Romney's New Campaign Song

I am totally not making this up. It is a toss up between this



and this



He has his best and brightest on it and, it seems, they need to meet in  Mumbai.

Get Yer Kickstands

I have used several double leg kickstands in my life. In my experience, daily commuting requires a kickstand, fenders, and panniers to be effect and fun. Double legged kickstands are not only very functional but nifty looking.

 In order of greatness. The Hebie. Strong and stable as can be last for ever, hard to get in the USA. It weighs a ton but is unlikely to ever break and I am pretty sure that replacing the spring is easy. Not only does  this hold the bike upright under nearly any load but the pedals turn which makes routine maintenance a snap.

Pletscher's two legged. Nice but unlike the Hebie you can not spin the pedals while the legs are down. Plus the legs fold up to fit on one side of the bike. I added the rubber feet. The mechanism can wear out and it isn't nearly as tough as the Hebie.

The above are my current kickstands. I used to have a M Wave. It is designed after the Hebie but is considerable less stout although inexpensive and very good value for the money.

Then there is the Civia. This was unstable and did was designed so that the leg rubbed the chain. I lost at one of the original feet and two replacements. On the whole a rotten  little item in terms of practicality. It is, however, the most aesthetically pleasing of all the kickstands.

The worst of the bunch is Orange Velo's pretentiously named Porteur Double Kickstand.  Out of the box  mine was broken and the nephew, whose at least wasn't damaged, assures me it is a junky and unstable pile of thus and such.

 What is your favorite piece of commuter gear?

Historishically Thinking

The current The New Yorker there is a review (sub req) of a work of fiction the author of which once said

[i]creasingly, I am less interested in writing about fictional people because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story.

Her response to her lament was to write a work of fiction interlarded with "facts," we are supposed to believe.

I have said this before and I will say it again: if you don't want to write fiction don't but for god's sake stop pretending that fiction dedicated to factiness is somehow or another factual.

Were she really bored with fiction, instead of tired with all the hard work of making everything up, she could write, I don't know, a biography or a work of history. No really, I doubt, to be honest, that either would be any good as the discipline of either biography or history writing is rather different than the discipline required to write fiction but still.

Nobody Likes Conservative Ideas

The other day one or another of the Balloon Juicers attacked a David Brooks essay for being a big ball of nothing.  DeBoer is, on the one hand, right. Brooks' essay is an extended example of how to avoid being explicit. On the other hand, paying even marginal attention to what he writes indicates that what Brooks thinks the Republicans will do is follow a more aggressive neoliberal line in the hopes, one expects, of completely destroying the economy and 100 percent recreating the 19th century.

As the whole ALEC thing indicates the more open and above board the Right is with its ideas and plans the less support it has. Lies, obfuscation, and "cultural war" are their primary means of avoiding the explicit.

They can't win a fair fight so they don't fight one. Brooks is a well paid spokesmodel for the Right whose job it is to squirt  squid ink instead of shedding light.

Supper

Too busy, couldn't come, or weren't invite? Well here is what you missed:'

Some odd pounds of smoked porkly goodness replete with fat,  violations of dietary laws, and general loveliness. There were vegetables but who is counting?

Just Authority

In David Brooks recent comment on the need for more authoritarianism and less democracy, he deploys the phrase "just authority" on more than one occasion and it seems to be an attempt to deflect claims that he is, in fact, arguing that Americans need to be more docile. The word just in this context can have a variety of meanings one, of course, would be just in the sense of "just war," which would mean something like morally sound because it adheres to a set of principals engraved by God or nature on the hearts of men.  Another meaning might be something like formally just, sort of legal positivism's notion that a law that follows the proper legislative procedures is a just law even if it stinks in the nostrils of decent folks.

Either way it is clear that Brooks wants great obeisance to authority. One wonders when his sharply worded attack on the reporter interrupted Obama during a press conference today., not exactly the first time this has happened.

So David Brooks the time has come to let the louts have it.

What War on Women

This really needs no comment:



via

Historishical

Steven Colbert is famous for, among other things, coming up with truthiness and factiness. Rich Santorum recently showed how a commitment to both that plays out in real life. In the recent Red Plenty book event over to the Crooked Timber a new an equally troubling idea is slowly emerging: historishical. As near as I can figure, Red Plenty is a work of fiction with some documents attached, which is to say it is a work of fiction.

