Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

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"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Thursday, April 19, 2001 MORE MARKET GENIUS The summary of Scott Klinger's report "The Bigger They Come, The Harder They Fall" (over at UFE) begins with: When Business Week releases their list of the ten companies with the highest paid CEOs for 2000, that would be a good list of stocks to sell short. Further extracts from a report dismantling yet another myth about the genius of the market are: "CEOs justify their pay packages by saying they generate tremendous wealth for shareholders. But it's a myth that CEOs are paid for excellence. Typically, their companies don't deliver excellence," says Scott Klinger, report author and co-director of the Responsible Wealth project at United for a Fair Economy. "Companies with more limited wage gaps are actually better bets for shareholders." he report examines the stock price performance of the companies headed bythe ten most highly compensated CEOs for each of the seven years between 1993 and 1999. The stock performance of each company was compared to both the S&P500 and the company's peer group over one-year and three-year time periods. In six out of the seven one-year time periods following a CEO's appearance on the top ten list, at least half the companies under-performed the S&P500. In 40% of the cases, the companies trailed the S&P500 by more than 15 percentage points. The stock performance of the companies with the CEOs rated number one in each year is even more dismal. If someone had invested $10,000 in the company with the highest paid CEO on December 31, 1993, held it for a year, then sold it to buy stock in the next year's pay leader and so on, by the end of 1999, the $10,000 investment would have eroded to $3,585. A $10,000 investment in the S&P500 over the same period would have grown to $32,301, more than nine times the pay leaders' portfolio. Predictably enough, the shareholders aren't the only ones being screwed by the overpayment of nonperforming CEOs: Among other findings, "The Bigger They Come" indicates that it is not shareholders alone who should worry about escalating pay packages for executives. In each of the years between 1994 and 1999, at least 50% of the companies announced significant layoffs within three years of the CEO appearing on the Business Week top ten list. The entire report is available in PDF format. posted by Steven Baum 4/19/2001 02:50:00 PM | link EDUCATION FUNDING Following up on a recent entry about primary and secondary school funding, I found Ted Halstead and Michael Lind's Taking charge: Why we need to fund education federally and how we can do it at the Washington Monthly. First, some facts: Our nation suffers from a troubled and class-stratified system of primary and secondary schools---which in effect means our public schools since a full 89 percent of American K-12 students attended public schools in 1999. ... The main problem is the extreme variation among school districts, rooted in our reliance on the link between school funding and property taxes, supplemented by state sales taxes. The traditional practice of funding schools primarily by such taxes results in dramatic disparities among states, cities, and even neighborhoods. Per-pupil spending on education in 1998 varied from an average of $4,000 in Mississippi to more than $9,000 in New Jersey, even after adjusting for cost of living differences. And disparities like these are also common within single states. In Virginia, for instance, average per-pupil spending in Hanover County in 1997 was only one half of spending per pupil in Arlington County. Needless to say, such a wide chasm in the amount of money dedicated to each child translates into lower teacher salaries and hence less-qualified teachers, larger class sizes, and inferior facilities for schools on the losing side of this highly unequal playing field. These deep inequities only compound the disadvantages of class, culture, and poverty that already afflict our nation's inner cities, creating an environment that is even less hospitable to the process of learning. With educational institutions that reinforce rather than reduce the injuries of social inequality, is it really much of a surprise that so many of our inner-city schools are islands of despair? The perverse design of America's current school funding mechanism is easy to illustrate. Suppose you have an impoverished inner city with a per pupil taxable property base of $60,000, neighbored by an affluent suburb with a per pupil property tax base of $300,000. The inner-city would have to levy a painfully high 10-percent property tax to raise the $6,000 per student that the suburb could raise through a mere two-percent property tax. To make matters even worse, the state and local property and sales taxes that are the backbone of today's school funding system are extremely regressive in their own right, meaning that they disproportionately burden the less well-off. The lower your income, the higher a share of your income typically goes to these taxes. When it comes to school finance, then, low-income Americans are doubly punished. Poor districts must impose higher tax rates to obtain the same amount of money that affluent districts can raise with low rates; and those higher taxes are often in the form of regressive property and sales taxes. There have been some inroads into ameliorating the spending disparity on the state level, with the Vermont Supreme Court providing the most succinct version of the reasoning behind the decisions to do so: The distribution of a resource as precious as educational opportunity may not have as its determining force the mere fortuity of a child's residence. The big changes started in 1971 when the California Supreme Court ruled that the use of local property taxes to finance primary education violated the equal protection clause of their constitution (although I doubt if "Big Tony" Scalia et al. would agree with that since it doesn't involve a presidential election). Similar suits were filed in 44 of 50 states and were effective to the point that by 1988 the proportion of educational funding provided by states (48.4%) surpassed that provided by the local districts (44.5%). But, as Halstead and Lind point out: If a child's education should not depend on "the mere fortuity of a child's residence" in this or that county within a state, then surely it should not depend either on the child's residence in this or that state in the United States. If it is unjust and inefficient for school quality to vary wildly between rich and poor neighborhoods within a state, it is equally unjust and inefficient for