Lies, damned lies, and NRA commercials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGOQFf9VCE

This is the National Rifle Association's new ad. Unfortunately, it's worth watching. It doesn't quite urge viewers to use guns to kill liberals, but it's so close. "They" {accusing me and many of you} "use their media to assassinate truth. They use their schools to teach children that our president is another Hitler... they use their ex-president to endorse The Resistance, all to make them march... to scream 'racism' and 'sexism' and 'xenophobia' and 'homophobia', to smash windows, burn cars,

#397: Atom & His Package, "If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're a Cock" (2001)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgwx_hBqxzo

To avoid redundancy, I'll get this song's politics out of the way quickly. Adam (Atom) Goren doesn't think "Redskins" is an appropriate name for a sports team. I agree. In case you're not sure you do, I recently argued in detail that it matters how we represent people of different races in stories, even if there's no immediate and direct harm done. Sports is all about the stories that unfold. "Redskins" is widely perceived as a racist name, racism is bad, and there's no equally good competing reason to use the racist name. "Political Correctness" is only an attempt to rename "Trying Not to Be a Dickhead" so it sounds scary.

The above paragraph is not one of the 425 best songs of all time. Yes, yes, I also recently argued that there's no such thing as objective rankings of music. The above paragraph is still not one of the 425 best songs of all time. So let's talk about Atom, his synthesizer (or "package"), his guitar, and his songwriting.

Framed by Roger Rabid

As we mourn the loss of Roger Rabid, longtime Fox News empire-builder, we may find his achievements easy to under-estimate, because they have been so often imitated since. But his creation -- a news network that freely mixed live-action humans with sketched 2-dimensional heroes, villains, and foils, subject either to reality's rules or cartoon logic as the plot dictated -- was at the time innovative, and a technical marvel.

My favorite of his lines comes from the scene were Roger and Slick Willie have been handcuffed to an enormous national debt for eight years, and suddenly Roger slips free. "You mean you could've freed our actions from the debt at any time???", a stunned Willie inquires. Roger shakes his head, and as he struts away, leaving Willie trapped, he explains "No, not at any time. Only when it helped rich people".

#405: the New Seekers, "Free to Be You and Me" (1972)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mU8gDKN5sE

If "Free to Be You and Me" were a brand new folk song, I have no idea what I would think of it. Maybe I'd be a fan. It's jolly and bops along at a pleasant pace; the group vocal harmonies, male and female and young-sounding, are nicely done; the banjo is Kermit-esque, and judging by the fact that I no longer own my Bela Fleck & the Flecktones album, being extremely talented at the banjo is a much less effective path to my heart than playing it like you're a green felt puppet.

The lyrics are ... uncomplicated. "There's a land that I see/ where the children are free/ and I say it ain't far/ to this land from where we are". Now, it's a children's song, but my kids have never shown much interest in children's music, so I'd probably fail to adjust much for that. It's also direct enough to be a national anthem, were it interested in anything as artificial as nations, but there are no national anthems in my countdown. It could also strike me as hippie-dippy sloganeering, and I could start parodying it almost without noticing ("There's a shop that's very nice/ where the children are half-price....", perhaps, or modifying "Take my hand, come along/ Lend your voice to my song" into "Use the wi-fi on the street/ give a share to my tweet").

Left tenant Sanders

I discovered the other day that it's still easy to annoy me, 3+ months into Donald Trump's presidency, by saying "Bernie Sanders would have won". Or at least by saying it really condescendingly; I might react better if it were said in other ways, but it doesn't appear I'll find out. The first problem with this claim is, of course, that we'll never know; our reality lends itself poorly to controlled tests involving experimental Earth and control Earth. But the other problem is that I *believe* the claim to be preposterously wrong. I think Bernie would have been crushed, solidly losing the popular as well as the electoral vote. Since my own politics are by American standards far left and anti-corporate, and basically share Sanders's goals, I think this delusion is harmful.

