all (or at least quite a few people we know) haven't been paying any attention because we missed this story.
My favorite part:
Leeanne Ridley, a mom of three in Pembroke Pines, Fla., has a bad case of baby fever. But right now, fearing the worst in the current recession, her family is putting dreams for a fourth child on ice.
Umm, she already has three kids. Call me crazy, but not having a fourth hardly means putting starting a family on hold. I love the media. They're really good at their jobs.
Jan 13, 2009
And magically it's being written (without the use of my hands that is). Once again let us delve into the world of brain computer interface (BCI). A company, Emotiv, has just released a commercial BCI called the EPOC which they say will be able to identify 30 different thought patterns and emotions. 30 different controls should be plenty to allow one to control a video game.
In one article about the EPOC, from CNN, the writer says the following:
"If we can interpret basic control thoughts now, it isn't far off where we'll be able to interpret more complex thoughts, even potentially things you're not consciously thinking of. If we can now do it in a non-invasive fashion, it probably won't be long before we can read these things from across the room.
And if we can "read" complex thoughts, then shouldn't we also be able to "write" thoughts into a person's brain?
See, now here's what bothers me about all of these tech articles about the future of BCI. They're all written by Tech-heads. Now I'm sure all these Tech-heads know way more than I ever will about technology, etc, etc, etc... But I'm pretty sure I know more than they do about biology. And from what I know, a brain can not be written on like a hard disk. I feel pretty comfortable saying that there is no way (at least within the foreseeable future, after all I am a sci-fi fan and can't completely rule out all that cool stuff) we are ever going to be able to write something on someones brain without some sort of direct interaction. Biology just doesn't work like technology. Now I'm no expert on the brain, but if it's like the rest of the body, and I think it is, than it mostly comes down to an interplay of proteins and chemicals.
Let me ask the tech-heads this: how are you going to turn some kind of energy signal into a chemical or protein signal?
When I see a paper about that, then I'll place my order for the Matrix Brain Training Machine. Until then Tech-heads need to stick to what they know.
With regard to the new and expectant fathers of Men vs. Culture, this spring's must-have baby accessory:
Anti-gas Protective Helmets For Babies
(from the people who brought you the ever-popular Anti-Gas Protective Face Mask For Nurses)
--originally posted at Ptak Science Books
Jan 12, 2009
1. His decision in 2001 to jettison the Kyoto global warming treaty so loved by Al Gore, the environmental lobby, elite opinion, and Europeans. The treaty was a disaster, with India and China exempted and economic decline the certain result. Everyone knew it. But only Bush said so and acted accordingly. He slowed the movement toward a policy blunder of worldwide impact, providing time for facts to catch up with the dubious claims of alarmists. Thanks in part to Bush, the supposed consensus of scientists on global warming has now collapsed. The skeptics, who point to global cooling over the past decade, are now heard loud and clear. And a rational approach to the theory of manmade global warming is possible.
2.Enhanced interrogation of terrorists. Along with use of secret prisons and wireless eavesdropping, this saved American lives. As Charles Krauthammer said recently, "Those are precisely the elements which kept us safe and which have prevented a second attack." Crucial intelligence was obtained from captured al Qaeda leaders with the help of waterboarding. it was necessary. Lincoln once made a similar point in defending his suspension of habeas corpus in direct defiance of Chief Justice Roger Taney. "Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" Lincoln asked. Bush understood the answer in wartime had to be no.
3.Rebuilding of presidential authority, badly degraded in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and Bill Clinton. He didn't hesitate to conduct wireless surveillance of terrorists without getting a federal judge's okay. He decided on his own how to treat terrorists and where they should be imprisoned. Those were legitimate decisions for which the president, as commander in chief, should feel no need to apologize. Defending, all the way to the Supreme Court, Cheney's refusal to disclose to Congress the names of people he'd consulted on energy policy was also enormously important. Democratic congressman Henry Waxman demanded the names, but the Court upheld Cheney, 7-2.
