In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 I had a few other ideas for a post this morning, but if you are a bluegrass fan, a guitar fan, or otherwise serious about music, you may be aware that Tony Rice died on Christmas.  Details are not being released, except that it was sudden.  Under the circumstances, we hear about a death, and our first thought may be, "COVID?"  However, if it was sudden, it probably wasn't.  Regardless, Tony Rice. A few words about Tony Rice, if you don't know who he was.  It is almost impossible to overstate his importance as a guitarist, or as an innovator in bluegrass and acoustic music generally.  Who first decided to use a plectrum on a guitar to flat-pick fiddle tunes?  We can argue about that.  Doc Watson, Joe Maphis... doesn't matter.  However, the first generation of bluegrass lead guitarists created a template.  Doc, Clarence White, a few others.  Then Tony Rice came along.  As great as Doc, Clarence and the rest were, Tony had an elegance to everything he played.  Singe

 When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, one of the ideas that circulated in some quarters of the left was what I started to call the "burn it down" theory of American politics.  To some, it was a kind of silver lining to Trump's victory.  It went a little something like this.  Yes, Donald Trump was terrible.  But in fact, he would be so  terrible that he would bring about a kind of political renaissance, revitalizing a left-wing movement and bringing about the kinds of political reforms that could never happen otherwise.  Just as the Great Depression was a precursor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, Trump would be a precursor to a revitalized left that would bring about... I dunno.  Somethin'. I addressed the notion periodically on The Unmutual Political Blog , with reference to Ra's Al Ghul, from Batman Begins . In this version of Batman, Ra's has a philosophy.  Every once in a while, you have to burn it down because the world has just gotten t

 Off-schedule yesterday.  Oops.  Marcus Miller, with a live rendition of "Burning Down the House."  I don't actually care for the Talking Heads, but Marcus Miller is one of the best bass players alive, and this is amazing.  There is a very good version on The Ozell Tapes , as well.

'Twas the morn' before Christmas, and all through USPS, Not a package was moving.  I hope you used Fedex! The bins were all stuffed in the depots without care, In the hopes that someone else would sort them whene'er. The children were nestled with their phones in their beds, While visions of tracking updates danced in their heads. And mamma and poppa, both drunk off their ass, Knowing they've got nothing, cuz' USPS is taking a long winter nap! When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my bed, to see if it was a carrier. Away from the window, he flew like a flash, To avoid any questions, about where my stuff's at. The moon that he flashed me reflected in the snow, There was no other lustre, because this Christmas blows! Then, what to my wondering eyes did appear, But an Amazon truck, because Bezos says, never fear! With a little old driver, overworked and abused, At least something is here, so USPS, fuck you! He coughed and he wheezed, and ma

 So.  Have you been hitting "refresh" on the USPS tracking tools a lot lately?  Um... fun, right?  What's your record right now?  For domestic mail, I have a nice, little out-of-print book that I thought  I had found, at a great price, that supposedly went out for delivery, never made it, and has been sitting somewhere  in my general urban area for over a week.  Just... sittin' around.  That's not counting international, which... oy.  So this is fun , right?  Let's talk Terry Pratchett.  His best book, in my opinion.  Going Postal . First, there's that title.  Gather 'round, young'uns, whilst I tell you a tale.  This was a term that people started kickin' around in the 1980s when a series of postal workers went nuts, and then went on shooting sprees, which is the more common order of operations.  (Shooting spree, then  nuts means you're looking to plead insanity, which is a dicey proposition.)  We called these people, "disgruntled post

 So many choices for today.  Let's go with Jimmie Rivers, "Airmail Special," from Brisbane Bop .

 It has become worse than a cliche to say that the Republican Party is a Trump personality cult rather than a normal political party.  Yet, it's still true.  Also, breaking news:  bears really do shit in the woods.  Yet, the response of the Republican Party to Trump's 2020 loss actually demonstrates a lot about this difference. I write frequently about the concept of valence traits, as they have evolved in game theory since that seminal article by Donald Stokes, "Spatial Models of Party Competition."  Rather than merely distinguishing between a positional issue  and a valence issue , as Stokes did, we place the candidates somewhere in some policy space, or rather, most of the time, they strategically select locations.  Each voter also has an ideal point somewhere in that policy space, and prefers a candidate to be as close as possible to his ideal point.  Grammatically, "his" is the neutered form, and one is supposed to use "his" to reference a no

 I've used Living Colour before, rather recently.  But hey!  Etta James!  "I Worship The Ground You Walk On."

 Kurt Rosenwinkel, the title cut from The Enemies of Energy .  Some of my musical selection jokes suck.  Come on.  This one's good.  Also, Rosenwinkel is awesome.

