Preach It Brother

Just so:

The manufacturing economy isn't "modular", but full of network affects. It is a root system, not a haphazard pile of building blocks. When you ship the manufacturing of an industry to another country, contra Larry Summers, you are shipping knowledge, you are shipping the increasing return on investment that comes with every next step in the industry. Not understanding this one bit, the economists as advisors and the political elite have truly helped bring the U.S. to this point of exhaustion.

Jonah Goldberg Still Dumb and Wrong

Jonah Goldberg writes that

[i]t’s already a cliché among liberals to describe [Perry] as the sort of cartoonish, ignorant cowboy they thought George W. Bush was (though to date, nobody feels the need to apologize to Bush for misinterpreting him).

We watched:



Or this



Or this



And so forth

Musette, the Tango, and the Accordionation of World Culture

The accordion was the beat box of its day after the development of an industrial process that prices down dramatically. Shortly thereafter Mussette was born in  Paris and then spread to the rest of the world. I can't find it right now, but somewhere in my musical archive is a double disc of late 19th and early 20th century accordion music from around the world. Well worth finding. Fist up, Paris, second Gardel, one of the first international film/singing stars to die tragically, and last a Fin proving that passion and the tango have little to do with one another. Enjoy your weekend.

Conservative Fear Mongering Explained

You know how Rick Perry argued, in bad faith one hopes, that scientists harp on global warming to keep the money flowing in? Well, according to this synopsis of a much longer report, Neoconservative and Conservative Islamophobes and fear mongers received over 45 million dollars to, you now, be professional Islamaphobes and fear mongers. Let's hope Rick Perry denounces these mercenaries and their paymasters.

Seat Height

I've read two posts about how to measure seat height. Both claiming to "simplify" the process. The two are more of less the same: stand up against the wall, stick a dowel between your legs, cram it up against your sit bones, measure the distance between the dowel and the floor, multiply by something, subtract something else, and then measure that sum from the ground to the seat. Simply as, I don't know, something hopelessly complicated. 

Here's the simple version and it works: Put on your cycling clothes and shoes, sit on the seat, put your heel on the pedal, lock your leg straight with pedal at its lowest point, adjust the seat so your butt rests solidly on it. Now ride with the ball of your foot on the pedal, and you should have power during the whole circle. If not lower or raise the seat just a bit until you do.

Works like a charm.

No, It Really Isn't

Michael Lind suggests that:

The equivalent of the Nicene Creed for secular humanists is the "Humanist Manifesto," published in 1933. Signed by the philosopher John Dewey and a number of now-forgotten professors and clerics, it called for a "religious humanism."

This is similar to making the argument that because H.G. Wells used the phrase "liberal fascism" for a week or two, boring his friends in the process, before rejecting and calling for the execution of Mosby's Blue Shirts modern liberalism must be fascistic.  I understand, of course, that Dewey is more important than Well, but the fact of the matter is that most humanists don't, in fact, belong to an organized church of the supreme being sort of an affair.

Paul Ryan Hates Democracy

The nerve of these thugs trying to get into a constituent service office. I mean after all it's not as if the Constitution guarantees the right to petition the government for the redress of grievance.[1]



Oddly enough everyone seems very mid-westernly pleasant.

via


[1]I know there's a tension here between the property holder's right to organize access to her property as she might please; but there does seem to have been a kind of hierarchy of liberties current in the 18th century, which varied depending on whether you were an automaticist or a humanists,[2] in this instance, I would argue the public and political clearly trump the private and commercial.

[2] I'll try to explain what this means at some point in the near future; for right this second, its the difference between thinking that people creating their own present and the proper order of things creating the proper present.

Libya

It seems that Libya has fallen and, except for the continued fighting, we who opposed the intervention/war ought hide our heads in shame. Leaving aside the whole post-war creation of state, society, and nation hurdle staring us in the face, a bad idea that achieves 1/2 its desired end remains a bad idea. Foreign intervention isn't a good idea, ask the Mamertines.

Oh For Dumb

So Obama goes for bike ride with his family and spends much of it riding with one or another of his daughters. But some maroon for the Mail Online decided that the real story here is:

Michelle Obama showed off her enviably toned thighs as she powered past the President in tiny purple cycling shorts on the first family's bike ride on Martha's Vineyard today.

Wearing a fashionable printed T-shirt and Converse trainers, the First Lady showed that she still has style, even when on vacation.

But her husband looked goofy and tired as he lagged behind wearing a baggy black polo shirt, and perhaps more surprisingly jeans.

He also made the point that Michelle is hawt. What's next? Obama's open dress shirt looks like Amedimejahn, or however it's spelt.

Beer Me

Matthew Yglesias really doesn't understand how the world let alone education works. In two posts of remarkable incoherence, Yglesias seeks to show that if you favor choice in one thing you must favor choice in all things and, whatismore, if you favor unions you have to favor crap beer because some major league makers of crap beer are unionized therefore unionization causes crap beer. Consequently, if you like non-unionized micro beer, you must support charter schools.  Others have pointed out the silliness of the argument.

