Later On

That’s a close-up. Here’s the full panoply:

The Pils travel brush performed admirably: loads of thick luscious lather, no fear of running short. Then the newly refurbished Hoffritz took over, holding a new Swedish Gillette blade: shaving perfection. Three totally smooth passes, completely flawless. A splash of Spanish Leather, and I’m ready for the day.

Once again I failed to take a special “before” photo of the Hoffritz Slant Bar before its rhodium replating, but here’s a clip from a previous use:

As always, click photos to enlarge.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

I clearly am struggling over some well-explored terrain, so along with trying to figure this out on my own, I am reading quite a few books on emergence, theory of complex systems, chaos theory, and the like.

Emergence seems to be a matter of complex systems that arise whose elements are simpler systems, and this cascading growth seems to be natural. If you want only the very basic stuff of reality, the primary elements that are not themselves systems of simpler elements, you get something like the Big Bang. Once that starts expanding and cooling you get the primary elements breaking apart (the hypothesized singular force, for example, breaking down into the four fundamental forces we know) and then the building of systems of those pieces. On the matter/energy side, for example, we have as primary particles the quarks and the leptons and the gauge bosons. At that point, systems (and emergence) begin. The first systems are quite simple: the proton and the neutron, for example. But they have properties quite different from the quarks that are the elements of each little system. And then protons, neutrons, and electrons, together with the forces, create atoms—a new emergent entity with quite different characteristics than its components. And these merge into stars and galaxies and processes result in novae (super and regular) with new systems emerging: the elements and chemical compounds.

Certain systems of these elements and chemical compounds work in such a way that under the right conditions life emerges: a new bunch of systems with properties that could not be predicted from the chemicals of which it is made.

Notice that the earlier systems hang on as they become elements in higher systems. A squirrel is living matter, but it is a system whose components are regular matter still subject to the laws of physics and chemistry. Even though the squirrel is alive and capable of motion, when it falls it follows the same trajectory as would a squirrel-shaped rock. Although new rules emerge (squirrels hide nuts), the old rules still hold (a squirrel falls under the influence of gravity).

Just now I realized that Douglas Hofstadter covered this ground long ago, and I read some of what he wrote—and what I read is undoubtedly influencing my thinking now. I stopped reading him because I felt an overweening self-regard from him, but probably it was simply envy and jealously. So I’m picking up again his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and starting it again.

16 minutes—I got distracted listening to my book.

I still feel the occasional extra heartbeat—not as such, just that my heart feels noticeable. It’s like I’m carrying a sick little puppy around in my chest.

I fairly quickly bumped into the limitations of the free version once I began to use the product in earnest: I could not see the outline view. After digging around their Web site (which seems to be interfaced directly to an application of their software), I found the chart below on this page (which includes more info):

The chart provides more perspective.

Part of the overall decline of the US, I believe. Greenwald:

The President’s Deficit Commission is designed to be as anti-democratic and un-transparent as possible.  Its work is done in total secrecy.  It is filled with behind-the-scenes political and corporate operatives who steadfastly refuse to talk to the public about what they’re doing.  Its recommendations will be released in December, right after the election, to ensure that its proposals are shielded from public anger.  And the House has passed a non-binding resolution calling for an up-or-down/no-amendments vote on the Commission’s recommendations, long considered the key tactic to ensuring its enactment.  The whole point of the Commission is that the steps which Washington wants to take — particularly cuts in popular social programs, such as Social Security — can occur only if they are removed as far as possible from democratic accountability.  As the economist James Galbraith put it when testifying before the Commission in July:

Your proceedings are clouded by illegitimacy. . . . First, most of your meetings are secret, apart from two open sessions before this one, which were plainly for show. There is no justification for secret meetings on deficit reduction. No secrets of any kind are involved. . . .

Second, that some members of the commission are proceeding from fixed, predetermined agendas. Third, that the purpose of the secrecy is to defer public discussion of cuts in Social Security and Medicare until after the 2010 elections. You could easily dispel these suspicions by publishing video transcripts of all of your meetings on the Internet, and by holding all future meetings in public . . .

Conflicts of interest constitute the fourth major problem. The fact that the Commission has accepted support from Peter G. Peterson, a man who has for decades conducted a relentless campaign to cut Social Security and Medicare, raises the most serious questions.

