Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Dear Orson "Scott" Card,
When I joked that your upcoming novel about a war between the red and blue states would be a rehash of the Turner Diaries, I was only kidding. But clearly, based on the excerpts you've made available, you were too crafty for me, and you went ahead and did it anyway.
My own words fail, sir. But yours speak pretty well:
He kept thinking, the first couple of semesters, that maybe his attitude toward them was just as short-sighted and bigoted and wrong as theirs was of him. But in class after class, seminar after seminar, he learned that far too many students were determined to remain ignorant of any real-world data that didn't fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.
Well as far as Reuben could tell, the middle they found was still far from any useful information about the real world.
Am I like them, just a bigot learning only what fits my worldview? That's what he kept asking himself. But finally he reached the conclusion: No, he was not. He faced every piece of information as it came. He questioned his own assumptions whenever the information seemed to violate it. Above all, he changed his mind -- and often. Sometimes only by increments; sometimes completely. Heroes he had once admired -- Douglas MacArthur, for instance -- he now regarded with something akin to horror: How could a commander be so vain, with so little justification for it? Others that he had disdained -- that great clerk, Eisenhower, or that woeful incompetent, Burnside -- he had learned to appreciate for their considerable virtues.
And now he knew that this was much of what the Army had sent him here to learn. Yes, a doctorate in history would be useful. But he was really getting a doctorate in self-doubt and skepticism, a Ph.D. in the rhetoric and beliefs of the insane Left. He would be able to sit in a room with a far-left Senator and hear it all with a straight face, without having to argue any points, and with complete comprehension of everything he was saying and everything he meant by it.
In other words, he was being embedded with the enemy as surely as when he was on a deep Special Ops assignment inside a foreign country that did not (officially at least) know that he was there.
Princeton University as an alien planet. Reuben Malich as the astronaut who somehow lost his helmet -- and spent day after day gasping for air.
He had to acquire the iron discipline of the soldier who works with the government -- the ability to stand in the same room with stupidity and say nothing, show nothing.
The real danger was not losing his temper, however. For in the second year of his studies, he realized that he was beginning to treat some of the most absurd ideas as if they had some basis in truth. It was Goebbels in practice: If you tell the same lies long enough and loudly enough, even people who know better will despair and concede the point.
We are tribal animals. We cannot long stand against the tribe.
Thank heaven he could go home to Cecily every day. She was his reality check. Unlike the ersatz Left of the university, Cessy was a genuine old-fashioned liberal, a Democrat of the tradition that reached its peak with Truman and blew its last trumpet with Moynihan.
Oh, and this one's proving a big hit with various parts of the liberal blog community, for obvious reasons:
"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."
"They won't be so happy when they see where it leads. They've already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."
"I bet they're already 'advising' Americans that this is where our military 'aggression' inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world."
"And maybe we will," said Malich. "A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang."
"And if we did," said Cole, "who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them."
"You're forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French," said Malich.
"You think we'll do it?" said Cole. "Bottle ourselves up and let the world go to hell?"
"Would it be any better for us to get really pissed off and declare war on all of Islam?" said Malich. "Because we've got plenty of Americans who want to do that, too, and we don't have the President anymore to hold them back."
"I have a terrible feeling," said Cole, "that some turban-wearing Sikhs are going to die today in America, and they've got nothing to do with this."
They reached the end of the bridge.
"It's weird," said Cole. "I always feel like when I get to Virginia, I'm back in the United States. Like DC is a separate country. And not just DC. Maryland along with it. Like the Potomac is the boundary line between the country I love and a foreign country where they hate me because of this uniform."
And when I say your words speak for themselves, what I mean is that they speak crazy, fluently, with no trace of accent.
Addendum: Just a note for anyone who might have thought that Card has--despite a chronic lack of writing ability and creativity--a modicum of expertise on the topic of the American government and culture, I'd like to draw your attention to that last paragraph. Most liberal blogs have been cutting it off after the French slur, but I think his passage about Virginia is telling. Because as anyone who lives near DC knows, the Northern Virginia area is about as blue as it's possible to get. It was a significant force in swinging the vote for Jim Webb this time around. Walking over the T.R. Roosevelt Bridge from DC takes you into Arlington, where I live--and it is definitely not some sort of red state stronghold.
So let's be clear: when Card's soldier crosses over the river and then claims that entering Virginia is like being "back in the United States," compared to the heavily-Democratic DC and Maryland, he's actually revealing just how thin a cardboard construct created by a Utah-based Mormon fanatic he really is.
There's also an echo of George Allen's "Welcome to the Real America" about Card's choice of words. I wonder if he's self-aware enough to realize it?
11:33 x Thomas x /fiction/litcrit x link x 1 comment
I think the woman who hands out the Examiner at Ballston Metro is going to crack soon. She stands at the top of the escalator, loudly pitching the paper to anyone who walks by. "Free Examiner." she says, a sentence that would normally have an exclamation point in it, but her tone makes it clear that she knows what's going on. And she's not happy about it.
The Examiner got its start when the Washington Post started handing out a stripped-down free daily called "Express" to Metro riders. The conventional wisdom is that newspapers do that kind of thing to A) increase circulation numbers, which otherwise decrease and hurt ad revenue, and B) hook young professionals that would normally get their news online. A Denver billionaire named Philip Anschutz decided that he'd get in on that hot, hot, loss-leader action--but his would be a poorly-edited right-leaning rag targeting not just Metro riders but also rich white neighborhoods. And thus the Examiner was born.
So in any case, although Ballston is largely rich and white, those parts of its demographic also tend to be liberal and literate. So almost no-one takes a paper from the woman at the top of the escalater muttering "Free Examiner." The few people I ever do see reading the paper tend to be either angry-looking women in their forties or white-mustached men in their sixties, invariably wearing the kinds of leather safari hats that indicate someone's going to stand up for Great White Hunters no matter what those pansy liberals say. I'm starting to hear a note of panic creeping into the Examiner woman's voice, standing there with all those unread papers. It may be time to start taking the elevator instead.
08:44 x Thomas x /dc/metro x link x 1 comment
It's a little late, I know, but this presentation by Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and current book-flogging memoirist, is pretty good. You may remember that Fiorina is the woman who rescued HP from a nine-quarter slump, only to be ousted after the controversial merger with Compaq and her pro-globalization testimony to Congress. We really had to fight to get this on B-SPAN, but I'm proud that we did. She's an interesting, polished, and high-profile speaker.
Update: Speaking of late, the Best of B-SPAN podcast was delayed while I was training other staff on audio production. I know you were all on the edge of your seat. The newest edition (retroactively labeled 12/1/2006) is now uploaded, and I enjoyed it very much, personally. It's on the question of "how much human development funding is enough?" With all the emphasis that people like Jeff Sachs place on getting more funding, that's a logical question--but Shanta Devarajan and Michael Clemons explain why it's the wrong question. Highly recommended.
The 12/15 podcast, for those who have an aversion to Real Media, will be Fiorina's presentation. Truly, MP3 is what brings us all together.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 0 comments
This is not actually a movie. It's a sketch. An outline. A way for future film students to study the buddy-cop action film without being distracted from the structure by acting or clever dialogue.
B13 is a French film set in a future that extrapolates two trends--first, that the car-burning riots were symptoms of a class struggle that continued until the Parisians finally just walled off their criminal districts and abandoned them, and second, that parkour becomes a common urban sport. The latter is particularly important, because it's a big part of all the movie's chase scenes.
The basic plot is that a clean nuke has been stolen in one of the most dangerous criminal districts, and it will go off and kill everyone there unless one cop--teamed up, of course, with an edgy young native--can defuse it in 24 hours. Along the way, the plot hits all of the cliche points for one of these genre pictures: there's the family member held captive, the criminal with the heart of gold, the unbelievably deadly police officer, the tense conversation where the cop and sidekick agree to work together, and the tables turned on corrupt officials, finished with an unsupported "romance." The script seems embarrassed to be so blatant, and glosses by each of its plot points with almost a nod to the audience that yes, this is that part of the movie.
