The Required Amount at the Prescribed Rate (Handcrafted From the Finest Corinthian Leather)
6/20/10
I simultaneously read Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and Hampton Sides' Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin and though they both focus on America in the late sixties, you wouldn't know it was the same country; Steve Martin lived an odd life you couldn't invent, getting his start at Disneyland doing patter in the magic shops and slowly evolving his act towards the avant-garde while he drifted through the Flower Power era . . . meanwhile, Dr. King was organizing a general revolution among the poor, hoping to bring them all to Washington to camp out and make the rest of the country understand their plight, and he was being stalked by both J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as well as a shifty man that went by various names, including Eric Galt and James Earl Ray, who-- after assassinating King, led the FBI on a wild hunt that required detective work across the South, in Mexico, Canada, and, finally, London, where he was captured by Scotland Yard's finest (which annoyed J. Edgar Hoover).
Costa Rica Shocks Japan
I always root for the Central and South American teams in the World Cup (and Mexico and Canada . . . proximity rooting) and so I was excited to see Costa Rica redeem the nation, after losing 7-0 to Spain, by coming up with a dramatic 1-0 win over Japan this morning . . . and I know it's got to be tough to announce an entire soccer match-- there's a lot of dead time and a lot of just knocking the ball around, but I still think that the announcer should not have called Japan "shell shocked" after Keysher Fuller's change-up chip shot goal, because of the firebombing of Tokyo and the atom bomb . . . "shocked" would have been enough-- that would be like saying, if the US team were to beat Iran, that it looks like the Iranians have been roasted by the Great Satan-- and I don't think you can say that on TV-- but soccer does bring out the hyperbole in many of us (my favorite adjective used by an announcer in this cup was a "tantalizing" pass).
Sports are Entertaining (to a point)
Yesterday was quite a day for sports: I got up at 5:00 AM to watch the epic Nadal/Medvedev Australian Open Match, but I had to interrupt my viewing to go play indoor soccer (I managed to avoid learning who won) and so I finished watching the match at 11:00 AM and then I took the dog on an epic snow hike through the park then watched some of the USA/Canada Men's soccer match -- the US team got scored on early-- and then I went on a strange bar crawl with Connell and Alec . . . we wanted to watch the Kansas City/Cincinnati game but there were no seats to be had at Hooters and no seats to be had at Arooga's, so we kept visiting bars but not drinking any beer, until we finally found a table at The Grove in Milltown-- everyone must have been stir crazy from the cold and COVID and the storm-- and we had some wings and met Rob and Dan and watched the US lose and the Bengals win (and we learned about the various Bengals cheers and found out that the lady at the table next to us was not a football fan but she found it interesting that everyone was cheering for her . . . because her last name was Bengals) and then I returned home and put on the Rams/49ers game for a bit . . . and then I shut it off and went and read my book, because that was enough sports for one day.
Graveyard for Resolutions
Luigi Explains Capitalism For Da People!
1) the thesis of the book is that the US free-market system has degenerated into crony capitalism, and Zingales uses Silvio Berlusconi as the paragon of this model; Berlusconi ran an insulated system of business and government corruption and comparisons between Berlusconi, who essentially ran Italy like his own private business, and Trump are inevitable and easy to make, so while the book was published pre-Trump, in 2012, Zingales does make the Berlusconi/Trump analogy in this episode of Conversations with Tyler . . .Trump succeeded in the real estate business, where it is more important to have strong relationships with government entities rather than creating something new in the market (and he's always relied on bankruptcy and the kindness of that system) and like Berlusconi, Trump has rewritten what is appropriate for a politician and member of the government;
2) Zingales starts with the proposition that fair markets are hard to manipulate and markets- while not perfect-- establish more efficient and accurate measure of value than say, an academic committee creating tenure requirements or statist regime doling out consumer products;
3) the problem is when large institutions, corporations, conglomerates and firms become "too big to fail" and both politicians and institutions recognize this because politicians, who aren't in office forever, would rather quell the chaos during their term-- avoid Armageddon, even if it's only a five percent chance of Armageddon-- with a bail-out, rather than be the person who lets the economy tank . . . but this doesn't allow the markets to do their job and accurately measure value;
4) he then explains how institutions that get "too big to fail" and understand this decimate the system-- he explains this with an analogy: if you play roulette yourself, you've got the same pay-out odds and vigorish whether you bet red/black or bet on a single number . . . for every hundred dollars you play, over time, you are likely to collect back $94.73-- the $5.27 is the amount the 0 and 00 extract . . . but if you pay an agent to play for you and promise him 20% of the winnings, but he doesn't have to pay anything if he loses, that agent is going to take risks and hope for a big payout . . . if he bets red with the $100 dollars, he only makes twenty bucks, but if he bets a single number, he stands to $700 . . . and if he loses, he loses nothing; so managers of funds take big risks, and the big investment banks encourage this because they know that either the lenders will lose out, as they are over-leveraged, or the taxpayers will bail the entire mess out;
