Why Taxes Matter

A touching piece by Andrew Leonard at Salon on his experience with firefighters:

And so the bullshit battle rages! Far too often, we’re forgetting what our public servants do. All I can think about, right now, is that even while risking his or her life to beat back the flames, a Berkeley firefighter took time out to make my daughter smile.

That firefighter deserves a raise. Put it on my next ballot, please.

I’m with that.

And, by the way, the 100 Dayers are at full throttle. Their Facebook group is called 100 Days of Summer.

The Angel’s Game

Just finished Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Angel’s Game. David Martin, a novelist, is tasked with inventing a religion by the strange and shadowy Andreas Corelli, a figure about which no one else can seem to find evidence of existence. I try to avoid stories with writers as the central character, but this is a fun, gothic novel with a relentlessness to the plot, drawing from patterns of “gothic horror” fiction. The twists become a little tortured in their over intricacy and the epilogue was a piece of the puzzle that didn’t really work for me, as the subject seemed out-of-world. But it was great fun anyway.

Researching Drug Policy and the Problem of Dumb College Writing Assignments

Last week I gave my writing students the assignment to research Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s drug policies just for kicks and to do some compare and contrast. We’re writing about the subject with Global Commission on Drug Policy’s Report as a base text. I knew what I was getting myself into on this assignment, but I threw it out there anyway (with some need to explain to some students who Mitt Romney was).

When the time came, I asked, “So, tell me what you found?”

They had all kinds of material from Obama. There’s lots of substance on the website and elsewhere. Most of the students (some of the students didn’t bother) claimed they could find nothing on a Romney position, other than a general “against legalization for medical purposes.” You know, of “pot.”

In our media age, readers and researchers would think that positions would be fairly well drafted out and easy to find. The Romney official website is general on most topics. It’s difficult to do fact-based analysis without clarity and specifics. That’s one of the elements I’m trying to teach.

On Learning Curves, Education, and Creativity

I’ve been troubling over a couple of picking patterns from The Painter and a few items by John Denver, little intricate patterns that are somewhat mind bending.

I also live In West Simsbury, which, in Census parlance, is a CPD (a census designated place) of the town of Simsbury, Connecticut (median income over 100k). We have the good fortune in this town of having a high quality of life. It’s a town loaded with professionals, a high ratio of people with higher education degrees, marvelous trees, and a decent school system.

Today, we attended my son’s Rock Camp concert at Martocchio’s Music, an outfit that runs music lessons year round and offers camps in rock and jazz music. The musicians are all kids of various levels, mostly who take lessons throughout the year, like my son. And they’re all fantastic, from the drummers to the guitar players. They’re also surpassingly creative, belting out tunes and inventing their own within a week. These camps are the result of lots of human commitment.

A few years ago we also attended a musical at the local high school and the performance values pretty much blew me away. I remember having conversations with my wife about this show: “They could take that on the road,” I said, or something pretty close. This was not the tones of a novice at the violin or clarinet.

Now to some conceptual arithmetic. In life across the country, we typically parse out the year by the school schedule. In our incrementalism, we lose sight of the fact that a lost year can never be recovered, no matter what a standardized test may say.

I’ve always wanted to learn to play guitar, but the fact of the matter is that learning difficult things becomes more difficult with age. I noted the degree to which students at Rock Camp have developed their skills early. My own friend at the guitar, Timmons, told me, yes, it’s hard, that’s why you start early.

We often forget in our decision making about school and culture the very lives were dealing with. Watching Moonlight Empire tonight brought back to my mind the often mysterious glances we give to children whom we often neglect in our credits and in our obsession with mass performance data.

Styles of Bad Reporting: CBS and Weird Journalism

Last night we watched a report by CBS news on the ALEC organization. It’s called Who is ALEC? It’s a good example of how not to do a report on an organization that is objectively controversial and that has seen lots of reportage in other news organs, most of it critical, which is the real news.

The first mistake is that the report doesn’t even talk to ALEC. It interviews Chip Rogers, a Senator from Georgia, who’s obviously a supporter of the organization.

We sat down with Rogers this week for an interview on the floor of the Georgia State Senate, where he is Republican majority leader, to find out what ALEC is really about.

This is a title fumble and a bizarre decision by CBS. How would this logic go: Let’s find out who ALEC is, go to Chip Rogers, he’ll know. He’ll give us the “real skinny.” Pardon my snideness, but what were the editorial and production decisions here? If CBS wanted to know about ALEC, they could have gone to the web site and read the About page. Instead, the interview descended to classic propaganda. CBS could have included at least one critic for the purposes of counter point.