The case for "Bernie would have won" is, I admit, simple.

#411: Queensryche, "Revolution Calling" (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdOsL4Xe7Q

In high school, tales of dystopia are oddly thrilling. We're shown a dictatorial world in which teens are forced to memorize official fictions and have few choices over the content of their lives, and we get to pretend this is escapist fiction, full of heroic resistance, instead of our daily routine. (I suspect dystopia becomes a more and more attractive theme the more assigned homework a given student completes.) These days dystopias dominate Young Adult novels (the Hunger Games and Divergent and the Giver and Chaos Walking and Maze Runner series, and on, and on), and get turned into hit movies as often as not. In 1988, we mostly just had Aldous Huxley and George Orwell -- winning us over through sheer persuasive brilliance in the absence of targeted marketing. Joined, occasionally, by a rock band taking inspiration from them.

Cooked fish: the quiet tyranny

At Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's favorite of the private clubs he owns, government safety inspectors discovered that fish intended to be served raw wasn't being inspected for parasites; that chicken, duck, beef, and ham were being dangerously stored at temperatures of 49 to 57 degrees F; and that the kitchen staff weren't washing their hands in a way that would sterilize germs. They learned this days before he was going to host Japan's Prime Minister there.

Trump, like any of the other Republican candidates would have (and like the Republican congress has repeatedly voted to do), is dramatically slashing the number of government safety inspectors, and attempting to repeal many safety regulations altogether.

Yes, but can we stand United?

I have Facebook friends linking an article about how what's wrong with the United Airlines incident is what's wrong with America. As anti-corporate as I am, my first inclination was to disagree here. It refers to a case in which United Airlines realized it needed space on a passenger flight in order to emergency-transport its own employees; offered $800 plus a free room at a nice hotel to anyone who volunteered to be moved to a flight the next afternoon; then, when no one accepted, it called in police force to eject randomly-chosen passengers (including a surgeon who had an operation to do the next morning).

My immediate feeling is that while the resort to police is a problem, I've been

Ugh jobs at good wages

Whatever we think of the Trump Administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, it bothers me to see immigrants on farms praised for doing "work Americans won't do". That phrase is an evasive way of saying "Work that plenty of Americans will do, quite eagerly, *if* you pay enough".

Is the farm work that illegal immigrants do unpleasant, exhausting, health-damaging, and low-status? Absolutely -- even Stephen Colbert has tried it and vouched in person. I bet it's even worse than working at an Amazon.com warehouse (although worse in degree, not kind). All of those are great reasons not to take work.

On the other hand,

ObamaCare, RepubliCare

A quick note on language and U.S. health care: "TrumpCare" is a TERRIBLE name for the Republican Party's health care "plan" (which at best will deprive 15-20 million Americans of functional health care, or even 26 million, and at worst end the individual health insurance market altogether). Please don't use it. The shorthand has to be "RepubliCare".

Donald Trump doesn't know or care about health care legislation -- RepubliCare is a creation of the Republican Party. Which doesn't care about it either, except the fact that it'll repeal the tax increases on the rich that Obama's Affordable Care Act put in place. Trump is a figurehead, and one who might be gone in a couple years anyway. The party that made him powerful is the toxicity's source, and it's high time they started being called on it.

**********
When I posted the above on Facebook, I got a lot of support, but some inclination to offer alternative names. Unfortunately, as lovely as individual opinions are in almost any context, politics rewards unified messages, and all the alternatives, while better than "TrumpCare", are worse than "RepubliCare":

Keeping warped minutes: on Popular Crime by Bill James

While this review will be unwieldy — I'm not sure I've ever reviewed something about which I had so many conflicted things to say — and parts of it will be negative, my basic attitude towards Bill James’s 2011 book Popular Crime is enthusiasm. It is fascinating, insightful, and fun. I recommend it highly.

