The Erie Carbon Hiker

 Energy policy  No Responses »
Nov 282009
 

Mike Ingels, aka The Erie Hiker, makes an interesting point about the global warming controversies in an article titled, “Climate Bill/Talks are a Train Wreck“. He points out that, according to polls, “there is a significant chunk of Americans who want a carbon cap, but DO NOT believe that there is solid evidence of global warming.”

So why would they want a carbon cap, then? Mike thinks it’s because people see local evidence of the results of our carbon excesses. However, another possible reason that comes to mind is the the bad effects on our foreign policy. But the polls don’t tell us that, as far as I know. I’ve made other comments in Mike’s blog article about the global vs local aspects.

But here is one more point: I hope that more careful polling would reveal that this segment of our society doesn’t want a carbon cap so much as it wants reductions in carbon emissions. I say this because a carbon cap is a recipe for massive corruption and abuse of governmental power, while reductions in carbon emissions can be accomplished without such abuses. But that’s just my hope. I don’t know if it’s really the case.

Most extremist administration ever

 Authoritarianism  2 Responses »
Nov 262009
 

obamacabinet

No wonder the Obama administration seems to have such a narrow, constrained outlook on life.

I got the chart from Say Anything blog, which got it from The EnterpriseBlog, which says it came from a JP Morgan research report. But I like the post at the Say Anything blog because of the comments, especially those about the role of public workers. It seems some people got kind of defensive about it.

Graduated escalation

 Foreign relations  No Responses »
Nov 252009
 

Someone finally points out that Barak Obama’s decision-making re Afghanistan is coming to resemble Lyndon Johnson’s in Vietnam. Ben Shapiro mentions it in passing. Good. Saves me the trouble of saying the words “gradual escalation.”

(I’m not saying nobody else has pointed it out. I’d think it would be obvious to anyone who lived through the 1960s. But Shapiro’s is the first mention that I’ve seen.)

Piano

 Books to read, History  No Responses »
Nov 242009
 

This sounds interesting, especially since I am now engaged in the sad task of taking apart/destroying an old upright piano made a hundred years ago. It has a cracked soundboard as well as other defects, so there wasn’t a lot that could be done with it. But I’m learning a little about how those things were put together.

“Mr. Langshaw’s Square Piano” by Madeline Goold. Reviewed by Alexandra Mullen

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Blowfish protect us from violence

 Bash the Messenger, First Amendment  No Responses »
Nov 202009
 

Here it comes. First they go abstract on us and generalize the Fort Hood killing to blame it on extremism. Not extreme views about one’s religion justifying violence, but extremism in general. Then after they’ve expanded the definition, they’ll contract it and say the way to stop future Fort Hood instances is to clamp down on extreme rightwingers who don’t believe the government should control the population through health care, or who oppose abortion, or who value the 2nd Amendment protections.

Expand, then contract. Repeat as needed. I call it the blowfish technique.

Or maybe it’ll be more innocuous. Maybe they will stop future Fort Hood killers the way they protect us from terrorism by frisking white-haired grannies trying to make their way through airports with walkers and canes.

Sameness yields inequality

 Regulation  No Responses »
Nov 182009
 

Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek gives us an excellent summary of the downside of universal standards. To which I will add that if you have universal standards, you can much more easily have a winner take all, which means greater inequalities in wealth and income. (Equality of standards yields great inequalities of wealth.) If you have universal standards, then it is easier for the biggest, baddest (i.e. most efficient) institution to gobble up the others and become too big to fail, which then means huge bailouts and/or other corruption.

…Rather than have a set of experts come up with the best standard, I would prefer competition among standards. Let investor dollars determine which are the best standards. Maybe tehre would be convergence, maybe not. And when there are lots of standards, you can get improvement as people learn over time. But those universal standards struggle to improve. The people who design them have a tendency to defend them even when they’re flawed.

At the end of the discussion, a committee was mentioned, I think it was part of the UN, that was looking at some accounting issue. It was mentioned that the committee represented the different regions of the world. There was a representative from Africa, South America, Asia, North America, and Latin America. Because every part of the world had a representative, it was assumed in the conversation that everyone’s interests would be heard.

The word “representative” is usually used that way, but it really has no meaning. …

Job qualifications

 Regulation  No Responses »
Nov 152009
 

I presume it’s not a surprise to anyone that Bank of America is having some difficulties in getting its preferred candidate to take the CEO job, given that any compensation package is subject to review by President Obama’s czar-operative, Kenneth Feinberg. [URL]

The scary part is that they will find someone to take it. They might even find someone who is adequate enough to do the job. But it will be someone who is politically compromised, and/or willing to become politically compromised. Sort of like we’ve seen with General Motors.

Love to hate overnight

 Bash the Messenger, Books to read, History  No Responses »
Nov 092009
 

This sounds like an interesting book:

“The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” (2009) by T.J. Stiles.

It’s about one of my favorite decades, the 1830s. And I’ve been wanting to read more about the rise of industrial corporations. I’m especially interested in the adjustments that people had to make in their lives and outlooks in order to become cogs in the industrial machinery. But a book about one of the industrial tycoons could be interesting, too.

I learned about the book from an article in the weekend Wall Street Journal by the same author: “Men of Steel: Billionaires, like little boys, have long liked to play with trains. With his latest purchase, Warren Buffett is on track to be today’s Cornelius Vanderbilt.”

