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Sunday, March 17, 2013

Woof? Moo? WFMU, the "Freeform" and non profit radio station of Jersey City New Jersey (and sundry other points of the compass rose), is holding its annual marathon fundraiser. They like doing things their own way, and in practical terms that means keeping advertisers and underwriters out it. Not interpolating third parties who would only be tempted to install their own needs and definitions on them. Keeping the essential equation between themselves and their listeners. Still, running a radio station is an expensive proposition. They work with small staff an inner and an adjunct army of volunteers who provide the on-air talent and administrative support respectively. Then there are the streams the ambition, and the disasters. The disasters? Well WFMU is close to the roiling waters of New York Harbor and Sandy, who was a punk, knew that. Electronic gear and water do not mix well. When a building tenant moved out they were able to reclaim their ground floor and begin plans to turn it into a performance space of endless possibilities. As the station slides into the internet age some years ago now they began streaming their broadcast and evolving new content streams. This gained them a world wide audience, but added a couple hundred thousand dollars of bandwidth that has to be paid for every year. They choose to do this fundraising the hard way through direct donations by their listeners. There is always corporate underwriting, the back door advertising of non profits, lurking in the wings, but it is kept at bay. At times I think my local NPR station runs through a list of half the corporations in America every quarter hour. And I image they take calls from every one of them. WFMU is a good cause. As a radio station and organization. There are few stations out there trying to make this kind of thing work. It is also very different from all the build-your-own-playlists enterprises out there. Your peers may know a lot of pop tunes, but they will never be versed in it as much as a dedicated record collector. If they are, then they probably already know about WFMU, because WFMU also succeeds as a community of the like-minded. Interjecting a small story here. In my previous post, one of an occasional series from a long-ago brief occupation as a Navy enlisted. I was trying to come up with phrase or idea that captured my entrancement with Google Earth and its ability to immerse you in complete detail of half remembered places. I searched the term "A map as big as the earth" which frankly gets you to a lot of things. One of those things was a book called Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z) by Hakim Bey [i.e. American anarchist-poet Peter Wilson]. After I finished reading a copy of the whole of this I found online. I went back and looked at the title page, where I noticed it said that the cover and type-setting of the print version that online version was derived from was by Dave Mandl. WFMU, I thought to myself, has a dj named named Dave Mandl. A coincidence! But it is no coincidence. It is an uncommon phenomenon to find yourself in such situation where something you do leaves you feeling fulfilled, and part of a like minded community. Of course you, reader, may feel ready to dispute this. But as an on-going fully accessible thing? I don't mean the occasional project at work that engages you and that you hope redeems the rest of the week, or month, year. Or the earnest hobby that you put more into than you get out of. A garden with finally, after trucks of fertilizer, a rose! For most though through most of their lives in the bell curve of achievement; personal satisfaction lies in the tail and the frustration of tangental living the mean. It's less a matter of luck that one finds that combination of community and fulfilling occupation, the right situation. More a matter of being able to objectively view a situation, and possessing the self knowledge would exist within it that most of us lack. Only twice in 50 years have I felt I belonged to a group or community. Not in high school, not in the native nest of my home town Holliston. In high school my best friend moved away to a town called Spartanburg (who moves to a place called Spartanburg?) It was out of high school in the Navy, that I encountered the feeling of belonging somewhere. And out of those four years not the first or the last two, but that early middle year, which was mainly spent at sea on an aircraft carrier. A close knit group, which was enforced by the worlds largest moat -- the Pacific Ocean. There was plenty of work, and on board one of the country's leading investments in national defense. Additionally places and lands I had never seen turning up every few weeks just outside the grey steel walls . The Navy had an advertising slogan in those days we used ridicule mercilessly, but for myself I'll give the Bates agency(who came up with it) a pass on that one. For a brief season I felt engaged and a version of myself used to potential. A few years later during my second semester at Maryland I joined the student radio station, which had only a year or so before been diverted from its purpose of training the next generation of programmed top-40 management to play the Clash and Birthday party. At first, through that semester, I did nothing but file records. Alex S, a hall mate, who dragged me over to their fall meeting, and myself were nominated assistant record reshelvers on the strength of attending that meeting (I have a group picture of that meeting somewhere). By the next semester I was on the fill-in list and doing more shows I could keep track of. Another semester or so on I had my own show, and a reason to buy the few records I have today; Radio Birdman, Big Star, records the station didn't already have. That was it. Two brief periods lasting only a few years. Two situations quite different nearly opposite and never feeling fully represented in the one or the other. For the rest; however, nothing. Vocation? It's hardly worth mentioning. There is nothing I've ever done which was deliberate or desired. It was all just work, to earn rent, the hand on the shovel. The library where I work currently has some positive attributes. The mission is educational, research focused, Acadamic libraries are reasonably avante tech. But not as a clerk. Librarians keep ownership of the work to themselves, leaving to support staff only the menial work. Whatever bores, irritates or repulses them. In the end the job is only a dull frustration. Avocation -- the part of your life you turn to when work fails you, takes the form of internal or external projects. Volunteer work or hobbies. I've never felt like volunteering for most concerns; though, when I first discovered WFMU I lamented that either they were not in Washington DC or that somehow (and this was the greater stretch) I did not reside in the New York metropolitan area. There is something, maybe being originally from Massachusetts, maybe the density of life, the shear weight of unknown details, but I often regard the New York area as being a foreign country. I gravitate towards inner-directed tasks like writing. Writing takes a lot of forms; though, each quite different from the other. Like those who can write easily I easily accepted the truism that anyone can write, and began this weblog. Intending to turn out an observant mix of polemics, philippics and fiction. A few years ago my friend Tran countered my expressed belief that this stream of occasional journalizing might lead to offers to write for compensation with "Hows that working out for you." A rare glimpse at a more arch persona she otherwise keeps behind layers of polite quiet conservative Viet catholicism. She is right; though, the writing here is anodyne well short of declarative, more prescriptive than narrative. Looking back to WFMU's fundraising carnival season there is a temptation to ask, is the Marathon just another staid economic transaction? Symmetrical and mutually informed, a bill of fare. An invoice for goods or services. Ordinarily, with such a lack of information there would be transaction costs to the deal. Dependent on an uncertain funding process, that process would need to over-compensate in significant ways, there would be inefficiencies. The audience probably knows more about station, than station about the listeners (lacking big data). Local volunteers know far more about stations intents and bona-fides than Long distance listeners. It is still a ordinary terrestrial radio station with its heart in northern New Jersey. Or does all the effort imply or result in a community bonding or building. A sum of all its parts and attendant mutual obligations. Broadcasting in the Internet era is broadcasting 2.0. Already an information/communication medium is WFMU passing along far more information and through this effort erasing the gulf between audience and initiators. I read a review of a book recently, whose title and author I couldn't recall although, after some searching I believe it to be this: Missing Out in praise of an unlived Life - [book] WorldCat by Adam Phillips which takes the position that part of the active mind keeps thoughts of other career paths occupations places to live, existences, in play on a semiconscious level -- to facilitate flexibility and change if necessary but also being part of ongoing assessment of current circumstance. They are our latent desires the interests we keep up on though they are not part of our daily lives. They are patterns and blueprints on a shelf. I keep similar ideas for other lives, other communities, other professions and avocations in mind. Not directly in mind, of course, which is reserved for the day to day charnel of getting up and going to work. These are dreams, the ones we all have but can never quite remember, that point to something and somewhere else. Some tell seemingly pointless stories such as what it would have been like to grow up in Plymouth instead of Holliston where my family moved when I was seven. That dream created a strange synthetic environment, Polistyn. I don't think such what-if dreams are supposed to be remembered in any comprehensive fashion, that's not their function. These slivers of other lives are like a glimpse of a ball being thrown in a just out of sight bullpen. Dream lives half remembered. You see the ball then you are bending to scoop the ball off wet grass, it falls away, leaving only a Dell workstation. The ball just another book that needs a barcode on it. At least its a book and not just WorldCat Knowledge Base ether. The Kamikaze fun-machine missed the segue there you think, turning the volume of the FMU higher, I would've gone with the Big Boys out of Adrenaline OD. Rehearsals for extinct anatomies. 8:59:12 PM    ;;

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Pattaya Beach Port Call I have gotten around to writing up another story from my Navy experiences. An upgrading of a paragraph I wrote 14 years ago. This is on the old Atomized site. At that time I dispatched the whole year of overseas deployment inside a single paragraph. This current story was only a sentence there. It was part of a whimsical and brief biography. I never felt I gave those days and people their due, but it's the sort of thing its hard to track back to after you've given it a nod. Those days reverberate strongly for me because I left the Navy after my initial enlistment and had transfered to a shore duty station halfway through. I never made it back out to sea after that one Western Pacific deployment on the USS Ranger (CV 61) and I never get far from the fact that I was still a teenager through the course of that year. This entry which is over on the Stories page deals with the Liberty Port Call in Pattaya Beach Thailand, now longer and with assorted pictures. A view along the beach looking south towards Pattaya hill/Lookout point These were four or five days of disorienting bliss. Unlike after I wrote the Great Subic Bay Sex Riot piece a year or so ago, when I never had any idea whether anyone ever read that or not. This time around I will extend this sites web meter to the stories page. Somehow I didn't think through to solving the problem by placing the HTML snippet, that drives the meter, on that page as well. A post I wrote about the day our ship, the USS Ranger, collided with an oil tanker has gotten a fair share of hits. Knowing that something is being read always makes me want to go back and completely rewrite it, but it's generally better to simply write with care and suitable completion on other adjacent things. By strange coincidence around the point where I had this about half pulled together, one of the people populating this story, Bruce Behers, contacted me and I joined a Facebook sub-page he had set up explicitly for the CVIC unit (OZ Division) from the USS Ranger's 1979 "WestPac". Which he had already gathered around three-quarters of us into. In the long run this will be fine, there may be an actual reunion in the offing. In the short run it was like someone dropping off an energetic puppy as a gift while you are trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle set up on a rickety card table. These reminisces are partially premised on their obscurity of subject. The people who move through these posts like ghosts are suddenly real people, with names and faces correctly defined and spelled, chatting and posting pictures on the most social of networks. Further, they are exhibiting recollections of the day equaling and exceeding my own motheaten memories. I suppose I could step back quietly take notes and write a more exhaustive pan-perspective version of this in a while. No story is ever truly complete; though, and this one for the moment restrains itself to a simple snap-shot of the demi-monde. Pattaya Beach Port Call 9:42:59 AM    ;;

