Bruce Western writes in the current Boston Review about the prison boom and its effects, summarizing findings and extending arguments he’s been developing for a few years, and which I’ve often written about here.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor’s degree. … Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. … These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.

[click to continue…]

On a friend’s recommendation, I watched the excellent “Now, Voyager”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035140/ the other night. A very fine performance from Bette Davis, who makes the transition from dumpy and downtrodden to shining society beauty brilliantly. But enough of the plot spoilers. Especially in the opening scenes, everyone sounds upper-class _English_. Perhaps not as cut-glass as “Brief Encounter”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037558/ , but close. Maybe some of the characters are supposed to be English (Dr Jacquith, played by the English Claude Rains might be), but others, such as the matriarch Mrs Henry Windle Vale (played by the English Gladys Cooper) are definitely supposed to be American (upper-class Bostonian). And Bette Davis herself, is, obviously, an American actor playing an American character (but still sounding _English_). So, did Bostonian aristocrats in the 1940s actually speak with English accents? Or were the dramatic conventions such that English actors (Rains, Cooper) didn’t have to change their voices?

(I’m recalling that Kieran wrote about accent change over time “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/19/how-the-edwardians-spoke/ , and that Harry wrote about Brits playing Americans “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/05/27/hugh-lauries-accent/ . In the year 2008 I know at least one posh Bostonian and she definitely sounds American, though only as much as Dr Niles Crane.)

Bruce Bartlett has a piece in the WSJ. His thesis statement: “Historically speaking, the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats.” Here’s the antidote. You can guess how this sort of thing is going to go:

In 1900 (under President McKinley) and again in 1922 (under Harding), Republicans tried to enact an antilynching law. Coolidge asked for legislation again in his 1923 State of the Union message. Unfortunately, Southern Democrats in the Senate routinely filibustered every Republican effort to aid African-Americans.

Thus: “[McCain] should explain that African-Americans will be much better off in the long run if they are receptive to candidates of both parties instead of being virtual captives of only one, which is then free to take them for granted.”

But surely if African-Americans feel the need to be specifically receptive to long-dead candidates of not just one but both parties, then a oijia board, not a ballot box, is the appropriate medium.

It would be kind of fun to flip this Bartlett logic over and sort of cross it with Mark Penn microtrends. You could have necrotrends: McCain needs to reach out to recently deceased left-handed soccer moms. Or: Obama needs to be sensitive to the concerns of long-dead jai alai dads. So forth. So long as political considerations are divorced from concerns about biological vivification, the possibilities are endless. If some politician is caught with a ballot box stuffed with the names of the deceased, he could defend himself on the grounds that only letting the living vote is sheer ‘animism’.

Bartlett does not even claim, in the op-ed, that there are living Republicans who deserve the support of African-Americans, due to their support for civil rights. The most recent instance he cites is Richard Nixon, who supported affirmative action as a way of busting racist unions. He is, apparently, seriously arguing that African-Americans should consider voting for dead people.

In short: these attempts to argue that McCain can’t be running for Bush’s third term because he’s running for McKinley’s second are getting a bit far-fetched.

This line is nice (paging Rick Perlstein): “Richard Nixon is said to have developed a “Southern strategy” of using racial code words like “law and order” to gain votes in the South.” Yes, that certainly is said.

UPDATE: I almost forgot. I sort of wrote this post two weeks ago, reviewing a Michael Swanwick story about democracy among the undead. “Salem Toussaint stood in the doorway, eyes rolled up in his head so far that only the whites showed. He held up a hand and in a hollow voice said, ‘One of my constituents is in trouble.'”

PZ Myers has a hilarious post about an I.D’er who failed to understand a particular scientific paper because, apparently, he thought ‘eponymous’ was the name of a particular class of bones.

OK, lemme follow up on my Talking Heads thread, in which I was fairly decisively refuted. [click to continue…]

By now you’ve probably all seen this:

Kevin Drum has one reaction. He also presents a remix of the cover, though I don’t think it’s all that effective. The New Yorker probably doesn’t have the neck to run a McCain followup that would really enrage the cable-news and spin-cycle bottom-feeders, but even if they did, it’d be hard to find a good analog to this one. Here’s one possible place to begin:

I’d suggest putting Dubya in Walken’s uniform, or the “Mission Accomplished” flight suit, and instead of the watch have him holding a tiny, angry-looking John McCain.

