Obsidian Wings

Looking for a society that values the sarcastic under-achiever

by liberal japonicus

Earlier, I wrote about the case of John Updike's trash and the person who went through it. From that 

Moran told me he checked into the legality of what he was doing in the years he collected Updike’s garbage. He also asked friends for guidance about the ethics of his actions. It felt wrong to him, and dragged him back into a mind frame he’d been trying to snap. Moran says he had been having a difficult time in the months leading up to that afternoon in May 2006. As a recovering alcoholic, his long bike rides were part of plan to stay healthy and sober. But the trash bags outside of Updike’s house became a new kind of addiction, a temptation he felt he couldn’t resist. He worried he was spiraling back into a dark place.

Yes, maybe he was substituting one addiction for another, but if he had been going through Shakespeare's trash, we'd be singing his praises today.

Anyway, linked to that is this NPR piece, about a movie about an art forger and the person who caught him. About the forger:

His skills with a pencil or paintbrush are undeniable. Often using a magnifying glass, Landis studies a print of an original work and, with meticulous attention to detail, copies exactly what he sees: religious icons, impressionist or modern works. His re-creations in the style of old masters are astonishing — and so are his tools.

They include "magic markers and pens and Wal-Mart frames ... raw materials that proper forgers might not use," says Cullman.

Because he donated the forged works and never asked for money, he never committed a crime and I was reminded of the collector of Updike's trash, especially by this graf:

Landis was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 17. Among famous art forgers, he's in a class by himself, says Colette Loll, an art fraud investigator. She's organized a touring exhibition of works by five notorious forgers, including Landis. Although what he was doing was wrong, Loll believes the process helped him manage his mental illness by giving him a sense of purpose, and by "feeding his desire for acceptance and friendship and camaraderie and simply to be liked and respected."

Earlier this month, Loll, the filmmakers and Landis attended a screening of Art & Craft at a conference for mental health professionals and families affected by mental illness. When it was over, Landis received a standing ovation. "To them Mark was a symbol of hope and wellness and productivity," says Loll.

Many of us wimpy folks on the left often get dinged because, it is claimed, we follow the notion given in the French phrase "“Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.” (whose origin is discussed here). But thinking about these two stories, I wonder if we all have some mental issues, and lucky is the person whose issues correspond with what society finds fashionable.

The war on the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS/L, the Khorasan Group, etc. etc. etc.

by Ugh

So, it seems the United States has embarked on yet another campaign of floggings for love in the Middle East, or as Glenn Greenwald, winner of this week's "trolling of the internets" headline award* put it "Syria Becomes the 7th Predominantly Muslim Country Bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate."  

It also seems that the United States has all but officially assumed the role of some kind of absent-ruler of a swath of the world that stretches from Morocco to Pakistan and reaches down into the Horn of Africa.  Where we have allies that hate each other, "allies" of dubious value, allies whose nationwide domestic policies are outrageous judged by the U.S.'s nominal values, and lead coalitions of nations in military actions of doubtful legality and legitimacy (Syria being the latest - with the bonus of helping out Assad it seems, him of the chemical weapons attack).  

The U.S. continually bombing in this area of the world is now the regular state of affairs, and has essentially always been the case for today's high school seniors - kindergartners on September 11, 2001.

I'm sure we'll get it right this time, however.  To quote the Nobel Peace Laureate at the United Nations today, "The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death."  And yet, "We are heirs to a proud legacy of freedom...."  

*Yes, I suppose Mr. Greenwald should be retired from the award.  

Adrian Peterson, Charles Barkley, and other scattered thoughts

by liberal japonicus

I'm back from 10 days in Kyrgyzstan, classes are about to start and there are too many interesting things to write about. ISIS? Scottish referendum? Ebola?

But this piece responding to Charles Barkley's comments about the Adrian Peterson case had me thinking about growing up, discipline and a whole range of stuff. More below the fold

Is it more like Kafka or 1984?

by Ugh

I'm leaning Kafka, but could be convinced otherwise, or why not both?  