5) lobbying is a monkey wrench in keeping markets fair and keeping large financial institutions and the government from becoming inexplicably intertwined-- and Zingales proposes something scary-- since the government controls trillions of dollars in subsidies and monies, the 3.5 billion spent by companies to lobby Congress and the 2.5 billion spent in political contributions may grow larger and larger, as business learns just how important it is to control the government . . . and this political climate of winner-take-all and fuck the other party isn't helping things;
6) with all this lobbying and bailing out and government/business intertwinement, we're not getting the beneficial long-term consequences of markets-- the accurate measurement of value and the benefits of competition . . . imagine that any time your kids are acting up and there's a conflict in the family, grandma and grandpa rescue the kids from any discipline . . . in the short term, these interventions lead to harmony and happiness, but in the long-term, you end up with spoiled kids and unhappy parents . . . Zingales uses another analogy to explain this analogy-- you gotta love all dese metaphors!-- he says that at the Grand Canyon, there is a sign warning people not to feed the wild animals, as if you do they lose their instincts and their ability to feed themselves . . . now the animals would love if people fed them but we need to "protect" them from the corruption of free food, for their own good . . . Zingales has seen this go down in Italy, and he sees America headed down the same road;
7) cronyism and unfair markets lead to winner-take-all scenarios, instead of healthy diversity and competition, and this is especially prevalent in the race to get into college-- while the number of people attending colleges in the US has skyrocketed, the size and amount of colleges has not . . . so there's winner-take-all competition to get admitted to the best schools and parents are spending much more time and resources on their children in order to get them in . . . this hasn't happened in Canada, where the admissions process isn't as competitive; so a tiny head-start when you are young can be very very important and wealth ensures this; Zingales uses a sports analogy-- if you allow professional teams to spend as much as possible, the riches teams will amass the best players and defeat everyone handily, which is great for one team but not particularly fun as a spectator or participant, so a salary cap-- which sounds non-competitive-- actually preserves competition . . . this is true for education and for lobbying, if money can buy success, then lots of money will be spent to ensure success and rules and social norms must be enacted to prevent this and encourage competition;
8) Zingales is certainly more conservative than me, and he's in favor of school voucher systems-- which I am not, for various reasons-- but I understand the logic of why he is in favor of the system, he brings up Finland, which has a much more rigorous method of selecting teachers-- in essence, they have to be smarter than American teachers-- and this means you're going to have to pay teachers more to attract smarter people; I do agree with him on this account-- if we could just get rid of the worst teachers, the bottom ten percent, that would help things enormously; I think it's hard to measure the difference between fairly good and good teachers, because it depends on the metric . . . some teachers are better at improving test scores, others at making kids passionate about a subject, others at letting kids learn on their own . . . but there's no question that some teachers are just terrible and probably get too much protection from the union, and it's also true that the best teachers tend to be in richer schools, so vouchers can change this balance and create a "salary cap" situation that makes things more fair and competitive for more students;
9) if you can wrap your request for subsidies and protection in a noble cause, you'll really screw up the market . . . Zingales uses student loans and Pell grants as an example-- government-backed subsidies that have helped make the price of college double, as there is more demand, space constraints at elite colleges and a high cost and difficulty in starting new institutions;
10) the SEC and other regulators have had trouble enforcing inside trading, and Zingales sees the onus of responsibility for stamping out this on business schools and alumni networks: they need to publicly shame and disavow people who participate in these practices, instead of only celebrating whoever makes the most money . . . it's tough because those are the people that donate;
11) Zingales is in favor of fewer regulations and simpler regulations-- but not the Trumpian dismantling of all regulations without a counter-balance; the way to offset the removal of regulations is with Pigouvian taxes . . . so instead of having insanely complex environmental codes, which leads to employment for lobbyists and lawyers, and costs the taxpayers money in the form of the government agency and all the market distortions caused by the big-business lobbying . . . instead, tax pollutants, tax the amount of harm a factory does, and you are much more likely to capture revenue (or curb pollution) so this is a compelling example of a conservative thinker proposing a "good" tax . . . as opposed to a bad subsidy; subsidizing ethanol enriches ethanol producers, but a tax on gas could curb driving, could lessen greenhouse gases, could capture revenue, and could incentivize the electric car industry . . . without redistributing wealth and enriching the ethanol producers for doing nothing more vital than having a noble idea . . . I'm sure no conservative thinker has made it this far in the post, but this is a really important concept which Trump and his lackeys seem to be totally ignorant;