The key difference between thinking historically and thinking historishically is that historians cannot make stuff. Confronted with lacunae they can, it is true, reach for the unstable verities of other social science, weasel words like might or may, assertions of must or had to, or they can attempt the no less slippery reliance on analogy. Or they admit to making a guess but  rely on their general mastery of the subject matter to  paper over the idly speculative guessing game.



However, the best historians when confronted with a lacuna, Heydrich's motivation say, or what the Nazis said to Hindenburg during the fateful meeting, etc, remain calmly silent secure in the knowledge that you don't get to know everything and that making stuff up is just not on.

On the other hand, some of the respondents are confused about Red Plenty's genre based on its truthiness and historishical nature. As one. put it

[i]t probably works well as history, though I really don’t know enough about Russian history to judge. It certainly has the feel of the best kind of history -  it captures what it (probably) felt like for the people under examination when the past was modern, and exciting, and uncertain and contingent, and all those other things that we have trouble imagining the past as.

Another confused the making up of stuff with historical accuracy arguing that

[b]y using fiction, Spufford is able to make abstract accounts of how the Soviet system operated concrete, and concretely horrible. The collage of stories allows him both to portray individuals striving to reach goals and the overarching system that encompasses those individuals.

For all of the authors citation of Hayden White's notion of emplotment, making stuff up is the opposite of concrete and has little to nothing to do with history as a discipline, which seeks to  make events concrete by using the facts of the matter to create a coherent and plausible account  of the event or whathaveyou under consideration.

If Santorum highlights the dangers and dementedness of truthiness and factiness, Ryan Lizza recent essay on Obama's second term highlights the danger of historishical thinking. He "argues" that

[i]f he manages to win this year, it is likely to be by less than that, which would make him the first President in a hundred and twenty-four years to win a second term by a smaller margin than in his initial election. Whatever a mandate is, Obama won’t have one.

It is worthwhile here to note that Lizza, relying on the work of Robert Dahl Lizza has already dismissed the idea of a presidential mandate as a "myth." This means, according to Lizza, that if Obama survives a close reelection he wont have something that doesn't exist much as in a similar fashion if I follow the rainbow I won't have a non-existent pot of gold.

The reasons for Obama's "likely" election year squeeker are the horrid economy and and the bizarre idea that

[b]arring a disastrous revelation or blunder, Mitt Romney will be a more formidable opponent than many assumed during his rightward lurch to secure the Republican nomination.

As Steve Benen has shown in an on-going series of posts, Romney cannot tell the truth and, as anyone who has watched the man in action can attest, he is the black hole of charisma and a human gaffe machine. In other words, if Romney suddenly becomes some one else and if the press refuses to expose his lies and mendacity he just might be a formidable opponent. I give Lizza the last point but cannot really cede the first.

Lizza also offers some "historical" analogies from other presidents second terms in an attempt to shore up his idle speculation on Obama's second term. The problem here is that historical moments are radically contingent on the subjects and object of this or that moment in histortory. As a result, history is one long narrative of radical rupture. A historian's task, oddly enough, is to explain the long or short series of events, individuals, choices, and motivations that allow us to understand or comprehend the rupture. However, as a form of predictive science history doesn't work at all and the other social science offer only owl of Minerva like dim outlines predicated on there being no rupture.[1]

Think about, as one example out of a million, the Soviet Union's collapse. It was not predicted by experts on Soviet politics. Ditto the events that followed on from 9/11.

The world as it actually is and the future that awaits us as a collective entity, out private future is the grave, is beyond knowing and using the historishical mode to describe or illuminate the impenetrable future is not just a fools game, it is sign of intellectual dishonest yoked to a careerist's desire to be interesting in the service of  individual advance.

[1] I would make an exception for the repitition of past mistakes, financial booms leading to busts, faith in markets, allowing homicidal maniacs to take the reins of state, and related etc.


UPDATE:
New material added and, no, I am not going to tell you what.

Bikes Explain Everything

I have long thought that expanded cycling would lead to a better world. It seems, however, that bikes also explain long lasting enmity between nations:

SPIEGEL: Mr. de Winter, why do the Dutch hate [Germans]?

De Winter: Of course we don't hate you, but the rivalry is the inheritance of the Nazi era. The Dutch couldn't forgive Germany for occupying their country. You stole our bikes. SPIEGEL: Your bikes?

