Category Archives: AmericanDelusions

A catch all for reading and research. Much ends up on AmericanDelusions.com website.

Friday – 4/3/2015

Final snow.

Slavery Was Not Inefficient

Cotton picking productivity in The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist

Continuing to work through this book. Here is a graph that demonstrates that the cotton economy was in fact dynamic and enormously productive. Slave owners used detailed accounting of each slave’s production and regular beatings and other physical violence to enforce ever greater levels of production.

Movie – Wild Tales

Argentine film, Wild Tales. Opens with a scene in an airplane that is really frightening because since the movie was made, the German airliner was crashed into the mountain in French Alps by a depressed guy. Scene in the movie shows captain banging on the door. Then the plane crashing into backyard of the co-pilots parents.

Completely over the top story of two guys who get into a traffic altercation on a remote highway. Both end up burned to death in a wrecked car.

Wednesday – 4/1/15

Shift in slave populations from The Story Half Told

Worked on essay on slavery.

Prix Fixe dinner at Panzur in Tivoli. Fancy fired chicken followed up with ice cream sundae. sat at bar to talk with Dave Drake. Very busy. The drinks are so complicated that Dave needs to keep recipes to concoct them. Food was very inventive and good.

Saw Vicki and Dennis Kosovac. She barely acknowledged me. He was his usual glad handing self.

Recipes for drinks at Panzurs.

Sunday – 3/15/15

Spent the bulk of the day at the Economy conference at the Scandanavia House 38 Park Ave. Two very good panels, one on values in economics and the second on the Internet at economics. The discussions by Greta Brochman (U. Olso) on the Nordic welfare model was great. Richard Sennett who I remember from his 974 book Hidden Injuries of Class gave a very striking description of the career environment of today’s economy. Must work on this. Presentation by Shoshanna Zuboff (Harvard B School) was flashy but actually also substantive. Advocacy capitalism vs surveillance capitalism, this latter is winning. Google most obvious example.

Picked up Karen on Upper West side and returned to Hudson by 6 pm or so.

6:12 pm

Saturday – 3/14/15

Heard full story from Ed and Meredith about the altercation with Emma Xu and the resulting arrest. She charged up the stairs at Ed and grabbed him around the legs. In the ensuing struggle he grabbed her by the neck to get her off. She then retreated and called the cops. They took one look at the bruise on her neck and arrested Ed. Thus beginning almost 24 hrs in a Philly jail.

Big discussions of finding a good criminal lawyer in Philly. Next door neighbors came over to help out. They made suggestions of contacts. Karen, Meredith and Ed went to Philly to lock up the apartment and take pictures of the hallway where the fracas took place. Ed had to stay at a distance since he is under a restraining order. While there Meredith found a key to Ed’s apartment on a NIMH bangle in the closet. Ed’ thinks that Emma came in and planted it over night while the apartment was unlocked.

They also met the landlord, a Nigerian fellow who owns a bunch of apartment houses and a copy center. He seems to be on Ed’s side based on his earlier dealings with Xu. She hasn’t paid her rent and has been a pain in the rear. He will move to evict her.

I went into NYC for my economics conference, What’s Wrong with the Economy – and Economics sponsored by the New york Review of Books and held at Scandinavia House, 38 Park Ave.

What a great conference.

No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald – book review

We are within days of the anniversary of the first revelations from Edward Snowden’s archive of NSA documents. The drum beat of new stories emerging from this trove continues even to this moment. ((NSA Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html accessed 06012014)) So, Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State might be greeted with a yawn, what could be new?

In fact, there is much that is new about how these stories have come to light and a very good overview of what we have learned about what Greenwald calls the US Surveillance State. This is a book in two parts. The first 89 pages read like a cross between a detective thriller and a spy story. There are hand offs of thumb drives at airport boarding gates, virgin computers, cell phones sealed off from the reach of the NSA by removing batteries or stuffed in freezers, meetings with a yet to be identified Snowden by an unsolved Rubik’s cube in hand. Continue reading →

8/13/2005 – Moore’s Law for dumps

Moore’s Law for Trash Dumps

Yesterday’s New York Times Business page brought the cheery news that the US capacity for burying trash has sky-rocketed. Put away those catastrophic visions of our civilization disappearing under the putrid piles of its own refuse. It seems that a combination of environmental regulations and the natural tendency of monopoly to win out over mom and pop enterprise has produced a glut of dump capacity.

A new version of Moore’s Law in action.

Through a combination of consolidation and new practices our nation’s dumps are well ahead of our national culture of trash.

You can see the whole NYT’s article here.

PS – for more about Moore’s Law in it’s original formulation see the Wikipedia article here.

