Later On

Thanks to Jack of Amsterdam for sending a link to this article. It begins:

“Billie Holiday was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years.”
—Frank Sinatra, 1958

Life is ultimately mysterious and indifferent about whom it gives much and from whom it expects a measure equal to its gifts. Those gifts are passed out with the same careless precision as handfuls of chicken feed hurled into a high wind.

Billie Holiday was obviously given much more than most, and her talent revealed itself through her intensity, her phrasing and her control of nuance more so than the conventional strengths of big sound, great range and stunning projection. Her voice was small, and her range was equally small. Standing next to most singers, she would never get you to put your money on her, unless you knew in advance that her emotional force and her ability to summon pathos, joy and melancholy with naked precision would demolish almost anyone intent on making a contest out of a hazardous moment on the bandstand with her.

There the story of one performance with super virtuoso Sarah Vaughan. Vaughan was so profoundly endowed with a superior instrument that she sometimes could not avoid strutting her stuff to the point of obnoxiousness. But the ax fell. When Vaughan called up “I Cried For You,” Holiday whispered, “You done screwed up now, bitch. That’s my song.”

That sounds like a person who had discovered what she had and  bet her life on it. In the face of virtuoso moves, Holiday was so far ahead on human feeling as to be invincible. She had learned her craft from Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, desiring Armstrong’s sense of time and his brilliant choice of notes as well as Smith’s big sound. She did better with Armstrong than she did with Smith, whom Langston Hughes said one could hear out on the street when she was singing in a theater before microphones had been developed to the point that Armstrong, Holiday and Sinatra could make the most of them.

Neither Armstrong nor Holiday nor Sinatra was a belter or would have been much in the world of opera where size, projection and nuance were taken to levels far beyond what one expected in popular music. Each of them brought popular music to heights of varied expression, emotional complexity and even psychological revelation that were far beyond what had been intended by most popular composers or made functionally limited in their strident pluck by Broadway types like Ethel Merman, who was capable of shivering the timbers.

Holiday was so special because she imbued her performances with a tenderness so charismatic that her example and her unbending musical presence forced instrumentalists to do their best at making up melodies or coming as close to crooners as whatever talent they had made possible. One could not be completely satisfied with a brass or reed instrument unless it took on qualities close to a voice elevated by artistry of the sort that only jazz could bring to its material. This was done by combining the highest level of improvisation, with the skill to fit a context and the absolutely essential ability to express oneself best by meeting the demands of the ensemble, adjusting breath by breath to where one is and what is going on as well as recognizing what to do with reality in motion.

That is the supreme achievement of jazz because …

Continue reading.

Interesting (and easy) DIY for those who have gardens and determination. Take a look. Well illustrated with photos.

Very good news. From the site:

Oxford Handbooks offer authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences.

Humanities

Archaeology
Classical Studies 
History
Linguistics 
Literature
Music 
Philosophy
Religion & Theology

Social Sciences

Business & Management 
Economics 
Political Science

The tax on the richest 1% of Americans is, of course, being wildly misrepresented by the GOP and their accomplices in the mainstream media. (See this post at Crooks & Liars on how the wealthy Americans on the Chris Matthews show talked about the surtax.) The Center for American Progress:

As part of its health care legislation, the House Ways and Means Committee has proposed implementing a tax surcharge on the richest one percent of Americans, with the revenue going toward financing a portion of the estimated $1 trillion cost for health care reform. Under the House proposal, the surtax would begin in 2011 and constitute a one percent marginal rate for households making between $350,000 and $500,000, 1.5 percent for households making $500,000 to $1 million, and 5.4 percent for those making more than $1 million. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) put it, "Let’s leapfrog over the middle class to the wealthiest people in our country. They’ve had it pretty good the last eight years in terms of tax policy under President Bush. And we think that’s a place you can go." Yesterday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius called the tax "a legitimate way to go forward." And as Families USA executive director Ron Pollack said, "Since this group enjoyed a significant tax reduction windfall during the last decade — and since this windfall played a big role in burgeoning federal deficits — it makes sense that this group bears some burden as part of the effort to secure America’s long-term economic future through health-care reform."