There's not necessarily anything wrong with such self-awareness, but the actors have so little chemistry with each other that it infects everything else with a kind of malaise. Say what you like about the Lethal Weapon series, perhaps the iconic example of the genre, but Glover and Gibson were fun to watch together. There's none of that rapport with anyone in District B13--maybe because, at just over an hour and twenty minutes, there's no time for it. In its quest for dizzying chase scenes and stunts, it speeds past everything else.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/foreign x link x 0 comments
Everyone's favorite cheap-but-quality instrument shop, Rondo Music, has a guitar with the exact body shape I'd love to see on a bass:
I love everything about it. Classic-looking, but still a little edgy--what William Gibson called "raygun gothic." Even better, when I e-mailed them about it, Rondo says they're considering making a bass version. I suggested two single-coil pickups and the same switching scheme as the guitar version. Whammy bar optional.
16:50 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 1 comment
DSMIDIWiFi (too many acronyms!)
Create Digital Music links to DSMIDIWiFi, a homebrew application that lets the DS act as either a MIDI controller or a synth over the wireless link. For some people this will be genuinely useful, and of course it's always nice to have something else in your bag of tricks. If nothing else, I can see using this to play with plugin parameters in Ableton or Phrazor, and the DS is actually small enough it could be disassembled and integrated into an instrument or another casing. DSMIDIWiFi also has the ability to add pitch-bend just by wiggling the stylus, which could be really expressive. On the other hand, I don't think it'll be challenging M-Audio's new wireless MIDI keyboard anytime soon--it's hard to play notes polyphonically on a DS, and there's no velocity sense capability. So for experimental musicians--or live musicians looking for an extra, non-traditional interface--this software will make sense. For most people, it'll be a novelty, and not much else.
Either way, the YouTube video that Tob, one of the DSMIDIWiFi programmers and creator of NitroTracker, put together to show off the program is pretty charming. In the future, all software should be demo'd by genial Scandinavians.
20:42 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 1 comment
This is where we draw the line
The dog does not wear clothes. I am adamant about this. While Belle suggests that he needs a coat or boots for the cold Virginia winters, I insist (despite all evidence to the contrary) that Wallace has dignity and we will not abuse it.
That said, he looks pretty sexy in these boxers, no? Much more work-safe than before!
09:33 x Thomas x /random/personal/filthy_beasts x link x 1 comment
Abusing Ableton Live Lite: More devices for the price of one
Ableton and Steinberg (makers of Cubase) seem to be the only audio companies that really understand the power of bundling. Buy any USB or Firewire interface or MIDI controller, and chances are you'll get either Ableton Live Lite or Cubase LE with it. And of course, both companies have a special upgrade pricing from those packages, saving $100-200 over the regular boxed edition. It's a good way to hook customers in. I've been tempted, although nowadays I'd be more likely to pick up Pro Tools M-Powered than Cubase or Live, just for compatibility and familiarity from my work environment.
Until I break down and actually buy a full DAW package, I'm working with the cheap stuff. Live Lite and Cubase LE are both good programs, each with its own limitations. Cubase LE doesn't allow MIDI plugins or use the latest VST plugin technology, but it does give users up to 48 audio and 64 MIDI tracks with 8 inputs/outputs, so normally it's my tool of choice. The fact that it's more traditional-looking and runs on lower-end hardware doesn't hurt. But unfortunately, due to poor impulse control the other day, I've temporarily uninstalled my copy, and it'll stay that way until I can find my old install CD or pull the files over from my other laptop.
So that leaves Ableton, recently upgraded to version 6. Live Lite only gives users four tracks, and won't let you use more than two of its proprietary plugins (called Devices) and one VST plugin at a time (between all four tracks). You can do a lot with four tracks, and Live Lite still boasts better routing and (surprisingly) a better GUI than Cubase. But the limitations on Devices and VSTs have been driving me crazy. I can get around the VST limitation by using Phrazor or another sub-host, but just adding EQ to vocal and bass tracks puts me up against the Device limit.
After some experimentation, here's a trick to get around the two-Device limitation without upgrading to the full version: instead of adding Devices one at a time to the track, create a Group out of the first plugin, then drag new Devices into that Group. Ableton counts a Group as a single Device instead of counting the individual elements, probably so they can include the enticing Group presets that they hope will incite you to buy the full version. You can drag Devices back and forth inside the Group to change their order, but be warned: once you've added something, trying to delete it again may cause Live to flash the nagware limitation window and cancel the deletion, although you can still delete the whole group and start over. Once you've got the effects stacked the way you want them, it might help to bounce the wet audio to a new track, freeing up the Device Group for more mixing. Treat it like one of the old four-track recorders, in other words.
I still think Cubase LE is the better bundle, and with the Tascam US-122 currently only $150 at Musician's Friend, it's hard to argue that it's not a bargain as a first interface. But with M-Audio's lower-priced boxes ruling the $200 range (and offering a Pro Tools M-Powered upgrade path), it's also easy to see why songwriters on a budget can end up with Live Lite as their main recording software. Being able to stack Devices with this trick goes a long way to making it a more useable solution, in my opinion.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital/ableton x link x 0 comments
The process of re-recording old songs continues, with overhauled versions of "Lazy Sunday Eyes" and "My Foundation," as well as yet another rendition of "Voodoo Funk." Here's a few thoughts on recording these:
Hear the results, as always, at the Four String Riot. Next up is to finalize/record "Mastermind," and then start writing again.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/mp3 x link x 0 comments
Bulgaria is an Interesting Place
Courtesy of an East European co-worker, here is this gem of an idiom:
Double-take? You bet. It's a Bulgarian phrase meaning a terrific pain to deal with, which--while brutal--does present a certain inescapable poetry.
I'm going to be on edge for days until I can use it in a conversation.
UPDATE- Also, this is good: in response to someone "turning their back" on a person or topic, Bulgarians apparently respond with "flowers have no backs." What does it mean? Who cares!
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 0 comments
Welcome to Second Life, Comrades
Want to bring a wistful look to the face, and a tear to the eye, of any good socialist? Mention those magical words: post-scarcity. It's practically the definition of utopia to wish for a world where no-one lacks for anything, which most Marxists rationalize by pointing to automation and a (hopelessly optimistic) faith in the innate goodness of humanity. There, they daydream, real socialism would finally be possible.
Second Life, the online environment and cult favorite of "edgy" technology writers, is a similar utopia for libertarians. A virtual world that proudly trumpets its economic statistics on the front of secondlife.com (currently, US$622,731 spent in the last 24 hours), it also subsides almost entirely on user-created content--or, nowadays, on content created by enormous corporations and organizations hoping to cash in on Second Life's geek cred.
What happens when one utopia runs into another? Recently, Second Life fell victim to exploitation of Copybot, a reverse-engineered program that allows players to copy items without paying for them. Raph Koster, famed designer of failed-but-ambitious online economic systems, elaborates on the point of the copybot--being able to create anything you want, without asking permission or paying money--as practically the embodiment of post-scarcity Marxism intruding on Second Life's libertarianism. They're being hoisted on their own petard, he states.
Speaking for the vast majority of people who are sick of hearing how great Second Life is, I'm going to admit to a small, warm feeling of satisfaction--like I just ate a freshly-cooked spite burrito. Mmm.
Mandatory disclaimer: I don't play Second Life. I've logged in once, long enough to verify that yes, it's a very ugly place, and no, it doesn't run well on my laptop. So I'm invoking Pundit Privilege here--the ability to write about things even though I don't have direct experience with them myself, just a lot of acquaintances who do. If that bothers you, all I can say is stay as far as possible from the Wall Street Journal's Op-Ed section.
So someone I know, who specifically asks to remain nameless, calls me last night after her first logon to a Second Life server. Let's think of her, while I'm under Pundit Privilege, as a taxi driver who gave me the perfect transitional device for an article. The Second Life newbie, not being a gamer, is first of all having trouble moving. Also, she is confused about the sights of Orientation island.
"There's a person washing the sidewalk," she says. "They have a sign or something that says you can make money washing the sidewalk." We are both silent for a moment. I don't know what she's thinking, but I'm wondering why a digital sidewalk is dirty in the first place, much less why it would be profitable to clean it. It sounds like a scam, I say.
"But," she continues, "I don't understand. What do people do here?" And I have to explain that they don't necessarily do anything, that Linden Lab (who create and maintain Second Life) simply provide the tools for their users to create everything else. So if there's something to do, it exists because someone bought the land from Linden (using real money) and built something on it.
The newbie is in Second Life for a design class project--she needs to write a business plan, and had the idea of opening a Second Life boutique, because then she'll have the hippest business plan in the class. She'd like to actually have a storefront--or at least a "coming soon" sign--for her professor and classmates to see. But that would require paying for a premium account, then buying and paying rent on land. I tell her it might be easier just to make a web page.
