As I was channel surfing tonight I stumbled upon an Austin City Limits show featuring Esperanza Spalding. Man, can this young woman sing and play bass. Her band is also quite impressive. You can catch the ACL show at the link above. That’s the best video recording of her I’ve found, but I did find this segment from the Jimmy Kimmel show, and it comes close.
Esperanza Spalding: Wow
February 7th, 2010Well I’ll Be A Monkey’s Uncle!
February 3rd, 2010I mean a chimpanzee’s uncle. Proudly-
21st Century Acoustic Guitar
February 1st, 2010Check out this hypnotic little number from Jimmy Wahlsteen, called “Shifts of Attention”-
Marcus Versus the SCOTUS
January 23rd, 2010Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post has written a nicely succinct critique of the recent Supreme Court decision that protects corporations from laws prohibiting unlimited spending for political advertising. Here are a couple of paragraphs dealing with the censorship and “corporate personhood” issues-
First, the majority flung about dark warnings of “censorship” and “banned” speech as if upholding the existing rules would leave corporations and labor unions with no voice in the political process. Untrue. Under federal election law before the Supreme Court demolished it, corporations and labor unions were free to say whatever they wanted about political candidates whenever they wanted to say it. They simply were not permitted to use unlimited general treasury funds to do so. Instead, they were required to use money raised by their political action committees from employees and members. This is hardly banning speech.
Second, in the face of logic and history, the majority acted as if there could be no constitutional distinction between a corporation and a human being. Untrue. The Supreme Court has long held that corporations are considered “persons” under the Constitution and are therefore entitled to its protections. For more than a century, Congress has barred corporations from making direct contributions to political candidates, with no suggestion that it must treat corporate persons the same as real ones; that prohibition stands, at least for now. The “conceit” of corporate personhood, as Stevens called it, does not mandate absolute equivalence. That corporations enjoy free-speech protections does not mean they enjoy every protection afforded an actual person. Is a corporation entitled to vote? To run for office?
It’s worth reading the whole thing.
The SCOTUS Endorses Sociopathic Elections
January 21st, 2010The Supreme Court Of The United States today reversed decades of precedent, deciding that corporate spending on political advertising cannot be regulated. They apparently decided this on the grounds that corporations are legally treated as persons that have first amendment rights, the first amendment guarantees free speech, and a corporation’s spending money on election ads is equivalent to a citizen’s expressing his or her political opinion. One could certainly take issue with the purported equivalence, but a more serious problem, it seems to me, is that corporations are legally bound to make the generation of profits for their stockholders their controlling priority; corporate leaders are legally forbidden from being guided by what they consider to be in the best interest of any other group (including the general citizenry of the United States or of the world).
The 2004 documentary “The Corporation” examines the history of this institution, and argues that if corporations are persons under the law, they are (by legal mandate) sociopathic persons, albeit very rich and powerful ones. The documentary illustrates this conclusion by focusing on the economic crises of the day (e.g., Enron, Worldcom, etc.). Of course, these corporate-driven crises pale in comparison to those of the 2008 meltdown, but the principles of corporate greed remain the same. If the documentary’s argument is cogent, then given that elections are often decided by small margins of voters who can be swayed by distorted election advertising, and corporations are now free to spend huge amounts of money on such advertising, it appears that many of our elections from now on will be decided by sociopaths.
I was surprised to discover that “The Corporation” can now be watched on YouTube in its entirety. Here’s the first part-
This documentary is itself a polished piece of propaganda, of course. Might such agitprop distributed through the internet help to mitigate the effects corporate spending on political advertising? Let’s hope so.
UPDATE- Here’s another option: to amend the constitution…
Massachusetts Votes, Blog Here Now Quotes…
January 19th, 2010“In a democracy, people get the health care insurance and the health care costs they deserve.” -Alexis de Herzbergville
As the ironies pile up higher than NFL linemen on a fumbled ball, and the various media-spins cancel each other out to a wobbly rightward rotation, the question appears to be: will the House Democrats have the fortitude to hold their noses and vote for the Senate bill? Or will a year’s worth of work go down in huge bonfire flames, over which the Republicans can brew tea for at least the next three years?
I don’t have a lot hope for the former option, but stay tuned.