Friday, January 25, 2013

Listing To Port Once again it is Rock 'n' Roll Top Ten Time. Or rather several weeks past time. Who to champion? I got no idea. I don't pay attention to things like I used to. Dead in the water and listing to port, that's me. But I have a post to write, so its time to trim the ballast tanks and start bailing. I don't really have an extensive nautical metaphor thing lined up. Wish I did, but that last sentence was it. Maybe next time. My modus operandi is that I keep a little list during the year, mostly at work, where I write down any song which impresses me distinctly, and which I don't immediately recognize. Nothing else goes into it. The last few years when I parse the list at the end of the year I find that I've been noting fewer new bands. This brings me to a question my nephew Grant asked one day recently. This while looking through my iPod: "Is there anything anyone my age (14) listens to that you would listen to?" The short answer to that is probably no (and to the implied verso). Although Nicole, his cousin six years older a junior at Radagast college in Providence, liked Thao Nguyen who I also like a lot. Their (Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down Band) third album We the Common comes out in a week or so. There are, I imagine, reasons for this Venn diagram of separateness in his and my playlists. I'll make a stab at a pop culture casuistry. Music among its many almost infinite facets functions as an affinity identifier. By this I mean that that a band; its music lyrics personalities and crafted image can be used as signifiers marking your desire to belong to or be included in certain groups. This portion of popular culture exists as a ready-made artifact especially for the young to accomplish this express task. There is a difference between expending effort singling out new bands versus liking music. I don't listen to music any less than I did before, and I still play my guitar, as in-artfully as ever. It is that I do not care as much whose music it is, or what scene (industry vector) it's emerging from. It is also true that as I get older and see waves of bands come and go It's easier to spot artists that are getting by on style, often borrowed style, alone. Usually these bands will not be around long. I know there are differing rules for judging style, I've got nothing against retro style, I've loved every rockabilly, garage, ska, soul, Beatle-pop, Tex-Mex and punk rock revival that's come down the pike, believe me. Now it could be that as a middle-aged person I do not resonate to the themes and obsessions of 12-24 year olds as much as I used to. Or even when it comes to it, comprehend them. The problem with that line of reasoning is that I still thrill to those same anthemic testaments of youth when sung by bands from my youth. I suppose it's simply a matter of privileging one's own cohort. I recognize that all youth is largely a parallel experience but ever in a different country. What I'm saying is that I'm talking 'bout my generation. Of course The Who were not really my generation, rather the Jam, the Clash, Mission of Burma, Dream Syndicate, Minor Threat were. I have mostly been in the alt/punk subculture community since '77 when I first heard the Ramones and Sex Pistols. It is certainly part of how I relate to music generally, that pop music exists mainly as an exterior set of reference points to me. The way I listen to music also influences things. I like radio over Pandora or Pandora-like things, but not programmed robot pop radio either. Nor college radio for reasons rendered earlier. WFMU is similar to (volunteer djs and self-programmed), but not the same as college radio. Call it curated radio. Stuff happens they react. What-they-play-is-what-you-get. My view is: a good radio station uses the whole road when they drive. 2012 en-noted favorites. In no order, numbered to obfuscate. First up Caetano Veloso. One of the founders of Brazilian Tropcali. Another of 1968's irreducible flames. I've written him in my notes before, but this year after listening to Maria Bethania I knew he had to go on the list. He wrote an autobiography in 2002 Tropical truth : a story of music and revolution in Brazil and I'm aware that there is a feature length documentary on Tropicalia out now and making the rounds on the film festival circuit Tropicalia (2012) - IMDb. I saw Searching for Sugarman at the Rehoboth Film Festival last year, maybe Topicalia will be there this year. Next a band that called itself the Flower Travellin' Band - Wikipedia. They were a late sixties/early seventies Japanese hard psych band. I'm not sure whether the song I heard was "Satori part i" or ii. There are at least that many parts maybe more. In a very similar vein, really, the Groundhogs - Wikipedia a late sixties/seventies British band in the mode of the Pretty Things or Pink Fairies led by one Tony McPhee. I find it surprising that I continue to come across great hard rock bands from that period I was not already familiar with. This shows again that history unless pressed tends to tell a small ordered tale and just pretend it is the whole story. The song I heard was "Garden", but of course there is also Cherry Red Another band I liked that turned out to be a contemporary band from San Francisco were The Wrong Words and their song "I will change your mind" a nice example of pop garage psych. A song called "Joa" by a Chicago band called Disappears which are a garage rock ensemble with a droney experimental side makes this list too. By the way I wouldn't want my inability to deploy a full suite of modern rock adjectives to keep people from thinking I don't like a sound. It's just that, as yet, there's no app for that. Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth was in this band for about a year early on. Next I have two bands named Holmes. First, the band I initially intended New Jersey's Holmes a Lyres-esque rocking band and their song from last year "Free the Preacher" which was possibly my most persistent ear-worm all year. Then while I was searching the Internet for something on that Holmes I came across Sweden's Holmes on bandcamp Holmes (Sweden). A very different band but I liked them. Under the unified rules of serendipity both Holmes need to be included in this list. To me they seem a cross of Band of Horses and the Decemberists, even moodier perhaps. Takako Minekawa - Wikipedia is a Japanese singer active in the 1990's and on. Her quirky indie-pop is not the same as j-pop by any means. Her song "Plush" is probably the best song about brushing hair you're ever likely to hear. Another Japanese singer I heard this year was MI-GU (Yuko Araki), the song was called Spiders. The Mi-gu project seems to involve a Hirotaka Shimizu as well, both from the band Cornelius. She has also done a collaboration with Mike Watt who I still remember from the Minutemen (I saw the Minutemen once). Last up David Kilgour - Wikipedia and the song "Today is going to be mine" this song is from his solo career and is off the 2002 album A Feather in the Engine. Kilgour was in the New Zealand band the Clean with which he occupied both ends of the 1980's defining indie pop. As an addendum to this year's list and perhaps cutting across the new music/old music divide. One takeaway I've had from many years of paying more attention to the lesser stars than the Big Stars of the world, is an appreciation for the quotidian musician. The guy or gal who has to go out on the road and play live in front of people to put food in the refrigerator. This includes those who may in fact make money off their recordings, but must tour so that people know they have recordings. It includes the DC barber who years ago came to an English class at the University of Maryland to talk about the narrative of the Blues, his real vocation. It doesn't matter whether they play because it's their preferred means of living, or having made a youthful start playing in a band and learned no other trade, it remains their only assured way of making money. I'm afraid sometimes that we've made pop music into too much of a young persons game That it's harder to earn a living from it, even as you learn and get better at it. Part of the problem is that Rock and Roll seems unadaptive as a medium. Too caught up in its role as the purveyor of youthful rebellion. Songs of girls guys and fast cars. Or, at that. songs about slow cars and fast girls. A medium ill-prepared to carry narratives of middle life concerns well. The work that you do just to meet other financial necessities. The entire web of obligations, car payments, marriage and children that is the character of mid life. You might make the argument that with its fast syncopated rhythms and loudness rock is preternaturally disposed towards the kinetic concerns of the young and nimble. However with its polyglot and polymorphic nature rock and roll is certainly structurally suited towards a wider range of emotional and psychological stances. Yet by and large with bands that get by age thirty let alone forty and continue to put out records the results are revealingly conviction-less. Romanticism and the popular quest always seem the true north of rock, where it ought to be heading, and everyone feels they're leaving sugar mountain too soon. There are counter examples to this. Those who by design or luck fail to embody the successive layers of precocious juvenilia that marks pop music. I ended this years list with David Kilgour to highlight music of this nature. Mature patient, from the New Zealand that also gave us the Go-Betweens. Closer to home there is also the Pernice Brothers. Whose albums speak of love, and life's transience with an authentic (New England/Cape Cod accented) rock voice. You just don't hear enough Pernice Brothers on the radio. 11:03:11 PM    ;;

Monday, December 24, 2012

Jam To-morrow At this time of year I usually try to put together a miniature pixel drawing and write up a small homily behind it. Not really happening this year. I got off too a late start, the moment passed. What I had been working on problematically violated major tenets of pixel drawing. It contained human figures that would need to look human, and other representations of objective things in the real world. It was going to involve a request for J-Rabbit to add New Order's Love Vigilantes to their repertoire. Still Something I'd like to see. Eventually I declared first-idea-fail and set about coming up with an ad hoc new piece to insert in its place. There is an order of things; rather a disorder of things. We pass the pieces back and forth trying to find arrangements or balance that would make it acceptable. Often we feel we are close, but the patterns remain intangible. I do have a pixel diagram for this Christmas after all. I drew three earths, and assigned them only so much of a story as to hang them in space. They are Jam To-morrow, Jam Yesterday, and never Jam To-day. These are their names. They are in some sort of order and follow each other around the sun. There is no jam on today's earth, you must eat your toast without it. At the outset of the holidays the Newtown shootings were on my mind, a dour cloud over the season. What happened at the Sandy Hook school was an engendered tragedy. It didn't just happen, it was no impenetrable mystery flung from outside our culture. It was born of who we are. Of what we won't take care of. Of the policy choices we make. The hardest part was the predictable reaction. Not the reaction to the shooting of children. No, rather the knee-jerk reaction of those whose first and only thought was to save their stockpiles of guns and ammunition from any question. Always talking past the elephant in the room. The NRA and their apologists like to claim a strange victimhood -- that it is not they or their hallowed object, the gun, that kills, but criminals and mad men. By criminal they don't mean of course those who may have broken a law or two, but the criminal other. By madmen: mad yes, but within a society leaves them be to their own devices, to spare the cost and responsibility. And the subset of the mad, who overly shares their predilection for "personal agency"? The NRA is loath for any mental health issue markers on the record that would check the ability to own guns. The gun industry wants to sell guns. It sells guns into a layered increasingly dark market where everyone who wants a gun gets one Whom Does the NRA Really Speak For - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic That is what the NRA sheilds. Garry Wills in his essay Our Moloch - NYRblog The New York Review of Books had this beast's number. Guns are an obsessive kink in the American psyche. A monstorous idiocy. A shadow that looms beyond its actual properties. Whether it's some vestige of frontierism, or the garrulousness of a nation composed of conquistador immigrants is a secondary matter. The trouble is the way we feed our future and our children to it. For the sake of political viability the democratic party enables this sacrifice. It became conventional wisdom for the party that guns had become a successful wedge issue. It was ceded as an issue for a generation or more. Until its effects might become a public policy concern, a health or insurance issue, like cigarettes or automobile accidents. At some point it will aggrieve enough people and affect enough money to sink on its own de-merits. When I first heard the gun control debate (or first paid attention to it) the burden of proof hung on the other side. Give them an inch they'll take a mile it was said in defense of broad ownership rights. If they question submachine guns, they may question machine pistols, they may question pistols altogether. Then they'll come for our hunting and varmint rifles. Now after backing off inch after inch year after year that mile runs the other way. Assault rifles, whether semiautomatic or fully automatic are military grade weapons developed as such (if not always sold as such). Fifty or fifeteen rounds in ten seconds? Which is why magazine size is a critical issue. Background checks honored in the breach. "Gun-show" loopholes allowing utterly unregulated gun trade. Concealed carry laws extended to everywhere; on campus, in churches. Most insidious of all anti-data laws. Attempts to hide or obscure information are rarely less than a full indictment on those who attempt it Gun violence research NRA and Congress blocked gun-control studies at CDC. - Slate Magazine. All this led me to a consideration the nature of bad. Bad in a general way, as in not of or with the good. Not evil per se, but un-optimized unhelpful wrongheaded fear-driven human activity and the attendant misery it causes. The "Kingdom of Heaven, and the Violent bear it away." The patchwork distribution of order and disorder is a point to note. Generally conflict, and calamity is localized. I've seen strife erupt in Vietnam, Cambodia, then Honduras/El Salvador, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Iraq and now at the end of the Arab spring, Syria. In each of these places the world stopped working for the afflicted populations, yet the rest of the world hummed on like an greased clock -- even excelled. This is the daily grey rain of reported news by decade and geographic quadrant. There is something to localism. Human prospect is tied to, or to put it another way mired in local conditions. Local culture, economics, leadership and protective governance. The quality of government is worth more to a people than its detractors would imagine who focus only on the quantity. My provincialism is to look at this balance of order and entropy in terms of the United States. Its unity and well-being. Congress as a political institution is essentially nonfunctional currently. The polarization that has marked recent general elections is still in waxing mode, and likely will be for several more elections. The phenomenon of captured gerrymandered congressional districts is more likely a symptom rather than a cause. The factionalism we see today may simply be driven by the cyclical conservatism described by Richard Hofstadter. Or deeper reactionary-ism , a manifest desire to undo the late progressive century, which others view as a second integral part of the enlightenment. Either way the stake of these civil wars is whether the unrest and sub-standard performance of our civic congress is significant enough to postpone or make impossible decisions and agreements we need to make, as a society, to maintain the level of cohesion and prosperity we have held. I think about the Way Forward. Prosperity may slip -- for there will always be periods of wearing out -- of ways and things renewing and rebuilding, but about what can keep things from disintegrating altogether into deprivation war and chaos. This can be conceived being done with with human nature, such as it is. Or with an evolving human nature. An adoption to circumstance paralleling social and cultural institution such as the changes made to accommodate the move from villages to cites. The contact culture that replaced the inter-relations of tribal and feudal culture. Maybe not just metaphorically either. The human brain equaling after a fashion the human psyche evolves to fit the environment it's in. Perhaps as long as the world had frontiers the path of least resistance for the aggrieved, the pushed aside was simply to keep moving, We have transitioned out of those days long since. The end of frontiers may be contributing to an age of increased conflict. Making new modes of accommodation necessary. This extended nature of humankind will look like madness, or at least weakness, in practice. It will come not from clarified rationality of existing institutions, but from far within the human germ. A thicker sense of things, a second further sight, a visceral apprehension of the nature of others rights. Against this, and aside from the crude motivations of fear and vengeance, is the superficial rationality of the smart play. This, despite the lip service we pay to the good, is how we live our lives. Breaking rules, sacred and profane, we dismiss as made for ordinary men. Laws and mores are fine we reason -- for small lives that dull order enables -- but not us. The rules that protect the mediocre just hold us back. We hold to an ideology of efficiency and individuality that prizes above all else that which obtains for us. A hyperlocal rationality of advantage. Ordinary deviations from normal behavior are not held against someone if they are seen as getting ahead by it. A tolerance of transgressions we would not deny ourselves. In the abeyance of group judgement, with its dulling interest in the leveling interest of harmonious order. The smart play is held as everyman's right. What I'm looking to describe is a deeper rationality. More of the subconscious brought up into conscious so that we are less shielded from the process of our own desires. An awareness that exposes the further threads of our actions causality. In a way that is obvious as an objects color, and beyond the emotive pull of Rousseau's bonds of empathy. Given the coldness and injustice of so much human interaction. It is against the good to claim that man's nature is as it is. That we must endure war and disorder, ethical systems lived only in the breach, because stepping outside the rule of law brings advancement and fulfillment to a few. Differing from pure hope or hope alone, the view for a more perfect human future is that it is not a thing that cannot be seen. It can be elicited through reason. Its effect can be imagined. The future is not that distant a country. Other worlds touch us already thinking of them. It is as the white queen says a "poor sort of memory that only works backwards." There will be jam tomorrow. 11:52:56 AM    ;;