school quality to vary between rich and poor states. "Most of the resource inequality cannot be solved at the state level," Education analysts David Grissmer and Ann Flanagan have observed in a report for RAND. "States spending the least are southern and western states that also have a disproportionate share of the nation's minority and disadvantaged students. Only the federal government can address this issue of interstate inequality in school spending." The average federal spending for primary and secondary education in other OECD countries in 1995 was 54%, with the remainder provided on the regional and local levels. This is seven times greater than in the U.S., and I shouldn't have to remind anyone how U.S. students usually fare against their foreign peers in various academic competitions. So that's what the situation is. How would Halstead and Lind change it? After rejecting previous proposals such as a national sales or value-added tax as regressive (which they are every bit as much on the federal as on the state level), they offer: We recommend yet another approach: equalizing school funding nationwide by means of a progressive national consumption tax. A person's annual consumption could be calculated based on a simple formula: income minus savings and investment (and, perhaps, some deductions) equals consumption. Unlike regressive sales taxes, a personal consumption tax can be made highly progressive by exempting a certain amount---say the first $15,000 of consumption---so that the average cost of basic necessities like housing, food, and transportation would be free from taxation. Naturally, the exemption level should be increased somewhat for each dependent. Because sales or property taxes do not differentiate between individuals with dependents and those without, our system would become more family-friendly in the process of becoming more progressive. ... Why not replace our fifty separate state sales tax systems with a single and simple progressive national consumption tax, whose proceeds are rebated to the states on a per pupil basis, thereby equalizing school funding while solving the Internet tax problem at the same time? This proposal would also serve another particularly timely public purpose by creating a bias in the tax code in favor of savings. To the extent that consumption taxes encouraged higher savings, they could increase the pool of capital available for investment, and strengthen our overall economy in the process. The grants to the states from this pool of money could be made contingent upon their eliminating or reducing their current methods for funding education, e.g. sales and/or property taxes. That is, it wouldn't be the flim-flammery of the Reagan federal tax cut which, while reducing the federal tax bite for many, caused most states to increase various tax rates to make up for the shortfall in federal funds caused by the combination of lower federal tax rates and cuts in many federal programs. The total tax bite for all but - SURPRISE! - the wealthy remained just about the same. And if those who've spent the last 20 years in a one-upmanship game to see who could federalize the most draconian drug laws, the most perverse mandatory sentencing laws, etc. still have the cojones to whinge about how this would deprive states of sacred and precious control over their own matters (except of course for election laws in Florida), they have an answer for that: Critics might object that our proposal would lead to a loss of local control over school curricula and standards, but this danger is easily exaggerated and the opposite is more likely to be the case. First, in areas from highway construction to welfare, there is a long tradition of "cooperative federalism" combining federal funding with local discretion. Our proposal for national equalization of school funding merely applies the logic of cooperative federalism to the area of education. Nevertheless, it would be wise to collect and administer the national school funds by means that would prevent Congress from micro-managing the way the money is spent. What is more, national equalization could easily enhance local control, rather than undermine it. For instance, allowing the money to flow directly to parents, under a school choice plan, would increase parental influence at the expense of bureaucrats in school districts' central offices. Note that although they do float a school choice plan, it would be to choose between relatively equivalent schools rather than between rich and poor schools, with the former getting that much richer and the latter that much poorer. Towards the end of the article they offer a quick historial summary of national tax policy that I thought worth repeating: Throughout the 19th century, for instance, most of our federal revenue came from tariffs on imported goods. Then the bulk of federal revenues shifted to a broad-based progressive income tax during the early part of the 20th century and, finally, in the second half of the 20th century, turned increasingly to regressive Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. Meanwhile, the balance between state and local taxes, on the one hand, and federal taxes, on the other, shifted just as profoundly. Before the New Deal, state and local taxes raised more of our total government revenue than federal contributions did. Since the 1930s, however, the proportions have been reversed: Two out of every three dollars flowing to government have been collected at the federal level. In the 21st century, as a result of the shift to an Information Age society, America's tax system should shift as profoundly. Note particulary the first part about tariffs on imported goods, i.e. the "free trade" rhetoric wasn't always as plentiful as it's been over the last couple of decades. Give the rest of their thought-provoking article a try. posted by Steven Baum 4/19/2001 09:36:54 AM | link Wednesday, April 18, 2001 ON A LIGHTER NOTE Some excerpts from James Thurber's "The Years with Ross," his reminiscences about working with original "New Yorker" editor Harold Ross. These are taken from the excellent Library of America Thurber volume Writings and Drawings, which could serve as a fine introduction to those not already familiar with the territory. One of Thurber's first meetings with Ross: I told him that I wanted to write, and he snarled, "Writers are a dime a dozen, Thurber. What I want is an editor. I can't find editors. Nobody grows up. Do you know English?" I said I thought I knew English, and this started him off on a subject with which I was to become intensely familiar. "Everybody thinks he knows English," he said, "but nobody does. I think it's because of the goddamn women schoolteachers." He turned away