Joel Klotkin, writing in the journal of the American Enterprise Institute discusses the relative outlooks of the Blue and Red State models, terms he uses as shorthand not only to describe a cultural divide, but also an economic outlook. Klotkin argues that the core ethos of the Blue State economic model is the notion that future economic growth will come largely from knowledge-based or “creative” industries. From that comes a vision in which the stereotypical Blue State man, gliding to work in a pollution free environment from which noisome Red State activities have been driven out, inhabits campus-like idea workplaces kept clean and absolutely safe by hordes of public employees. The Blue State economic model sees itself as the engine of economic growth, on which the Red State Model has been leeching to pay for its outmoded and sentimental attachment to things like the Armed Forces, church picnics and NASCAR races, when what is needed is more government services, cap and trade and better music. As he puts it:
Today two principles now drive the political economy of the blue states—and so shape the Obama administration today. The first one is the relentless expansion of public sector employment and political power. Although traditional progressives such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Fiorello La Guardia, and Pat Brown built up government employment, they never contemplated the growth of public employee unions that have emerged so powerfully since the 1960s. …
The only way to pay for these expenditures rests on the second key blue economic principle—the notion of an ever expanding high-end “creative economy.” This conceit is based on the notion that tangible things matter little and that, as former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly put it, “communication is the economy.”
AdvertisementNew York pioneered the idea that the economy could depend totally on the efforts of the talented few, mostly those on Wall Street but also those in the media and other “creative” industries. This formula has been widely accepted since New York Mayors John Lindsay and Ed Koch allowed New York City’s public sector to expand, often with borrowed money.
The only problem, according to Klotkin, is the increasing evidence that the Blue State economic model isn’t subsidizing anything at all. In fact, it can barely pay its own way. “While state and local budget crises have extended to some red states, the most severe fiscal and economic basket cases largely are concentrated in places such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, and, perhaps most vividly of all, California. The last three have among the highest unemployment rates in the country; all the aforementioned are deeply in debt and have been forced to impose employee cutbacks and higher taxes almost certain to blunt a strong recovery.” People are fleeing Blue States in such numbers that they could actually see their Congressional delegations shrink.
Nothing daunted, Klotkin argued the Blues hoped Obama would put the hinterland in its place and thereby reverse their long decline, only to find him transplanting the Chicago Way to Washington and building an ultra-Blue inner circle which treated them like conquered rubes. He writes:
many in the true blue states greeted Barack Obama’s election like the coming of a Messiah who would redress these serious problems. After all, it is widely believed in blue states that the red-state barbarians had looted the Treasury for their clients in the energy, industrial, home-building, pharmaceutical, and defense industries. Now the blue states, and their industries, would get payback. A vast expansion of public infrastructure, more emphasis on basic industry, and incentives for new entrepreneurial ventures could now help rapidly declining areas in the blue states. … The financial bailout reflects one part of this. Money lavished on bankers and lawyers, most of them in New York and Chicago, represents relief to what is now a core Obama constituency. Indeed the whole Troubled Asset Relief Program mechanism is being run by what Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, has described as a “wonderfully closed circle.”
Klotkin’s piece is perceptive, but a little too pat. Things cannot be so neatly divided into two categories. The economy interlocks in many ways. And all industries, not only the creative industries, are knowledge driven to a large degree. It is doubtful whether very many people walk around thinking of themselves as Blue or Red Men. But to the extent to which a set of interests corresponding to “Blueness” and “Redness” exist, they may be acting like attractors dividing the body politic. In other words, Blue and Red are serving as organizing principles which are splitting things apart. The strangeness of the Presidencies of the last 16 years may be due to the fact they were an incomplete portrait, like an RGB (Red Green Blue) color model image from either R or B was always missing at any one time. Obama pitched his candidacy with the subliminal promise that he would “fix” things. But instead of dissipating the attractors and restoring the color model, Obama has subtracted yet one more color from the picture: green. And now the picture may vanish altogether. The real insight of the Klotkin’s piece, I think, is not its categories of Red and Blue but how it highlights the political forces that have been subtracting cohesion from the entire system, causing a gradual divergence, to the point where each has interests of its own. One way to reverse this trend is to reform the rules in such a way that the game becomes non-zero sum again; so that not only will the welfare of the Blues and the Reds increase together, but depend on each other. Klotkin paints this picture of alienation in the Bluest of states: California.
Perhaps the most searing disaster is unfolding in the rich Central Valley. Large areas are about to be returned to desert—due less to a mild drought than to regulations designed to save obscure fish species in the state’s delta. Over 450,000 acres have been allowed to go fallow. Nearly 30,000 agriculture jobs—mostly held by Latinos—were lost just in May. Unemployment, 17 percent across the Central Valley, reaches to more than 40 percent in some towns such as Mendota.
“We are getting the sense some people want us to die,” notes native son Tim Stearns, a professor of entrepreneurship at California State University at Fresno. “It’s kind of like they like the status quo and what happens in the Central Valley doesn’t matter. These are just a bunch of crummy towns to them.”
Kevin Kelly‘s ideas, I think, get short-changed in the quotation. He understood that wisdom came in small packets from everywhere. “Dumb parts, properly constituted into a swarm, yield smart results. The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness. The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment.” Politicians, in order to survive, are network-breakers; manufacturers of identities. But for the foreseeable future changing the game will not be on the agenda. There’s too much political potential in serving niche markets, whether they are crummy towns, creative centers or the Windy City. Maybe there will be one or two more election cycles of politics as usual before the really basic issues are discussed. Perhaps Barack Obama’s greatest contribution will have been to erase so much of the picture that there will be nothing for it but to imagine a new one.
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Whiskey commented, in the ‘Nothing half so melancholy’ post: ” . . . at heart Obama’s struggle is not a foreign invasion but the civil war between the elites who loathe and despise their native peoples, and the native peoples.”
In ‘Gulliver’s Travels, Book III, Jonathan Swift describes Laputa (think-land), a floating island on which the ruling, elite, scientific intelligentia live. The inhabitants have one eye skewed upwards and one inwards. (They have a hard time communicating with each other, for sure.) Their floating island lives off of the production of the peasants working the land below. If the peasants revolt, the Laputians position their floating island to interdict the sunlight, or, for drastic measures, lower the island to crush the peasants.
The floating island is Britain and the land below Ireland. But the story is also a frightening allegory of the relationship between the knowledge class/government and the working class, or even between ‘blues’ and ‘reds.’
Maybe something like Catholic social doctrine, including concepts of subsidiarity and ‘widening circles of prosperity’ will gain some traction as a coherent way to think about the common good. But since that doctrine is about government working to promote the well-being of individuals and not about growing the government, our Laputians have no use for it.
You guys/gals remember when “blue” was conservative? Back in Bush Jr’s 1st election?
Who changed all that?
I wonder if a physic mixed of cold, dark and hungry would expunge wrongful blue attitudes? If the Morlocks giveth, when the Morlocks taketh away…?
Mark,
Your allusion to Gulliver’s Travels reminds me of another excellent example in this genre.
It is the movie, Fantastic Planet. In it, blue Aliens keep little humans as pets. But, one day, one of the pets steals the Blues’ encyclopedic head-set and a revolution occurs.
Cool, prescient stuff, and, if memory serves me correctly, the entire animated film was hand-drawn and colored, and it was produced in Czechoslovakia at the height of the Cold War: both are noteworthy achievements on their own.
I highly recommend this film, especially to teen-agers bumping up against politics for their first time. Next to Orwell’s essays, and many, many others, Fantastic Planet is an essential prophylactic for dangerous times.
-Steve
907/2; i noticed that too –i figured it was the MSM running away from a ‘left’ and ‘red’ identification. It happened with the electoral maps the big news orgs published, and the shorthand i.d. grew quickly from there.
wretchard, kudos for an excellent post. Esp. the visual, the removal of G leaving no picture at all, and that that default to a ‘new frame’ (a ‘back to the future’ fo sho) may be this admin’s historical role to-be. That’s gonging the big bell, and nicely put, with the mental picture and all.
(by all means read the Kotkin piece, but i can’t resist quoting the opening:)
On the surface this should be the moment the Blue Man basks in glory. The most urbane president since John Kennedy sits in the White House. A San Francisco liberal runs the House of Representatives while the key committees are controlled by representatives of Boston, Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and the Bay Area—bastions of the gentry.
Despite his famous no-blue-states-no-red-states-just-the-United-States statement, more than 90 percent of the top 300 administration officials come from states carried last year by President Obama. The inner cabinet—the key officials—hail almost entirely from a handful of cities, starting with Chicago but also including New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area.
907ie, I’ve wondered the same thing. The color scheme from GHWB (blue) v. Clinton (red) stuck with me since the party that so often took offense to being dismissed as marxists/communists (similar to how they protested for the past eight years that their patriotism was being questioned) would be labeled by the whole media as ‘red’. Then, I believe it was the ’96 election, the color schemes were reversed (and became cemented in place after the 2000 election). But I’ve wondered if there was a story behind this earlier change.
steveaz,
“Prophylactics for teenagers” sounds like a blog entry designed to generate traffic.
The test of Klotkin’s theory should be the fate of Google. Will it stagnate as the Red state economies wither under Obama’s assaults and they discover that no Red states means no customers and no customers means no income? Will Google drown in the breakdown of public order and loss of services caused by the implosion of the Blue state model that nurtured it? Will they have to move? If so where to, China?
California was a microcosm of the national dichotomy. They choose to eliminate the jobs in oil production, defense, and agriculture that had paid for the universities and the media markets. Even the great incubator of Liberalism the film industry was built by hard headed Republican businessmen. The growth of the fantasy that wealth could be separated from production and intellectual activities such as writing and acting were sufficient is a conceit that can be traced to the breakup of the studio system. Another unintended consequence of the anti-trust suit of 1948, see US v Paramount Pictures.
W – “Perhaps Barack Obama’s greatest contribution will have been to erase so much of the picture that there will be nothing for it but to imagine a new one.” I for one will never forgive Bush and McCain for giving our country away to those who contested it and promoting fear and shame over the government manufactured financial crisis. How dare they shout fire in a crowded movie theater when their pronouncements were merely meant to confess their own culpability for a poorly run government? They then threw the rest of their battered supporters to the wolves of anti-American sentiment, the viral Left. Thanks guys.
““We are getting the sense some people want us to die,”
They do. You are occupying their land and your offspring will compete with theirs. Have you considered abortion? Maybe getting yourself fixed, how ‘bout euthanasia? It really is better this way.
BTW, here is the trailer for Fantastic Planet, the whole thing is up on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E
The ruminations are always there to listen to. It is the vastness of the problems that confront. Why is it that the tracks of the train of history can only be seen from the caboose and then even the focus is changing.
The solutions are difficult and as complex as the people who create them. The people in the train vote to change the engineer now and then but the tracks weave through the border states. As we go forward one can see the ghosts of those past politicians who laid out the bridges and the trackbeds. They really did not know enough about the train to design the best margins or the best routes.
Somewhere in that train a group must choose to slow the train enough that the framework and track can be made practicable before the train gets there.
If the passengers look out the side window they can see the other wrecks on the side of the railbed. Its only when the engineer drives through the night blinded sky that those who might have seen cannot. May the Belmont Club serve as the headlight on the Northbound train for soon I fear that cold Colorado rain will be falling.
“We see a dozen dreams in every passing mile.
Can’t begin to count the trips that she and I have made,
But I wish I had a dollar for each time we’ve both been down this grade.
900,000 tons of steel, made to roll.
The brakes don’t work and this grade’s so steep, her engine’s sure to blow.
900,000 tons of steel, out of control…
She’s more a rollercoaster than the train I used to know.
It’s one hell of an understatement, to say she can’t get mean.
She’s tempermental, more a bitch than a machine.
She wasn’t built to travel at the speed a rumor flies,
These wheels are bound to jump the tracks before they burn the ties
900,000 tons of steel, made to roll.
The brakes don’t work and this grade’s so steep, her engine’s sure to blow
900,000 tons of steel, out of control…
She’s more a rollercoaster than the train I used to know.”
– Grateful Dead “Tons of Steel”
steveaz: I note with interest that the name of the film in French is La Planete Sauvage, The Savage Planet.
Two other interesting articles on this subject have been written by City Journal’s Steven Malanga:
The Real Engine of Blue America
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_blue_america.html
Anti-Business States Awash In Red Ink
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/08/antibusiness_states_awash_in_r.html
Re: Why the Dems are “blue” and the GOP is “red” (see #2 and #5 above)
There is a much simpler explanation for the switch: Mnemonics. My guess is that it eventually occurred to someone that red, right and Republican all begin with the same letter, and thus would make more sense (and be easier to remember) used together. Granted, this mnemonic device doesn’t work with blue, left and Democrat, but that obviously was no barrier to it catching on.