If Only

While true he ignores the actual fact that for everyone in power the you and me is 1% of the total population:

And You Thought I Was Nuts

Neil Young and Crazy Horse sing Oh Susanna:

A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift lives.

From Here to There

How do you go from vaguely Dylan incomprehensible poetry like this:



To full on political engagement like this



Or, for that matter, from comedic jazzy whatnot like this



 To the near madness of this



To the philosophical depth of this



And that is leaving aside one of the finest albums ever.

In other words, what seems today to be clear and certain will or might in the fullness of time become if not its opposite at least something both weird and wonderful. Or so I tell my self when surveying the current economy and my  place within it.

I May Be Inadequate But You Are Horrid

I was out on a not amble but now quite whiz-round of the Cap City today and was fairly far removed from habitation when I glanced to my left and saw a young man stripped to his boxers with his shorts on his head, no shoes on his feet, no shirt on his back, who was either passed out or sleeping. I called out "are you alright" two or three times while slowing down. He sort of sat up with a dazed look on his mug and some kind of a sore on his right temple.  I trundled back around and stopped the bike off the path and began to ask him some basic questions, do you know where you are? where are you going?, etc, the answers to which indicated that he was not a raving maniac.  I did not have a phone and he had no one to call. He was trying, he said, to get to a cul de sac by the Airport and had, he claimed, walked from Milwaukee. I tried to wave down a cyclist but, it would seem, the ride trumped a fellow human in clear distress.

 As for help he said  he really did not need any. I gave him a full water bottle, all the food I had with me, and 20 bucks and pointed him in the direction of the nearest set of building. As I rode away I was castigating my self for not doing more, giving him some kind of a lift, walking with him to somewhere and, just in general trying to figure out why I didn't do more or something more effective.

It occurred to me that the anti-good Samaritan cyclist, two city or county workers out mowing totally ignored the poor guy. And then as I overtook a jogger, who had run passed and turned back toward whence she had come, ask me what was going on. I slowed down and explained the situation to which she responded that the whole thing was creepy and by word and whathaveyou indicated that she wished the guy would just sort of disappear.

So I may be inadequate and will never qualify as an authentic good Samaritan and, this will come as no  surprise to those who know me, will always be a flawed human being but the rest of you are horrid little people and really need to rethink your relationship with those around you.

Ray Bradbury

is, of course dead. I read and enjoyed all of his books that I read, which is to say some small percentage of all the books that he wrote. I can, fairly vividly, remember the essential strangeness of the texts and the thrill of his use of language.  What I did not know was that Bradbury was huge in the USSR.  As an added bonus a recipe for dandelion wine:

Once we made a bottle of dandelion wine. (Our “micro-district” on the western outskirts of Leningrad was fairly overrun with dandelions in the summer.) Every Soviet teen-ager worth his salt knew how to make a batch of moonshine: You took a pharmacy-bought, five-litre bottle with a narrow mouth; you filled it with four litres of water, added a kilo of sugar, and a stick of yeast. Then you fitted a garden-variety condom over the bottle’s mouth. . . . You pricked a tiny hole through the tip of the condom. Then you left the bottle alone for ten days or so, in some dark, inconspicuous, reasonably warm space. While the process of fermentation was in progress, the condom on top of the bottle remained stiffly erect, held up by the steady stream of outgoing air. Once it was over, the condom fell limply to the side, which was how one knew that the moonshine inside the bottle was ready for consumption. To the initial mix, we added one kilogram of dandelion petals.

The result was

the most revolting concoction imaginable, yet we downed it in swift, greedy gulps, dead drunk while still in the process of drinking.

 The essay is really quite lovely.

The Right Explained

Jay Nordlinger over to the NRO's Corner waxes egalitarian:

Some of us believe that America should stand foursquare for equality under the law and equality of opportunity. Equality of outcome, of course, is a different thing altogether.

Except, of course, for the whole marriage of men and women whose sexual orientation Nordlinger and Co despise or perhaps envy, women's pay, access to healthcare, education, and related etc which, as we all know, is the proper property of those with money.

Just below the above bit of dishonesty we find another example of how right-wing notions of equal access and equality under the law falls prey to the righ-wings detestation of minorities. Deroy Murdock writes, his pixels shaking with outrage, of

[a]New Mexico appeals court ruled recently that one’s Christian faith is an insufficient reason to decline business that violates one’s religious views.

It seems that some bogus Christians wanted to not only the one who cast the first stone but also thought Christ's rejection of segregation by deeds was a typo refused to photograph a lesbian wedding.