That’s why Commission co-chair Alan Simpson — with his blunt contempt for Social Security and and other benefit programs (such as aid to disabled veterans) and his acknowledged eagerness to slash them — has done the country a serious favor.  His recent outbursts have unmasked this Commission and shed light on its true character.  Unlike his fellow Commission members, who imperiously dismiss public inquiries into what they’re doing as though they’re annoying and inappropriate, Simpson — to his genuine credit — has been aggressively engaging critics, making it impossible to ignore what the Commission is really up to.  

In June, he walked out of a Commission meeting and proceeded to engage in an amazingly informative, 8-minute colloquy streaming in real time on the front page of FDL, making unambiguously clear that the Commission is working to cut Social Security benefits.  And over the last several weeks, he has used increasingly flamboyant rhetoric to attack both defenders of Social Security and the program itself, as well as even attacking wounded veterans for failing to sacrifice enough by giving up some of their benefits.  Whatever one thinks of Simpson’s remarks, I prefer his public, engaged candor to the extreme, arrogant secrecy of his fellow Members.

Throughout last year, a few lone, progressive voices were sounding the alarm that the core goal of the President’s Commission was to enable cuts in Social Security, but the Commission was operating in such stealth, and the idea was so inconceivable that Obama would lead cuts in Social Security, that few believed it.  The Democrats’ plan was clearly to try to win the midterm election by telling people that the GOP wanted to attack Social Security and the Democrats would protect it, only to turn around once the election was over and then enact the Commission’s Social Security reductions.  Simpson’s comments have changed all that.  Now, even the hardest-core Democratic loyalists are objecting to the Party’s plan; here is lifelong Party operative Bob Shrum, of all people, blowing the whistle on what the Democrats are trying to do with this Commission:

So why not campaign all-out, in [Tip] O’Neill’s plainspoken way, against a GOP that is disloyal to the most successful — and most popular — social program in American history?

Because Democrats have been disarmed by the president’s deficit reduction commission, which plainly intends to propose Social Security cuts.

Rather than allow such cuts to be greased through the lame duck session of a decimated Democratic Congress, or passed under cover of "bipartisanship" in a decidedly more Republican one next year, shouldn’t the case be stated and debated before the election? (Right now, Social Security is treated as the issue that dare not speak its name.) There is also the question of Democratic identity: What does the party stand for if not Social Security? And then there is the question of Democratic stupidity: Qualified and muted comments by Democrats in effect suggesting that Democrats won’t endanger Social Security as much as the other guys will can only further pave the road to defeat.

The president’s deficit reduction commission was a response to a series of popular myths — that the federal deficit is a root cause of our economic distress and that Social Security is a root cause of the deficit. . . . So the deficit commission has targeted Social Security, which has nothing to do with the deficit.

Simpson’s comments have triggered a parade of similar evidence.  Key Democratic House member Chris Van Hollen pointedly refused to vow that Democrats would vote against Social Security cuts when pressed by MSNBC’s Cenk Uygur, and several progressive pundits — including TPM’s Brian Beutler and Ezra Klein — this week documented what has been clear for some time:  that the Commission is stacked with ideologically conservative and corporatist appointments from both parties likely to recommend cuts in Social Security.

But perhaps the most significant result of Simpson’s candor is . . .

Continue reading.

I’m watching the instructional videos and now really liking the software. The conventions are easy to understand and to remember, but you can’t simply guess what to do: the videos are important. But they are quick, easy, and eye-opening.

Frank Rich’s column in the NY Times is worth reading:

Among the few scraps of news to emerge from Barack Obama’s vacation was the anecdote of a Martha’s Vineyard bookseller handing him an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom.” The book has since rocketed up the Amazon best-seller list, powered by reviews even more ecstatic than those for Franzen’s last novel, “The Corrections.” But I doubt that the president, a fine writer who draws sustenance from great American writers, has read “Freedom” yet. If he had, he never would have delivered that bloodless speech on Tuesday night.

What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what “Freedom” mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what “The Great Gatsby” did for the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is everywhere in “Freedom,” from extramarital sexual couplings to the consumer nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone, regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war — not with terrorists, but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.

This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10 in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It’s a mystery why a candidate so attuned to the nation’s pulse, most especially on the matter of war, has grown tone deaf in office. On Tuesday, Obama asked the country to turn the page on Iraq as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in 2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval Office speech of its own.

That Obama did consider Iraq worthy of that distinction — one heretofore shared only by the BP oil spill — was hardly justified by his tepid pronouncements of progress (“credible elections that drew a strong turnout”) or his tidy homilies about the war’s impact. “Our unity at home was tested,” he said, as if all those bygones were now bygones and all the toxins unleashed by this fiasco had miraculously evaporated once we drew down to 50,000 theoretically non-combat troops.