For anyone interested, I’ve written two pieces recently on water power in California. The first piece discusses the oil seeps off santa barbara & deep sea water desalination further south. The second piece discusses this summer’s paradigm shift toward toward algae oil and the role of algae oil in funding deep water desalination
Andrew Jackson said, “Our happiness and prosperity essentially depend upon peace within our borders, and peace depends upon the maintenance in good faith of those compromises of the Constitution upon which the Union is founded.” The peace he speaks of is between the abolitionist and the slave owners. The compromise he speaks of is slavery. BHO and his elite cadre are driven by redistribution by any means. Sixty acres and a mule was just not sufficient plus Jim Crow must be avenged, what other meaning is taken from Michelle O’s dissatisfaction of her country – until now. Why all the open-ended countermeasures of stimulus and health care, he is just not ready to use the proper term – reparations. Those “creative” industries most to prosper from a massive reparation, Goldman Sachs, Citicorp and others in within the circle of influence. So a few auto dealerships and some retail shops go away, it’s for the better good and one of our own will pick up the slack. What of the redneck class, give them forty acres, we still need our arugula.
If I remember correctly, David Brooks in an Atlantic article around 2000, came up with the Blue-Red divide.
Red would have been obvious because of its socialistic connotation, but he wanted to avoid that – too loaded.
IMHO that’s unfortunate because the Blue states really are moving toward Socialism.
Charles, thanks for those links. I’ll read and also include them in my next round of Twitter updates over at Twitter.com/starlingdavid.
yes, thanks, charles –will save & read with interest –
I think wretchard is spot on with his take that Obama is catalyzing fragmentation of the polity instead of the unity that he campaigned on. Of course, Mr. Obama may have meant by unity that we would eventually all be coerced into thinking one way – his way.
The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments codified a change in the relationship of the citizen to the polity by making us all, first, citizens of the United States. FDR perhaps irrevocably set that relationship on towards it logical conclusion of a United States that was really just a federal government with 50 political subdivisions.
Between successive Supreme Court’s expansive interpretations of the Commerce Clause and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act individual states are forced to play a weak second fiddle to Washington’s tune. There are some hints that the 10th Amendment may not forever be as 18th Century as our Progressive friends would have us believe.
When you get down to it the 10th Amendment is the only practical bulwark against continuing Federal intrusions on individual liberty. Only a state has the power and authority to stand up and say no mas to the Feds.
“New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, and, perhaps most vividly of all, California”
Hey, let’s not slight Wisconsin. We voted for Obama and Dems now control the governorship and both houses of the legislature. On a per capita basis, our cluster f**k is right up there with California.
BTW – I have no problem with the modern “knowledge industries”. It’s the Blue state model of governance that will drive us from our beloved Wisc. Hello Whiskey – here I come.
And finally, Blindman, gotta love those Grateful Dead songs with a railroad theme.
“Switchman’s sleeping, train hundred and two is on the wrong track and headed for you.”
– Grateful Dead “Casey Jones”
Well whiskey is right about one thing: it is going to be one faction or the other.
Third way approaches, Christian socialist approaches, Soft Socialism–all of these will not work. Not one of them. We have had a various times some thing like this in form or ideal. That is why we are here at this crisis in the first place.
There is no Third Way. Christian socialism–or any kind of socialism–will not work. This is the signal lesson of the last century. The welfare state must be abandoned. Collectivism must be overturned. Government must radically be reduced and the money put back into the hands of citizens that can create real wealth, take real responsibility and be truely “creative”. We must return to the faiths and the principles of our fathers, and relearn their hard-won lessons. There is not a shiny “new solution”. There is not some marvelous “synthesis” to be had. There is capitalism, the creative labor of the indivdual protected by the tenants of classical liberalism as outlined in our Constitution, personal responsibility. limited government, the rule of law and the principles and beliefs of the Judeo-Christian heritage. That is it.
One can talk all about “blue state economies” but they are just Ponzi schemes–TARP being a glaring example. The Blues staters are wrong to imagine that “that the red-state barbarians had looted the Treasury”. It is they who loot the treasury. The whole construct is one of narcissistic denial. It is a laughable notion altogether. Our tolerance of them is just the problem.
We have had little out of this new “creative knowledge worker” who has been touted as our savior. Google? It is a shadow of what Bell Labs has produced. It is merely an elaborate ad revenue engine. Many of their core technical contributions are merely the commercial application of concepts developed elsewhere. And even here it is one of the few that survived the tech bubble. It is absurd to imagine that their search engine or their computing cloud is the pinnacle of scientific or technical achievement. If this is the best we can do, then we are fooling ourselves. Long before we had this current impasses we had a great many “creative knowledge workers”, and they mostly worked in private industry, and they were hardly concentrated in the “blue state”.
Indeed, our “scientific community”, particularly in Academia, has merely become another special interest client of the state. Their very rationale for existence has become compromised, not to mention their reputation and integrity. There is so much scientific hogwash on campuses these days, at least in my field, that a great many papers have about the same value has deconstructionist papers coming out of the English departments. Film, the Media, the “Arts”? Pathetic. A menace to personal and public culture and virtue. Finance? Well now we know about that. Okay, we get some good web site design.
It is all just vanity. It is a false economy based on state thievery, snug disregard for self examination, mediocrity and an an absurd believe in elite institutions and credentials. It is a sort of spiritual adolescence. It cannot last, not even with the enslavement of all of the Red States.
We must get over the idea that these people are the best and the brightest. That they are “smart”, that they are “creative”. They are only creative to the extent that they use their gifts to rationalize away their thievery and mediocrity. It is no wonder that they adore Obama: He is their very manifestation and avatar.
Either sanity is brought to bear or the Cold Civil War turns into a hot one, and pronto.
What needs to torn down is the New Deal and all its accretions. What needs to be “imagined anew” are the principles, practices and beliefs that built this nation.
saw this on Green’s Drunkblog last nite:
45. Habu:
I noted there has been no question why the senators,congressmen and executive branch have the platinum health plans provided. If his health
plan is so great it should surely include them to show their approval
He’s back
If reparations are the order of the day, then make the Democratic Party pay: it was the party of slavery; a branch of the party governed the Confederate States; The Copperheads were its members in the North; the KKK was the party’s militant wing; the Jim Crow laws were its policies;and, in North Carolina, in 1878, the Democrat Party with its armed thugs took over and drove out a Republican municipal government.
We could also discuss reparations for white slavery in this nation that started before black slavery.
absurd believe-absurd belief
Blue and Red populations and their representatives seem to have increasingly little to say to each other. I notice it everyplace…on blogs, in casual conversation, and of course in the debate over Obama’s proposed health care plan and the cap and trade deal. Even on Facebook, when politics come up among “friends”, the contenders talk past each other, no minds are changed, there is no room for compromise…just increasingly vehement disagreement.
I wonder how much longer this bird flies? I think when you come right down to it, Blue and Red want a divorce. The whole idea is usually quickly dismissed, mostly I think because of all the baggage associated with the Civil War. But a divorce beats another possibility…Spain 1936.
21: Mongoose, very well said!
Google was offered a chance to fund what may very well be the energy source that will save the world:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
They turned it down. No matter:
We Will Know In Two Years
Re: the blue & red color scheme.
Seems to me the explanation I heard was blue was always used to represent the incumbent party’s candidate and red was the out of power’s party candidate. So in on November 7, 2000 this was W – Red Gore – Blue. However, the W v Gore count went on so long people and the press started characterizing Blue & Red as associated with the Democrats and Red as Republican and never broke out of that mindset.
Now, as to the meat of the post.
One telling tale is even Republicans/Conservatives in the “blue” states will resort to this stereotype. A Facebookie of mine appears to the a Martha Stewart mom and married to a guy who pulls in big bucks (no whammies). She is very much of this mindset that the interior of the nation is sucking off of their money and would be totally nowheresville w/o the coasts. I asked her where her fancy food comes from and she sniffed they can grow food locally. HA! I’ld love to see the likes of them engage in large scale food production that allows them to support their Martha Stewart lifestyle.
Another story involved the wife of a colleague of mine. She works for some firm in Green Bay and this company has a branch office in New York City. She called some person in that office to jump on someone for not following through with the proper paperwork and that person sniffed back “We are the creative people, you do the paperwork!”.
Of course, Florence King notes on the number of conservatives who are horrified by Brit-Comms, PBS, and classical music.
That is the role that Sarah Palin is in the anti-Obama. Obama is the distillation of the slick urbane hipster and Sarah is the distillation of the down home local country way,
#10 Blindmna I know you rider! Thanks bud your comment gave me the goosebumps!
El Jefe:
An actual civil war requires two paries who are willing to engage in combat. The blue state “knowledge” workers are incapable of acts of self defense. The civil war would be very short and not very bloody as the red state “barbarians” brandish their 9mms in the faces of the blue faction and they go into an immediate fetal position.
Regarding the origins of the ‘Blue/Red’ thing.
It started in the six-week long election mayhem of Bush vs. Gore in November of 2000. Basically, by coincidence or design, all but one or maybe two of the big six (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC) had an elctoral map that used blue for Democrat and red for Republican. (Probably those working there just felt blue was “cooler” and thus used it, given their leanings.)
There was nothing particularily unique or different about that at first. But here is the key…. those maps were in our faces for six straight weeks in an extremely visible and highly emotionally charged manner. The events were profoundly branding and divisive in an almost tribal manner. There was so much writing and analyis and discussion, that journalists and pundits began to simply refer to the maps and “red states and blue states” as a shorthand colliquism.
Thus it stuck. There is really no specific record of “Blue States” and “Red states” prior to November of 2000, there very much was afterwords.
(It is worth mentioning that FOX was not one the networks using red for Republican, and blue for Democrat. They went the other way around. Draw what conclusions you will from that.)
Politicians, in order to survive, are network-breakers; manufacturers of identities.
Exactly. This can be positive. This can be negative.
Richard Nixon, to his credit, used the reference “Silent Majority” to describe people who opposed the Left but weren’t out there in the streets.
Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized against Jim Crow by being open to help from people who weren’t black. This, as opposed to those who advocated “Black Power”. When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We cannot walk alone,” he wasn’t advancing collectivism or opposing the idea of individual action, but was rather opposing black separatists who wanted to exclude people who were not black from participating in the movement.
Sometimes the principal prize in a war is the privilege of naming it. One obvious example is the Civil War. It also has been called “The War Between the States”, “The War of Northern Aggression”, “The War of Southern Insurrection”, and “A Rich Man’s War and a Poor Man’s Fight”. The different titles to the same war define the war very differently. No Confederate official would regard his war as a “civil war” unless that meant making war on counties that seceded from the Confederacy; to him, it was an attempted war of independence.
Likewise, the ultimate prize of al-Qaeda’s war against us is the very name of the fight; al-Qaeda spreads a pack of lies claiming that we are “fighting against Islam”. In contrast, I see this fight as a defensive war against the tyranny of Muslim Fascists.
Perhaps what we call “Red” and “Blue” are really Cyan and Magenta. This is not a minor difference because that would mean the other two contributing colors would not be Green but would rather be Yellow and Black. CMYK is just as valid as RGB, and it is at least as common in printers.
Cyan is more apt than Blue; university towns may call themselves Blue, but they dream of being Green. In reality, they are Blue-Green, not truly Blue, but Cyan. And Cyan is less Blue than anti-Red. Magenta is more apt than Red; this isn’t red of a bleeding heart, but rather a staunch opposition to Green. These towns may be called Red but they dream of being Blue, Blue as in rich, powerful, and setting the cultural agenda of America; they see being Green as getting in the way of that dream. So, in reality, they are Red-Blue, not truly Red, but Magenta.
That leaves two other colors. Yellow and Black. Black is obvious; many Americans refuse to see the world in anything other than Black and White. It could refer to moral absolutes; it could refer to race. Whatever else can be said, Black exists. This leaves Yellow. Yellow of the Gadsden Flag. Yellow of the New Mexico flag. Perhaps Yellow of the infamous “yellow press”. Yellow, so often not regarded as part of America and yet so central to its historical identity. Yellow, so mysterious not because it is hides itself but rather because the powers that be try to act as if Yellow doesn’t exist.
Put Red, Green, and Blue together, and the resulting color is Black. Put Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black together, and the resulting color is White. The very labels one uses can shift the balance of power. The decision of whether to use RGB or CMYK may depend upon the resulting picture one desires to create.
I find that most of these “knowledge workers” know little about Classical music, BTW. Conservatives are much more knowledgeable, in my experience. It may be a function of age, however.
Mongoose,
Ever read the website “Stuff White People Like”? It lampoons the hipster mindset and one of the “Stuff White People Like” is classical music. However, it is noted this affinity is very superficial and more of putting on airs than genuinely liking it.
Florence King has her finger on something though. Classical music, the theater, and high art are often found in or associated with the cities. When Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance is playing I don’t envision scenes out of my window (wood lot, hay field, corn field, cows, etc) but I imagine a large city street with large numbers of people scurrying about. Not only the picture it paints but the piece itself evokes the feeling of being in the downtown of a large metro area.
The point Florence King is making though, is not a left/right thing, but the notion unless it is C/W music blaring out of your pickup truck and The Bill Engval show on your TV at night, you can not be conservative.