The Justice Department intervened late Friday in a defamation lawsuit against United Against Nuclear Iran, a prominent advocacy group that pushes for tough sanctions against Tehran. The government said the case should be dropped because forcing the group to open its files would jeopardize national security.

The group is not affiliated with the government, and lists no government contracts on its tax forms. The government has cited no precedent for using the so-called state-secrets privilege to quash a private lawsuit that does not focus on government activity.

Well, they have to at least give some hint why the state secrets privilege applies, no?  Apparently not:

In this case, however, the Justice Department said that “the concerned federal agency, the particular information at issue and the bases for the assertion of the state-secrets privilege cannot be disclosed” without jeopardizing national security.

I look forward to this and future administration's use of this new (and yet I'm sure completely legitimate) application of the state secrets doctrine.  Maybe they can dismiss wholesale brand name drug company suits against generics.  Why not?  I'm still stunned that the federal courts (a co-equal branch of government y'all!) accept this kind of nonsense.  I guess if this can go on at the DoJ, intervening in private defamation lawsuits and asserting the state secrets privilege is a no brainer.

I'm trying to think of what might justify this and got nothin'.  Anyone?

Update:  Also, too, this happened.  If I were cynical and/or jaded I would say the reason given for not answering the Senate Intelligence Committee's questions sounds a lot like "we can't answer your questions until the cover-up is completed."  Maybe "whitewash" is a better word?

Tensions between the CIA and its congressional overseers erupted anew this week when CIA Director John Brennan refused to tell lawmakers who authorized intrusions into computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to compile a damning report on the spy agency’s interrogation program.

Your binge-watching open thread

by Doctor Science

I've been binge-watching Brooklyn Nine Nine as I sort through papers, including paying the bills for my husband's double knee replacement.

This is how broken the American health system is:

surgeon's bill: $8500 per knee, total $17K. After the "negotiated discount adjustment" from the insurance company, the bill was ... $3700. That's a lot of negotiation. Total bill to us: about $1K, due to our deductible.

inpatient hospital bill: $153,517, for surgery Wednesday, discharge on Friday. Plus $5742 for lab work, etc. Total: $159K. Then the insurance company got an "adjustment" of almost $52K, paid almost one hundred and six freaking thousand dollars, and we were left with a bill of under $2K.

We haven't gotten the bill from the rehab hospital yet, I expect it will be ... interesting.

So when people talk about how much knee replacements cost, which cost are they thinking of? These two bills have a "full list price" of $176K. The insurance company paid about $109K, we're paying about $3K. Does *anyone* really pay full list price, or is it always discounted in practice?

Meanwhile, B99 is a pretty good way to pass the time. It's not Barney Miller yet, but at least it knows that's what to aim for. The actors are talented across-the-board, more so than for Miller, probably, though they don't yet have that sense of heart that made Miller so great.. And having just gone back and looked at an old Barney Miller episode to refresh my memory, getting rid of the laugh track is one of the greatest advances in TV today. How did we all stand it?

The trouble with TV binging, at least if you're me, is that you end up with at least one character's voice in your head. Is the fact that it's Andre Braugher as Capt. Ray Holt surprising, or is it pretty much inevitable?

Talk about what you binge-watch, or rant about your medical bills, or whatever.

Help me Snopes myself!

by Doctor Science

In his July Wired article about the history of autocorrect, Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes:

A commenter on the Language Log blog recently mentioned hearing of an entire dialect in Asia based on phone cupertinos, where teens used the first suggestion from autocomplete instead of their chosen word, thus creating a slang that others couldn't decode. (It's similar to the Anglophone teenagers who, in a previous texting era, claimed to have replaced the term of approval cool with that of book because of happenstance T9 input priority.)

A few days ago, Anna North of the NY Times asked Will the New Autocorrect Steal Your Soul? (spoilers: no.), and quoted the above paragraph from Lewis-Kraus' article as suggesting that "Autocorrect errors may even birth new languages".

As it happens, I was that Language Log commenter. Ben Zimmer of Language Log contacted me to let me know about these articles, and to see if I had anything to add.

