Rush Limbaugh-ful

So I listened to this piece of comedic brilliance that Rush Limbaugh aired recently. It's a song entitled "Barack the Magic Negro," to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon." (Ironic that Limbaugh, with his boat-load of drug abuse issues, is parodying a song that makes drug references, no?) It was, shockingly, not funny. The expression, "Magic Negro," was invoked first by an LA Times editorial about the role that Barack Obama plays for the guilty white conscience--that of the non-threatening, asexual black man that assuages white guilt about racial injustice.

At this point, nothing Rush says on air or chooses to broadcast on his show really shocks me. And there's not much to be gleaned from criticizing the song. More interesting to me is the LA Times editorial itself. Namely, the fact that after nearly a full column of describing the phenomenon of the "Magic Negro" in the modern American imagination, the writer describes how Obama fits the same role in this way:

Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books, or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate." His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).

So Obama is magical because he's "articulate," "genial," and has refused to call his opponents names even in the face of baiting by the media. Two paragraphs earlier, the writer also pointed out how little real criticism Obama had gotten, other than his lack of racial genuineness. Apparently, the writer is taking the lack of criticism to mean that there's a lack of desire to criticize him--not that there's a lack of actual stuff to criticize him about! This move to me seems really dangerous. Can't Obama just be a really good guy without that being evidence of his being a pawn to the liberal guilt of white America?

Do I need a non-threatening black figure to assuage my guilt over slavery? Mostly I want someone like Obama, who could fuel a real grassroots political movement, to push for national health care, public funding of campaigns, environmental regulations, and end to the War in Iraq. I think back to Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. What I remember is being blown away by the strength of his ideals and the power of his rhetoric. Not the fact that I'd finally found the solution to my gnawing racial guilt. Obama being president will do nothing to make up for slavery, segregation and ongoing racial prejudice. He will solve a lot of problems, but no one and nothing can make those wrongs of history right.


In other news, I saw the movie Brick last night. It was great--the writing reminded me of a cross between a less-profane David Mamet and a more literate Dashiell Hammett. Funny that those names rhyme. It has a lot in common, I thought, with David Lynch's willingness to look at the underbelly of wealthy suburbs, as in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.

The talent sh-Obama

Barack Obama has suffered the attacks of critics who question the substantiveness of his candidacy. The Economist pointed to his failure to present a health care plan at a forum on health care, and the Associated Press leveled a charge of being "all style." And yet, Obama seems to have lost no momentum, and has recently begun revealing key policy proposals, including a carbon cap and trade program limited to transport fuels. He's still drawing sizable crowds, including thousands in Iowa City on Earth Day.

The truth is, I doubt people around my age--people who have been so energized by Obama's candidacy--are concerned about charges of his lack of experience. We grew up during the internet, the Silicon Valley boom, when talented people of all walks of life with little or now experience with computers were flocking to California to join in. I have seen classmates with degrees in Art History and English land jobs at top investment banks and consulting firms. We have been told that in the new economy, where America's manufacturing strength has been gutted, America's comparative advantage lies in a vaguely defined ability to create a talented workforce who can become managers of global capital flows. (I'm skeptical, but I hope it's true because I'd hate to see some Indian management consulting firm start doing my job for half the money.)

The point is, in Obama we see someone long on talent and idealism, and we're willing to trust that raw talent to guide the country. It's a refreshing change from having a dolt and his gang of cynical and corrupt backroom dealers in charge. Who knows--maybe Obama's so-called substance shortfall is illusory. But even if it's real, my generation--and the one older than us, too--have been conditioned to value talent, trusting that Obama will study up and has the capacity to become a policy wonk. I don't want him cramming for the exam, so to speak, and would like to see some solid policy proposals sooner than later. But I don't think the style-not-substance attcks will have legs with core Obama supporters, as long as young Americans trust Obama's style to be riding on a hefty dose of talent.

Plus Obama has the best logo.

The Berkshires

It smelled like woodsmoke and spring. We took no pictures of the old graveyard, or the inn in front of it. I woke up at 3am and thought I heard a ghost in the attic. And, we went hiking.

