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This blog has moved.
 

I've changed my blog to Movable Type and moved it to my own website:

http://www.io.com/~casburn/blog/

 
Come visit!

 

I have given up on Ed Regis' book, The Info Mesa (Norton, 2003), because of the shallowness of the writing. The final straw:

Unfortunately, all this business activity had taken its toll, and in 1972 he and his first wife divorced. He remarried two years later, however, and he and his new spouse, [...], both of them being good Catholics, would wind up raising six kids. [page 50]

 
"Catholics have a lot of kids" is cliché, and calling a man a "good Catholic" right after mentioning his divorce and re-marriage is careless (and, judging from the tone of the book, not meant as irony or sarcasm).

It's a shame that The Info Mesa is such a weak popularization — its subject, the Silicon Valley-like grouping of information science companies around Santa Fe, is worthy of and could provide the material for a good general-interest book.

 

A middle school teacher in Nebraska, on mandatory standardized testing:

Politicians (and business people/capitalists) are competitive. They have a challenge, they try harder, and succeed. They see this as the solution to education: raise the bar, tougher standards, more competition. They don't see the reality, that not everyone is as competitive as they are.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going, but what about those who aren't tough?

Students are the ones in charge of their education. They decide if they will learn or not. If they see or predict or experience failure, they don't try.

The last decade or so of assessments have seen slight increases in achievement, but increased dropout rates and lower graduation rates.

Assessment needs to be a tool to help students succeed, not a means to compare schools/districts/states and punish those which do not measure up.

[...]

Students and their families are the ones who are/should be accountable for their education, not schools, districts, states.

 
"Public education system" is a misnomer: Public schools can provide only an opportunity to learn, not a guarantee to educate. If students won't (or can't) do, then teachers can't teach.

To hold schools accountable for what is almost completely beyond their control will not increase learning. As we have seen in Houston, it will instead increase lying.

 

"The choice of Athens as capital [of newly independent Greece], a town dominated by the imposing ruins of the Parthenon and with its associations with the glories of the Periclean age but in the early 1830s little more than a dusty village, symbolised the cultural orientation of the new state towards the classical past."

-- Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, pg. 49

 
In 1834, Athens and Sparta were roughly the same size. Today, Athens is the center of a metropolis of three million people, while Sparta is a provincial town of 16,000.

Athens should be a larger and more important city today than Sparta: It is more centrally located, and is connected to an excellent port.

But Athens is a metropolis not because of its location or its port, but because a group of 19th-century Greeks and Western Philhellenes believed passionately that the Athenians of 2300 years before had been right, and the Spartans wrong.

The power of history.

 

"People have got into their heads the extraordinary idea that English public schoolboys and English youth generally are taught to tell the truth. They are taught absolutely nothing of the kind. At no English public school is it even suggested, except by accident, that it is a man's duty to tell the truth. What is suggested is something entirely different: that it is a man's duty not to tell lies. [...] [T]he thing we never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, of giving a complete and fair picture of anything we are talking about, of not misrepresenting, not evading, not suppressing, not using plausible arguments that we know to be unfair, not selecting unscrupulously to prove an ex parte case, [...] not pretending to be disinterested when you are really angry, not pretending to be angry when you are really only avaricious. The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is exactly that—that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy."

-- G. K. Chesterton, 1906

 

A book review in the New Statesman pinpoints two valid parts of Michel Foucault's work:

"[...] [I]t is easy to forget that Foucault's influence stems from a simple but penetrating insight, developed early in his career: that the history of western civilisation is also the history of what that civilisation despises and excludes. Foucault was far from being the first historian to realise this, or to construct a version of the past upon it. But he was a leading figure in the generation that, in the wake of the convulsions of May 1968, sought to change contemporary society by interrogating it as 'a construction'."

 
Society is a construction, but a society, like a building, can be built so improperly that it collapses upon itself. You cannot construct it in any way you please; and an ugly building can stand for centuries, while a beautiful and theoretically correct building can crumble in months.

"[I]n the wake of the convulsions of May 1968", many people started communes. They discovered that constructing even the simplest society was harder than it looked.

 
[Link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.]

 

I presume that Samuel Beckett did not intend to write an 18-word secularized summary of the Book of Ecclesiastes, but:

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

 

An e-mail to Fox News:

Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 22:46:31 -0500 (CDT)
From: Steve Casburn
To: comments@foxnews.com
Subject: Al Franken lawsuit

 
Dear Sirs,

I had not planned to buy Al Franken's upcoming book, but the lawsuit that Fox News has filed against its release amused me so much that I now intend to buy the book on the day it hits the stores.