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting post by Zachary Roth at TPMmuckraker:

Earlier this week, we told you over at TPMDC about the newly named members of what’s being called the Pecora II commission, which has been given the crucial task of getting to the bottom of the financial crisis.

The stakes are high here. If we’re ever to come to a full understanding of the causes of an episode that has created enormous pain, dislocation, and anxiety for a large number of Americans — allowing us to craft policies to ensure it doesn’t recur — we need an effective commission. In other words, one that’s capable of conducting an aggressive investigation that goes after the truth and lets the chips fall where they may, even if that means publicly calling out powerful Wall Street interests and lax Washington regulators. And not one that settles for making a few polite recommendations while protecting its political overseers — as too many Washington commissions have done in the past.

But so far, the evidence suggests that’s not what we’re likely to get.

From the start, Congressional Republicans managed to game the rules of the commission so as to allow their appointees to effectively hamstring it. Then, they named commissioners — particularly their choice for the powerful vice chair post — whose backgrounds suggest they’re likely to do just that.

The panel is made up of six Democratic appointees and four Republican ones — but without the ability to issue subpoenas, it’s largely toothless. And the final bill requires that for it to do so, at least one of the commission’s Republicans must vote in favor — a change from the original language, which required only a majority vote or the agreement of the chair and vice chair. A Senate staffer told TPMmuckraker that Republicans threatened to withdraw their support for the whole idea of a commission if this change wasn’t made.

In other words, because congressional Republicans — led by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell — played hardball, the commission’s GOPers can effectively neuter the panel if they stick together.

None of the three rank-and-file Republican appointees seem like good candidates to break ranks.

Continue reading. The GOP is not really interested in governing effectively because they don’t like effective government—or any government. So their role is mainly to act as spoilers and impede change to the extent possible—to stand athwart the progress of history and scream "Stop!", as William Buckley put it.

The NY Times today has a follow-up to their article in the Sunday Style section, "Marijuana Is Gateway Drug For Two Debates." The follow-up consists of short essays to answer the question "If Marijuana Is Legal, Will Addiction Rise?":

• Roger Roffman, professor of social work
• Wayne Hall, professor of public health policy
• Mark A.R. Kleiman, professor of public policy and author
• Peter Reuter, University of Maryland professor
• Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief

I got a small sample puck of Kell’s Original Handcrafted Shaving Soap, Hemp/Aloe Blend, Unscented, with my order from BullGoose Shaving Supplies, so I decided to give it a go this morning. I rubbed it against the grain of my beard, and then lathered a bit on it as well, using the Plisson HMW 12. Man, what a rich and thick lather! It was great, and though unscented had a faint but very pleasant fragrance, I assume from the ingredients. The Merkur Slant did a fine smooth shave (two tiny nicks, though: My Nik is Sealed did its job), and the Proraso aftershave was fine.

I immediately went to BullGoose to order a puck of this—and to check out the other fragrances—but he doesn’t seem to carry the brand, and I haven’t found it yet with Google. Anyone know where to get this stuff?

I’m finding that few people like to reflect on the fact that milk is one form of mucus. I find the fact fascinating.

Sounds like an interesting book:

What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect
by James R. Flynn

A review by Cosma Shalizi

James Flynn is best known for having discovered a stubborn fact. In a series of papers culminating in the classic 1987 article "Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure," he established that in every country where consistent IQ tests have been given to large numbers of people over time, scores have been rising as far back as the records go, in some cases to the early 20th century. What Is Intelligence? is Flynn’s attempt to explain this phenomenon, now known as the Flynn effect.

The makers of IQ tests conventionally begin as follows: They take the scores of a reference sample of test takers, weight them, add them up and transform them to fit a Gaussian probability distribution (the bell-shaped curve), with a fixed mean IQ of 100 and standard deviation of 15. The reference sample is supposed to be representative: In essence, the scores of later test takers are computed by seeing where their raw scores fall in the distribution of the reference sample and reading off the corresponding Gaussian value.

