Centerfield

Open Thread: What's Good in Your Life?

Currently reading: still working on my new version of Thucydides, and Churchill WWII vol5 of 6 (I've already read v6, so it's the last one for me).

The kid has propelled himself forward, kinda. The Profesora is living in fear.... I think she worries too much - crawling isn't half as interesting to him as cataloguing all the human voice box noise possibilities.

Best, there's a promising-looking football game coming up in half an hour between UT and Kansas State.

(not-so?) Closed Thread

Motley Fool Suggests RIAA Hitting Brick Wall

Slashdot is less than unhappy to see this.

Are some big RIAA members seeing it the same way? That could explain the other day's Amazon announcement.

Jarvis Half-Right on Non-Spoonfed Citizenry

Jarvis was half-right in his latest post

If we feed them hope and we feed them reason and tolerance then they will become tolerant and reasonable and hopeful.”

Isn’t that essentially insulting? We are politicians’ empty vessels. We are molded by their rhetoric?

The Presidency isn’t a PBS self-improvement show. It’s an executive job.

He's half-right. We aren't simply politicians' empty vessels. Contrary to what many wingers seem to think, none of us are easily programmed by politicians', ads, or other propaganda. Now, I do think we do respond to what our chief honchos say at a deep level. Some people (a minority, I think) are inclined to simply believe the exact opposite of whatever he says. Others will grant what he says more attention than what other people say, albeit listen with skepticism. Others will be easier or harder to persuade, but nobody just believes the company line. The most you'll see is extreme respect for what the President says, I think.

BUT. When a President comes and opens his language and speeches to a broad coalition, he really does have alot of influence. Take George Bush, advocating the Iraq War. A majority was for it back when the war happened, and that's why - he was alot more careful than he is today (not great - see the Axis of Evil - but not bad). When he goes partisan, so do his listeners. As I've grumbled before, Bush has been alienating many centrists by his partisan tone when pushing the Surge. If he'd used this kind of speech when arguing to invade Iraq, polls would've been rather different, and Congress might've voted it down. At the least, Bush would've had to wait for an (R) Congress instead of being able to force the issue against a (D) majority.

Americans had fun debating the war, and alot of facts on both sides showed up in the debate. The only place you can even kind of vaguely find a fact or two on the Surge is in Petraeus' slides. That seems like a pretty good example of what Obama's talking about.

American Capitalism supports Chinese Suppression

A good article about American capitalism supporting Chinese surveillance and suppression There is one point where I don't agree:

America must disenthrall itself from one of its most cherished myths: that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand, that the spread of markets inevitably means the coming of democracy.

First, I've never seen it labeled as a certainty, but instead an increasing likelihood with increased prosperity. Second, it's too early to tell in this case. Third, there are other signs pointing the other way. Chinese officials are much more careful and circumspect about corruption and having to care alot more about their people than a generation ago. That suggests a trend toward more Chinese being rich enough to care about good government. Remember how the SARS story went? And officials are beginning to work to slow the growth of China's massive pollution problems.

Amazon Sells DRM-Free Music From Some Big Studios

...slashdot rejoices.

What took so long?

Best Blog Title Ever?

Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR. Some of the posts aren't too bad, either.

Israel/Syria Bombing Explained?

Engram's written an interesting post on several aspects of ongoing events in Syria, including the bombing.

Why Is Republican Democracy Good?

In classrooms, they teach us all that the United States is a Democratic Republic, as opposed to just plain Democracies, which didn't scale and involved single cities like Athens. But that's about it.

Imagine if the City Council of Washington, DC, or maybe its town assembly, governed the entire nation. Yes, it'd be a pretty bad government compared to what we have, because capital cities are always arrogant and partisan, and, well, people everywhere really only understand and deal well with what's in front of their nose.

Imagine if most generals who failed or had the slightest question mark raised tended to fall. Rumsfeld would've fallen much faster, but so, likely, would've one Gen Grant, whom you may've heard of. The Athenian Assembly could and did sentence people to death and any other penalty hastily - including an entire town in the Peloponnesian War. Imperial Athens and Republican Rome were like our DC - full of intrigues via investigations against the powerful, except it was far easier for the powerful to be booted with little evidence of wrongdoing.