I'm amazed that a news network seems so unaware of the concept of "free publicity".

 
Sincerely,

/s/ Steve Casburn

 

"[I]n prose the economical is the classical."

-- Clive James, praising Mark Twain's "homespun demotic" style

 

"The only reliable lesson the past teaches us is how locked we are in the present. People ask, Where are the great Hollywood movies, the great pop songs, the great television newsmen, the great Democratic presidents, the great public intellectuals, the Great Books?, as though these were all eternally available types. They are not. [...]

"[...] The world just rolls over, without anyone noticing exactly when, and a new set of circumstances is put in place. But the impulse to hold on to the past is very strong, and it is often hard to understand why things that worked once can't continue to work. [...]

"[...] We look backward for clues because, the future being the other side of a closed door, we have no place else to look. [...] We want to play with yesterday's cards, but yesterday has already unraveled past reconstructing. Today is the only day we have."

-- Louis Menand, from the Preface to American Studies

 

Josh Marshall points out one of the many Bush administration acts which belie the Bush-Cheney campaign rhetoric.

(The linked text might be slow to load.)

 

In his recent book, Fooled by Randomness, hedge-fund operator Nassim Taleb twists a familiar saying to provide an analogy for people (such as, say, some mutual fund investors) who make investments based solely on past performance:

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them would come out with an exact version of the Iliad. [...] Now that we have found that hero among monkeys, would any reader invest his life's savings on a bet that the monkey would write the Odyssey next?

[...] Think about the monkey showing up at your door with his impressive past performance. Hey, he wrote the Iliad. Quickly, sign him up for the sequel.

 

An odd quirk of history: A Churchill led England in 1704 at the beginning of her days of glory, and a Churchill led her in 1945 at their end.

(G. K. Chesterton once made a similar remark, though he meant it disparagingly, about the Cecil family.

 

With its new C230, Mercedes has found a market that I didn't know existed: Wealthy people nostalgic for the mid-'80s Isuzu Impulse.

(This post is dedicated to Mark Hasty.)

 

The idea of the military using playing cards for identification turns out to be older than we'd heard.

In a 1990 letter from a friend, I found an ace of spades that depicts the front, top, and side views of a Soviet MI-24 Hind D helicopter. The Pentagon called these cards "Aircraft Recognition Playing Cards".

 

A headline writer for The Nation asserts the patriotism of Gore Vidal, a man who has deliberately and ostentatiously lived outside his patria for decades.

 

Lose Ben Stein's Money

(No, Ben, you can't.)

 

Seen on a car in Houston today:

[bumpersticker] They can send me to college, but they can't make me think!

[window decal] Texas A&M Engineering

 
In a word: "Aggie".

 

A book review from the April 15, 2003 issue of Library Journal (pg. 156):

Bobby Bowden, the legendary head coach at Florida State University, has set several records in college football, including most consecutive ten-win seasons, most consecutive bowl wins, and two national championships. In The Bowden Way: 50 Years of Leadership Wisdom [...], Coach Bowden, with his son Steve, reveals his secrets to success on the field and in life: religion, honor, honesty, and integrity.

 
From an April 29, 2003 article by the Associated Press:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- A son of Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden pleaded guilty Tuesday to swindling millions from investors -- including his father.

Steve Bowden admitted conspiring [...] in a scheme that prosecutors say defrauded investors of $10 million.

[...] Attorney Adolph Dean said Steve Bowden brought in his father and three other investors, who lost a total of $4.4 million. Bobby Bowden invested $1.6 million, Dean said.

 
If you're still interested in the Bowdens' "secrets to success", you can buy their book at Amazon.

 

J. Bradford DeLong writes about why the reported failures of "participatory democracy" in Argentina should come as no surprise. (Also see DeLong's follow-up post.)

 

Mark Hasty emphasizes (with handy ASCII diagrams!) the importance of being centrist.

And Dylan Wilbanks adds his thoughts as well.

 

Patrick Ruffini's blog is one of the more thought-provoking political blogs out there. I often disagree with Patrick, but his writing demonstrates a literacy and his research a numeracy that I appreciate and learn from, and I often forward his entries to friends.

I was surprised, then, to read these assertions in one of Patrick's entries for May 11:

The late Clinton years showed the tendency of economic trends to overwhelm virtually anything in their path. As a result, we had effortless surpluses that flowed as easily as black gold does into Saudi royal bank accounts. But instead of reinvesting the surplus back into the private economy in the form of tax relief to individuals, President If-You-Don't-Spend-It-Right squandered it on lavish domestic spending.