from the window and glared at me as if I were on the witness stand and he were the prosecuting attorney. "I want to make a business office out of this place, like any other business office," he said. "I'm surrounded by women and children. We have no manpower or ingenuity. Inever know where anybody is, and I can't find out. Nobody tells me anything. They sit out there at their desks, getting me deeper and deeper into God knows what. Nobody has any self-discipline, nobody gets anything done. Nobody knows how to delegate anything. What I need is a man who can sit at a central desk and make this place operate like a business office, keep track of things, find out where people are. I am, by God, going to keep sex out of this office - sex is an incident. You're got to hold the artists' hands. Artists never go anywhere, they don't know anybody, they're antisocial." On working with Ross after being hired at the "New Yorker": "Gretta Palmer keeps using words like introvert and extrovert," Ross complained one day. "I'm not interested in the housing problems of neurotics. Everybody's neurotic. Life is hard, but I haven't got time for people's personal troubles. You've got to watch Woollcott and Long and Parker - they keep trying to get double meanings into their stuff to embarass me. Question everything. We damn near printed a newsbreak about a girl falling off the roof. That's feminine hygiene, somebody told me just in time. You probably never heard the expression in Ohio." "In Ohio," I told him, "we say the mirror cracked from side to side." "I don't want to hear about it," he said. On Ross the humanitarian: Our illnesses, or moods, or periods of unproductivity were a constant source of worry to him. He visited me several times when I was in a hospital undergoing a series of eye operations in 1940 and 1941. On one of these visits, just before he left, he came over to the bed and snarled, "Goddam it, Thurber, I worry about you and England." England was at that time going through the German blitz. As my blindness increased, so did his concern. One noon he stopped at a table in the Algonquin lobby, where I was having a single cocktail with some friends before lunch. That afternoon he told White or Gibbs, "Thurber's over at the Algonquin lacing 'em in. He's the only drinking blind man I know." And on Ross the expectant father: I remember his panic the evening he got home from work and was told that he was going to be a father. He leaped to the phone, called a woman friend who gave him the name of an obstetrician, and then called the doctor, who came running. After a brief examination, the doctor came out of the bedroom, as annoyed as Ross was distraught. "It is possible that your wife is pregnant," he said, "but it's too early to tell for certain. As it happens, this is not an emergency, as your call indicated. I could actually have taken time to eat my dinner." "Judas, I didn't know," Ross told me the next day. "I thought you had to act fast." posted by Steven Baum 4/18/2001 03:01:06 PM | link BILIOUS BILL David Podvin gives unctuous windbag Bill Bennet the business in The moral hooker of the right wing. Taking aim at Bennet's self-erected moral tower, Podvin writes: As with all people who declare themselves to be morally superior, William Bennett is a cynical fraud. Far from being an ethical exemplar for the rest of us, he is a partisan deceiver whose sole contribution to our society has been to raise the level of selective indignation to an all time high. Calling William Bennett a hypocrite is an understatement that rivals calling Jeffrey Dahmer an omnivore. And then on yet another chickenhawk's sterling record in two wars: He supported the Vietnam War, but chose not to participate because he believed that it was better for our country?s moral compass if an American other than him died fighting in it. After all, had Mr. Bill perished in a steamy Southeast Asian jungle then there might not have been anyone virtuous enough to be both the Secretary of Education during the worst decline in test scores in American history and the Drug Czar during the explosive increase in the use of crack cocaine. That?s two lifetimes of ineptitude for a mere mortal, but Bennett achieved all of this in less than a decade. In fairness, the rumors that America?s foremost hardliner on incarcerating nonviolent drug users was voted Man Of The Year by the Medillin Drug Cartel have never been proven. Then we have have the moral stances of this protector of truth and piety: Bennett is a practical moralist; he is not above lying in order to achieve the desired effect. He said on ABC News that the gay lifestyle is so unhealthy that the average age of death for a gay man is 43. When confronted about this ludicrous pseudo-statistic, Bennett indignantly cited the scholarly research of Dr. Paul Cameron. Cameron is the same reputable academic who came up with the following research: lesbians are 300 times more likely to die in car crashes than are heterosexual women. That?s 600 bull dikes for every Thelma and Louise. Even after being challenged with this information, Bennett continued to cite the phony figures because, after all, the ends justify the means. This is not to say that Bennett never takes a heartfelt moral stand. The three pack a day smoker, who lectures to kids about the need to avoid addiction, was almost arrested in Southern California for refusing to put out his cigarette in the nonsmoking section of a hotel. As an act of civil disobedience it doesn?t quite rank with Rosa Parks refusing to submit to Jim Crow, but it does add another undertaking to the Bennett resume - that of scofflaw. Finally, on Bennet's selective outrage over the decline of the commonweal's moral fiber: On the book jacket of 'The Death Of Outrage', Bennett explains that allegations of sexual misconduct by those in politics must be taken seriously if our nation is to be moral. Since that time, there have been revelations of literally dozens of acts of sexual misconduct by Republican luminaries, ranging from adultery to rape to child molestation. An extensive search of Mr. Bennett's public statements failed to unearth even one condemnation of this behavior. He also refused to condemn George W. Bush for drunk driving, or for lying about it, or for lying about carbon emissions, or for lying about prescription drug coverage for the elderly, or for lying about who will benefit from the tax cut, etc., ad nauseum. Bennett explained that Bush has not been under oath when he has lied, so it's okay. Remember that statement the next time you hear Bennett talk while he is not under oath. I'm going to have to dig up some of the howlers Bennet delivered during his reign as drug fuhrer. posted by Steven Baum 4/18/2001 