The clincher to his "argument" is to

[s]uppose Bob and Steve, a gay couple, launch a photography service to take pictures at gay weddings. One day, Jack and Jill show up and ask if Bob and Steve will take photos at their straight wedding. Uh-oh! If Bob and Steve say no, then they will be guilty of sexual-orientation discrimination.

Yes that is right Deroy the implication of a state under law with a commitment to the notion that laws are for all would, in fact, make it illegal to violate the law regardless of the idiocy or legitimacy of the motivation to violate the law.`

The right is the way it is because it, or rather its denizens, have no idea what words, phrase, ideas, and intellectual movements, mean or meant.

Recalled to Life the Final Comment

What exactly the recall election meant or means in Wisconsin politics is, of course, years away from being full understood. However, much of the emergent punditocracy's narrative strikes me as being foolish and wrong and based on a bunch of assumptions that don't hold up to sustained scrutiny.
 
It is difficult to see how the Walker victory constitutes a resounding defeat for the coalition of unions, workers, and politically active leftists. That coalition has now in place a million something network of politically engaged voters; it has a clear message that abhors the ALEC-based retreat to the 19th century; it has stopped an further rightward shift or shenanigans in the immediate future.

Given that, as everyone pointed out, how Obama was AWOL from the fracas it is difficult to see this election as having any bearing on the up-coming presidential election.

The election also, it seems to me, threw the tactics, strategies, and philosophical orientation of Walker and Barret supporters into sharp contrast. For the coalition behind Barret this was largely a state campaign waged with instate money, volunteers, and related etc over issues specific to Wisconsin.  For Walker's campaign this was a national campaign which drew on the power of the plutocrats his policies benefits and the various right-wing organizations that seek to erode the power of state legislatures to set their own agendas, i.e., ALEC.

Indeed, one constant refrain emerging from the noise and confusion is that Walker is a national figure on the right. This indicates, to me in any event, that the way forward for the neoliberal right and conservatives more generally is away from their always dishonest commitment to states' rights and toward and ever more powerful and autocratic centralized state.

On the plus side:

The Salem runner was last in the race and she picked up the other runner after she collapsed and  made sure she crossed the finish line a head of her.

Recalled Yet Again to Life

So it looks like the Wisconsin Dems did, in fact, regain the majority in the Senate by 2%.  Again to all of those touting Walker's expanded political capital, it is just not the case. Furthermore, when you think of the millions of dollars and related etc Walker garnered from outside the state, it ought to be clear that his curiously dead eyes are now fixed on a wider horizon.

The Right Wing revolution is, baring ballot shenanigans, over.

Innovation II

I mentioned the debate about central  planning and innovation over to the Crooked Timber the other day as well as the patriarchal authoritarian lout Bloomberg's stupid regulation. It occurred to me that there is significant overlap between the  opponents of central planning and those on the right who denigrate Bloomberg.

But here is the deal, you know how cars get safer every year, and to the extent that inspections still exists, food and drugs aren't adulterated. That is because of central planning. Ditto roads, bridges, and, in the days of yore, public schools.

Nobody in their right minds wants the state to, say, regulate beer or the taste of burgers or the shape of your clothes but by the same token nobody in their right mind wants to let a bunch of deranged maniacs concerned only with profit to decide how safe a vehicle, fireproof a home, or any related etc.

Sure there are the 27% but none of them are, in fact, in their right mind.

Recalled to Life

So Walker "won." Why the scare quotes? The Dems, it seems, regained control of the Senate. There will, no doubt, be a recount.

The fact of the matter is that the real driving force behind the evisceration if of Wisconsin's economy and the attempt to turn it into the Texas, Georgia, or Alabama of the Great Lakes region was the Fitzgerald duocracy. Take away a viciously undemocratic Senate and watch Walker fail to generate traction state-wide or nationally.

Oh and about that crap about Walker being the next big thing on the national political scene, here's another much touted hope for the future.



Walker is twice as dumb and three times less charismatic.

Framed

As we all know Mayor Bloomberg is busy fulfilling his role as patriarchal-authoritarian-billionaire-twit of the year. Scott Lemieux responds that the proposal that

  this kind of thing can bring out my inner libertarian.