The Athenian Empire fell when the Athenian people grew arrogant enough to believe they could conquer the world and gave power to demagogues who promised easy victories over first Sparta and then another big democracy, Syracuse. I lived near DC for many years, and feel that its culture is pretty arrogant, just as Athens' was, and for similar reasons. We can all be grateful the rest of the nation gets to vote. Mind you, I do think DC should get statehood (via amendment) - as they point out, no taxation without representation. That representation would still be a small minority. I also think DC should get the power to annex suburbs in Maryland and Virginia to reduce planning and funding problems.

That's what the Athenian Empire, and Roman Republic were like. Except at the very beginning of the Athenian Empire, there was only anything like any freedom for the one city. The Athenian Empire allowed subject cities to choose their own governments, albeit with the same kind of encouragement for democracy we've given, but Athens came to dominate all questions of foreign and military policy for subject cities, and took advantage of their status to invest imperial capital in Athenian projects like the Parthenon, and to punish even minimally troublesome subject cities by giving bits of them to Athenians.

Republican Democracy was invented in Great Britain. That's how it came to be called the United Kingdom - it's the unifications of the Monarchies and Parliaments of all nations on the island of Britain. You get to vote for your MP, regardless of whether you were born in England, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, or N Ireland (am I missing any?). Most PMs have been English, but the office is currently held by a Scot.

Notice that, when the UK got an Empire going, it did still look more old-style, in that Imperial subjects, like in, say, North America, couldn't cast any votes on anything, only some citizens of the United Kingdom could. Also, interestingly, on the subject of citizenship, was that one big cookie that Augustus and later Emperors gave out to to make people happy with the Empire was widening Roman citizenship far beyond the City; why not? no vote came with it anymore.

The UK still works today, though some Britons seem to think it's getting a little creaky, as they've federalized Scotland. Version 1.0 of anything tends to be a little limiting compared to later versions.

Agin Obama's Senior-Targeted Tax Cut, Like the Senior Discount

I'm againt Obama's proposed tax cut for the elderly for the same reason I'm against senior citizens' discounts - the old have the most money in our society, since they've had the most time to squirrel it away. See my senior citizens' discount article for a nice graph on the subject.

Open Thread: Favorite Meat?

My favorite is Texas beef brisket BBQ. I've never been enough into steaks to pay the high prices much, and burgers are nice, but not in the same class atall.

Good ribs are also nice, but let's face it: the food / (effort x mess) ratio is mediocre.

In THEORY, I can see where chopped pork BBQ could be nice, but I've never had any done by anybody that cared about making it. OTOH, while we're talking pork, I've never had a caribbean lechon that the maker didn't care about; much better. But brisket still edges it for me.

Some Localblogging: 'Horns Crime Problems

The Texas Longhorns football team is having some problems this year. Legal problems. Problems finding eleven players still all out of jail.

Three players have been suspended, and two more who knocked over a store are out permanently. Clearly, the team has some kind of problems this year. The local paper's humorist, Kelso, suggested that the team needs a tough mama (registration req'd - worth it if you have enough time to catch up on some Kelso back columns).

Seems to me like the problem is too much success. This' been going on a little bit forever, just as, I'd guess, in most teams that have recent winning records. But now Texas has a recent championship under its belt. Great success breeds great arrogance.

Hopefully, Coach Brown can see that and figure out a way to remind his team they're only human, after all. But it won't be easy with all the personal, media and management pressures.

Hitch Explains It ALL About Sen Craig

Very interesting, Hitch.

Indian Unity What-If

Reviews of this book on the Indian/Pakistani partition inspired me to post about some related mail exchanged by FDR and Churchill about it during WWII.

President Roosevelt counterproposed a loose, American - Revolution - union - style Continental Congress to give unity a chance to be worked out. Churchill thought ethnic cleansing was a better solution, though.

The mail sequence was that, after a British commission examining issues in freeing India released a report favoring partition, FDR was unhappy. He send Churchill mail pointing out that this would surely involve considerable tragedy (which it did), and that since India was multiethnic already, he didn't understand why this was necessary. FDR suggested trying the Articles of Confederation that backed the Continental Congress until the Constitution came into force. Churchill replied with a letter from an Indian Muslim group noting that Hindus were the ethnic majority, and fearing persecution in an independent India.