01:50:28 PM | link JOE CAMEL, SMUGGLER So not only do cancer peddlers Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds attempt and succeed to legally addict children to one of the most addictive and deadly narcotics available, but now they're involved in illegally smuggling their coffin nails. From the report Big Tobacco Busted Again by James Cruickshank and Fran Abrams (originally from the Independent in the UK and reprinted at Corporate Watch): Two of the world's biggest tobacco manufacturers knowingly sold cigarettes worth billions of pounds to Latin American drug barons and to a smuggling ring based in Britain, according to documents seen by the Independent on Sunday. Court papers lodged in New York, claim that Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds had "a scheme to smuggle cigarettes on a worldwide basis". By controlling the smuggling they increased their sales and profited from the illicit activities, say the documents, and executives of RJ Reynolds did deals with smugglers to help them win multi-million dollar sales bonuses. The companies are facing legal action brought by the European Commission for an estimated £3bn lost in taxes over 10 years. If they lose they could be forced to pay damages and fines totalling £12bn. I guess it's fitting that they might get nailed for tax evasion just like Al Capone, their spiritual predecessor. Predictably enough, Big Tobacco's also climbed into bed with their chief global competitors, doing their best to help legitimize kindred souls: The two companies "control, direct, encourage, support, promote and facilitate the smuggling of cigarettes into the European Community", the papers say. They make arrangements for smugglers to pay for their purchases through Swiss bank accounts so the money cannot be traced. Executives of RJ Reynolds were offered performance bonuses of up to £2m that led to them "dramatically increasing sales" through smuggling, say the papers. One employee, Richard Larocca, developed business relationships with Colombian narcotics traffickers who had used US bank accounts to launder drug money. Many of the cigarettes were later smuggled into the European Community. The documents even claim RJ Reynolds developed a special kind of Winston cigarette for its best smuggling customers to help them compete with "unauthorised" gangs who were shipping contraband Winstons from other sources. The company also agreed to strengthen its packaging after the smugglers complained the cardboard cases were too weak for the rough handling methods they were forced to use. The activities of Philip Morris, which makes Marlboro, enabled drug barons in South America to "legitimise" their business. "In short, what starts out as drug currency on the streets of the US ends up as smuggled goods, including cigarettes, on the streets of Western Europe," the papers show. Between 1995 and 1997, both companies knowingly supplied large volumes of cigarettes to a network of UK-based front companies known to be a cover for smugglers who shipped them out illegally to Spain and Portugal. In RJ Reynolds' case, the cigarettes were sold to "distributors" in Panama with the full knowledge that the real purchasers were the UK-based smugglers. This was done to prevent law-enforcement authorities from uncovering the deal. The smugglers created false documents suggesting the cigarettes were being shipped to non-EC countries such as Morocco. In fact, they were taken illegally to Spain. It's impossible to be too cynical about the corporate drug pushers, especially in light of the fact that while they can hide under the skirts of the corporation and get away with paying fines (for which they've probably already got slush funds), individuals are still being sent to prison for over 50 years for growing marijuana. posted by Steven Baum 4/18/2001 11:04:24 AM | link REPORT ON LICIT AND ILLICIT DRUGS While searching for ammo, er, information after viewing last night's Frontline repeat - Busted: America's War on Marijuana - I found a marvelously well-written and thorough book written in 1972 by the folks at Consumer Reports. It's called The Consumer's Union Report - Licit and Illicit Drugs by Edward M. Brecher and the Editors thereof, and is available in its entirety online at the Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, an even bigger and more thorough reference source for such issues. The first chapter, called "19th Century America - a 'dope fiend's paradise'," offers a view back into the good old days: Opiate use was also frowned upon in some circles as immoral--- a vice akin to dancing, smoking, theater-going, gambling, or sexual promiscuity. But while deemed immoral, it is important to note that opiate use in the nineteenth century was not subject to the moral sanctions current today. Employees were not fired for addiction. Wives did not divorce their addicted husbands, or husbands their addicted wives. Children were not taken from their homes and lodged in foster homes or institutions because one or both parents were addicted. Addicts continued to participate fully in the life of the community. Addicted children and young people continued to go to school, Sunday School, and college. Thus, the nineteenth century avoided one of the most disastrous effects of current narcotics laws and attitudes--- the rise of a deviant addict subculture, cut off from respectable society and without a "road back" to respectability. Of course it's not too surprising that the opium addicts of that century weren't criminalized and marginalized seeing how they were all good, solid citizens, i.e. white. Indeed, the history of marginalization and criminalization is inextricably linked to the history of blacks, hispanics and other minority groups in this country, as is well documented in the report. And, given the current statistical distribution of those incarcerated in the largest per capita prison system in the world, it ain't just history. posted by Steven Baum 4/18/2001 10:18:49 AM | link TWENTIES FROM HEAVEN The esteemed Dean Baker, whose lengthier analyses can be found over at CEPR, said a couple of things quite well in the March 31 - April 6 edition of his "Economics Report Review," which regularly reports on the business and economics items in the NYTimes and Washington Post. First, he commented on the 49 black businessmen who took out ads in the Washington Post and NYTimes to claim that "the estate tax was particularly harmful to the efforts of blacks to accumulate wealth through generations, since for many families this will be the first generation of blacks to hold significant wealth." Not quite: While the estate tax may be harmful to the efforts of these particular blacks to accumulate wealth through generations, it