El Jefe: Though much depised by the Blue, I can conceive the Blue permitting the Red to secede, no more than I can imagine any other parasite welcoming separation from its host.
In my dreams I imagine a peaceful separation of the members of the population on either side of a diagonal line running from Northwest-to-Southeast or Northeast-to-Southwest. Each person could decide, by moving, to his preferred locale: the Blue Side where things would stay the way they are now, or the Red Side where there would be no welfare (beyond charitable giving) system, but instead de-regulation, major tort reform, and de-taxification. The precise location of the line would be determined by the fraction of the population choosing one side or the other.
The Red states would love it, the Blues would prevent it.
I dunno Marcus A…I’m listening to Haydn just at the moment (Paris Symphonies), I enjoy French restaurants, read plenty of books, watch foreign films sometimes, and I don’t watch much television, although I do like some country music.
But on the other hand, I live in Houston (a great place to be, in the reddest of states) I’m a paid-up NRA member, we own a pickup, some rural property, and I’ve never voted Left. I’m about as conservative politically as you get. Florence King’s always entertaining, but sometimes the stereotypes are wrong.
People are fleeing Blue States in such numbers that they could actually see their Congressional delegations shrink.
Not if ACORN is hired by the Census Bureau for the 2010 Census.
Who has confidence anymore in the probity of accountants of either heads or votes or money?
Ashcat India, Palestine, Korea that partitioning thing just doesn’t work to well.
#37…it worked pretty well with the Czechs and Slovaks, seems to be working out okay down the line as far as Croats, Slovenes and Serbs, after it was done, although not in Bosnia.
It works when (1) the parties to the split accept the concept — not the case with the US in 1861, with Korea, with Ireland in 1922, and with Vietnam earlier, or with Serbia in Yugoslavia early on, and arguibly with India as to Pakistan and also with Palestine (the Palestinians can’t accept the whole idea of Israel); (2) when the borders following the split are not disputed — usually that’s a problem with ethnic/religious partitions (Israel/Palestinian authority, Ireland again, Bosnia, Kashmir).
ashcat/34; The Red states would love it, the Blues would prevent it
…and there it is in a nutshell, the truth of the master/slave, or parasite/host relationship.
Also, to state the obvious, cities can’t live without the countryside, the countryside can do just fine without the cities. Maybe much better, even, once the markets adjust.
Sad to relinquish the semantic ground because in the military the blue force are the good guys and the red force is… well you know.
We have red team reviews to give us a third party outsider opinion. They typically offer constructive ridicule on programs that are near ready for completion. Usually from a devils advocate point of view.
El Jefe Maximo,
I sound very similar to you. Conservative politically (after a flirtation with the left in my college days), love classical music, this fall you may find me driving into the grouse woods with my 870 in the back of my suburban (or brother’s or father’s) listening to Rachmaninoff or very possibly the Grateful Dead. Either that or we’ll be cutting wood (need a couple cord for up north, and I am hoping to have three-four cord for home).
There is definitely a strain of conservatism that would recoil to certain aspects of that. Wait a minute, I’ll go and dig up the exact passage:
The anti-intellectual Left may depress me, but family quarrels being the fiercest, it takes the anti-intellectual Right to infuriate me. My particular betes noires are the moronic oxen known as “populist conservatives,” who turn hostile if you even let it be known that you enjoy public television. Opera and Britcoms set them off the most, prompting their favorite putdown, “The world’s richest man is a Harvard dropout.” http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Misanthrope%27s+Corner.-a078692101
From the Misanthrope’s Corner National Review October 1, 2001.
Mongoose is on a roll. To elaborate what he says about the difference between real, productive knowledge work and parasitical knowledge work, I’ll only mention what I think is a good read: David Novak’s “The Fire of Invention: Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation,” which is a paean to capitalism. It’s a collection of essays and short. I especially enjoyed Novak’s writing on Lincoln’s defence of and celebration of patent law, i.e. intellectual property and innovation.
I like the idea of El Jefe Maximo in a pickup truck, rifle on rack, listening to Haydn. My favorite part of Obama’s inauguration was the Yo-Yo Ma, Perlman, etc. performance, even if it was finger-synched. If Sarah Palin becomes president, I hope she brings them back for an encore. My biggest concern about her is that she probably doesn’t know who they are.
And by the way, check out Yo-Yo Ma’s new album of Ennio Morricone music. His performance of “The Good, the Bad, and Ugly” theme is special.
The great composers would have little truck with these Blue Staters and their pretensions. Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms–all a different order of man altogether. Great minds, great souls and great spirits. They are not of the same tribe of the modern “artist” befouling our cultural life or the “aesthete” poseur haunting Starbucks. They would know them for the faint-hearted decadents that they are.
They would not have minded selling them a few tickets, however.
Their beliefs mostly coincide with those of conservatives, particularly those of conservatives of faith. Some try to draft Beethoven into Rousseau’s sh!t-caked army, or try to make an atheist out of Brahms, but this all is just not so. Not a materialist or collectivist in the lot.
All of the money spend on “gifted programs” and on degrees has yet to produce anything like them.
A Glorius fruit of Christendom.
30. Andrew X:
“”Regarding the origins of the ‘Blue/Red’ thing.
It started in the six-week long election mayhem of Bush vs. Gore in November of 2000.
…
those maps were in our faces for six straight weeks in an extremely visible and highly emotionally charged manner. The events were profoundly branding and divisive in an almost tribal manner.”"
I retain the anger that I have towards former VP Al Gore. He and his blinded-by-desire minions put 300 million people through weeks of divisive commentary and honed the divide that now splits the country. *HE* made his personal desire for the presidency paramount.
Now, he wants to divide us into “Climate Change Believers” and “deniers”, perhaps not intentionally, [well, you never know], but divide us just the same. He admitted he exaggerated ‘facts’ to arouse emotions, and refuses to debate with a single person, hiding behind ‘consensus’ and ‘decided science’ shams.
That man is a trouble upon us all. Please tell him to go back to his mansion or houseboat, and stay there.
tom
Unfortunately, I live in a blue state. The only sort of work our governor and legislator appear to believe worth promoting are those requiring PhDs (stem cells, bio-research and similar) & those transporting the PhDs about (light rail).
Wisconsin is home to Mercury Marine, but may not be for too long as they are contemplating a consolidation move to Oklahoma, of course, no one seriously believes the move will be from OK to WI. Of course, that will only make the mood in Madison more business punitive and positively feedback.
907ie asked how did conservative states become linked to the color red and liberal states to the color blue? Go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states
Goose & marcus Jean Sibelius wrote under extreme nationalist verve under the threat of Russian domination of his beloved Finland, it reverberates in these times. Big bad Black the sound alone brings a smile, Oklahoma is good let them come.
El Jefe,
Yes, I certainly want a divorce. Am quite willing to give up the house (Wisc.), if the spouse (Blue State style governance) will just promise not to follow me to the new abode.
Pipe dream: Re-invigorated Federalism could allow us to go our separate ways (to some degree) without a reprise of the Civil War. Sort of like a friendly trial separation. You Blue Staters are so smart? Fine, you run your states the way you want; just stop tormenting us!
Ahh, other Florence King fans –and classical music fans –ahh, ahhh, ahhhh.
Jay Nordlinger regularly comments on is how out of place he feels at concerts the left is very well represented at those events and usually very vocal and that includes the performers & conductors.
Anyway, in the end one’s tastes in arts & manners does not make a lefty or a righty make none-the-less a major part of the debate centers around just that. This is a thing a certain number of C/W artists are fighting too, who would mistake Willie Nelson as a conservative?
It all comes down to the notion that conservative is dumb, left is intellectual.
Another factor in the divide is the tremendous boom in agricultural productivity. The father of a friend who all live in Southwest Minnesota & Southeast South Dakota told me when he was young one person could tend 100 acres of farmland, now that is 1:1000, rural American does not have to be so populated anymore. That dynamic drives so much, can’t keep ‘em on the farm simply because they are redundant by the time they are grown up.
Well there is nothing wrong with having a PhD., but let us remember what much of education is about: To teach the works of the great to the mediocre.
A PhD. marks, or should mark, a particular kind of learning and little more. It certainly is no guarantee of wisdom, genius, character or creativity. Nor in our society such it be that mark of a particular docial or political elite. Government most especially must not be the province of such folks. Once we understood this all.
The current state of affairs has much to do with the New Dealers and how they replaced the old Wasp ascendancy. This will need to be revisited, come the revolution.
Many of the great of us had not this form of education. Beethoven did not even know how to multiply, though he had a remarkable mind and was a remarkable autodidact. Newton’s education may have been at times a hindrance to him. Brahms, another remarkable autodidact, had little higher education yet had one of the more interesting minds of the 19th century above and beyond his great accomplishments as a musician.
But i do feel that our graduate education is in decline. There are to many unqualified people getting too many easy and meaningless degrees. Even in hard subjects, I find much weakness and nonsense. It has become almost a form of a hazing ritual for entry into the new Nomenklatur.
As an aside, I would recommend that we substitute this term for “creative knowledge worker” for that is in fact what they are: An American version of the Soviet Nomenklatur.
NullificationNow,
I’ll say this as gently as I can: up yours on notion of Mercury leaving WI. I have spent time working at Mercury (as a consultant) and if they leave my job of finding a job is going to become even more difficult.
Your note on Sibelius is very interesting and illuminating. Finlandia starts out very darkly which is odd in hymns to the homeland, but your placing the composition in context of an aggressive and domineering Russia sheds light on that darkness.
As a knowledge worker in the very heart of Silicon Valley, I can say that it has just about shot its wad.
The big boom of the information revolution was based on new technology that vastly lowered the cost of communications. This triggered a wave of huge productivity gains throughout the economy. As providers of this improved productivity, Silicon Valley has been able to take its share of the gains as economic rents. That is a very rare and prividged economic position.
But look around, don’t we see a decline in the rate of productivity gains from communications? When your IT department pushes another function onto your desktop, is it something you need and can use productively? For me, the answer is no. Every new item has a declining rate of return. what more is Microsoft’s “Communicator” giving you? What else do we need from Google? Need another database from SAP? Does Facebook help you make money? Still trying to get rich on eBay?
The long trend is plateauing yet we’re seeing business as usual from our elites. They think times are still flush when in reality we’re seeing a revision to the mean. There will be another Spring but first comes the Winter.
#22 Mongoose.
Well said. I recall when the Stepford Democrats in my town went gaga over Richard Florida when he brought his “creative class” patent medicine show here. I thought baloney.
There is indeed no third way or substitute for our Judeo-Christian origins and the Graeco-Roman inheritance of classical liberalism (distinguished from its corrupt “progressive” contemporary version).
Sign me up for the fight.
Sibelius, hell! Long live Smetana and the mighty Ma Vlast.
marcus sorry didn’t make the connection, however Ok. would be better than say Indonesia as many US industries will be forced to leave to stay competitive.
“That dynamic drives so much, can’t keep ‘em on the farm simply because they are redundant by the time they are grown up.”
My cousin took over his fathers farm. Is one of a rare breed of a modern farmer. My uncle, though a paper millionaire worked harder than anyone I know, started taking over the day to day operation of several farms in his small community in Iowa. Fewer and fewer young men envisioned farming as their future.
Well, that movement from the farms happened in the pre war period really. That is not the factor today. Youthful adventure and the lack of jobs cause it, but it is as much a factor in upstate NY as it is in Iowa. What we have seen lately is the misplacement of the smaller, “yeoman” farmer by large agri-business and this is troubling for many reasons.
marcus: Nordlinger may have a problem with his crowd, but i am involved with the industry, and it is mostly just upper class snobbery rather than leftism that he is talking about. I live in NYC and go to concerts and know a great many artists, conductors, etc. and I have no problems. Let us not forget who built Carnegie Hall after all. The NRO crowd seems a inordinately prickly lot, if you ask me.
The really joke is that most of the artist are European, so they really could care less about American politics. They are even more snotty to the US blue bloods than the blue bloods are to folks like Nordlinger. But of course, they are so clever and circumspect about it that the glam crowd does not even notice that they are being insulted. Nobody in that world worth respecting respects anything but talent and accomplishment (good cheer helps quite a bit too). Everyone else is there to listen.
I imagine that much of what we are lately calling “the Left” are not the left at all, and should things break against the real left we will see a whole other social order. With this will come less ruffled feathers from the likes of Nordlinger at opening Galas.
We just have to get them to see that the Democrats mean their doom.
The following facts were noted in Wikipedia.
1.In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, called a map, the regions can be colored using at most four colors so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. Two regions are called adjacent only if they share a border segment, not just a point.
2.Kempe also showed correctly that G can have no vertex of degree 4. As before we remove the vertex v and four-color the remaining vertices. If all four neighbors of v are different colors, say red, green, blue, and yellow in clockwise order, we look for an alternating path of vertices colored red and blue joining the red and blue neighbors. Such a path is called a Kempe chain.