Americans are less forgiving. In recent polls, 60 percent of those surveyed thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn’t worth American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism. This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

While we were distracted searching for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, . . .

Continue reading.

Frank Rich describes Andrew Bacevich: "Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq in 2007." Rich then quotes from this article by Bacevich in The New Republic:

The Iraq war? Fuggedaboudit. “Now, it is time to turn the page.” So advises the commander-in-chief at least. “[T]he bottom line is this,” President Obama remarked last Saturday, “the war is ending.” Alas, it’s not. Instead, the conflict is simply entering a new phase. And before we hasten to turn the page—something that the great majority of Americans are keen to do—common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment. Absent reflection, learning becomes an impossibility.

For those Americans still persuaded that everything changed the moment Obama entered the Oval Office, let’s provide a little context. The event that historians will enshrine as the Iraq war actually began back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Iraq’s unloved and unlovable neighbor. Through much of the previous decade, the United States had viewed Saddam as an ally of sorts, a secular bulwark against the looming threat of Islamic radicalism then seemingly centered in Tehran. Saddam’s war of aggression against Iran, launched in 1980, did not much discomfit Washington, which offered the Iraqi dictator a helping hand when his legions faced apparent defeat.

Yet when Saddam subsequently turned on Kuwait, he overstepped. President George H.W. Bush drew a line in the sand, likened the Iraqi dictator to Hitler, and dispatched 500,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf. The plan was to give Saddam a good spanking, make sure all concerned knew who was boss, and go home.

Operation Desert Storm didn’t turn out that way. An ostensibly great victory gave way to even greater complications. Although, in evicting the Iraqi army from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces did what they had been sent to do, Washington became seized with the notion merely turning back aggression wasn’t enough: In Baghdad, Bush’s nemesis survived and remained defiant. So what began as a war to liberate Kuwait morphed into an obsession with deposing Saddam himself. In the form of air strikes and missile attacks, feints and demonstrations, CIA plots and crushing sanctions, America’s war against Iraq persisted throughout the 1990s, finally reaching a climax with George W. Bush’s decision after September 11, 2001, to put Saddam ahead of Osama bin Laden in the line of evildoers requiring elimination.

The U.S.-led assault on Baghdad in 2003 finally finished the work left undone in 1991—so it appeared at least. Here was decisive victory, sealed by the capture of Saddam Hussein himself in December 2003. “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced L. Paul Bremer, the beaming American viceroy to Baghdad, “we got him.”

Yet by the time Bremer spoke, it—Iraq—had gotten us. Saddam’s capture (and subsequent execution) signaled next to nothing. Round two of the Iraq war had commenced, the war against Saddam (1990–2003) giving way to the American Occupation (2003–2010). Round two began the War to Reinvent Iraq in America’s Image.

With officials such as Bremer in the vanguard, the United States set out to transform Iraq into a Persian Gulf “city upon a hill,” a beacon of Western-oriented liberal democracy enlightening and inspiring the rest of the Arab and Islamic world. When this effort met with resistance, American troops, accustomed to employing overwhelming force, responded with indiscriminate harshness. President Bush called the approach “kicking ass.” Heavy-handedness backfired, however, and succeeded only in plunging Iraq into chaos. One result, on the home front, was to produce a sharp backlash against what had become Bush’s War.

Unable to win, unwilling to accept defeat, the Bush administration sought to create conditions allowing for a graceful exit. Marketed for domestic political purposes as “a new way forward,” more commonly known as “the surge,” this modified approach was the strategic equivalent of a dog’s breakfast. President Bush steeled himself to expend more American blood and treasure while simultaneously lowering expectations about what U.S. forces might actually accomplish. New tactics designed to suppress the Iraqi insurgency won Bush’s approval; so too did the novel practice of bribing insurgents to put down their arms.

Yet as a consequence the daily violence that had made Iraq a hellhole subsided—although it did not disappear.

Meanwhile, once hallowed verities fell by the wayside…

Continue reading.

Check out Paul Barrett’s review of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It:

Here’s something unusual: good news about the $420 billion American higher education business. Authors Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus report that, with an open mind, teenagers and their parents can find any number of surprisingly high-quality, reasonably priced colleges and universities. Forget Harvard. Arizona State, anybody?

The business of shaping undergraduate minds, in the authors’ view, charges too much and delivers too little. However, Hacker, a sociologist at Queens College in New York, and Dreifus, a science journalist at The New York Times, set themselves apart from other recent chroniclers of the American campus demise by offering constructive advice in Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It.