Second Life is, as I said, supposed to be some kind of utopia where creativity is rewarded with a stream of virtual money, which can be redeemed for real money. It has no government. Linden Lab stays out of disputes as much as possible--their first reaction to the CopyBot fiasco, for example, was to tell people to prosecute under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Predictably, cyberselfish outlets like Wired trumpeted a lack of regulation as "a bold experiment in protecting creative work without the blunt instrument of copyright law." Meanwhile, merchants and a number of players have begun closing up shop, under the belief that there's no point in Second Life without an economic system of scarcity.
But to me, what's amusing about Second Life is what it reveals about poverty. Sure, the internal world is a meritocracy of sorts--assuming that you've got cash to rent space for your storefront. But even among the set of people who can cruise the grid for free, there's selection taking place--it requires a relatively new computer with a decent 3D card (my 1GHz laptop with built-in video chugged through even the most basic areas) and broadband Internet access. On top of that, those who can enter Second Life are presented with a world that has less legal baggage than many lesser-developed countries. One of my projects at the Bank has been audio work on problems of land tenure--when the poor don't own their land, they can't use it as collateral for development, and they can't rely on a secure legal situation. That's a serious problem. It is ironic, from my point of view, that when geeks had the chance to create their own private world, they immediately recreated land tenure problems--and saw them as a positive. It's a world where you don't have to eat or pay road maintenance or deal with the big, bad government. You just have to pay rent, and hope that the mob doesn't screw you over.
Implicit in the world of Second Life seems to be the primacy of value. How much are those shoes worth? How much could I get by designing my own shoes? How much would I need to sell in order to make back my land costs--or can I make money by land speculation alone? The concept that we might value something by non-monetary means--did I enjoy creating it? do I want to share it with others? does it make me feel good?--seems to have passed the community by. Or, at the very least, nobody talks about it. Blogs like Second Life Insider mostly seem to comment on commercial items that come across as utterly bizarre to those who don't actively take part--why would I want skates? What's the point of having funny-looking shoes, or a virtual dragon? CNN isn't commenting on the creativity of designers. They're more interested in the money Second Life is generating, and Congressional plans to tax it.
And the newbie asks me, finally, why this is any different from a video game. But it's simple, really. If I buy a game, even an online game like World of Warcraft, I'm paying for someone to entertain me. It's akin to a book or a movie, and the story or experience has non-monetary value to me. Joining Second Life is paying to take part in more commercial transactions, most of which will be less fulfilling than their real-world equivalents because of their intangible nature. It's no wonder people can be so addicted to accumulating virtual property--even in possessing it, you're reminded that you really don't own anything. Perhaps in the wake of that subconscious dissatisfaction, the need to acquire remains unsated.
I don't know which one gives me more cause to despair: that Second Life players think it's inconceivable that someone would be creative without financial incentive, or that they can't see how the system itself is reinforcing that viewpoint. The term "false consciousness" has never been so tragically appropriate.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/internet/second_life x link x 0 comments
Apart from producing the podcasts, recording voiceovers, and editing a couple of radio shows, most of my production work at the Bank involves supporting the video editors with their soundtracks. We use Final Cut Pro in the Multimedia Center, and although I'm sure it's a fine tool for video editing it doesn't seem to be very effective for more than the most basic audio work. For one thing, the effects need to be rendered before you can hear them, and I can never actually get any audible changes out of them (I'm probably doing something wrong, but the video people avoid the audio side like vampires in an Italian kitchen, so they're not much help). Soundtrack, the tool that accompanies Final Cut, is all well and good--but it's not really my cup of tea, and none of the editors want to put in the work to learn it.
So with all that in mind, here is a quick set of two tutorials for the common tasks that I perform while working my magic on soundtracks. I need to write a tutorial for my co-workers anyway, it might as well be now. Also, note that although Pro Tools can work with multi-track audio through the OMF/QT import part of the DV toolkit, you can also work with a stereo .wav of the whole soundtrack--and I often do.
1. Better Vocal Ducking:
When you bring in a voiceover on top of background noise, you want that background to get out of the way so that the vocals can be understood. That means lowering the volume, usually. Now, you can go through and manually adjust the volume using the track automation, but that's a pain and you might miss something. I prefer to do it through plugins. Now this is a pretty standard part of audio production, and you can google plenty of advice on it--assign a compressor to your background track, sidechain it to the vocals with a medium-high ratio, and its volume will automatically lower whenever the vocal track plays.
The problem with this, as my manager immediately pointed out when I first started using Pro Tools, is that it only ducks the volume right as the vocal comes out, and it sounds more natural if the background can start to fade just a little bit before the vocals actually enter, as if someone had anticipated the vocals. This also preserves the first word of the voiceover--it doesn't get lost in the slight pause before the compressor really kicks in.
I solve this problem, like most of my audio magic, with creative use of sends. Basically, you want to split your vocal track into two directions. Change its output to a bus, say Bus 1, and add a Send to a different bus, Bus 2 perhaps. Use Bus 1 as the background track compressor's sidechain input (the key icon in RTAS plugins will activate sidechaining if it's supported, and let you pick an input), but instead of setting the compressor to the usual settings, you want to give it a moderate attack and a very long release. I usually use the following settings (although I'm quoting from memory, so it may be off a little):
See what we've done? You've used the vocals to trigger a slow compressor, hopefully creating a fade, while simultaneously adding a delay to the audible vocal so that it'll arrive after the compressor turns down the background. You do need to be careful with timing, obviously, because the timeline display is now 333ms offset from your ears, but if you're after precision you should probably just invest in a plugin that supports look-ahead. This is the cheap way to do it.
2. Remove a noisy camera/audience:
Here's something to remember about audio: it's easy to add, but not so easy to subtract. Unlike video or images, you can't just cut a noise out, because it's part of the soundwave. Some tools, like Adobe Audition, will let you paint out chunks of the spectrum, but it's still not a perfect solution. And remember, sound is a representation of a physical phenomenon--in a lot of cases, it's the mic capsule or coil moving that is reproduced through your speakers. So physical movement or different sound frequencies can actually mask other sounds, because they're physically moving the mic and changing its interaction with the sound.
That's all very fun and technical, but what it amounts to in real life is that a lot of footage is shot in bad locations, through crappy equipment and sub-optimal mike technique. Maybe a speech was shot using the camera mike at the back of the room instead of plugging into the PA system. Maybe it was done on the move, and there's a lot of wind and crowd noise. Editors want that gone, or at least reduced, so you can hear the subject.
This is relatively easy to do. Remember that most of a voice's content takes place between the frequences of 100-5000Hz. Outside of that, you might miss some of the sibilant consonants, or low vocal rumble, but you'll be able to understand a person. Also, most electrical and camera noise takes place at the upper and lower limits of the spectrum. So to remove physical handling noise, like bumps, and boomy acoustics, I open up an EQ plugin and set a high-pass filter with a very sharp cutoff at around 180Hz, fine-tuning a little through headphones. I put a low-pass filter at around 6KHz, which minimizes clicks and a lot of tape whirr. If you add these through the AudioSuite menu of Pro Tools, using the preview function to listen before you apply them, you'll end up with a new, processed region that you can export back out for Final Cut.
06:09 x Thomas x /music/recording/production/post x link x 1 comment
There are new versions of "Voodoo Funk" and "We Used To Be Friends" up on the pretentious solo project, as well as the the hateful Myspace. With that said, if you were going to listen to them right away (crickets chirp, tumbleweed, the sound of echoes in a large empty space) you might wait until tonight around 8pm EST--they still need some tuning, and makeup gain (the Tascam US122 has many virtues, but hot input is not one of them). The goal of redoing these songs was that the previous recordings were pretty distorted and sometimes had boxy vocal sound.
Next up are my really old recordings, and then I need to put together three more songs or so before I go out and humiliate myself trying to gig for real again.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/mp3 x link x 1 comment
Hm.
Short posts, I think.
Yes, short would be good.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce x link x 0 comments
Here's a fun little bit of bipartisan food for thought:
Last week I read John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience, which is an interesting book even if I'm not sure its argument should go as far as Dean takes it. At the very least, his commentary on the phenomenon of right-wing authoritarians is a powerful lens for examining the rise of the Religious Right, especially the new fundamentalist strains with their bizarre emphasis on submission and power.