3.Dichromacy is a moderately severe color vision defect in which one of the three basic color mechanisms is absent or not functioning. It is hereditary and sex-linked, affecting predominantly males.[9]
The 4 color map problem is a classic planar geometry problem regarding the smallest number of colors that are needed to complete a map where no 2 colors share contiguous borders. The classically used colors in the map problem are red,blue, green, and yellow. Color blindness with red-green and blue-yellow patients will generally yield to a blue red choice in map design when there only need to be 2 colors. There may be other sublime and diabolical reasons that red and blue were chosen but in the end we should remember that it is usually the men who are color blind. The blue for Northern states is likely historical detritus from the civil war era.
zhombre: Setpford Demcrats. LOL. good one, I will use it.
” Every new item has a declining rate of return.”
Cheer up –
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, in 1899.
We just need to humble ourselves and reject the deconstructionist notions that we live in post-history.
Now, for the notion that we can have an ever increasing economy based on service. I have a hard time with that. Our future will be nothing without our intellectual capital, material resources, and the willingness to produce that which we are accustomed to having. Should that come to pass we will be busy building a future whose foundations rest in the here and now and not on the ideals of a few green revisionists.
Gates and Obama are despicable race-mongering liars.
Network news fails to examine high cost and proven failures of government-run health care
BMI looked at morning and evening shows on ABC, CBS and NBC from Jan. 20 to June 24, 2009. We found that the networks boosted the administration’s case for government run health care in several ways:
Favoring proponents of ObamaCare to critics by a margin of more than 2-to-1
Barely discussing the $1 trillion or higher price tag (9 percent of stories)
Exaggerating the number of uninsured Americans 80 percent of the time
Ignoring Medicare’s “explosive fiscal situation” despite calling Obama’s public option plan for health care reform “Medicare-like.”
NullificationNow,
Yes, agree OK better than China or Indonesia. Mercury already has some of their engines assembled in China. I remember the day that notion was announced, Union guy was PO’ed and not at the guy who put China on the MFN list (Clinton) but W.
Whitehall: exactly. High tech has moved into Consumer facing “infotainment”–Google, Facebook and the like. When a firm like twitter is all the rage this should tell us something. This is hardly cutting edge tech. I do imagine that someone will crack micro-targeting and the data mining effort andturn a few heads. But you seem quite right, enterprise computing is not where it is at. Few firms can profit by selling software now in this area.
It is deeply hard to start a high tech startup now. In the great Reagan boom it was as easy as could be and there were so many problems to solve.
I do think that we will see a lot of supporting tech shenanigans in health care and “green energy”. They will essentially be selling shovels to the next batch of 49ers.
BUT!
Consider a revived manufacturing sector were the bigger firms are system integrators of sorts, and there are thousands of subcontractors all united in a huge JIT supply chain. Lots of interesting supporting tech solutions would be required here.
If we are ever to bring back manufacturing in this nation we will have to do something like this
#37 Acorn -will- be doing the 2010 census. Once the libs flip Texas’s electoral votes into the Blue column, the Democrats will win the presidency forever.
Wow, I have read all of the comments with interest. Back at the “An Ally of America” thread mr. anton really diss’ed in the worst way my area of the country. Which only highlights this post by wretchard.
I have long been an advocate of the Left/Right coast and midwest power centers getting a clue. If the center of the country (blue) just told them to FO they would be in world of hurt.
Just like the comment somewhere recently about so much land in the central valley of Ca being idled because of some fish. We had the same idiocy here on the Rio Grande. A little carp (silvery minnow = little carp) was supposedly endangered. So the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy was forced to keep stream flows at a certain level. What that has done is limit the agriculture downstream and killed a certain segment because we cannot hold enough water in flood control dams to feed the irrigation needs. Stupidity. Clinton P Anderson wrote an editorial that talked about the riverine system before the WPA levy’s were put in during the Depression. The river went dry seasonally. The spring floods fed the cottonwood forests in the riverine system yearly as the trees need the spring floods to reproduce. That has almost killed the cottonwood forest. That stupid carp survive for aeons before without our intervention that probably does nothing but screw up the natural systems.
Okay, back on point. If the elites (Left/Right coasts & Ivy League) were segregated out of the country what would we miss? Can any of them tend a victory garden? Grow a crop? Design a bridge? Design a tank? An airplane? No. They all have degrees in business or law and want to tell the engineers how and why. Mostly they are useless rent seekers.
That is the quote from the City Journal article sidebar linked by starling above. How true. Who are the welfare consumers and where do the majority reside? Big cities.
Marcus – A side note, Oklahoma is the only state that voted all Red in 2008 when counted by counties. The only one. No wonder Mercury would move there. Also, some of the best bass fishing in the US is close. And bass fishing is I would guess one of their larger market segments.
I find it interesting that many commentators here are from the West. L3 & el Jefe from Houston. steveaz & TrangBabg from AZ. Me from NM. Where is the BC demographic as far as location? Western or maybe just working-man? A couple of old Dead Heads, too, for good measure.
“A little carp (silvery minnow = little carp) was supposedly endangered.”
Here in San Diego it was a bird, the Gnat Catcher. Millions of dollars for development were shut down to save the last few of the species. Well, it turns out that the Gnat Catcher was abundant in Mexico and Southern California just happened to be its most northern range though they shared identical DNA. You see, the bird did not know it was American or Mexican, there being no suitable language tests and the border being particularly porous to birds. We are still beholden to that special American one though. We love all things American when they have fur, feathers or scales.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the most salient point in Kotkin’s article was how the Obama approach is the Chicago approach writ large–cronyism and co-optation of targeted groups, with no concept of any greater good or of systemic improvements as opposed to targeted bribes, er, benefits.
Robohobo, you don’t know the half of it:
“Delta fish suffered a crippling decline while taxpayers paid nearly $100 million to a Kern County water wholesaler for an environmental protection program that was largely ineffective, a Contra Costa Times investigation has found.
In the process, the wholesaler sold water to the state for as much as $200 an acre-foot and last year bought water from the state for as little as $28 an acre-foot.
The Kern County Water Agency was the biggest buyer in a program that delivered discounted Delta water in a way that now appears to have been particularly harmful to the environment. It also was the biggest seller of water to an ill-fated, publicly-financed state program meant to protect the same environment, the investigation found.
The Kern agency collected $96 million in taxpayer money — nearly all of it borrowed on the bond market — for sales to an “environmental water account” that was shelved after seven years at the end of 2007, records show.
While state water officials took steps to ensure they did not directly repurchase the discount water, the exchanges amounted to “classic arbitrage,” where investors exploit price differences in financial instruments, said Barry Nelson, a water policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.”
Use borrowed money to buy water back at a premium in a program that actually does more harm than good. And people wonder what’s wrong with this state.
I think it is much like mongoose said: “I imagine that much of what we are lately calling “the Left” are not the left at all, and should things break against the real left we will see a whole other social order.”
We’re close to reaching the tipping point.
I, for one, refuse to cede California to the blue side.
Robohobo,
Another WI blogger thought the major motivation was to get their main DC established down south to lower distribution costs, being people can fish/boat all year long down in FL, TX, OK, NM, AZ, So-Cal, AL, etc. While I think that figures in the calculations (when I worked there I worked in PnA distribution) the business atmosphere here in WI has become so toxic I can not imagine anyone wanting to locate any sort of traditional business operation here.
Another factor is the union. The Mercruiser plant in Stillwater, from what I understand, is non-union, while up in Fond du Lac the workers there are unionized by the International Association of Machinists.
Interestingly enough, Mercury Marine is a major supplier to Harley Davidson, guess who else may then decide to move?
More and more of WI towns are becoming boutique towns selling trinkets and offering services to tourists.
#41 Marcus Aurelius- Those “Britcoms” are really awful. Just because something is British doesn’t make it sophisticated. They make “Married with Children” look like “Fraser.”
The venture capital firms here in the Valley have turned to energy as the next great easy money hope. Unfortunately, energy is about physics while communications was about squeezing down everything to mathmatics.
What they found, as I did when I looked at the issue in my MBA program circa 1996, was that there were NO advances in physics to exploit about energy. The few viable business plays are around the fringes and are cost-reduction plays (3D seismic modeling for oil and gas exploration for example.)
The current bandwagon of VC investments is pure rent seeking. Their investments will make money ONLY with government coercion. When government imposes a 30% renewables mandate and cross-subidizes electric bills, Sunpower will get real business and only then. When government requires remote controlled thermostats in all homes and businesses, then the suppliers to the “Smart Grid” will have a market.
Little wonder that the Silicon Valley business elites overwhelmingly turned out for Obama.
Note to Annoy Mouse –
I didn’t say that we won’t have another cycle of big productivity gains, just that IT and the internet is about played out and will become a normal business like DuPont and Boeing, two companies that had analogous positions in earlier innovation cycles.
Another fundamental basis for our last couple of decades of boom times has been the arrive of Chinese labor to the global market. Dump a billion or so extremely cheap workers on the market and the global price collapses while overall costs fall. Can China continue to spend on infrastructure and education to bring the rest of their population into the global market?
Again, I think this long cycle is plateauing for a couple of decades until a new technical innovation arrives and risk capital is invested in it. Again, the global economy is reverting to the mean.
We could afford new members to the tax-eater ranks when above-average economic growth was happening. Politicians were eager to buy their votes with our money. Today, they represent a constituency that seems to have overwhelmed the producers’ political interest.
Much of California’s “prosperity” of the last few decades has been fueled by bubbles powered by debt and fiat “wealth.”
That is in the process of being liquidated.
Sacramento has some serious retrenchment to do.
If saner heads were in charge, water would again flow to the farms, and oil would again flow from the wells to make the transition less painful.
(I heard something on the radio about re-opening the channel island fields?)
High tech has moved into Consumer facing “infotainment”–Google, Facebook and the like. When a firm like twitter is all the rage this should tell us something. This is hardly cutting edge tech. I do imagine that someone will crack micro-targeting and the data mining effort andturn a few heads. But you seem quite right, enterprise computing is not where it is at. Few firms can profit by selling software now in this area.
“Information” is merely an amplifier, by itself its virtually worthless. You can’t eat it. you can’t burn it to stay warm. It won’t keep the rain off your back. Zero multiplied by anything is still zero. It amplifies what people have had to do throughout history–provide for the necessities and luxuries of life. If the information in question helps you double your crop yields this is a good thing. But unlike fertilizer, which could have done the same thing, there are no repeat customers for old information. It may be a commodity, but its unlike any other, and that tends to skew the traditional economic models when we’re talking about an “information” economy.
AND-AS LONG AS I’M HERE Robohobo–watch that stuff about OLD Dead Heads. I too am a Dead Head, but if you call me “old” to my face I’ll be forced to beat you with my cane. Consider yourself warned.
Incidentally, I’m from Texas.
#67 Robohobo
Subotai is a Westerner, from Colorado.
Subotai Bahadur
Whitehall said, “The current bandwagon of VC investments is pure rent seeking. Their investments will make money ONLY with government coercion.”
Which perfectly explains why Kleiner Perkins picked up Al Gore as a partner.
Per TCobb “‘Information’ is merely an amplifier”
Better to view information as a friction remover. Better information lowers costs, especially transaction costs. Look at pawn shops versus eBay.
Jrod gets my point and offers the premier example.
Now please don’t let me cast ALL venture capitalists as evil-doers. There are still socially useful deals going down from legitmate VC (as I polish my next business plan!) It is just that that the Big Boys want on the Big Government tit.
Mongoose 58
“Nobody in that world worth respecting respects anything but talent and accomplishment (good cheer helps quite a bit too). ”
That is a beautiful line. What I would give to have my kids totally connect to that thought.
Indeed, our “scientific community”, particularly in Academia, has merely become another special interest client of the state.
Look no further than magazines like ‘Scientific American’ for proof of this, with writers and an editorial staff which is completely in the tank for AGW and is overtly bigoted against religion in general with particularly long knives out for Christianity.
Look no further than fisheries research and management, which has completely devolved into pursuit of grant money for the ‘scientists’ who can provide the most dire warnings of gloom.
Whitehall writes
“Per TCobb “‘Information’ is merely an amplifier”
Better to view information as a friction remover. “
Information as vaseline? Hmm–your model seems to fit the information that comes out of the mouth of the current Administration. The question is: what parts of us and what parts of them is the vaseline intended for?
My apologies–a question is not really a question when you know the answer too.
Oklahoma is OK (which is what their license plates say, which I thought – as a Texan – was sort of a sad self-assessment when I lived there for a while). State income tax, but I do envy them Senator Tom Coburn.
Happy to get back to Texas – which is considerably better than just OK
No state income tax. State legislature meets a couple of months every other year.
Red folks welcome, Blues please go elsewhere.
Mongoose. Feel free to use the phrase. And contact me at zhombreray@gmail.com.
The only problem with Texas is its location. If it were on the West Coast I’d be there in a heart beat.