would be almost impossible to design a tax that more heavily favored blacks than the estate tax. Precisely because of the large racial disparities in wealth, a far lower percentage of the estate tax is borne by blacks than would be true of income, payroll, or sales tax. Therefore, eliminating the estate tax, and thereby forcing some other tax to be higher than would otherwise be necessary, would be detrimental to the vast majority of black families. Then he comments on the paralogical fog through which reporters view and write about the stock market: There were several stories on the stock market that appeared determined to ignore the market's relationship to the economy. There is no economist in the country who would argue that the stock market could consistently rise more rapidly than profits grow, over a very long period of time. And economists generally believe that the profit share of corporate income stays relatively constant over any long period, which means that profit grows at roughly the same rate as the economy. Yet news articles repeatedly discuss the market as though it were a great fountain that sprinkles money down on investors, regardless of how slow corporate profits grow or how high the price-to-earnings ratios rise. Stock returns are by definition equal to the growth in share prices plus the dividend yield. Since the current dividend yield is close to 2.0 percent, there is no plausible path of profit growth that will provide long-term investors with the sorts of returns implied in these news articles. If there is a silver lining to the current economic downtrend - with the latest thundercracks including layoffs by both Philips and Cisco - it's that all the yammering about privatizing Social Security has been silenced for the moment. posted by Steven Baum 4/18/2001 09:48:00 AM | link THE "I TOLD YOU SO" DEPARTMENT From an item in The Register: An insurance policy against hacker-inflicted damage costs 25 per cent more for companies using Windows NT. This is because "there are so many security holes in Microsoft products", John Wurzler, of Wurzler underwriting managers, told us today. Wurzler's stance could be a little unfair - security is far more dependent on how well the infrastructure is designed and set up rather than the products used to build it, we argued. Wurzler concedes this point but says his company has to charge premiums based on an insured organisation's turnover, the probability of an attack and the chances of success of an attack. And the interesting thing is that such policies are available in the first place. Wurzler has sold insurance policies of between $5,000-$25,000 and, so far, the highest pay-out has been $200,000. Technically speaking, I didn't exactly "tell you so" in the first place, but I probably would've if I'd thought about it and gotten around to it. And if you really want to get down to brass tacks, it's always been sort of implied by the lack of mentions of "that other stuff" hereabouts. posted by Steven Baum 4/18/2001 09:37:51 AM | link Tuesday, April 17, 2001 JOINING THE CONSPIRACY A very interesting discussion's going on over at BookNotes in the last few days. A reader commented to Craig that although many stories not publicized by the "liberal" mainstream media are noted in web logs, their dissemination is too patchy to make a significant difference. The reader's challenge to get "the conspiracy" a bit more organized led Craig to state: I would like to hear from more of you. I would also like to hear suggestions of how, as an extended community of web loggers, we might work together to amplify our voices. A kind of distributed samizdat weblog press seems like a good idea to me. Come to think of it, "samizlog" would be a pretty neat name for a weblog. And once I got past my knee-jerk need to not post what anyone else is posting I could join right in. All it would really require would be the more frequent interspersing of "meta" entries pointing to salient stuff elsewhere amongst the usual mix of extended rants, paeans to hard-to-find literature by obscure authors, cheap shots at the hidebound jazzentsia, and various other frivolities. In the words of Gary Gilmore, "Let's do it!" posted by Steven Baum 4/17/2001 10:50:01 AM | link INTERESTING STAT In a story about a Clinton pardon you won't be hearing about from the shrieking heads on Fox, I encountered a most strange and interesting sentence about WWII, i.e. During the war, 8 million soldiers served in the U.S. military. It convened no fewer than 2 million courts-martial. Even if you factor in all the charges against solders for having the wrong skin color and other such stupidities, this seems a bit large. Hell, it seems outrageously large, especially given all the verbiage about the "greatest generation." The article provides: Blunt was convicted under No. 96 of the Articles of War, which gave officers general authority to punish any deviation from "good order and military discipline." "All of the cases prior to 1950 are really suspect," says Korean War veteran Fred Bauer, a civilian lawyer who defends soldiers accused of violations. "The lack of due process in the military system at that time was truly outrageous." In 1950, in the face of many complaints, the Uniform Code of Military Justice established new law. It handled lesser infractions with administrative disclipline short of military courts. Courts-martial are much less frequent today. Army lawyer Lt. Col. Larry Morris says the Uniform Code has helped "correct some of the imperfections" evident in World War II. I guess the discipline thing was just out of control in those days, although any further insight anyone might have about this would be appreciated. On a side note, a related book I've got but haven't yet read is Robert Sherrill's Military Justice is to Justice as Military Music is to Music. Read the article to find out exactly why Blunt was court-martialed, and for anecdotes about a real war hero worth a million draft-dodging fakers like John Wayne: He and 17 others fell into the hands of Hitler's fearsome SS troops. When he overheard the SS officers talking of executing their prisoners, he piped up in German with a ludicrous-sounding lie hatched in terror and desperation: They should know they were surrounded by American artillery hidden behind those hills. By sheer luck, two shells came crashing down nearby within moments. The 100 Germans laid their guns in the snow and surrendered to their 18 American captives. Given just the anecdotes available in the article, it's a crying shame that Blunt's memoirs remain unpublished, although it's heartening to see he's been pardoned. posted by Steven Baum 4/17/2001 10:37:09 AM | link THINK OF THE FARM CHILLUNS! One of the more egregious