But to me, one of the most interesting sections of the book actually appeared at the end in the appendices, where Dean revives definitions of conservative and liberal mindsets as written by James Burnham. Dean states that he personally sees a few changes since it was originally written (specifically, he thinks that the two sides have switched places on 7, 8, 12, and 13; and he sees less of a strong difference on 1, 3, 4, and 5), but I was amazed by how it seemed to fairly sum up what the two ideologies are about (I really only disagree with 13, and I'm too cynical for 1). The table is reproduced below--what do you think?
| 1. Conservatives believe that government involves a non-rational factor. Without allowance for magic, luck, or divine favor, there is no convincing explanation for why one government works better than another. There is no rational explanation for why one person should submit to the rule of another's absent habit, tradition, or faith. But without such submission, government dissolves or relies on force, which is nonrational. The conservative distrusts abstract political ideology as a principle or formula for political life. | 1. Liberals have a general confidence in the ability of the human mind to comprehend, through rational science, problems of government and society, and they often trust in a particular ideology as a key to a successful government. |
| 2. Conservatives believe that human nature is essentially corrupt, or evil, and is limited in its potential; therefore, conservatives do not believe in utopian or ultimate solutions to major social problems. | 2. Liberals believe that most human weaknesses and errors are the result of weak social structure or inadequate education, for human potential, if not infinite, has no discernible a priori limitations; therefore, it is not unrealistic for humans to work tward an ideal society in which problems such as war, poverty, and suffering do not exist. |
| 3. Conservatives respect tradition, established institutions, and conventional modes of conduct. Theya re reluctant to initiate quick or deep changes in traditional ways, and seek to restrict or slow the pace of changes that have become unavoidable or morally imperative. | 3. Liberals do not believe tradition alone justifies favoring an institution or mode of conduct; and they are willing to accept quick, drastic, and extensive social changes based on rational and utilitarian grounds. |
| 4. Conservatives believe in a diffusion of "sovereignty" (used by Burnham to mean "governmental power") and a still wider diffusion of power, thus honoring the "separation of powers" and "checks and balances" envisioned by the constitution. | 4. Liberals think that diffusion of power may be useful against "reactionary forces" but are not much troubled by most power's being in the hands of beneficial social entities (the common man, the people, workers, and farmers) and will waive concerns about power altogether for certain ideological goals (full employment, racial equality, social welfare, or peace). |
| 5. Conservatives reject unrestricted plebiscitary (direct election by all the people) democracy in favor of representative government in which a number of indirect institutions mediate between the people and those in charge. | 5. Liberals tend to approve of plebiscitary democracy, seeking forms of government that express the will of the majority as directly and intimately as possible (e.g., direct popular elections for president, direct primaries, initiative and recall, popular referendums, election of judges, extension of suffrage, and the like). |
| 6. Conservatives believe in "states' rights," or the retention by each state of an effective share of the federal government's sovereignty, because this diffuses power. | 6. Liberals see "states' rights" as either unimportant (an anachronism) or inefficient, for it leads to reactionary policies like pro-segregation, anti-labor, and anti-internationalist measures. |
| 7. Conservatives believe in the autonomy of the various branches of the federal government, and oppose encroachment or usurpation by any of them upon the other branches. | 7. Liberals think that strict separation of the branches of government hinders government's ability to solve major problems. |
| 8. Conservatives believe the public should support limiting government powers. | 8. Liberals think the public should support greater government power to accomplish progressive goals. |
| 9. Conservatives feel that the American constitutional system embodies principles of clear and permanent value. | 9. Liberals hold that the Constition is a living document, with its meaning dependent on time and circumstances. |
| 10. Conservatives want decentralization and localization of government. | 10. Liberals think that decentralization and localization can hinder solutions to modern problems. |
| 11. Conservatives believe private, profit-making enterprises are the most just and effective means for economic operation and development. | 11. Liberals are critical of private economic enterprise, and believe in government control of private activities, if not some measure of government ownership. They find private enterprises are frequently opposed to the interests of the people and the nation, and that in many cases the government can do a better job than private enterprise. |
| 12. Conservatives hold that the private life of the individual, as opposed to the destiny of the nation or of society, should be the focus of metaphysical, moral, and practical interest. | 12. Liberals feel that an expanding sphere of government involvement--in social and cultural life as well as in the economy--results in the best mode of life for people. Thus, expansion of government activity aids in attainment of a good life. |
| 13. Conservatives favor Congress over the executive branch of government. | 13. Liberals favor the executive branch, with its administrative bureaucracy, over Congress. |
It's a lot more fair to both sides than my definition ("Conservatives love Jesus and hate everything else.")
00:00 x Thomas x /politics/activism x link x 1 comment
The New York Times has a well-written editorial on fighting poverty behind the TimeSelect firewall. Luckily, it looks like someone in the office is a subscriber. I apologize for the length, but what can you do?
Ask Americans whether they want to spend taxpayer money to educate girls abroad, and 80 percent say yes. Do they want to give food and medical assistance in poor countries? Eighty four percent do. Prevent and treat AIDS ? That's 79 percent.
But ask them whether they favor foreign aid, and only a bare majority does.
This disconnect occurs because a lot of Americans are concerned about how foreign aid is spent. Most Americans think Washington should help the needy abroad. But they worry the money will be wasted.
There are too many stories about taxpayer funds winding up in the Swiss bank accounts of dictators, financing dams and highways that never get built or paying exorbitant salaries to American consultants. Americans also wonder when they hear about how miserable life in some countries continues to be: why doesn't foreign aid seem to be doing any good?
One reason is that not much money goes to combating that misery.
When pollsters ask people in the United Statesto guess how much their government spends on foreign aid, the median response is 25 percent of the federal budget--and Americans think that it should be 10 percent. The real number is less than 1 percent. And only a tiny percentage of that goes to fight poverty.
That percentage was even smaller during the Cold War, when a large chunk of American foreign aid went into dictators' pockets or to their helicopter fleets. Its purpose was not to help people, but to buy friends.
But even today, 39 percent of the State Department's foreign aid budget goes to military aid, supporting congenial governments like Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan, and to fighting drugs.
Of the money that is marked for development--to help poor countries get richer--a lot goes to programs to help a nation's central bank become more independent or to train congressional staff. This is important work, but it does not fight poverty. And a lot of what remains goes to help people in emergencies--feeding the hungry after crop failures, or rebuilding after a tsunami.
Not much is left for preventing crop failures in the first place. President Bush has proposed to give $23.7 billion in aid grants to poor countries in 2007. But even by the most generous calculations, only $3.7 billion is actually anti-poverty aid.
If antipoverty efforts do not help as much as Americans would like, one reason is that their government is spending far less than they think it is. This is unfortunate because there are programs out there with a proven track record of working--of lifting poor people out of poverty, and keeping them out--some run by governments, some by charity groups, and a few by businesses.
Here are some particularly effective ones.
I. The Gold Standard: Universal Vaccination
Universal vaccination is cost-effective foreign aid at its best. It is so successful, so widely considered essential, that many people today do not realize that it began only 20 years ago.
When Unicef and the World Health Organization started a global effort to vaccinate children against common childhood diseases in 1985, they were met with widespread skepticism. Vaccination rates for children in many countries were appalling--only 20 percent of the world's children in 1980 had gotten their third shot of D.P.T. (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus) on time, the conventional measure of vaccine coverage.
But the program has had stunning success. By 1990, 75 percent of children had completed their D.P.T. shots on time. Bangladesh went from 9 percent D.P.T. completion in 1987 to 98 percent five years later. Worldwide, children were being immunized against polio and measles as well.
The logistics are heroic. Wars are routinely halted for inoculation campaigns. Entire countries get vaccinated in two days. Measles vaccines are successfully kept cold during day-long journeys by bicycle and canoe.
A full course of immunization, including everything in the supply chain, costs only $30. In the last 20 years this campaign has saved 20 million lives. It has given hundreds of millions of children a better start.
In the 1990s, however, the world's attention turned to other problems, and vaccination rates slipped backwards. Bangladesh fell back to 66 percent in 1999. Every year 27 million children--a quarter of the world's children--go unvaccinated against the basic diseases. Two to three million of these children die. Even for those who survive, these diseases can be crushing, forcing children to drop out of school, and parents to spend time and money they cannot afford on doctors and care for their sick children.
The challenge today is two-fold: to improve basic vaccine coverage, and to put new vaccines into global use. Vaccines now exist to protect children against common diarrheal and pneumococcal killers, against hepatitis B and a common influenza. But they are mainly in use in wealthy countries. Soon there may be a malaria vaccine as well. All these must become part of the universal vaccine package.
