The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Play Ball (Better Luck Next Year)

    By PeraclesPlease on Sat, 01/21/2017 - 1:21pm | Arts & Entertainment, Politics, Sports, Technology

    1) Focus on things that make a difference - ignore the chatter and buzz, the click-bait and easy gotchas - they just chip away at time. Baseball announcers have to fill a lot of dead air, so can talk about anything from root canals and outboard motors and somehow connect it to the game. My mother called it "diarrhea of the mouth", but in baseball circles they call it "a good living" or "Harry Carey", depending.

    2) Time is money, money is time, and we don't have enough of either. Stop the class warfare over money - money largely wins elections and ball games. Everyone says the players are overpaid, but they still buy tickets and fill the stadium. Care about values, cultivate rich ethical friends, fast track the road to wins.

    (Jesus corollary: as the poor will be with us always, so will the rich and glamorous and obnoxious. Deal with it).

    3) Watch Moneyball, take away key points: a) adapt or die, b) you're not out to replace a player - you're out to buy scores and wins, c) the competition will copy your successful techniques if allowed, d) don't trust the polls - do your own analytics.

    PS - argue about candidate values and flaws and street-cred *after* you win the pennant - until then, make lemonade: get up earlier, hustle after grounders, and don't confuse being a player with being a commentator.

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    Arts & Entertainment
    Politics
    Sports
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    Did we give up? (when the Germans attacked Pearl Harbor)

    By PeraclesPlease on Fri, 01/20/2017 - 9:13pm | Politics, Potpourri

    An old yogi asked me once, "is the purpose of suffering to suffer?", presumably to mean it's to learn, as a way to avoid suffering. He continued, "the baby poops its diaper - do you put a flower in it? No, of course you don't put a flower in it - you clean the diaper".

    Yes, to stay on this road is to kill ourselves, spiritually, psychically, maybe if lucky even physically. Gurdjieff talked about a man enthralled with this most beautiful fruit he'd discovered, so much he couldn't put it down, even though the red peppers were killing him. Yes, we as a party and a people do love to hear ourselves talk.

    28 years ago, the Berlin wall came down, freeing millions behind the Iron Curtain soon followed by apartheid crumbling in South Africa and then the Soviet Union itself. The US responded as it usually does, put on its suit, grabbed its briefcase, went out to try to sell these people something - computers, fertilizer, cars, deodorant, stuff. Plenty of stuff.

    Topics: 
    Politics
    Potpourri
    Michael Maiello's picture

    Donald J. Trump: Beyond the Thunderdome

    By Michael Maiello on Fri, 01/20/2017 - 2:20pm | Politics

    I guess I missed it, somehow... the ruination of America, the collapse of society, the onset of post-history.  I thought Donald Trump didn't read much and was not a reflective man, but he does seem have to a taste for Cormac McCarthy:

    Topics: 
    Politics
    Danny Cardwell's picture

    Diane Nash: Still Fighting

    By Danny Cardwell on Tue, 01/17/2017 - 11:17pm | Social Justice

    In an era where the left seems more occupied with being right about their technocratic arguments than engaging meaningful causes related to life and death, it was refreshing to travel from my little corner of the Confederacy amid the throngs of Confederate flags and Trump Minions to meet someone who risked it all. Diane Nash's humility was the only thing that topped her quick wit and intellect. She wrote her will at 19! To put that in context, most of the new left (some twice her age then) won't stand up to their boss and ask for a raise. The new left expects people to follow them into battles over the environment or trade deals,but then turn their back when it comes time to address police brutality and our fraudulent criminal justice system.

    Topics: 
    Social Justice
    Danny Cardwell's picture

    No Negotiations Without Preconditions

    By Danny Cardwell on Tue, 01/17/2017 - 4:46pm | Politics

    No Black person with a prominent platform should meet with Donald Trump or representatives from the Trump administration without preconditions. The United States government has a long-standing policy of setting preconditions for negotiating with hostile state actors. This is a policy Black America should employ as we move into the age of Trumpism. The duplicitous nature of Donald Trump’s rhetoric has damaged any credibility his words have. If he’s serious about his outreach efforts (something I doubt) his next move needs to be his best move. The CDC and Pfizer couldn’t make a panacea capable of eradicating his past racial transgressions, or the racially insensitive attacks on Barack Obama, but taking some bold steps in the right direction would be a good start to open the space for future negotiations.

