Month: January 2006

Bruce Campbell Vs Army of Shorties

Let’s start off with Ten Important News Stories That The Media Doesn’t Cover.

New study suggests that public school students do just as well on math tests as private school students, once they unleveled the playing field by adjusting for background and used a small enough sample size. I think what this study shows is that the government can prove anything it wants to prove badly enough. See also: global warming, War on Terror.

Compare and contrast, 50 points, essay question: “US plans to ‘fight the net’ revealed” dealing in “information operations,” versus Congressional staffers re-write Wikipedia entries to suit their bosses. Exceptional answers may be submitted to Wikipedia.

Next up, Most Americans think President Bush’s eavesdropping plan is a risk to their civil liberties. Also they think that by the end of the Bush Administration, the economy will be the same or worse, the health care system will be the same or worse, and the Federal budget deficit will be bigger.

Grim reading on the fact that if Roe v. Wade falls, abortions will not stop just because they may be illegal. Wealthy women will always be able to get one, and poor women will die trying. The way to prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

How many years have we been told that the key to getting ahead in this increasingly knowledge and skills based economy is to go out there and get the best education we possibly can? Yeah right! An alarming number of people who took that advice are buried under “another mortgage” worth of student load debt.

And on a final, happier note — pun intended — Jukkou-san brings us the Virtual Armonica.

Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart

Today is the 250th birthday of one of music’s great geniuses, Mozart. According to Grove’s, he was christened Johannes Chryostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, Wolfgang Gottlieb for short, even though he always preferred the Latin translation of his middle name, the more familiar Amadeus.

Let me join the rest of the world in a big rousing “Happy Birthday!!”

Mozart, alas, died at the age of 36. Speculation that he was poisoned has run rampant since then, fueled by his widow, who was always willing to make money from the works and remembrance of her husband. The fact of the matter is that his doctors knew quite a bit about poison and ill effects of mercury; if Mozart was poisoned, we must presume the far-fetched idea that both doctors were involved in the plot. By the way, you can tell a lot about a book on Mozart by flipping to the back and seeing what day they say he was buried. Mozart died December 5th, 1791. Local law stated that a body could not be buried until two days after death (to prevent accidental burial of someone not quite dead yet). Any book that says Mozart was buried December 6 is not to be trusted.

If you only have the opportunity to read one book about Mozart this year, make it The Mozart Myths. This little book slices and dices the legends surrounding his all-too-brief life with great skill and insight. If you have more time, consider Mozart in Vienna and Mozart’s Last Year, particularly nice for the evaluation of Mozart’s estate. I have always found the assertion that he “died a pauper” to be a little bit of an exaggeration, even before you consider that his possessions were deliberated undervalued for tax purposes — to say nothing of whatever cash Constanze might have hidden on her person.

There is one book on Mozart I must recommend you not read. I will not name it here. The author’s primary hypothesis is that Mozart’s marriage was falling apart, and indeed his younger son was actually his apprentice Sussmayr’s child. His “evidence” is that the husband and wife were not in the same city exactly 40 weeks before the child’s birth. Had the author run this idea past his own mother — or any woman who has ever been pregnant — the book would surely never have been written. Furthermore, if the author had done an additional two minutes of research, he would have found this drawing from an early Mozart biography (written by Constanze’s second husband) of a particular deformity of Mozart’s outer ear. The model was Mozart’s younger son, who inherited the condition.

As far as his music goes, don’t limit yourself to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the Requiem. There’s a whole world of Piano Sonatas and Operas and the Clarinet Concerto and all kinds of work for strings, as well as the much overlooked Music for Glass Harmonica. (It was a very new instrument at the time, having been invented like many things of the era by Ben Franklin.)

He’s one of the most famous composers in human history. If you were to ask random people on the street to name a composer of classical music, odds are good he is one of the half dozen names you are most likely to hear. So let’s crank the stereo. Rock me, Amadeus.

Parade of Anecdotes

We keep hearing that the economy is just fine. No, really. If the economy is so great, I have a few questions:

Why is Porsche actually having to advertise?

