About as Much Substance as You’d Expect

by Rich Beckman on November 9, 2011

…from a ghost.

Con­tin­u­ing the “time to fit the books into the book­cases” project, I read Arthur C. Clarke’s The Ghost From the Grand Banks. I believe I picked this up a few years ago at a library book sale where one walked out with a gro­cery sack of books for a dol­lar or two. I own many books by Clarke and he was cer­tainly a favorite when I was young and that is why I bought this.

It turns out that I have read this pre­vi­ously, but it is so for­get­table that I forgot.

Briefly, the book cov­ers the race between two enter­prises to raise the Titanic in 2012, the 100 year anniver­sary of the sink­ing. Clarke comes up with two com­pletely dif­fer­ent con­cepts on how the ship might be raised. I’ll refrain from giv­ing away how and whether they work. There is lit­tle char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and the slight­est bit of suspense.

A few weeks ago, I caught some parts of an old movie on TCM, the title of which I do not remem­ber. I do remem­ber a scene where the lit­er­ary critic ren­ders his ver­dict on the protagonist’s just pub­lished novel. The critic spent some time on how the book was filled out with wide mar­gins and other tricks to at least look like a real novel even though it was barely more than a short story.

The Ghost From the Grand Banks runs 253 pages with ten pages of title, copy­right, con­tents, etc.; seven plus pages of Sources and Acknowl­edg­ments and a twelve page appen­dix that is adapted from a lec­ture Clarke gave on Man­del­brot num­bers. Man­del­brot num­bers do appear in the book, but not in any way that is nec­es­sary to the plot.

So the book runs 284 pages. There are four parts, each of which is begun with a full page for the title of the part. There are 44 chap­ters with each chap­ter title tak­ing up half a page. There are 28 com­pletely blank pages found between the chap­ters, inserted wher­ever nec­es­sary to push the new chap­ter to the odd num­bered page. That totals 54 of the 284 pages that are blank. The mar­gins are wide. Many chap­ters end with just a few lines on the last page.

Finally, the paper is thick. The Com­plete Poet­i­cal Works of Eliz­a­beth Bar­rett Brown­ing is a bit less than one eighth of an inch thicker and it runs 566 pages (dou­ble). The Plutarch vol­ume of the Great Books of the West­ern World series is the same thick­ness and it runs 905 pages (triple).

I would say that it is too bad The Ghost of the Grand Banks did not go to the same length as the pub­lisher went to to hide it’s brevity, but more of this book would not be better.

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Isn’t That Enough?

by Rich Beckman on November 9, 2011

As the scan­dal swirls around Her­man Cain,Vic­tor Davis Han­son comes to Cain’s defense in The National Review. Yes, in terms of what we know (or what I know at this writ­ing), Cain seems guilty only of being a bor­ish lout.* And yes, Clin­ton got away with work place sex­ual harass­ment (prob­a­bly because Mon­ica didn’t complain).

It is not likely that the Democ­rats are behind the scan­dal. I do not know how Glo­ria Allred and Sharon Bialek got together, but it is cer­tainly pos­si­ble (likely in my book) that Ms. Bialek sought her ought and pol­i­tics is not at issue. Beyond that, most Democ­rats would be glee­ful to see Cain get the Repub­li­can nomination.

Mr Han­son writes:

Cain also wins greater scrutiny, not exemp­tion, because he is black — or at least a cer­tain sort of black. In addi­tion to his con­ser­vatism, his voice, bear­ing, gram­mar, and dic­tion, even his showy black cow­boy hat, bother lib­er­als in much the same way that Joe Fra­zier was not Muham­mad Ali and Clarence Thomas was not Anita Hill.

Mr. Han­son, Cain’s con­ser­vatism, his mar­ket­ing approach to pol­icy (9,9,9), and his dis­dain for for­eign pol­icy ( Ubeki-​beki-​beki-​beki-​stan-​stan) are more than enough for us to not like Her­man Cain. His color has noth­ing to do with it.

Hat tip: Kevin Drum

Update: ABL at Angry Black Lady Chron­i­cles does the work to take down Mr. Hanson’s defense of Cain much more thor­oughly than my lazi­ness allowed above.

*Though we do not have any details of the com­plaints about him when he was head of the Restau­rant Association.

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Surprise!

by Rich Beckman on November 6, 2011

So, last night Newt Gin­grich and Her­man Cain had a debate. At one point Gin­grich asked Cain “what about the cam­paign has most sur­prised him”.