 Perhaps you have been out of school for long enough to have lost track of the academic calendar.  Otherwise, you are aware that this is grading season, in which those of us in my bizarre profession make our lists of who has been naughty, who has been nice, and so forth.  It is not the highlight of the job, and I need a break from grading.  I shall do this by... grading a Trump tweet, as though it were a political science assignment.  What could possibly  go wrong?  This will be less stressful than grading, right?  Right ? Anyway, a thing happened yesterday.  It should not have been news, but the world is not as it should be.  The Majority Leader of the Senate congratulated the President-elect.  How is this news ?  Because the Majority Leader of the Senate leads a party of liars and craven cowards held in thrall to a conspiracy theorist who is still in denial about the fact that he lost, and that he has been laughed out of court.  So, a Republican acknowledging that Biden is about to b

 I spent some time yesterday flipping through my trusty, old copy of Gulliver's Travels .  As a political scientist, a science fiction fan, and someone drawn to dark humor, my fondness for Jonathan Swift is, as we say in statistics, "overdetermined," but what can I say?  Embrace the cliche.  Swift was just great.  Anyway, I needed to spend some quality time with Swift yesterday.  By the title, and the reference to Gulliver, you may think you know where I'm going.  Not quite. OK, Lilliput.  But I have a different observation about Lilliput.  Do you remember the nature of the political schism in Lilliput?  It was between the Big Enders, and the Little Enders.  Which end of the egg do you break?  That's it.  That's the big schism.  Wars are fought over this, in Lilliput.  Why?  'Cuz.  Is that any more absurd than wars over sectarian dogma, or fighting over stupid shit like the melanin content of your skin?  Science fiction authors have been beating this not-v

 OK, music clip.  From This Is Spinal Tap .  Randy Newman was too obvious.

 A few weeks back, I wrote one of my science fiction posts on a rather irritating libertarian screed, in science fiction form:  The Probability Broach , by L. Neil Smith.  I commented that there is a strange, utopian streak in libertarian writing, which is problematic in itself, and a demonstration of the flaws common in the thinking of many libertarians.  I don't describe myself as a libertarian, nor really as anything other than "idiosyncratic."  Yet, I am sympathetic to many of the arguments of libertarianism, or at least of classical liberalism.  And yes, I will lecture you this morning on the definition of "liberalism," which even many scholars seem willfully unwilling to understand.  However, I'm-a-gonna ramble.  Fair warning. Anyway, I will not dwell for too long on the point of Donald Trump, the person.  My disdain for him is hardly a secret.  Fortunately, he won't be president for much longer, and even his allies on the Supreme Court are exhaust

 Funkadelic, the title track from Free Your Mind... And Your Ass Will Follow .

 Robert Walter, the title cut from Cure All .  Subtlety?  What's that?

 Yup.  Hunter Biden is under investigation.  Something about business dealings with China.  How legitimate is the investigation?  Did he really do something wrong/illegal?  We cannot, as of yet, know. If you are sufficiently far to the left, sufficiently motivated by Trump animus, or sufficiently angry about Trump's corruption of the justice system, you may simply think that if soon-to-be President Biden demanded that an Attorney General pull a Bill Barr, and let his son go, it would be the fair-play version of turnabout.  After all, not only did Barr intervene in several cases of personal interest to the current president, Trump is now considering preemptive pardons of himself and his family members.  As of this morning, PredictIt is putting a self-pardon at 33 cents on the dollar .  What do I think of those odds?  I have no  clue.  I'll just restate my advice to put your money in a well-diversified portfolio.  A simple, S&P index fund is generally the way to go. Anyway, I

 To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention for the last four years, Donald Trump is still trying to steal the 2020 election.  He continues filing legal challenges, and he continues pressuring state governments to overturn the indisputably legitimate tallies by which he lost. Like the loser he is. To be sure, Republicans across state governments are showing more integrity than I expected, but I expected zero integrity.  I expected them to cave this year.  After all, Trump has his cultists threatening violence, not just against the Democratic Governor of Michigan, but against Republican officials in Georgia.  I expected them to cave, and steal the election for Trump this  year, like a bunch of lying cowards. So, we're fine, right?  Biden will be inaugurated. The problem:  finding Republicans who will admit  that is a challenge.  It is not merely a challenge finding Republicans who will admit that Biden won legitimately, but finding Republicans who will admit that it'

 Let's turn back to some science fiction.  This morning, we examine a less-than-satisfying book, but it will allow me to make some observations about COVID, bioterrorism, conspiracy theories, and I'm not absolutely certain where I'll go with this, but whatever.  It's Sunday morning, I've got a bunch of coffee and a bad book sitting by my computer, so let's have a good, old fashioned rant, shall we? We begin, though, with the first tests of the atomic bomb.  At this point, we understand how nuclear fission works.  As the Manhattan Project prepared for the Trinity test, though, it was a well-established hypothesis, building towards an empirical test.  Empirical tests don't always go the way we expect... [he says, having observed more failures of his hypotheses than he cares to admit in this particular post].  One of the fears was that an uncontrolled chain reaction could do more than create a somewhat bigger than ordinary boom.  "Kill all life on Earth&qu

 Col. Bruce Hampton, "Basically Frightened."  I thought that I would post the version from the original Aquarium Rescue Unit  album, with Jimmy Herring on guitar, Oteil Burbridge on bass, and Matt Mundy on mandolin, but youtube immediately gave me this astonishing version with AJ Ghent on slide guitar.  Wow.  OK.  So this is the version I am posting.  AJ is amazing, and while we lost the Col. some years ago, his influence is incalculable.  I didn't even know AJ played with him, but I am not surprised.  He trained generations of musicians.  A great man.