Why is Ford having to announce that they will lay off (another) 30,000, not long after a similar announcement from GM? Oh, and Daimler Chrysler is laying off another 6000 worldwide.

Why has Target started carrying hair shears, putting them right next to the barrettes and hair color?

Why do we keep hearing stories about wages going down and things being tough all over?

Why is CNBC running commercials for temporary health insurance?

Why is my mail box overflowing with information on investing in precious metals, a traditional safe haven for times with the economy is in a tailspin?

Why are commodities such as oil, silver, and gold at or near record levels?

Why has Bank of America, one of our biggest banks, missed their earnings target?

I would just like to know how much information we need before we start questioning the validity of commonly circulated economic statistics.

Maybe I am a Centrist After All

I used to consider myself pretty centrist. I mean, alright, I was a member of the Progressive Student Union in college, but probably its most conservative member. But I believed enough of the same things they did that we could work together for things that seemed doable and important on campus. I considered myself centrist at the turn of the millennium, when Clinton –Bill Clinton, the one that was actually President — had survived impeachment, and when Dubya was a Governor with Presidential aspirations, back when air travel didn’t mean slip-on shoes.

Then, somewhere along the line, the Center apparently took a turn to the right, and I found myself out in the cornfield among lefties, liberals, activists, and other progressives.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

To listen to the rhetoric, “everybody” agrees we must support our troops and that means nobody can say anything bad about the Bush Administration. Because, well I don’t know, maybe the insurgents are quoting Randi Rhodes at our troops instead of trying to kill them. Well, you know my stance on that. I do support the troops: I pray for peace.

But then, yesterday, out of the blue, I read this item by Molly Ivins, who I had considered to be just a tetch to the left of me. And I realized that the center had not moved after all! The highway signs had just been changed. To quote:

The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush’s tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do “whatever it takes” to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

So let me get this straight. Most Americans want to bring the troops home, have health insurance, get a living wage, have the rich pay higher taxes, cut the deficit,* and protect the environment; yet somehow that’s a crazy liberal idea? And more to the point, why can’t our elected officials who claim to be so mindful of public opinion manage to do what it turns out the sometimes overwhelming majority of us want?

I hope Howard Dean has these figures, because it seems to me the Democratic Party doesn’t need an angle so much as they need to play to Peoria, the real Peoria, not K Street. Corporations do not vote; people do.

*As an aside, I’d like to point out that if more Americans earned a living wage, they would pay taxes on that money. And if we got rid of nutty tax breaks, that would be more taxes paid too. Now, you don’t suppose that could help reduce the deficit, do you?

John Stossel and the Amazing Logical Fallacy

Maybe you heard about it, and maybe you actually watched John Stossel’s “Stupid In America.” To be fair, Mr. Stossel is a small-l libertarian and has been airing his opinions about the American educational system since at least 1999, so we can all be forgiven if this sounds like things he has said before. This is only the latest salvo.

I’d like to take a couple paragraphs from Reason’s coverage of the show, as written by Mr. Stossel:

The Belgians did better [on identical tests given to Belgian and American students] because their schools are better. At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

Now, I am willing to let stand the facts he cites in the first paragraph, and assume he has statistics to back them up. Namely, 10 year old American students test well compared to their international peers, but 15 year old American students do not. Our inner scientists should immediately ask why: what are they doing that we are not; what is different; is it the schools, the teachers, the methods, the teaching materials? Obviously something changes between age 10 — when kids are doing fine — and age 15 — when they are not. By and large, the families and neighborhoods of these kids have not changed, which limits the number of factors which could be at work. Mr. Stossel does well to point out that our kids appear to get dumber the more school they attend and money is not the magic factor.

I would love to sit him down with John Taylor Gatto for an hour or so and televise the results.

Unfortunately for all of us, Mr. Stossel does not ask “what do the Belgians do with kids aged 10-15 that we do not?” Instead, he makes the logical leap that “the state monopoly on education is to blame.” He envisions a capitalist frenzy where “There could soon be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.” Strangely enough, Mr. Stossel appears unaware of the many private schools in the United States, schools with philosophies, fees, and performance levels as variable as snowflakes. Oh, and let’s not even bring up homeschooling.