Leaving aside the issue of how Carter's deregulation of beer making for private consumption led to increases in craft brewing for sale, I think it's worth pointing out that the only way this works is if charter school improve educational outcomes, they don't. Here, of course, his mindless commitment to failed ideological project blinds him to the fact that effective reform is driven by what works and what doesn't in the world as it is actually constituted rather than what ought to work if the world as it actually is conformed to a discredited ideological cosngtruct.

Brilliant

Tom Waits and Muppets:
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via

Cats and Dogs Living Together

We all remember that scene in Ghostbusters when Bill Murray suggest that the end is nigh when cats and dogs live together. We are all alos aware of the endless and pointless debate about which "pet:" is superior. I will, however, insist that when it comes to psychological warfare cats beat dogs hands down. For the past two days the crazy little dog has been trying to get the crazy kat to either play or fight. The crazy kat could with one or two swipes of his might fist do the crazy little dog in; however, he has decided that gaining the high ground and staring in the opposite direction as the crazy little dog becomes increasingly frantic is much the better option.

I'm Sure Nothing Bad Will Come of This

Thinking robots:


It's not like they just got closer.

Bah

Adjunctivitis in spades. Posting will be light

Famous Bikes

Via I found a website dedicated to actors on bicycles. Pretty darn nifty, for example:

Yes, that is Mr. Hand playing cane polo with Chaplain Tappman.

Driving Mrs. Daisy

The dystopic future envisioned by the Neoliberals, of more service and less -- you know -- decently-paid jobs, is here:

Also, foreclosed gardens for all:

She noticed something else. Those forlorn yards were peppered with overgrown gardens and big fruit trees, all bulging with the kind of bounty that comes from the high heat and afternoon thunderstorms that have defined Atlanta’s summer.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

So, it seems, that Rick Perry is a contender in this round of the Presidential race. He is, it's clear, nuts. And, it's clear, he's pragmatic in his movement into ever nuttier nuttiness. However, it's equally clear that he has the quality the successfully-fear-mongered right and endlessly-self-infantalizing right seek:

A couple of quotes about Perry jumped out at me from Costa’s story from Waterloo:

“It was kind of like dad was coming home,” chuckles Reed Bannon, a Waterloo businessman. “Once he got up there, everyone kind of knew it was time to sit up, shut up, stop slouching, and eat your vegetables.”’
…
Jim Mudd, a businessman from nearby Cedar Falls, sat next to Perry during dinner. He had never met the governor before, nor did he expect Perry to take a seat beside him. But he came away impressed. “He’s a strong dog,” Mudd says. “From what I can sense, he’s the strongest candidate.”

 Oh dear, as Johnny Rotten might put it, crazy, without a principled bone in his body, and given to thrashing the masochists. He's a perfect storm for the contemporary Republican party.

Getting There

I realize that this may seem a bit cryptic; however, the best way to cycle to Sauk City is Old Sauk to Bourbon to P, to whatever that street is that goes by the Uphill Grind, to KP to Mazo take Y and Bob's your uncle. Saw three Sand Hill Cranes and only 2 cars tried to kill me. In addition, Mazo may be the single most depressing city outside of Upstate.

UPDATE: If you want to get all the way to Sauk, you have to turn left on 78. Also, too make sure to stop in Black Earth and  pick up some of the bratwursts from either the restaurant/meat market or Black Earth Meats. 

Here in Wisconsin: About Last Night

So 2 Dems won and 4 lost. The trend, as they say, is better for Dems than for Walker and The Reps:

Olsen really lost traction, although Cowles gained. The overall, however, looks good. Also too, remember the last statewide, Prosser v whatshername, was close to 50/50. And Kloppenberg came from nowhere.

Conservatives Hate Reality

We hear a lot about the Right making its own reality, ignoring facts, and more generally living in a fantasy world.
Here's a picture:

Was you first thought: security guard wannabe? Mine too.

Here's what some NRO flying monkey wrote:

No, that isn’t Brando. Close though. It’s James Lileks, one of America’s wittiest writers (and it turns out he’s darned witty when he talks, too).

Here's a picture of Brando before, you know, the eating and Larry King kissing:

Leaving aside Brano's hair and the, I don't know, general beauty, they are as alike as chalk and cheese.

Unbearable Lightness of Apolitical Technocratism

Over to the Crooked Timber, there was a flurry of posts on left neoliberalism. One of the key points raised was its cluelessness when it comes to politics because of its technocraticism, should that be a word. Today, it seems to me, Krugman shows that this kind of cluelessness is more widespread than you might think.

He writes of the Fed's announcements on rate hikes, i.e., there won't be any with these, I won't say snotty or sophmoric but I will think them, remarks:

The Fed didn’t announce a new policy. And despite what some press reports said, it didn’t even commit to keeping rates low; all it did was say that if the economy stays weak, rates will stay low — well, duh — and that it might think about doing other stuff one of these days [.]