Corporations did not evolve

At the 3:30 mark, Rep. Barney Frank, in arguing for the recently passed act giving shareholders the right to have a (non-binding) say on executive compensation, responds to a Republican's claim that the government has no right to regulate corporations in this way. As Frank says: "God made no corporations. No corporations evolved--I'll be neutral on that subject." Corporations, as he claims, are artifices of positive law, given special priveleges by the government. Therefore, the government has the power to regulate them.

I had a similar argument in mind during a discussion that took place in my State and Society class at the Yale School of Management. In the course of discussion about a Merck case and an exhibit that showed pharmaceutical companies' return on equity averaging around twice that of the average industry, I claimed that that level of return was socially suboptimal. If we could achieve the same quality while the pharmaceutical companies received lower profits, most all of us would be better off. Certainly the risks of the pharmaceutical industry justified higher profits, I said, but a risk-premium of 100%? Unlikely.

My professor responded with: "First, I want to congratulate you on your astute analysis ... but you're a communist." Apparently, to argue that the government--whose regulations guarantee the pharmaceutical industry high profits, thanks to the FDA drug approval process, and, more importantly, patent laws--could alter those regulations to enhance competition and reduce profits makes me a communist. I'm not arguing for government ownership of ... anything. I'm arguing that the pharmaceutical companies, granted legal monopolies over molecules by the government, make fewer, or no, economic profits. Let them have profits--let the best companies succeed and earn their shareholders an above-average market return. But don't let an entire industry earn exorbitant profits at the expense of the we whom the government is entr

Econo-messed up

When I was a junior in college, on the first day of Game Theory class, our professor had the class run through a prisoner's dilemma. We were all to imagine that our grade for the class would be determined by this one exercise, in which we write either an alpha or a beta (beeeeta, in his English accent) on a piece of paper. We would then be randomly paired with another student. If we had both put alpha, we'd get B's. If we had both written beta, we'd be rewarded with B+'s. However, if one of us put alpha and the other beta, the one who wrote alpha would be rewarded with an A, and the one who wrote beta would be punished with a C. Thus the prisoner's dilemma--everyone wants to get a B+, but no one wants to risk getting a C, and everyone, by the logic of game theory, should write alpha.

I, of course, being far too moral and upstanding for my own good, wrote beta, and it turned out that around 40% of my classmates did as well. The rest were alpha-writing bastards.

Having taken the class and learned my lesson, I got the chance to do the same exercise with the same professor, only this time at business school (very Boy Meets World). This time, I wrote alpha, and got to explain to everyone else in the class why it was the "strictly dominant" strategy. Afterwards, I thought a lot about the fact that the ethical rightness or wrongness of the options hadn't changed, but my beliefs about what was normatively right had. My moral calculus, unchanged, had now been outweighed by a weightier economic, or utilitarian, calculus--I had been taught that cooperation gets punished, and rightly so, since it's "strictly dominated."

Fast forward to the release of the Yale School of Managements magazine Q(n) and this essay by Jim Barron, which casually mentions some research that has shown that studying economics makes a person less likely to cooperate. The study can be found here, and among its findings are:

1. Economists donate less to charity than predicted by their incomes;
2. Even one semester of economics will teach you the costs of being honest, and make you less likely to be so;
3. And, the smoking gun, given a prisoner's dilemma situation akin to the one I faced, graduate students of economics are about 1.5x more likely to defect than the average college student.

So there it is--economists are bastards. Going back to Jim Barron's point, though, anyone who studies economics is likely to start behaving as if the precepts of utility maximization are widely-heald determinants of behavior. They are--among economists, and MBA students. Most other people value things like cooperation, doing the right thing, being good.

This is why it's so frustrating that there isn't a required ethics class as part of the core curriculum at SOM. We're all getting exposed to these potentially corrosive concepts without the countervailing weight of normative ethics. Utility (profit) maximization is not the be all and end all of decision-making. Without ethics in the curriculum, when an ethical question comes up, there tends to be a lot of hand-waving and gesturing--"Shouldn't we worry about this?"--but there isn't any sense that there are good, rational ways to deal with ethical dilemmas. There are, and I'd been exposed to them before I took Game Theory. Perhaps that's why I was so willing to play the strictly dominated strategy of cooperation.