Curious about Belgian schools? According to this, the multiple languages spoken in Belgium are an issue, and “As well as state schools, there are subsidised ‘free’ and independent schools, often run on religious lines, though their curricula and certification are recognised equally within the system.” This tends to indicate to me that the broad strokes of curricula are controlled at the national level, and some sort of certification is conferred much like “accreditation” in the United States.

Perhaps more important to the mystery of why 15 year old Belgians are smarter than 15 year old Americans is that they “start to channel students into general, vocational, technical or artistic streams depending on individual choice and ability,” and “Assessment is ongoing and rigidly enforced.” In other words, they admit the heresy that not everybody is college material. Vocational and technical training is a good thing. Furthermore, nobody gets promoted without having the skills and knowledge to move on. Notice the difference between No Child Left Behind and this ongoing, enforced assessment: in NCLB the school fails but the kids move on to underperform at a higher level; in Belgium, the student keeps working until they have the skills to move on.

Gee, no wonder.

In closing, I bring you coyotes in a neighborhood near you (Wile E…. er, wiley, aren’t they?), more approval ratings than you can shake a stick at (thanks, Sarah!), who says wheelchairs can’t be cool, maybe living wage is an easier issue to rally behind than secretly spying on Americans, and finally a must read item, States caught up in Real ID nightmare. Remember two things: the primary purpose of a driver’s license is showing that someone can safely operate a motor vehicle; and just because we know who somebody is doesn’t mean we know if somebody is a bad guy.

Shorties of the Black Lagoon

“Torture data long enough, and it will confess to anything you want it to.” Barry Ritholtz brings us The Unpleasant Truth About Inflation and Rethinking the ‘Strong Jobs Recovery’ Scenario. In short, data is being manipulated to make it seem that inflation is benign and job growth is decent if not spectacular. If you only read two items on the economy today, make it these.

I bought a funnel cake today where Jesus walked… No, really, there is talk of building a giant Holy Land theme park in Israel. Because, well, God Knows there are no land disputes there. And the world clearly needs more theme parks.

Violence Against (Some) Women Act. In seems that when Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, they managed to put in a section making it against the law to anonymously “annoy” someone online, but somehow they missed the fact that it’s perfectly legal to buy the phone records of a complete stranger or the object of one’s dark obsessions. Um, how exactly does this make me safer?

Who Likes Short Skirts?? Well, not your clients and not your boss. That cheesy guy who gives you the creeps but hey he’s a client and he pays you well? He likes short skirts! Seriously ladies, a new study confirms common sense: Looking “sexy” and looking like an intelligent management/executive type don’t mix. “Dress for success” is still largely true.

And one more thing: Don’t forget that Mr. Alito’s confirmation hearings begin today. Be sure to scroll down and click to watch the slideshow of quotes. My favorite is when he ruled against the school newspaper that didn’t want to run advertising for beer. Strip-searching the 10 year old girl just because her daddy was suspected of being a drug dealer falls a distant second to that.

56% of Americans Think the 4th Amendment is a Good Thing

Yes, it turns out that most Americans believe that the Bush Administration ought to get a warrant before snooping, even if they are terrorists. For the terminally curious, here’s how they got the numbers.

There are still a lot of people trying to spin this big mess, and here’s some debunking of the spin. The bottom line is this: if they are really bad guys, get a warrant! That’s what FISA is for! If they are not bad guys, get lost! As for the argument that we can’t prove they are bad guys, only linked to bad guys, I invite you to read Molly Ivins’s piece, “Six Degrees of Osama bin Laden”.

Go ahead, think about it, play the game. I bet you’re closer to terrorists than you think.

Whose phones have they tapped, anyway?

In closing, DeLay bows to pressure from his own party to leave position of leadership, Cheney’s health continues to be in question, and Hurricane Season 2005 is finally over.