Mongoose is quite right about Google. They leverage mostly Unix/Open Source projects, contribute a bit of code, and then use if for their core revenue generator for ads. They shuttered their radio ad placement division, and one other I can’t remember. Their Android OS for mobile phones has not taken off, and their Google Chrome OS (simplified Unix) has so far gone nowhere (they’ll likely partner with a netbook manufacturer). None of that is game-changer stuff like cheap fusion, or cheap solar, or batteries that can store electricity with far less loss, and far less weight (power-to-weight ratio).
However, my problem with Wretchard’s critique (I read Kotkin’s stuff last night) is that Wretchard does not take issue with Kotkin’s core facts: Blue States are declining, horribly vulnerable to downturns in the wealthy “knowledge sector” which amounts to Law, Finance, Movies, and some software engineering and marketing. Wretchard also makes a handwaving argument that the core economic, social, and cultural interests of the factions are not irreconcilable and mutually hostile. Power is a zero-sum game, if Blues have it that means Reds don’t. Same with tax revenues, spending decisions, and advantages for Blue/Red children.
Moreover, the problem with both Wretchard and Kotkin is that they ignore history. California was reliably Republican and middle class, and Kotkin in another post tells the tale of how California’s elites pushed out energy, agriculture, manufacturing, and aerospace in the 1960′s-1970′s. But he glosses over the “Why?” Why did that happen? It happened because women at that time entered public life and began to demand their own values: gone were the icky, messy, smelly stuff that offered blue collar men opportunities but had zilch attraction to women, and favored were the “princess industries” where a girl or woman could rise like Cinderella.
It’s a “Faith Popcorn” world. Or Maureen Dowd, or Wonkette, or Elizabeth Wurtzel or Natalie Krinsky aka “Chloe does Yale,” or Candace Bushnell world. Sex and the City. Fabulous shopping, no annoying kids, most of all no annoying, boring, middle class people (particularly men) doing boring middle class things, the European pattern of rich White Aristos doing fabulous Gossip Girl things, with a poor outer ring of non-White non-natives as servants and convenient guilt sources.
Women disconnected from traditional marriage will always favor the “Princess Economy” — look at how most of these women became princesses (note how much women hate Sarah Palin who refused to become a princess and stayed a country girl). We have our own aristocracy beloved of women, First Rockstar Obama and Michelle, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, even court jesters Paris Hilton and John Gosselin. Contrary to Kotkin, the coasts get stronger and stronger, punishing average people more and more. Because women want to be Princesses, and want an economy, a social order, a culture oriented around lots and lots of permanent (male) peasants and a few fabulous princesses. NO OTHER OUTCOME could be possible with the dissolution of traditional marriage via contraceptive technology, rising female incomes, and urban anonymity.
Absent any outside factors, women win, all the time, because they have superior demographic numbers allied with non-Whites to crush their enemies: Straight White Men. Sadly for everyone, outside factors, primarily the desire for Bin Laden and men like him to build exile armies and take over their native lands, means mass casualty terror attacks are a given. A Bombay World plus. With nukes or other WMDs to kill as many Westerners/Americans as possible, so that prestige creates a tidal wave of men and money to the attackers. The Mohammed Model. Based absolutely on what Mohammed did in Medina to retake Mecca.
Blue Cities make big fat targets. Dispersed Red Suburbs make poor targets. And yes, the shipping container bomber will always get through.
Mongoose, what sciences are you pillorying? I’m a physicist (and yet another Wisconsin-ite), and though the field is subject to its own fads, and major breakthroughs are hard and rare, I see honest effort.
One man I work with started trying to look for quark substructure, which would have been a glamorous breakthrough. He didn’t find evidence for it though, and has spent the past half a year trying to understand the uncertainties well enough to be able to say _precisely_ how far the standard model is reliable. The unglamorous “filling in a little piece of the picture” requires–and gets–the same amount of effort as the dramatic results.
(BTW, we know the standard model is incomplete; thus the probing in all directions to find out where it breaks down.)
AFAIN with the baseless slanders about the Golden Schtat!!!
Outrageous!!! just look at these graphs and behold our enlightened scheme of money management!!!:
http://www.chuckdevore.com/blog.asp?artid=94
AFAIN=AGAIN
Tcobb – did you know that the German word for “vaseline” is “weinerschlider”?
Whiskey has an intriging correlation. Women don’t expect to live by the sweat of their brow and seldom respect those that do, when there’s easier money around. Women have had an increasing participation in the political elites in California that matches the declining growth and current stagnation of the state’s economy. Perhaps they discovered that the government can be a better sugar daddy with fewer restraints, much like black women did during the days of AFDC. Life is so much easier when you don’t have to worry about hungry babies, Fewer worries with an empty womb.
NoMoUro – I agree completely about “Scientific American”. What was once a sterling publication is now nearly pure leftist propaganda. It was very good for me as a kid, an inspiration, but now I won’t have it in my home.
To all – keep an eye on Chuck DeVore – he could just upset Barbara Boxer for Senate!
Them darn chicks! Shut down industry in California because it was icky. And here I though it was due to globalism and profits to be gained by exploiting third world labor. I’m going to have to sit my wife down and ask her why she killed all those icky rust belt factory jobs.
There’s an evenin’ haze settlin’ over town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak
Well, the place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad
My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf
Come sit down on my knee
You are dearer to me than myself
As you yourself can see
While I’m listening to the steel rails hum
Got both eyes tight shut
Just sitting here trying to keep the hunger from
Creeping it’s way into my gut
[Chorus:]
Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the frontline
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues
Well, I’m sailin’ on back, ready for the long haul
Tossed by the winds and the seas
I’ll drag ‘em all down to hell and I’ll stand ‘em at the wall
I’ll sell ‘em to their enemies
I’m tryin’ to feed my soul with thought
Gonna sleep off the rest of the day
Sometimes no one wants what we got
Sometimes you can’t give it away
Now the place is ringed with countless foes
Some of them may be deaf and dumb
No man, no woman knows
The hour that sorrow will come
In the dark I hear the night birds call
I can feel a lover’s breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death
[Chorus]
Well, they burned my barn, and they stole my horse
I can’t save a dime
I got to be careful, I don’t want to be forced
Into a life of continual crime
I can see for myself that the sun is sinking
How I wish you were here to see
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?
Now they worry and they hurry and they fuss and they fret
They waste your nights and days
Them I will forget
But you I’ll remember always
Old memories of you to me have clung
You’ve wounded me with your words
Gonna have to straighten out your tongue
It’s all true, everything you’ve heard
[Chorus]
In you, my friend, I find no blame
Wanna look in my eyes, please do
No one can ever claim
That I took up arms against you
All across the peaceful sacred fields
They will lay you low
They’ll break your horns and slash you with steel
I say it so it must be so
Now I’m down on my luck and I’m black and blue
Gonna give you another chance
I’m all alone and I’m expecting you
To lead me off in a cheerful dance
I got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don’t know what work even means
-Bob Dylan
Workingman’s Blues#2
he could just upset Barbara Boxer for Senate!
Isn’t that Senator Barbara Boxer? I understand that she worked so hard for that title.
I’ll reserve my personal title for Ms. Boxer. I’ve made my share of crude jokes for today.
It would be more precise to say that Chuck DeVore is running for the senate seat currently held by Ms. Boxer. We expect Ms. Boxer to campaign to be returned to that position.
#29 jerryofva:
The elites will outsource their violence, of course. Recall the New Black Panthers intimidating voters?
But how will it take for the hired thugs to realize that they can just take over?
The thugs are more used to violence, but they will be outnumbered.
Old, Dead Head, Engineer, Rockford, Illinois
Wretchard also makes a handwaving argument that the core economic, social, and cultural interests of the factions are not irreconcilable and mutually hostile. Power is a zero-sum game, if Blues have it that means Reds don’t. Same with tax revenues, spending decisions, and advantages for Blue/Red children.
Women are a fact that men have to live with. The war between them, if war there be, began in the Garden of Eden and has been going strong ever since. Irreconcilable conflicts don’t necessarily have to end in the permanent victory by one over the other. All irreconcilable means is it can go on indefinitely. Ordinary people live out their lives in a world of unfinished business. There may never be a “final” victory by any of the points of view represented by the Blues or Reds over each other, although there may be periods when things become unbalanced until they are restored. I’ve come to believe that all we can hope for is what the gardener tries to achieve: to pull out a few weeds and try to get a few wholesome herbs to sprout up in the coming days, resigned to the knowledge that the weeds will be back.
The notion that “communication is the economy” reminds me of this ancient proverb:
“In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury.” (Proverbs 14:23)
Annoy Mouse (#68):
Love your posts.
Here’s a bit cribbed from the Cornell University Birds of North America web site (it’s subscription only so the URL won’t help you; I hope they’ll forgive my quoting them). It largely supports what you write about the California Gnatcatcher, not to be confused with the widespread Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher; the former bird should probably be renamed the “Baja California Gnatcatcher.”
It is a very charming LGB, as we birder’s like to say (Little Gray Bird):
Extolled by conservationists for its ability to stop a bulldozer in its tracks and reviled by land developers as their worst enemy, the tiny California Gnatcatcher has become a symbol of the challenges of how to interpret and apply the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Commonly found throughout most of southern and central Baja California in a variety of arid scrub habitats, the range of this small, nonmigratory songbird extends northward into coastal southern California, where it occurs on some of the most expensive private real estate in the United States. Explosive human population growth and resultant suburban sprawl within the last 50 years has reduced and fragmented the species’ coastal sage scrub habitat, and led to Federal protection of the northernmost subspecies as a Threatened species in 1993. Furthermore, concerns engendered by this decision catalyzed passage of legislation by the State of California intended to protect natural communities while allowing continued economic growth. Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt described this novel initiative, known as the Natural Community Conservation Planning (NCCP) program, as a “breathtaking experiment” that “may become an example of what must be done across the country if we are to avoid the environmental and economic train wrecks we’ve seen in the last decade.” Conservation of the California Gnatcatcher continues to be the dominant factor in determining details of the NCCP program’s implementation, thus emphasizing the importance of scientific information about the species’ behavior, ecology, and distribution.
Little is known of the California Gnatcatcher’s biology in the heart of its range in Baja California. In contrast, substantial research has been conducted on its distribution and biology in the United States during the last 10 years. Much of this recent work was done in response to various management and conservation decisions, resulting in a diverse but sometimes poorly conceived research agenda pursued by environmental consultants, academics, wildlife agency personnel, and conservation advocates. Many results were never peer-reviewed or formally published, leading Rotenberry and Scott (1998: 238) to comment that “researchers had few avenues of communication, no one could build off the established work of others, and mechanisms for identifying reliable data went unused.” Publication of papers presented at the 1995 California Gnatcatcher Symposium began to correct this situation (Rotenberry and Scott 1998), yet much of what is currently “known” about the species still is found only in scattered field notes, anecdotal reports, and “gray literature,” rather than rigorous scientific studies. Where warranted, this account refers to such unpublished data as a means of summarizing all currently available information, while readily acknowledging the need for more careful and controlled studies. All unpublished reports cited here have been deposited at the Wilson Ornithological Society’s Van Tyne Memorial Library (Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079).
Jamie Irons
Back in the day the Pentagon gamed war: Big Red ( Russia ) vs Great Blue ( America )– naturally Blue was the color of victory.
These wargames always had Big Red as a first mover with Great Blue as the respondent.
It’s a good thing that such wargames were never brought to life since is was pretty common for Big Red to reach the Rhine before atomic bombs crippled Red logistics.
That the East-West conflict became domesticated after the end of WWIII/Cold War is an interesting shift.
Age: middle.
Habitat: Napa Valley (really, at exactly 1,000 feet of elevation on a mountain forming the eastern edge of the Napa Valley), so I guess I am a westerner.
It is my belief (perhaps mistaken) that I am the only moderately conservative inhabitant of my immediate area. Without meaning any self-praise, where none is due, I may represent a species rarer and more endangered than even the California Gnatcatcher. You want to talk reduced and fragmented habitat!
Jamie Irons
I live in Ohio and do not claim any special insight — by which I mean I don’t claim it, not that I don’t have it.
The Blue State economic model sees itself as the engine of economic growth, on which the Red State Model has been leeching to pay for its outmoded and sentimental attachment to things like the Armed Forces, church picnics and NASCAR races, when what is needed is more government services, cap and trade and better music.
I’ve seen this claim made on the basis of Taxes paid by residents of the various states to the Federal Government — the progressive income tax and corporate taxes, in the main. High state income taxes can be deducted from High Federal Taxes, so the state government benefits from a higher Federal Income Tax (their effective tax rate is lowered in relation to other states by the Federal write off).
This tax haul would also relate to pricing power. Individuals work for their after tax income. If their skills are such, they may demand more income to help defray increased taxes. To keep high value workers (who may take a chunk of the business when they leave) the firm can raise prices or lay-off folks on the loading dock or the Clerical staff of a provincial office. In this case it is that worker or the consumer — red state or blue — that pays the tab for the increase taxes. Also, the higher taxes and increased regulation will favor the established players at the expense of the upstarts.