12) while it is in a voter's best interest to remain uneducated in most political forums-- it's not worth the time and effort-- Zingales does illustrate how shame, muck-raking, and a little bit of knowledge can go a long way in affecting policy and political outcomes . . . and deep into the book, he acknowledges that some people have an interest in public affairs, or they wouldn't have read his book, which tackles a complex subject in a detailed manner . . . anyway, these ideas are really important to understand; we need to harness the power of markets in America, often by separating big business and government; as anyone involved in sports knows, making things fair and competitive means more than simply removing all the rules . . . it takes thought, creativity, flexibility, and rigor; Zingales makes a fantastic case for a market-based ethic and hopes that breaches of this, in the form of cronyism and incestuous relationships between business and the government, will someday be stigmatized the way smoking is today . . . I hope he's right.
These Regions Go To Eleven
Here are some important facts about traveling in North Carolina:
- All North Carolina borders are open.
- There is no national quarantine.
The United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another. These nations respect neither state nor international boundaries, bleeding over the U.S. frontiers with Canada and Mexico as readily as they divide California, Texas, Illinois, or Pennsylvania. Six joined together to liberate themselves from British rule. Four were conquered but not vanquished by English- speaking rivals.
The borderlands on both sides of the United States–Mexico boundary are really part of a single norteño culture. Split by an increasingly militarized border, El Norte in some ways resembles Germany during the Cold War: two peoples with a common culture separated from one another by a large wall. Despite the wishes of their political masters in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, many norteños would prefer to federate to form a third national state of their own.
But the Virginia Company’s plan was based on the faulty assumption that the Indians would be intimidated by English technology, believe their employers were gods, and submit, Aztec-like, to their rule. The Indians, in fact, did none of these things. The local chief, Powhatan, saw the English outpost for what it was: weak and vulnerable but a potential source of useful European technology such as metal tools and weapons.
By a twist of history, the dominant colonies of New England were founded by men who stood in total opposition to nearly every value that Tidewater gentry held dear.
From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror.
Of course, the Deep South wasn’t the only part of North America practicing full-blown slavery after 1670. Every colony tolerated the practice. But most of the other nations were societies with slaves, not slave societies per se. Only in Tidewater and the Deep South did slavery become the central organizing principle of the economy and culture.
Until the end of the seventeenth century, one’s position in Tidewater was defined largely by class, not race. The Deep South, by contrast, had a black supermajority and an enormous slave mortality rate,
thousands of fresh humans had to be imported every year to replace those who had died. Blacks in the Deep South were far more likely to live in concentrated numbers in relative isolation from whites.
Marriage outside of one’s caste is strictly forbidden. So while the Deep South had rich whites and poor whites and rich and poor blacks, no amount of wealth would allow a black person to join the master caste.
The last of the nations to be founded in the colonial period, Greater Appalachia was the most immediately disruptive. A clan-based warrior culture from the borderlands of the British Empire, it arrived on the backcountry frontier of the Midlands, Tidewater, and Deep South and shattered those nations’ monopoly control over colonial governments,
Proud, independent, and disturbingly violent, the Borderlanders of Greater Appalachia have remained a volatile insurgent force within North American society to the present day.
Indian wars and other violence in Appalachia had profound effects on the other nations, particularly the Midlands.
The way things finally shook out, The Native Americans were certainly the biggest losers . . .
The American rebellion was precipitated by the Seven Years’ War, a massive global military conflict between Britain and France that lasted from 1756 to 1763. It’s remembered in the United States as the French and Indian War, because here the British fought against New France and its aboriginal allies.
In the end, the French were defeated, and all of New France (save the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon) was handed over to the British Empire. This had two consequences for the people of the continent. First, it removed from the political and military stage the only European society on which Native North Americans could rely.
During the start of the Revolutionary War, New York and New Jersey weren't particularly interested in freedom, liberation and revolt (perhaps because we are so well situated for trade . . . why rock the boat?)
