QoD - From SoBe

Fun fact: remove all of the vowels from Reince Priebus and you get RNC PR BS.
                          ---   Southern Beale

Double Fantasy

Double fantasy

Some Thoughts on Writing

 Here's Sarah Vaughan with the Basie band doing a great old song, Just Friends.




Funny sometimes, how one thing will play into another.  After rehearsal last night we were talking about the horrible job the publisher did with the parts for a terrific Tommy Newsome arrangement of Just Friends, written for Don Severenson and the Tonight Show Orchestra.  It's nothing like the rendition by Sarah Vaughan with the Basie band above, which I included because I like it, and I can't find Newsome's on YouTube.  However, you can listen to a sample here.

The trombone parts are 6 pages long and every page turn but 1 is impossible.  Playing the trombone requires two hands at all times.  Ditto the bass, and the bass player showed me how his part had impossible turns - leading into the most important bass passages.  This type of scoring is lazy, thoughtless, and disrespectful of the musicians who have to deal with it.

The thought the bass player left me with, after some conversation, is that when you write something, you should make it impossible for your reader to misunderstand or misinterpret.  This applies to prose as well as music.   I try to write clearly, but I've never thought about it in quite this way.  The idea applies not only to the mechanics of writing, but also to organizing and presenting your thoughts and maintaining focus in your presentation.

Which reminds me of this criticism I wrote of Tim Worstall's Forbes piece.   There was a lot of commentary at the cross-post at AB, and Worstill had a lot to say there, including, "I am getting really rather mystified at all the people who seem to be so deliberately missing the point I was making," and finally, "To repeat, I am critiquing the use of the insurance model to provide such desired health care: not determining how such desired health care should be provided nor even venturing into the question of whether such health care is desirable or not."  You can read it all over at AB.

Maybe I was too impetuous, and should have read the article I was critiquing more carefully.  Now that I know his point, I can't go back, re-read, and figure out if I would have gleaned more with more care.  But Worstall did not make it impossible for me to misunderstand or misinterpret.

Even before rehearsal, I wrote a comment back to him, containing what I think is some pretty good advice..

 So we learn that, contra the title and the extended quote from Sandra Fluke near the beginning, your article really has nothing to do with either her or Limbaugh, and is only marginally related to contraception.  The real topic, if I understand it correctly now, isn't even the subtleties of insurance vs assurance, but rather idealized health care funding.  So, yeah - I will now freely admit that I missed your point - totally - but it was not deliberate, as you asserted in your first comment.

If you want to have your readers get your point, then, instead of glibly riffing on a current hot topic, I'll suggest that you actually write about whatever it is you are writing about, and not require your readers to either do a click-through to discover the actual topic in a different article, or have a close familiarity with your publication history.  When you put something out in the public sphere, you lose control of what readers are going to make of it, and you can't expect them to know your implied context.  So you need to help them along if you have a specific agenda.  An article that is intended to make some point really needs to not only stand alone, but also explicitly make its central point, without a lot of distracting digressions.

I'll also suggest that you use links to show source data, to corroborate assertions, or provide further reading for whoever might be interested in digging a little deeper, not to illustrate the implied point of the current article.   I had to read your comments here to discover what I think you might have been talking about there.  And my next thought was that your point was the difference between insurance and assurance, though I guess that isn't it, either.

That is not communicating effectively.  When you find yourself mystified by the problem of people misunderstanding what you say, then I'll further suggest that blaming your readers will not move you very far toward a solution.   

Is that harsh?  I can't decide.  I don't know if Worstall read these words.  But I'm going to take them to heart.  I've noticed that people will sometimes ignore the main content of my post, and go down a side track due to a flip comment or marginally relevant value judgment I made.  So - there is a lesson here for me as well.

I hope I'm wise enough to take my own advice.

What the Hell?!? Friday - Vocabulary

Sometimes I get confused by similar sounding words, like defalcation and . . . well, never mind.

So, to help avoid that kind of problem, here is clarification on today's pair of near-homophones (not to be confused with, frex, Rick Santorum.)

Predator (n) An animal that eats other animals.

Predater (n) Someone who knew (so to speak) your significant other before you did.

A Song of Ice and Miss Muffit

Huntsman Endorses Romney

John Huntsman is throwing in the towel, after consistently polling in the low single digits.  (Eschewing an obvious joke here.)

Now he endorses Mitt the Ripper.   Propitious flip-flop?  You be the judge.

How Important Is Hayek?

Art reminds us of one of Krugman's posts from a couple weeks ago, with this PK quote:

"David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics."

PK goes on to point out that Hayek's current relevance is almost purely political rather than economic, with the implication that it is a distorted view of Hayek that the current crop of right wingers uses to oppose anything that smacks of progressivism. Warsh, in the link above, is more blunt, or as PK puts it, "cruel."

To be clear, this bluntness and/or cruelty is not leveled at Hayek himself, but rather at those who would self-servingly re-animate him as a conservatard caricature.