Perhaps it is the loss of pricing power that is causing so much distress in the “blue states.” They have shown they can withstand high rates of unemployment for years on end, as long as there is money in the game. But once the higher costs can no longer be passed “out of state,” money is drained from the game and the political consensus frays. It seems even California Democrats will drill for oil when the spoils run low.
I think the Blue states now look for salvation in the form of the Cartel. It is a logical response to a loss in pricing power. A Cartel is a Political, not an economic, animal. It can be used to spread inefficiencies among all producers. These arrangements will buy off the strong, punish the opponents, exploit consumers and oppress everyone (including their own workers).
Of course they will not let you “red staters” escape (for your own good, of course). What would be the point in that?
I could wrong. I claim no special insight.
Blue States vs. Red States. Blue vs. Red. That sounds like the Crips versus the Bloods to me. Anybody who talks about how it’s all a zero sum thing is talking like a gangster and not like a statesman. Good grief, even smart gangsters like Lucky Luciano could figure out there’s a lot more money to be made when gangs keep the peace and stay out of each other’s way. Even in organized crime, it isn’t a zero sum game when a gang war cuts into the profits for everybody. Whatever else can be said about the Commission, it kept the peace among thieves, and that’s more than can be said for the Crips and the Bloods.
Jamie, I’m a beginner bird watcher. In my very small corner of British Columbia, while reading the BC I am distracted by black-capped chickadees at a feeder. Also had a stellar jay on my backyard deck this morning. They are very bold, beautiful blue birds, but make the most G-d awful sound.
On my front lawn this morning I saw flickers, robins and starlings, all in a mad dash for the worms. Very amusing site.
Just small pleasures can help you make it through a day.
sgi (with apologies to non-ornithotropic BC’ers for my OT blathering):
Where I am, the Steller’s jays were confined at first about a quarter of a mile from my house, down among redwoods in “our” canyon. But over the thirty years since I arrived, the Douglas firs on my property, which were at first just a few feet tall, have grown to almost 150 feet, and the Steller’s jays have moved in. Though they make a racket, they are great fun to observe. Try feeding them peanuts in the shell; you won’t be disappointed! They like to pick them up one at a time, give them a rattle to assess what’s inside, and make a decision which one they’ll fly off with often after trying out five to ten “candidates.”
We have the Chestnut-backed — rather than the Black-capped — Chickadee, but they really are almost the same bird.
Jamie Irons
Gosh, how I luv BC. I wish I could buy you all a beer!
Whiskey @85,
Some good ‘graphs above: you write with a driving tempo that is very compelling. Like TrangBang, I favor a few other factors in the hierarchy of causes for our Northern cities’ (and with them, our nation’s) decline. Next to your thesis, which I call “ERA’s Unintended Consequences” (again, my label, not yours) I’d include domestic and international perturbations in the availability of key primary resources like energy, steel (energy costs figure into transportation and product-competitiveness more than many “greens” like to admit), along with corporate institutional malformities, like excessive union interference in key manufacturers’ governing, design and pensions boards’ decisions. Then, I’d rate urban corruption and its evil twin, “bike-path” politics – both being redolent of Klotkin’s “The Chicago-Way” and both buoyed by the sort of dialectical ravings (black-white, male-female, gay-straight, see-saw, see-saw ( someone put some oil on that thing!)) symptomatic of a marriage on the brink of divorce.
As I survey the entire spectrum of proposed causes, I’ve got to admit that your bio-cultural – or, sexist, if you will – critique has grabbed my eye.
Cheers,
-Steve
Tamquam @11
I noticed that, too…
It seems the French adjective “sauvage” better captures the sinister mood of the film. The French title is more honest than the English one.
That’s just me talking, though – me, and the reuben sandwich I just ate.
Burp!
Here is an old article and a good one and it hits at one side of the Urban v Rural squabble:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31079
The question of to what degree the blue elites are really left is an interesting one. By left I mean socialist/redistributionist, a foe of the free market. My experience is indeed that many of these folks are primarily snobs who have unthinkingly absorbed a superficial leftism from their environment.
However, I don’t think the President is one of those. My guess is that he’s a leftist first, and all the other stuff – the racial politics, the extreme support of abortion, the environmental business – are positions he adopted to fit in and with which he can exploit the rubes to get what he wants.
Incidentally, I work in the fine arts. The President’s notion of replacing private philanthropy with state support, not to mention the proposed cap on charitable deductions, would decimate orchestras, museums, and opera companies in the United States. THAT would certainly drive a wedge between the elites and the true leftists, but of course by then it would be too late.
The comment about there not being blue states, only blue cities, is very true. Upstate New York, which ought to be a great place to do business, has been destroyed by tax rates set ridiculously high in order to squeeze the most out of Wall Street.
Classical music, the theater, and high art are often found in or associated with the cities.
Perhaps it’s because we no longer have very many people whose firsthand memories extend back this far, but we seem to have forgotten that there was quite a bit of hunger for culture and (other-than-vulgar) entertainment among rural Americans, as evidenced by the popularity of chautauquas up through the early 20th century when radio and movies eclipsed the live performance model. I even suspect that a literate and intellectually curious country person from back then was likely to be far more cultured than a city tough; certainly more than your average American teen today. (Bach who? Leonardo? A turtle, right?)
I guess it’s the condensed nature of cities — more of everything, good and bad, available in shorter time and distance — that leads us to perceive of them as being reservoirs of culture and the rural areas as being “the barrens.” I do find the term “culture” and this old paradigm of city mouse vs. country mouse more irony loaded by the year. Whose culture? What’s the content? Why subscribe to it?
What we call “art” these days (i.e., the “culture” of the cities) has for the most part lost its meaning and therefore its purpose. Once upon a time, art was about expressing the true, the beautiful, and the good. You could look at a Renoir, read a Shakespeare sonnet, or listen to Beethoven and be transported, even if only for a few minutes, to the transcendent. Now it almost always goes in the other direction, down to teufelsdreck.
And at the same time, the despised (among the artsy snobs) yokels in flyover territory have become, in large part, the last and best guardians and communicators of the true, the beautiful, and the good. A river runs through it, indeed.
***********
On a personal note (rim shot) … we always had music at our house. Lots & lots of music, considering no one was a professional musician. Dad liked Glenn Miller, Eddy Arnold & Xavier Cugat, played the harmonica, sang beautifully and often; piano-playing Mom used every device she could find to introduce us to classical music. Christmas? Great, let’s listen to “The Nutcracker Suite” and “Peter and the Wolf.” (Don’t ask me why, but the latter was always a holiday routine.) Disney’s “Fantasia” and the Tchaikovsky-driven score of “Sleeping Beauty” were child-capturing culture nuggets.
The sibs, natch, were into the modern stuff and blasted it through the house — Billy Joel, Elton John, Jim Croce, Carly Simon. I blasted my Star Wars soundtrack album and my Chuck Mangione. (Dad’s comment on the drum solo in “Children of Sanchez”: “What’s all that banging?”) And somewhere along the way I picked up Dvorak, Sinatra, Billy Preston,
you name it.
My one sister hated Dad’s Glenn Miller but ended up becoming the best musician in the family — specializing, ironically, on the clarinet and saxophone, Miller’s signature-sound instruments.
There was always music. Now I find I can’t get along without it.
106 Marcus Aurelius -
“Here there be tractor pulles”! Good one.
And, yah, we had the Hummels all over the mantle. (Would that be Mickey?)
Jamie thanks, good stuff!
What a joy to read The Belmont Club. What a great gift. I’m so grateful. Thanks.
Wretchard: I think you are incredibly niave about the Culture War,this Cold Civil War we are fighting. One side has to pretty much win. There is not margin for error and little common ground . I feel that you are being a little pollyannish here. Things have swung so out of balance that the scales have tipped over. Tumult and the repudiation of one side or the other is must ensue. It is much like the growing crisis of the Acient Regime in 18th and 19th century Europe. Look where that led: The immoliation of that order in WW!.
We are in this crisis because we have kept postponing it all these years. We did that because we were rich enough (and arrogant and lazy enough, I guess) to put up with it all. The battle is soon to be joined and one side will lose.
As an aside, while I think at times whiskey lets his obsession cloud his judgment, he is right to assert that no matter how long the war between the sexes has been going on, the females have some new weapons at their disposal. This is indeed a new phase. Historically, feminized societies do not last very long. They are generally overcome by more masculine ones. China rises.
But more concretely, should they destroy the white man in this nation, they will then turn on the white females. Additionally, some females actually grow up and have children and some of these are actually male. This coupled with the fact that the so called “Princess Industries” actually produce little of value will militate against a long term “Princess Regime”.
And yes, the Blues are trying to build a cartel. but they cannot keep for they really have little to offer that is economic or morally sound. Their stance is primarily immoral and impractical. It cannot go on much longer this way
We are headed toward a major crisis point in the life of our civilization. It is unclear that the current political arrangements and venues will obtain much longer. Wretchard, i belive that your mistake is in assuming that you (or we) are in a position of repose, at a remove from the conflict and possessed of the power to reach in there and right that balance.
Events are in the saddle. We are deep in the fray. It has gone to far.
There will not be reconciliation. You cannot raise the cane up when it is in the field. Again, there is no “Third way”. We return to founding principle or we perish.
P.S. Regarding Sarah Palin and classical music, I wouldn’t discount her knowing about Yo-Yo Ma. Her talent portion of the beauty competition from back when was music, specifically, a flute solo. However, I do admit to being dismayed by her choice of music. Pop-cr*p at its worst. Then again James Galway seems to have made lots of big bucks playing occasional schlock. So even the pros are not immune. Flute is an unfortunate solo instrument IMO … a little lightweight for compositions to do it much favor. Sorry if I’ve just ticked off the flute-players of BC!
Speaking of BC, this post reminds me of the provincial NDP government trying to encourage ‘high tech industries’ to replace forestry and mining as engines of employment.
Someone made the unfortunate point that the largest consumers of ‘high tech’ were the forestry companies.
I read recently that finance amounted to 34% of the UK economy. Finance is a service industry, and part of the recent collapse was the realization that money that was created out of thin air wasn’t particularly real.
A point of contention that causes much gnashing of teeth in the more enlightened neighborhoods in Canada is the rise of Calgary as a cultural center. These vile people with dirty hands from either oil or filthy lucre happen to spend their excess on paintings, art, music, etc.
It is no wonder that it is all falling apart. The US has become a consumer of services and foreign made gadgets. Paid for with borrowed money. Anything that actually makes something is being actively driven out of business by regulation or other factors.
This is going to be a long one.
Derek
bogie wheel,
My college music appreciation professor noted people looking to do research in old English music head to the hills of Appalachia to do the research.
This is one of the big reasons I am into the Grateful Dead. A friend of mine characterizes their music as “electric bluegrass” and another fellow used “acid country”. Their music is more than that and fuses a lot of styles, it all seems intelligent and thought out (the thinking goes beyond to what will sell, lets face it the GD never fared well with scoring top-40 hits), even if poorly executed at times (some of the bootlegs in our collections are duds and some are just sizzling and how many times do we hear Bobby not remember their lyrics). Reading up on the song “Jack-A-Roe” is interesting in its history and the number of variations on the song’s story.
Tumult and the repudiation of one side or the other must ensue.
Add Mongoose to the growing list of those who understand that the only way the center/right survives this is by retribution and the use of the bully pulpit (should they come to possess it again) in a de-leftification program which is minimally as thorough as de-Nazification was at the end of WWII.
To paraphrase Wretchard from many years back, this must not reach the stars.
I live in one of those crummy little towns in the middle of now-where new mexico…
See, Bach (for instance) belongs to everyone. That’s one reason why the academic ghettoes carved out for special ethnic studies groups are so pointless. You want people who look like you not to read good books? Really? How stupid. Yet some profit from cultivating this stupidity.
People observe often that the classical music audience is graying. This is true. I suspect one reason for this is that many of the traditional classical music lovers in the cities … have simply failed to reproduce. The best way to love high culture is to observe your parents loving it.
Derek, look at the reactions of people to ‘Deadliest Catch’ or Mike Rowe’s ‘Dirty Jobs’ or ‘Ice Loggers’, shows which protray men (primarily) doing hard work and producing real stuff.
Most hard-working people see these shows and love them.
Yet there are vast swathes of people who look at the guys in these shows as though they are museum exhibits, and can’t comprehend that these things even exist. (these are the types that think chicken grows in plastic wrap on trees, and tuna swims in little cans in the ocean. If you ask them where food comes from, they’ll reply “the store”.
There are others who loath and fear what is on them (metrosexuals and Whiskey’s anonymous urban sluts primarily, but also suburban NPR mommies who would be scandalized if their little Jared grew up to be one of THEM).
That there need to be shows about this tells a lot, in the first place. Not that long ago most people produced real stuff, there would have been no novelty or entertainment value in shows like this.
Guess which loves, and which loathes?