“The nit-​pickingness of the media,” Cain said, explain­ing that he had known “I would have to work hard, I knew I would have to study hard,” but that he was not fully pre­pared for the media onslaught — espe­cially as it occurs when a can­di­date rises in the polls.

Good grief! Mr. Cain, you are not qual­i­fied to be Pres­i­dent if you are not able to even antic­i­pate that run­ning for pres­i­dent would cause you to be sub­ject to the media’s scrutiny.

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Just Because It Is in the Wall Street Journal…

by Rich Beckman on October 29, 2011

…doesn’t mean it makes sense.

The link is to an arti­cle titled Four Rea­sons Key­ne­sians Keep Get­ting It Wrong.

Well, some­one is wrong four times.

1) big increases in spend­ing and gov­ern­ment deficits raise the prospect of future tax increases.

Actu­ally, another good dose of stim­u­lus would prob­a­bly push the econ­omy into real growth. The most pow­er­ful way to dimin­ish the deficit (and lessen the need for tax increases) is to grow the economy.

2) most of the gov­ern­ment spend­ing pro­grams redis­trib­ute income from work­ers to the unemployed.

In the first place, I seri­ously doubt this is true. Or rather, I am cer­tain that the per­cent­age of the fed­eral bud­get that goes to the unem­ployed is actu­ally rather small.* It may be pos­si­ble to define “spend­ing pro­grams” in such a way that “most” of them redis­trib­ute income from work­ers to the unem­ployed, but there is some game play­ing going on there.

In the sec­ond place, money to the unem­ployed is money that gets spent, and fast. Tax cuts for the wealthy do not get spent. They get saved.

3) Key­ne­sian mod­els totally ignore the neg­a­tive effects of the stream of costly new reg­u­la­tions that pour out of the Obama bureaucracy.

Assum­ing it is true that the stream of costly new reg­u­la­tions are hav­ing sig­nif­i­cant neg­a­tive effects on the econ­omy (and I’m not con­vinced it is true**), this does not in any way mean that Kenye­sian poli­cies do not work.

4) U.S. fis­cal and mon­e­tary poli­cies are mainly directed at get­ting a near-​term result.

Well, yes and no. They should be aimed as much as pos­si­ble at a near term result. But it is not true that the pos­i­tive effects (the jobs) dis­ap­pear as soon as the stim­u­lus ends. One only has to look at the last stim­u­lus. Over two mil­lion jobs were cre­ated while those stim­u­lus dol­lars were being spent. Now that those dol­lars have run out (or are down to a trickle), the jobs have not disappeared.

I think there was a time when the Wall Street Jour­nal was not just a pro­pa­ganda organ for the con­ser­v­a­tive right. But today it is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

*

Safety net pro­grams: About 14 per­cent of the fed­eral bud­get in 2010, or $496 bil­lion, went to sup­port pro­grams that pro­vide aid (other than health insur­ance or Social Secu­rity ben­e­fits) to indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies fac­ing hardship.

These pro­grams include: the refund­able por­tion of the earned-​income and child tax cred­its, which assist low– and moderate-​income work­ing fam­i­lies through the tax code; pro­grams that pro­vide cash pay­ments to eli­gi­ble indi­vid­u­als or house­holds, includ­ing Sup­ple­men­tal Secu­rity Income for the elderly or dis­abled poor and unem­ploy­ment insur­ance; var­i­ous forms of in-​kind assis­tance for low-​income fam­i­lies and indi­vid­u­als, includ­ing food stamps, school meals, low-​income hous­ing assis­tance, child-​care assis­tance, and assis­tance in meet­ing home energy bills; and var­i­ous other pro­grams such as those that aid abused and neglected children.

Note that much of that 14% is not going to the unemployed.

** If reg­u­la­tions are caus­ing so many dif­fi­cul­ties, why are equip­ment and soft­ware invest­ments out­pac­ing pre­vi­ous recov­er­ies. Why do only 13% of small busi­ness own­ers say that reg­u­la­tions are the biggest prob­lem they face. Also, remem­ber that when a study says that a given reg­u­la­tion is going to cost a given sum of money, that money is still cir­cu­lat­ing in the econ­omy and it likely results in jobs. Finally, to not have the reg­u­la­tions is to accept that eco­nomic growth is more impor­tant than a clean envi­ron­ment and worker and pub­lic pro­tec­tions. Note that lack of envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion is likely to lead to tax increases at a later date to pay for the clean up.

