In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 I have been thinking about doing this for a while (and hinting at it), and finally, let's do it.  I don't re-read very frequently.  There are too many un-read books in the world, so a book has to have something special for me to devote my unclaimed time to it for another go-around.  Neal Stephenson is among the great writers, and great thinkers of our time, but if we're being fully honest, dude's even more long-winded than I am, and I don't know when to shut the fuck up.  At least when it comes to the written word.  The difference, of course, is that he is a great writer, and I suck.  But the thing is, reading even one of his books is a serious time commitment.  Re-reading takes less time than the first go-around, but with Stephenson, it's still a fuckload of time over which Huygens and Hooke could argue about measurement.  And the Baroque Cycle  consists of three Stephenson-length tomes.  And some of his books are more intellectually dense than others.  Snowcr

 Watch the grammar nerd twist himself into knots over the question of whether putting "voting rights" into quotation marks permits the treatment of the phrase as a singular when the phrase references a plural.  This matters.  What doesn't matter?  The political fight referenced.  Fuck.  That wasn't a complete sentence.  (Neither was "Fuck," for those keeping track.) Right now, the Democratic Party is in an apoplectic fit over its inability to pass various bills at the federal level to block states from implementing a variety of measures that the party equates, exaggeratedly, with Jim Crow.  I have stated my position on these state-level laws before.  I find them unethical and unconstitutional in part .  Put me in a legislature, and I'd vote against them.  Put me on a court, and I'd rule against the parts that I find unconstitutional. We must, though, keep in mind several things.  First, remember what we learned from voter ID laws.  In terms of electi

 OK, one of my favorites of modern jazz guitar today.  Bill Frisell.  Frisell is a strange guy.  He has done everything from avant-garde experimentation with Living Colour guitarist, Vernon Reid to ambient oddities recorded on the ECM label to my favorites, his experimentations blending jazz with country.  His best album, in my opinion, is Nashville .  Here's the first cut, "Gimme A Holler." Note several things about what Frisell does.  Credit must obviously go, in part, to one of the greatest bands ever assembled, including the greatest bluegrass musicians around, like dobro master, Jerry Douglas.  This piece wouldn't work without him.  Frisell, though, is among the most subtle guitarists around.  Tone over flash.  Country guitar is generally associated with the twangy tone of a Fender Telecaster, or tones similarly achieved on other models, but Frisell is playing in more controlled territory, while making subtle changes to the tone as he plays.  More importantly for

 I loved Looney Tunes.  Didn't you?  The best?  Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote.  They were every  scientist's favorite for the elaborate violations of basic physics contained in their dances of improbability.  Classic.  In the simplest form, though, the iconic sequences are those in which Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, and fails to fall by not looking down. At the moment, the New York mayoral race has brought some attention to "ranked choice" voting.  Ranked choice voting is a Wile E. Coyote solution.  Don't look down.  That way, you won't fall.  Eventually , you will.  But not until you look down.  In this brief post, I force you to look down.  Me-meep ! So what are the problems that supposedly need to be solved by ranked choice voting?  We normally use plurality rule voting, which creates several "issues."  It reduces the number of effective choices to two, by Duverger's law.  In so doing, the plurality rule creates strategic problems.  It

 Since I wrote a long post yesterday, I'm just going to do a quick, fun one today.  As you may or may not have seen, my favorite Louie-Tune in Congress, Rep. Louie Gohmert (Guess Which Party - Guess Which State) outdid himself fairly recently.  Yeah, he saw the competition from Marjorie Taylor Greene, and he upped his game.  Jewish space lasers?  Hah!  Louie laughs at your infantile attempts to out-crazy The Gohmert!  What I did not realize is that Louie is more literate that we ever gave him credit for being.  You see, he has apparently read my favorite sci-fi series-- the Broken Earth  trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin! The trilogy has some kind of movie deal now, because everything  is an adaptation, and I'll spare you another rant on that today, but a) they'll fuck it up, b) what's the point when the great joys were things like the second person/third person shifts in  The Fifth Season,  which can only work in print, c) I can already predict what kind of disastrous adaptatio