My college music appreciation professor noted people looking to do research in old English music head to the hills of Appalachia to do the research.
Well, I wouldn’t know about Old English music & Appalachia (although I can recite The Lord’s Prayer in Old English), but the through-line of Celtic music to bluegrass is certainly clear as a bell to my ear. I also hear connections from bluegrass to jazz for some reason. Maybe it’s the backbeat?
Marcus Aurelius, I sure like “Box of Rain’ and “Brokedown Palace”.
Looking at the government follies, how about a little “US Blues”. Shake the hand that shook the hand / of PT Barnum and Charlie Chan”
People are always pimping books here. We should list some tunes that moved us if Cousin Wretchard gets the inclination.
James: Well I am not “pillorying science” per se, I am more grousing about the decadence of it as it sits as a profession in our society today. I feel that portions of sciences have been coopted in to the “New Nomenklatur” that the Left here has been steadily building all these years.
I did not mean to imply that all science out there is bad or fake or just puffery. I merely was commenting that a great portion of the papers I see are have a lot of BS and hand waving in them and have little to do wth meaningful science or engineering. They are just gobbledygook published to keep up the facade. Per review itself has been failing. All one need do is look at AGW (not to mention economics) to see this. Many of our academic “scientist” are really just academic rent seekers, and there is little accountability. Global warming is a case and point, but you see it in AI/machine learning, biology. genetics, and even Physics (string theory has some rather strange and mystic acolytes in its church).
We also see a proliferation of scientific “disciplines”. The very notion that there is such a thing as “Climate Science” is troubling. There is no such thing, at least not at this point, there is the pasting together of various sciences and engineering disciplines to reach certain conclusions. But also we have “Social Biology”, “Psycholingistics”, “Environmental Sciences” and dozens of other “new scientific fields”, that, to my way of thinking at least, are mostly bogus hokus pokus. We have become lazy as a civilization in our acceptance of what actually constitutes a science and what is proper to expect from scientists.
Science has become a special interest group on the public tit and thus as been politicized. There are a great many so called “scientists” that are really nothing of the sort. They are opportunists and careerist. It is as though we have entered a “New scholasticism”.
As a matter fact, science is verging on Scientism these days, and the scientist is in danger of becoming a sort of “secular humanist priest”. This is an error, BTW, all too common is Marxist sociteies, and I have a hunch that we aquried this vice through some folk’s admiration of the Soviet Nomenklatur system.
That is not to say that there are not honest scientist and that there are not advances, but there is a lot of flakiness, fakery and dodginess out there too. I personally feel that we are at a point of stagnation and the advances are much less than they once were. If not, then we are verge on such a circumstance. I do not think that the scientific community is being honest with themselves about their current mediocrity. Furthermore, I do not think this mediocrity is due to a mere lull while we wait for the next “great breakthrough”. I think it is structural and it has to do with the nature of government “patronage” and the social and political structures of science today, particularly in Academia, and particularly as regards just who gains entrance and just what beliefs are allowed. As someone here said about the Left, they have a tendency to “campus” people to weed out the heretical. This prefrce leads to stagnation and mediocrity.
There is no guarantee, you know, that science, or great science, is now a permanent fixture of civilization, that it can always be relied upon to be there as a powerful, living occupation. Earlier in the thread we had talked about Classical Music. Well here there was an incredible burst of creativity that spanned a few centuries. It seems to have quite abated now. . The same could be said about great literature or great painting. At some point societies either lost interest or lost the capacity to keep up the effort to maintain the effort and the standards. Perhaps there is even an inherent limit to what can be accomplished (though I detest such a conclusion myself).
(Now that I think about it, the current academic “modern classical composer” is a sort of mirror of the faults that i see emerging in the scientific community.)
Scientists should be aware of this and wary of taking the acceptance of society for granted. When I see all the lies coming out of the “Climate Change” folks, I truly fear for the future of science. Once it loses it credibility, it just becomes another collection of beggars rattling their tin cups.
It is something to consider.
As most of you probably know, the G-20 summit is going to be held here in Pittsburgh in late September. A bunch of D.C. folks and city-county officials swarmed our convention center yesterday morning (kicking out my tech person who was working on our video projectors) and did a sort of preliminary logistics walk of the space.
I’m as big a booster for Pittsburgh, my adopted town, as you will probably ever meet. So although it’s flattering for the Burgh to get the spotlight for a couple days, on the practical side it will be a nightmare for average folks (counting me) who have to work in and commute to Downtown. In so many ways, the G-20 summit is like an abbreviated version of the Olympics … the red-headed stepchild you never want to find on your doorstep.
Anyhoo, the backroom discussions that led to Pittsburgh’s being chosen for this, uhhhh, honor, continue to fascinate me, and IMO have everything to do with a family by the last name of Rooney, kinda sorta famous in these here parts.
The official line being given is that we were chosen because of our being an example of recovery. Which in certain ways we are. We used to be a one-industry town, that industry collapsed, we have now diversified our local economy, and we are still here and kicking (and passing, and hat-tricking!), and will be here for many years to come. Bottom line: We ain’t Detroit. (We just win our championships there…)
But the spin-on-the-spin is interesting too. Catch this paragraph from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article on the visit yesterday by the D.C. folks:
White House officials have said Pittsburgh was chosen as the location for the meeting because it is emblematic of the transition from industrial grime to green economy to which other nations aspire.
“Green economy”? Pittsburgh? That thar is some furious spin.
There is no guarantee, you know, that science, or great science, is now a permanent fixture of civilization, that it can always be relied upon to be there as a powerful, living occupation. Earlier in the thread we had talked about Classical Music. Well here there was an incredible burst of creativity that spanned a few centuries. It seems to have quite abated now. I think great science and great music are both currently going on. The problems is, with the present state of the fields there is no time-filter seiving out the garbage.
Marcus: Well i would like to believe that. But I do not think that there are any “Mute and inglorious” Beethoven’s out there. We really are producing nothing like the great golden age of classical music. Not at all.
And it is not for lack of trying. There are thousands of so called “Classical composers” out there, and a great many of them have great jobs as academics, etc. Few are in a garret somewhere.
The notion of the obscure composer unknown in his lifetime but then raised up to Parnassus after his death is mostly a myth. Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms were internationally known celebrities in their times.
There is a great hunger for excellent new music of the level of the the great age of Western Music. There does not seem to be much forthcoming.
I had no idea there were so many Deadheads here at Belmont Club.
Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.
While there was “pop” music in those days, it seems to me, that pop music today sucks quite a bit of the O2 out of the musical biosphere, at least on the PR front.
There are a number of well known conductors & performers but as far as composers go that is something else. I’m trying to think of my collection and the only ones featuring contemporaneous composers are my Kronos Quartet CDs some of these compositions are good all around, some are interesting, and some are twaddle, Bartok, Rachmaninoff, and Gershwin are after the KQ cds my newest compositions.
Oh yeah Bernstein (42cnd Street) and while I don’t have any of his works Copland is another one. I know John Cage often is a name that comes up but his 4:20 disqualifies him in my mind. John Williams is another one and John Williams has made lots of music in the new form of the movie score.
Somewhat off topic, but it’s fun and we don’t have a thread on it yet. Concerning that blackest of Blue State men, pseudo-scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., it seems the arresting officer had his police radio on, and Gates could be heard screaming at him. The story doesn’t say if it was recorded, but boy do I hope so. And can we get it on YouTube like NOW?
Gates also now famously said “I’ll speak with your mama outside,” which has already made its way onto a t-shirt, and threatens to become a new catch phrase.
Amazingly, the officer is standing up to the shark attack on him, as is the police department. They didn’t roll over under the pressure. This is a sea change.
This may be one of those strange little pebbles tossed into the pool that creates huge ripples that go on for a long time. I think a lot of people-of-no-color are simply saying “enough” to the racial mau-mauing they’ve been subjected to for decades. The thought process is something like: “You got your black President and we’re STILL racists?”
As Fred Flintstone would put it, this might be the camel that breaks the straw back.
And just to chime in… The Greatful Dead. Ugh. The most boring band in the world.
Somebody has to be the contrarian around here.
M Simon – I have been following the polywell experiments on your site for a few years now. The experiments are still being done at the Santa Fe Institute are they not? Santa Fe is my home town and the northern mountains were my range for many years. I has occasion years ago to do some work at PBFA-II. I used to work for the company that designed the control systems for the joint. I was just doing wire monkey work.
So, we have some folks from lots of places. A lot of westerners too. My Aunt was from the central valley of Ca. She and her husband ran an orange, walnut and grape farm in Exeter for many years. She and my Dad were born in Alameda.
aaron – Where are you from? I live in ‘Burque and have been here since I got out of the service in ’75.
90. trangbang68
Yeah!
I saw Uncle Bob in Allentown, PA on 7/14 and he changed the lyrics around a little. Unfortunately they went in one ear and out the other, and I had no way to record what I heard. It was a great show, though.
Blue/Red election colors. The networks back a long time ago decided that at every Presidential election the color of the Party of the incumbent would switch.
2000 Democrat incumbent, color blue for incumbent, red for the challenger. So Gore blue, Bush red.
2004 incumbent now red, challenger blue. So Bush red (again), Kerry blue. 2008 should have been incumbent blue and challenger red.
However, over those 8 years the Republican/conservatives became identified as “red” and the Democrats/progressive/liberals as “blue”. Switching back would have been opposed by the likes of “Redstate” on the conservative side and no one on the Left wanted to be called “red” for obvious reasons.
An election color quirk is now a permanent identity. I for one wish it was the other way as red is the traditional color of the left. But hey it’s just a name. The world makes the word’s meaning not the other way around.
Marcus @ 115:
I knew a couple who were musicologists. Their travels took them from somewhere in Appalachia to Louisiana to New Mexico. It seems there were threads running all through these areas. I forget the exact details but they traced it. They ended up in Las Cruces I believe. They found a local treasure, Cleofes Ortiz from Villanueva. Cleofes played fiddle. He knew songs by ‘this is the tune my cousin Clarinda taught me when I was 12 and she heard from …..’. He was a treasure and fun to be around.
As for Dead Heads – we’ll I am not one though I do appreciate their music. There are lots of similar traditions in improvisational bluegrass/folk/jam music. Also, Jerry Garcia was a really good graphic designer and I have more than one of his “brand” ties. Tcobb – If you got cane you’ll have to catch me first! I bet I can gimp faster than you! A little off topic, one of the amazing recordings that is new is Alison Krauss and Robert Plant called “Raising Sand”.
Subotai – Being from just south of you I can say I know the state of Colorado well. I went to HS in Canon City at a Catholic boys boarding school that is now closed. I have relatives and friends in the Denver area. Amazing place.
133. geoffb:
I agree; I’d prefer to see the color red identified with the radical leftist Democrats, but the way I look at is that red is one of the colors of the American flag, and that predates the Communist red flag.
how cool, three favorites of mine, “Children of Sanchez”, Florence King, and John Williams’ great operatic film scores (anybody recall the theme from “How the West Was Won”? –the sound of, er, ‘landscape elation’?), all showing up on BC today. That’s great!
While I appreciate the Grateful Dead, the work of Jerry Garcia and Dave Grisman and associates is much more accessible and fun. It is acoustic and more folksie/bluegrass. “Old and In the Way” was an early band name for them.
As a nuclear engineer I remain skeptical of the Polywell. I don’t want claims, I want to see results, independently verified. I suspect this is a right-wing energy fantasy, an analogue to photovoltaic and wind.
Still, show me.
Mongoose, hear hear! All of your comments are well taken, and greatly appreciated, as are those of our esteemed host.
Mongoose for president!
I work in the biomedical science field and have found that most of the principal investigators spend nearly all their time begging for money. At this point, it gets in the way of real science being done. The whole grant funding process has gone way beyond the notion of weeding out bad scientific projects in favor of well thought out ones. Now it has become a monster that eats up all the scientist’s time.
Scientists do not lay awake at night thinking about the latest scientific problem. They lay awake worrying whether their grant will get funded. This reliance on government grants has the effect of weeding out innovative ideas. An unproven idea, or technique, will have a much more difficult time getting funding. Better to stay the narrow course of well understood ideas and techniques, in order to have Specific Aims that will impress the grant reviewers. The grant funding process ultimately encourages group think. That may not be what it was set in place for, but that is where we have ended up.
Personally I love classical American music, like “Rodeo” by Aaron Copland or his “Fanfare for the common man”. It just doesn’t get better in my book, unless its Hayden.
And as for pictures and paintings and such, well Russel and Adams captured a lot of what is great about the wonders of the country and all of its inhabitants. While that fellow named Audubon did most of his work in the west’s “flyover” country (pun intended).
It seems that so many valuable historical and cultural artifacts sold at the larger auction houses originated in minds inclined toward country settings, not suburban sprawl or urban denial. To embrace the thing about this country that makes it America, red or blue, is to embrace the country.