Here is the thing. Libertarians aren't the only ones to oppose patriarchal, authoritarian bullshit, in the Frankfortian sense. Socialists, Communists, and Democratic Socialist oppose this kind of nonsense. By ceding the ground to libertarians Lemieux is valorizing the insane notion that the left generally wants to rob the world of its freedom to do what it will. That simply isn't true.

I find it difficult to believe that anyone seriously dedicated to the reversal of thirty odd years of neoliberals assault on humanity think that Bloomberg's unilateral imposition of a childishly silly policy that will have little to no effect on obesity or consumption is a good idea.

Most of thought and think the no butter diktat was equally silly. Libertarians are twits and insisting that resiting patriarchal, authoritarian bullshit is their bailiwick is to accept their hopelessly blinkered view of the world in which the struggle for effective democratic solutions to the intractable problems of humanity in a  social situation is a form of nanny statesim, which it isn't.
 

Bonk

I am pretty sure today I ate only breakfast and while riding home after a day in the saddle and cooking of ribs I bonked. For the last mile I could barely turn the pedals and, I think, sweated out approximately three gallons of fluid. Arriving back at home base I ate, in no particular order, six to ten snack-sized candy bars, a small water melon, and a banana and then fell into a dreamless sleep.

It is actually a fairly frightening experience and at one point I thought that I might just lie down by the side of the road and sleep. You would think I could at least remember to eat while cooking but no.

Innovation

Over to the Crooked Timber they are having a book event on Red Plenty. I am going to have more to say about the obvious problems with this text in a bit. Today, I wanted to focus on one aspect of the discussion arising from this essay on the difficulties of creating a computer-based centrally-planned economy.

For many of the critics of central planning such an economy's inability to innovate is a key marker against it.  For these critics the sainted Steve Jobs' creation of the the Ipad could never ever happen in a planned economy. Leaving aside the dubiousness of this claim[1] and leaving equally dubious notion of the Ipad as a game changer, let's consider a slightly different innovation.

When I was a kid all medicine cabinets, or so it seemed, had a slot in the back.  The purpose of this  slot was to accept safety razor blades when there keenness went the way of the dodo.  The safety razor is innovative. I used to use a cut-throat razor and they are a pain. Safetyu razors aren't. I have used some form of safety razor, Shick injector, Mercur, or Gillette for over 20 years now. Shaves great costs little and lasts nearly forever. Indeed the only razor I ever had to replace because it broke was the plastic Gillette I bought in Germany. [2]

In the same period, more or less, the "personal grooming" industry have spent, I'll be conservative, billions creating new razoring technology.[3]  Blades went from two to three to five to goodness knows what is next.  The razors excrete unguents, oils, balm, and, for all I know, Frankincense and Myrrh. The thing is, my Mercur or any safety razor does just as good a job at a fraction of the price and with none of the waste. Not just the waste of the unneeded blades oils and unguents but also the waste of the zillion plus dollars in advertising designed to get you to think that you need a razor of 15 blades with attached palm oil applicator.

Think if that wasted time, effort, and money had rather gone into teaching and funding primary and secondary education. Surely that kind of investment would have paid much greater and longer lasting dividends.

And consider this.  One of the new trends among the rising generation, who have a way of becoming both old fogies and models for their immediately younger cohorts, is the bearded or complicated mustachioed youth. Should the image of male beauty, much like our economic and political systems, revert to a 19th century celebration of the unshaven and, perhaps, unshorn all that time, energy and money will have gone up in smoke in the service of a temporary advertisement-induced fad.

My point, while long-winded, is simple, most capitalist innovation is finding some way to package things already readily available in new and unnecessary ways as the real problems that plague the world go unaddressed and often unacknowledged.

[1] There is little new technology in the Ipad mostly it was a clever packaging of already existing technology and, what is more, if all the Ipads in all the worlds disappeared it would have nearly no effect on the world and its wife.

[2] I was living in the good ol' USA at the time and when I went to the store where I bought the blades I asked if I could buy a new safety razor only to have the  clerk explain that they would have that.

[3] You can remove razors and put in the automotive industry and cupholders to get a sense of the widespread silliness of capitalist innovation.

The World and How It Got That Way (USA Edition)

Here is a long essay by a former Republican congressional staffer filled with well deserved criticisms for the radical right and tepidly egalitarian neoliberal centrists who currently seek to drive the ship of state further into a ditch, to engage in metaphoric mix and match.

More On The Economics of the Bicycle

I mentioned the millions saved by cyclists like me, as it turns out neoliberalism fears the might bike:

via