Warsh: "But the claims conservatives are making about the role he played as an economist are beginning to smack of Ruizismus. That is, they have jumped a caricature out of the bushes late in the day and claim that their guy ran a great race."

Warsh took a lot of heat in comments - which he accepted with almost saintly forbearance - from right wingers who misread his post. These are not stupid people. Their misreading comes from ideological blindness - an insidious form of self-induced, willful ignorance.


My comment at Warsh's place, from earlier today:

I’m later than late to this post, and took the curious route of reading the comments first. That made the post itself quite a revelation. Having no dog in this fight, it’s pretty easy for me to see that it is far from the hatchet job that several other commenters imagine it to be.

It’s not clear whether the point is to damn Hayek with faint praise or to praise him with faint damnation. But there is some attempt at balance, and it is clear that accusations of ad hominem are rising from fevered imaginations. An unbiased reader will note that mention of Hayek’s divorce was in the context of “Thereafter he labored under five distinct handicaps,” which is actually giving him a bit of cover for decades of relative obscurity.

Re: the n-gram chart, (linked in comment 24 by Paul Wolfson) it’s easy for an objective observer to note that Hayek had gone absolutely nowhere for 30 years before his Nobel reception tickled a modicum of interest. Then Reagan/Thatcher supply-side-ism – however irrelevant – gave him a boost, for about a decade. Since then, even with Beck’s hucksterism, it been flat-line, at best, for well over a decade.

The decline of Keynes and Friedman over that same span may well reflect the general dumbing-down of practically everything in a sound-bite age dominated by professional liars like Gingrich, Limbaugh and Murdoch’s entire stable, and dim-wits like Paul Ryan, Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry.

Even in his grave, poor Keynes has been ad-hominem-ed to death. More so that any other currently dead economist. Well, except for Marx.

So – are we screwed, or what?

Knight's Castle

A request by Ari at EotAW for books to recommend to his precocious 9-Yr-old son reminded me of a favorite book from that time in my life

My comment:

I was 9 or 10 when I found KNIGHT’S CASTLE by Edward Eager at the Locke Branch Library in Toledo. Absolutely loved the dreamy magic realism. It’s a fine example of moral fiction that is not preachy. The story involves siblings and cousins, and does an excellent job of presenting the girls as equal to the boys, while recognizing each as a unique individual. This book was originally published in 1956! Went on a quest to find it again when my son was about 10. Fast forward: my wife gave me a set of Eager’s books a few years ago, and I read them with my grandsons – to their great pleasure.

That’s when I learned that Eager was from Toledo, also.

As a kid, I was enthralled with the middle ages - and dinosaurs, too, but that's a different story.

Was there a book that you were especially fond of as a child?

Map of Westeros

This one is quite good.

Most of the action of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE takes place here.

Quote of the Day

"Hige sceal þe heardra,  heorte þe cenre, 
mod sceal þe mare,  þe ure mægen lytlað . . ."
                  --  Byrhtwold


H/T to Delong
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What the Hell?!? Friday - Imus-inspired Double-Entendre Edition

I will simply imbed this with no further comment.  Really - what could I add?




H/T to Avg Joe at The Corner.

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What the Hell?!? Friday, Pt 2 - Best Headline EVAH! Edition

Seriously.

Truth is SO MUCH better than fiction.

Deputy: Strip Search Finds Crack Between Buttocks

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Is There A Democrat in the House?

I'm talking about real Democrats, not blue dogs, DINOs and corporate shills like B. Hoover Obama.

You might be able to count them on only a few fingers, but by god, at least there's one.

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Best Wisconsin Sign

Check it out here

Update:

This one is my new favorite.

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Quotes of the Day from the Party of Lincoln

While at Rude's Place,  I noted this post, from which I will quote liberally - and in fact, progressively.

You lift quotes from RP at your own risk.  This is safe, though, because he was quoting old Honest Abe.

1. "I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to! I would to God that such a system prevailed all over the world." - From a speech on March 5, 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, regarding a shoemaker's strike (which, believe it or not, involved 20,000 shoemakers who were not, apparently, elves).

2. "Inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labor has produced them. But it has so happened, in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have without labor enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government." - From his notes

3. "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits." - From his 1861 State of the Union address, decrying "the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government."  about tariff policy, scribbled down on December 1, 1847.

One can state with absolute certainty that were Lincoln alive today, he would chose a different party.
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Earthquake in Hungary, and I'm Neither Rushin' nor Lyin'

"Rescue officials say parts of western Hungary and Budapest, the capital city, have been affected by a 4.8 magnitude earthquake, the strongest in the country since 1985."  Fortunately, no casualties were reported.

The very short article conlcudes:  "The quake was centered near the town of Oroszlany, 70 kilometers (44 miles) west of Budapest."

The name "Oroszlany" struck me, because I've known people named Orosz.  The name means, "Russian."  Presumably, some time in antiquity, their ancestors wandered into Hungary from Russia.  Could be.  After all, as someone once told me about history (and uncertain ethnicity) in that part of the world: "The fences were low, and the nights were dark."