The president when he speaks, as he did again on his Health Care “reform” (Not my idea of health care reform) or as he did on occasion when defending the Stim-Pork-ulus Package, and as he did a number of times during the campaign for the presidency makes statements that ridicule free enterprise and the value of competing business in driving down costs and increasing the availability and reach of the market. It is evident that president Obama has not had a job in the private sector, has not struggled to make a business flourish and grow to sustain multiple families, and has not had to struggle against the deleterious effects of government intervention into affairs that directly affect his livelihood other than whether or not he could get a job with the nonprofit organization that feeds on taxpayers money. That he does not understand the value of competition or the power of free market economics. So he sneers at the mention of competition, as though it were an outmoded concept from a past that will not again be.
The president in body language and in tone is sending the message that he despises the very heart and the very soul of American economic activity and certainly the policies he proposes and the bills he struggles to have made into law are designed to kill American economic activity and destroy the American middle class and its small business owners. Why?
Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth I saw the Grateful Dead and New Riders of the Purple Sage on a double bill at The Fillmore East.
rickl, betraying my old self, saw Dylan in 1966 at Kleinhan’s Music Hall in Buffalo in one of his early electric shows, I believe with Al Kooper and Michael Bloomfield.
My only live Dead concerts were the Festival Express in Toronto in 1970 and Watkins Glen in 1973. I read of Watkins Glen with 600000 in attendance, 1 out of every 28 Americans were there. A skydiver with flares caught fire in the air and died.
I don’t remember much of those days, and its probably just as well.
oops –of all the great John Williams scores to isolate, i hadda pick an Alfred Newman/Ken Darby (blush). But, they’re all three great!
‘Riders of the Purple Sage’ –ok, now i’m remembering the Moody Blues –
wade/139; re your question in your last para, did you know that the ‘stress test’ program that covered the 19 financials and qualified them for the free-money discount window –do you understand that the round number 20 would’ve include CIT, at #20 –CIT, the red state small biz financier?
Why did the O inner circle cut the test off at 19, and leave hanging CIT to compete against free discount window money –which CIT can’t get? CIT, the big vital jobs generator of rural and small biz America?
If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t there.
143. Lifeofthemind:
The main thing I remember about the 60s is the space program. I was 11 at the time of Apollo 11.
And I mostly remember Walter Cronkite for his space coverage. I didn’t pay much attention to his Tet editorial at the time.
141. trangbang68:
rickl, betraying my old self, saw Dylan in 1966 at Kleinhan’s Music Hall in Buffalo in one of his early electric shows, I believe with Al Kooper and Michael Bloomfield.
Wow. Very cool.
I’ve seen him roughly 35 times, starting in 1978. Most of those concerts have been from 1990 to the present. He has had plenty of ups and downs during his career, but in the last decade or so he has been consistently good, both live and in the studio. His last four or five albums are among the best of his career, in my opinion.
In Allentown he played 14 songs, and only five of them were from before 2001. I loved it, since I love his recent albums. Anyone who thinks that Bob Dylan is a nostalgia act is in for a real surprise.
Also, in the past several years, he has been playing at minor league baseball stadiums during the summer. I don’t know whose idea that was, but it was brilliant. Minor league ballparks are great places for concerts. They can hold several thousand people yet are much more intimate than big city stadiums and arenas. They are all general admission, so you can go down on the field and stand close to the stage, or you can sit in the stands and eat a hot dog.
#134 Robohobo
You’re an Abbey kid? As in Holy Cross Abbey?
Do you remember the road that took off due north from the kitchen/dining room, running past the Guest House? On the west side there was a line of houses, one white, 3 brown modulars, and a yellow and brown one just before the agricultural fields and catty-corner from the cemetary. They were used for housing for lay teachers as part of their pay package in lieu of cash when the school was open. After the school closed, the monks rented those houses out. My family lived there on the Abbey grounds for 14 years. And no, I never was a monk. In fact in a Japanese garden we put in the back yard, we had a statue of Buddha that ….. bemused the archbishop.
What year did you graduate? Sometime we need to get together outside of Wretchard’s house and I will tell you about the last days of the Abbey.
Subotai Bahadur
Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment, may be of interest to you folks who are considering declines in areas of achievement such as art, music and science. Murray tracks the course of human achievement from around 800 BC to 1950 AD spanning world cultures. He has a model for ranking and evaluating an individual’s contributions to various endeavors that he claims has the same statistical accuracy as intelligence testing.
His basic finding is that per capita human accomplished on this planet crescendoed to a peak in Western Europe in 1850 and has pretty much been on decline ever since to the degree that the number of things produced since 1950 that will be remembered 200 years from now is approaching zero. It’s not zero, but it’s approaching zero.
By the way, his proposed theory on why this is so, on what really was the creative engine that set Europe off uniquely on its rocket ride of human accomplishment, was an unforeseen finding that surprised him. It’s Christian Thomism, a la the ratio et fides motifs most recently expressed by Pope Benedict in Regensburg. And of course the corollary is that decline of human accomplishment, starting roughly around the time of Charles Darwin, correlates very closely to the abandonment of Thomist views.
Some details on California, where some of my ancestors have lived since 1776. In the Bay Area, most of the productive businesses are non-union. It is only the public employee unions that have any numbers. So one source of liberal strength, is that in local elections, employee unions support people who will vote to raise their benefits. Since local city council seats are the first stepping stone to “higher” offices, it tends to weed out conservatives.
A second major impact is manipulation of districts to insure the incumbent wins. While we got term limits, since the districts are manipulated, you end up with the same sort when someone is termed out. Since the dems have been the ones drawing the lines, they have about 5 more seats than they would if you drew a fair map.
The dems also have had some sharp politicians in Unrah and Willie Brown. No one to match on the right.
Another is the lack of religion in the bay area, except the new religion of environmentalism. I grew up in Berkeley, now my father was the last republican in Berkeley.
Regarding job creation in the Bay Area, a lot of it comes from Stanford. A lot of businesses have been created from nothing, starting with HP. The real question should be for the world, are we killing the silicon valley goose that lays the golden eggs?
Buddy, bless the bond holders.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200907231412DOWJONESDJONLINE000864_FORTUNE5.htm
Wade, they may pull thru –but the question remains why Geithner & Summers cut off the stress test at 19 banks and left #20 pore old red-state small-biz CIT dangling without the discount window express lane cleared as it was for the next 19 up the size scale.
Especially given that CIT is in TARP for $4bbl or so –and apparently Geithner & Summers were willing to just let that to-be-paid-by-taxpayer sum evaporate, even tho it was at risk to begin with due to the Government Sacks’ boys’ TARP program (which is fast becoming known as the “Obama National Bank”).
What was that Warren Beatty movie about the Communist revolution called? BLUES? /sarc
Nah, I think we shouldn’t let them get away with this doublespeak. Call the Red states RED, dadgummit.
The Blue Team is OUR side.
Elby: thanks a bunch. BTW, I would make a much better Field Marshal or Station Chief than a POTUS. Hard for me to suffer fools gladly. I have not given up hope that good leadership wil; yet emerge.
heh –the good ones never want the job –
Mark said the following:
>Maybe something like Catholic social
>doctrine, including concepts of subsidiarity
> and ‘widening circles of prosperity’ will
>gain some traction as a coherent way to
>think about the common good.
We seem to be getting there via the collapse of the public school systems.
A friend of mine sent me this upon the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for SCOTUS:
>Judge Sonia Sotomayor, if confirmed to the
>Supreme Court by the Senate, will bring the
>total of self-identified Catholics among the
>current justices to six. These six would be
>two-thirds of the Court’s membership—and
>half of the Catholics who have ever served
>on the Court in its entire history. If we
>include Judge Sotomayor, the three most
>recent appointments have all replaced
>Protestant justices with Catholic ones.
>
>Anyone see this as a symptom of the collapse
>of public high schools? Quite possibly the
>reliable place to find either liberals or
>conservatives with the intellectual chops
>for the bench is …. parochial school
>graduates. Which, incidentally, means that
>if this is true, the next couple decades
>should see the Federal bench becoming much
>more Hispanic/Mexican, Hispanic/Cuban, and
>Vietnamese (the three identifiable Catholic
>groups that disproportionately send their
>kids to parochial schools), and a great deal
>less African-American (except maybe from
>Louisiana).
>
>Used to be said that during the 1945-55 era,
>the Supreme Court was a continuation of
>1920s Ivy League bull sessions except it was
>binding.
>
>Perhaps in the 2020s and 2030s it will be
>said of St. Iggy’s High bull sessions …
>who knows, maybe even in English.
rickl, I would rank Dylan albums personally as follows:
favorites: “Blood on the Tracks”, “Highway 61″, “Modern Times”, “Oh Mercy”, “Bringing it all Back Home”, “Nashville Skyline”, “Blonde on Blonde”, “Time out of Mind” and the three Christian albums. I like lots of stuff on other ones. I haven’t heard the new one. “Modern Times” is amazing for a guy who has been at it so long when so many of his surviving contemporaries are limping through bad retro shows at county fairs.
“Political World” on “Oh Mercy” is very prescient of our times. “Trying to get to “Heaven off “Time out of Mind” is a haunting song. Great artist.
My fave single of the less well knowns is Tomorrow is a Long Time. And here’s a cover of it that guaranteed will make you an Elvis fan forever. Listen to him bend that ‘only if she was lying by me’ line.
Somewhat off-topic (as much of this thread has been),this might be a good place to recommend David Hart’s newest book, “Atheist Delusions.” It has much to say about the rise and decline of the West, thought that is not its principal subject.
solovyov (#158):
Thanks for that lead to David Bentley Hart; the book sounds fascinating, and I ordered it from Amazon.
Jamie Irons
(former atheist in a foxhole)
jamie, on the bird sub-topic, i thought Burt Lancaster and Karl Malden in The Birdman of Alcatraz is film acting at its apex. As in, there’s nowere else to go with it, it’s the tops.
Subotai-
Yup, Holy Cross Abbey. Class of 1970. I saw the garden! We were bemused also! At one of the short reunions we thought that maybe Brother Martin Muheim(d) was responsible. I could tell you tales of Canon City. There are still old classmates living there and beyond in the rest of Colorado.
I can be reached at robohobo53(at)gmail(dot)com
Are you still in Canon City?
The Hobo
Buddy,
I entirely agree about Burt and Karl (Burt and Ernie, too, for that matter!)…
Jamie Irons
“Scientists do not lay awake at night thinking about the latest scientific problem. They lay awake worrying whether their grant will get funded.”
And one of the ways of getting funding is to cater to the latest political fads, such as Global Warming. My professors were quite open and matter-of-fact about this when discussing careers in the physical sciences.
Just one more reason, sadly, to be skeptical of experts, even in the supposedly honest sciences.
162; heh –reminds me, Kermit’s favorite opera was Wagner’s “The Low n’ Green”
“I’ve just ticked off the flute-players of BC!”: bogie wheel@113.
You are in good company, as Mozart famously disliked the flute, preferring the recorder.
‘floutists’
solovyov: Yes thanks for that. Will pick it up.
With all the personal salutations going on I wanted to jump on the bandwagon and mention to Jamie Irons that over two decades ago I was returning from a reunion in New Haven, and my seatmate on the plane told me his brother had been working as a Doctor on (if I recall correctly) the Navajo Reservation.
In summer of 1962 my brother and my Mom and I spent 2 weeks in the Hopi mesa village of Shipaulovi, with visits to Mishongnovi and a few other sites. My brother’s guitar teacher in Ventura county was half-Hopi, half-Hawiian…
It was magical. I could tell some stories, but the point of this was to wonder if you might be the Doctor mentioned by my traveling companion. This would have been either 1977 or 1982.
Robohobo,
It’s late, but here’s mine. Grew up in the Depression in OK, with lots of books and music. Kids had music lessons back then. My family would sing around the piano at night, mostly old Southern or Irish folk classics, Mother playing and singing alto with my Sis. me soprano and Dad’s Irish tenor.
Dad volunteered for the army the day after Pearl Harbor.
Was a music major my first college year. Lots of classics, opera. I guess the last contemporary composers I liked were Villa-Lobos and Roger Williams (especially the score for “Private Ryan.)
Former university teacher (economics) and former Lefty. Did some prison time for one of my Lefty projects. Learned a lot there. Also became a Christian there, and after parole to California, seminary and the pastorate. Pastored 3 churches, one Hispanic. Started and ran 2 very large homeless shelters, where we pioneered in getting families OUT of homelessness, with high success rates over the years.
Finished moving to the Right in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Don’t know how anyone managed to stay Leftist after the unimpeded view we got of the Soviet disaster then.
Left California for Austin, to be near my grandson, from age 6 to 18. (Also have lots of adopted grandkids, since you can never have enough grandkids.) Started another charity in Austin, getting people off welfare, and pastored another church near here.
Austin is a good place for being outdoors, and for food, music – lots of things. Austin’s Leftist, true, but still in Texas. Near my family. Works for me.
GerryP, you sound like exactly the sort of old rounder that Austin is famous fer!
–
–says i with mucho goodwill
Thanks Buddy. Same to you! Regards, Gerry