My first reaction was hilarity. You see, when Lewis-Kraus says "recently mentioned", he means, um, August 2010. The comment was on the post Cell Phone Cupertinos by Mark Liberman:

I'm pretty sure I saw something several years ago about a whole dialect (argot? jargon? slang?) that had developed among young people in Japan (or possibly some other Asian country), based on phone cupertinos. Basically, they used the first suggestion from the autocomplete function *instead* of the original target word, to create an argot that was reasonably opaque to outsiders.

Now, 2010 is more than a generation ago, in Internet years. And I was recalling something I thought I'd seen several years ago at the time, so we're probably looking back to 2008 or earlier.

It's clearly a good story -- not only was it picked up at Wired and the NY Times, but when I discussed this at supper last night my family knew what I was talking about, because it's been mentioned in conversation around here. But at this point I honestly have no idea whether it's true, or something my mind put together and told me was true.

I remember making the comment at Language Log, enough to have talked about it to my family over the years. I remember trying to find a link while writing the comment, and gave up when I couldn't come up with one quickly. I have a mental image of the screen where I read it, and a sense that there was an image of people sitting on a train or subway, each looking at their phone -- but that illustration might have just been provided by my brain, I don't know. The text might have been about Korea instead of Japan, and I have the persistent feeling it was from the NY Times, even though I'm pretty sure now that it wasn't.

I've been googling and googling, looking for things pre-August 20, 2010 that might be what I was talking about, and coming up blank. Or, rather, coming up tangled and confused.

Was I talking about how Japanese girls used pager codes? That article was less than two weeks before the LL post, so it's definitely not what I was thinking of -- but it's quite likely that if I was actually remembering anything real, Mizuko Ito was being quoted, so I'm writing to her after I post this.

Did I mash that together with how the Chinese use puns to get around internet censorship? I would have heard about that on Language Log, even if I didn't see the NY Times article.

And did I then mix that up with English-language T9 predictive-text slang? And the pervasiveness of cell-phone culture in South Korea?

Or was I thinking of gyaru moji? This is an Japanese girls' style similar to l33t, but with extra complexity to exploit the many character sets available on Japanese cell phones. Gyaru moji seems to have fallen out of favor since around 2008, probably since it was slower than standard writing -- though I suspect emoji are being used to fill the gap -- the need for communication that is opaque to adult eyes, and also the desire for communication that is nice-looking and pretty.

And yet, I have no sense that I'd heard of gyaru moji before I dragged it out of the search engine just now! Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? Did I make something up, not realize it was fiction, then spread it as fact? Or was I actually talking vaguely about something I had truly heard elsewhere?

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali. This 1954 "remix" of Dali's iconic The Persistence of Memory (1931) seems to me almost like a premonition of the internet, and the way our memories all seem to be falling apart as more and more of them are stored in other people's heads and online. And now I'm asking you-all to search my memory for me.

Slart's country journal

from Slartibartifast, found in a hermetically sealed tupperware container

It has been very difficult for me to remain in touch, respond to runaway italics and the like. We have recently moved out in the sticks, and one of the bonus features of being out in the sticks is that internet may or may not be available. Satellite internet, it turns out, is woefully inadequate to support e.g. 8 hours a day continuous EVPN.

So now, at age 53, I find myself working out of my Dad's basement. It seems like a good time to start blogging again, just to round out the image.

We moved here end of July, and immediately gutted our kitchen (down to the studs and ceiling joists). I think our cabinets go in on Friday. Flooring might happen before mid-September. So we are a tad dispossessed.

Even so, there are things to be done. We need to clear out a bunch of overgrowth, so while I was on a business trip (last week) my wife bought a Great Pyrenees puppy, and four goats for her to watch over. This is the good part: one of the goats is a buck. If you have never been around a billy goat, you don't know just how much of an overinflated claim "horny as a billy goat" or "smells as ripe as a billy goat" are. What's the distance at which a billy goat can offend the olfactory senses? 10 feet? 25 feet? Well, let me tell you: I can smell him from the end of our 100 foot driveway, and if the wind is blowing in the right direction, I can smell him from near my dad's place, a quarter mile away. I am not going to get into the habits of a billy goat, as they are too vile for me to even consider whilst corresponding with even notionally polite company.

