In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Today, let's step way back into the wayback machine and have ourselves a listen and gander at the great Django Reinhardt.  To the modern American ear, his music might sound particularly anachronistic, but I encourage everyone to listen (and read) widely.  Without Django, there would be no such thing as lead guitar.  Also, his music was really cool. Here's the deal.  Django was a Belgian gypsy, playing guitar at a time before electrification.  Prior to electrification, the only role for a guitar in a band was as a rhythm instrument.  Why?  Volume.  The acoustic guitar just isn't as loud as, say, a horn.  (Or a violin, as played by his partner, Stephane Grappelli.)  Rhythm meant chords, chords, and more chords.  And then tragedy struck.  A caravan fire.  Reinhardt was hurt.  Badly.  Now watch and listen.  In particular, watch Django's left hand. Did you notice something about which fingers moved?  T...

 I posted something a little while back stating, essentially, that Biden's policy agenda is little more than a large pile of small things creating the appearance of scope because of the collective price tag without anything truly interesting or important.  After last night's speech, do I stand by that assessment? Yes. To reiterate my basic framework, modern American liberalism put its last big piece into law with the passage of the ACA, and since then, the left has struggled to redefine itself.  If they had a concrete vision of what a policy regime should be, then the closer they came to achieving it, the more classically  conservative they should become, defending their gains.  Instead, they are casting about looking for new goals in self-redefinition. The result?  Lots and lots of little stuff.  Nothing close to the conceptual  change of the ACA.  What do I think of it?  I mostly don't give a shit.  Some of it, I like, some I don'...

 Kelly Tshibaka.  She is challenging Lisa Murkowski for Alaska's Senate seat.  Given a certain teen movie from the 1980s, I'm not one to comment on others' names, but I'm going somewhere with this.  She hates Twilight , and thinks that no one should see the movies, or read the books.  I've been saying this for years!  Holy Flying Fucking Spaghetti Monster, her name is Chewbacca, and she's on an anti- Twilight  crusade?!  She must be the greatest nerd candidate ever!  Right?  Right? So just how much crazy would we have to accept to get all of this cool stuff? O.. oh.  Never mind. At this point, the way both parties are going, I'm just going to be writing in "Neil deGrasse Tyson" for every office anyway.  Oh, well.  At least I can fantasize about Chewbacca running on a "Make Vampires Evil Again" platform. Goddamnit, I just referenced Twilight  on this fucking blog.  I hate pop culture.

 I need a science fiction break.  Unfortunately, the book I just read was not particularly good, but at least I can grumble without any real anger.  So away we go.  Schismatrix , by Bruce Sterling.  Here's the basic premise.  In the future !!!  Sorry, future (it's that kind of book), Earth has been mostly left behind and quarantined.  Most of humanity is living on space stations 'n stuff.  There is a social division between those who are trying to create a future for humanity through genetics and bioengineering (the Shapers) and those who use cybernetics (the Mechanists).  The plot is basically a bunch of vignettes throughout the life of Abelard Lindsay.  He starts out as a rebellious "preservationist," interested in preserving old Earth cultural stuff, but he is basically a wandering opportunist who eventually leads a group to adapt their physiologies to live underneath the oceans of Europa.  'Cuz. Recommended?  Not parti...

 This is going to be one of those posts in which I tell you that everybody on every side is wrong because our political system is blinkered.  I suppose I have telegraphed that.  However, what good is having a blog that nobody reads if I cannot use it to vent my irritation through math?  So here goes. Eventually. First, I'm going to tell you a story about a couple of friends of mine from college, and how they got stopped and harassed in a "driving while black" incident.  These stories all have a relatively similar flavor, but the particular joy of this tale of police-imposed woe is that it allows me to bash Texas, because Texas is a shithole country, and fuck Texas.  Seriously.  Fuck Texas.  Secede already.  And take your Texas shoulder-chips with you.  None of us would have a problem with you if it weren't for those shoulder-chips, but those Texas shoulder-chips are really fucking intolerable.  So secede.  Then maybe the rest o...

 Just a quick one for today, so I'll go with something vaguely topical.  Charlie Parker, "Confirmation."  As in, bias.  Along with Dizzy Gillespie, Parker was one of the founding fathers of bebop, which was the point at which jazz veered away from pop.  Swing, even at its most complex, was still basically dance music, and instrumentalists of a certain caliber needed more freedom for exploration.  So, they got together at a club called Minton's after hours, and playing together, bebop just developed from their jam sessions.  It was not dance music.  It was too complex, too cerebral, and when those who don't listen to jazz describe the genre as being abstruse or impenetrable, it is often bebop that such people have in mind. The primary reason is that bebop is not generally based around a hummable melody with a catchy hook, like a pop song.  Instead, a bebop piece will have a core structure which is often just... odd, constructed that way becaus...