“Duncan Black”:http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_07_06_archive.html#858626388020530189 links to Amity Shlaes at the Washington Post “telling us”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102543.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 that Americans _are too_ whiners. As he says, having people like Shlaes and Gramm mouthing off is a public service in a general election (if only McCain would nominate David Bernstein as a senior surrogate, my happiness would be complete). But talk of Shlaes reminds me of her notorious 2005 “FT column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/73ac2964-50fa-11dd-b751-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

It is early to be getting partisan about New Orleans. …Iraq has not caused the US to botch Katrina – either the preparation or response. On the contrary, the fact that the country and President Bush personally were already mobilised for disaster has saved lives.

the US was prepared for Katrina. All the old and new federal offices worked together and confronted the storm early. Nearly two days before Katrina hit New Orleans, the president made millions available to Louisiana by declaring the state an official disaster area. In a press conference on Sunday morning, he instructed the country to listen for any alerts – and warned straightforwardly that he could not “stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf coast communities”. On Sunday too, Alabama and Mississippi received access to cash when they in turn were declared disaster areas. Citizens of New Orleans with special needs were instructed to go to the Superdome.

Very shortly after writing this appalling piece of hackery, Ms. Shlaes ceased to be a columnist at the _Financial Times._¹ I don’t think that it’s _at all_ unwarranted to surmise that the column and Ms. Shlaes’ rapid departure were connected.

So we may possibly have some idea of what it would take to get a columnist fired at the FT. I’d be interested to know what it would take to get a persistent vendor of mendacious and malignant tripe such as, say, Charles Krauthammer, fired from the _Washington Post_? By the man’s own admission, his credibility is problematic. A few months ago, we passed the fifth anniversary of his “statement”:http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.274/transcript.asp that

Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Indeed.

¹ A “search”:http://search.ft.com/search?sortBy=gadatearticle&queryText=%22amity+shlaes%22&aje=true by date suggests that Shlaes produced one more column (which tried to blame the Katrina shambles on the Evils of Federalism, directly contradicting what she had said the previous week), a piece for the wealth section, and a book review over the next couple of weeks, and was then gone forever.

Quiet around here so I’ll keep up the weekend nonsense posts.

I really like Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch”. It’s a great single and a fun video. However, it is disconcerting to me, on some level, that the song is basically a cross between Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” all runway cold and post-electropunk. I think that a mash-up of those three songs would be great, if anyone wanted to go to the trouble.

Furthermore, I would like to inquire: what do you think of The Talking Heads? I’ve been listening to a lot of old Heads and I’m puzzled. The first big concert I ever went to was the Heads on the Stop Making Sense tour. It was very early in the tour and Byrne didn’t even have the big suit yet. I would sort of like to be able to claim that this very influential band somehow defined a musical moment, and I was there. But, on reflection, they don’t seem to have had all that much lasting influence. It seems like they matured from a spare, NY-style art rock outfit into a pretty good disco band, sound-wise, with Byrne as flamboyant nerd-showman. But there’s only one David Byrne, so it’s not as though subsequent bands have copied that. And it’s not as though indie music subsequently went the pretty good disco band route. So they were, oddly, an evolutionary dead-end. Am I just talking nonsense?

Three unique books by Taro Gomi (that’s a link to the author’s site): Squiggles: A Really Giant Drawing and Painting Book [amazon]. Then click around to find the companion volumes, entitled Scribbles and Doodles. Each page gives the kid a partial, starter-scribble and an assignment. ‘Draw the flag of the bunnies’. Or ‘add water’ to a picture of a bunch of fire fighters. Or ‘add some leaves’ to a page of bare trees. Or a simple line of stairs with ‘draw people walking down, some of them falling!’ The books are big – 350+ pages. Not expensive. Good for trips. (I just sent my kids state-side with Belle, each armed with a Gomi book.)

The books do a great job of providing lots of great ideas for kid art without the instructions becoming bossy and boring, a happy balance struck in virtue of the author/illustrator’s talent for whimsical, back-to-basics simplicity.

Gomi is author of the immortal Everybody Poops

I just experienced a peculiar computer problem. My mac is peacefully sleeping when suddenly its fan starts whirring at perilously high speed. Obviously the poor thing is having a nightmare, I thinks to me. I’ll wake it up and tell it everything is all right. So I hammer on the keyboard and eventually command-q has the desired effect. But now my mouse does not work. Diagnostics (that’s fancy talk for: trying stuff) indicate it is not the mouse. Rather, both USB ports on the keyboard have died. So now I get to plug my mouse into the back of the machine itself forevermore. Oh joy.

What could my computer have been dreaming about that was frightening enough to fry two USB ports in its sleep?

Oh wait. Restarting it did nothing to fix the problem. But shutting down, then starting up, has allowed me to plug my mouse back into the keyboard, with effect.

Thank you for your interest and attention. This has been a test of the my minor emergency network. Had there been an emergency involving you, you would have had to figure out what to do.

So I’m listening to this Peter Beinart/Jonah Goldberg bloggingheads exchange on patriotism and, round about minute 8:00 Goldberg grumbles about the rhetoric of progress and ‘parliament of man’ and all that. Then:

Barack Obama talks about making America better by remaking it, by reinventing it. The aesthetics of his campaign are about a revolution. Well, it seems to me that if you believe this country needs a revolution, if you believe that it needs to be remade, then your love for it isn’t that profound.

