LA Times: The Nightmare, Now on Steroids

As new boss Sam Zell hires a passel of executives from Clear Channel to run the newspaper. Via the WSJ:

Tribune has hired half a dozen radio executives since
Mr. Zell took effective control of the company in a leveraged buyout in
December, most prominently Mr. Michaels, a former radio chief for Clear
Channel Communications known for helping consolidate the radio industry
as well as for wacky stunts. He once arrived at a radio broadcasters’
conference carried on a litter and dressed in the garb of an Egyptian
pharaoh to underscore in a speech how powerful consolidation would
prove for radio.

Mr. Abrams started last Tuesday and in the past few
days Mr. Michaels has hired four other radio executives from Clear
Channel, all former colleagues. They include Jerry Kersting, finance
chief of Clear Channel’s radio division and engineer of many of the
acquisitions that helped turn the radio division into the powerhouse it
is today; senior vice president of programming Marc Chase; vice
president of technology Steve Gable; and vice president of programming
Sean Compton.

My sympathies to those who must try to put out a newspaper for wacky corporate radio honchos.

The Devil Makes Three: Music to Drink By

Well, they’re a lot more than that, actually. Put their "Graveyard" in a mix and it stood up well to numerous other songs from much more famous bands. Wanted to go see them tonight in Ventura, but the preview I wrote about them seems to have helped sell out the place! Oh well. They’ll be back: they seem to play almost continually up and down the West Coast. For more, please see my piece in the VCReporter.

Download 02_graveyard.m4p

Devilmakesthree

To Save the Soul of America (From Violence)

In 2008, the year the Democrats will chose Barack Obama as their nominee for President, this speech from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., could be described as "the fierce urgency of now" speech. But King gave this speech on April 4th, precisely one year before his assassination, and on this April 4th instead of highlighting his death, I think it makes sense to highlight his leadership, on foreign adventures, and on the abiding hope of some Americans that this country can overcome its purveying of violence and recover its soul:

As I have walked among the
desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov
cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer
them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social
change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked
— and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation
wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring
about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I
could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in
the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those
boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of
thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.


For those who ask the question, "Aren’t you a civil rights leader?" and
thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this
further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of
America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain
rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America
would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its
slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way
we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had
written earlier:


     O, yes,
     I say it plain,
     America never was America to me,
     And yet I swear this oath–
     America will be!

Happy Birthday, 2001

The greatest of all movies without interesting humans turns forty today. Just shows there’s a place in the world for awe, as well as comedy, love, terror, and so on. Reminds me of a fascinating passage from the late Arthur C. Clarke’s first great novel, The City and the Stars. From Chapter Thirteen:

Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.

The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, nor the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves.

2001a

Patriotism vs. Nationalism (Barack, Are You Listening?)

Daniel Larison explains:

…this is the crucial difference between patriotism and nationalism:
patriotism is love of one’s country and defensive, while nationalism is
expressed typically through contempt and fear of other nations and a
will to power over other nations.  The Iraq war was made possible by a
propaganda campaign by the government, the exploitation of public fear
and anger, the warmongering of nationalists and the twisting of
patriotic sentiment into support for a war of aggression by casting the war dishonestly as one of self-defense.
That the administration succeeded in this is not a measure of
mindless love of country, but rather a fairly mindless foreign policy
consensus that says that small states on the other side of the planet
pose meaningful threats to the United States.  To cede that it is
patriotism is mainly to blame for the Iraq war, rather than the
government’s abuse and manipulation of patriotism, is to let the
government off the hook much too easily.

Larison writes for The American Conservative. He’s no lefty, believe me. I bring this up because so many people of my tribe, perhaps traumatized by the sight of constitutional scofflaws such as Richard M. Nixon and George W. Bush wrapping themselves in the American flag, disdain patriotism entirely. That’s a mistake — a big one.

This distinction, which Barack Obama would do well to seize upon, could make a difference with millions of American voters, who love their country devoutly, and mistrust those who think the American flag somehow beneath them.

Polar Cities: Wussies Need Not Apply

My equaintance Danny Bloom — following up on the Polar Cities idea first proposed by James Lovelock–was spotlighted this week by Andy Revkin in The New York Times.

Glad to see Danny’s hard work getting some attention. My favorite comment on his concept, which, simply put, is that if we don’t change our lifestyles, we’re going to have to changes our lives — and move north — comes from this hardy Alaskan.

What makes you think were going to let all you folks in? ; }

Fairbanks, AK 

— Posted by Constance Ledlow

Polarcities

      

    

The Black Swan Speaks: Beyond the Narrated

"We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the concrete, the emotionally laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the officials, the scholarly-sounding verbiage [b*****t], the pompous Guassian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Francaise, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated."

"Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, igorning what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort."

"To be able to focus is a great virtue if you are a watch repairman, a brain surgeon, or a chess player. But the last thing you need to do when you deal with uncertainty is to "focus" (you should tell uncertainty to focus, not us). This "focus" makes you a sucker; it translates into prediction problems, as we will see in the next section. Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb — The Black Swan

The Bushian View of Antarctica

Tom Toles of the Washington-Post is the editorial cartoonist most concerned with the fate of the natural world, by far, but he’s also the editorial cartoonist best able to find humor in our Prez’s view of the world, sez me. It’s a balancing act that leads to some unforgettable visions…even in his sketches.

Tolesonantarcticice