Thus two test takers who give exactly the same answers can get different IQ scores if normed against different reference samples. Test makers periodically renorm their tests, keeping the mean at 100, but the same score can represent very different levels of absolute performance. Flynn examined the raw scores for tests that had kept the same questions over time. He found that scoring 100 today requires more right answers than scoring 100 did in 1950, which in turn required more right answers than doing so had in about 1900. The rate of gain has varied from country to country and from test to test. In some cases there has been a gain of only a few points over a half-century, but in others, IQs have risen by 6 or 7 IQ points per decade.

On average, measured IQ has been rising at roughly 3 points per decade across the industrialized world for as far back as the data go. This means that someone who got a score of 100 on an IQ test in 1900 would get a score of only 70 for the same answers in 2000. This is the Flynn effect.

Flynn easily swats down some proposed explanations for the effect. It is too large, too widespread and too steady to be due to improved nutrition, greater familiarity with IQ tests or hybrid vigor from mixing previously isolated populations. (Nobody seems to have suggested that modern societies have natural or sexual selection for higher IQ, but the numbers wouldn’t add up in any case.) So either our ancestors of a century ago were astonishingly stupid, or IQ tests measure intelligence badly.

Flynn contends that our ancestors were no dumber than we are; rather, most of them used their minds in different ways than we do, ways to which IQ tests are more or less insensitive. That is to say, we have become increasingly skilled at the uses of intelligence that IQ tests do catch. Although he doesn’t put it this way, Flynn thinks that IQ tests are massively culturally biased, and that the culture they favor has been imposed on the populations of the developed countries (and, increasingly, the rest of the world) through cultural imperialism and social engineering.

Flynn cites a hypothetical, but typical, test question: …

Continue reading.

Unbridled free-market capitalism doesn’t work—that is, does not adequately support the public good and the community bound together under a government (supposedly a government of, by, and for the people)—that was shown in the late 19th and early 20th century, when people finally had enough. So the experiment was begun of a carefully regulated capitalism, but it seems that the regulators are ultimately corrupted by the capitalist companies they are supposed to be regulating. So what will work? Probably nothing will, over a long period: corruption is a form of entropy, and entropy ultimately wins.

Creationists believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis (to my mind an obvious mash-up of creation myths) and deny the fact of evolution. Some will admit evolution of animals, but not human evolution. And yet in the human genome we clearly see evidence of evolution—heck, even the existence of different races suggests that some changes must have occurred in humanity after Adam and Eve (in Creationist terms, two actual people from whom all humanity descends).

I was thinking about one mutation in particular: the ability to digest lactose, which greatly helped humans who herded animals from which milk could be obtained: those who had the mutation could thrive on more foods than those who lacked it, and so in time made up the majority of those groups: human evolution in action.

How do Creationists answer this?

Taking my time, but did enjoy a good breakfast: eggs with onion and red pepper, bacon, toast. Oops, no tea. I’ll fix that.

Interesting development: I’m reading Jeff Sharlet’s The Family on the Kindle DX and found that I couldn’t use the first footnote as a hyperlink, as I should be able to. I called, and learned that some publishers don’t bother to do the footnote linking. I got a credit for the money I spent to buy the book plus $10 additional, plus I get to keep the book and if the publisher decides to fix this, a new copy of the book with active footnotes. Pretty reasonable, I’d say.

Certainly he’s one of my favorite sf writers. Here’s the article.

Totally improvised, but very tasty.

1/2 duck breast

Poke the skin side with a fork a bunch of times, then put it skin side down into a large sauté pan that has been heated on Low for several minutes. Raise heat to Medium to sauté the breast. While that’s going on:

1 spring onion (the mate to the one above), trimmed and chopped, including the green leaves.

When the skin side is good and browned—and the sauté pan has a good amount of duck fat—turn the duck breast over and scatter the chopped onion around. Continue to sauté on Medium and stir the onions occasionally with a wooden spatula. While that cooks:

1 bunch watercress, roots sliced off, the leaves thoroughly rinsed in a sink of cold water, then drained and chopped.

