ForgottenStars.net

March 6, 2021October 3, 2021

Onward Cultural Warriors, slipping on banana peels!

In this week’s entry in Right Wing Insanity, we have…Dr. Seuss.

I shit you not. This one has been amazing in its dishonesty and stupidity all at the same time. Here’s the summary I put up on Facebook:

1. Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the private entity that owns the copyrights to Dr. Seuss’s books, makes a decision to remove six books from the market, because the books contain racist imagery typical of their time.

2. The FOX News crowd freaks out about “cancellation”, even though, once more for the people in back, this was a market decision made by a private entity. (These are the people who usually claim to love “freedom” and “the market”, but invariably lose their shit when “the market” uses its “freedom” to recognize realities they don’t like.)

Now the funny part:

3. FOX News fans buy Seuss books en masse, thinking apparently to show support for the cancellation-in-progress author, thus giving buckets of THEIR OWN MONEY to the very private entity that made the market decision in the first place.

Let’s not forget that these are the same people who think the election was stolen, that masks are useless, that climate isn’t changing, that tax cuts raise revenue, that trickle-down works, and so on.

That’s about it. “We’re so mad about this thing that we’re gonna shovel money at the people who did the thing we’re pretending to be mad about!” It’s like deciding to prank the people down the street by ordering a dozen pizzas to be delivered to their house…but paying for the pizzas with your own credit card.

And why do I say “pretending”?

Because nobody in the media, no matter what Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro or any of the other talking heads on FOX News, is actually upset by this. It’s just pretend nonsense, as cynical an attempt to whip up the base as anything I’ve ever seen. FOX News, for all its beating of the drum, won’t even show the offending images on teevee; and here you see a Republican MAGA weirdo Congressional candidate spouting a staggering amount of lying for a single tweet:

Let me get this straight.

On the right are the lyrics for Nicki Minaj’s song “Anaconda”. This song was played on mainstream radio and on YouTube with no age warning.

On the left are the words of a Dr. Seuss book.

Joe Biden only considers the Dr. Seuss book inappropriate.

WOW! pic.twitter.com/byYEMjpbFB

— Chris Bish 🇺🇲 (@BishForCongress) March 3, 2021

Note that Ms. Bish is pretending that some cherry-picked random thing from Dr. Seuss is what is actually the issue, and also note her mention of President Biden as if he has the first thing to do with any of this. Hey, Ms. Bish! Want to show the offending pictures of African or Chinese people, and tell us why you think they’re perfectly fine? No? Didn’t think so.

The rubes have got to stop falling for this shit, and what’s more, it would be helpful if they’d start to ask themselves: If they’re being this dishonest in trying to fire me up, what else are they lying through their teeth about? That, friends, would be a far more profitable rabbit hole to explore than whatever nonsense the QAnon people are floating on any given day.

Comments closed on this post.

Share This Post

March 4, 2021October 3, 2021

The end of the tunnel is coming into view….

When I fill this up, do I get a free Buffalo chicken finger sub?

Share This Post

March 3, 2021October 3, 2021

Tone Poem Tuesday

Florence Price, who was one of my major musical discoveries (maybe “revelations” is a better term?) of 2020, wrote this wonderful String Quartet in G Major in 1929, and…that’s just about all the information I can find about it. It’s worth remembering that some of Price’s music was lost after her death, and more would have remained forgotten had a cache of her papers and manuscripts not been found in a dilapidated house in Illinois many years after her passing.

This quartet opens with a beautifully lyrical allegro, sunny and cheerful. But it’s the second movement where the quartet really shines: combining a slow tune that is redolent of old spirituals with a more bouncy section that’s almost jazzlike, it’s in the second movement that you can really feel Price’s Black heritage.

This is the website for Laena Batchelder, that quartet’s lead violinist, by the way. She seems very talented and with a good taste for eclectic music.

Share This Post

March 2, 2021October 3, 2021

February Struggles

Last month was not a great month for writing, for a number of reasons. The major reason is that sometimes when you write by the seat of your pants, you reach a spot where you’re sitting at the computer thinking, “Gosh, I have no idea what happens here.” (Now, you might be asking, “Why don’t you plan out the story before you start writing it? My eloquent answer to that is, “Because shut up, that’s why.” Moving on….)

But things are possibly looking up! Here we go, March! (I hope….)

Share This Post

February 23, 2021October 3, 2021

Composer Focus: Jean Sibelius (part two)

Returning to Sibelius!

The land of Karelia is a region in northern Europe that currently comprises sections of Eastern Finland, and Northwestern Russia. Like Alsace-Lorraine between France and Germany, Karelia is a land that has been disputed for centuries, and the scene of many armed conflicts as powers east and west of it struggled to hold it. Today the region of Karelia is split in two.