Recent grads and their cash-drained relatives may know some of what’s in this volume. For younger, uninitiated families and old-timers in the foggy grip of campus nostalgia the book offers a bracing dose of reality. After three decades of tuition increases exceeding the overall rate of inflation, a ritzy college degree comes with a $250,000 bill. Uninspired—and usually underpaid—part-time instructors do 70percent of the teaching these days, according to Hacker and Dreifus. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, often described as the country’s top undergraduate business program, freshmen in Management 100 are taught, in part, by undergraduates who took the course just a year or two earlier. "Few sophomores," the authors write, "have the fund of information, techniques for coping with questions, or the skills for conducting discussions that college-level teaching requires." Or that Penn’s $53,000 annual tuition would suggest.

At many schools, liberal arts students are cast adrift in a curricular sea of the overly vocational (at Ohio State, Turfgrass majors can specialize in either golf course or sports turf management) and the unnecessarily narrow. The authors raise an eyebrow over Stanford’s 229 undergraduate history courses, maintaining that many of these highly specialized classes simply "make life easier for the professor who often just has to use notes from his last article or the galleys of her next book."

Hacker and Dreifus insist that students with any intention of learning are likely to be disappointed. Carefully steering clear of nativism, they report the dirty little secret that over in the math and science buildings, graduate students imported from China, Russia, and Korea too often lack the English skills to lead classes on physics or calculus. The cumulative results are depressing. Freshmen courses have enormous rates of students withdrawing or failing: 45percent is common, according to the National Center for Academic Transformation. More than a quarter of all freshmen nationwide never return for their sophomore year.

The authors also observe how conventional universities are coming to resemble for-profit diploma mills through inexpensive, Orwellian-titled "distance learning." At Florida Gulf Coast University on the outskirts of Fort Myers, students in Humanities 2510 sit in dormitories or at home studying painting, sculpture, and architecture via online lectures. Adjunct professors with modest credentials answer questions by e-mail; telephone calls are not allowed. Multiple-choice tests emphasize dry facts and figures. Short papers are required, but students don’t have to attend performances or see art in person. In lieu of customized grading, instructors draw on "sample stock comments" they slap on student papers. "Humanities 2510 seems close to cramming for a quiz show," the authors write. To readers, it might just seem like a rip-off…

Continue reading.

I really like dark chocolate—and not merely for the health benefits. (The Wife prefers milk chocolate—no accounting for taste.) Take a look at Chocomize and Chocri: custom-made chocolate to your own specs. The backstory by Zachary Tracer in Bloomberg Businessweek:

Will chocolate weather the recession better than the finance industry? Eric Heinbockel is betting it will. With a year as an unpaid intern at a small New York brokerage under his belt and no decent offers after applying for dozens of jobs, the 24-year-old gave up on his dream of a career in finance. Instead, last year he and two friends he met while getting his political science degree at Columbia University started Chocomize, an online shop that lets chocolate lovers customize their candy bars with ingredients ranging from graham crackers to gold flakes. “We looked into chocolate and saw it was relatively recession-proof,” Heinbockel says.

Just as Dell (DELL) found success by letting customers tailor-make their PCs online, Chocomize offers customized candy. The company allows buyers to choose their chocolate—milk, dark, or white—and up to five of more than 100 add-ins. Beef jerky will set you back $1.85 on top of about $4 for the bar; cayenne pepper is 75 cents, dried raspberries are $1.20, and gold flakes are $3.25. One couple ordered 125 dark chocolate bars with bacon, Brazil nuts, and raisins for their wedding. “It’s their day, so I guess they get to do what they want,” Heinbockel says.

The Chocomize trio got turned on to chocolate after a happy accident. On a warm day in June 2009, Chocomize partner Nick LaCava, 23, left a bag of chocolate and other candy in the back seat of his car. When it all melted into a gloppy mess, LaCava’s friends suggested it might be edible if he were to toss it in the freezer. He did—and loved the result. “To me, eating chocolate and gummy bears seems like the coolest thing in the entire world,” says LaCava. “That’s sort of when the lightbulb went off in our heads,” he recalls. “All these different ingredients in chocolate. What if you could choose your own ingredients?” . . .

Continue reading. I had to try it. You get to name your creation. Here’s my first go:

Interesting post at Wired Science by Jess McNally:

Unlike infectious diseases and news, behavior change spreads faster through online networks that have many close connections instead of many distant ties. Redundancy is key, as people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see many others doing it.