New Netherland’s patriot uprising met with sudden and complete defeat in the summer of 1776 following the arrival of a British armada of 30 warships, 400 transports, and 24,000 soldiers. This invasion force scattered General Washington’s army, retook the city, and by the end of September occupied an area conforming almost exactly to the boundaries of the New Netherland nation. The rebels dispersed and ecstatic townspeople carried British soldiers around on their shoulders. New Netherland had fought a war against liberation and had lost badly.
New Jersey simply fell into anarchy. “The state is totally deranged [and] without government,” a Continental Army general observed before the British moved in. “Many [officials] have gone to the enemy for protection, others are out of the state, and the few that remain are mostly indecisive in their conduct.”
Why does Canada exist? Perhaps to show us the things that we screwed up . . .
If you’re an American, have you ever really asked yourself why Canada exists? When the American Revolution came about, why did only thirteen rather than eighteen North American colonies wind up revolting?
We’ve been taught to think of the ratification of the 1789 Constitution as the crowning achievement of the American Revolution. Most people living in the United States at the time, however, didn’t see it in quite those terms. Outside Tidewater and the Deep South, many were alarmed by a document they regarded as counterrevolutionary, intentionally designed to suppress democracy and to keep power in the hands of regional elites and an emerging class of bankers, financial speculators, and land barons who had little or no allegiance to the continent’s ethnocultural nations. Indeed, the much-celebrated Founding Fathers had made no secret of this having been one of their goals. They praised the unelected Senate because it would “check the impudence of democracy” (Alexander Hamilton), and stop the “turbulence and follies of democracy” (Edmund Randolph), and applauded the enormous federal electoral districts because they would “divide the community,” providing “defense against the inconveniences of democracy” (James Madison).
The competing philosophies of these eleven nations become abundantly clear during the Civil War.
There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery, they argued ad nauseam, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.
The planters’ loathing of Yankees startled outsiders. “South Carolina, I am told, was founded by gentlemen, [not by] witch-burning Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics who implanted in the north.
“There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” he continued. “New England is to [them] the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption
From central Pennsylvania to southern Illinois and northern Alabama, Borderlanders were torn between their disgust with Yankees and their hatred of Deep Southern planters. Both regions represented a threat to Borderlander ideals, but in different ways. The Yankees’ emphasis on the need to subsume one’s personal desires and interests to the “greater good” was anathema to the Appalachian quest for individual freedom; their moral crusades
On the other hand, Borderlanders had already suffered generations of oppression at the hands of
aristocratic slave lords and knew that they were the people the planters had in mind when they talked about enslaving inferior whites.
And there are some fables of the Reconstruction:
Meanwhile, in Greenwich Village . . .
In 1955 the three nations of the Dixie bloc were still authoritarian states whose citizens—white and black—were required to uphold a rigid, all-pervasive apartheid system.
In Mississippi, it was illegal to print, publish, or distribute “suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes,” with perpetrators subject to up to six months in prison. Klansmen and other vigilante groups tortured and executed blacks who violated these rules, often with the public approval of elected officials, newspaper editors, preachers, and the region’s leading families.
Across the Dixie bloc white Southerners initially reacted to the movement with disbelief, having been conditioned to think that “our Negroes” were “happy” to be oppressed, patronized, and deprived of basic human and civil rights.
Another New Yorker, President Theodore Roosevelt, pioneered federal government involvement in environmental protection, founding the national forest, park, and wildlife refuge systems. Roosevelt’s Yankee cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created the National Wildlife Federation in 1936.
Not every region is as concerned about the environment (or the people who work in it) as Yankeedom.
Taxes are kept too low to adequately support public schools and other services.
From the gas fields of Louisiana to the industrial hog farms of North Carolina, environmental and workplace safety rules are notoriously lax.
The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible.
There is some discussion of one of my favorite books on regionality:
This is the strategy Thomas Frank described in What’s the Matter with Kansas? which revealed how the oligarchs of his native state used social and “moral” issues to rally ordinary people to support the architects of their economic destruction.
Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking.
Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.
The important thing to understand is that within our country there are regions that predominantly believe and value completely different things than you.
Tom DeLay proclaimed in the early 2000s, “The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.” “Nothing,” DeLay told bankers in 2003, “is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.”
After the 2010 BP oil spill, Representative Joe Barton (from Deep Southern Texas) publicly apologized to the company for having been pressured to create a fund to compensate its victims, calling the initiative—but not the spill—“a tragedy of the first proportion.”