Help has come from an organization launched in 2000, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. Financed by governments, organizations such as the World Bank and Unicef and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI gives poor countries money to improve their infrastructure and logistics. and then gives them more if they actually achieve improved vaccination rates. It also helps assure a predictable market for new vaccines, which encourages drug makers to produce them in large quantities. It has helped expand both basic and new vaccine coverage--because of GAVI, for example, 90 million children have been immunized against hepatitis B (pdf).
Immunization became a victim of its success, but close attention and new partnerships are now reviving vaccines. It is a lesson that eternal vigilance is needed, even to protect a program that became venerable practically overnight.
II. Give Poor People an Ownership Stake
Look around the edges of any large third world city and you will see vast settlements built by the residents themselves. Migrants from the countryside claim empty plots in nighttime land invasions, put up a blanket with a pole or a cardboard roof and begin stockpiling bricks. Their livelihoods are similarly jerry-rigged. A man will nail together a booth, at which he can sit and repair his neighbors. shoes. A woman will open a window to the street to turn her living room into a mini-bodega, selling cooking oil and rice.
Most people surveying these kingdoms of dust and hope see only poverty. But Hernando de Soto saw something else--untapped wealth. Mr. De Soto, a Peruvian economist, realized that the world's poor own trillions of dollars' worth of assets. But their houses, plots of land and businesses lacked formal title--and so could not be used to do all the things that people in wealthy countries do to turn a little money into a lot of money.
Without title, people can not sell stakes in their businesses, use their homes as collateral for loans, buy insurance, or form limited liability corporations to reduce their personal risk. They cannot get credit in banks. They do not improve their businesses because their investment may suddenly vanish at any moment. They must spend money and time bribing the police to keep from being kicked off their land. In many cases they cannot even get electricity and telephone service.
Mr. De Soto's crusade, which has now marched to El Salvador, Egypt, Mexico, Honduras, Tanzania, El Salvador, the Philippines, Haiti, Albania and elsewhere, attempts to turn these dead assets into living capital. All countries, of course, have ways to register property. But in most poor nations, they involve so much red tape that they are essentially useless for the poor. Mr. De Soto had tried an experiment in Peru--he established a two-sewing machine garment factory in a Lima slum and hired five college students to get all the necessary permits to legalize it. He claims it took them 289 days and cost them 31 times the average monthly minimum wage.
Mr. De Soto likes to say that when he walks through the rice fields in Bali, a different dog barks whenever he crosses from one farm to another. The dogs recognize the assets under their masters' control. But the legal system does not.
To change this, Mr. De Soto founded an organization in Lima called the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. It carries out research on the informal sector. But the governments of Peru and El Salvador have also hired the I.L.D. to run registries that give poor people simple, quick ways to get title for their land, homes and businesses. It also helps them use those titles productively. In other countries, I.L.D. is helping governments design such agencies or train government officials to do this work.
The I.L.D..s work in Peru means that legalizing a business can now be done in a day, by visiting a single desk. The cost dropped from $1,200 to $174. The group says that between 1990 and 1995, 300,000 titles were registered in urban Lima (pdf), and the value of the underlying land doubled by 1998. Hundreds of thousands of new businesses have been legalized. Poor people saved millions in administrative costs, and Peru raised millions of dollars in new taxes.
Getting title, of course, does not mean that poor people can necessarily turn it into higher incomes. To use newly legal assets, the poor must still contend with banks that won't lend to them, and courts that require bribes and put up other hurdles. Tackling these issues may help solve one of the most vexing drawbacks of globalization and the market economy--in much of the third world, they have tended to benefit only the wealthiest. But establishing property rights is a necessary first step.
III. Microcredit: The 62-Cent Solution
In 1976, a Bangladeshi economist named Muhammad Yunus came upon a group of 42 artisans--but perhaps the more appropriate word is "slaves." They made crafts such as chair seats, and used materials lent to them each day at exorbitant rates of interest by the buyer of their work. They were forever in debt, unable to turn enough profit to buy their materials in advance at market prices. Mr. Yunus gave the group a loan from his pocket that averaged 62 cents per person. With that, they bought their freedom.
Twenty years later, the Grameen Bank, the organization Mr. Yunus founded, has lent small sums of money to 6.7 million people in Bangladesh, almost all of them women, many of whom had never before touched money. It offers savings, insurance, home mortgages, pension funds, scholarships, credit for families to buy fertilizer, build latrines or dig wells, and a program of no-interest loans for beggars, so they can offer candy or dried chiles for sale as they go house to house.
Microcredit now reaches nearly 100 million clients in more than 100 countries. The World Bank has found that microcredit accounted for 40 percent of the entire reduction in moderate poverty in rural Bangladesh--and that it had an even bigger impact on extremely poor borrowers.
Microcredit raises an entire village's standard of living--even non-borrowers' lives improve. (Lending to men, by contrast, proved not to affect poverty at all.) Studies of microcredit programs all over the world show that it produces higher incomes and better-fed children, and improves a family's ability to survive illness or drought.
To many people, the name Grameen is synonymous with microcredit. But the Grameen Bank is not even the largest microcredit lender in Bangladesh--that is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. Nor were Mr. Yunus's 62 cent loans the first--the earliest documented microloan took place in 1973, in Recife, Brazil, lent by Accion International, a group that has now lent over $10 billion.
But what Mr. Yunus and Grameen did--why they are sharing the 2006 Nobel Prize for Peace--was show how an idea helping a few hundred people could be expanded to help millions. Grameen has also struck the proper balance--it is sustainable and profitable, with $600 million in savings from borrowers as capital. At the same time, it has never forgotten that its mission is to fight poverty, not maximize profit. It charges interest rates far lower than other commercial microlenders.
Grameen developed a model now in use globally. Although it is a bank, in many ways it is the opposite of a bank. Traditional banks in poor countries do not lend to the poor--administrative costs are too high, and the poor were thought to be bad risks. Normal banks stick close to business districts, require collateral, and lend mainly to men.
Grameen turned this on its head. Instead of collateral, Grameen depends on social pressure to guarantee loans. Women form borrowing groups of five, and must pay back their loans regularly for others in the group to be able to get one; borrowers must pledge to eliminate dowry, eat vegetables, have small families and educate their children--requirements not likely to be found at conventional banks.
It has been a decade since Grameen Bank accepted any donations or took loans. But hundreds of newer microfinance groups still look for donors. Accion International, for example, creates new microfinance institutions in 22 countries, which stop needing help once they become profitable. It also trains traditional banks in how to lend to the poor.
Microcredit started as an antipoverty program, but continues as a business. That is one reason it has grown and grown while other forms of aid fight for governments. dollars and attention.
IV. Bribe the Poor
In 1995, the Mexican peso crashed and the economy contracted by 6 percent. At the time, Santiago Levy, the deputy finance minister, realized that the country's antipoverty programs were going to fail its poor. The programs were a hodgepodge of food subsidies, adopted in response to powerful food producers. They were inefficient because they targeted foods everyone ate, rich and poor. Some even targeted foods the poor don't eat, such as bread--poor Mexicans eat tortillas.
Mr. Levy saw a looming disaster--but also an opportunity to build political support for an antipoverty program that worked. Stealthily, he organized a pilot project to test a new idea in Campeche, far away from the capital so it would draw little notice. He began a program to pay poor mothers to keep their children in school and take their kids to the health clinic. He compared the results to poverty figures in a group of similar villages without the program. It was a great success. Data in hand, he persuaded President Ernesto Zedillo to phase in the new program and phase out the food subsidies.
Oportunidades, formerly called Progresa, is now embraced by all parties in Mexico and, with financing from the World Bank, is helping virtually every poor family. It not only focuses antipoverty spending on those who really need it, it does so in a way that encourages families to break the cycle of poverty for their children.
The average family in Oportunidades gets $35 a month--about a quarter of the rural family income. Families with many children in school can get up to $153 a month, a ceiling imposed to avoid providing incentive to have more children.
From the beginning, Oportunidades built in rigorous evaluation. Those studies have shown that it does focus its help on Mexico's poorest people, and that the money is producing good results. Children are bigger and healthier. Oportunidades has also cut child labor and led to more schooling--in rural areas, for example, the number of children starting high school increased 85 percent. Moreover, by paying women, Oportunidades has augmented their power inside the family without increasing domestic violence.