Sibelius, in his early years of composing, was also fiercely invested in Finnish nationalism and independence, so he was happy to accept a commission from a students’ organization in the Viipuri province, a part of the Karelian region. At first he wrote a tableau of eleven movements, each one with a specific folk-like and rustic character designed to appeal to the nationalistic feelings of the region. Later, Sibelius condensed the larger work down to the Karelia Suite, which is one of his most enduring works.

Unfortunately, the original version of the larger tableau is lost, the score having been burned by Sibelius’s own hand. But most of the orchestral parts survived, allowing a reconstruction in the 1960s, with the missing parts being completed by Finnish musicologists. Luckily the Suite has survived. It comprises two march-like movements, brassy and bold and thrilling, bracketing a Ballade that is evocative and lyrical.

Here is the Karelia Suite by Jean Sibelius.

Share This Post

February 20, 2021October 3, 2021

Liberatopia isn’t seeming like much of a topia these days

Former Texas Governor and former US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry was quoted the other day as saying this:

“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.“

Well, now.

This, right here, is a perfect illustration of why I have always rejected libertarianism.

Whenever I ask how social issues and problems will be solved in a libertarian system, the answer always starts with what I call “the Soft Libertarian Formulation”: the market will solve all problems. Freedom will solve all problems. In all cases, the markets in their free wisdom will always be better suited to solving specific social problems than the government.

My reply to this is always, “But what if it doesn’t?”

No, really. Think about it. What if something, some problem, some disaster, comes down the pike that the free markets just can’t fix? And what if that problem just persists, going on and on, getting worse and worse, possibly even to the point where people are dying?

The market will solve all problems better than the government…but what if it doesn’t?

This possibility is never admitted, never considered. There is simply no problem that can’t be fixed through freedom and markets and zero government interference!

But now, look what’s happening in Texas. They wanted to be free of federal interference. They wanted their own power grid, with their own authority to manage their electrical needs in any way they wished. And they got their desire! Only problem is, they did it in the finest capitalist free-market way, taking the cheap way out at every opportunity. Texas does have winter storms now and then, so obviously it would be a good idea to winterize things, right? Only, that would cost money, and what rich capitalist wants to spend money they don’t have to, right?

And now Texas is in a world of hurt.

Here comes Rick Perry, presumably asked if maybe Texas’s weird obsession with energy independence from Washington policy makers has proven a bad idea.

Because here, Mr. Perry, is a bad social problem that the Free Market not only can’t solve, it actually created.

And Mr. Perry says, “Nope, we’re good being without electricity for days on end if it means we stay the way we are.”

This is a version of what I call “the Hard Libertarian Formulation”: It does not matter what problems come along. The Markets and the Freedom are so inherently good, all by themselves, that preserving them is preferable over any alleviation of human suffering by way of government. By way of collective action.

It’s my experience that eventually every libertarian will eventually land on this position. Collective thinking is always bad. No problem can ever be approached in any kind of collective way, and if a problem arrives that can only be solved through collective action, through government, well then: the problem must not be solved. Individuals should simply swallow their emotions and live–or die–with the new facts of life, because nothing, nothing, is more important than avoiding government and collective action.

This is, incidentally, why I think you find climate change denialism so strongly ensconced in the political right: because climate change actually is a problem that has no solutions coming from the free markets, and they know this. Because libertarianism cannot be wrong, there can be no problem that libertarianism can’t solve. And if there is, then the problem must not exist.

This isn’t the first time Perry has said things like this. One time he said (I think he was running for President at the time, maybe in 2012) something along the lines of “No government has ever created a single job.” This will, of course, come as news to anyone living in a city with a major military base. Or in a town with a state-run college. Or…in Washington, DC.

(I wrote this two nights ago and have had it in drafts since then. In the meantime, news is coming out that Texas’s utility companies, in the great and wonderful tradition of unregulated capitalism, are gouging the hell out of their customers by issuing electricity service bills totaling in the THOUSANDS of dollars. People who are without power, heat, water, and easy access to food are getting electric bills for up to $10,000. This is what unfettered, unregulated capitalism will get you, each and every time. It continues to amaze me that people who don’t have a prayer of ever being in the small club of capitalists who get to benefit from its inherent tendency to funnel wealth upward still advocate for its adoption, because of the Hard Libertarian Formulation.)

[Comments closed on this post]

Share This Post

February 19, 2021October 3, 2021

I raise a glass to you, Dr. Vishniac

It’s amazing what stories stay with us through the years. Some stick for obvious reasons, but some do not; some just stick all on their own. When I was in fourth grade, more than forty years ago, I watched the first broadcast of Carl Sagan’s science show Cosmos. In the fifth episode, entitled “Blues for a Red Planet”, Sagan discussed at length Mars and our human relationship with that planet, up to and including the Viking Lander.