When the duck breast is close to done (when you press on it and roll it back and forth, it doesn’t feel rubbery) and the onions are thoroughly cooked, add the watercress to the pan and stir it around with the onions. (The duck breast continues to cook.)

salt and freshly ground pepper

Another few minutes to sauté and then turn heat to Low and cover the pan. I let that cook for a few minutes, then lifted the lid to smell. It seemed as though the watercress might be a bit bitter, so:

1 cup cherry tomatoes, cut in half
a splash of soy sauce
juice of a lemon

Add the above to the pan, stir veg, cover the pan again and let it cook for 15-25 minutes on Low, maybe stirring once or twice.

It was very tasty. I hadn’t heard of sautéed watercress, but I’m sure it’s done—certainly the flavor was robust enough for that. My original thought was to use it in a salad or in sandwiches, but I liked this use quite a bit.

Gail Russell Chaddock in the Christian Science Monitor:

Lawmakers questioning former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Thursday honed in on the facts of the forced marriage between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch – though for starkly different reasons.

To Republicans, the Treasury Secretary had threatened the Bank of America into a merger that no longer made business sense.

To many Democrats, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis duped Paulson and the government into funding a private merger to the tune of $20 billion.

But throughout the day-long hearing, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were clearly troubled by new unchecked government powers that the nation’s financial crisis let loose.

“Once you have crossed the Rubicon on this interventionist mindset, you have changed the nature of the capitalist system,” said Rep. Scott Garrett (R) of New Jersey.

Other Republicans called for an “exit strategy” from a world where government determined which industries and firms lived and which did not.

“This brave new world we’ve entered into of nationalizing major industries really does place a strain on a system that was never designed to make these decisions – or do the oversight,” said Rep. Brian Bilbray (R) of California.

“Where is the exit strategy? What date can I tell my constituents that this committee in Congress will not be discussing how we directed the decisions in at least this major industry.”

Before considering any expansion of further government regulatory powers, Congress needs to understand how those powers have been used – or misused – to date, Democrats added.

“All of this happened against a backdrop of unchecked government power, with no transparency or accountability,” said Rep. Edolphus Towns (D) of New York, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Exhibit A was a private merger that turned into a $20 billion federal bailout…

Continue reading.

Stephanie Simon in the Wall Street Journal:

The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms.

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

"We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

Three other reviewers, all selected by politically moderate or liberal members of the board, recommended less-sweeping changes to the existing curriculum. But one suggested including more diverse role models, especially Latinos, in teaching materials. "We have tended to exclude or marginalize the role of Hispanic and Native American participants in the state’s history," said Jesús F. de la Teja, chairman of the history department at Texas State University.

Social studies teachers from Texas are meeting this summer to write new standards. They can accept, reject or modify the six reviewers’ suggestions, all of which were made individually. The teachers’ recommendations are sent to the 15-member board of education, a conservative-dominated body that has authority to revise standards.

The three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities, including Mr. de la Teja, a former state historian. The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America’s Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgments on the nation’s sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.

The conservative reviewers say …

Continue reading. As you can see, the  reviewers include some outright loons. Why Texas chooses uneducated people to define educational standards is a mystery.

Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

In the least surprising revelation of the day, the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t see much in the way of savings coming from health-care reform in the next 10 or so years. This is because the bills under consideration do not save much money in the next 10 or so years.

I would, however, like to propose a couple of rules for commenting on this story. Politicians who are going to use this CBO report against the existing health-care reform proposals must do some combination of the following:

a) Support, as the CBO says you should, the eradication of the tax exclusion that protects employer-based health-care insurance;

b) Support, as Lewin and Commonwealth say you should, a public insurance option that can bargain at Medicare’s rates;

c) Support, as the Office of Management and Budget and every health-care wonk in town says you should, one of the various policies floating around to give MedPAC authority to continually reform and modernize Medicare;

d) Support some form of aggressive cost-sharing that would make people extremely angry because it will save money by reducing their access to health-care services;

e) Support comparative effectiveness review that can judge not only the effectiveness but also the cost-effectiveness of various treatments, and give the federal government authority to use that data when deciding reimbursement rates.