There are fashions in foreign aid, and Oportunidades is hot. The World Bank sings its praises (pdf). So far 25 countries have adopted some version. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg just announced he is looking for donors to finance a pilot program to test whether New Yorkers, too, can be bribed out of poverty.
V. Link Up the Villages
When Shenggen Fan, now 45, was growing up in a village in China, it could take two days to get to Shanghai by motorboat and then bus. It took him an hour to walk to high school. Farmers grew only products they could eat or sell to their neighbors.
Now when he lands in Shanghai, he can drive to his family's home in three hours. The high school is a 10-minute bike ride from his house. Farmers now buy animal feed and fertilizer from trucks visiting the village, and sell other visitors the cereals, watermelons and pigs they raise. The village has grown much more prosperous.
What has changed? Roads. Dirt trails were first replaced with all-weather roads made of broken bricks mixed with dirt, with drainage. Then the road to town was paved.
Almost everything people need to be able to live decently requires a road. A good dirt road with ditches is fine, or one built by villagers themselves with local stones or locally-made bricks. It just needs to be a road that allows a farmer to push his products to market in a hand cart, and that lets buses and trucks get from the village to the main trunk roads. The villagers themselves can maintain it.
Roads allow farmers to market their products, and bring in fertilizer and seeds. They let rural residents take non-farming jobs in nearby towns. Sick people can get to the hospital in time. Roads make it easier for the government to bring in water and electricity. Children can get to school faster, which means more will go. "With roads, people travel out and bring in new knowledge," says Mr. Fan. "They change their behavior. Roads are a window to the outside world. In extreme cases, roads are life-saving--in the Ethiopian famine of 1984 and 1985, thousands of people died because they could not be reached by food aid."
Today Mr. Fan is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. The studies he and his colleagues have done on how poor governments should spend their money show that building small feeder roads is one of the single most effective ways to fight poverty (pdf). In India, it would be the single most effective antipoverty program, the group concluded. Feeder roads would also be among the best ways to spend money in Africa and China.
Rural roads are not glamorous. Government officials want to build highways, not feeder roads. China, for example, has expanded its national highway system by 44 percent a year since 1988. But rural roads have expanded only 3 percent a year. In Africa, fewer than 10 percent of feeder roads are currently passable during the rainy season, effectively cutting off villages for months at a time.
Thirty years ago, the World Bank concentrated on infrastructure. But many of its projects to build dams, highways and electrical plants were plagued with corruption and waste, or ended up hurting poor people. Building infrastructure, including roads, got a bad name. What's needed today is the infrastructure equivalent of microcredit--small projects for villagers that are a necessary first step out of poverty.
VI. Target the Decision-Makers
Suppose you are a parent in rural India, or parts of Africa, or China. You are poor. School is available for your children. But you may have to pay school fees, and you must buy uniforms and books. The nearest school is in the next village--a dangerous walk for a young girl.
Besides, you need your daughter at home to fetch water and take care of her younger siblings. You know that education is important--but it is your sons who will support you when you are old, while your daughters will become part of their husbands. families. Your decision is easy--the boys, and only the boys, go to school.
Gene Sperling, formerly President Clinton's national economic advisor, now at the Council on Foreign Relations, likes to talk about the central paradox in girls' education: Going to school is good for girls. Educated girls make more money. They are more productive farmers and have smaller, healthier, better-educated families of their own. They are even less likely to catch the AIDS virus. Educating girls is also great policy for a nation. Closing the educational gender gap boosts economic growth.
But educating girls is not necessarily good for parents--and they make the decisions. Most poor people in the world live in societies in which the girl marries into her husband.s family. Educating a daughter, these cultures say, is like watering a neighbor's garden. Parents will send their girls to school only if the costs are very low.
That's one reason why far fewer girls than boys go to school. Of children in primary school today, 150 million will drop out before they finish--two thirds of them girls. In Africa, the majority of girls do not finish primary school.
School is often very expensive. School fees in some countries, such as the Congo, are more than the national per capita income. When Tanzania abolished school fees in January, 2002, school attendance doubled overnight--and most of the new students were girls. There are other costs. Parents must buy books and uniforms. When Kenya tried abolishing fees for uniforms, books and school construction in some places, students stayed in school 15 percent longer.
The other cost to parents is the lost value of the girls. work at home. To solve this problem, many countries now pay families to send children, especially girls, to school. It is a central feature of Oportunidades-style cash payments, for example. Bangladesh's government provides 15 to 20 kilograms of grain , mainly wheat, per month to families of poor boys and girls if they maintain 85 percent attendance in primary school. The government also pays a stipend to all girls in rural areas in grades 6 through 10, covering the cost of tuition, exams, books, supplies, uniforms, transportation and even kerosene for lamps to study by. The girls must keep up minimum grades, attend classes and not get married until out of school. This program has boosted girls. enrollment from 27 percent to 60 percent.
Bangladesh is also home to the schools run by BRAC, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. BRAC's community schools have doubled the completion rates of government schools by overcoming the hidden obstacles to educating girls. BRAC runs more than 30,000 schools for poor students, many in places where the nearest government school is far away. Teachers are women--often local high school graduates given training by BRAC. These features reassure parents that their daughters will be safe on the way to school and while in class. School schedules work around harvests and allow girls to be home during peak chore times. BRAC schools are run in close consultation with parents and do everything possible to help parents give their daughters the gift of learning.
VII. A Green Revolution for Africa
What was probably the single most effective antipoverty program in world history began in northern Mexico in the 1940s. Test plots showed that new varieties of dwarf wheat resisted many plant pests and diseases, and doubled or tripled the usual yields. Similar improvements followed in corn and rice. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations spread the seeds to India and Pakistan, and parts of Asia, Latin America and North Africa, along with irrigation techniques, pesticides and fertilizer.
The Green Revolution is not yet over--productivity continues to increase, and even faster than in the early days. It has prevented famine and brought improvements in income, health and survival to hundreds of millions of people.
But few of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa's farmers get less than half the amount of grain per acre that Asian farmers get. From 1980 to 2000, India's agricultural yields rose 28 percent. Africa's dropped by 7 percent.
A Green Revolution for Africa is a challenge. Africa's climate is much more varied than south Asia's, so what crops need varies from place to place. Africa's infrastructure is worse than India's was, the soil is more degraded and AIDS is killing off the continent's labor force.
But while a single Green Revolution benefiting all of Africa may not be possible, a patchwork of Green Revolutions is. Indeed, this is happening.
The Earth Institute at Columbia University is working with 78 villages across Africa to help them improve crop yields, part of a demonstration project trying to attack several different causes of poverty at once. Each village gets help with crops, clean water, nutrition, schools and health, for a total cost of no more than $110 per person per year. The Millennium Village project hopes to show that conquering poverty is possible for very little money. In agriculture, the project provides appropriate seeds and fertilizers to farmers who pledge to contribute part of their surplus to local schools for their lunch program. The subsidies diminish as farmers become able to buy the seeds and fertilizers themselves, and after three years the farmers are on their own.
Even after just one year, success has been notable. Farmers are growing a minimum of 3.5 times as much grain as before, with one village in Rwanda increasing its output 62-fold.
Can this be done on a large scale? The evidence says yes.
Ethiopia--a country once emblematic of crop failure and hunger--has doubled food production in the last 10 years and the government says it will double again by 2010. Malawi's harvest this year was double that of last year. Ethiopia's strategy was to provide farmers with better seed, more fertilizer, and hundreds of extension agents to spread good techniques. Malawi began to pick up 75 percent of the cost of farmers. fertilizer and seed. Many farmers are now able to feed their families and sell surplus crops for the first time. Part of the advance has been luck--good rains. But success today will give farmers a cushion and better tools for withstanding the next drought.
The initial costs of improving crop yields is daunting for many governments in Africa. But if the Millennium Villages and countries like Ethiopia and Malawi can show success, they will make a strong case that farmers mainly need a one-time boost and that the benefits are great for Africa's poorest and most vulnerable to drought.
Tuberculosis is curable. Millions of people alive today can personally attest to the power of antibiotics. A simple course of four antibiotics, which costs as little as $11, can now vanquish a dreaded killer.
So why do nearly 2 million people a year still die of it? Because these antibiotics must be taken daily for six to nine months. That means that the local health clinic must have a steady supply. Patients must continue to take the full course even though they stop coughing, and the medicine causes nasty side effects. TB strikes mostly the poor, especially those living in crowded conditions. Many of them are migrants, who may be lost to the health system when they move.
