Positive Liberty

As mentioned below, this is the 40th Anniversary of the Summer of ‘69, memorable among that pig in the demographic python, the Baby Boomer generation for Woodstock and the Apollo 11 moon landing. Historical trivia buffs will remember that Summer of ‘69 highlights also included Edward Kennedy’s unsuccessful attempt to teach Mary Jo Kopechne how to swim and the Canadian government’s declaration that French is equal to English, the legislative equivalent of declaring that Kenny G is the musical equivalent of Miles Davis. Warren Burger replaced Earl Warren as Chief Justice, paving the way for future Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy writers to come up with “Earl Warren Burger” questions. Little noted by the non-homosexual community at the time, but the Stonewall Riots marked the more or less official beginning of the modern gay rights movement, eventually, as the tasteless but witty line goes, transforming the Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name into the Love That Never Shuts Up. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon announced the “Vietnamization” (read: U.S. defeat and withdrawal) of the Vietnam War and Charles Manson was giving cults a bad name out in sunny California.

Of all these variously noteworthy events, I’ve been thinking more lately about the Apollo program and our subsequent near abandonment of manned space missions. Continue Reading »

Special 4th of July, 40th Anniversary of the Summer of ‘69 Edition, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock:

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Bonus Quasi-Historical & Genealogical Trivia Section: Family tradition has it that the location of the British ship holding Francis Scott Key where he witnessed the bombardment that inspired the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner was not the Patapsco River but a cove directly west of Ft. McHenry shown here.
(N.B. — Family tradition is almost certainly wrong.)

“I’m ready for my close-up, Principle DeMille.”

The first Summertime Blues cover, from the psychedelic rock band Blue Cheer’s 1968 debut album, Vincebus Eruptum:

Occasionally I will mention in passing my belief that reason, wonderful (literally wonderful) though it is, is a more limited tool than many intellectuals would like to believe. I never seem to get around to explaining what I mean by this and I have no intention of trying to do so now. An example of what I mean, however, occurred to me when I mentioned recently in another thread the British journal of philosophy, Mind. The problem, in a nutshell, is whether we can justify deductive reasoning at all beyond reliance on what are, at bottom, mere logical intuitions. The question goes back to the ancient Greeks — well, what philosophical question doesn’t? — but has continued to perplex some of us who ponder it still. Here’s a delightful explanation, reprinted (alas, without permission) from Mind 4, No. 14 (April 1895), pp. 278-280, by logician Charles Dodgson, better known, of course, as Lewis Carroll:

Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back.

“So you’ve got to the end of our race-course?” said the Tortoise. “Even though it does consist of an infinite series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or other had proved that the thing couldn’t be done?”

“It can be done,” said Achilles. “It has been done! Solvitur ambulando. You see the distances were constantly diminishing; and so –”

“But if they had been constantly increasing?” the Tortoise interrupted “How then?”

“Then I shouldn’t be here,” Achilles modestly replied; “and you would have got several times round the world, by this time!”

“You flatter me — flatten, I mean” said the Tortoise; “for you are a heavy weight, and no mistake! Well now, would you like to hear of a race-course, that most people fancy they can get to the end of in two or three steps, while it really consists of an infinite number of distances, each one longer than the previous one?”

“Very much indeed!” said the Grecian warrior, as he drew from his helmet (few Grecian warriors possessed pockets in those days) an enormous note-book and a pencil. “Proceed! And speak slowly, please! Shorthand isn’t invented yet!”

“That beautiful First Proposition of Euclid!” the Tortoise murmured dreamily. “You admire Euclid?”

“Passionately! So far, at least, as one can admire a treatise that won’t he published for some centuries to come!”
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I doubt it. Or rather I doubt that they take it as seriously as many of us non-economist pseudo-intellectuals do. For my own part, I’ve had an on again / off again habit of reading and once even subscribing to The Economist. Not counting a lifetime subscription to Mind my wife gave me as a wedding present, I can’t think of another magazine except the New Yorker, the first couple of years of National Lampoon and, oddly enough, the Atlantic to which I’ve ever subscribed. I say “oddly enough” because there’s an interesting critique of The Economist at the Atlantic’s website, comparing its continued success with the tribulations of Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and Rankings World Report.

I suppose the weekly news magazine simply isn’t as useful as it once was. People may still subscribe to their local newspapers for, well, for local news, not to mention the dangers of dripping cereal milk on one’s laptop at the breakfast table. But the whole point of news magazines is or was to get a good quick survey of the week’s happenings with a bit more in depth reporting on whatever the week’s big stories were. The instantaneous news cycle, however, has taken much of the steam out of a product that promises longer reportage and more color photographs as long as five or six days after a story breaks when the internet is chock-o-block with hourly updated reporting (not to mention amateur punditry!) free for the taking.

I’m not, in fact, an Anglophile – though some would claim I’m merely in deep denial on that point – but what I always enjoyed about The Economist was its non-U.S. perspective. Frankly, not even that is enough to make me a regular reader anymore, what with hundreds of foreign sources of news and commentary also available on the internet. But I drifted away from reading it entirely for a while when it dawned on me that I knew more about economics – and believe me, dear readers, that’s an extremely low threshold of knowledge – than some of the magazine’s writers. Like the New Yorker, I came to believe the magazine had been coasting on its former strengths for some time. Then a few years ago I gave it another shot and, like the New Yorker, it had gotten much better again if not exactly up to its former glory days.