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Sandy, or just a thing. Of all the things I read on the late unlamented hurricane Sandy. The best, the most perfect was this Onion article: Nation Suddenly Realizes This Just Going To Be A Thing That Happens From Now On | The Onion. And with a resigned shrug of acceptance, we move on to our brilliant future. It's funny 'cause it's true. Hurricanes have their own special sense of doom within the disaster matrix. Slow and inextricable they literally take days to arrive, leaving you plenty of time to apply what band-aids you can and make what bad decisions can be made to discount it or stay to watch it. A coastal city in the path of an ocean cyclonic storm is in a devastatingly precarious position Disaster Losses and Humanity's Building Boom in Hazard Zones - NYTimes.com. Perched on the edge of the sea the ocean is Immediate and inescapable. Further on the areas of a harborland reclaimed from low lying marshland the ocean never more than five or ten feet away. This is bad because sea level ain't really level. Wind and tides (moon tides) pile it up. It's lumpy in its own fashion. Five or ten feet mean little to the ocean. Only a moderate sea level rise moves this untempered lumpy mass to the point where hundred year storms become fifty, twenty-five become ten. And a "ten year" storm lands somewhere on our coasts every year. Human proximity, adjacency, to areas where full force of nature reigns make for a zone of brittle environments. The edge of oceans We're too close to the sea : Washington Post Fr 23Nov12 oped . Grassland and timberland in dry country is the edge of certain fire. Where mountains smoke - volcanism. By rivers in broad watersheds, floods. Where the rains can come - and go, droughts. I bring up this last to point out that the former are all in the category of immediate catastrophes, drought is a special case of a cruel seemingly invisible (moment to moment) damage, that is often more economically costly in the end. With Ocean storms the critical factor, the sufficient condition is human density in this brittle environment. The more people living per square mile is proportional to the measure of cost after the fact. It is the extremity of potential reach into the economy before the fact. Density magnifies the border region. In an urban environment within a handful of city blocks the ocean disappears as a reality and is forgotten. This only equals 1/2 mile of tidal marsh, and the ocean remembers and flows Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines - NYTimes.com. WFMU, my favorite radio station, forms a case study of sorts on what Sandy and all future Sandy's can do to us. It is a small free-form radio station. Its online Internet presence giving it a national and international presence that belies its actual breadth of operation. Institutionally it is a non-profit corporation. A union of its former dj's who formed and bought the license from its former college when it closed. They moved the operation from Mount Hope to Jersey City. Downtown, Where the lights are bright and the ocean is close. Monday 21 Nov 2012 was WFMU's very bad day. The flood arriving with the storm Flooding and Flood Zones | WNYC turned WFMU (WFMU, Montgomery Street, Jersey City, NJ) into "Island off the coast of New Jersey." These are station Manager Ken Freedman's words When he found not possible to ride a bike to the building. When the surrounding land again became dry and they could inspect things they found the record library wherein at least two of every kind of musical genre was housed un-deluged. There was plenty of other damage, though. Equipment: Phones both transmitters, some of the Internet streams. More cruelly WFMU's Fall Record Fair, an 125K revenue event, had to be cancelled due to power outages at the venue it was to be held at the following weekend. The record fair is not only WFMU's signature annual event, a major east coast vinyl record trade meet, but is also how WFMU counts on getting out of any late year fiscal hole. All gone. In total a $250,000 set back Jersey City radio station WFMU-FM still struggling to recover from Hurricane Sandy I wouldn't go beyond their own talking points, but like thousands of other enterprises in the metropolitan region, making their way day to day, little has to happen for an shoestring budget to become a broken shoestring. WFMU already often has to hold a small and largely silent marathon in the last quarter to ease into the new year. This year they needed that and ran it seamlessly into more urgently vocalized Hurricane Recovery Fundraiser. Such are the new exigencies of weather Major cities will flood, the subways will drown, the internet and electricity will withdraw from us, neighborhoods will be swept into the sea. So it goes. The Rush to Resilience: 'We Don't Have Decades Before the Next Sandy' - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities:. Its a greater problem, of course, than mere intemperate weather. Poorly behaved and ill-timed weather. It is a matter of distinguishing weather events from climate change. The issue is not the hot summer heatwave or heavy snowfall, but change in historic weather and precipitation patterns. The change that this bring changes in land use, and in flora, and fauna. That forces change in the world's food production and distribution. Changes that strands and bypasses the infrastructure we have created to provide for our civilization generating surpluses. All which emphases that human expansion into certain environment zone guarantees conflict with nature A Grim Warning from Science by Bill McKibben | NYRblog |. Concept of concern is that climate not just something we must adjust to. It is a "nature" we cause. Anthropomorphic, the result of mankind's directions on it. There is an irony of sorts in this. As antagonistic as nature is to our manmade environments, we feign our opposition with the nature of things, but do not exist outside these things, separate from them. Our reach becomes nature's reach. Our impact on the planet's systems and cycles is now approaching parity with natural phenomenon, but not through the manner of our consideration but our inconsideration. Warmer still: Extreme climate predictions appear most accurate, study says Washington Post In the vast collation of environmental renderings, the key one in this discussion is global warming: the effect from green house gases, mainly carbon dioxide. From this, from less water locked up in polar icecaps, sea level rise, a greater energy reservoir in in warmer oceans and resulting climate pattern change. Some of the parameters involved are fairly simple to understand. Co2 levels measured in tons, or parts per million. Air temperature, planetary averaged, measured in degrees Celsius. From this sea level rise measured in meters. Some of it as each effect turns an elliptical gear of another adjacent is not as easy to understand How sensitive is the climate to added CO2? | Ars Technica. The primary adjustment a rational planner would make is to decrease causing it, until it is understood. Not increase causation until it is undeniable and unchangeable In All Probability Climate Change and the Risk of More Storms Like Sandy - Dorian Rolston - The Atlantic. There is considerable cost and effort to this, so it is also not unreasonable for rigorous questioning. Could man-made green house gas be causing the observed effect? Further is it significant against background of other natural climate phenomenon? I have a metaphor I call the Piccolo Theory, I use to think on this. All sub-systems and cycles forming Earth's biospheric homeostasis (or lack of) is like a full orchestra engaged in a tune. Mankind's contribution to these processes is like a Piccolo among the other instruments (well, really it is like a Sousaphone, but for the sake of a well tempered argument a smaller instrument). It may be hard to pick out, it may be hard to understand its role in the composition. It is part of the arrangement; though, and colors the final sound which would not be the same without it. Our contribution to climate change exists. We own it and are responsible for it. At the bottom of all these arguments is a lone question. Is all this climate denial and the foot dragging. Of insistence on a clarified mechanism, not merely a statistical model on anthropomorphic grounds alone, never in muddy concert with other process. Is this a principled stand, or is it merely unethical avoidance of responsibility? A blame and cost shifting maneuver? An industrial externality of profound scale? Some people are simply too weak and venal to ever be counted on. In the household of the whole they are a dead loss. The fossil fuel industry will never pay a dime, never cease yoking the world to their own end until all is extracted. Not getting in the way as other forces adjust to events and realignments of the human environment and economy will be the most we hope they contribute. Whatever. 11:29:40 PM    ;;

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Luddavist Before the election I read a short article a slight offhand piece which just didn't seem right. It was a link from twitter where despite my great effort to only follow the sensible, a riot of opinion reigns. When the election was over I re-read the piece: King Ludd is Still Dead - Kenneth Rogoff - Project Syndicate:. It still rankled like a mild affront. The economist Kenneth Rogoff had become aware that the working class views automation of labor with degrees of anxiety and consternation. Even a fear of technological change. They, he is concerned, believe it will spawn mass unemployment and societal unrest. Rogoff dismisses this as simple Luddism. Just so many excitable peasants with pitchforks and burning brands chasing a rattling Jacquard-card Frankenstein from our midst. Neoclassical economics, he states reassuringly, predicts this will not happen. People will eventually find jobs; albeit after a long painful period of adjustment. Further, history show us rising living standards and no trend of rising unemployment. This must be true I reflect. Neither Charles III or the Kaiser had an iPad or a galaxy iii whereas today some commoners have two. Unemployment generally when well behaved keeps itself within a standard deviation of the seven or eight percent point that keeps the rest of the workforce in line. The current days are a period of accelerated technological change, Rogoff admits. Robots (automation) replacing labor. Not just manual labor mind you but the labors of the mind. Chess playing soft machines, he points out, have established themselves as masters of chess efficiency able to play more games faster than ordinary workers. Yet, more people are making a living playing chess than ever before. This is Rogoff's primary and puzzling pivot of the article. To throw this chess metaphor in and hang his hat on it. Even after Deep Blue proved machines (A/I) could play chess better than people, people still play. So clearly the robots haven't ruined chess. Ergo there is no pace of technological change humans can't adjust to. So King Ludd is dead. Long live King Globalism. Born of the perfect storm of rapid technological change, the relentless search for low wage populations, and the financial sectors il-tamed capture of the world economy. In this world the individual worker is not player as much as piece. Mere rank and file, not even passed pawns with some road clear to a promotion ahead, but hemmed in by circumstance, totally pwned. For the worker modern capitalism is a system of low end adjustments carried on their collective backs. Queens Rooks and Bishops rush by on their dramatic runs. The equestrian class leap over their heads like so many prize show horses. Rogoff's major take on this adjustment gap is a macro look at it. It is at end a minor problem, and a self sorting one at that -- the adjustment is always made. It is not a threat to theory and thats what counts. Somewhere a gear tugs free of the friction and viscosity of lives. The lines of a graph groan and heave themselves into position. A new equilibrium is reached. All is order and calm. Technological change may be inevitable, but it is not the workingmans friend. At the micro level of the economy a certain dislocation has occurred. More than that a Tempo lost. The rich grow richer and more distant from laboring servicing America. In any culture at any point in mankind's history it is not some incoherent notion of absolute wealth read obscurely as well-being, but relative wealth and the power this disparity gives the few over the lives of the many. With just two or three years lost wages from a minor period of structural unemployment in a typical family, a generation's goals are defined down. College plans, property renovations abandoned. For those trying to move out of poverty and into the middle class, it is a life-time postponement of the American Dream. As a postscript of sorts to this, I offer another link. An article that appeared in the Washington Post after I wrote this Ray Kurzweil on the future workforce : Washington Post. Particularly I note Kurzweil's comments on the ability of dispossessed workers to retrain and adapt directly relating the resources the powerful allow them: The robber barons of yesteryear hogged the resources and prosperity for themselves. Today, investment banks, special interest groups, and governments divert key resources. I don't see human nature evolving as rapidly as technology will. 10:34:48 PM    ;;