If they don't finish the course, terrible things can happen. Patients stay sick, but now with a form of TB resistant to the basic drugs. Medicines that can cure this form of TB can cost $10,000, and the course of treatment is two years. Because of poor adherence, resistance has reached the point where some forms of TB are incurable. South Africa is battling an outbreak of this extremely resistant TB, and no doubt many other places are as well--they just don't know it yet.
The solution is a strategy invented in Tanzania in the 1970s and now in use all over the world, called DOTS, for Directly Observed Treatment, Short-course.
DOTS has several components--among them good supply management and diagnosis--but what is key is what it is named for. Someone becomes a pill pal, with the job of watching the patient swallow the medicines. This can be a neighbor, a family member, or a community health worker.
DOTS is now widespread--it covers about 60 percent of the world.s diagnosed TB cases. It greatly improves the chance of cure. DOTS gives patients a social incentive to take their pills. But sometimes other layers of incentive are necessary as well. In her book Millions Saved Ruth Levine, the director of programs at the Center for Global Development in Washington, writes about China's TB program. In 1990, TB in China was the leading cause of death in adults, killing 360,000 people that year. The next year, China switched to DOTS.
China found a way to make DOTS even more effective--by relying on the market. With help from the World Bank, China's government pays village health workers to find TB patients, get them to the lab for periodic sputum checks, and see them through the full treatment course. The pill pal gets a bonus, too, as does the health center. China's TB cure rate went from 52 percent to 95 percent, which prevents 30,000 TB deaths per year. Rates of resistant TB are far lower in the parts of China where DOTS is used.
DOTS is one of the most cost-effective health programs around. Each cure costs just $100, and brings a return of $60 for every dollar spent. It works because the drugs are cheap and it relies on community workers instead of doctors. The DOTS strategy recognizes that the promise of being cured is not always enough to change the way people behave. It uses social--and occasionally monetary--incentives to get the community and the patient working towards health.
These are not the only good programs. There are many more out there . family planning, provision of small amounts of nutrients such as Vitamin A , agroforestry to restore the fertility of soil, to name a few. But the above eight are some of the best.
A few common threads link these eight programs.
Many of them rely on the market. Microcredit and property legalization help poor people to start businesses. Other programs pay people for desired behavior.
Another common element is a focus on women and girls, who tend to be poorest of the poor and use help more efficiently than men.
A lot of these programs got their start when one individual looked at a familiar landscape in a fresh way.
The most important things these programs share, however, is that they work--and with more money they could be working on a grander scale. Financing them, and others like them, is the kind of foreign aid Americans say they want, and should have.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/analysis/development x link x 0 comments
Thailand has pulled out of the One Laptop per Child program. Apparently the new military government thinks it's a bit silly.
Not that I expect a lot, but the immediate response from the Ars forum is, shall we say, bleak:
Right. It's not that the critics have valid objections (and don't just take my word for it, this is also a nice post from a WorldChanging contributor). It's that we're just ignorant Americans. That's a nice bit of rhetorical judo for a program that basically amounts to rich technocrats selling hardware to the lesser-developed countries without any pedagogical or infrastructural support. But then, the line that "we don't need a plan now, we're fast-paced venture capitalist geniuses with a secret plan" has long been an excuse of the program.
15:30 x Thomas x /bank/analysis/development/technology x link x 1 comment
Courtesy of Dan in unrelated comments, NPR recorded the Black Keys show that Belle took me to for my birthday, and a blogger has broken it into discrete songs here. There seem to be a few volume jogs in the files--I'm not sure if they were there in NPR's original recordings, but at one point the sound dips for a few seconds in "ThickFreakness"--but it was a great show and this is a good (legal) way to check them out. Note the copious (sometimes overwhelming) use of feedback--these guys play loud.
I guess relatively few people have actually heard of the Black Keys. When Belle picked up the tickets, she said that she actually thought they were an older band from the recordings I'd played. It's true that they're a bit retro blues-rock. You should check them out anyway. You will like them. Or maybe you could just pretend to keep me happy.
In other pet band news, Clatter is taking pre-orders for their new CD, titled Monarch. It has a cover of Rush's "Limelight," which will be fun for anyone who still thinks "Anthem changed my life, man," but the previews sound quite good--if a bit different from the Blinded By Vision album.
All makes me want to break out the fuzz pedal and do some recording tonight.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/artists/black_keys x link x 0 comments
Orson Scott Card is writing a book/video game/movie about war between red and blue states. He says:
Call me crazy, but somehow I have my doubts that he's really going for a fair and happy ending for both sides here. And how bad of a writer do you have to be to write "true-blue, red-state soldier?"
Previously, people alleged that Card was writing apologias for Hitler. I wonder if this is his version of the Turner Diaries.
18:22 x Thomas x /fiction/litcrit x link x 1 comment
The World Bank Institute's Urban and Local Government division is holding a game design competition. Designers are asked to submit proposals for a board or card game that will teach the concepts and benefits of street addressing, and the winner will recieve a $6,000 consultancy contract to fine-tune the game before publication. Runners-up may receive short contracts to discuss their concepts if there are interesting aspects for consideration. If you're interested, you can find the call for proposals here, but hurry: the competition closes at the end of November.
Why street addressing? For Americans this sounds like a silly assignment. My manager stood up at the meeting and explained that it's actually a huge economic drain in lesser-developed countries, including places we typically think of as mostly-developed. For example, she said, when she worked in East Germany during its transition from communism to democracy, the street signs had been removed but new ones hadn't been posted. Finding the firms for which she was consulting on any given day without clear addresses took a great deal of effort, and harmed productivity. Convincing local governments of the benefits of street addressing, as well as the methods for implementation, can be really important.
My thought, and feel free to steal this, is a card game where each player is trying to reach their destination in a fictional city. By playing street sign and address cards, they build a set of directions and move closer. Other players can play obstacle and inefficiency cards that represent a lack of good orientation, sending opponents off course and moving them farther away. The first player to reach their final destination, say by assembling 20 "direction points," wins the game. It's like Magic: the Gathering, but for street addresses. I can just see myself trying to explain that to my colleagues. "Magic: the Gathering? Thomas, you are such a dork."
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/design/learning x link x 0 comments
Maybe you saw where Wired solicited sci-fi stories limited to only six words long. Some are good, some are terrible. Obviously they didn't ask me, but it's an interesting writing exercise.
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/micro x link x 0 comments
When I was in high school, going nuts in a small rural Virginia town, my family used to watch Lonely Planet on the Travel Channel. Our favorites starred a short, gregarious Englishman named Ian, who habitually got drunk on a local beverage. In one South American country, he sat on a park bench with a ranchhand and learned how to pick up women. He would eat anything. Living in the Shenandoah Valley, a place my mother occasionally compares to Communist Russia in terms of accessibility, watching Ian wander around the world in such an infectious good mood was actually a real inspiration for me.
Some of the better aspects that made the Lonely Planet series great are present in Long Way Round. A 7-part series that originally aired on Bravo, it follows Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman as they traveled from London to New York by way of Eastern Europe, Mongolia, Russia, and across the US (i.e., the Long Way Round). It gets off to a slow start as they prepare for the trip, but once the pair starts traveling through the less-developed parts of Europe it becomes more interesting. Perhaps because they're traveling through such backwoods areas, McGregor's fame is basically irrelevant, so he and Boorman (plus their cameraman, Claudio) take part in different cultures unencumbered. One of my favorite moments is a night at a Russian gangster's house, where the host climbs down the stairs to entertain his guests with a guitar in one hand and an AK-47 in the other. They also have prairie oysters in Mongolia, and put up with constant police supervision all through Kazakhstan (quite different from Borat, obviously).
Of course, once they cross into Mongolia and Siberia, the show changes from a mostly feel-good cultural vacation into a harsh slog (for the travelers, not for the viewers), as the motorcycles become bogged down into increasingly boggy and punishing terrain. At points the team has to stop completely as the bikes break, or as the rivers are simply too high to keep going--and at one point on the Road of Bones, even the support team's 4x4s have to be towed across a river crossing by enormous Soviet trucks. Perhaps the best take on this comes from a Russian doctor hired for the trip. "These men, they have families, children," he repeats over and over. "What are you doing this for? Why?"
