Matins

¶ The first three paragraphs of Jeff Bezos’s remarkable commencement address to Princeton’s Class of 2010. A clever man talking to clever kids draws a vital line. (via kottke.org)

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

Mr Bezos’s grandfather’s timing could not have been better.

Lauds

¶ Philip Bell’s plea for more musical education will probably fall on deaf ears — the deaf ears of older people. We must hope that younger people are listening! It strikes us that, as a fundamentally social act, music-making ought to be more prominently features than individualist-oriented “art.”(Nature News; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Yet all these benefits of music education have done rather little to alter a common perception that music is an optional extra to be offered only if children have the time and inclination. Ethnomusicologist John Blacking put it more damningly: we insist that musicality is a rare gift, so that music is to be created by a tiny minority for the passive consumption of the majority⁸. Having spent years among African cultures that recognized no such distinctions, Blacking was appalled at the way this elitism labelled most people ‘unmusical’.

Kraus and Chandrasekaran rightly argue that the marginalization of music training in schools “should be reassessed” in the light of the benefits it may offer by “improving learning skills and listening ability”. But it will be a sad day when the only way to persuade educationalists to embrace music is via its side effects on cognition and intelligence. We should be especially wary of that argument in this age of cost-benefit analyses, targets and utilitarian impact assessments. Music should indeed be celebrated (and studied) as a gymnasium for the mind; but ultimately its value lies with the way it enriches, socializes and humanizes us qua music.

Prime

¶ John Cassidy’s excellent piece on Paul Volcker reminds us that the former Fed chairman is arguably the most authoritative voice in American economics. No quant he! (The New Yorker)

Volcker’s skepticism about bankers and other financiers dates back to his days at the Fed, where he opposed the Reagan Administration’s efforts to deregulate the banking system. In 1982, Congress passed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, which gave struggling thrift banks (also known as savings and loans) the right to make commercial loans. (Previously, they had been restricted to residential lending.) The legislation was intended to enable thrifts to earn higher profits, and it was strongly supported by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, the former head of Merrill Lynch. Volcker repeatedly disagreed with Regan and with other members of the Administration. Referring to the S. & L.s, he told his staff, “Give ’em commercial lending power, and they’ll end up with all the bad loans.”

This is precisely what happened, and Volcker regards the S. & L. crisis, which ended up costing taxpayers about a hundred and eighty billion dollars in today’s money, as a template for the financial catastrophe of 2007-08. Unlike many economists, who regard financial innovation as generally a good thing, he is suspicious of many things that today’s big financial institutions do, such as creating complex securities and building elaborate mathematical models. Last December, at a conference in England for banking executives, he said that the most important banking innovation of recent decades was the A.T.M.

Volcker is driven by a sense of moral urgency. For years, financiers motivated by the prospect of short-term gains—traders, investment bankers, quantitative analysts, hedge-fund and private-equity-fund managers—have been extracting outsized monetary rewards, while insisting that they earned them by creating wealth for their clients and making markets more efficient. Then came the crisis of 2007-08, in which misguided financial engineering brought down the entire economy. Speaking to the conference in December, Volcker said, “Wake up, gentlemen. Your response, I can only say, has been inadequate.” In an era accustomed to the circumlocutions of Alan Greenspan and the anodyne public statements of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Volcker’s outspokenness insured that his statements were widely noticed. “He’s got a well-defined view of finance that is very refreshing,” notes Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor who is the chief economist of the White House advisory board that Volcker chairs. “He says, ‘You’ve gotta keep an eye on these guys. If you give them the chance, they will use their market position to line their pockets.’ That’s an important world view.”

It’s also an attitude that Volcker extends to his family. A few years ago, Volcker’s eldest grandson, who is a math whiz, informed him that on graduating from college he was planning to become a financial engineer. “My heart sank,” Volcker told me. (After working for a couple of years

Tierce

¶ We love Google to pieces &c &c, but we have to insist that Google’s “renewable energy” deal is far more virtual than actual. (Good)

When a wind farm generates X units of clean electricity, it gets two valuable things. First, it gets the electricity itself, which can be sold out on the market alongside electricity generated in other ways. But it also gets “Renewable Energy Credits,” which are certificates that those X units of energy are clean. An energy consumer can buy those renewable energy credits from the renewable energy producers (or on an open market) to satisfy requirements they’re under to use a certain amount of renewable energy. When that happens, the buyer has, essentially, bought the right to call X amount of energy use “renewable” (and the seller loses that right). This system achieves a few goals. First, it puts a special premium on clean energy. Second, it allows energy consumers who are far away from the sources of renewable energy to still “use” renewable energy by buying RECs.

Who’s stopping Google from moving its servers to North Dakota?

Sext

¶ It seems only right that the magazine for those who read it “for the articles” is aiming to become “the go-to site for those who are bored at work.” Please weldome TheSmokingJacket.com — Playboy made SFW! From Don Babwin’s AP report at Yahoo:

The site, named after one of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s favorite pieces of clothing (silkpajamas.com was taken), won’t include the long interviews or in-depth articles found in Playboy.

Instead, it’s meant to be decidedly un-serious. Or, in the parlance of its audience, ROFL — rolling on the floor, laughing. And cool, “basically a juke box of cool,” said Jellinek.

Among the original content visitors to the site will see is a list of signs that show a man has given up trying to attract women. They include wearing Velcro sneakers and pants with elastic waistbands — clothing Hef wouldn’t be caught dead in, if he thought of wearing anything but his trademark jammies.