So, apropos of my opening question, I wonder if there’s a market for a print version magazine called The Blogger?

Everything that’s wrong with American Idol can be summed up in two words: Janis Joplin.

From 1968, Summertime:

Self-Indulgent Trivia Bonus: The only record album I ever won was Cheap Thrills from some local radio station promotion and I don’t even remember the circumstances — how’s that for a typical 60’s touch? — but I do remember a girl I knew in high school, Jeannie Marie Hall, being a big fan of Joplin. As I happened at the time to be a, let’s say, big fan of Jeannie (alas, nothing ever came of it), I paid more attention to my freebie LP than I probably would have otherwise. There aren’t really that many records from the 60s and 70s I still pull out once in a while these days and play, but Cheap Thrills is one of them. Thanks, Jeannie, wherever you are!

From 1969, a hit single following their appearance at Woodstock,
Sly & the Family Stone’s Hot Fun in the Summertime:

Or so contends the headline of a just released AP story.

Color me dubious, but without enabling legislation revising the authorizing language of Title 5 U.S.C, etc. providing various spousal benefits for federal employees, I can’t imagine a mere executive order withstanding constitutional challenge. And I can’t, for that matter, imagine such enabling legislation being passed by Congress at present even given the Democratic Party’s majority control of both houses. I’d be glad to be proven wrong as to that, but I have a hunch that there is less here than meets the eye.

In case you’ve missed it, there’s a feud running between Sarah Palin and David Letterman. Continue Reading »

“I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote!”

Without doubt, the most covered summer rock anthem of all time (some of those covers I plan to post as the summer wears on), here’s the original Eddie Cochran version of Summertime Blues:

(Yes, that’s right, people were all short and squat back in those days. Either that or the best audio version currently available on the internet has unfortunately screwed up the video aspect ratio. I cut and paste, you decide.)

And, come to think of it, I still am. Oh, I’m not deaf to criticism, and I’m not trying to play dumb here, so I do try to halt the lame jokes every once in a while, lest you think I’m blinded by an ideology that’s older than the Gay Nineties.

But seriously, folks. I mildly resent that the word “gay” has come to have its primary use referring to male homosexuals, although I especially loath the term “homophobia.” I mean, really, spare me the hand-me-down Freud, please. There are plenty of people in the world whose prejudice toward homosexuals isn’t grounded in fear of repressed or latent homosexuality any more than your average racist or sexist fears waking up one morning to discover he’s suddenly a Negro with a vagina.

“Negro?!?! How dare you?!?! You, a privileged White Anglo Saxon Protestant Male, are absolutely forbidden to use any terms in reference to black people except African American, and even then only until we decide to change it to something else, after which we expect your immediate and complete compliance!”

Which reminds me of a former female colleague (she’s still female, by the way, just no longer a colleague) who actually once referred to a black guy from the U.K as an “English African American.”
Continue Reading »

… said journalistic legend and Soviet sympathizer, I.F. Stone, “is that you can never tell where a front page story will show up.” (I paraphrase, but that’s the gist of the quote.) Another wonderful Post habit is an almost complete disconnect between a story’s headline and the story, itself. Here is a headline from today’s Post:

Economy Forces 2009 Grads to Dump Dream Colleges

And here’s the opening sentence from page two of the story:

It is still not entirely clear how the recession will affect the college outlook for most of the nation’s 3.3 million 2009 high school graduates.

It’s clear enough for the headline writer, though.

Sure, the story opens with a claim that “[in] a survey to be released Tuesday, 71 percent of high schools reported that more of their students are forgoing their ‘dream schools’ this year than in previous years.” But the rest is scant anecdata, questions about the yet unreleased report, itself, and dubious generalizations. How many more of their students, for example, are in play here? A statistically significant number?

Yeah, the recession is undoubtedly affecting college attendance decisions. Big deal. In related news, people with lots of money have more options than people with less money. Film at eleven.

Now how about a story about how government aid programs significantly contributed to the increased sticker price of those colleges in the first place?

“Sweden’s Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament.”

The Pirate Party came in fifth with 7.1% of the Swedish vote, enough for an EU seat, running on a copyright and patent reform ticket in the wake of the conviction in April of the Pirate’s Bay filesharing site. As the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones observed:

Many people just don’t see illegal file-sharing as a crime, however hard the media industries try to persuade the public that it’s just as bad as shoplifting.

Fair enough, and a fairly good example of the limits of state power to enforce unpopular laws.

I believe in the usefulness and the justice of intellectual property rights, which is not to say I agree with the current state of intellectual property law, let alone the notion that a business model that predicated its profit on the original release of material is per se entitled to windfall profits for its re-release in perpetuity. And while I have some scrupples about wholesale digital file piracy, I’ve been known to copy the occasional CD from friends or the library and to make cassette tapes of other people’s LPs back in the day, so I’m not qualified to cast the first stone here.

In fact, human history is pretty much the story of the haves trying to keep what they’ve got from the have-nots, the have-nots discovering new ways to take it, the haves finding better ways of protecting it, and so on and so forth. In that sense, politics is merely the continuation of that endless struggle by different means.

AFP reports that a taster sampled dishes prior to their being served to President Obama in a French restaurant on Sunday.

In related news, Vice President Biden said the restaurant was a nice change from his usual job of sampling kibble before it’s served to First Dog Bo.