It's not a question I can answer, because I probably would have given up after the second week. But it makes for pretty good television.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/documentary x link x 0 comments
Our Birthdays Are Better Than Your Birthdays: Jim Webb's My Hero Edition
Don't get me wrong: I've enjoyed all my birthday gifts and wishes. And normally I don't actually make a big deal out of the annual Celebration of Thomas. But then I got a lumpy, misshapen package labeled "From: America," and when I opened it up I found two Democrat-controlled houses of Congress and a Rumsfeld resignation. That's so sweet: it's just what I wanted! Thanks, America! I take back all the nasty things I said about you.
Well, most of them.
A few. Conditionally.
Anyway, it's thrilling news, and of course I'm ecstatic. Not as giddy as some, granted--I read a diary on Kos claiming that we were looking at the beginnings of a progressive period in this country, and I really don't have that much faith in my fellow man. But it's a start.
But once everyone's settled down, the Republicans have rushed through as much lame-duck, last-minute legislation as possible, and the new congressmen and congresswomen arrive, we'll have to ask: okay, what now? What have we actually won? And I would argue that it's not really the votes that matter. It's the control itself.
After all, it's nice to have a majority, even a slim one. But with control of Congress comes subpeona power--investigations, baby. The Iraq war. NSA wiretaps. Election fraud. Torture. The whole nine yards, with the power of the legislature to push for accountability. And I believe firmly that we need that--people must be punished and findings must be released, if for no other reason than because otherwise these issues will continue to be twisted and denied by conservatives who don't care about reality and history. It astonishes me that there are still people capable of believing that we're winning in Iraq and that tax cuts without spending control is a viable budgetary theory. We need to establish, with as much evidence as possible, the documented truth. At the very least, the extreme right needs to work harder for their delusions. If that means media circus, then so be it.
The other benefit of control is procedural. Although Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on how the Republican Congress broke the legislative process was well-written and timely, it's not news to anyone who follows the news. We've heard for years about riders slipped into bills, Republicans who closed hearings in fits of pique, and committees that locked out their Democratic members. The best thing the Democrats can do--and I think they will--is to restore the integrity of the process. It doesn't mean that they will do no wrong, or that they'll legislate up a progressive storm. It means that the fundamental apparatus of lawmaking--discussion, debate, and deliberation--will be restored. No more midnight votes. No more secret meetings. No more procedural con-artistry.
There are those on the Right who are under the impression that this Congress will be a "do-nothing" legislation. Normally, I would ask those people what they thought we had for the last six to ten years. But more importantly, I think they're wrong, in that they're partly counting on the President's veto power. And that is another case of ignorance to history, because this is not a presidency that uses the veto. Bush's only veto thus far was on the stem-cell issue (and as I noted in my Escapist article a while back, he's notably lax on vetos in international organizations like the WTO as well). No, his style is more to dramatically reinterpret legislation through an executive signing statement--a propensity that, again, I hope will soon be under Congressional scrutiny.
The other misconception is that we will see impeachment proceedings, despite Nancy Pelosi's statements to the contrary. I'm not opposed to impeachment, personally. But I think that if it happens, it will be in response to Congressional oversight--there's that subpeona power once more. Now that Pelosi is third in line to the Presidency, it is tempting to think that we could actually uncover enough evidence to force both Cheney and Bush out of office, but I doubt that we have enough time, and I doubt that we have enough support.
One functional branch of government is enough for me today. How sad is that?
10:48 x Thomas x /politics/national/congress x link x 1 comment
What We Learn When We Learn Economics
Mark Thoma at Economist's View recommends (with good reason) this article (warning: PDF) on the unspoken biases of undergraduate economics. Christopher Hayes, the author, notes that the concepts of free markets and market efficiency remain unchallenged in basic economic classes, while complications like externalities and irrational behavior--you know, the considerations of real people--are reserved for the advanced and graduate-level students.
This explains a lot of extreme free-trade rhetoric from amateur pundits. It also undermines the charge of left-wing indoctrination centered on universities.
00:00 x Thomas x /politics/issues/economy x link x 0 comments
When Wallace and I go for car rides, we have a little song that we sing. The lyrics go something like this:
You're not vomitin'
You're not vomitin'
You're not vomitin'
'Cause you're a not-vomitin' dog.
Its melody is a bit like a non-gendered toy commercial jingle from the 80's. I start the song whenever Wallace starts to look vaguely carsick--which, even for a dog of great intelligence and expressiveness like our puppy, can be hard to judge. Better safe than sorry. So far it is working, although whether it is the power of suggestion or the fact that we've only taken one trip since I've started singing, I couldn't say.
We sing this song because Wallace did throw up in my car the other day. He's had vehicular accidents before, but it was always in Belle's car. It is simply human nature: dog vomit all over your girlfriend's property is a pity, but also slightly amusing. Dog vomit on your own property is a capital crime. But in my defense, what Wallace produced in my car was orders of magnitude more disgusting than what I saw in hers. The stench from his Exorcist impression was honestly the most disgusting thing I have ever smelled, much less mopped up with a paper towel. I don't know how he contained it--I think it started eating through the floor mats. He's such a mild-mannered dog, it's sometimes hard to imagine that he's capable of these Geneva Convention violations.
What's really funny is that I have started to worry, and Belle is relatively nonchalant about his uneasy stomach, which is a reversal of our usual roles. Normally, the interaction goes more like this:
Thomas: (not looking up from the book/video game/television) That's just something that dogs do, babe. My dogs played in the blender half the time. He'll be fine. It builds character.
But in response to my concerns that perhaps we should change Wallace's food, Belle raises an eyebrow. "Dogs throw up all the time," she says. And she has a point. Dogs do throw up on a regular basis. They are scavenging animals, after all. In fact, for some dogs, it is just another means of communication. Where cats bring you dead animals as gifts, the dog might imagine that nothing could express his joy and simple love for you nearly as much as the contents of his digestive system. It's near the bottom of his heart, right?
Or at least, I find that it helps to think of it that way. Especially when I'm breaking out the paper towels again.
10:31 x Thomas x /random/personal/filthy_beasts x link x 1 comment
Our Birthdays Are Better Than Your Birthdays: Heart-Shaped Box Edition
Best girlfriend on the planet, yes?
09:56 x Thomas x /gaming/software/guitar_hero x link x 1 comment
Want to see something funny? Cory Doctorow, tireless champion of useless digital hysterics, takes yet another crack at the copy-protection built into iTunes files. You can apparently strip the protection out using iMovie now, which Doctorow finds terribly exciting because previously he "spent six weeks this year running two PowerBooks 24/7 to convert all my iTunes audiobooks to MP3s."
I've made no secret of my own personal animosity to Apple's digital media, largely because I dislike all compressed music on principle. So I sympathize with him on his desire to actually own the files he buys. But one is forced to wonder, I think: if Cory Doctorow really hates iTunes DRM as much as he says, enough that he's willing to dedicate expensive hardware to the relatively trivial task of re-recording them via crappy built-in sound cards, why does he keep buying them from Apple in the first place? Why doesn't he just buy the books on CDs and rip them himself, no doubt a faster process anyway?
I mean, I have a visceral reaction to Old Navy's advertising, so I don't give money to Old Navy. I go elsewhere for clothes--or at least, Belle wishes I would. The idea is that I give them an incentive (i.e. they might get my money) to change their ways (i.e., they stop running annoying faux-ironic commercials starring deadbeat D-list celebs). Whether or not Old Navy actually cares about the incentive I'm offering (so far, results of the Thomas Wilburn Old Navy Embargo have been depressingly nonexistent), I thought that the "vote with your dollars" approach was a fundamental part of capitalism. It seems kind of silly for Doctorow to moan unceasingly about how Apple should change its ways, when all the while he's funding their copy-protection with his business.
07:48 x Thomas x /music/business/distribution x link x 1 comment
Although I couldn't say why, this weekend I started thinking about Orson Scott Card--maybe because I saw shades of him in a barely coherent stem-cell debate, maybe because I was reminded of Mormon theology by Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell. Either way, while I try to catch up on the Bank's Human Development Week videos, you may be amused by this article on how "Orson Scott Card Has Always Been An Asshat." I've personally never been able to read him the same way, especially after reading the first linked essay there. And one day I am going to make it to a library and dig up Radford's review, "Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman."
01:40 x Thomas x /fiction/litcrit x link x 1 comment
As I wrote my review, I recently bought a Cort Curbow bass. I ordered it from Curbow Stringed Instruments directly because I hoped that ordering straight from the designer would be a safer proposition than one of the online retailers. Indeed, Curbow representative Simon Griffiths assured