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Against Hope I watched all three of the Presidential debates. The Vice Presidential debate too. I was operating under the idea that things like this are my civic duty. A strange prospect for debates as un-civilized as these. The first debate was a curious debacle for the president. Curious because he listened, carefully, and gave reasonable and measured answers. If you had caught this on radio or read a transcript you might have the impression he did well. If you watched it, you knew he did not. You knew he he didn't want to be there, being treated like he had to give account. Big dog Syndrome I call it. After four years of being President you grow accustomed quashing the temerity of criticism with directions to the door. Some pointed out more concretely that President Obama was not given to frequent press conferences and hadn't held one in in half a year or so. He had gotten out of the game of answering questions. Beyond his undisguised irritability was a subdued aspect, and body language that suggested discomfort Over the next week and days this appearance of unease and personal ennui coupled with an inability to effectively articulate his vision for a second term began to equal an enthusiasm gap among some followers and potential voters The New Obama by Jonathan Schell - Project Syndicate. Candidate Romney on the other had his strategic goals covered by simply not being the character the overly long campaign season had left him as, while leaving little else to go on The Undisclosed Mitt Romney - NYTimes.com. Much of which was of his own doing. He demonstrated (in all three debates) an impressive command of facts and factites. Factites a word I've invented to refer to nice handsome explanatory phrasing and integer-level date which however corresponds with nothing in the real world. Romney does too much of that. The gaps between his facts and factites is the difference between policy and failed policy. Too much of his myriad grand plans are simply in-actionable or rely on magical thinking about tax reduction. The debates were of polarizing style. The candidate shedding signifiers the way cats shed fur to shape and hearten their respective base. They were contentious to a fault. Striking many as rude and obnoxious if not angry, bordering on a rage scarcely hidden behind forced uncanny smiles and hollow laughs that hinted at brittle personalities. The substance of the debates - the part you got when you turned the sound up - was mostly uninformative. Both candidates dodged questions to deliver encapsulated versions of existing talking points. I watched the debates in different ways: sound on, sound off for brief segment, and off but with close-captioning on the best to see if they were saying anything. At the same time with various second screens up; twitter, fact checkers, snark purveyors, I could see that there was little point on dwelling on the factually challenged pas-de-deux It was a boxing match. It was about landing punches The debates; though, were just a hobbyists reduction, a model, for reporters and players of the entire 2012 campaign. If you had read a newspaper (but who does that anymore) at any point in the last year; you didn't learn anything new from the debates. The other notable feature about this campaign is the stunning amount of money raised and spent The New Price of American Politics - James Bennet - The Atlantic:. Both candidates in recent reporting have raised over a billion dollars. By refusing federal matching funds they can raise on their own in unlimited fashion. So much for that segment of campaign finance reform. Thanks to the Supreme Courts ruling in Citizens United Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission - Wikipedia there really isn't much left to McCain-Feingold. Citizens United did leave in place some rules for public disclosure, and the new unlimited funding allowance goes to PACs not to be strictly identical with the campaigns of federal races. The coordination must occur at a distance of at least five feet or involve more than two cell phones. The signal feature of all this is the degree to which much of this big money is masked from public awareness Campaign finance in the United States - Wikipedia . We have a sense that individuals like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers are putting fortunes into this campaigns. Promising a better ROI than anything else that money could conceivably do. Beyond that we have no idea where Crossroads GPS or Americans for Prosperity get their money from and won't for months or years if ever. Dependent on some investigative reporter working in the dying field of journalism chipping the story out of stonewalls. Billionaire is a genteel world associated with such men and women when their names become known and they travel down the philanthropical side of their lives. But lets call the such by what they are the Ultra-wealthy and look at whether we want our country and our lives to be ruled by their sensibilities Plutocrats : the rise of the new global super-rich and the fall of everyone else (Book, 2012). This big money routinely lines itself up with small government, But that's small for them and not for you. Government or not, nature abhors a vacuum. A ruling elite will form and if left to itself will work only for itself. In the absence of a strong government - whose primary mission is advocacy for the people what you get is the privatization of America The other thing about this election, my own candidate for elephant in the room, is the disappearing discourse associated with such stark rhetoric. When politicians speak from their obsessions, often those of most garrulous part their base the conversations seem unreal and not germane. They insist on sticking to linguistic frames, not engaging. Democrats and Republicans speak right past each other on such significant issue as: 1) Servicing the Debt (more than the mere fact of debt itself), 2) keeping social security solvent, 3) decoupling medicare and pensions from employment, 4) keeping K-12 education uniform universal and reasonably efficient. Its not just that each has their own thoughts on these matters. It's that these problems are treated as rhetorical devices and not actual problems at all. Those that these messages are aimed at often never notice. The Internet as an external information delivery medium is easy to program to only view-points that reinforce those that are already held. These are further filtered by a myriad of search engine algorithms and the like to hermetically seal a person in their opinions. From there cognitive bias takes over and internally reduce any contravening idea that some how manages to get through. Twitter, apparently, is especially good at amplifying misinformation Social Media Sway | Science & Society | Science News among the predisposed. The idealism of the informed Netizen vs belief communities listening only to themselves. There is a short story I remember from when I was a kid, a baseball story probably old even then. A rookie decides to slide on, and spike an infielder, A third baseman if I remember, to break up a double play. He does so, cuts him makes him bleed. I don't even recall whether he was safe or thrown out on the play. That wasn't the point. The point was that after the play the infielder casually pulls down his sock for a brief moment and shows the rookie an ankle scared by years of spikings. His jejune rule-breaking made no difference on the play. Calculated cruel unnecessary ineffectual. I give this as a metaphor for the low arrogance of the "So Fact-Check me" camp. Public boundary's lie trampled and torn beneath the feet of, primarily, the Republican challenger in this campaign. Nothing will be gained by this. Some may vote for him for this gambit, but all will add this to their apprehension of the man. In the end it will not move him forward. For these reason and more; delineated in this article: Six Reasons American Political Polarization Will Only Get Worse by Steven Strauss - Project Syndicate:, the partisan polarization will get worse, perhaps far worse before it gets better. Fundamental race relations lie unresolved in this country. It will be ten years to a generation before the current political acrimony fades to something else. I support President Obama, and intend to vote for him. Why Obama Now? The long answer involves what nation we want to be. There are many paths. The short answer is that I never expected him to change everything instantly cataclysmically. To bring about a utopian post racial America through charm alone. I took him to be a intelligent thoughtful hardworking honest and pragmatic man. He was the better man four years ago. He is the better man today. That's it, it's that simple. The Future; it's not just a Miranda July movie. Our future as a democratic nation is at risk. In a sense it always is. The greatest mistake is to suppose there is some untroubled momentum to democracy that keeps it on its path from some great and extraordinary beginning, with little or no active effort on our part. Nor is it a matter only of who gets elected in two weeks. Though, it is about the judges they will appoint who will decide and increasing make law for a generation The Hidden Stakes of the Election by Cass R. Sunstein | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books. It is about the environment, While I recognize that only moderate progress has been made on this front and climate change has submerged as an issue. A Romney administration would treat the environment as a corporate impediment and dismiss its reality and all attendant concern. It is about jobs, and not just jobs, water-treading jobs but good jobs Our Crisis of Bad Jobs by Jeff Madrick NYRblog The New York Review of Books. It is striking against the American dream becoming the American myth Joseph Stiglitz 'The American Dream Has Become a Myth'. It is an accumulating effect of letting little things slide, and what you are willing to let go to gain some comfort and perceived security. It is about the (Per)cents of it all: the One percent, the Forty-seven percent, and the Ninety-nine percent. Some years ago in the last quarter of the previous century the forged links that held the centripetal forces in this nation in check slipped Principally wealth has massed in just a handful of sectors and begun to accelerate from the mean. Inescapably in its opinions and desires wealth becomes a separate population from the vast remainder. The vast power of that wealth controls and captures the remainder. Makes a servant of it - citizen as consumer or service only. The over-riding facet of this new relationship is wealths dismissive and imperious exasperation with those below the mean, the Forty-seven percent. This nation as it was originated and constituted cannot continue with such concentration of wealth EconoMonitor : EconoMonitor - The Myth that Growing Consumption Inequality is a Myth.. one by one its institutions will hollow out and cease to function and wealth will slip away Race for President Leaves Income Slump in Shadows - NYTimes.com:. To see how poorly the mainstream media covers this is to realize the mainstream media is just that: corporate and middle class. Representative of the mean, dis-inclined generally to shift in their seats let alone rock the boat. What world we want to live in, what world we think we live in. Conditions have returned us to a multipolar world after a brief unipolar interval. While still the remaining superpower, our simple will, our petite take on American Exceptionalism, no longer decides the worlds direction Commentary: How American Exceptionalism Dooms U.S. Foreign Policy | The National Interest. We can not sort the world out as out ten year war in the middle east demonstrates, nor shut the world out. Europe's economic chaos has the capacity to become our own. Chinese factories make a critical portion of our material goods. The economy of the world will gradually emerge from the dualism of Bretton Woods to a bricolage of regional strengths; in markets and resources - in both material and human capital. The economies of China India Brazil, and others. Though this process will not be an even or straightforward rise, they will matter. The epitome of our shrinking world view was occurred in the third debate 20+ mentions of Israel, 30 or of Iran, one or two for rest of world House essay: The Obama-Romney map of the world - Politics - CBC News. Semi-conscious acknowledgement of weakened status. We have only our own problems the rest of the world is on its own. All we have is domestic politics masquerading as foreign policy. The genuine details of which are rapidly becoming obtuse. Fundamentally for the future of this country what is out to confront is a our growing nature as a National Security State, the existence Use and Abuse of these powers. Out there lie assassin drones, ubiquitous surveillance, and a new jurisprudence of secrets, special need and not rights. Against hope, there is only despair. 11:46:50 PM    ;;

Sunday, September 30, 2012

The Map A couple of weeks ago a map came through the cataloging unit at the Library where I work as a copy cataloger, a resoundingly clerical occupation. The map didn't come to me but as a federal document it came to our Federal Depository cataloging clerk Cheryl. The map being large and rather colorful caught my attention as she processed it, and I went over to have a look. It was titled Bedrock geologic map of Vermont. Even though it was a Federal document in this guise I could see it was originally produced by an organization called the Vermont Geological Survey. I paused at this point and scanned all the names of the fairly sizable team that contributed to the survey, looking for a particular name I thought might be there. But I didn't see it. The name I was looking for was of a childhood friend from my home town. His name was George and he had moved from Massachusetts down to Spartanburg South Carolina in our junior year of High School (to a town called Inman actually). He was my best friend and it made that last year of school drearier than it already inescapably was. Things progressed; I went into the Navy and had (a not all-together conscious) working class outlook stamped on my psyche. Which years of college later on never undid. George went to Clemson and became a geologist. It was around this point that we lost touch with each other. Losing touch with things and people could be regarded as my life's work, I excel in it. I knew he transferred from U. Alabama at Tuscaloosa to U. Mass Amherst midway through graduate School. He did this while my younger sister Susan was going to school there. I had the impression that after completing school he moved to either New Hampshire or Vermont. Whether I knew this for a fact or whether it just seemed a very reasonable guess I could't say. It did not seem reasonable to suppose he would have nothing to do with an organization like the Vermont Geographical survey, so I went on to their website Vermont Geological Survey. You can see the map that caught my attention as a thumbnail link in the upper right hand side. I went methodically through all the Links on the left hand side navigation pages until i did turn up a document he had co-authored with them in the Stream Geomorphology section. I forget the exit trail I followed from there, but soon I was on the website of Vermont's Norwich University Norwich is actually a military school, while George was not a military person, his father a mechanical engineer who worked most of his life with Drapers a loom manuactuer had been in the army during the war and a colonel in the Massachusetts reserves. I found George in the Geology Department faculty section Our Faculty and Staff | College of Science and Mathematics: Geology and saw further that each faculty member had an individual spotlight page for themselves. Here he had written a small testimonial about why he became a geologist. He talked about the hometown Holliston that he and I both came from. He gave tribute to teachers I also knew, and in Mr. Tosti's case had as a teacher as well. I was struck and humbled by this quiet affectionate tribute to these mentors and educators. I still remember our class field trip to Cape Cod and Mr. Tosti's passionate environmentalism. I have never written about Holliston in all the years I've run this weblog. I feel guilty in this and wrong as well. I liked most of the years I lived there growing up, and most of the people. It was a quiet rural town that became suburban to Boston in the great boomer flood of the sixties. If, in the last teenage years i lived there it seemed empty and claustrophobic, that wasn't Holliston's especial fault. I note that George has moved on to New England's eternally existent frontier. I write about my years in the Navy, but not my years at college (or really any of the years after). Not of the campus radio station; vortex of a strange avante-punk radicalism and horizon broadening awareness of American music subcultures. The Navy years I follow a tension between trying to give the experience, the places and people justice. I want to write with fine grain detail and even with dramatic cast, through dimming memory. With the insight of a Joseph Conrad. And thre are readers for this. At the same time I don't want to fixate on a small period of the past when I was very young. I suspect, that if I could find a way to bring the thing off with my limited talent and tools - no one is less of a writer than myself. I would draw a line around the Navy years as an outlier let simple direct narrative tell for that. But let some set of stories, a controlled weave of fiction and observation shuttling back and forth speak for the rest. 11:35:28 PM    ;;