Has the man never celebrated the 4th of July? What does he think the fireworks are supposed to represent? His mom told him it’s just a pretty light show (she didn’t want her young son to think revolution is a good thing) and he never thought to ask again when he grew up?

Why did the founding fathers hate America? [click to continue…]

One of the benefits of a blog like CT is that non-specialists can always ask specialists to explain stuff. Here’s Martin Wolf, “writing in the Financial Times”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/69ebb588-4ead-11dd-ba7c-000077b07658.html about Britain’s housing bust:

bq. If economists differ on whether house prices are now reasonable, they differ still more on whether a house-price collapse must spell ruin for the economy. A decline in prices brought about by a big boost to supply ought to be beneficial. *Even a correction in a bubble should not bring pain: for owner-occupiers, the lower value of their houses is offset by the lower implicit cost of renting them from themselves.* [My emphasis] Moreover, the losses of those cashing out of the market are offset by the gains of those buying into it. This is why it is mad to applaud ever-rising prices.

So what on earth does he mean? If I were feeling pain (which I’m not because I’m not going to sell my house any time soon), how would my agonies be offset by a reduction in the implicit cost of something that isn’t actually happening? Enlighten me please.

I have a Bloggingheads dialogue with Eric Posner up, where among other things, we talk about the “origins of the netroots”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/12432?in=00:04:20.5&out=00:09:44.5. The (not very original, I suspect) theory that I put forward in the dialogue is that this wasn’t the result of any necessary affinity between the left and the Internet, but instead a historical accident, resulting from the emergence of a new medium at a moment when US progressives were (a) extraordinarily frustrated with the Iraq war, and (b) deeply disenchanted with the traditional means through which they might have found expression of their views in happier times (TV and purportedly ‘left’ newspapers like the _New York Times_; the Democratic party). This is less a political science judgement than a semi-journalistic one – I haven’t done enough specific research to really do more than articulate my best guess as to what happened. I am interested in working more on this in a more serious way at some stage though, and would love to both people’s views (preferably good disagreements with my argument) and any evidence for or against that they can think of. More generally, there is a lot of work to be done updating the social movement literature to deal with these new Internet mediated movements – at the very least, there are a few dissertations in it.

Matt Yglesias “gets political spam from Airtran”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/paging_paul_krugman.php

AirTran got ahold of my email address somehow or other over the years and sends me occasional doses of spam. Normally, it’s to promote some deal or something. But now they’re giving me rants against the evils of oil speculators

But it turns out that this is part of a much larger campaign. Cue “Zephyr Teachout:”:http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/27220/united_delta_american_southwest_the_airlines_move_in_on_moveon

I got an email this morning from United, asking me to go to a petition site, which asks me to enter my zip code and send a note to my MOC to “Stop Oil Speculation” and lower energy costs. Tracy Russo reports she got the same email from Northwest. The entire coalition list is at the bottom of this post, and includes the Petroleum Marketers Association of America and Agricultural Retailers association, as well as Delta, Continental, US Air, American, Airtran…

I don’t think this is big news in the good way, mind you–its important because it signals that corporations are willing to use their massive databases to try to leverage political will in Washington. I’m sure this isn’t the first of its kind, but its the first of such a scale that its caught my attention (I’m happy to be rebutted in the comments). We’re talking tens of millions of emails (possibly nearing a hundred million? Jose Antonio Vargas, can you find out?) if all the airlines’ lists are involved. This is clearly just the beginning, and its a crude one–a few years from now you’ll see more organizing, including international organizing, to leverage corporate databases to influence policies that help corporate wealth.

This is an interesting challenge to Clay’s account of how the politics of group formation is changing (all the more so as one of his “key examples of group empowerment”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/04/here-comes-ever.html is airline customers who are annoyed at their treatment. I think that Clay’s fundamental claim – that the transaction costs that have hitherto often blocked group formation have been lowered dramatically – is both important and indisputably correct. But this doesn’t necessarily have a levelling effect on power relations, as Clay sometimes seems to suggest when he talks about mobilized consumer groups, protesters etc.

My impression is that we still don’t have good concepts for figuring out the consequences of lowered transaction costs of group formation and communication, partly because we are fighting a set of tired arguments between techno-evangelists (Glenn Reynolds’ dreadful _An Army of Davids_ standing in for multitudes here), and techno pessimists (Andrew Keen, Sven Birkets and other guardians of traditional hierarchies) about whether the Internet is a generally empowering or disempowering phenomenon. It’s neither, of course, and it’s in the detail of which _particular_ groups get empowered and disempowered, and under which circumstances, that the interesting questions lie. I’d be very interested in Clay’s views about how to move forward in this direction (or in another, of course, if he thinks I’m wrong)