It is not an easy book to summarize, and later I will take my time helping you through its odd structure. But to start with samples of its topics, my favorite sections include the ones where Bill James, who made Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in 2006, argues

* that Lizzy Borden was innocent (she never took an ax and gave her father forty whacks);
* that John F. Kennedy was accidentally killed by a Secret Service agent who was flustered by Oswald’s shots;
* that Sam Sheppard, the kindly doctor-on-the-run who inspired the TV series the Fugitive, in fact hired and collaborated with the killer of his wife;
* and that JonBenet Ramsey’s parents were definitely innocent of her killing, and likely framed by an intruder deliberately trying to ruin the dad’s life.

That would seem an immodest project already, perhaps. More ambitiously, and to varying degrees of success, James

Turing the White House

I'm seeing tweets of people doubting -- and this really shows you how the dishonest left in this country treats a sitting president, a popular president -- doubting if I could pass a Turing Test. Now maybe you've heard about the, look, the mainstream liberal media reports the Turing Test all wrong, for one thing. Alan Turing, brilliant man, a heroic veteran, one of the first computer scientists; I had an uncle who was a computer scientist, very smart, one of the smartest, met Turing, had deals with Turing, I have nothing but good things to say about him, but the Turing Test was about men and women. That's what they don't tell you.

Small is de-uglified: on how to dramatically improve the U.S. prison system

From pages 425 to 435 of Bill James’s sprawling, unpredictable (but brilliant) book Popular Crime, James outlines a dramatic reform of the prison system that is, in my opinion, exactly correct.

It would be a huge step forward: in terms of crime reduction, fear-of-crime reduction (not at all the same thing), in-prison behavior, and the integration of former criminals into society. I say that as a guy who’s come up with dramatic prison-reform schemes of my own, purely as a hobby, btw (my profession is teaching): his scheme is better than mine ever were. Because my forthcoming review is struggling not to be as sprawling and unwieldy as the original book, I’ve decided to write up his proposal here.

In very short form:

Walking through paradise: the best music of 2016, part two

(Continued from part one. The list is immediately followed by actual writing/ blogging, I promise.)

Single of the Year
1. Regina Spektor, “the Trapper and the Furrier”
2. Shearwater, “Quiet Americans”
3. Esperanza Spalding, “Good Lava”
4. Saul Williams, “Burundi”
5. Aesop Rock, “Blood Sandwich”
6. Xenia Rubinos, “Mexican Chef”
7. Deerhoof, “Criminals of the Dream”
8. Anderson / Stolt, “Knowing”
9. Emma Pollock, “Dark Skies”
10. Anna Meredith, “Taken”

Single honorable mention(s)
Aesop Rock, “Dorks”
Aesop Rock, “Rings”
Beyonce, “Formation”
Birdeatsbaby, “Mary”
Blackpink, “Whistle”
David Bowie, “I Can’t Give Everything Away”
Dear Hunter, "Gloria"
Death Grips, “Giving Bad People Good Ideas”
Dowling Poole, “Rebecca Receiving”
Everything Everything, “Distant Past”
Field Music, “the Noisy Days are Over”
4Minute, “Hate”
Jesus Jones, “How’s This Even Going Down?”
Julie Ruin, “Mr. So-and-So”
King Gizzard + the Lizard Wizard, “Robot Stop”
Knifeworld, “High / Aflame”
Let’s Eat Grandma, “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms”
Marching Church, “Heart of Life”
Melt Yourself Down, “Jump the Fire”
Momus, “Fuck This Year”
New Model Army, “Devil”
Overlord, “Mission to Mars”
Sleigh Bells, “I Can Only Stare”
Esperanza Spalding, “Unconditional Love”
Regina Spektor, “Small Bills”
Kate Tempest, “Europe is Lost”
Tribe Called Quest, “We the People”
Kanye West, “Ultralight Beam”
Jane Zhang, “Dust My Shoulders Off”





Regina Spektor emerged this year as one of our great protest songwriters. The “protest” is surprising. “Great” shouldn’t be, yet