Friday, August 24, 2012

Littoral Combat Ship agonistes A couple of months ago I wrote a post about challenges facing the US Navy. I was in the Navy for a hitch, a long time ago, and yet still find the Navy and its mission an eradicable point of presence. I had the opinion that the Navy ought to press forward with one new ship type, the Littoral combat ship (LCS) - Wikipedia, because while it was a troubled purchase I thought there were needs it met. After I finished that post (and when the NYT wrote a big article on the LCS A Smaller Navy Ship With Troubles, but President's Backing - NYTimes.com) I realized two additional things I should have mentioned. One was that what most drove the form factor of the ship was the desire to operate large helicopters from it. The other thing was that people weren't just dubious -- every big program has got the dubious -- there was an extremity of disgruntlement even rabid dislike for this ship. So I decided to revisit whether the LCS program are good ships or bad ships. One criticism is that the ship is under-gunned. However, it is generally in line with the capabilities of other corvettes, a ship type common in other countries but not traditionally built or operated by the US Navy. It is; though, not comparable with the best of these, nor with any frigates, a larger ship-type it shares size and overall ambition with. This is significant because its unit cost now equals that of a frigate, and the LCS program was conceived as replacing a line of generally successful frigate classes for the US Navy. Comments swirled that the US's military industrial complex is not building ships of the same quality that other nations can. It's worth noting that for many other countries a ship this size is a capital ship and more care is present in their design and manufacture. There is the also the criticism that the small size leaves fundamental defensive gaps, in anti-air warfare (AAW) particularly. It does not carry the standard area air defense missile. And it also relies on towed sonar arrays rather than sonar integral to the hull. It cannot listen persistently for enemy submarines. It may be helpful to put up a small table of comparisons to make some of these issues clearer. Listed first is the LCS, then the frigate it is in part replacing followed by the US fleet mainstay the Arleigh Burke DDG. Then a section of comparable frigates operated by other Navies, last an additional section of ships that were specifically compared to the LCS in a Navy postgraduate school thesis. The table is for orientation purposes only, a sketch of key features. I have used the primary weapons as a stand-in for the more complex topic of the sensor and data systems necessary to identify and hit targets. Fire-control systems generally correlate with the weapons installed. Bolting a standard missile launcher to a corvette accomplishes little without upgrading to a SPY-1k or similar radar system to guide it. Comparisons among light warship types Comparisom groups Ship classes Dsplcmt t. Length ft. Beam ft. Draft ft. speed kts Complement AntiShip/Sub arm. AA arm. Helo/Hanger Cost  (mil) US Navy Freedom LCS 2,862 378 57 13 45 30+/75 Mk-3/110 57 mm gun, Mk-44 30mm chain gun, Mk-50 Torpedo, AGM-175 guided missile RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missiles 2 MH-60R/S Seahawks, MQ-8 Fire Scout +Hanger $670 (cw/cyclone class PC $31) Perry FFG 4,200 453 45 22 29 176 Oto Melera 76mm gun, Mk-38 25mm, Mk 60 Torpedo 20mm Phalanx SH 60 Seahawk +Hanger $650 (2009$) Burke DDG 10,000 509 66 30.5 30+ 323 Mk-41 vls: Rim-66 , BGM-109, RUM-139, Mk-45 127mm, 25mm gun Rim-66, RIM-161, RIM-174, RIM-162, 20mm Phalanx 2 MH 60 Seahawk +Hanger $1,843 Comparable Corvette Classes Braunschweig Corvette (Ger.) 1,840 292 43.5 11 26 65 76 mm, 27mm Guns, RBS-15 ASM 21 cell RAM CIWS S-100 Reconn/Drone +Hanger $309 Holland OPV (Neth) 3,750 356 43 15 21.5 90 76 mm, 30 mm guns, 4x 12.7mm None NH-90 +Hanger $169 De Zeven Provincien Fr.(Neth) 6,050 472 62 17 174 30 Oto Melera 127mm, Harpoon (Mk-41 VLS), Mk46 Torp. Mk-41 40 Cell VLS: SM-2, ESSM, Goalkeeper CIWS NH-90 +Hanger $532 Absalon SS (Den) 6,600 451 64 20 24 100(300) Mk-45 127mm, 30mm, MU90 ASW Torp. Mk-48 VLS RIM-162, Harpoon 2 EH-101 +Hanger $269 Evaluation and Comparison of Freedom Class LCS… Ozdemir (2009) Formidable class frigate 3,200 377 53 20 29 70-90 Oto Melara 76mm, RGM-84C Harpoon SSM, 12.7mm, A244/S Mod 3 torpedoeso Sylver A50 8-cell VLS MBDA Aster 15/30 S-70B Seahawk +Hanger $175-200 MILGEM (Milli Gemi) class corvette 2,300 327 47 13 30 93 76mm gun, 12.7mm, Mk 46 Torpedo, 8 tube Harpoon Mk-41 VLS ESSM, RAM S 70b Seahawk +Hanger $250 Steregushchiy 2,200 tons 343 36 12 26 90 90mm gun 14.5mm mg, Redut VLS: (P-800, kh-35 3m-54 Klub), Kashtan CIWS-M CADS, ss-n-29 Torpedo AK-630 CIWS KA-27 +Hanger $150 Sigma class corvette 1,692 297.62 42.72 11.81 28 20, up to 80 Oto Melara 76 mm, MBDA Exocet MM40 Block II, 20 mm Denel Vektor G12 (Licensed copy of GIAT M693/F2, EuroTorp 3A 244S Mode II/MU 90 quad MBDA Mistral TETRAL, forward & aft landing pad $222 Visby class corvette 640 239 34 8 43 35 Bofors 57 mm Mk3, Type 45 torpedoes RBS15 Mk2 AShM landing pad $184 Data from Wikipedia.org, Global Security.org, New Wars - Warship Costs A point embedded in this table is an idea of the vessels size. There is a rough rule of thumb that only ships around or above 3,000 tons are good open-ocean seakeeping vessels. Below that they are best suited to coastal patrol duties. The LCS is expected to be self deploying, that is it is expected to sail from American ports and cross oceans to take up station for months at a time. It is on the border of comfortably accomplishing that. Small is also often wet, wave are big. The Freedom class variant of the LCS may even be an inherently wet hull design with little ability to take on additional weight in weapons and systems without some redesign. A better question than whether the LCS is a good or bad ship is to ask whether it is the right ship or the wrong ship. Its suitability for its mission. Despite numerous claims that this is a ship without a mission, the usage and tasks of the LCS are commonly understood. Wide Area Interdiction, both anti nuclear proliferation and other contraband interception as well. Ordinary patrol work and flag presence. The importance of the latter cannot be overestimated. The Navy needed as well surface warfare (SUW), Mine Intervention Warfare (MIW), and Anti-Submarine warfare (ASW) in shallow coastal sea spaces in the face of asymmetrical Anti-Access / Area Denial. Ninety percent of these ships lives would be spent working in low threat but busy environments in the manner of a Coast guard cutter, and the right ship will have many characteristics of a cutter. Critically for its tasks the Navy wanted Helos. Helicopters in hangers, protected from the corrosive sea elements, able to launch and recover in smooth and moderate sea states. With ranges up to 300-500 miles, at speeds to 170 mph. Able to attack speed-boat technicals, sweep mines, search and kill submarines. Helo is how the Navy spells versatility. At a general level any navy must take care to be a balanced force. There will always be something approximating a main battle-fleet of capital ships. And a marine troop delivery capability. There is also always the daily task of simply being about, on the water, in the places where things are going on. The basic parameters of this third part of the fleet as the Navy already sees it involves not just power projection over the Littoral, shallow coastal waters, but in the Littoral with an assortment of smaller ships. As platforms engaged in multiple tasks. What the Navy got for a decade of conceptual trouble was what you could call the Too-New-Ferry-boat. Both of the LCS contracted builders use hulls descending from existing ferry-boat designs. And both incorporate radical stealth features. Sparse geometric slab sides and a determined lack of familiar navy deck clutter. They are by no means the only stealth corvette in existence, many -- most of the corvettes in the above table are also. But they are the first US Navy vessels to have these features. The equally loathed Zumwalt destroyers will have these features also. The Independence subclass is a trimaran, both hulls are derided as so much shaped aluminum (although minesweeping missions are enhanced by Independences non ferrous make-up, minesweepers traditionally were wooden hulled). A community reaction including congress that these ships are not serious and bear a heavy burden of proof otherwise, has settled upon them like top-heavy tonnage "CRS-RL33741 Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Program: Background, Issues, and Options for Congress". The name Littoral Combat ship itself rankles. It's not a traditional warship, rather an augmented patrol corvette, a minesweeper, a speciality ship. If severely damaged in combat -- and it is not designed to sustain much damage and continue its mission its damage control resources are minimal -- it is considered totaled and the crew is expected to abandon ship The LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment - USNI Blog. At a certain price point and under certain cost benefit analysis this may be reasonable if sanguine position. At this point you have to watch the general tenor of the talk as criticism begins slipping into little more than: These new ships, they're not like the Old Ships. The steel fighting ships. The Oliver Hazard Perry, Bagelys, Gridleys, Clemson ships. And when those ships as they came down the ways, similar men stood around and exclaimed: Good solid oak and smooth-bore cannons is what makes a real navy not these iron buckets. Community reaction of this sort is ever present. It is not argument, merely sentiment. A backward looking attitude of reflexive regressive nostalgia. The whole LCS program inside and outside the Navy has become politicized bureaucratically. In the way that opinions ossify and settle into tribes, The Navy's management claims the program is coming along, external watch dogs are increasingly doubtful A Response to the Navy's "Vigorous Defense" of the Littoral Combat Ship: . In the fleet the LCS is seen as an imposed top-down high concept design. Coming from a narrow academic wargaming corridor perceived as have little or nothing to do with the practical realities of long deployments thousands of miles from home and hostile missile-carrying speed-boats. It is felt that insufficient attention to staffing and training issues for small crew and complex ship. Where every crewmember must be expert or at least qualified on several procedures or pieces of equipment (such multitasking is a constant facet of Coast Guard operations). For the LCS crewing the Navy has borrowed an idea from the submarine force, multiple crews. 3-2-1 crewing they call it: Three crews, two ships, one deployed forward. A rotation unlikely to alleviate on-the-job-training inadequacies. Many if not most of these issues where identified by the time the first two ships hit the water and began sea trials. Some were known from the start of the program but waves of optimism and "can-do" carried things along past the point where they could have been rethought. Somewhere in a comment section someone volunteered that the LCS program was pushed through for the sake of command billets. True enough I suppose. Of course that absurd line of reasoning indicts every warship below nine thousand tons the Navy has ever built. This is the tip of the paranoid style. You start to see claims the Navy Department has become uniquely and suspiciously incompetent and corrupt. That things are being done for hidden and obscure reasons. And you start to see (as I have) phrases like: "If Reagan were here to see this ship…" Apparently Reagan has become a talisman fetish continually invoked by the handwringing fretful. The desire for ship to be flawless, lies on one end of a spectrum from where it is delivered quickly, a sum of its incapabilities. There is danger as well in the cadillac syndrome the tendency to keep spending time and money building a gold-platted dreadnaught immune to being sunk. I recently read a book called Neptune's Inferno about the naval battles of the Guadalcanal campaign, Savo, Tassafarona and others and came away understanding that no such ship exists. There is no one Navy the United States can just build and stick in the water. There are at least three. The Navy built in previous years facing the current situation. The fleet being built against tomorrow's contingencies, and what is called the navy after next a stab at global trends and technology for sea power a generation away. The Navy identifies needs, then looks for ways and means to fulfill them. The Navy knows it needs a global presence and likely will through the century. It knows it needs a medium-sized patrol-escort ship, freeing up high offensive platforms for fleet roles without abandoning interdiction constabulary missions. There is now doubt even within the upper echelons of the Navy whether they have built that ship. This after a critical classified internal review know as the Perez report begain circulating in March of this year. Following this a there was quiet shake-up of the program's management and an advisory board was set up to try to put things back on track CNO Establishes LCS Council. Beyond the specific need for a shallow draft warship, there is the more abstract idea of rebalancing the fleet. This is the idea of a fleet consisting of Economy A and Economy B ships, generally where the latter are approximately 1/10 cost and 1/25 of fleet hull numbers) The littoral combat ship : from concept to program. Case Study No. 7 (pdf). This reflected Street Fighter thinking, a wargame concept for a small fast hard-hitting ship to set against other navies and para-navies non-capital ship capabilities. At almost all times historically a successful and effective navy for a country is split between "battleships" ships-of-the-line "the van", and patrolling ships corsairs, cutters and sloops of war which made up the greater number, particularly in deployment. From the start it was explicitly expected that these LCS ships operate in a networked manner between each other and into further existing Navy C3 systems to fulfill a inherent scouting mission The Navy had other ideas for its small ship. It wanted it to be capable of taking on different missions Littoral Combat Ship: An Examination of its Possible Concepts of Operation [PDF]. Certain European navies had tried to parse this with MultiRole Stanflex (standard flex) modules. Where weapon and sensor platforms could be swapped out on medium sized warships by fixing and standardizing their sizes, power and control interfaces. The US Navy taking this one step further conceived of mission modules encapsulating an entire ships purpose inside a module. These modules were intended to be independently transportable and installable on station or at least while deployed. A process only taking a day or so. The Navy now acknowledges that hot swaps of the mission modules cannot be done in-area LCS: Quick Swap Concept Dead | defensenews.com due in no small part to security concerns. The process of switching from surface-swarming to mine to anti-submarine packages would generally need to take place in a rear area and could take a week or more before the LCS unit was back in place. In war games the Navy has run, the red team can always exploit this and force the LCS ships out of the littoral zone at critical junctures. Multirole units tend toward the patrol auxiliary. Utility feature dense and offense weapon light. This is measured against a multi-purpose (multi-mission) ship like the Arleigh Burke with its larger integrated ASW module, over the horizon surface targeting, and area AAW. The supposedly modest capabilities of the bare "sea-frame" LCS is posited as proof that these ships are disadvantaged in combat and of no use to the Navy though it was never expected to be used in just simple configuration. It is also worth noting that very few of the quite useful Destroyer Escorts of World War Two were lost in combat; because the Navy command at the time knew and understood their limitations. They accepted these limitations in order for the ships to excel at their purpose which was mass production, to be where they were needed; along side every convoy across the Atlantic. Critically the LCS is designed as a multi generation sea frame to accommodate electrical system obsoleteness. The pace of electronic replacement (think iPods and intel chips) could put three or four generations of gadgets large and small in the LCS hull over their service lives. Unlike some previous ship designs the LCS's electrical supply and bus trunks shouldn't preclude that. The fact that the Navy talked itself into two hull designs, a trimaran and a planning hull (essentially a giant cigarette boat) for a single stated purpose will always seem to have more to do with industrial appeasement than operational necessity. The Navy has in the past created incrementally different designs towards a goal in a close set of fiscal years, but contracted utterly different designs for the same task seems redundant. Moreover each contractor is fitting out their design with their own sensor suite. There is temptation to read in this that the LCS never fully emerged from its conceptual phase. There are ways to deal with this. Deploying squadrons with a mix of mission packages. As the Navy approaches deploying these ships operationally they have already concluding the LCS should operate in pairs Birth of the Littoral Combat Ship | U.S. Naval Institute. Perhaps as the LCS builds out and enters the fleet in numbers. It will make sense to fit the designs out more permanently to a primary function. One, a modern surface warfare corvette. In this capacity with local surface suppression, but also multiple over-the-horizon abilities. This is a capability the LCS lost when the Lockheed Raytheon NLOS missile was canceled, and which the short range Griffin does not provide. As well an area AWW sufficient to protect not only itself but any paired units. The other design would then specialize in AMW, MCM and ASW missions. The dual award block buy contract structured some saving in up front costs. The question is whether these savings will make up for the costs of maintaining two training and logistic regimes over these ships lifetimes. There is still the option, after the two shipyards have delivered ten ships. to "down select" -- pick just one design going forward. With the option of having the other ship ard (or another shipyard altogether build the preferred design How many units does the Navy want to build for an unproven design anyway 8, 24, 40? With the Benson-Gleaves, the Fletcher classes of the war years and Knox-Perry's within the last generation, large order numbers didn't come until the maturity of the class design. Initial numbers were built in small batch's in grouped fiscal years evaluated in service. There are a number of reasons the Navy would like to build to and maintain a force currently known by the rubric the 300 ship Navy. Politicians have their own and separate reasons. Operationally it is the size the Navy needs to be where they need to be without cutting corners -- without pushing deployments tighter than manpower and material evaluation would caution. This is no small matter and the costs of violating this are enormous. There is another reason the Navy might like to keep their warship number up is risk adverseness. Below a certain level - never a fixed level or even one reducible to a single formula - a military force will become inclined to protect their limited assets, moving them out of harms way. Positioning them where they are likely to never have the chance to accomplish anything at a critical moment. Protecting the national interest and trade replaced with a desire not to have a ship sunk and crews lost. This is to a degree unavoidable, its human nature when confronted with a limited resource. The Navy needs a large production unit in the fleet. A ship that can exist in numbers that allow it to be deployed in strength to the myriad concurrent trouble spots of the world. It would be ideal if this ship could also be a resilient combat frigate equally capable of operating with the fleet. Affordability is the key factor in their replacement; though. A frigate that could do what the LCS's detractors would have it do would cost significantly more than the LCS. More than the Perry FFGs, built a generation ago and now only marginally useful. They could never be added to the fleet in the numbers and the within the time frame that is the class's reason for being. They would be a ship added for comfort and continuity, and no native purpose. 10:45:31 PM    ;;