I would also like to propose a related rule: any reporters who receive a quote from a politician referencing this CBO score should be required to ask the politician which of these policies — or which alternative cost-saving policies — they support. And that should be on the record. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize health-care reform for not saving enough money. In fact, I think it’s important. Health-care reform should save more money. But it’s not legitimate to do that if you also oppose any and all measures for saving money.

(Oh, and to play by my own rules, I support a, b, c, and e.)

Ben Armbruster has this amazing admission at ThinkProgress:

Today on C-Span’s Washington Journal, a caller told a story of how he was forced to see numerous doctors at different hospitals in the area in where he lives, some as far as 100 miles away, to get a diagnosis. The caller then faulted health insurance companies for preventing the practice of having “diagnostic tests done under one roof.” “So in essence,” the caller noted, “the insurance companies are the ones controlling what tests you can get, when you get them, how you get them and if they’re accepted or not.”

In a remarkable moment of candor, C-Span’s guest — Republican Congressman Tim Murphy (PA) — agreed:

MURPHY: Yeah and that brings up the point here that with regard to one of our big frustrations with insurance companies is they control the market place, they control what’s done, a lot of times doctors not making the decisions here. And you recognize the frustration.

Watch it:

Murphy is right: Insurance companies control markets and are the ones making medical decisions. Insurance companies have consolidated in local markets which has resulted in limited choice and higher profits. In fact, “1 in 6 metropolitan areas in a 2008 study of more than 300 U.S. markets is dominated by a single health insurer that controls at least 70% of consumers.” And as The Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky has noted, insurance companies try to cover only the healthy because offering care to sicker Americans puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace.

In order to preserve the status quo of keeping health insurance in the private sector,
the GOP’s strategy has been to repeat the dubious claim that a public option “rations” care. But by making that argument, as Murphy pointed out, rationing care is just what these very same conservatives are supporting. Indeed, during her confirmation hearing in March, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, “as insurance commissioner where I served for eight years saw it on a regular basis by private insures, who often made decisions overruling suggestions that doctors would make for their patients that they weren’t going to be covered.”

Transcript:

Read the rest of this entry »

Nate Carlile at ThinkProgress:

Earlier today on Fox News, RNC Chairman Michael Steele was asked whether Republicans would borrow from President Clinton’s famous catch-phrase during the 1992 campaign, “it’s the economy stupid,” in the run-up to the 2010 election. Steele proceeded to launch into a rambling answer that used fuzzy math to assert that, in only six months, President Obama has added “10 trillion dollars” to the national deficit, while President Bush is to blame for only “a trillion”:

STEELE: They love going back to George Bush and his deficit that was inherited. Great. I’ll take George Bush’s deficit right now of a trillion dollars over the 10 trillion dollars that this administration has created in just six months.

Watch it:

Steele is clearly confusing the difference between our national debt, which stands at roughly $11.4 trillion, and this year’s budget deficit, which just exceeded $1 trillion.

To help jog Steele’s memory, here’s a bit of a deficit recap: Bush inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion in 2001. Budget experts projected a $710 billion surplus for 2009 when he came into office. But the deficit soon exploded, thanks largely to the Bush tax cuts — which accounted for 42 percent of the deficit. When Bush left office, he handed President Obama a projected $1.2 trillion budget deficit for this year, the largest ever.

As for the debt, when President Bush took office, it was $5.73 trillion. When he left, it was $10.7 trillion.

Just last month, the New York Times published the results of an examination from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. The report, which examined federal spending stretching back almost a decade, found that Obama “is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits”:

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

Try as Steele might, this is blame shifting that just won’t work — especially after the Bush administration made it clear that “deficits don’t matter.”

Kevin Drum has a very good post, well worth the click.