We've offered him up for free on craigslist; if we don't get a nibble in the next two weeks, we're having him, erm, banded. That's current usage for "fastening a plastic band above the testicles until they fall off". If I knew what I was doing, I'd just ziptie him a good one. Legend has it that once an even really rank billy goat loses the objects of his distraction, he becomes only as fragrant as a non-viable male goat inside of a week. I would volunteer to drive him through a car wash a few times staked in the back of a pickup truck to hasten the process, but I am too nice of a guy.

Meanwhile, at least one of the two females is pregnant. We may wind up milking her; no idea whether one pygmy Nigerian can give you enough milk to make meaningful amounts of cheese.

So, in summary: country life ~= no internet, and billy goats == don't even go there. Seriously. If you don't believe me, I'll open a tupperware container next to him, seal it shut, and mail it to you.

Corporate Inversions

by Ugh

So the latest and greatest tax news in the popular press (MSM, if you must) is about corporate inversions where a U.S. parented company becomes a non-U.S. parented company via a merger with a non-U.S. company (often significantly smaller than the U.S. company, but not always), thus escaping large amounts of the "contributing to the fisc" part of the Internal Revenue Code (there are other parts?!!?).  The latest being Burger King who is absconding to the Great White North (sorry Canada).

It is a little amusing to watch this play out publicly and politically, i.e., not in the dedicated tax press.  You have Obama and other Democrats talking about "unpatriotic" corporations (a Hobby Lobby penumbra, presumably) and demanding an end to the practice.  You have Republicans and CEOs talking about how this is even more evidence of our broken tax code requiring an immediate reduction in the federal corporate tax rate and the adoption of a territorial tax system.

A few things to note here:

1. This is all tied to treating multi-national corporations as "U.S." corporations/residents just because the ultimate parent filed its incorporation documents in the United States - as opposed to some other measure of corporate resident.  If Burger King (or any of the other companies that have inverted or are considering it) had the foresight to incorporate the parent company in the Cayman Islands years ago, this wouldn't even be a discussion.  Indeed, tax advisors tell start up companies to set up the parent company of their new venture in a tax haven all the time, although usually other considerations outweigh (e.g., they aren't making any money now anyway so why bother, certain financing advantages).  But somehow switching to the Caymans after the fact is a problem.

2.  The current round of inversions are different from those 10+ years ago.  Back then, you could invert by simply changing where you were incorporated with minimal operating costs and almost no operational changes, although there were still potential adverse U.S. tax consequences.  Now, thanks to section 7874 enacted in 2004 (during W's reign and with an R-controlled House/Senate, no less*) you actually have to have a "real deal" to invert, i.e., Burger King's inversion will be much much more than filing a few papers and reaping huge tax benefits.  This is part of the reason why you're not going to see any movement in Congress in tightening the rules, despite the talk.

3.  It's not at all clear that lowering the corporate rate to, say, 25% and switching to a territorial system as suggested by the R's would stop any of this.  A 12.5% rate (Ireland) or 0% rate (a tax haven) is still much lower than 25%, plenty of incentive to invert and, once inverted, erode the U.S. corporate tax base.  Things might slow down, but they won't stop.  And the U.S. rate is not going to 0 or even 12.5%.

4.  On the other hand, I'm not sure why trapping businesses in the United States just because they happened to originally incorporate here decades ago is all that good of an idea either, especially under the post-2004 rules.  Locating a business where it is "Managed and controlled" as a way to try and keep them in the United States seems like an incentive to shift management and control elsewhere (and, depending on how the test is set up, may also be easily manipulated).

If this needs a solution, I'm not sure what it is.  One might be to treat the entire enterprise as a single entity for tax purposes by ignoring the corporate form, this would eliminate any inter-entity transactions as is done for financial accounting purposes, and then taxing profits "where they arise."  This would be a territorial system, but would also eliminate a lot of simple base stripping opportunities (no more deductions against your U.S. income for interest payment to your wholly owned non-U.S. financing company).  But it seems this is a non-starter.  The OECD is attempting to solve a lot of these problems in its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project while still respecting inter-group transactions (for the most part) - but odds are not looking good for it to be a resounding success.