11/18/2004 – The Level of Political Discourse: a visit to the Federalist Papers

The Level of Political Discourse: a visit to the Federalist Papers

Recently I re-read parts of the Federalist Papers, the articles written by Hamilton, Jay and Madison in support of the approval of our constitution in 1787 and 1788. The strongest reaction to my brief re-visit is that the level of public discourse a little over 200 years ago was enormously higher than today. These articles, frankly written to influence the general public and published in the newspapers of the day, clearly take their audience seriously. There is no talking down, dumbing down, to use a more current phrase. Let me illustrate this with a quotation from one of the papers:

The Federalist No. 47
The Particular Structure of the New Government and the Distribution of Power Among Its Different Parts

New York Packet
Wednesday, January 30, 1788
[James Madison]

To the People of the State of New York:

HAVING reviewed the general form of the proposed government and the general mass of power allotted to it, I proceed to examine the particular structure of this government, and the distribution of this mass of power among its constituent parts.

One of the principal objections inculcated by the more respectable adversaries to the Constitution, is its supposed violation of the political maxim, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct. In the structure of the federal government, no regard, it is said, seems to have been paid to this essential precaution in favor of liberty. The several departments of power are distributed and blended in such a manner as at once to destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the essential parts of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the disproportionate weight of other parts.

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system. I persuade myself, however, that it will be made apparent to every one, that the charge cannot be supported, and that the maxim on which it relies has been totally misconceived and misapplied. In order to form correct ideas on this important subject, it will be proper to investigate the sense in which the preservation of liberty requires that the three great departments of power should be separate and distinct.

The oracle who is always consulted and cited on this subject is the celebrated Montesquieu. If he be not the author of this invaluable precept in the science of politics, he has the merit at least of displaying and recommending it most effectually to the attention of mankind. Let us endeavor, in the first place, to ascertain his meaning on this point.

The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be judged, so this great political critic appears to have viewed the Constitution of England as the standard, or to use his own expression, as the mirror of political liberty; and to have delivered, in the form of elementary truths, the several characteristic principles of that particular system. That we may be sure, then, not to mistake his meaning in this case, let us recur to the source from which the maxim was drawn.

(You can read the rest of this online at http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa47.htm)

Clearly the rhetoric here is elevated, even ornate, by today’s standards, nevertheless, still eminently readable and accessible. Madison expected the average reader to integrate knowledge of the British Constitution, Montesquieu, and Homer (to pick just the references in the passage quoted above. What can we say of today’s political discussion?

11/16/2004 – Colin Powell and Loyalty

Colin Powell and Loyalty

Colin Powell’s resignation yesterday as Secretary of State has produced an expected tsunami of blather. Much is made of his early “opposition” to the Iraq war and his loosing struggle to influence Bush foreign policy. In almost the same breath, we also hear about what a loyal team-player Powell is, always accompanied by comments about Powell’s long military career where such loyalty is required.

The last thing the US needs is more government officials who are loyal to a President. When large decisions are made, and going to war is such a large decision, moral and ethical values should be much more important than loyalty to a President. Loyalty to what is right and what is right for the larger America and the world is loyalty we should applaud.

We still have one former Secretary of Defense running around the world writing books and giving speeches that include the lines that he could not speak out about a war he knew to be wrong out of loyalty to a President. That war cost over 55,000 American lives and probably a million or more Vietnamese lives.

Is Colin Powell the next Robert McNamara? Are we going to hear in some overblown biography in ten years that Powell opposed the war, knew it was the wrong thing to do, but he couldn’t speak out because of “loyalty”? We need government officials who believe they have a duty to the larger public and will take action when they believe fundamental government policies are wrong.

11/9/2004 – Coincidence or Harbinger?

What do the following states have in common besides all having voted for Bush last week?

Texas, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Kentucky, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, West Virginia, Georgia, Arkansas, South Carolina,Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana.

These are the bottom fifteen states in health care system performance among the 50 states for 2004. Can you guess the order of the list? Which state is 35th and which is 50th?

For the source of this data and the rest of the report click over to the United Health Foundation.

11/8/2004 – Get Out The Vote

Get Out The Vote – next time

In the aftermath of the Bush victory there has been lots of discussion about the size of the voter turnout and the relative effectiveness of the Bush campaign’s get-out-the-vote organization. One simple fact needs to be focused on: even with a turnout of 116 million in 2004, roughly 97 million potential voters did not show up. Americans are still not involved in the election process.

Here is one concept for the next quadrennial presidential circus:

Lets have a get-out-the-vote campaign that focuses on the secular vote.

Going door-to-door, you could ask a basic diagnostic question. For example, “Do you believe that the Bible is the literal word of God?” If you get a “Yes”, then move on to the next door. If you get a “No” response, then point out to the potential voter that the fundamentalists are pushing their religion into schools, government, the Supreme Court, your bedroom, music, TV, and movies, to mention a few of their targets.

With 97 million people not participating in our politics, even at the level of voting, there is plenty of room to develop a significant new base of action.

Mr. Wonderful's World

“I might wake up dead tomorrow.”