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Beware of Greeks bearing Games Again it is Olympic summer. I am looking forward to the games though not as much as I used to. As a kid I thought the Olympics were the bomb; the single best think human beings got together and did as a people. Our other main gig -- World Wars -- lack the dopey charm of reinstituting a set of athletic competitions we barely understand the social purpose of from two thousand years ago. Part of it is the unfulfilled promise of the exotic. Beach volleyball is... not entirely what I had in mind there. Sailboat racing, crew, white water kayaking, BMX biking, velodrome biking, archery. That's what I want to see, along side the traditional and honorable track and field events which are the heart of the Summer Olympics. Diving Contests I'll tolerate, there is something aesthetic about it. Gymnastics I don't care for, but I know many other people do passionately. And I admit, it can be pretty dramatic. But ever since the network carrying the games discovered they could slew off the non revenue, non bikini games to the cable and streaming side most of what I care to watch has disappeared from the their broadcast game. I really want to say a special word about fencing in this regard. I always found fencing fascinating and the olympics frankly is the only occasion I've ever seen it on television. I was especially keen to see it this year because my nephew Grant has taking this up; fencing with the Chevy Chase Fencing club (featured in the second segment of this CNN piece: Less known Olympic sports). The air broadcast feed does not seem poised to show any fencing at all this year. This Olympics seems to be a veritable demonstration of content lockdown in action. NBC's control of web distribution of Olympic events. (1) air broadcast in delay (2) (cable) NBC Sports also largely in delay, (3) web supposedly blanket coverage in Greenwich time, is only available to people who had some kind of cable subscription. They are keeping it largely sealed up. I have heard of no mass resort to proxy servers to watch it in real time. Where as at this same time a half world away my other nephew, Lucas (older sisters family) going through a Chinese immersion program in Beijing had to resort to proxy servers routinely just to get on Facebook. It is what you want and how much you want it, at the end of all endeavor. Reflecting back to the Beijing olympics in 2008 vs London in 2012, which city really has the most surveillance camera. I think that may be another panopticon gold for Team GB. But we are all Benthamists now. Maybe the most I can hope for is a short midsummer respite from the election. From the campaign ads that are lizard ugly and getting uglier by the minute. Like flies on sherbet. I blame the candidates certainly for the tone of this election, the press for covering it like the opening of a hometown amusement park. They own their actions and are praiseworthy or blame worthy for it. At end when I reach for the remote to mute the messages of incipient American doom I reflect that our politician are never, can never be more, than a mordant mirror of ourselves. Lets all watch some beach volleyball. 11:00:27 PM    ;;