I'm not very keen on George W. Bush and the horse he rode in on. But some people love this stuff:
By the end of his presidency—and the sixteen-year run of Dixie dominance in Washington—income inequality and the concentration of wealth in the federation had reached the highest levels in its history, exceeding even the Gilded Age and Great Depression.
If you're someone from New France, Yankeedom, the Left Coast or the New Netherlands and you want to drive yourself batshit crazy, imagine this . . .
Comparative early-twenty-first-century sociological surveys have found that New France is the most postmodern nation in North America. It is the region with the lowest proportion of people who believe in the devil (29 percent) and hell (26 percent). Asked if they agreed that the “father of the family must be master in his own house,” only 15 percent of Québécois said yes, compared with 21 percent of Far Western Canadians, 29 percent of New Englanders, and 71 percent of respondents in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Another academic pollster found them to be more tolerant of homosexuality, extramarital affairs, prostitution, abortion, divorce, and having neighbors with AIDS, large families, drug problems, or emotional instability. Québec, one scholar found, was the region of North America with the highest degree of enlightened individualism and the least respect for traditional forms of authority.
While the Dixie bloc pulls the U.S. federation hard to the right, New France pulls Canada well to the left.
So Woodard sees this scenario playing out over and over, until there's something so cataclysmic that it tears us apart:
We don't have a shared cultural history in this country. Woodard believes our only hope is this:
The American Dream Is Just That
Shouldn't Canadian Geese Live in Canada?
I thought I was going for a relaxing bike ride on the towpath, and in some respects it was-- I saw lots of wildlife: a muskrat, a scarlet tanager, several goldfinches, a heron, and some turtles-- but also had a run in with several Canadian geese, their chicks have just hatched and their nests are right on the side of the path, so the adults-- in order to protect their young-- would block the path when I approached, and so I had to whip stones at them and shove my bike at them and hit them with sticks in order to get them out of the way . . . I saw one jogger do an about face and head back the way she came, her pleasant run truncated by an ornery bird.
Unemployed! In Greenland!
"You could go to college . . . or you could read this book. It explains EVERYTHING about the world. And it's a lot cheaper."
I held up Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World.
The book is rather deterministic in its thesis: you can't escape the rivers, mountains, flatlands, harbors, oceans, and jungles in your country. And they will determine how you interact with your neighbors and how you will interact within your own country. You may have great natural resources, but no rivers and easily built roadways with which to interconnect your cities and towns-- which is much of South America. You may be at the mercy of the flatlands to your east, which is why Russia is always mucking about in the Ukraine. You might be-- like South Korea-- constantly worried not only about the threat of war, but also about a massive flood of refugees. In Africa, rivers don't go very far before they plummet downward in waterfalls. In the Middle East, borders were drawn up after World War I and don't correspond with geography (not to mention the Sykes-Picot agreement).
In America, our rivers are navigable and they lead to safe harbors. We also don't have ot worry about out neighbors (unless you're Donald Trump). Canada doesn't have enough people and there is too much desert between us and Mexico for that border to be a military threat.
And as the ice melts, there will eventually be employment in Greenland.
While Marshall's unabashed realpolitik might annoy some advocates of free will, I didn't mind it.
The best thing about the book is it contains lots of maps. I love looking at maps, and I don't have a very good visual memory. I can look at a map, and then two paragraphs later, I'll have to turn back a page and look at it again. Where is Sweden? Oh there it is. Got it. Wait? Where is it?
A Book Makes Dave Feel Emotions
Alan Moore: Predictable and Amusing (Just Like Me)
1) doing the dishes
2) picking up dog poop
3) tying my children's shoes
4) wearing underwear
5) flossing
6) blogging
7) canker sores
8) Boardwalk Empire
9) driving
10) Canada.
Kickin' Off BHM with a Classic (by a white lady)
There's also a lot of deepfelt Christianity, probably because the novel primarily functions as a persuasive tract, and-- as Annette Gordon Reed explains in her New Yorker piece “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” AND THE ART OF PERSUASION: How Harriet Beecher Stowe helped precipitate the Civil War:
Currently, "Uncle Tom" is a black person who sells out his race and is excessively obedient and servile to the powers that be. Even Urban Dictionary recognizes that this is a bastardization of the term. This is probably because of the many piss-poor overly melodramatic stage performances of the novel that made Uncle Tom into a fawning sycophant.