fabrications being flogged by the Shrub administration and their media sycophants is that the "death tax" (i.e. the "inheritance tax" renamed to make it seem more evil) is taking the family farm away from the farm chilluns when the parents depart. The reality is a bit different. The spinmeisters have got farmers like Harlyn Riekana fretting that the evil gummint's going to take away the inheritance of his three daughters, i.e. his 950 acres of Iowa farmland worth over $2.5 million. Not quite: But in fact the Riekenas will owe nothing in estate taxes. Almost no working farmers do, according to data from an Internal Revenue Service analysis of 1999 returns that has not yet been published. Neil Harl, an Iowa State University economist whose tax advice has made him a household name among Midwest farmers, said he had searched far and wide but had never found a farm lost because of estate taxes. "It's a myth," he said. Even one of the leading advocates for repeal of estate taxes, the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it could not cite a single example of a farm lost because of estate taxes. The lies are apparently also fooling the population in general: While 17 percent of Americans in a recent Gallup survey think they will owe estate taxes, in fact only the richest 2 percent of Americans do. That amounted to 49,870 Americans in 1999. And nearly half the estate tax is paid by the 3,000 or so people who each year leave taxable estates of more than $5 million. So why aren't the family farms being taken (and the precious chilluns being thrown into ditches) by the evil gummint? Estate taxes are paid by few Americans because they are not assessed on the first $1.35 million of net worth left by a couple. Amounts above this are taxed at rates that begin at 43 percent and rise to 55 percent on amounts greater than $3 million. As the Riekenas and the Blethens have learned, there are many legal ways to reduce the value of one's wealth for estate tax purposes. So even for the largest estates, the tax averages 25 percent. Very few farmers even pay estate taxes, much less lose their farms (and abandon their precious chilluns). Yet tax return data show that very few farmers pay estate taxes. Only 6,216 taxable estates in 1999 included any agricultural land and equipment, the I.R.S. report shows. The average value of these farm assets was $440,000, only about a third of the amount that any married couple could leave untaxed to heirs. What is more, a farm couple can pass $4.1 million untaxed, so long as the heirs continue farming for 10 years. So a couple can leave up to a $1.35 million net worth farm to their children without paying the "death tax", and can leave one worth up to $4.1 million untaxed if the precious chilluns don't want to abandon the family farms themselves for a decade. Oh, and tax dodges enable even the richest estates to pay an average of 25% rather than the evil 43-55% mentioned in tones of doom by the spinmeisters. To put it bluntly, when Shrub mispronounces statements like, "To keep farms in the family, we are going to get rid of the death tax." when not a single instance of a family farm being lost in that way can be produced, he's a liar. posted by Steven Baum 4/17/2001 09:45:14 AM | link Monday, April 16, 2001 ENUFF ALREADY! That'll be quite enough of that morbid stuff for today, old bean. Just because you can't have any beer for a few more weeks doesn't mean you have to go and morbidify everyone else out there. Take a couple of Blackadders tonight and you'll feel much better tomorrow. posted by Steven Baum 4/16/2001 04:37:54 PM | link GOON BUT NOT FORGOTTEN Damn and blast. It's a sad day for cultural icons. First Joey, and now I learn (via Virulent Memes) of the demise of Sir Harry Secombe a.k.a. Neddie Seagoon who, back before he was knighted, was a Goon extraordinaire. Secombe wrote a book called Goon for Lunch from which a sample chapter describing the show (in typical goonish fashion) is available for your reading pleasure. Other documents of possible interest are the alt.fan.goons YAQ (Ying tong iddle i po Asked Questions) file and the Goon Show Glossary. The latter describes Harry Seagoon thusly: The main charictor of most Goon Shows. More often that not he gets conned into doing a task by Grytpype-Thynne or in most cases, just being conned. Neddie is a short, Welsh nut-case who is sometimes taken to bursting into song and would be concidered "big boned" by today's standards. His roles involved being anything from a roving British Prime Minister of no fixed address to an inpoverished busker with rich McUncles to an eccentric millionair in search of a long forgotten International; Christmas Pudding. Variations of him included Caracticus Seagoon, Cryptic Ned and Neddie McSeagoon. Hmmm, it's rather sad that Ned is the main charictor and I can think of much to say about him. Sorry, Sir Harry. posted by Steven Baum 4/16/2001 04:17:06 PM | link I WANNA BE SEDATED The first I was aware of Joey's demise was when I spied the top story on the front page of today's B/CS Eagle, with my sadness at the loss of a bit of my past sharing emotional space with my disbelief that that paper would print the story at all, much less as the top headline. The nearest I can figure is that the editor was probably a headbanger back in the 1970s and, despite the encroaching senility of conservatism, still has a fond memory or two of the Ramones. Perhaps he even saw them live, as I did for the first and only time at the Agora in Columbus, Ohio (across from Ohio State and, last I checked, now a restaurant) in 1979 or 1980 (ah, the memories get vaguer and sweeter). This was the same venue in which I saw U2 on their first tour and other class acts like Dave Edmunds and His All-Welsh Band. For those who want to relive some of the feel of a Ramones show, I'd recommend It's Alive (1979, rereleased on CD in 1995). I got the vinyl version back in 1980, and have a hankering to dig it out of the vinyl mausoleum tonight for a listen. Too bad it's still in print, or I'd MP3 the whole damn thing as a farewell offering to a good memory. posted by Steven Baum 4/16/2001 03:46:28 PM | link MR. PANIC This first part of this was written 11 days ago, and the second today. It's mostly a brain-dump of some of the stranger parts of my psyche, so you might want to give it a skip if you're looking for something of literary or computer or political or scientific interest. It may also provide some sort of insight as to why new material's been as rare as hen's teeth for the last month or so. About four years ago, I drove myself to a hospital emergency room because I'd been experiencing pains in my chest and in my left arm. Those are of course symptoms to cause any male past