Friday, June 29, 2012

End of Television Era of Internet Viewing I'm sticking by the last glowing embers of over-the-air-TV. Broadcast TV. This is mostly due to a disinclination to add a cable bill to the atrophy of my clerical wages. Undoubtedly aided by my ambiguous feelings toward television in the first place. I don't have any particular dog in the fight, you turn on the set, and it is what it is. But I have noticed that television is changing. Not just broadcast television in the half-life of its post digital conversion, an endeavor that was -- how can I put this -- thinly conceived, its different. This also extends to cable which has hit a certain lumpy maturity. More, considering television as a system consisting not only of delivery, but consumption and commentary, it is changing ending a way of being. What will stand in its place will be something but will not be television as we have known it If You're Expecting The TV Industry To Just 'Collapse', Keep Dreaming - SplatF. It was seeing how the next generation, my niece and nephews, interfaced with television that made me realize the changes were skittering towards full upheaval. With Nicole and Lucas, the older pair - a college sophomore and high school junior: it was first consumption of whole seasons on DVD. This wasn't new, it had been around since VHS days. It was a mainstay of PBS catalogues to offer British shows in that manner, but the VHS cassette was bulky and storage awkward. DVD's reduced a season of television to the size of a book. A new profit stream was born. Formerly, a show was run then rerun, and if good enough stripped in syndication and rerun several more times, until people were sick of it. All to linearly diminishing profit. More recently, changes within the change, my nieces & nephews find themselves relying on iTunes for CoS (Consumption of Season) viewing. Using Video on demand - Wikipedia services Netflix Netflix Wikipedia to pick up/out particular shows and get caught up. My niece liked Hulu Hulu - Wikipedia for its "clean" interface. Though it would more often not have the selection depth she needed. My other pair of nephews initially made greater use of iTunes as content source, partly because Grant and Raine were younger, middle and elementary school aged, these were watched on a desktop (home of the central iTunes installation) by a family group. My sister also stuck with Blockbuster until they carted away the shelves and soaped up the windows. Later as they acquired more devices Grant would watch shows singly on Netflix or Hulu plus, on his iPod touch, the laptop, then the iPad. Both families engaged in the Hulu dance around their occasionally obscure availability rules, catching shows during the changing and seemly random window of opportunity. The discovery layer for all episodes and webisodes as often as not was Google, rather than any set habitues. With my niece particularly this was recently mixed with site recommendation of her friends and peers. Over all there was a great diversity of sources. What drives this diversity of service, the content stream used, is what is available where and when.The descriptive rubric that came up most was Catching Up; catching up with missed TV shows in bursts when time was found amidst a busy school schedule and extracurricular activity filled life. And all pursued in the name of "taking control" -- this was Nicole's phrase. The sense of empowerment plain felt and unironic, though largely the object of consumption, was traditional television product. This is what stuck with me most. There were revolutions occurring: technical and social. It seemed at the least a grand battle. Cable (TV inclusive) vs the internet Tubes, broadcast vs narrowcast stated another way. Either way it was on. I felt that Hollywoods standard product was by neccessity going to change. It was the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) a technical and marketing revolution that completed the promise of home taping and made "time shifting" a program a practical reality. It seems to me that many of the channels running weekend show marathons of Psych are operating in conscious imitation of DVR or dvd patterns. The expanded DTV channels trying to emulate not cable so much as these emerging patterns of use and performing as an aid or adjunct to series recording. On the other side of this equation are efforts towards preserving an artificial uniqueness of experience (you can only see it here -- right now, through us). This accomplished with Digital Rights Management (DRM) and other regulatory walls. Fostering the need for the consumer to come and return to the gated well. Bandwidth is another factor in this revolution of means, replicating TV on the web. The story here is how companies push (stream) content thru the Internets to all America (to be sure this same process is occurring all over the world), without incurring insurmountable penalties of latency and cost. The internet was not originaly intended to carry the amount of data that broadcast television dealt in. Nor was it conceived originally as a vehicle for ubiquitous cable content. It has simply rolled up those missions like a big ball of silly putty. The streaming industry's work-arounds for this include prepositioning (cacheing) popular movies and shows at the heads of the teleco tubes (based on a statistical likelihood of being called upon. Leveraging P2P strategies so content is shared around as it streams outward. TC/IP packets of movie content moving back and forth, peer to peer as they are called upon. In the unlikely event that the advertising model collapses then air broadcast, the networks will move to or sell their premium content to cable entities who will place it behind subscriptions and encryptions. At the least they will complete attempts to make cable (particularly satellite TV) providers pay for broadcast pull downs (where cable providers run the air broadcast networks seamlessly through their boxes), for the sake of additional revenue and to protect the sense of value in network news, sport and entertainment fare. Sponsorship and the advertising model, the encapsulated regular scheduled grid broadcasting, and even primetime have existed since the 1930's. The general form of broadcasting carried over fairly intact from radio to television, and the same networks delivered it. The original radio networks put a great deal of effort into convincing manufacturers during a period of great mercantile and brand expansion that broadcast advertising could put their product in peoples minds. But there was always a portion of alchemy to it all and required that everyone believe in the power of advertising. The 30 and 60 second advertising commercial product "webisodes" really still holds currency and a great deal of effort will be expended to hold and extend that video value. As people test the waters of the Internet for the weight of entertainment freight new content forms are being seen This is a new model Hollywood Web television - Wikipedia. Branded micro episodic features. Idiosyncratic and high-concept often leveraging actors from more staid and traditional realms. Comedians in Cars getting coffee for just one modest instance. These featurettes are capable in theory of being serialized to various lengths. They are for what its worth more malleable than the last 70 years of straight jacketed Hollywood fare. It is no surprise that Apple with its initial foray into this world, Apple TV, a device designed to merge the Internet into your existing broadcast or cable TV environment includes direct lines to Vimeo and integration with Netflix and Hulu. Through the last twenty or so year television has become a creature of massive media interelation. The familiar major networks of the broadcast era long ago began a process of incorporating both other distribution forms -- cable initially, and production houses. A slow process of buying, being bought and partnering where needed that is called vertical integration. NBC - Wikipedia is owned by GE and Comcast is a joint venture. ABC - Wikipedia is owned by Disney CBS - Wikipedia is owned by National Amusement which gathers CBS, CW, and Paramount-Viacom into it's folds. under the Sony tent; Crackle Crackle - Wikipedia, known initially for short form, is now moving into traditional longer forms. While little of the magic all this media synergy was supposed to bring materialized. The Cable Industry remains for the time being well off. The Washington Post company's bottom line is substantially aided by their Cable One holdings. There are structural -- regulatory -- reasons behind this: regional monopolies and the enforcement of bundling rules. This the proscription that basic and premium tiers of channels must be bought in groups prized channels subsidizing the depth of cable and providing a strong deep income flow. "A la carte distribution" the consumer picking off just the channels they want heralds a major threat to traditional profit model. The End of TV and the Death of the Cable Bundle - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic: It is why broadcast and cable concerns feud with entities like DishTv just outside the monopolized heartland Dish Chief: TV Needs to Change - WSJ.com:. In analogous fashion it is why some networks and their cable partners are leaning towards regimes that specify no Internet views of their product without a cable subscription Why NBC Doesn't Care That You Want to Watch the Olympics Live on TV - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic. Value of Television The hour judicial or medical system drama, the half hour comedy, a convention of programming dominates broadcasting. Cable's versions of these are slightly less pat. Liberated from FCC restrictions they allow themselves to be freer grittier and increasingly attract better actors and writers. Though anything running with commercial breaks must bring events to a an artless series of mini pseudo-dramatic peaks. As a dramatic form all television is positioned and fixed between the radio serial and film. Compromised territory in terms of the expense of its production and the need to to hold a general mass audience week to week. Exhaustion of format has arrived. We've seen it all before. All the tropes, all the ways ways of telling a bland joke and getting a tired laugh. One thing that retro channels like Antenna TV and RTN demonstrate is that little in TV has changed in two generations. TV seems a sociologically descriptive rather than aspirational account of American life. Not uplifting or leading. Kultur rather than culture. Even there tinctured and censored to a embarrassing and misleading middlebrow modesty. Falling short of the least social realism as to preclude that from being an intended goal. The eternally lurking question: what is value of Television? Television has never relied solely on cast-and-script dramas. Programming situated in reality has always been around, reality and reality lite. Since the very beginning sports, the former, has been a major part of programming. An archetypal narrative of opposing sides and rivalries. Individual sub-narratives of heroism victory and defeat. It is all very appealing, very satisfying. Then there are the myriad of so called "Reality" shows (the latter). These are controlled to the point of being scripted falling into pat narrative templates. Flirting with a certain pandering cynicism at times: bad boys, cheaters, manipulators all depicted decadently flourishing. I don't know enough about these shows to know whether they are allowed to win, but I doubt much actual game theory is allowed to guide the outcomes. Beyond all this there is a menagerie of game shows, talk shows, news magazine shows each with its own corner of the day, and argument on the consumers attention. Each based on the idea of a daily programming schedule and a scarcity of position on it. The singular defense of television; however insipid it seemed was that it had a cultural function. It was the social glue, the warp and weft of the water cooler. It provided a shared experience. A third of the people you ran in to the next day had seen the same thing, and by the end of the day and tales retold everyone knew what was broadcast the evening before. It went beyond that. All these programs told tales from the fountain of existing American shared experience and mores. It was programmatic: social conditioning and pattern recognition. it was about learning the possibilities of an American life. Capturing the attention of young and malleable minds through endless and repetitive zeitgeist morality plays. Television performed functions that ran from baby sitter to guidance counselor. They provided templates for success, for leadership, and vocation. Critically, I think, even beyond these external socialization functions. Consumption of stories has a special purpose. I recalled reading that exposure to simple narratives is related to general happiness. The idea is that narratives are essential to well being. The idea of keeping a clinical narrative journal for instance Seagal1999.pdf. They teach the individual how to construct frame and tell stories (narratives) about one's own life. Narratives about loss, adversity met and overcome, goals set and achieved. An encapturing of events spun to experience that tells of individual maturity and growth. Eudaimonic well-being Narrative identity and eudaimonic well-being (pdf) is a special form of value driven happiness it is about giving our chaotic experience order and direction and through that delivering the happiness that comes with positive direction and social purpose. A happiness more towards that of Coleridge's dour wedding guest, parting from the loquacious mariner: "a sadder and a wiser man he rose the morrow morn." Realtime Demandtime Fundamentally it is a matter of how TV is conceived. Outside of certain categories of unique programming specials, movies, documentaries, news shows (and only just barely). Television has never been appointment TV for me. Turning that empty marketing concept on its head I'd name it disappointment TV. I'll watch a fair range of stuff, but my attachment to it rarely goes beyond "because it is what is being broadcast now." There is no imperative about any particular program that I demand its presence, that I would set aside time at a latter date to watch it. It isn't that I have an intense dislike of American TV. It is that I regard it as a fungible good. For the various value any one program one it is as good as any other. They are functionally interchangeable. Even down to their story arcs. There isn't one I would pursue categorically over another. I consider using the Internet to pick off unsubscribed cable programming with diffidence. With the exception of only a few standout shows, it's just a coarse version of vanilla Hollywood. It is not the (potential) depth of film, nor the intense introspective realism of a well written novel. Largely excepted from this is Public Broadcasting. Shows like Frontline, Nova, American Masters, and various documentaries. these are nonfungible and recyclable (that is re-broadcastable streamable). With the exception perhaps of Frontline they do not dine on topicality and don't become stale for some many years. Maintaining degree of market value. National Geographic can sell dvds as well as anyone. My main premise is that I believe the imprint of manufacture and distribution laid a heavy imprint on the shape and form of the standard television program. The conflict and resolution content of the scripted hour drama. The pattern of jokes, takes and double-takes of the half hour comedy all this was the persistent and inertial effect of primetime and the grid. Locked in aspic since the first consolidation of radio in the 1930's and following the demands of sponsorship and mass advertising on programming thereafter. It's easy to over-emphasis recent history in entertainment content. It is just as informative to examine the influence of 19th novels and turn of the century "Strand" type magazine serializations to find the roots of today's short form amusements. I haven't mentioned theater yet either which is, after all, the well-spring of all narrative play-acting. Others are better positioned to comment on this than me. It does strike me that TV series are more like theater than commonly thought. A theatric run will perform the same play night after night for months or far longer. A TV series basically enacts the same essential drama with every episode. It is built into the characters, their flaws and strengths, nature of their relation. The originating situation and the crisis/antagonist it was designed to meet. With minor variations, improvements of the actors in their characters, all episodes are variations of the pilot. A meta-episode can be derived from them. Story arcs only partially hid this. Television is a lowest common denominator video system. Change is happening; though, and these changes in consumption and delivery schemes will eventually radically change the product. There is book The DVD novel : how the way we watch television changed the television we watch which came through Mckeldin library cataloging unit, where I work, the other day, on just this. I have not had a chance to read it yet, but I am not the only one seeing this sort of potential outcome. I think that if the Internet does become a distribution channel for video TV series, film, teleplays et al and yet still maintains some sense of uniqueness. That it is not bludgeoned into a submissive existence as cable TV 2.0. The content form will change. Content is King they all say. Eventually like a river shaken out of its banks by an earthquake the mode of profit will abandon the dry old banks to plants along the new watered channels Micro-content, looping and less structured narrative shows. A more adventurous fit of narrative and reality that gets beyond singing contests, and summer camp games on faraway islands. One that is willing and able to treat complex social subjects and problems. Some believe they already see -- within that small circle of elite cable programming a highbrow (well middlebrow) THE HOLLYWOOD ECONOMIST: Role Reversal: Why TV Is Replacing Movies As Elite Entertainment between TV and film. This reversal is tied to the vast expense of production, motion picture production, and the overseas markets that need to be developed for these films so they will profit. While this profit is the Tent-pole programming - Wikipedia that holds up the rest of the industry. To be such a big tent they need to be less American, based less on dialog of any kind. More based on visuals and action. This has opened the door for TV productions to move in, within the restrictions of their format, and tell stories about American characters and landscapes in the cadences of American idioms and gesture. Language as we really speak it to each other. 7:58:03 PM    ;;

Sunday, June 17, 2012

A Good Kitty Turin (1992-2012) was a good kitty. He was my sister Susan's cat. Honestly, he would probably not like to be called a kitty. At twenty years of age he had burnt through the betraying indiscretions of youth. Of yarn ball chasing and the like. Had gathered enough mannered reserve and gravitas to be known by his given name (or by some private cat name). Turin, a selfpossessed cat My sister Susan gave him his name. She has also over the years named cats Gandolf, Pippen and Merrie. If you sensed a certain JRR Tolkien theme to this, you wouldn't be wrong. This last cat Merrie is also an equal piece of this story. A small tortie she shared the same life span and life departure with Turin, thought they were not blood related, They were simply adopted within a year of each other and grew old, eventually too old, together. Merrie also was a good kitty. For most of the ten years I knew them they seemed content to serve as guarded antipodes to each other. I once had a cat which I named Felicity after a Wedding Present cover of an Orange Juice song (A Leeds Band, a Glasgow band respectively). Well, It made sense at the time. Merrie was a quintessential lap cat. She could purr for hours, but she resisted the lure and freedom of the outdoors, even when they moved from urban Vancouver to suburban Bethesda. Something to do with a garbage truck in Chicago. Turin, a grey tiger, always seemed in demeanor a dog as much as cat. The mayor of Parkwood drive my brother in law observed; a politician of a cat. He always followed the doings of people more than other cats. A keen eye on pecking orders and his best interests. He was a "fixed" cat also he didn't have the burden of impress girl cats. As he came from the Chicago animal shelter original name was Chester which my sister didn't think suited him. The shelter also told her his original owners could not afford to feed him, which is how he came they. He had a life long complex about adequate food. It took some effort from him from over eating, eating too fast, eating all of Merrie's food. This was acerbated by a kidney condition as he got older. He couldn't process nutrition well and no amount of eating helped. Merrie had been adopted from the San Fransisco Animal Shelter a some months earlier. Both these cats are more well-traveled than I am. People think that cats as a species are aloof and uncommunicative. They manage; however, to always make their needs needs known. I've heard that cats unlike dogs will not look where a person points. This I know is not entirely true. Cats routinely follow the gaze of their peers, other cats, and even neighboring dogs they deem astute and trustworthy. If you can completely capture a cats attention -- if you are holding food in your hand say, or have worked up a good game of "I've rolled the ping pong ball under the couch." A cat will look where you point. Turin would do this, he trusted the gestures of those he trusted. Cats don't fathom they can't communicate with you, I don't think the notion ever occurs to them. They have a wide array of vocalizations inside the meow, purr and growl, If you're paying attention you begin to realize they have different meanings. Contextualized meanings to be sure, It helps to be aware of where they've wandered in from when they start talking. Usually its something more or less obvious: "My food bowl is empty, my water bowl is empty, the auxiliary water bowl is empty, you've stripped the sheets and blankets from the bed where there is the patch of sunlight where I take my naps at this time of day, I would like to go outside but there is a robin out there I just don't get on with." Its all very important to them. They often would point their body in the direction of whatever material condition they wanted you to remedy, tying to make your task as easy as possible. This last was often a great help I was only aware that there were different mews for all their questions. And that when all was done and said kitty questions are easier to answer than people questions. This is I'm sure a large part of their general charm 11:27:33 PM    ;;