The site will dip into the Playboy archives with photographs like those from the 1983 Playmate Playoffs, in which bathing suit-clad women competed in games such as a tug-of-war. There will be links to the kinds of things people are already e-mailing their friends, from funny moments on television shows such as “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” to a Korean Parliament brawl that’s been a big Web hit recently.

(via The Morning News)

Nones

¶ Meanwhile, in Managua, Daniel Ortega throws a party for himself, celebrating what former colleagues but now disenchanted opponents dismiss as a “retro-tropical dictatorship with a God complex,” in the words of reporter Tim Rogers. It is sad to read how democracy works in Nicaragua today. (Real Clear World)

Though the Sandinistas represent only 35 percent of Nicaragua’s population, the military discipline and ideological fanaticism make them the most tenacious political bloc in the country. So much so that an M&R Consultants poll released last week shows that if the 2011 presidential elections were held today, Ortega would win with 54 percent of the vote, thanks to a 100 percent Sandinista turnout and an abstention rate that could reach as high as 50 percent among the rest of the population, which has little faith in the country’s election process.

For many ex-combatants who fought to defend the revolution against U.S.-funded contra invaders in the 1980s, defending Ortega’s continuity in power now is part of the same struggle that has shaped their lives.

“For us, the re-election of Daniel is necessary so that there will be continuity in his revolutionary project,” said former Sandinista combatant Santos Abaunza, a jovial man who turned out to the plaza wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and a red-and-back Sandinista bandana. “I think Daniel needs at least another two terms in office (10 years) so that the revolutionary project will be firmly installed.”

Vespers

¶ Tim Parks’s forthcoming memoir, Teach Us To Sit Still, sounds like a fascinating study in holistic illness. Here’s tantalizing tidbit from his Foreword. (Guardian; via The Second Pass)

To date I have written twenty books, with this twenty-one. I may have shaken off my parents’ faith, then, but not the unrelenting purposefulness they taught me, that heady mix of piety and ambition. And like my father I have lived under a spell of words. He read the Bible and wrote his sermons. He told you what was true and how you mut behave. Rhythmically, persuasively, the way politicians do, and the pundits of opinion columns; the people who know everything and are sure of themselves. My novels have tended the other way, suggested how mysterious it all is, how partial anyone’s point of view, how comically lost we are. But even this is preaching of a kind. The fact is, as soon as you start with words you’re locked into a debate, forced to take a position with respect to others, confirming or rebutting what has been said before. Nothing you say stands alone or is complete in the present: it has its roots in the past and pushes feelers into the future. And as we grow heated, marking out our corner, staking our claim, we stop noticing the breath on the lips, the tension in our fingers, the presurre of the ground under our toes, the tick of time in the blood. None of my father’s admirers noticed how tense his jaw was, how much his hand shook when he raised a glass or microphone, what an effort it was for him to assert assert assert, to keep the 2000-year-old faith, giving encouragement to the doubters, finding clever arguments to confound the devil’s advocates. When I think back on Dad’s cancer and death — he was sixty and I twenty-five — there is a certain inevitability about it. Forever ignored, the carnal vessel cracked under strain. Sometimes I think it was the invention of language that started this queer battle between mind and flesh.

Compline

¶ If you don’t read anything else all week, make time for Kyle Minor’s interview with Greg McCaw at The Rumpus. Mr Minor is a straight man who lost his faith; Mr McCaw is a former music pastor who, because he eventually came out as a gay man, lost his job. The dignity, decency, and humanity of this conversation makes it a treasure. And the good news is that today’s young people are almost certain to make a better world.

Minor: Do you think evangelicals are starting to change their minds about issues related to gay, lesbian, and transgendered people? Do you think the evangelical movement as a whole will ever change its positions?

McCaw: Yes and no. Yes, in that institutionally churched people always mimic the general population. Look at any social issue: abortion, divorce, etc., the rate of incidence is the same in churches as it is in the general population. Of course, there are as many LGBT persons, percentage-wise, in the church, as there are in the general population. The increasingly strong trend is no doubt in favor of acceptance of LGBT persons at all levels in the West, and this is trickling into the churched population as well. The truth is that the entire world is changing around them, and they will have to change as well in order to survive. And that is the bottom line of any institution: Survival. Some people and some churches will, of course, never change, but they will be the vast minority. In fact, some of the best motivation toward change in faith is coming from inside faith groups themselves. I am encouraged by the attitudes of younger persons. Within the next ten years, these same younger persons will begin to take the leadership positions in all faith groups. This will lead to enormous changes. The modern mindset [ed.: It is common in contemporary evangelical discourse to speak of the “modernist” evangelical mindset giving way to the “postmodernist” mindset. These categories are mainly used to describe competing dominant generational ideas about the relationship between the church and the broader world, and they don’t seem to have much to do with the way these terms are ordinarily used in discussions of, say, T.S. Eliot or Robert Coover], while fighting to the death, is slowly giving way to a new era of thinkers. That is why I remain encouraged and dearly hope to be influential in this kind of change, not just about LGBT issues, but also about poverty, hunger, homelessness, violence, and creation care. I believe that younger people of faith will begin to lead us back to some good news.

Have a Look

¶ “What You See When a Kingfisher Is About to Eat You.” (Visual Science)

¶ Felix Salmon’s Summer Book Giveaway.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 10:21 am.