In any event, here’s an extract on the question of Who ALEC IS:

“They look at us and say, ‘Hey, here are the legislators that believe in free markets; here are the legislators that believe in limited government,'” Rogers said. “It really is a shame that companies have to continually look over their shoulders to protect themselves from an onerous government.”

ALEC member companies are a Who’s Who of the Fortune 500: tobacco giants Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris) and Reynolds American; telecommunications leaders AT&T and Verizon; energy conglomerates ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Koch Industries; big pharmaceutical firms Bayer and Pfizer; State Farm insurance and United Parcel Service. None of the companies on ALEC’s corporate board would grant us an interview.

What ALEC does for legislators is create model bills mostly on fiscal issues that are templates for 800 to 1,000 bills introduced in the 50 state legislatures every year. ALEC has claimed to members that 20 percent [of] its bills become laws.

All kinds of weird and news worthy conclusions can be drawn from this lift. The Senator: 1) thinks he’s “onerous.” 2) ALEC is his ghost writer 3) ALEC writes 20% of the law. Additionally, consider this quote:

But at least 20 companies cut ties with ALEC this year after it had drifted into non-economic issues such as “stand your ground” self-defense laws and strict photo voter identification laws.

The report never defines what it means by “drifted into” and fails to follow it’s own logic in this quote:

ALEC had no role implementing the stand your ground law in Florida, where teenager Trayvon Martin was allegedly shot by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who has asserted a “stand your ground” defense. But ALEC did create a similar model bill after Florida’s law.

The report makes no effort to explain the final sentence.

One final note. I think it’s perfectly fine for reporters to ask questions that test a person’s logical points. In this next quote, the interviewer makes no attempt to do this in an illogical response to a question about voter IDs.

“Simply telling the person who is taking your vote who you are is not much of a burden, and at the end of the day, if you’re allowing one person to vote illegally, you’ve just cancelled out my vote,” Rogers said. “It’s really common sense – if you are going to vote, tell us who you are.”

Voter ID was an issue that led Wal-Mart to quit ALEC, telling the group in a letter it had weighed in “on issues that stray from its core mission.” In a statement to CBS News, Wal-Mart mentioned its support of the Voting Rights Act and the company’s efforts to help employees register to vote.

Rogers addressed Wal-Mart’s concern head on: “If I were to go to Wal-Mart, and I were to attempt to buy a bottle a beer, I would assume that Wal-Mart would ask me for identification. If not, they could lose their license to sell that product. I would hope that most Americans cherish the right to vote a little more than they do the right to buy a bottle of beer. So, I think it is a little disingenuous on Wal-Mart’s part in that they’re actively engaged in indentifying people using photo ID to suggest that is a reason they no longer want to be actively engaged with ALEC.”

The Senator is jumping to the conclusion that a voter who has come to the precinct is an illegal voter. On what cause? Where’s the evidence? Voter ID’s aside, the reporter could have asked Senator Rogers why he thinks his analogy is sound, legally and functionally. Maybe everyone could “register to purchase alcohol.” Even I hadn’t thought of that.

CBS should do some serious thinking about editing. This is incompetent.

Older Storms and Thoughts on the Weather

Images streaming from mid-Atlantic states are pretty familiar to people in my “neck of the woods.” Drop a little snow, drop the degrees by about 70, and the images are virtually the same. Similar are the collective amounts of outages because we have yet to commit to innovating our systems. We were out of power for ten days here in October of 2011, and the community lit up with incredible communitarian efforts. I’m hearing stories of the neighbors coming together and the same sort of arguments about energy. At one point, virtually all of CT was out of power and Vermont turned into a land of mud. I sympathize and send my hopes for improvements and fixes.

Perhaps this and the coming storms will get us putting our heads together rather than banging them against brick walls.

Patterns on the Subject of the Guitar

I’ve finally have a handle on a few things guitar related. Again, I’ve teaching myself the instrument. The result: I can play a few classical pieces at the level of a third grade Spanish language lesson, like programming a hello world set of commands or a simple calculator with basic operators. I can play the notes but not the music, which is the goal. I also have a handle on some Celtic rhythms and styles, like reels.

The handles are specific to 1) Travis picking and 2) strumming, all of which demand not just the fingering and wristing of patterns but learning to hear them in relation to the body parts.

I’m pressing on the notion of 8 beats per bar as a common grammar. In strumming, certain beats of the eight beat bar are simply silenced, while in Travis picking, the same thing can happen, but syncopated. Over and over and over again until things start to hurt.