Hat tip: Alt­house

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Up the Walls of the World

by Rich Beckman on October 27, 2011

I am con­tin­u­ing my way through old sci­ence fic­tion as I look to lower the num­ber of books I own to what fits on exist­ing shelves (this will take for­ever). Up the Walls of the World is by James Tip­tree, Jr. which is a pseu­do­nym for Alice Bradley Shel­don. Accord­ing to Wikipedia, Tiptree’s true iden­tity (and sex) was revealed in 1977. Up the Walls of the World, by James Tip­tree, Jr. was pub­lished in 1978 and the author’s photo is on the back of the dust jacket. Pre­sum­ably the pen name was retained to attract exist­ing fans.

The most inter­est­ing thing about this book is how much a cen­tral con­cept has in com­mon with the pri­mary plot of Star Trek the Motion Pic­ture. An extremely large space far­ing entity absorbs a Voy­ager space­craft and poses a threat to life. The female lead merges with the entity as part of the solution.

Another sim­i­lar­ity is the book seems to go on and on in an effort to describe the entity with the same effect as the end­less trip through V’ger in the movie. That effect being the reader’s (viewer’s) thought “Can we get on with this?”.

The movie is just one year after the book so clearly the movie did not steal the plot directly. Over at IMDB, the trivia on the movie includes:

Writ­ers who con­tributed ideas or draft scripts in 1975 – 77 included Gene Rod­den­berry, Jon Povill, Robert Sil­ver­berg, John D.F. Black, Har­lan Elli­son, Theodore Stur­geon, and Ray Brad­bury.

One might posit that one or more of these authors knew Tip­tree and was made aware of the out­line of her cur­rent work. But Tiptree’s iden­tity was unknown and Sil­ver­berg and Elli­son were both on the record with their belief that Tip­tree was a man. Per­haps Up the Walls of the World was an expan­sion of an ear­lier short work by Tiptree.

Other than the Star Trek “con­nec­tion”, Up the Wall of the World is not all that interesting.

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The Catholic Church and the Weakening of Kinship

by Rich Beckman on October 27, 2011

This is a cou­ple of weeks old, but I found it inter­est­ing. This is Kevin Drum at Mother Jones dis­cussing Fran­cis Fukuyama’s The Ori­gins of Polit­i­cal Order:

But how do strong cen­tral author­i­ties evolve in the first place? Fukuyama spends a great deal of time talk­ing about kin­ship struc­tures and the way they inter­fere with state build­ing (thus the brief foray into pri­mate psy­chol­ogy at the begin­ning of the book). Loy­alty to fam­ily and tribe is nat­u­rally strong, he argues, and tear­ing down that loy­alty is cru­cial to build­ing an effec­tive state with ade­quately strong cen­tral author­ity. This, again, isn’t an espe­cially novel obser­va­tion, but his appli­ca­tion of this obser­va­tion to early Chris­t­ian his­tory was new to me. “The Catholic church,” he writes, “took a strong stand against four prac­tices: mar­riages between close kin, mar­riages to the wid­ows of dead rel­a­tives (the so-​called levi­rate), the adop­tion of chil­dren, and divorce.” All of these are things that help kin­ship groups keep prop­erty within the group, and by sys­tem­at­i­cally cut­ting them off, and then pro­mot­ing the vol­un­tary dona­tion of land and prop­erty to the church itself, the Catholic church enhanced its own power. Later on, rules like priestly celibacy were designed to pre­vent kin­ship groupswithin the church from inter­fer­ing with the cen­tral power in Rome. All of this strength­ened the power of the church at the expense of kin­ship ties, and while under­min­ing the fam­ily may or may not have been a delib­er­ate strat­egy, that was the end result. Tribal and fam­ily con­nec­tions in West­ern Europe became (and remain) much weaker than in much of the rest of the world.

Of course, there are other good rea­sons to take a stand against mar­riage between close kin and I am not clear on how divorce helps kin­ship groups keep prop­erty within the group (and I’m a bit hazy on how the adop­tion of chil­dren accom­plishes same). Maybe some­day I’ll read the book.…

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The Trilateral Commission

by Rich Beckman on October 19, 2011

The Tri­lat­eral Com­mis­sion was cre­ated in 1973. I was eigh­teen. It could not have taken long for some peo­ple to be talk­ing about how the elites con­trolled the world and we, the peo­ple, were just given enough to keep us com­pla­cent, and that the Tri­lat­eral Com­mis­sion existed for that pur­pose. Or some such line of thought. I feel like I have been hear­ing such talk my entire life.