the age of 30 one hell of a fright, and they sure as hell did so to this then 36 year old. It turned out that I had acid reflux disease rather than a bad ticker, something I should have figured out from the fact that I hadn't keeled over during one of my grueling sessions on the cardiovascular machines in the gym. I've since more than acceptably handled those sharp, local pains with a generic over-the-counter acid blockers like ranitidine, and when those familiar pains to creep through occasionally, I know what they are and no longer press the panic button. But, having turned 40 a couple of years back, pains in the chest are - like for every other male in that category - no longer the only type of ache that might cause those of sufficiently hyperactive imagination to reach for that big, red button. So imagine my frame of mind when, stepping out of the shower a few weeks ago, I noticed a soreness in one of the two lads renting the downstairs apartment. Talk about a sledgehammer, 20-ton safe, brick upside the head wake-up call. The soreness went away after a few days, to be replaced with a slight tightness or pressure, which may or may have not always been there, but hadn't been noticed since every single neuron with the slightest connection to that area hadn't been on the Stage 1 alert they were now on continuously. But, having the collection of mental abberations that I have, I didn't immediately rush to the doctor. Why? Because I'd done so a month before about a week after I'd noticed a sore appear near the back of my tongue. It was of a type I'd never noticed before, and so I dwelled on it and dwelled on it and dwelled on it until, about a week later, I'd convinced myself of the worst. I went in the the urgent care clinic at around 8 AM on Thursday and left around 5 PM, after a full day of examinations and tests that had convinced the doctors that, as they put it, my hair wasn't on fire. In the intervening week the morbid imagination had either magnified real symptoms or invented ones that didn't exist, with one of the former being an increasingly strong allergic reaction to mold spores - an allergy that depresses all the sensory apparatus and eventually the psyche - as I get older. But, once I knew - at least temporarily (as indeed are all such things if you think about it) - that everything was okay I felt fine. It's been going on about wo weeks since the first notice of the ache in one of the lads, and it took until today for a panic attack to hit. I'd just partially eaten a lunch that took some will power to get through - the same sort of lunch I've wolfed down hungrily for many years now - and was heading to a cafe to obtain the spot of hot tea I usually get right after lunch. The mild nauseau I'd felt intermittently while eating became less mild and intermittent as we approached to cafe, so I told my companions to go on in and obtain their beverages and I'd grab a table. I did so, sat down, and started hyperventilating to quell both the growing nauseau and the increasing feeling of panic. After about twenty minutes of this, I indicated that someone might want to take me to the urgent care clinic, but it was decided to call the emergency squad instead. They showed up a few minutes later, at which point my fingers were tingling and my legs wobbly from the hyperventilation in addition to whatever real symptoms may have existed, although the nauseau had pretty much vanished by then. I talked with the paramedic for bit, and decided not to take the ride to the emergency room but rather call my doctor and attempt to move up a previously scheduled April 11 appointment for a thorough check-up to today. Luckily enough, I managed to get a 3:30 appointment, although not with my regular doctor but rather with one of his colleagues. That's the situation as I write this at 2:52 PM CST on April 5. It's now April 16. I went to the doctor's appointment, turned my head and coughed, etc. and received a diagnosis of some sort of colon infection for which a sulfa drug called Bactrim was prescribed. Also, no alcohol whatsoever for the month during which I'm supposed to take the pills. (For those keeping score, that's now 10 days without a single beer.) But, on the plus side, the complaints from downstairs are subsiding and I'm feeling better. That is, aside from too drastically reducing the quality and quantity of food uptake, i.e. from some healthy stuff, some junk stuff, and beer to all healthy stuff - mostly apples, bananas, and rice. This had its own effect on the plumbing as well as bringing out the nauseau side effect of the Bactrim on Friday evening. Senor Dumbass is now eating something substantial before taking the horse pill, which has the remarkable effect of removing that particularly nasty side effect. I played ultimate frisbee yesterday for a couple of hours in 85 deg. heat and about 80% humidity after mowing the yard, and other than the expected muscle and joint pains I'm not feeling any ill effects today. Once I can get the more psychotic, anxiety-ridden parts of the brain to calm down things should be back relatively near to that place called normal, or whatever it is that simulates normal hereabouts. But it does seem that the "binge" days are over, and that even after the month of Bactrim is done I'll be limiting myself to the two drinks per outing limit recommended by the local medical professional. Well, actually he sort of suggested a lower limit, but didn't threaten me with defenestration when I suggested a more reasonable (at least for me) alternative. Hey, if the French can do then so can I. Getting old's a real bitch, what with having to occasionally mimic responsible behavior and all that. But, considering the alternative ... posted by Steven Baum 4/16/2001 02:19:01 PM | link VOX BIBLIO The direction of my attention by a certain addled primate to a review of Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (which is about as combative as the subtitle implies), prompted me to digest the reviews of his past output made available about two-thirds down the page. I clearly remember reading (and fuming about) the 1994 New Yorker piece mentioned in the review. It was about libraries dumping their card catalogs in favor of computerized indices, and while Baker made a fairly good argument for the preservation of the former, I could see that it probably wasn't a terribly bad thing. Double Fold, on the other hand, is about terribly bad things like nuking entire runs of newspapers in favor of microfilmed copies that are not only inferior copies but copies that don't last as long as the originals. Read the review and/or the book if you want to get the gastric juices further jangled. Baker's fiction is as interesting and usually controversial as