The common grammar can explain different styles of music and the role of the instrument in music: in classical guitar and modern rock, the guitar is central, and the player is a “guitar hero.” In strumming, generally speaking, we have the guitar player as “role player.” The classic guitar player as Romantic hero.

On ACA, Theology, and More

I’ve been having interesting conversations via email and FB on the question of the ACA and certain theological questions, ranging from Biblical exegesis all the way to Gould. They’e been fruitful and have jogged many things out of memory.

I’ve just completed my typical readings of the Supreme Court language on the ACA and my reaction, at least at this time, is that Justice Roberts’ and the Scalia lead dissent are somewhat strange. The majority opinion and dissent appear to be talking past each other, though more on the dissent side. The dissent is particularly flavorful in its rejection of Justice’s arguments.

Their’s a chasm in this ruling. Withal, Roberts holds that

it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress’s power to tax.

He writes on page 50: “The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance.” Earlier above D, he writes:

The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax. Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.

This is one of the key logic principles:

Congress’s use of the Taxing Clause to encourage buying something is, by contrast, not new. Tax incentives already promote,for example, purchasing homes and professional educations.
See 26 U. S. C. §§163(h), 25A. Sustaining the mandate as a tax depends only on whether Congress has properly exercised its taxing power to encourage purchasing health insurance, not whether it can. Upholding the individual mandate under the Taxing Clause thus does not recognize any new federal power. It determines that Congress has used an existing one.

I can understand this in terms of renters vs homeowners. But I think this logic misses a finer point: that indeed, people who have health insurance are involved in transactions some of which contribute to those who don’t have it.

Weird Political Writing: More on the Bizarre

I caught this Fallows entry through the feeds (meaning RSS). Fallows is, I imagine, reporting on the Romney campaign. In this report he makes remarks about shit Romney does, which just seems odd as “reports from the road” genres go. We learn that Romney is taken by touch pads and talked to a doctor about changes of address, who may or may not have been exaggerating. I don’t see how this “information” makes sense.

A brief spat developed over this piece at The Daily Caller in my FB feed. It’s an example of the “irony thing” again from a Conservative organ, wherein there’s a bit missed about the definition of hypocrisy, context framing, and the ability to construct an argument not with evidence or appeals but rather with a humorless grin.

Since we can’t get a million infrastructure jobs up and running, we need something better to do, I guess.

Learning by Doing and Other Observations

When I took up the guitar a few years ago, I hardly knew what I was getting into. I’ve since gone through the tips of several pairs of shoes kicking myself for the decision. But I’ve learned a lot about learning over the course of my thousand or so hours of practice.

Because I don’t have the benefit of the typical lessons, I never know if I’m developing bad habits. This may or may not matter. One way of getting around this to to watch lots of YouTube videos. I type in the name of a song and find that the performance bears little resemblance to months and months of my learning the notes. Conclusion: learning the notes is not the same as playing the song.

The relationship between the left and right hand is partially the issue. I’m going after two modes: classical guitar and bluegrass/folk/Celtic. Conclusion 2: while folk uses a picking style, classical mode does not because of the range of polyphony possibilities on the instrument. They’re both totally cool forms, but one can’t play Sor with a pick. The modes here require different forms of math and complement the problem of notes and songs, or, perhaps better, music and copying. One can copy the notes to memory and not really play music. In classical mode, the right hand is playing simultaneous voices to a high degree of approximation. In folk, two guitars are required for this, but this has a lot to do with arrangement and, I would assume, the influence of the fiddle on scoring. I don’t know enough about this to be confident, though. But the violin is defined as monophonic, while the guitar is just as bizarre as a harp.

I struggle with the right hand, to find the proper structure of a song’s texture. These renderings of Stanley Myer’s Cavatina illustrate what I mean. The first is by Peo Kindgren. The second by Ana Vidovic. When I observe each these, I’m looking at the right hand, but not for too long as to become overwhelmed with grief at my own inadequacy. The skill here partially requires some sort of loosening up of the brain over many many years.

In any event, I’ve learned to be patient and to listen. I’ve also come to appreciate even more the significance of process in learning. For some skills, following patterns of developing–and thinking about those patterns–is critical to creative rule breaking. For example, I started to take strumming a little more seriously these past few weeks. Yesterday, I got into strumming for reel patterns and found that this is an interesting way of training the left hand to move faster, while at the same time being more precise about clipping the proper string with the right hand. The finger nails have to pluck the “noted” strings. Once this is done, the player can put some rhythm to work. Time to work on some rhythm.

Process learning. Traditions are important in this regard.