 Derek Chauvin was convicted.  As he should have been.  Yet I cannot find a single media outlet that is getting the story right.  Why not?  Because nobody is talking about Tony Timpa.  This weekend, it's time.  George Floyd and Tony Timpa.  The BLM storyline is as follows:  George Floyd was murdered because he was black.  This is a thing that happens to black people.  Had he been white, it either never would have happened, or justice would have been swift and certain.  It took video and mass protests, nationwide, to secure a conviction, and even then it was not certain. Yet if you know the case of Tony Timpa, this story is difficult to maintain.  Except for the fact that George Floyd was murdered.  That, you can get from the isolated facts of the case, and the video itself.  The rest, the social context... remember my broken-record advice.  What stories are you not seeing? Tony Timpa's death has been buried ...

 No, I am not a postmodernist.  One may glean that with relative ease.  Moreover, I think that the school of thought has done real damage to our political dialog.  Yet, as I often encourage you, oh nonexistent reader (how's that for postmodern?), it is important to read things from different perspectives.  Sometimes it is even enjoyable and enlightening.  This is particularly the case with Stanislaw Lem, about whom I have written before, and I'll write about him again today because it is often useful to revisit his classic works in science fiction. Some concepts and definitions.  To the degree that we can define.  There-- more postmodernism. Anyway, broadly speaking (writing?), postmodernism is a school of thought that questions the idea that truth is objectively knowable.  There's a lot more to it, but that is the important aspect, for our purposes today.  It is spittin' distance from solipsism, which is the most utterly useless school ...

 Time to do this for real.  The state of our public discourse on issues of race and other matters of identity, prejudice and discrimination is distressing.  The loudest voices in the room are generally not the representative voices in the room, but they do dominate the discourse, and consequently the policy discussion.  The "both sides" thing can be problematic, and the Trump era put those who fall back on the "both sides" rhetorical device in a corner, because Trump himself was so far outside the bounds of what we often call, "Western liberal democracy."  The "both sides" rhetorical device can be a cop-out to avoid noting when one side is qualitatively worse than the other.  Yet there comes a point when our discourse really does go far off track because, yes, both sides have made a mess of it. We have reached that point on matters of what we may generally call "social justice."  I will not bother, in this post, to explain the problems ...

 A quick one today, so this is just what's stuck in my head.  The title cut from Herbie Hancock's best album, Maiden Voyage .  Note a couple of elements.  Note Herbie's use of space rather than constant bombardment, as you get in bebop from a decade earlier.  Thematic.  When they hit you with a flurry of notes, it is purposeful.  Genius.

 Well, this is finally happening.  Or... not.  As you may have read by now, a bill is being introduced to add seats to the Supreme Court.  Alas, I can no longer link to my original post from The Unmutual Political Blog , but I have been telling you that this has been coming since the day McConnell put a blockade on the vacancy created by Scalia's death.  (And of course, anyone who believed that McConnell would follow the "no confirmations in an election year" rule that he invented in 2016, with a Republican  president... well, such people lack the requisite intelligence to read, so there is no point addressing them.  Nevertheless, his entirely predictable response to Ginsburg's entirely predictable bucket-kicking reinforced Democrats' strategic incentives.) So what's-a-gonna happen?  This will fail.  The probability that the sponsors get this bill passed is zero.  There is a higher probability that Donald Trump's next move will be to ope...

 Yesterday, I did another of my "poke the bear" things in my commentary on The Labyrinth Index , by Charles Stross.  I observed that, technically, Cthulu is anti-racist, because the act of wiping out all of humanity would eliminate all racial inequality.  In a way, it amuses me to write these things, or I wouldn't do it, but in a bigger-picture way, I am irritated by the existence of my motivation to do so.  Too much of the oxygen in our public sphere is sucked up by stupid arguments, and as a consequence, our public debate over real issues suffers.  I wanna tackle this.  Coming soon, because while it's fun to poke at the foibles of wokeness, wouldn't it be better if we could actually tackle the big stuff in a serious way?

 Just a quick one for today.  I'm a little behind in The Laundry Files  series, by Charles Stross.  If you don't know the series, it is basically a cross between The X-Files , HP Lovecraft, and Dilbert .  A British government agency-- the Laundry-- is charged with managing supernatural threats, and it is overly-bureaucratized.  The supernatural, as it exists in the series, centers around Lovecraftian horror, but includes basically everything else too.  As with any long-running series, the books range in quality, hence the "OK, I guess I'll get to the next one," but whatever.  Book 9-- The Labyrinth Index -- came out in 2018, and I just got around to reading it.  I don't feel cheated, but I am at least sufficiently amused to make a couple of observations. First, here's the basic plot.  Followers of Cthulu are taking over the United States, and here's their insane plot.  (Gaze upon an elder god and go mad, so of course their plot...

 It is time to check in on some arguments and observations I made periodically leading up to the 2020 election about the nature of ideology.  We are about three months into Joe Biden's administration, and while that "100 Days" thing is a stupid, pointless, arbitrary marker, as Biden stares down the barrel of it, so to speak, let's step back and look at what his presidential agenda has become, and what that means for the ongoing process of redefining American liberalism. Some political science refreshers are in order.  Ideology, as we define it in political science, is constraint.  It is the binding between issue positions, such that one who has an ideology is bound-- constrained-- to hold the issue positions defined by the boundaries of the ideology in question.  There are, by Converse's model from "The Nature of Belief Systems In Mass Publics," three types of constraints-- logical, psychological and sociological.  Since logical constraints-- first princ...