So, whadja think? Possibility or hopeless? I think it would've had problems, and Muslims WOULD have suffered persecution, but less than either side did in the ethnic cleansing.

Some New York Times Comments

Jarvis posted an interesting analysis of the TimeSelect death.

You know, I've always had a bad relationship with the NYT. The Profesora likes it, but not me. When I first started understanding newspapers, I found the NYT arrogant, and thought my hometown paper of the time (the Washington Post) was longer on facts.

When papers went on the web, washingtonpost.com was there pretty early. They were in the second generation, and had it just right. They still do, keeping up with innovations like blogs, interesting chats, and video. They have pointers to important speeches and reports online. They've never forgotten a subscription identity I've given them.

NYT has been the awkward sister, on the web. For years, all the news fit to print on the Web involved either computers or labor unions. And NYT requires cookies. And it was often hard to read. And, for me, it's still not as good as wapo or the Economist, much less blogs.

Kick Out The GOP Because They're Corrupt

Maybe that wasn't our best issue.

What are we supposed to do when BOTH sides of the ballot are corrupt? How are Murtha and Reid any better than their GOP predecessors? And no thanks to Pelosi for giving Murtha his power; Pelosi wanted to give him even more power, as Majority Whip. Sigh.

It's normal for Congressional Democrats to have not-so-strong leadership - we like it that way - but this is a huge, sucking vacuum. At least the out-and-out crook didn't stay, but it's not saying much....

Israel Bombed Targets in Syria, Nuclear-Related?

According to the London Times, Israel bombed selected targets in Syria said to be nuclear-related. More here, and here (hat tip, insta).

Sounds good to me. Although, I hope they took more care with their WMD intelligence than we did in Iraq. They might not've - they're rumored to also torture for intelligence.

Pournelle Grumble: Against Freedom

During the Cold War, a competition between a coalition headed by a great democracy and a coalition headed by a big oligarchy, Jerry Pournelle's heart was on the other side in a real way. He was a very conservative science fiction writer and computer columnist. Mind you, he didn't want the Commies to win. No, his foolishness was of a different kind. He was against freedom.

He always labeled his writings as coming from Chaos Manor, which I think is a pretty good metaphor for how he thought. He thought of himself as being upper class, and always facing perpetual battle for order. He, I think, wished he lived in a state that valued order over freedom. When he read classics, his heart was with the Spartans, an unfree oligarchic state, like the Soviets, Chinese, and Eastern Europe of the time. I'm reminded that I want to do this grumble by reading about an ancient war in which...a coalition headed by a great democracy and a coalition headed by a big oligarchy were at war. Sound familiar?

His novels featured a world in which the US and Soviets got together to oppress the world together, with the excuse of preventing nuclear war. Nevermind that no CoDominium was needed to prevent nuclear war in real life. Nevermind that in the real US, voters would've tossed any politians suggesting such an idea maybe even BEFORE the next election; he was pretty lonely in that idea. Alot of rights and R&D were put under strict control in his novels.

The real US armed forces of today already have enough technological improvement over the military we see in action in a star-spanning power in his books to be able to whip that one with one hand tied behind its smaller-numbered back. It doesn't have so many missiles, and, well, the missile automation and doctrine are from the 70s.....

In his books, only conservatives are able to think of moderate policies. We see alot of ex-cons settling new planets; in his books, ex-cons can never create anything constructive, only threaten. I guess in his world, one of my favorite pizza places would be impossible, run by an ex-con who said he'd learned a lesson; he'd certainly learned self-discipline. And the Secret Service, at least, seemed to agree, because it was also one of their favorite pizza places, too.

Eventually, the CoDominium breaks up in some way, and, of course that results in nuclear war (?why?). In the books, A planet settled by conservatives called Sparta takes control with the aid of the former US/USSR space fleet, and imposes a monarchy on the human race (nevermind that the REAL Sparta distrusted monarchy).

Their excuse for repressing humanity is that they're preventing big wars like the one that took Earth, nevermind that they've destroyed several planetary populations to save them; I'm just not getting it, anymore than I get that the British monarchy had to have control of North America.