“There has been a lot of theory about the difference between information and behavior spreading,” said economic sociologist Damon Centola of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the study published Sept. 3 in Science. “We’ve assumed that they are the same, but you can imagine that behavior is not really like that, that you need to be convinced.”

The research has important implications for people designing online communities intended to change or maintain a behavior, like weight watchers or online health communities, Centola said.

To do the experiment, he created an internet-based health community and invited people already participating in other online health forums to join. Over 1,500 people signed up to participate, and they were placed anonymously in one of two different kinds of networks: a random network with many distant ties (above left), or a clustered network with many overlapping connections (above right).

Users in both networks had the same number of assigned “health buddies.” They couldn’t contact their buddies directly, but they could see how their buddies rated content on the site, and could receive e-mails informing them of their buddies activities. Centola said he deliberately didn’t pay the volunteers, so they would participate out of legitimate interest in the site’s content.

In six different trials over a period a few weeks, Centola seeded the site with information about an online health forum and tracked people as they signed up and participated.

In the clustered network, 54 percent of the people signed up for the forum, compared to 38 percent in the random network, and almost four times as fast. Not surprisingly, Centola also found the more friends people had that also signed up, the more likely they were to return to the forum to participate.

“I feel that the greatest contribution of this study has to do with the very unusual social experiment that it relies on,” said economist Tomas Barrios of Stanford University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Usually experimental data for social experiments comes from hard-to-swallow lab settings, or if not, very low tension, low risk social situations that can be ethically intervened by experimenters.”

Barrios also said many researchers have made mathematical models to understand the spread of behavior, but that the models have have little application in predicting what will actually happen in the real world.

These studies cannot be done yet using data from Facebook or Twitter, Centola says, because the network is constantly changing and too gigantic to download all at once.

Probably more US fans of soccer after this last World Cup. Here’s a book to be enjoyed:

The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer

by David Goldblatt

A review by Nathan Weatherford

After this year’s World Cup had ended in July, I found myself still ravenous for soccer and started looking for books to read on the subject. When I came across David Goldblatt‘s The Ball Is Round, its 900+ page count was initially off-putting, not to mention its purported goal of providing an entire world history of the sport from humans’ earliest attempts at kicking around stones to the current merchandising empire that is the English Premier League and everything in between.

Luckily, Goldblatt is anything but a dry writer, and his love of the game is on full display from foreword to conclusion. The chapters are sequenced chronologically and divided up by geographical area. This allows for an in-depth look at how the sport developed in every country that still plays today (and since soccer truly is "the world’s game," perhaps you understand why the page count is so high).

One of the most interesting trends that Goldblatt describes is the progression from amateurism to professional sporting. Soccer obviously didn’t start out as a professional sport, but I found it fascinating that almost all countries were actively against professionalism for much of the early decades of the organized sport, claiming it went against the spirit of the game. Most early athletes in organized leagues made no money for playing (at least, not officially), and were on their own if they sustained injuries over the course of a season. It took a long time for the game to reach the current level of commercialism it sits at now, with some players’ transfer fees alone reaching into the tens of millions of dollars.

The chapters of the book that I found most compelling were those dealing with Africa. Goldblatt effectively conveys Africa’s potential greatness on the soccer field, the many world-renowned athletes that countries such as Ghana and Cameroon have produced, and the hold that the game has on the entire continent. Of course, this information only serves to make the current state of affairs in African soccer all the more disheartening. Goldblatt goes into great detail about all of the obstacles preventing success in what should be some of the best countries in the world on the soccer field. A lack of real infrastructure makes setting up national leagues extremely difficult, as it’s hard to play away games when there aren’t enough serviceable roads. What’s more, almost all of Africa’s best athletes gravitate towards European leagues where they can actually make money correspondent to their talent. This in turn lowers the overall competition level in national and international games played in Africa, which has resulted in constant underperformance at World Cup and Olympic competitions — to say nothing of the immense pressure to succeed exerted on these national teams by countless dictators over the past few decades. Goldblatt elucidates this gloomy situation extremely well, and I appreciated his evident respect for each nation’s soccer traditions in spite of the overwhelming odds.