    Topics: 
    Politics
    Doctor Cleveland's picture

    Barack Obama, American Stoic

    By Doctor Cleveland on Mon, 01/16/2017 - 6:41pm | Politics

    If the Founding Fathers had a chance to meet Barack Obama, they would of course be shocked. Even the most enlightened of them were not prepared to imagine an African-American President. And what they would think about his policies is anyone's guess: the Founders' political philosophies were shaped by their political environments, and they wouldn't fit easily into today's debates.

    Topics: 
    Politics

    Fuck Da Noize

    By PeraclesPlease on Mon, 01/16/2017 - 2:16am | Personal, Politics

    Yesterday a female CEO/glorified saleswoman "broke LinkedIn"** with a potty-mouth post to blatantly flog her not-so-in-demand and rather niche/regional product. Predictably it got a lot of reads, attention, comments, and a predictable followup post - basically, "so I said fuck, get over it".

    LinkedIn will undoubtedly not "get over it", but *will* absorb the change and suffer another hit to its already waning fortunes as professional-network-turned-Facebook, anticipating the day where it becomes MySpace (read: past tense).

    But the noise is instructive. She did what many insurrectionists will do - drive the bus straight into the wall and laugh about it. The famed article "The Tragedy of the Commons" was based more on shared markets being damaged by neglect, less cared for than private spaces - Adam Smith's non-benign one-handed twin.

    Here the noise is not just the uproar - it's also the cognitive dissonance - the "you can't do that" feeling that destroys our confidence and basic precepts, violates our now (epi-?)genetically encoded values system - taking the last cookie without asking, crossing the street on red, etc., etc.

    Topics: 
    Personal
    Politics
    Michael Maiello's picture

    The Actual Reason Markets Do Not Work In Healthcare is... Pain!

    By Michael Maiello on Fri, 01/13/2017 - 1:41pm | Politics

    Today, David Brooks asks whether or not markets function well in the American health care system and he seems to think that, when it doesn't, it's largely because health care providers know so much more about health and wellbeing than health care consumers:

    Topics: 
    Politics

    Was Comey Blackmailed?

    By PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/12/2017 - 4:02pm | Politics, World Affairs

    The most obvious question, yet no one's asking it.

    It's not like he didn't know the rules. And it was a complete nothing-burger.

    Did Putin get to Jimmy? Enquiring minds want to know.

    Discuss.

    Topics: 
    Politics
    World Affairs

    Bayesic Instinct

    By PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/11/2017 - 5:52pm | Technology

    Towards the late days of October, Huffpost's lead pollster started releasing polls claiming greater than 90% probability of a win, explicitly challenging Nate Silver of 538 and his "conservativism" or even manipulating the data. One commenter noted, "we'll know after Nov 8". It was all too funny and surreal, like a guy saying he knows all about carpentry and grasping the hammer head and nailing with the handle.

    No, you can't "know" anything from a single outcome, unless you predicted 100% that it wouldn't happen - that your certain hypothesis was refuted. Otherwise, you're simply left with false confidence in 1 data point - unless you bothered to research your outcome.

    As background, I'm pretty awful in probabilityand statistics - having the basics of dice permutations down, and getting the math of certain cross-correlations in dependent events, and doing enough damage in trying to model stochastic processes. But mostly I done forgot.

    But even if I hadn't, it might not matter. Just as the field of linguistics is going through a phase of rough and tumble re-evaluation after 30-40 years of certainty centered around Chomsky, probability and data analysis is getting an upgrade - perhaps not changing the science, but more how people use it as an art.

    In trying to make some sense from this awful year and a half, and draw some usable lessons from it (rather than another set of kneejerk platitudes and I-told-you-soes, I'm digging into both psychology and analytics in the new year to get some different insights - angles I wouldn't have thought of before.

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