4. Unswerving support for Israel. He ostracized Yasser Arafat as an impediment to peace in the Middle East. Bush announced that Ariel Sharon should withdraw the tanks he'd sent into the West Bank in 2002, then exerted zero pressure on Sharon to do so. And he backed the wall along Israel's eastern border without endorsing it as an official boundary, while knowing full well that it might eventually become exactly that. He was a loyal friend.
5.No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education reform bill cosponsored by America's most prominent liberal Democratic senator Edward Kennedy. The teachers' unions, school boards, the education establishment, conservatives adamant about local control of schools--they all loathed the measure and still do. It requires two things they ardently oppose, mandatory testing and accountability. Kennedy later turned against NCLB, saying Bush is shortchanging the program. In truth, federal education spending is at record levels. Another complaint is that it forces teachers to "teach to the test." The tests are on math and reading. They are tests worth teaching to.
6.Declared in his second inaugural address in 2005 that American foreign policy (at least his) would henceforth focus on promoting democracy around the world. This put him squarely in the Reagan camp, but he was lambasted as unrealistic, impractical, and a tool of wily neoconservatives. The new policy gave Bush credibility in pressing for democracy in the former Soviet republics and Middle East and in zinging various dictators and kleptocrats. It will do the same for President Obama, if he's wise enough to hang onto it.
7.the Medicare prescription drug benefit, enacted in 2003. It's not only wildly popular; it has cost less than expected by triggering competition among drug companies. Conservatives have deep reservations about the program. But they shouldn't have been surprised. Bush advocated the drug benefit in the 2000 campaign.
8.John Roberts and Sam Alito. In putting them on the Supreme Court and naming Roberts chief justice, Bush achieved what had eluded Richard Nixon, Reagan, and his own father. Roberts and Alito made the Court indisputably more conservative. And the good news is Roberts, 53, and Alito, 58, should be justices for decades to come.
9.strengthened relations with east Asian democracies (Japan, South Korea, Australia) without causing a rift with China. On top of that, he forged strong ties with India. An important factor was their common enemy, Islamic jihadists. After 9/11, Bush made the most of this, and Indian leaders were receptive. His state dinner for Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 was a lovefest.
10.the surge. Bush prompted nearly unanimous disapproval in January 2007 when he announced he was sending more troops to Iraq and adopting a new counterinsurgency strategy. His opponents initially included the State Department, the Pentagon, most of Congress, the media, the foreign policy establishment, indeed the whole world. This makes his decision a profile in courage. Best of all, the surge worked. Iraq is now a fragile but functioning democracy.
Excerpt from The Weekly Standard
Jan 11, 2009
Jan 9, 2009
Businesses work to recruit the best employees. For some that may be the best designer, the best writer, or the best salesman. In OHSU's case it is the best scientist (or maybe doctors, but that's the medical side and as far as I'm concerned totally boring). Now, there are many strategies one could use to recruit the best, financial incentives being the most obvious. I'm sure OHSU uses money, and it doesn't hurt that Portland is a very livable and enjoyable city. My personal favorite technique they use is the beautiful building technique.
Incoming desirable scientists are given lab spaces in the nice fancy buildings with the good views. Used to be that was the VA Center for Cancer Research (my former home), which is situated up on top of the hill with nice views of Mt. Hood from one direction and Mt. St Helens from anther (of course the third views is one of the ugly ass VA Hospital building, and the fourth, depending on where you look from, is most likely a parking lot). With the building of the new waterfront Center for Health and Healing (at the bottom end of the arial tram, and also my new home) that has changed. Now the CHH is the hot place to be, and thusly where they stick the new up and coming recruits.
Why the CHH you ask (and if you don't then I am asking it for you)? Well, for starters its and awesome building. Built to limit the environmental impact it collects rain water for toliet flushing, has solar panels all over it's south face, a green roof, and probably many other things. It also has a much better caffateria. But the kicker is of course the view. All the offices are on the north side, so when you need a break from your bigwig things you can taken in this view:
The other three aren't bad either. Being on the 14th floor has it's perks (by the way, can you guess which one is the view from my desk?):
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