*Although this is giving them way too much credit as the AJCA of 2004 was otherwise a giant slobbery kiss to corporations on the U.S. international tax front.

Is wage theft mostly a US problem?

by Doctor Science

In honor of Labor Day, Steven Greenhouse of the NY Times wrote about how more workers are claiming wage theft:

a flood of recent cases — brought in California and across the nation — that accuse employers of violating minimum wage and overtime laws, erasing work hours and wrongfully taking employees' tips. Worker advocates call these practices "wage theft," insisting it has become far too prevalent.

Business groups of course disagree:

If anything, employers have become more scrupulous in complying with wage laws, the groups say, in response to the much publicized lawsuits about so-called off-the-clock work that were filed against Walmart and other large companies a decade ago.

-- because what happened 10 years ago totally still dominates their sense of what they can get away with, presumably. On the other hand, a search of the business world's "local paper", the Wall Street Journal, reveals only one article about wage theft in the past year -- about McDonald's, giving the impression that wage theft is an issue only for certain low-wage and low-status workers.

Greenhouse's article got more than a thousand comments within a day, many from people describing the wage theft they'd experienced in businesses of all kinds. You can see a similar outpouring in the comments to a NY Times editorial from April about wage theft from white-collar workers. The Times does not hesitate to link wage theft to surging corporate profits and the lack of a political agenda "that regards labor, not corporations, as the center of the economy."

What I wonder is whether widespread wage theft is significantly more of a problem in the US than in the other wealthy nations -- Europe, Canada, Japan, etc. The google-machine suggests that it is -- I can only find a little about wage theft in Canada, less in the other countries. But that may be a question of phrasing, or that wage theft in those countries is strictly limited to immigrants and other stigmatized populations, not breaking out to affect "regular people" who count more with the press and government.

But I just can't help noticing how crucial the most blatant form of wage theft has been in American history. In 1790, more than 18% of the US population had their wages stolen *entirely*. By 1860, it was down to 13% for the country as a whole -- but in both South Carolina and Mississippi the majority of the population were slaves.

I think it's worth asking whether American culture got into the habit of expecting some proportion of workers not to deserve *any* wages, where any money they received was really a gift, something for which they should be grateful. And whether, for instance, this habit or cultural expectation was especially strong for e.g. agricultural field labor, which thus came to seem particularly unworthy of remuneration -- even though it's where the food comes from.

The Third Horseman of the Book of Revelation, as depicted in the Apocalypse Tapestry of Angers, (c. 1380). I found it when I image-googled "a day's wages", because it was linked to a Metallica fan page, quoting Revelation 6:6-5:

When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come and see!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "A quart of wheat for a day's wages, and three quarts of barley for a day's wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!"

Though in modern renditions (including Metallica's) the Third Horseman is usually interpreted as "Famine", you'll note that the tapestry doesn't seem to show him that way.

Like the tapestry-maker, I think this figure should be understood as "bearing a cash register", and representing Economic Injustice and inequality. The Revelator's understanding of Famine is closer to Amartya Sen's than many Christians are comfortable with.

Stolen iphone nudes and John Updike's trash

by liberal japonicus

Been seeing a lot of articles about the stolen nude photos, (here is the google realtime newsfeed) and, as it usually happens, a bit of serendipity in seeing this New Yorker article. This is not to suggest that John Updike's trash are nude photos of celebs, but juxtaposing the two stories is interesting.  

I'd connect this to notions of toleration, defined as things you could do, but you won't. I'm not sure if there is anyone who I am so interested in that I would like to rummage through their roadside trashbags, but I would give my eyeteeth to find some discarded detritus of Native American linguistics, along the lines, if not the size of, the Herrington archives. I can't help but think that there is something seemingly dysfunctional about the academic culture of letters that sanctions the relentless excavation of any point related to anyone deemed researchable, yet draws such a strict line around co-opting the expression of those thoughts.