From the monthly archives:

November 2008

Light In The Attic Sampler & You Don’t Love Me Yet

by John Holbo on November 3, 2008

Amazon is giving away a a free ‘sampler’ album from Light In the Attic records. It’s drop dead fantastic, I say. It’s got “Katie Cruel”, by Karen Dalton [wikipedia]. Such an amazing song, and an amazing voice – like Billie Holiday decided to sing a perfect contribution to the soundtrack for “Deadwood”. Dalton’s In My Own Time was released in 1970, then only made it to CD a couple years ago. Then there is “An Elegy”, some kind of champagne trip soul hop remix of a Free Design track. Then another Free Design track, “Make The Madness Stop”. (Either you like Free Design or you don’t. It’s totally ridiculous stuff.) Then there’s a crazy great Betty Davis track, “He Was A Real Freak”. A fun ringer, “Sugar Man”, from someone named Rodriguez. The brief bio from the label is interesting. His 1970 album is “one of the lost classics of the ’60s, a psychedelic masterpiece drenched in colour and inspired by life, love, poverty, rebellion, and, of course, “jumpers, coke, sweet mary jane”. The album is Cold Fact, and what’s more intriguing is that its maker – a shadowy figure known as Rodriguez – was, for many years, lost too. A decade ago, he was rediscovered working on a Detroit building site, unaware that his defining album had become not only a cult classic, but for the people of South Africa, a beacon of revolution.” Also on the sampler are a couple of solid reggae/r&b tracks – especially “Chips – Chicken – Banana Split”, by Jo Jo and the Fugitives. The tracks by The Black Angels and the Saturday Knights are solid, too. Like I said: great album, and free.

I see that the Black Angels just played a Halloween gig with Roky Erikson. That reminds me of another free mp3 to pass along. A great cover of Erikson’s “You Don’t Love Me Yet”. I know about that one because I really enjoyed Jonathan Lethem’s novel – same title
– which didn’t get much attention. It’s kinda like Philip K. Dick wrote an episode of “Friends”. But in a good way. No, that’s not what it’s like, except for the names. What can I say? It’s a slight work, evoking aimlessly attractive youth. There are comic couplings and decouplings, and very nicely written it is.

I know what day it is. But every post can’t be about the election.

Philosophy in the news ….

by Chris Bertram on November 2, 2008

The Times “has a story”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5063279.ece that “Peter Millican”:http://philosophy.hertford.ox.ac.uk/peter.htm , an Oxford philosopher, was offered $10,000 to help some Republicans “prove” that Obama’s memoirs were ghost-written by Bill Ayers. On a bizarreness scale of 1 to 10, that gets close to the Obama-was-Malcolm-X’s-lovechild story.

The real crisis

by John Q on November 1, 2008

While the global financial crisis and the US election have monopolised attention for the last couple of months, the climate change crisis hasn’t got away, and most of the news has been bad. It’s now pretty widely agreed that any global policy that doesn’t stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations around 450 parts per million (CO2 equivalent) runs a real risk of environmental disaster. The only plausible policy of that kind This is a contract and converge scenario where all countries accept a common emissions entitlement per person, to be reached over coming decades. That in turn means big reductions in emissions entitlements for people in developed countries.

The Australian Treasury has just released estimates of the cost of an measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, most importantly an emissions trading scheme. Of course, there have been quite a few exercises of this kind, but what’s striking about this one is that it looks at a much wider (and more realistic, if we want to save the planet) range of options, going all the way to a 90 per cent reduction in emissions relative to 2000 levels, achieved by 2050.

Treasury estimates that, under this scenario, GNP per person in Australia will average $78 000 in 2050 compared to $50 000 at present. By contrast in the reference scenario which has an 88 per cent increase in emissions, 2050 GNP is estimated at $83 000, or about 6 per cent higher (I don’t think this takes account of environmental and other damage costs avoided through climate mitigation, which will much more than offset the cost of mitigation in the long run).

When I get a bit of time, I’ll report more on the details and assumptions. But the quibbles coming from predictable rentseekers, and their tame consultants, look like just that, quibbles. It’s striking how many supposed advocates of the free market think we’ll all be rooned unless we continue to subsidise industry (and households) by allowing them to dump their garbage into the atmosphere free of charge.

Treasury’s estimates are, not surprisingly, quite consistent with the arguments I’ve made for a long time. That’s because any competent economist doing the analysis must come up with estimates of a comparable order of magnitude. If you want to make the case that saving the planet requires reducing living standards, or even a big reduction in the rate of growth of living standards, you need either to invent a whole new economics or wave your hands vigorously enough to conceal the fact that you don’t have any economic analysis to support you.

Gaybaiting

by Henry Farrell on November 1, 2008

What “Robert Farley”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/10/somebody-went-there.html just said.

Update: Gregory King, associate director of public relations for AFSCME has spoken to me on the phone at length, and sent me the statement below. I remain highly skeptical about the claim that this wasn’t gaybaiting, but am happy to give both sides of the argument.

AFSCME’s radio advertisement in Kentucky says absolutely nothing about Senator McConnell’s sexual orientation. We are as interested in McConnell’s undisclosed service records as we were in those of George W. Bush. Urging Senator McConnell to be “straight” with the voters of Kentucky is not gay-baiting. That is as ridiculous as suggesting that Senator John McCain named his bus the Straight Talk Express in order to appeal to anti-gay voters. AFSCME is being unfairly smeared with an unfounded charge of gay-baiting. We have done no such thing.