Anti-gravity?

So what if I'm a huge nerd who likes speculative scientific findings. This report from NewScientist last November discusses findings from some European scientists funded by the European Space Agency that spinning superconductors twist space-time in a manner 17x more powerfully than predicted by Einstein. So what you ask? Here's the money paragraph from NewScientist (i.e. the only paragraph I truly understood):

The results could be out in a year or so. If they are positive, it puts the technology of science fiction on the horizon. Levitating cars, zero-g playgrounds, tractor beams to pull objects towards you, glassless windows that use repulsive fields to prevent things passing through. Let your imagination run riot: a gravitomagnetic device that works by changing the acceleration and orientation of a superconductor would be the basis for a general-purpose force field.

So far, there's nothing I could find that confirms the work done by these Europeans, but if you want to read some crazy conspiracy theories and reports of a gravitomagnetic device that "punches through brick walls" you can go here.

Despite all the sci-fi fanboy fantasy, there is some real science behind this, as demonstrated by Gravity Probe B, now orbiting the earth. Early results show that Einstein's predicted gravitomagnetic effect exists. The question, can it be effectively amplified by superconductors, and, furthermore, when are they going to put spinning superconductors in my sneakers?

UPDATE: In thinking about this, I remembered this story from the Chicago Tribune about the airline workers who claimed to have seen a UFO that left an "eerie hole in overcast skies." I'm no physicist, but that hole would be consistent with a directed gravitational force that acts on anything with mass, like water vapor. Spooooky.

Much Badiou about nothing

From a Monday post at Talking Points Memo:

[T]here’s one aspect of this story that seems to have attracted no editorial mention or public interest. Implicit in all the coverage is the assumption—by Democrats and Republicans alike—that the Attorney General is going up to Capitol Hill to lie. As far as I can tell, this is a universal assumption. The Republicans are rooting for Mr. Gonzales to be successful in his perjury, to tell a coherent story that his enemies cannot break down. The Democrats are rooting the other way, off course. They’re hoping that their ace interrogators will be able to shoot enough holes in Mr. Gonzales’ story that they can destroy his credibility. But nobody seems to find it shocking or tragic that the Attorney General of the United States is going to lie to congress. . . . I’m sure that if Gonzales makes it through his testimony without being totally discredited, Fred Barnes and Brit Hume will be all over Fox news boasting that the Senators “never laid a glove on him.” But no one seems the least bit concerned about his truthfulness, just his tactics. . . .

This seems largely true to me, but it doesn't take even a casual observer long to recall other examples of thoughtlessly accepted lying in the realm of politics. Useful, though, that this one is so obvious and so especially egregious--when the sitting defender of justice is expected to lie for political gain. Justice is concerned with nothing if not the truth, and there need be no better evidence for the politicization of the Justice Department than the fact that the Attorney General cannot tell the truth because of his own political machinations.

Alain Badiou, the contemporary French philosopher, would argue that any notion of politics that allows such baldfaced lying is sick. Badiou wants to align politics, justice and, most importantly, the truth, so that politics is always a "truth process"--a way of discovering and fighting for the core truth of a situation. He has something interesting to say about the emptiness of American politics:

The antinomy of truth and debate is a bad joke. Except, of course, if one deems it necessary to assert special rights for falsity and for lying. In this case, it would instead be necessary to say the following: debate, which confers rights without norms upon falsity and lying, constitutes the very essence of politics. But what Revault d’Allones calls ‘the courage of judgement’ is more like the laziness of those who are sheltered from every norm and see their errors or their lies protected by right (Metapolitics 14-5).

To put it simply, Badiou argues that a culture of political debate that protects liars and does nothing to condemn them (as evidenced by the crowing of Fox News commentators) is one in which political debate will never yield the truth. Watching the talking heads on the news, and this seems so right; they are not seeking the truth, they are seeking nothing, and they are surrounding it with hand-waving and yammering to keep all of us watching.

Welcome

Here be it all.