Melville's Billy Budd

Wow! That's site's an English course all by itself!

I aim to be like Billy Budd: hard working (and competent), honest, kind. And pretty much ignore the slights of those who hate me.

I don't think I'd take a beating with equanimity, though.

Oh, whoops! I'm confusing that story with Two Years Before the Mast, or part of it, which seems to have influenced Melville.

Check out the Melville website, especially this page.

Nick Coleman's taking the Bourgeois path here.

Bourgeois means, among other things, "bürgerlich", or 'citizenish' - as a member of the community. These other people he's talking about want to exclude the community they've moved into.

Read the article, you'll see what I mean.

I have more to say here and in my comment on this post by Mitch Berg.

I'm sorry, I've been so under the weather lately

I haven't been able to handle one blog, up to my standards (whatever you think of them), let alone two.

I always ask myself at the dashboard, whether what I'm thinking of is particularly bourgeois or philistinish, and lately everything I've thought of is just chatty or political. The Old Whig handles that stuff. Of course, I also handle items over here that need more work, but the trouble is that I've also been very busy handling customers and selling things, so gathering up items for repair has had to take a back seat.

I just want folks to know that I care about this blog as well, and I'll get something going shortly.

When the baby's done dancing to "Gootchy Gootchy Ya Ya Ga Ga" with Raymond Barone.

This is really an Old Whig post, but

since the Powers That Be have made it difficult for me to mess with the settings, I think I'll put it here.

An excerpt from James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds (a great excerpt there as well), ch. 10, section 3:

Let's say that corporations exist because they reduce the cost of getting large numbers of people to act in a coordinated fashion to accomplish particular future goals, and because they make the future (at least a company's small part of it) more predictable. What's interesting about that description, though, is everything it leaves out. It says nothing about the way companies deal with their suppliers and customers (who are essential to accomplishing anything but whom the company can't order around), nothing about how companies should get their employees to act in a coordinated fashion, and, most interestingly, nothing about how the company decides which goals it should pursue and in what fashion it should pursue them. In other words, the fact that corporations exist doesn't tell us anything about the way they really work.

For much of the twentieth century, though, we knew how companies worked. In fact, we assumed that corporations all, in some sense, had to work in the same way, at least if they wanted to be successful. First, a corporation was vertically integrated, which meant that it had full control over most of its supply chain. Few companies went to the extremes that Henry Ford did in insisting that Ford Motor Company own the iron ore and the sand that went into its care\s, but on the whole the assumption was that what a company could do for itself, it should do for itself. Second, a corporation was hierarchical, with many layers of management, each responsible for the one below it. The people at each level of the hierarchy could handle certain problems on their own, but more difficult or complex or consequential problems got handed up the chain to someone more important (and, supposedly, more skilled). And a third, a corporation was centralized. This didn't mean that headquarters controlled everything that a company's divisions did. In fact, the company that set the mold for the twentieth-century corporation, General Motors, prided itself on its decentralized structure, since each division--Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac--was run on a day-to-day basis much like an independent business. But all of the big decisions that shaped GM's strategy or its internal organization were made at GM headquarters. More to the point, perhaps, in the old-model corporation final decision-making power was concentrated in the hands of a very few people, and often in the hands of one person: the CEO.

Paradoxically, even as American companies became more hierarchical, more centralized, and more rigid, they paid increasing lip service to the idea that top-down organizations were oppressive and damaging. In fact, the idea that worker "empowerment" is a key to a healthy company, which became something of a managerial conceit during the 1990s, has been a perennial favorite of management gurus for almost a hundred years. In the second decade of the twentieth century, for instance, a number of major corporations established profit-sharing plans and gave their workers voting rights in the company. In the 1930s, the so-called human relations movement, led by the sociologist Elton Mayo, purported to have proved that workers were happier and more productive when they felt that their concerns were being listened to by management. (In retrospect, Mayo's studies now seem to prove that the workers were happier and more productive when they were getting paid more by management.) And in the 1950s, which today is thought of as the heyday of the old-line, bureaucratic corporation, companies were positively obsessed with teamwork and committee meetings. William H. Whyte's classic critique of middle-class conformity, The Organization Man, was driven, in no small part, by his frustration with the emphasis on the value of groups. For Whyte, companies were entirely too infatuated with the virtues of the people in the middle of the pyramid and not respectful enough of the men at the top. As he put it, "It is not the leaders of industry that are idealized...but the lieutenants."

Although they were rhetorically committed to the virtues of collective decision making, most American corporations were not especially interested in turning rhetoric into reality and did not try to do so. Collective decision making was too often confused with the quest for a consensus. This was, in particular, Whyte's bete noire, and justifiably so. You don not seed a consensus in order, for instance, to tap into the wisdom of a crowd, and the search for consensus encourages tepid, lowest-common-denominator solutions which offend no one rather than exciting everyone. Instead of fostering the fee exchange of conflicting views, consensus-driven groups--especially when the members are familiar with each other--tend to trade in the familiar and squelch provocative debate. If, as the saying goes, a camel is a horse produced by a committee, it was undoubtedly made by a committee looking for consensus.

I push the limits of fair use here in an effort to promote the thinking Mr. Surowiecki has put into this book, and to show that this thinking is a potential unifier of left and right throughout the world.

If his goal is merely to make a buck for himself in the short term, he will sue my ass off for breach of copyright (not that there is much there to chew on, he wouldn't live more than a month), but if he and his publisher are willing to accept my assistance, the world will be a more prosperous place and we will all be wealthier for his input.