And Africa makes up only a few chapters in this enthralling history of a sport loved by billions of people. Anyone with residual World Cup fever would do well to read The Ball Is Round and learn a bit more (okay, a lot more) about all those teams you saw competing in South Africa this past summer. Goldblatt sprinkles in ecstatic descriptions of famous individual games throughout soccer’s history as well, which helps keep the book from devolving into a simple recitations of facts — evidence that he, too, understands the inherent dichotomies at the heart of the game: individual and team, club and nation, style and fundamentals, money and beauty. In the end, soccer is big enough to encompass all of these facets, and it’s great to have a book that’s big enough to do the same for its history.

Robert Reich:

Welcome to the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor — most of the rest of us — are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. The Labor Department reported on Friday that just 67,000 new private-sector jobs were created in August, which, when added to the loss of public-sector (mostly temporary Census worker jobs) resulted in a net loss of over 50,000 jobs for the month. But at least 125,000 net new jobs are needed to keep up with the growth of the potential work force.

Face it: The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working. Near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package, along with tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.

That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

1. The Origin of the Crisis

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).

Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn’t receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.

When American families couldn’t squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt. This seemed painless — as long as home prices were soaring. From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.

Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst — and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? …

Continue reading.

James Fallows thinks highly of Personal Brain, and I downloaded it to my old computer but never got around to using it. Now, because of the Long Argument, I feel a need for a tool that will allow me to write thoughts and then see (and alter) connections with previous thoughts, and this seems as though it might work. I’ve installed it again, and this time I watching the videos and actually trying to learn it.

15.5 minutes on the Nordic Track. I went a little longer because I got interested in the book I was listening to, one recommended by Steve of Kafeneio: Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.

In talking with my diet counselor yesterday, I mentioned how hard it was to get started in the morning, and how after 4 minutes I wanted nothing more than to step off the machine to, say, check my email or something. The thing that keeps me going is the thought that I sure don’t want to do that 4 minutes again. So I keep going, and of course by around 6-7 minutes I’m settled in and feel like I could keep going (at the same pace, which is not fast) for a long time. But I do stop.

The angiogram, which is the procedure I’ll get, will be on Thursday. Little blogging then: entire day up at Stanford.

Take a look at this video:

That’s from Steve Benen, who comments:

We talked earlier Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s (R) remarkable opening statement in a gubernatorial debate last night, in which the far-right incumbent appeared deeply confused about what she was trying to say. In the minute-long opening statement, there was a nine-second stretch in which a stumped Brewer said literally nothing.

Several alert readers emailed to let me know, however, that the debate actually got more entertaining from there — with perhaps the most striking moment coming after the event.

During an exchange on the economy, state Attorney General Terry Goddard, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, noted that it doesn’t help the state when its governor tells the nation that Arizona is a dangerous place, unsafe for tourists and investors. He was referencing an incident in which Brewer insisted that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are responsible for "beheadings" in the Arizona desert. The governor appears to have just made the claim up out of whole cloth, as part of a larger attempt at shameless demagoguery.

During the debate, Brewer refused to comment on her own allegations, so after the event, reporters followed up. The frighteningly unprepared governor, unable to think of a response, froze, said nothing, and then literally fled.

I don’t know what Arizona Democrats plan to do with this, or if Dems even have a credible chance in this race, but these videos have a "chicken for checkups" quality to them. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine voters watching Brewer’s performance and having confidence in her ability to be a capable chief executive.

In related news, a local CBS affiliate in Arizona aired an investigative report about Brewer possibly having a conflict of interest regarding private prison giant Corrections Corporation of America, and its connection to the state’s anti-immigrant law. Brewer responded, not with a defense, but by punishing the affiliate by pulling her campaign ads from the network.

Recent polling shows Brewer cruising to a win in November. We’ll see if the polls change in light of last night’s fiasco.

Via Ed Brayton.

There’s the close-up—and you can click to enlarge. This is one of my favorite razors. And here’s today’s set-up:

I decided on the Omega boar/badger mix, and it did deliver a great lather. (I soaked it while showering.) I did return brush to soap briefly for the third pass, but no complaints about lather. The capacity of the little brush may increase with further use, but OTOH going back to the soap for a dab is not a problem.

The Gillette Aristocrat #22 performed flawlessly with a “new” Swedish Gillette blade: three passes to total smoothness, no nicks, weepers, or burns. (I do occasionally get a nick, but not weepers or burns which are generally the result of more pressure than I use.) A splash of menthol—Proraso aftershave—and I’m ready for the Nordic.

I love Eat Like A Girl. Every post is delightful.

The enthusiasm gap between Dems and the GOP is here explained by examples.

I think both the Dems and the GOP have lost interest in governing and are now all trying to feather their nests as fast as they can before they are found out.