In my mem­ory this the­ory was usu­ally put forth by a clean cut, wire rim wear­ing, pot smok­ing socialist…but maybe I’m just mak­ing that up. I don’t even know.

At any rate, I was not too inclined to accept the idea that the world was con­trolled by elites (though now I sus­pect it is…though I have no idea if the Tri­lat­eral Com­mis­sion has any­thing to do with it) and even if it was, I looked around and thought to myself “This isn’t such a bad deal.”

Sure, there were eco­nomic dif­fi­cul­ties and there was no end of injus­tices going on, but life in the US for the vast major­ity of peo­ple was pretty damn good. If the elites wanted to con­trol the world and this is how they allowed the masses to live so they could do that, well, I was fine with it. Maybe the alter­na­tive was how the masses have lived through­out his­tory and I was sure nobody wanted that.

Assum­ing that those clean cut, wire rim wear­ing, pot smok­ing social­ists were cor­rect, you have to give credit to those elites. Run­ning the world can’t be all that easy and, on bal­ance, they did a fair job of it for quite awhile.

I’m guess­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of elites has not been up to the task. Things have gone rot­ten here in the US. Even though the reces­sion has ended and cor­po­ra­tions are mak­ing lots of money, noth­ing has trick­led down. Peo­ple are out of work or afraid of becom­ing out of work after ten or twenty years of income stagfla­tion and the value of homes plum­met­ing. Which brings us to the Occupy protests.

The most inter­est­ing thing about the Occupy protests is watch­ing every­body try to deter­mine who is actu­ally protest­ing and what do they want, and what does it mean. Prob­a­bly no one answer to any of those questions.

Well, maybe to the “what does it mean” question.

It means that the national econ­omy no longer func­tions as it once did. The masses, who once had it pretty good, are now strug­gling. To lis­ten to some of what is said in Wash­ing­ton, the elites still have no idea what the prob­lem is.

It is sim­ple, return us to the good old days when the elites con­trolled the world and allowed the masses to live in rel­a­tive and increas­ing pros­per­ity. Is it too much to ask?

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Romney’s Mistake?

by Rich Beckman on October 5, 2011

So, Mitt Rom­ney has

com­pared the cur­rent anti-​Wall Street protests to “class warfare.”

This is inter­est­ing. If Obama is vul­ner­a­ble next fall, it will be be due to the econ­omy. I fully expect that the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee will talk of lit­tle else.

I also expect the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee to be Mitt Romney.

All those peo­ple protest­ing Wall Street would not be there if the econ­omy was hum­ming along and unem­ploy­ment was five percent.

Rom­ney has now gone on the record of say­ing that peo­ple who want the econ­omy to improve are con­duct­ing class war­fare. That does not strike me as the best way to woo the votes of those unhappy about the economy.

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Giving the Customers What They Are Looking For

by Rich Beckman on September 19, 2011

Over two years ago I posted an entry about Mei­jer com­ing to town and the strange store lay­out they had and how Wal­mart responded. Since that time, I have con­tin­ued to receive a lot of vis­its from peo­ple that had Googled “Wal­mart store lay­out” or some­thing similar.

This entry prob­a­bly does not really help those seek­ers out, but maybe.

Wal­mart built a new store in Con­nersville, Indi­ana and opened it up this past sum­mer. Here is a pic of the new store lay­out (click­ing on it should give you a larger version):

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Only a Matter of Time?

by Rich Beckman on September 19, 2011

Pres­i­dent Obama has received no end of grief over his rush to com­pro­mise right out of the gate. I have felt all along that this was due to his insis­tence when cam­paign­ing that he would change the tone of the debate in Washington.

For some time now it has been more than clear that it takes two to change the tone and that the Repub­li­cans were not participating.

So now Obama is finally putting bills with pro­gres­sive ideas in them on the table and insist­ing that they be passed, as well as bring­ing out the veto threat in what seems a more seri­ous way than previous.

So how long will it take before a Repub­li­can accuses Obama of break­ing his cam­paign promises to change the tone in Washington?

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