In the best book in the series, The Mote In God's Eye, coauthored by Larry Niven, we see the Empire worrying intensely about competition from outies, planets outside the Empire. We see a democratic rebel planet population entirely destroyed. And they're right - it'd only take a couple of democratic planets maybe fifty years to develop enough technology to end the Empire.

In that book, we see a system of a Parliament and Emperor presiding over an imperial hierarchy. The Emperor, though seemingly living under some kind of constitution, clearly has alot more power than, say, any British King since the Glorious Revolution.

Lest you think that's just fiction, and not how he feels, not so long ago, he 'fessed up to wishing our democracy would be hacked, on the occasion of a court proceeding going against a border vigilante. He was smart enough to take that post down, though.

This is the grumble I should've written instead of my 300 review grumble. I was projecting Pournelle's views onto rather more people. It is, I think, fair to put Victor Davis Hanson in the Sparta-loving during the Cold War pot, but there's no evidence that it is or was a popular view.

Open Thread: What's The Most Disappointing Library You've Seen?

Runner-Up: In NE Austin, a magnificent edifice, looking moderately big. Inside, it has...nothing, really. It's about as sparse as a library gets. Shouldn't they've spent the bux on books instead of architecture? They did at the branch near me (though that isn't open so often).

Worst: Topkapi Palace, Istanbul (the Ottoman Imperial Palace). It has a fairly big building as a library, even more magnificent, since it's in a palace. But it has only a few bookshelves. None of the walls have shelves; it uses translucent wall panels for lighting. And there are no freestanding shelves, just shelves on the interior wall. I guess Kings, princes, and princesses didn't need many books? Did the courtiers have the real collections?

Have Any Demagogues Reached The US Presidency?

After rereading a bit about a war lost by a democracy electing two demagogues in a row (Cleon and Alcibiades, in the Peloponnesian War), now I'm wondering if our federal system has protected us against that. Clearly, we aren't protected against duffer mistakes.

So, can you think of any demagogic Presidents?

This thread's gonna be boring and only entertain suggestions 50 or more years ago, because it's impossible to be fair after that.

A Farewell to Alms? Fat Chance

I'm pretty skeptical of the primary notion in yet another book I haven't read, that Anglo cultural virtues were mostly spread by inheritance. This post is an inspired by Tyler Cowen's enthusiasm for the book.

All the evidence I've seen suggests descendants that rich families are likely to largely demonstrate worse saving and discipline skills than their contemporaries, simply because they have a choice. Especially by the third generation. The first generation, of course, has good skills because that's how they got there. But the rest? No.

George Bush demonstrated his lack of saving skills to the entire nation for the first six years of his term. Right up until he lost a major election. He has only just now issued his first veto threat to try and contain spending. And it was the same thing with Kings - the founder of a dynasty would usually be financially parsimonious and good at raising money, but later generations would put their realms in hock.

And there's evidence this situation was worse still in Georgian England, the period when the Industrial Revolution was started, than today. If you've ever read any Jane Austen or other period novels, you will have run across the social expectation that the upper-class mustn't work. The objective was to live off a set sum/year. If you didn't already have a fortune, you could get it by marrying well or brown-nosing elder relatives. Creating more yourself was strictly off. Hardly an, er, model major entrepreneur.

Yes, it's true in today's society that there's no shortage of entrepreneurs who inherited their wealth - the minority that DO have the right skills have capital to more easily start a bigger business, have better connections via their family, and can afford a failure or two. But most businesses start without wealthy founders.

Muslims For Peace

Muslims in Austin held a rally Tuesday to show their opposition to Muslim terrorists.

So, if you ever wonder, where are the moderate Muslims speaking out against terror, there's one answer.

Some Skepticism About the Obesity Epidemic

What they said.

UPDATE: The Profesora reminded to link again to junkfoodscience, which is dedicated to bad food and obesity science, and noting bad results thereof. Current top story:

[in the UK] three more children have been taken away from their parents and put into government care...because they are "too" fat.

Gen Petraeus' Slides

Petraeus' slides.