But one statement in the article almost convinced me not to waste my time. It’s this:

With the meltdown of 008, the public’s attitude [toward Wall Street] switched from love to hate overnight…

This of course is nonsense. Certain newspaper people have been trying to peddle this line, but I don’t know why they’d expect anyone to believe it. Hatred and detestation of corporate America has been part of the air we breath for as long as anyone can remember. What happened in 2008 probably reinforced a lot of peoples’ opinions. It may even have changed a few, though I don’t personally know of anyone in real life or on the internet whose view of Wall Street and business corporations underwent any fundamental change because of the 2008 meltdown. Politicians and their media flunkies like to exploit a crisis, of course, but one has to allow for the fact that they have an agenda.

Oh, well. I’m hoping the book is better than that one statement.

Dear Rep. Schauer

 Health care reform  No Responses »
Nov 062009
 

Here is a letter I sent to Rep. Mark Schauer this morning.

Rep. Schauer,

Please vote against the Pelosi health plan. Please save your vote for health care reform, instead.

In past generations many of our young soldiers gave their lives to keep our country from going down the road where the Pelosi plan will take us.

Don’t let our country become a hellhole like the UK with a surveillance camera on every corner and anti social-behaviour ordinances that overturn the rule of law, but which are necessary to deal with the social pathologies that result when one’s personal decisions are of little consequence.

There is much the government can do to improve our country’s health care. Congress can remove the extreme injustice by which the self-employed, the unemployed, and and others do not enjoy the same tax advantages in purchasing insurance that those of us who work for large corporate entities have. Congress can empower people to make meaningful choices to manage health risks. These are dangerous and terrifying choices, but denying us the ability to make these choices, as the Pelosi plan will do when it takes its natural course, will make us less than human.

And Congress can help those whose pre-existing conditions preclude the purchase of health insurance. Forcing insurers to become something other than insurers, as the Pelosi plan does, is the absolute wrong thing to do about it.

I suspect that if we were allowed to see what else is hidden in the Pelosi plan before Congress gets a chance to vote on it, we’d find many other things wrong with it, too. Otherwise, why is it necessary to use deceit and secrecy to get a bill passed without our knowing all the details of what’s in it?

Paul Manz

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 022009
 

At the close of our church service today, I stuck around in the pews instead of going downstairs for coffee, not wanting to let the postlude go to waste. It was a Bach piece, I don’t remember what, played by Roxanne, our substitute organist for today and our onetime regular organist. I wasn’t the only one who stayed behind just to listen.

Later when told her how much I enjoyed it, I joked that it was like Paul Manz coming back. Then she informed me. Paul Manz had died just a few days ago. If I could listen to it again, I could probably explain what parts of the Bach had reminded me of Manz. Roxanne said she had played a Manz piece for the offertory, as a tribute. Usually I notice things like that, but I had stepped out for a few minutes and missed it.

Paul Manz was at Concordia College, St. Paul, when I was a student there. We all knew we had a great one among us. I got to see and hear him play just a few times, but it was always a treat even to hear one of his students play. If I hadn’t skipped chapel so much of the time, I would have heard even more. But this was when the Vietnam war was heating up. The school was dropping requirements and standards left and right, as was happening at most colleges. So I skipped morning and evening chapel more often than not. But there were also the times when one could wander into Graebner Memorial Chapel late in the evening and listen to students practice. I knew already then that the sounds and sights would be the source of future nostalgia.

When I was a new freshman I had to take piano, as did all students in the teacher education program. My father had made some attempts to teach me when I was younger, so I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with a keyboard. The professor (a man named Brauer, perhaps?) said I had a nice touch on the keyboard. At one of my lessons he said, “John, you could still be an organist. It’s not too late!” But I wasn’t interested in working that hard. If I was going to work at anything, it would be history and science. When the piano requirement was dropped, I dropped it.

There was a pecking order among those who were going to be teachers. Those with usable musical ability were higher than those who had none, who were at the bottom of the heap. Those who were organists were higher than the others, and could write their own tickets, so to speak. And at the top were the elite ones who studied under Dr. Manz. (Things like history, literature, and science were not factors in establishing one’s status.)

A roomate-to-be had come to Concordia expecting to be one of Paul Manz’s students. He had already served as a frequent organist at one of the downtown Detroit churches, and had an ability to improvise that was way beyond my understanding. He auditioned, and then was crushed to learn that Dr. Manz would not accept him as once of his students. If Roy ever sees this, maybe he can tell the story himself, as he did many times back then to entertain us. But none of what happened changed the fact that we were in awe of Dr. Manz.

Today I listened to the tribute that Michael Barone has done at pipedreams.org. (As far as I know, none of the local public radio stations carries Pipedreams. I occasionally get to listen to it when we’re traveling.) Tonight I listened to the hour-and-a-half program — twice — and came away with an even greater appreciation for the range of what he has done.

I tried to explain Paul Manz to a friend who had joined the conversation with Roxanne this morning. I pointed out that when you hear organ preludes that remind you of a steam calliope at a circus, that’s Paul Manz’s music. Roxanne’s way of explaining it was better: His music is joyful. (You can hear the steam calliope effect in some of the pieces on Pipedreams, but there is a lot more than that.)

The Pipedreams program was recorded in 1981 2001, and features interview segments with Dr. Manz. In one of them he describes how he and Herman Schlicker designed the Schlicker organ at Mt Olive Lutheran Church. He explained that he wanted an organ that was big enough to lead the congregation in song, but not so big as to overwhelm and frustrate them. That is a characteristic of a lot of Manz’s organ preludes. To put it crudely, they are right-sized. And they are joyful. (I’m now listening to the Michael Barone program a 3rd time.)

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