That is my whole goal in life; for everyone to be more prosperous and less envious via the magic of interdependence (aka cooperation). James Surowiecki is a big help in showing the way.

Oop! Gotta add another visitor to the link list!

Falafel Sex. Apparently the name is based on a malaprop by Bill O'Reilly.

I've never been a fan of his. Pretty tough to like a guy who thinks that everything important happens "inside the Beltway."

The Philistine take on the Oscars

I'm particularly well-suited to give a "tone-deaf" report because I haven't been to anything but a few children's movies in years. I'm a big fan of Shrek. I really want to see the four big winners, Million Dollar Baby (four Oscars), Ray (two Oscars), but particularly The Aviator (five Oscars) and The Incredibles (two Oscars) because The Objectivists liked them so much.

I liked the winning song, Al Otro Lado Del Rio, very much, though I liked watching Beyonce sing three of the other songs even more.

I was going to rip The Motorcycle Diaries, but the reviews I've read have sold me on it. (That damn Advertising!) It's Che's lifework I hate, though, not what inspired it, and it seems that that is what the movie is about. The admixture of politics and business deserves to be fought, but the means of violent revolution and communism aren't the proper tools for the job. At least they won't relieve the poverty and suffering of the people you're talking to.

The babes were hot, particularly Virginia Madsen and Scarlett Johansson. I enjoyed the women's dresses.

Jamie Foxx deserved the Best Actor for Ray, I think. Morgan Freeman deserves every award that comes his way. I find it hard to believe that Clint beat Scorsese, but it's probably true that neither film deserved a sweep.

Don Cheadle and Hotel Rwanda should have won something.

I actually thought Chris Rock was pretty funny and smooth, even with the pro-Michael Moore diatribe. The jokes that grew out of that cracked foundation were good. Too bad it's all the guy knows about politics. Somebody send him Michael Moore hates America.

I agree with the producers who decided that the technical awards needed a little speeding up; having their awards in the aisles was a nice change of pace. It sort of downplayed the grandiosity of the stage and played up the role of the audience. But when they lined up the whole editing and costuming crews on the stage it emphasized the fact that most of them were losers.

So there! I thought it was a good show.

Update Mar. 3: This dude shows me how it's done.

World Atlas of Archeology on the Web

Something to check out. They need blurbs or updates though.

The Cheeser's are making themselves useful.

The Oklahoma Spaceport will be home to the new Rocketplane XP, a "modified Lear 25 series using the same General Electric CJ-610 turbojet engines found on the standard business jet configuration."

Oklahoma Spaceport? "The plan calls for Rocketplane XP to depart from the Oklahoma Spaceport located in Burns Flat and whisk customers skyward to over 60 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth."

Who? How?

Rocketplane Limited, Inc. has obtained from the State of Oklahoma a $13 million face value Investment Tax Credit to develop a re-usable sub-orbital tourist business at the Oklahoma Spaceport. Rocketplane's main office and engineering center are based at Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City, and quite appropriately located on Amelia Earhart Lane.

See Space.com's article for when, why and more on how.
Where do the Cheeser's come in? "Orbital Technologies Corporation of Madison, Wisconsin is providing the main rocket motor that incorporates patented vortex engine technology."

This comment makes me think that I may one day do a "What the Hell's wrong with that?!" post on the subject one of these days, "Marketing space will not be easy. Fun haters are everywhere. Most of them are lawyers, insurance agents and government officials. Anyone marketing space to civilians must be prepared to meet obstacles," [Jane Reifert, President of Incredible Adventures] reported.

The Philistine take on Biedermeier.

Biedermayer is a decorating style from the middle 1800s that got ripped a lot by the Avant Garde at the turn of the 20th Century.

Seems pretty eclectic to me, but I'm only seeing bits and pieces, not a whole room decorated in the style. Some of it... heck, most of it looks pretty good. That divan, or whatever you call it, is pretty ugly.

I just ripped off a bunch of links from

TBFKADVK and Hugh Hewitt.

And I honored my first guest with a link to his site.

Libertarian stuff I need to work on.

History Without Blinders, by Anthony Gregory: a review of "A Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Regnery, 2004, 270 pages.

Gregory likes it.

Review of 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man', by Jude Wanniski.

Actually, it's not a review, it's the transcript of an interview of John Perkins, the author of "Hitman."

Here's what Reynolds says about the book.

I wasn't looking for this, but the Unrefined Eye

(no, I'm not changing my name to that, just emphasizing the aesthetic meaning of Philistine) likes this stuff at usefilm.com.

What the Hell's Wrong With That?!

This will be the signature feature of this blog. I will caste my unrefined eye over the media, and my memory, looking for snarky comments about things that I like. And I will begin to push back.

Middle class values and tastes need to be defended, dammit!

Lileks handles this one pretty awesomely for me though. I don't watch "24", or any other show that requires a commitment of time. I'm a father, a husband, a customer servant and a blogger. That's enough commitments.

Lileks:

Apparently the producers have not just gone mad, but given in to age-old American desires for stereotyping people for devious reasons. Hold tightly to your chair and your hat: "24" suggests that America might be targeted by Islamic extremists.

I am not kidding you.

I'm happy with that quote to whet your curiousity. RTWT. (Oh, that means Read The Whole Thing. I saw that on another blog, so I guess it's okay to use it.)

I just wanna say Welcome

to my new, [impolite term]-lookin' blog. I'll be changing it pretty quick here.

Okay, that's done. Now it looks more manly.

The first thing I've learned is that I don't like my profile quote. I think it's true, but it seems rather...inelegant.