Some good data here - I recommend 'em. They show numbers on every important aspect of the security situation. Unlike his boss and predecessors, he doesn't seem to be ignoring important data that I can think of.

I'm not surprised to see the extra troops coming back; I always thought the big failing was that the troops were being held back from actually occupying or securing anything rather than troop levels. IMHO, Petraeus has been paying attention to conditions in Iraq instead of fashionable views of Iraq from the White House or Pentagon.

After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates

Peter Magnusson has pointed out that farming has stopped being the biggest category of job people on the planet do ( slashdot thread). It's because people have been slowly getting more and more efficient at growing things. Fewer and fewer people or acres are needed to make more and more food. Yes, acres are being retired every year from farming, considerably raising the amount of unused land in the US. I haven't checked global stats to see if farming retirement exceeds greater usage from population growth worldwide.

This certainly doesn't mean there's danger of not having enough farmers to grow things. No, efficiency will continue to rise. If a crisis of some sort arises, we'll see prices rise enough to tempt people and ex-farmland back to work.

As recently as 200 years ago, a smart man, one Jefferson, couldn't imagine the United States ever going mostly industrial, much less beyond that.

Progress has been decidedly uneven - the US employs 1/20th (OK, that's probably wrong because of illegal immigration, but even with that it's a small %age) of its workforce to make a huge and pretty varied food surplus, while the world as a whole needs 36% of its labor force to make decidedly less good meals for most of itself.

One reason for this is that there are more and more jobs, especially in the advanced democracies, that make farming look bad-paying and with terribly hard labor conditions - long hours and terrible uncertainty. They pay better because they make higher-value things like computers, software, and movies. There's more overall money/person in services (software and movies are counted as servies) than in industry, and more per person in industry than in farming. Of course, it's not quite that simple - there are plenty of people making more money in farming than in cold-calling services, for example.

And, alas, World Hunger is still very much with us. There is no sign of distribution becoming COMPLETELY global, nor of grinding poverty vanishing (though both problems are diminishing).

More About the Dalai Lama

The recent Chinese regulation on reincarnation seems to've inspired Robert Farley to do a Deposed Monarch Blog on the Dalai Lama.

Bremer On Dissolving Old Iraqi Army

True, but only part of the story.

He should also have been thinking about what kinds of problems this would cause and done it more thoughtfully. The Army should've been dismissed piecemeal, and other jobs made available to each dismissed piece in turn.

Also, he should've had our Army get out off its Green Zone duff to handle security until the Iraqi security forces were ready and had proven themselves. I mean, I always thought that was occupations were about....

Part of the problem seems to be that Bremer and other American military leaders appear to me to have accepted sheiks' and other leaders' assurances that they would keep order. That, of course, neglaected the questions of (1) whether individuals on their turf would see it as order (ethnic cleansing and protection rackets are orderly to the shieks, certainly, but unacceptable for our purposes), (2) how many bullets would go whizzing in turf wars, and (3) that extremists could come to occupy alot of turf without control, enough to make political progress hard because now they own Parliamentary seats.

All that should especially have occurred to him after seeing Baghdad a daily mess of firefights.

I agree with his article as far as it goes because Hitler used the old, pro-authoritarian German Army and Staff as a major tool to come to power. Plus, authoritarian armies often get in the habit of going around and collecting mordida.

Open Thread: Yay, Real Football's Back!

Think Indy will make it to the final round of playoffs this year?

From Craig to Gay GOP love triangle murder-suicide, or Political Death By Pinking Shears

This is chinese water torture, gay style, for the GOP.
Regarding Senator Craig - after today's revelations regarding his idiotic usage of a simple answering machine I'm sure the GOP is hoping that now he will accept his fate and move into obscurity and the sooner the better.
But waiting in the wings is yet another gay Republican scandal and this one may hurt even more, depending on what details win out in the news cycle.

As reported a week ago in northcarolinaconservative.com

and in the local news station channel 6:

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. -- A prominent Republican Party consultant is one of three men found dead in a Central Florida home Thursday in an apparent double murder-suicide possibly sparked by a lovers' quarrel, according to detectives. A woman's out-of-state phone call requesting a well-being check on a friend led Orange County sheriff's deputies to the bodies of Ralph Gonzalez, David Abrami and Robert Drake Thursday.