Late To “The Wire” Party
January 18th, 2010I’ve always avoided watching television series, particularly those billed as “dramatic”, since the writing is generally shallow, the directing formulaic, the editing frenetic, and the acting rarely more than passable. But I recently started renting the DVDs of HBO’s “The Wire” series to distract me during my winter treadmill hours, and I have to admit I’m impressed. I just finished the first two seasons, and I’m looking forward to getting on to the third.
David Simon’s dystopian view of contemporary Baltimore starts from a microscopic study of drug pushers in the projects and gradually telescopes out to encompass all sorts of social and political corruption. The show sets out to convince naive middle-class viewers (such as myself) that the corrupt economy of the street is but a pale reflection of the corruption infecting more “respectable” social institutions. But for all its pessimism about the state of the nation, its characters are never one-dimensional; even the worst (and some are very, very bad) are never portrayed as merely bad. Business is business, and the game is the game, at all levels of society; the players did not make the rules. Not that this lets them off the hook, though: they still make their choices, however circumscribed their situations may be. And a few – mainly the better cops – manage to come across as moral exemplars, if only by finding ways to minimize their compromises.
Here’s a Bill Moyers interview with David Simon, but don’t let their explicitly political banter mislead you into thinking that the show has a dogmatically liberal point of view; like all truly insightful fiction, its characters transcend socioeconomic generalizations. And, most importantly, don’t think that the show is humorless; tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin, and the writers of this show know that quite well-
If you’d like to see the second half of this interview, click here.
Literary Excerpt of the Day
January 17th, 2010What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they’ve had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Death-stroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.
Junot Diaz -The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Haiti, I Feel Your Pain
January 13th, 2010
Haiti earthquake damage (APTOPIX)
After seeing the news reports on the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti yesterday, I found myself remembering the 1994 Reseda (aka Northridge) quake that Cheryl and I endured. Although it registered a mere 6.7 on the Richter scale, we lived only 3.2 miles from the epicenter and, according to Wikipedia, “the ground acceleration was one of the highest ever instrumentally recorded in an urban area in North America”. I vividly remember being awoken at 4:30am by the surreal shaking and a sound that’s very hard to describe, partly because, like some sort of cosmic bass synthesizer, you heard it through your body and not just with your ears – a sort rolling rumbling accompanied by the cacophony of a zillion things tumbling and breaking. The main quake lasted only about 20 seconds, but when it was over it looked as if a tornado had blown through our apartment. Nothing was where it had been a few moments before; the pipes had broken under our sinks; our toilet reservoir had broken in two; a two-story wall with four plate glass windows the size of patio doors had buckled in the middle and was leaning inward at about thirty degrees. Power was out; hundreds of car alarms had been triggered, adding to the ambiance of emergency. I remember the dazed feeling of not having the foggiest idea of what to do, except to try to get out of there before the next tremor hit. Not easy to do when we couldn’t even find shoes to keep our feet from being cut on all the shattered glass, or a flashlight to help guide us through the chaos.
The tremors continued for the next 36 hours every few minutes. Had this been the legendary “big one” that would someday occur along the San Andreas fault? Hearing that it hadn’t been, we couldn’t help but worry that this quake might have been its immediate precursor. I recall sleeping in the back seat of our car that night, being awoken every 30 minutes or so by a large aftershock, when the trauma – which I had managed to keep under raps throughout that first day, when survival seemed all that mattered – suddenly hit home.
We were lucky. Our apartment had been constructed to fairly modern quake-related building codes. Like a big tent, it swayed with the tremors instead of resisting them, and so didn’t entirely collapse. Also, it hadn’t been built atop a parking garage, many of which – like the one below – hadn’t made it through the quake-
1994 Reseda quake damage (USGS)
We were also lucky to live in one of the richest places in the world, where first-responders could relatively quickly provide aid to those who needed it, and there was plenty of food and other supplies in the markets. In those days FEMA was well-managed; I remember receiving a check for a couple thousand dollars only a few days after the event, and based only on our address. That helped to pay for the hotel room we needed for the next couple of weeks, while the damage to our building was being assessed.
I can only imagine what the residents of Port-au-Prince must be going through – the anxiety caused not only by the quake damage, but also by the concern that food, water, and civility might soon be running out. Help them by donating to the Red Cross or text Haiti to 90999 to donate $10 directly to Haiti relief via your cell phone bill.