his non-fiction, although his last novel was quite a bit more of the former than the latter. The Everlasting Story of Nory is - as opposed to earlier Baker novels based on decidedly more "adult" themes - about the inner life of a 9-year-old girl spending a term at an English school, her parents having moved to that wee island off the coast of France. Baker gets the kid mentality fairly well, perhaps not having totally left that realm himself (and jolly good for him if that's true), as we see in this review excerpt: Children are omnivorously curious, greedily eager to experience the world in all its multifarious strangeness and imaginatively fascinated by quirks and quiddities. They are also doomed to get it all slightly wrong -- a poignant, existential misunderstanding that Baker turns to wry comedy in his rendering of Nory's private language: ''par none'' for ''bar none'' and ''up to sniff'' for ''up to snuff.'' He peppers Nory's story with the bright coinage of her own childish linguistic currency: ''slobbed,'' ''dits,'' ''quease,'' ''confendio,'' ''boffled,'' ''scrabs,'' ''frazzledly'' and ''squushed,'' which he gleefully scatters through the text, perhaps courtesy of ''the informant.'' The "informant" was his then 9-year-old daughter who assisted him with the "kidstuff". It's a good thing Baker chose to write about a particularly clever and precocious 9-year-old or we wouldn't have the pleasure of: Here's Nory, in her drama class, chewing over in her mind that old Shakespeare question: ''Shakespeare's name was probably William R. Blistersnoo but he thought he needed a preferable name in order to be famous, and since there was tons of stabbing and spearing of people with swords in his plays he thought, 'Let's see, William Swordjab, no. William Fight? No. William Killeveryone? No. William Stabmyself? No. Aha! William Shakespeare! Yes, that will be just the thing.' '' If you enjoy Baker's non-fiction, then you might want to dip into his fiction, although those of a more prudish nature might want to start with Nory and then sort of ease into Vox or The Fermata. Or, if fiction's not your thing, give U and I, his strange fan letter to John Updike, a try. posted by Steven Baum 4/16/2001 10:57:07 AM | link STANDARDIZED PROTEST In Texas and other states, standardized tests are being touted as a big, easy and cheap fix for problems with the educational system. As with most promised panaceas, this hasn't done much more than sweep the problems under a newer rug. One documented problem in Texas is that many marginal students have been excused from taking the test via various mechanisms, thus skewing the sample and pushing the average score upwards. Another problem has arisen in Scarsdale, New York, where the parents in a wealthy suburb are protesting standardized tests because ... ... they have stifled creativity and forced teachers to abandon the very programs that have made the schools excel. The parents of some 100 eighth graders - a third of the class - have pledged to keep their children home from school when tests are administered in that grade next month. They are doing this with consent, and even subtle advice, from school officials, who administer the tests. The school superintendent hasn't exactly stifled his feelings on the matter, either: Excesses of the standards movement have promoted lock-step education. hey've diverted attention from important local goals, highlighted simplistic and sometimes inappropriate tests, needlessly promoted similarity in curriculum and teaching. To the extent they've caused education to regress to a state average, they've undermined excellence. Like in Texas, the Scarsdale schools are doing what is called "teaching to the test" to the detriment of other programs, with the significant fact here being that they have and can afford those other programs, e.g. special units on various topics in mathematics, the sciences, etc. taught by instructors qualified in those topics. That is, they're have enough money to obtain the resources and teachers to do such things, whereas the poorer schools do not. In other words, they're throwing money at their educational system and improving it. And that's the great secret that those who would push standardized tests, uniforms, etc. as methods for improving education don't talk about and will deny until the cows come home. If you "throw money" at the poor schools by hiring more qualified teachers (or retraining those who are already there) and improving the physical plant, then you will create a better school and better students. It's funny how many in the non-academic world, who wouldn't hesitate paying top dollar for a newer and better bean counter, will parrot the party line about "throwing money at a problem" when you suggest an increase in funding for education. If less than a tenth of the cash thrown at various and now-vanished dot.coms in the last five years had been invested in primary education, the payoffs would almost certainly be huge in a very few years, both tangibly and intangibly. And it's a dead solid cert that the 10% would've done a hell of a lot more good than it did. All of the cheap and easy schemes to improve education are proving to be less than salutary. About the only things that work are programs that concentrate the better students in schools that are already well-funded, which will be the pragmatic effect of voucher programs - which have the bonus effect of taking money away from already poor schools and giving it to the wealthier ones to which the students transfer. It's easy enough to obtain good results when you concentrate good students in well-funded schools. It's harder to do so with average or marginal students, especially if the school isn't financially well off. But we either owe them a substantive attempt or an apology for wasting their time and hope with vapid talk about egalitarianism. And if you want to toss a cliche around, how about "money talks, bullshit walks" instead of "throwing money at a problem won't fix it"? Equal funding for primary schools won't provide the wholly unrealistic goal of equal outcomes for all students, but it will provide an initial level playing field. That is, it will actually be egalitarian - as opposed to the current funding situation - rather than merely provide lip service to that concept. And if the self-styled "greatest and richest country in the history of the world" can't find the financial wherewithal to do this by increasing overall funding rather than by spreading around what's already available, then maybe it needs to pause for a moment of introspection before the next orgy of self-congratulation. posted by Steven Baum 4/16/2001 08:59:59 AM | link

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