In the midst of that episode, while discussing the possibilities for life on Mars, Sagan related a story about a friend of his, a microbiologist named Wolf Vishniac, who developed experiments that a robot ship sent to Mars might be able to perform, testing the soil for the presence of microbial activity.

Here is the excerpt in question. I have remembered this story, the sad story of Wolf Vishniac, to this day. I think of Dr. Vishniac, a man born almost a hundred years ago and dead almost fifty, often when I am reading or thinking about the current state of Martian exploration. On this day, when NASA landed another rover on the Red Planet whose primary mission involves testing for evidence of life, I honor his contribution to the quest for an answer to a simple, but profound, question: Was there ever, or is there now, life on Mars.

Share This Post

February 17, 2021October 3, 2021

2021 in the Books: Greeks by any other name, and how I learned to stop fearing the budget deficit!

More reading!

:: Lloyd Alexander has been one of my favorite authors since I was a kid, but that assessment is basically on the strength of just two of his series: the Prydain Chronicles (which are a classic of 20th century fantasy), and the Westmark Trilogy (which I also consider a classic of “historical fantasy”, the genre that my favorite author of all time, Guy Gavriel Kay, calls home). I had never read much beyond his output in those works, so I read The Arkadians.

Alexander was definitely drawn to the trope of the earnest young man thrown into the deep end of adventures involving the powerful (and usually nasty) people of his world, and this book is no exception. Lucian is basically an accountant, a bean-counter in the King’s court, when he manages to overhear the King’s soothsayers plotting against the King. Just like that he is forced to flee, and like other Alexander protagonists, he travels the world looking for a way to get his life back while he finds friends along the way. Here he meets a poet who has been turned by curse into a donkey, and a girl who has secrets of her own. Lucian embarks on adventures that recall the Greek epics, albeit with more gentle humor and a lot less violence.

The Arkadians is steeped in Greek mythology, but Alexander doesn’t beat you over the head with it, which is something I remember from the Prydain books: the Welsh myth in those books was very muted, something you almost had to look for. It’s the same here, and Alexander’s prose style makes for a fun and breezy read. There’s none of the emotional heft in this book that you find in Prydain or Westmark, but that’s not a complaint at all.

:: Americans tend to worry a lot about the Federal budget deficit and the national debt, and rightfully so.

Or…do they rightly worry about those things?

What if we’re worry about the wrong thing? And what if, by worrying about those things, we handicap our own governmental response to the issues of the day?

Hence Stephanie Kelton’s book The Deficit Myth.

I am the first to admit that I don’t have the strongest foundational of knowledge when it comes to economics, but I have felt a vague sense for years that our discussions of these issues is based on a whole damn lot of faulty assumptions. We talk about dollars that only exist as ones and zeroes in certain columns on a computer drive somewhere as being genuinely real dollars, and we constantly kvetch about government debt and deficits. (Well, we sometimes kvetch about those things. It usually depends on which party is in control of the levers of power in Washington.

I’ve also been hearing for years that “Government should be run like a business!” and “Government has to live within its means, like a household budget!” and so on. I’ve always had the vague feeling that these sentiments are completely wrong, but I could never really articulate just why I thought those sentiments were completely wrong. Along comes this book, The Deficit Myth, by Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University who has also worked for Senator Bernie Sanders. Her central argument is that deficits and the debt don’t really matter, not really, for many reasons, the most important being that the United States is monetarily sovereign and its government is an issuer of its own currency, so by definition, the US government cannot go broke. The things to focus on, for Kelton, are employment and inflation.

I found Kelton’s arguments interesting and even convincing a great deal of the time, even if I didn’t always understand the more technical, nuts-and-bolts aspects of her positions. She focuses quite a lot on a “job guarantee” program administered at the Federal level, which would maintain full employment even in times of economic downturn, which is an interesting approach. I did find myself wondering how this will work as automation takes over more and more of the typical work of human beings. I count myself among those who believe that we are rapidly approaching a point where there simply won’t be enough work for humans to do, and that’s going to pose serious problems. Will we start transitioning to an economy that is not based on work? Or will we prop up the work economy by simply creating busy work? These issues don’t come up in Kelton’s book, and I found myself wondering about them.

Still, this book is an engaging and even interesting read.

Share This Post

February 16, 2021October 3, 2021

An Exercise in Geek Fashion

There’s a vintage advertisement for the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons that makes the rounds once in a while, so this time I decided to play a game of “Who Wore It Better”. I think I did it pretty well!