All three men are connected to GOP politics according to the northcarolinaconservative.com article. Ralph Gonzalez was a GOP political consultant who, among other things, managed FL Congressman Tom Feeny’s 2002 campaign. Abrami lived with Gonzalez, but that doesn't imply that Abrami was gay. Robert Drake is more interesting. He's apparently connected to a gay escort service called BOISRUS (I'm NOT going to link it). He's also connected with NC Rep. Congressman Patrick McHenry who's got quite an anti-gay voting record but one look at his picture and my gay-dar went off the screen. How many closets are left to open?

Hilarious note. As a careful watcher of Craig's first press conference the one thing that brought me to the floor was the KBOI ad on a panel truck that slowly drove by near the end of his statement.

Stalin, though interesting, is depressing. This is much juicier. It's even better than Bat Boy!

Robert Novak just wrote an article regarding the pessimism within the GOP party regulars.
Add this to the mix and stir in the dollar amounts that democrats are getting vs. the republicans and and you have to wonder what else is going to happen.

oh, yeah, more Abramoff.

More crime info at

http://crimeblog.us/?p=536#more-536

this is a rather convoluted blog by someone who has a lot of time on his hands, but entertaining.

This post is for entertainment purposes only.

Stalin, Great Statesman?

It's sad how often biographers come to identify with and idolize those they're studying. Think that happens before or after the study? Hat tip, Megan McArdle.

Problems for Tibetan Buddhist Hierarchalists Ahead?

The Dalai Lama says he wants to follow the example of the Jewish faith in exile, and continue its existence in exile.

But, you know, Tibetan Buddhism is hierarchical. There are figures equivalent to the Pope, going in a pyramid down to the lowly worshipers. Now, the Jewish faith started terribly hierachical, and has ended up pretty nearly unheirarchical. There no longer is any equivalent of a Bishop or Pope, nor will there ever be, because you can't put long-fled birds back into bags.

From my point of view, Jews and Judaism has had much more influence after the Diaspora than it ever did when the Temple was still up. Part of that is simply that Jews inevitably meet far more people now than when mostly in one or two countries. Another part is that many Jews had to face horror and death constantly, and thus had to be on their toes.

But, to me, at least as big is that, because hierarchs couldn't simply impose their will at pain of torture or death anymore, Jewish rabbis and religious scholars had to start thinking to gain mindshare, and, what's more, they could without said penalties, and they did. Even many Jewish peasants gained an interest and respect for reading and thoughtful argument, and did as much of both as their host authorities and circumstances permitted. They still do.

For similar reasons, Zen Buddhism, the ultimate in individualistic faiths, has, I think, been more successful in the West than hierarchical Buddhisms. Will we see big populations of Tibetans in free countries turn to Zen and/or a nonhierachical mutation of Tibetan Buddhism?

I was reminded that I wanted to do this post by this post on China requiring permission for reincarnation, which I thought was some of the funniest news I'd heard in awhile. Yeah, yeah, probably China will try to produce its own Dalai Lama who's filled out all the paperwork nicely and is a nice Chinese Communist. But who will believe, since he's already said he's going to reincarnate outside China? Too slow, way too slow, China.

South Vietnam Stabbed, Huh? Evidence, Please?

This post is grumbling about the belief extant that South Vietnam was seen as legitimate, had popular support when we ended support, and thus the Vietnamese were stabbed by US withdrawal, as expressed here.

The insurgency in Vietnam was dead by 1971, thanks to South Vietnam's armed forces, America's forces, and a South Vietnamese civilian population that overwhelmingly viewed the South Vietnamese government as legitimate.

The insurgency was dead by '71? The VC don't seem to've agreed.

Great-mileage EU Diesel Cars Aren't Making it to Our Shores

Why aren't good-mileage EU diesel cars making it to the U.S.?

This seems to me like a more important, much easier, and more immediately fast and practical way of making cars with better gas mileage on the streets than higher CAFE standards. What gives?

Not only have they been shown to work in Europe, but the bugs've already been worked out. Some diesels available in Europe, but not here include VW's Polo Blue Motion and Lupo 3L, Honda's 3L, and a ton of others.