Pat Metheny & Charlie Haden
January 4th, 2010Searching for a Pat Metheny acoustic solo or duet to post on this cold January night, I stumbled upon this curiosity: Pat and Charlie Haden playing “This Is America?”, with an intro by Elvis Costello, and – if that were not enough – Bill Clinton spreadin’ the love as only he can.
By the way, if you like the music, check out Pat and Charile’s Beyond the Missouri Sky.
Farewell, 2009…
December 30th, 2009…and may the teens be better than the oh-ohs.
Here’s JibJab’s 2009 summation-
Thanks Ber.
Collapse (The Movie)
December 25th, 2009A couple of nights ago I took advantage of Seattle’s art-house film scene to see Collapse, the movie featuring peak-oil doomsday-theorist Michael Ruppert. The film itself is pretty cheesy, constantly cutting away from the interview to use somewhat inappropriate stock footage to illustrate Ruppert’s points. For instance, Ruppert suggests that people all over the world have already started to riot in response to the recent economic difficulties (the film was made in March 2009), but it’s pretty clear that the riot footage is pulled from a wide variety of sources, many having nothing to do with those difficulties. There’s also a rather huge leap of logic connecting the real estate and derivatives bubble with peak oil concerns. While there may be evidence somewhere of such a connection, it is not presented in the film. Finally, Ruppert’s fundamental view of the economy-as-pyramid-scheme seems to overlook the obvious fact that the economy is not a closed system, but rather allows for new inputs from improved technology and – perhaps most importantly – social innovation. (As a side note, it also never fails to amaze me that folks who downgrade paper money as ultimately worthless nevertheless upgrade gold to the status of God Almighty, as if a relatively rare metal were somehow inherently valuable… my point being that all economic value is either directly related to satisfying biological needs, or else is a matter of mere convention).
But while it is easy to write Ruppert off as a paranoid conspiracy theorist, partly because he focuses so selectively on data that support the worst case scenarios for the near future, and partly because he self-servingly refuses to debate those at least as well-informed as he is, it’s hard to simply dismiss his impassioned insistence that we should work much more urgently to develop plausible alternatives to oil for energy production. The correlation between the onset of the petroleum economy and the 20th-century population explosion is enough to make you think quite seriously about the consequences of an inevitable future decline in oil production, with its apparently unavoidable effects on agriculture and transportation.
Here’s the trailer for Collapse-
Oh, and by the way, Merry Christmas.
Sky In Greenlake (Seattle)
December 22nd, 2009On a cloudy December afternoon. Taken with my iPhone…
The Senate As A Practical Joke
December 17th, 2009As Health (Insurance? Care?) reform (?) lurches forward like a headless chicken being shoved this way and that by a few senators from states with hardly any population (yeah, I’m talking ’bout you, Joe, and you, Ben), I’ve come to the conclusion that the Founders designed our system of government – or at least the Senate – as a sort of huge practical joke. What other explanation can there be?
Oh well. As our recent Defense Secretary Rumsfeld – himself quite an entertainer – might have put it, “You go to legislate with the Congress you have… not the Congress you might want or wish you had…”
Quote of the week
December 11th, 2009
Barack Hussein Obama
Nobel Peace Prize speech
Pseudo-Science and Pseudo-Philosophy
December 9th, 2009Here’s a good example of writing (by Robert Lanza, M.D.) that combines pseudo-science with pseudo-philosophy (metaphysical speculations that, when put together in several paragraphs, form a long chain of near non sequiturs)-
One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the “many-worlds” interpretation, states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the ‘multiverse’). A new scientific theory – called biocentrism – refines these ideas.
[Editorial comment: we learn at the end of this article that "biocentrism" was invented by Lanza, who, according to his (auto?)biographical note, "is considered one of the leading scientists in the world".]
There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling – the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?
It goes on like this for a while (actually, it gets far worse). You can read it all here.