 I teased this post during the week, so here it is.  Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has now dispensed with all pretense.  In a way, I appreciate this since I have little patience for pretense, but unfortunately, this means the political system must now grapple with the GOP's formal announcement of a strategy that is so fundamentally incompatible with the US constitutional order that there can be no way forward as long as the GOP pursues it.  The Republican Party will no longer confirm Democratically-nominated judges (presuming they hold the Senate, as they likely will after the 2022 midterm).  This is an apocalyptic announcement.  We used the term, "the nuclear option," for the Senate maneuver by which the majority party ignored the rulebook to abandon the filibuster for judicial and executive branch nominations, but make no mistake-- this is far more dangerous, and far more deserving of apocalyptic terminology.  Turning the Senate into an institution where might-makes-right

 Let's have something different today.  When you think of the steel guitar/pedal steel, what do you think?  Generally, either country, or Hawaiian.  It started in Hawaiian music, and then moved over to country, but it is a misunderstood instrument.  The greatest master to expand its potential into other genres?  Buddy Emmons (sometimes spelled "Buddie"), who recorded a straight jazz album in '63 ( Steel Guitar Jazz ), and in the process, made some interesting observations, implicitly, about jazz.  Here's "Witchcraft."  Famous song. OK, so let's go through what Buddy did and didn't do.  Note what's missing.  A lot of long slides over a fuckload of notes.  That's lounge-music territory.  Instead, Buddy would pick up the bar, then put it down again, on the same string elsewhere, or on another string.  Or, and this is really important.  If you lay the bar across the strings, you have a chord, and if you pick within that chord-- leaving the ba

 When Antonin Scalia died, the political world was mostly  shocked and aghast that Sen. Mitch McConnell's immediate reaction was to invent a new rule that said "no Supreme Court confirmations in election years."  Everyone who wasn't a complete idiot knew that he was not only lying about the claim that it was an old rule, but that he would break it for Republican presidents, as he did to confirm Amy Coney Barrett.  Every single person who took McConnell at his word in 2016 should be disenfranchised for stupidity.  Fuck universal suffrage. As I have been saying for years, when the epitaph for American democracy is written, it will say: "Murdered in cold blood by Mitch McConnell."  I was saying it before Trump, and with Trump out of office, McConnell is roving the battlefield, looking for survivors to slaughter.  McConnell is every bit as psychopathic as Trump, but scarier because he isn't developmentally disabled.  He's smart . McConnell's latest s

 Recently, I have been thinking about CJ Cherryh's Regenesis .  (Yes, that is how she spells her name.)  I did not actually like this book, but I find myself thinking about one of the few redeeming points in the novel, and some of the insights that come from it.  So let's revisit it. History.  Wounds.  Damage.  Unhealed wounds.  Lingering damage.  How you read that string of not-quite sentences may depend on your perspective, and that is rather the point, isn't it?  Yet as I think through all of the many interpretations of these sentiments, and their implications, I come back to the character of Jordan Warrick.  Jordan Warrick is first introduced in CJ Cherryh's Cyteen  trilogy, and then we see the completion of his journey, such as it is, in Regenesis .  There are many lessons to be taken from Jordan Warrick, particularly in contrast with his clone-son.  That'll make more sense shortly, for those who have not read the books.  How does one deal with history and old

 I thought about being cute, and replacing the "f"s with "ph"s in the title, but then I thought about all of the spam comments that I'd have to block.  Not worth it.  Anyway, let's have ourselves a little corrective on everyone's favorite anti-majoritarian procedure, the filibuster.  Books can be, and have been written on the history and development of the filibuster, the question of whether or not it was an accident, and yadda-yadda, but here is the basic rundown. In the House of Representatives, when they end debate and call for a vote, the motion they use is called the "previous question" motion.  The rules of the Senate, when originally written, did not include a "previous question" motion as a procedure.  That meant that debate did not end until everyone  agreed that debate was over.  In 1917, the Senate introduced a motion called the "cloture" motion to end debate, but it required 2/3.  In 1975, that threshold was redu