Looking back through history, the biggest absolute changes in the size and scope of government don't occur low-spending-growth, low-revenue growth periods (like now, minus the war). They occur in periods like the late '90s when nobody's looking and nobody cares about double-digit spending increases, and in periods of wartime. Much to the chagrin of budget hawks, we have just had two such periods run up against one another.

 
As we'll see below, Patrick has a point when he says that the "late Clinton years" saw relatively liberal spending, but only when compared to the early Clinton years, which were a time of remarkable and laudable fiscal restraint by the federal government. The increase in federal on-budget outlays during the relatively liberal "late Clinton years" was similar to the increases seen during the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations.

Looking at the Clinton years as a whole, there was not a single year when the federal government's on-budget outlays had a "double-digit spending increase" — the largest increase was between FY1999 and FY2000, when the outlays increased by 5.6% (and that figure is unadjusted for inflation).

One way of looking at the spending pattern of the '90s: The on-budget outlays in Reagan's last budget (FY1989) accounted for 17.3% of the national GDP and his largest budget (FY1983) accounted for 19.2%; the on-budget outlays in Bush 41's last budget (FY1993) accounted for 17.4% and his largest budget (FY1991) accounted for 18.3%; the on-budget outlays in Clinton's last budget (FY2001) accounted for 15.1% and his largest budget (FY1994) accounted for 17.0%. (The Congress played a major role in all of these budgets as well, of course.)

Another way of looking at it: Below is a table showing how much of the incremental increase in the national GDP was used for an incremental increase in federal on-budget outlays in each fiscal year of the Clinton administration (remember as you read these that every one of Reagan's and Bush 41's 12 budgets used at least 17% of the national GDP for on-budget outlays):

              GDP delta    Outlay delta   % taken

   FY1994       $386.2b       $39.6b       10.3%
   FY1995        379.4b        44.6b       11.8%
   FY1996        370.6b        32.5b        8.8%
   FY1997        490.6b        31.0b        6.3%
   FY1998        478.7b        45.4b        9.4%
   FY1999        473.8b        45.1b        9.5%
   FY2000        581.1b        76.9b       13.2%
   FY2001        302.7b        59.0b       19.4%

In other words, only in the final year of the Clinton administration did the percentage of new GDP taken for new on-budget federal outlays exceed the percentage of total GDP taken for federal on-budget outlays in each year between FY1980 and FY1993.

I would argue, then, that nothing like "the biggest absolute changes in the size and scope of government" (if we're measuring "size" and "scope" in terms of money) occurred during the Clinton years. As a budget hawk myself, I was surprised and impressed by how effectively the federal budget deficit was wiped out by the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress.

(All numbers used in this post are from the Historical Tables of the Budget for Fiscal Year 2004, a PDF version of which is available at the website of the Office of Management and Budget.)

 

The year is at about its halfway point -- six months since Ohio State beat Michigan, and six months until the Buckeyes travel to Ann Arbor to play again -- so today, near the nadir of the year, seems like a good time to note that University of Michigan graduates have been nominated for president by major parties three times -- Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948, and Gerald Ford in 1976 -- and have lost each time.

That should provide some solace for Bo Schembechler.

 

The headline from an article about the Notre Dame football team in the Washington Post edition for November 23, 1963 (note that date):

Irish Shooting for Atonement

 
(I wonder if someone got fired over that...)

 

At first glance, it is puzzling that Jacques Chirac, the major French conservative of our time, led the effort (and went to such an extreme) to oppose the American government's decision to occupy Iraq.

But as the founder of the Rassemblement Pour la République, Chirac is, above all, a Gaullist, and his actions seem to have been intended to further the major goal of Gaullist foreign policy:

De Gaulle seems to be trying to evolve for France a very complex version of the balance of power policy [...] France would like, in a series of concentric rings, first to attain ascendancy in Western Europe and then to make Western Europe the leader in a Continental bloc between Britain and Russia. Ultimately that bloc would be established as a major peacetime voice in global affairs.

-- from "Foreign Affairs: de Gaulle — VI: Summary" by C. L. Sulzberger; New York Times; December 28, 1966; page 36.

 
In this light, the ties that Chirac built with Russia and Germany might seem to him to be more significant in the long run than the ties he frayed with the United States.

 

In my heart, I hope that today's celebration in Baghdad is justified by future events, and that Iraqis will soon enjoy a stable government that presides peacefully over a free people.

In my mind, I doubt as Edmund Burke did:

[...] I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights?

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver, and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men, but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.

-- from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)