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Post Racial There is a school of thought in part sincere somewhat relying on wishful thinking, and in further part disingenuous; that with the election of Barack Obama, America's first Black President, this nation had entered a post racial era. It meant something, of course, the electoral moment at least. It affirmed our aspirational and egalitarian precepts. Or at least allowed us to say they were affirmed. Even if it were only some who so affirmed and this accepted as a gift to the general behalf. Even as rationales were developed and stood in to negate it: "An articulate man perhaps, but only around a TelePrompTer" -- "America's affirmative action president". A dubious shadow in such a merit based land. It did not mean, when the dust settled, that racism, coded and deep-boned within our culture, had suddenly disappeared, that hundreds of year of history had rolled back changed and unwound differently. Many have claimed this for years As if their assertions of many decades that we were (color) Blind and (eyeless) on a level playing field made it so. That no intrusion upon the public or the private sector to ameliorate or rectify living economic striations and walls that held so many back were ever needed. Such people openly mock the themes under which President Obama was elected in 2008 hope and change. Hope? You betcha. I do value hope. I hope that that in some manner of metaphor humankind is capable of maturing as an individual matures as he or she grows to adulthood. People talk of nations in this manner, but the story should move beyond nations to an evolution of those who people nations. I hope that the ability to care for others is not just a peak experience extended from a position of comfort, but an integral part of our nature. That all our problems are tractable before our capacity for innovation. That we can overcome mankind's propensity to divide always between a wealth capturing elite of haves and a mass captured by poverty. Where the only critical decision of a culture is whether the wealthy consider themselves trans-human or the peasantry subhuman. I do desire change. Change that equals progress. One beyond conventional notions of human progress. The idea of a steady and effortless advancement obtained merely by traveling through time. The dubious notion of technological progress regarded as human progress. Technical change is an iterative process of improvement of tools. Refining tools towards greater efficiency of energy and time. In instances of easing mankind's material burden, it is a move against entropy. It assumes the appearance of the good. Ally of the reasoned living against the nonliving. But technical change has no moral component. It is neither good nor bad, praiseworthy or blameworthy. Technical change, often if not always opens new problems, as it is used to solve old ones. A matter of simple machines wrought to complex machines. In the manner of fractal geometric growth. Its only direction is not up but simply outward. Mankind's distressing failings beg the question what varieties of change are available to man? The road of human progress. A change either to Humankind's physics or metaphysics. A change in Mans Nature. Our capacity for empathy increased. A greater propensity towards right reason. A Change in human culture: civilization and reason. This I regard as institutional change. Reason is as much a human institution as a part of human nature. Philosophy the study of the efficacy of reason in human perfectibility. By rigorous examination of the cultural institutions and moral codes of mass social living, we will gradually evolve into new ways of being. With an expanded conception of our place in the world, our just relation to other living things. A more inclusive less pre-judicial view of each other. Letting go a dubious and intolerant brutality of being as a preternatural duty. None of these ideas are new. Nor is it accidental that with the second term election the Obama team is playing with themes of basic fairness The 'Fair' Question: If We Must Raise Taxes, Where Should We Start? - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic:, a central and enduring theme of Socratic/Platonic philosophy from two and a half millennia ago, and having the weight of ages on them even then. The stumbling block to more comprehensively treating others as you would have be treated by them lies the concentric circles of otherness from the ego. The Symbolic Assailant is a psychological assessment of the other. The Other being in concept anyone encountered falling into certain generalized categories. It is manifested as a vessel onto which to place the sum of your fears. An attitude towards the other that they mean you harm. All at once, in a person opposite, all your fears surround and oppress you. It is an attitude which contains a projected portion of ones own self; a secret and aware assessment. The chasing shadow. The logic of presumptive action, direct action, leads the inclined individual to a radical exhibition. The mere existence of the other in the imagination bringing about a point of crisis. To take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. It usually ends with someone dead on the ground. Most of what we know -- what we think we know is the received knowledge of certain socializations. Institutional cast awareness following from automatic and predictable assessments of the axis of assailment. They are made along lines of power relations. The criminal justice system has grown into an institution that has become remarkably adept at putting young black men in jail Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America The New Yorker. More than nine percent of the black male population in 2009 Perhaps more thans endured slavery during the golden age of that peculiar institution Incarceration in the United States - Wikipedia. The general non integration of housing and schools belay a resistance of these institutions to any true color blindness. Surrounding municipal and state government work forces is a strident rhetoric in dismayingly unsubtle terms against affirmative action hiring and union protection against massive downsizing. Serving little end other than to keep middle class jobs and a middle class life locked away from minorities. According to Gallup poll in the article Politics - Ron Fournier and Sophie Quinton - How Americans Lost Trust in Our Greatest Institutions - The Atlantic trust church & religion are up up 3% since 2002. A rise likely derived from the utility failure of other institutions such as those that control access to credit such as housing or other small civilian loans (Banks are down 24% in this same poll) These institution are no longer seen as serving in meaningful and reliable ways. News media's contribution is to continue to present minorities as characters in pre-scripted productions. Hoodie equals thug equals vanquished in a never-ending cowboy morality play. In Journalism crime still pushes much local news and crime is invariably contextualized by race. The well spring of injustice that is institutionalized racism, is given particular point by the NRA and conservative state legislature's new project of so called stand-your-ground laws America's deadly devotion to guns | World news | The Guardian. Two things stand out about Stand-Your-Ground laws. They favor the survivor, they serve only the survivor. Those most caught up paranoiac narratives, those inclined to shoot first. They favor those the criminal justice system favors. A system that often puts little professional distance between themselves and the general prejudices of society. Another thing giving the lie to this post racial America is the increasing creep of low level racism. Particularly racist speech, which by the cryptic and uncertain measure of online news comment sections is as virulent as I've seen it in my lifetime. There is a powerful desire to say it out-loud, to give voice to loathing. To move it into the mainstream. This is the starting point of an agenda. To rationalize hatred, celebrate fear, and divide. The extreme dislike of the realities of a multicultural society feeds their conviction that regarding the expansion of the franchise, that mistakes were made. True human progress is written small against the years. Within the story of centuries is another of hope and well being; the thought that next generation of every family can gain a little against the last. With increased security peace education and health. Where nations do not in fear of chaos turn over their democracy and rule of law for the gruel of guarded perimeters parceled rights and a stratified society where only the elite is rewarded with true opportunity, and the rest fall back. Primary education, K-12, is one place where this slide can be arrested. Where every generation can set out unencumbered, by the baggage of the past. The educational system is the primary institution of any culture. There are in any culture institutions of gravity which name and reinforce the societies core values. These will be the ones which prevent men from disappearing as responsible individuals into accumulations of power and wealth. Requiring that all people live and act before all other people. The courts, markets and congress however much money is coursing through the system must remain transparent. No hidden deals No hidden exercise of power. There is no reason why predatory economic activity ought to be allowed in the name of unfettered economic activity. In the context of this discussion that includes a range of cheap practices of credit institutions: store front check cashing, reverse mortgages, car title loans/financing. As well differential small-grained geographic advertising (cigarette and alcohol) by large national corporations, pushed heavily into poorer neighbrhoods. That this activity can be considered upright and legal is a signal of the disfunction of politics not poverty. I feel I am grasping for something larger; though. While much of our world is still resolutely organized there are parts of our faux post-racial culture, desire for dialed back governance, that no longer forcefully demonstrates progress. This post Bretton Woods world should be a period of critical review of our institutions. A priority given to a stabilization to human affairs, not just industrialization. One that would mitigate cyclic return to Hobbesian states of nature, dividedd on difference. A carefully wrought centuries stable culture selecting and harmonizing our amenable nature. 11:24:48 PM    ;;

Saturday, March 17, 2012

GOP Seppuku Manufacturing is weak, the housing market still comatose, GDP growth an anemic 1.7% half of what it should in ordinary times, compare it with China's growth rate possibly five times higher. Additionally unemployment levels are quite high; 8.3% with the labor force participation rate, labor force divided by the overall size of the employable cohort, at historic lows. There is no handy foreign policy rallying point on the horizon. That is the president has not started or ended a war triumphantly. That's not exactly true, the Iraq war is over, he has set up what ought to be a solid roadmap to end the Afghan war, barring the inevitable errors of attenuation. Further the primary enemy for which so much was done, al Qeada, is now decapitated and largely blind. There is nothing; though, like starting a good war for popularity, they're nothing but trouble once up and running The Ordinary Result of such circumstance on a presidential race is that the incumbent loses. This is the crux of it. There is simply no way this election should be in contention, yet manifestly it is. The republicans have managed to perversely organize this into an odds on proposition. Part of this may simply be that despite a conventional wisdom that any president owns the prevailing economy by re-election time, the people may remember some of how all this came about. The GOP has made a hard right turn along their road Anti-Government Extremism Thrives As Politics Get Angrier | TPMMuckraker. The push to establish tenants of conservatism, social conservatism at least, as Matters of Conscience is their key to abrading rights won - restored rather - by women and minority groups over the course of the 20th century. It is their work-around to the commerce clause's forcing open all those bus and lunchroom counter seats. A right turn echoing that of Yukio Mishima's fatalistic fascistic nationalism. Mishima after a lifetime as novelist, playwright and poet, decided as a matter of conscience that Japan had grown soft and weak, not properly venerative of religious sentiment. So he pitched himself (and a small cadre of followers) into an intensive program of martial arts and Bushido. Then sort of lost his head and tried to stage an amateur coup...not necessarily in that order. It didn't really work out. Fewer than he supposed thought the answer was to turn back to the past. Make no mistake about this; though, the intent, the desire is there to undertake a re-litigation of the 20th century point by point case by case. Suffrage, the legality of unions -- any rights for workers. To overturn it all until America again resembles their preferred version of the nineteenth century Republicans for Revolution by Mark Lilla | The New York Review of Books. A project of this magnitude requires that conservatives remake themselves as the new relativists. Objective facts of current life as reported by the media (the despised main stream media) are to be cast as false and created by the media. This really requires that, at end you, believe that there are no facts merely opinions about fact constructs. But all this is chasing what exactly? This small article on the the way "American Exceptionalism" has come to grip the popular imagination of the right is instructive How Joseph Stalin Invented 'American Exceptionalism' - Terrence McCoy - Politics - The Atlantic. An image of the future as myth of the past. Reagan Remembered. Thirty years revisionism of the GOP's most popular politician in a generation, spun and re-spun until he becomes an empty symbol of the most extreme and un-compromising conservatism. His real existence as a man simultaneously forgotten and advanced as proof of the attainable nature of ideological ambition. Reagan's Morning in America reelection campaign the emotional appeal of which is still playing on these people was advertising, it was marketing. It was designed to push the buttons of a certain subset of the population and invoke nostalgic feelings for an American past that never existed. Simplified, orderly, appealing, sepia tinted. It is now accepted as a true reality and model for the future they strive for. What they want to get back to. What they wish to gain is the image of control those ads represented. A control that reflected an assumed natural superiority and dominion by white males over the rest of creation. Over wealth women reproduction and sexuality Frank Rich: The GOPís Problem With Women -- New York Magazine:. A continuum of patrimony and property. And most certainly that America was to always mean European settled America, its true owners. Before looking for reason or logic in this, it's worth asking to what degree is this an accident or intentional? Is the intent to crash the republican party as it exists? That is to wrest control of it intact mid-air, or take ownership of what pieces can be dug out from the crater. Others look at this more mundanely as just a disagreement of means but not way. To defeat Obama retake the White House and Congress. I think that it really seems more like a battle for the soul of conservatism. That there is a faction that no longer believes in divided government in any rapprochement with liberalism of any kind or strain. Still, believing in a aspirationally rational world for any event I ask Cui Buono who will benefit from all this. The center cannot hold, it shifts tectonically. Wealth always seems to land on its feet. Movement conservatism has been more willing recently to engage in local and retail politics and is more successful at it. Primarily by building majorities in state legislatures. This could be somewhat of a dead end eventually as radical state legislatures may not prove a precise analogly to national legislatures or even state executive priorities Symbolic Legislation to Nowhere: Why Statehouses Fail in Governance - Andrew Cohen - Politics - The Atlantic:. But as the federal government is weakened and paths for constitutional amendments are forged through these legislatures, the future of the nation is formed. It's difficult to pry apart the cause and effect of the matter, but it is also very likely that the widespread and increasing practice of creating Gerrymandered incumbency-safe congressional districts often at the hands of these same radicalized state legislatures had a hand in the total evaporation of national level moderates, the near enemy in the Republican party. In uni-party districts there is never a nod toward the center only flight to the edges Snowe identified problems; fixes up to us - Opinion - Bangor Daily News - BDN Maine:. This republican party is divided, not only as to who will lead the party but as to what the party is about. The season's primaries test the parties candidates, Gov. Rommey, Sen. Santurum, Speaker Gingrich, Rep. Paul against the parties affinities. None have been able to mesh effectively with the un-embodied nascent swirl within the party Republican Party at odds with itself in presidential nomination fight - The Washington Post:. It is still unclear how much voting blocs like the Tea Party -- revealing more of a social conservative construct to their debt reduction rhetoric -- will have on the party as it decides itself. The Tea Party blocs are geographically balkanized and as they look across county and state lines from one collective to an other they may mistake all that lies between as being like them. Over estimating the national desire to pick up the reins of a previous centuries mores. There are problems facing the United States many of them part of a suite of problems shared by the rest of the developed world. The aggrieved wing of the Republican party clings steadfast to the belief that Obama is the only problem The demonizing of Barack Obama - The Washington Post. This is the primary logic error of conservative America. They are an echo chamber listening only to themselves. When libertarians (and near-libertarions talk about rights. I always think of soap bubbles. Libertarian focus overly on rights as experienced by themselves, a special case of individual rights. The ideology of personal and property rights leads them to subscribe to these rights in absolute terms. Equating a right to a bubble expanding from a point infinitely untrammeled into the universe. Of course when a second bubble from a second entity point is introduced and expands, the two come together in a wall the way two soap bubbles meet. As more bubbles come into being the press of concerns create an intricate geometric plane. It is at this boundary that rights, all rights, all property, all law exist. They are not in the point or the expansion, that is simply the hunger of the id. It's at the wall this adjudicated plane of existence answering to nature and mathematical balance that right comes into existence. This barrier, elastic to a point, will hold and push back every time someone believes they have a right to possess according to desire, or assert a special order of conscience. Suborning the will and well being of others by gender race and whim. 8:43:06 PM    ;;

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2013 P. Bushmiller. Last update: 4/11/13; 10:06:47 PM.