He then notes that " three members of the FOMC dissented even from that" silly, obvious and totally  duh worthy utterance. Get that? Something that was so obviously obvious roughly 1/3 of the board voted no. I bet the the 2/3s who voted yes are thrilled to find out that Krugman thinks that they are dolts and dullards.

Then he writes that

if you really thought that the Plosser-Kocherlakota view that rates need to rise even in the face of low inflation and high unemployment because, well, they just should was going to prevail, this might have given you some comfort.

What he means here is something like "just because the people who have been wrong about everything  didn't get their way this time there's no reason to be happy and praise those who did the right thing. The important point is to belittle people with whom you hope to craft a policy alliance."

Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with that. Except to the extent that alienating potential allies in a desperate moment is bad idea.

Thatcher, Reagan, Bush I and II, Clinton and Major Never Existed, to Say Nothing of New Labor

From the NRO

They say everything old is new again, and that is certainly true of the British riots. The main areas of outbreak — Tottenham, Brixton, Toxteth in Liverpool — were scenes of similar riots and disorder in the 1980s and early ’90s. To that extent, they show how 14 years of Labour-party rule merely papered over the cracks in British society.

What baffles is this Thatcher and Reagan get all the credit for changing the debate from "welfare state" to "neoliberal state." And since then, we have suffered under one form or another of neoliberalism. It didn't work. There were clearly inflationary problems with the post-War Consensus prior to the horrors of "stagflation." However, the right  neoliberals insisted that under their watch the rising tide would life all boats while the left neoliberals insisted that welfare would aid those whose boats leaked.  Neither state of affairs have come to pass.

So what is to be done? At the  moment, here in the US it's Obama's neoliberalism, Romney's whateverism, or Bachman/Perry Christianism. It is, I think, too early to start drinking and too late to follow John Prine's advice:

Racoons Sans Beetles

From TPM we hear of a Republican candidate for Senate who thinks that

[t]he raccoons figured out the beetles are in the bucket," Bruning said. "And its like grapes in a jar. The raccoons - they're not stupid, they're gonna do the easy way if we make it easy for them. Just like welfare recipients all across America. If we don't send them to work, they're gonna take the easy route.

Some quick points: First there are no jobs. There have been ever fewer decently paying jobs since Regan. There has been ever less "welfare" and ever more "workfare" since Regan. Workfare, I learned last night, includes "training" people for all manner of gainful employment. Like detasseling corn, which as "workfare" means that the trainees get no pay but rather "workfare" payments, which is another way of saying the state  operating as capital's business manager organizes the reserve labor army thus decreasing the "fixed" cost of labor. Neoliberalism, it can't be said enough, hates people.

Obstruction! Obstruction!

Michele Bachmann demands that Obama recall Congress because something must be done about the current crisis.

On of her fellow Tea Party maniacs explains what will be done to deal with the current ciris while

[a]t a town hall meeting yesterday, a Tea Party member urged Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) to bring impeachment proceedings against President Obama in the House. Burgess replied, “It needs to happen, and I agree with you it would tie things up…No question about that.” When asked to clarify, Burgess said he wasn’t sure what the proper charged to bring against Obama would be, but reiterated his support for such a move. “We need to tie things up,” he said. “The longer we allow the damage to continue unchecked, the worse things are going to be for us.” Burgess joins numerous House Republicans in their impeachment-saber rattling.

It's not as if the Republicans and not just the Tea Partiers have made not-doing anything a policy its that they are willing to do anything to not do anything. Think additional stimulus is the wrong policy? Impeach Obama. It's just stunning to me that these anti-American bufflaheads can say this and it isn't the lead story in every paper in the country.

Oh and for what it's worth, I would argue that the recall elections here in Wisconsin are different precisely because they are about 1) substantive disagreement on policies 2) result from a heretofore unannounced policy shift and 3) at the very least involved the misuse of the democratic process to limit the public's and their representatives understanding and knowledge of the radical alterations imposed with the aid of ALEC and others from outside the state.

Gloves

I like crocheted bike gloves. I used to buy the Performance bike one because they were really good quality and cheap. Now, however, they no longer make or, at least, sell them. So I started buying the Bontrager ones. Last year, for example, I bought two but ordered them through the LBS because you know support matters. It took a month and half for the gloves to show. So this year, I bought two pair from Trek's online store. The gloves showed up in two days, I think it was. Amazing. A week or two after wearing one every third day, there's glove rotation in my life, one them did this:

I used their web-based contact email dealio on the 2nd, got an email from them on the third asking for the picture. Sent the picture on the same day; received a reply on the the fifth telling me to expect the gloves next week. On Friday these showed up in the mail:

My only complaint is aesthetic: I wish they were the color of the original crocheted gloves, which is the red whit and blue of French - or I always assumed it was the French.
Let's hear it for Trek. Not only fine bike, great service and "giving back," screw Bike Snob's anti-Trek bike snobery.