Since I'm not familiar with the town, I ran the name through Google translator, and got the result, "Lion."

Lion.  Really.  Just for kicks, I put a space in "Orosz  lany."  The translator then spit out "Russian girl."  Nice, I suppose, but a rather odd name for a town.  My lovely wife (who gets an H/T BTW) is a Polish girl or, to my surprise, "Lengyel lány," for Lengyel is also a family name I recognize.

So, next I tried translating "Lion" from English into Hungarian, and got, "oroszlán."  Close, and a bit coincidentally Lewisian, but no szivar.

Could it be "Lioness" perhaps?  Nope - that's "nőstény oroszlán," and not at all helpful.

At that point, I lost focus, and just started playing with the translator, confirming that I did indeed, know how to count to ten, though my pronunciation is laughable.     

And now, it's time to say,  jó éjszakát.  (To which the childhood retort was, "Well you aint so hot, either!")
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What the Hell?!? Friday -- Vocabulary Expropriation Edition

Loyal readers will recognize the expression "Great Stagnation," which I coined all on my own, and have been using for quite some time to describe what economists routinely call the "Great Moderation."  

I don't read Tyler Cowan - though I recognize his name from being mentioned frequently at MB.  Cowan, professor of economics at George Mason University is a Hayek-style libertarian, free-market ideologue.  I have absolutely no reason to believe Cowan reads me, and would be astounded if he has any awareness of me at all.

But Cowan has now released an e-book (or, at 15,000 words, perhaps an e-pamphlet) titled - of all things - THE GREAT STAGNATION - How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.

The subtitle offers a broad hint about how Cowan's view differs from mine - primarily about causes, and secondarily about expectations, I don't see how we can ever get better without another New Deal. 

We have greatly different - probably even starkly incompatible - world views, but the same conclusion about the current state, though for totally different reasons.

What the Hell?!?   I want my pejorative terminology back!
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Well, I'd say this about wraps it up.

This needs no elaboration, but I'll just bring back the Glen Reynolds quote from the previous post.

There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source.

Who can argue with that?

If you need more evidence, amuse yourself by browsing through the merchandise here.

This is a particularly innocuous political cliche.

All Images & Content property of RWS Prod. Copyright © 2002-2008

 

 
H/T to Tux

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Triggering The Shooters

This billboard is located only a few blocks from where Christina Taylor Green, Representative Gabrielle Giffords and many others were gunned down.



Sarah Palin: "America's Enduring Strength" from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.


Limbaugh, and Palin, and Beck -- Oh, My!

Rivers of Blood, indeed.  That's where the politics of Blood Libel takes us.

There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source.

Thus sayeth Glenn Reynolds, University of Tennessee Law Professor and Pajamas Media  Pundit.

Well, sayeth I, what better way to victimize Sarah Palin and her ilk than to cast a bright light on them!  Not to mention their innocuous use of political clichés.


In the video above, Palin makes an uneven appeal for national solidarity, while deftly shifting the responsibility for the Arizona massacre from rabid right wing rhetoric to the lone "deranged gunman" a "single evil man." She chastizes us that we must not attempt to "apportion blame" for this terrible event.

Here are a few excerpts.   What strikes me is the same thing that struck me during the Bush administration: so much talk about personal - here, "individual" - responsibility and accountability, but somehow always for other people. Never for the actions or words of Regressives in positions of high responsibility.  I've highlighted some of the more remarkable passages.

After this shocking tragedy, I listened at first puzzled, then with concern, and now with sadness, to the irresponsible statements from people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event.


President Reagan said, “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election.

There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols?

And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of differing opinion and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.

We need strength to not let the random acts of a criminal turn us against ourselves, or weaken our solid foundation, or provide a pretext to stifle debate.

Shorter Sarah: Not my fault, so shut up.  And don't try to stifle MY SIDE of the debate.

One of those who claims right wing rhetoric and imagery bears a direct responsibility is I.  Another is Thom Hartman; and a H/T to him for his show today, where I learned the term STOCHASTIC TERRORISM, which is exactly what we are getting from the right wing these days.  It is no different in principle from the inflammatory words and videos issued by Osmam bin Ladin or Anwar al-Aulaqi.

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

This is what occurs when Bin Laden releases a video that stirs random extremists halfway around the globe to commit a bombing or shooting.

This is also the term for what Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, and others do.  And this is what led directly and predictably to a number of cases of ideologically-motivated murder similar to the Tucson shootings.

In the interest of fairness and balance, I invite anyone to point out to me examples of Stochastic Terrorism originating on the American left.
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Quote of the Day - Jesus H. Christ

In comments over at BT's place, bobby, who is "still looking for 'whirled peas'.. ;-)" asks:

I've always wondered.. what does the middle initial 'H' stand for??

Mimus Pauly has the answer.

The "H" stands for Hallmark -- because God cared enough to send the very best.

;-)

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