Kripke would be turning in his grave, if he were in his grave. Saul Kripke is, among other things, an inventor of “modal logic”, the logic of possibility and necessity. Such logic deals with counterfactual sentences like the first one of this paragraph. Translated into Kripke-speak (and putting aside the thorny issue of how to interpret metaphors), that sentence would be stating: “There is a possible world in which Kripke is turning in his grave”. And, on Kripke’s view, there is such a possible world just in case it is conceivable. Of course, there’s a lot of philosophical debate about which worlds are really conceivable or not, and on the question of whether conceivability is really the right test of a modal statement’s truth. But, unfortunately, some otherwise level-headed philosophers – such as David Lewis – have run with this semantic ball all the way to speculative-metaphysics-land, arguing that if modal statements make sense at all (and they do), then all possible worlds must exist just like the actual world exists (including physically)… consistent with the sort of multiverse theory Lanza is apparently imagining.
Now, not every multiverse physical theory needs to presuppose Lewis-style possible world semantics. Indeed, one which merely presupposes, as Lanza puts it, that “each of these possible observations correspond to a different universe” need not do so, as long as “different universe” can be interpreted merely as a possible world in Kripke’s sense of the expression. But notice that Lanza slides from this metaphysically ambiguous assertion to the further view that “There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe.” This, along with other remarks in Lanza’s article, reeks of modal realism (that is, Lewis-style modal semantics, as opposed to Kripke-style). Now, I have no a priori proof that a multiverse theory that presupposes modal realism is false. But, if such a theory is supposed to be scientific, it has to be confirmable or disconfirmable. And while a purely physical multiverse theory – one which doesn’t presuppose modal realism – might be confirmed empirically, by the observations it helps to predict and explain, no metaphysical view can be confirmed or disconfirmed in this way. The Kripke/Lewis debate ultimately boils down to differing linguistic or conceptual “intuitions”. So when writers like Lanza combine multiverse theory, modal realism, and the downright silly reduction of personal identity (or self-consciousness) to the “20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain” that is conserved after death, and implies that it is a scientific theory, I have to protest. In the last forty or so years, more silly pop-metaphysics has been produced by speculations based on quantum physics (and the uncertainty principle) than by anything else. And this is a prime example.
Note: this post was re-written in response to a comment made by Marshall Missner (see the comments section).
Rubbing It In
December 7th, 2009
There seems to be a vengeful ghost in my Yahoo! Weather widget (which I keep on my “My Yahoo” home page). It keeps showing me the weather in Sundsvall Sweden and Sunnyvale CA in addition to Oshkosh. When I delete these locations, they arise from the dead next time I log in. This wouldn’t be so annoying, except for the fact that the weather in Oshkosh is invariably colder than the weather in Sweden, and of course MUCH colder than Sunnyvale. And to add injury to insult, we’re expecting 8-12 inches of snow in the next 36 hours.
Oh Ullr, why dost thou taunt me so?
First Snow
December 4th, 2009
Notice how green the grass still is… and this is December in central Wisconsin.
Amazingly, we managed to get through November without any measurable snow. Then it turned into December, and like clockwork, the temperature dipped into the low 20s and we got dusted. More is on its way.
Please note: we accept sympathy and even prayers (not to mention money for heating fuel). If you need a god to pray to, for this purpose I suggest Ullr – Norse God of Snow. However, my guess is that he’s more put upon by skiers praying for snow. I suppose that means you will have to pray with great fervor. Then at least you’ll be warm…
Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game
December 2nd, 2009
Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks
Okay, this may not be as funny as the Onion’s recent “Victim In Fatal Car Accident” skit, but we have some standards of taste and decency around here…
Believing is not seeing
November 24th, 2009This is an extraordinary example of what might be called “functional seeing”. Compare checker square A and square B-
Although you should not believe this just on the basis of what you see, squares A and B are exactly the same shade of gray. You can confirm this in a graphics program (like photoshop). The fact that you see the squares as different shades of gray strongly suggests that your brain has evolved to tell you more about shadows than about the particular shades of colors. Why? Because representing shades of color as such is something that only an artist needs to do; it has very little survival value (unless you happen to be one of those lucky artists who gets paid for discriminating colors). On the other hand, distinguishing shadows is an important aspect of seeing objects in a natural world, and seeing objects is crucial to survival. One other thing: the fact that you can’t see the two squares as having the same color even after you know that they do is proof of the visual system’s “modularity” or “informational encapsulation”: vision is highly resistant to modification by belief or knowledge. Believing is not seeing.
Thanks to Edward H. Adelson at MIT for making this image available.