Ethel the Blog

Lost in the late night comedy shuffle in the early 1980s was Fridays, which ran on Fridays on ABC from 1980 to 1982, and whose cast included Larry David, Rich Hall and Michael Richards.  While I was too busy boozing it up on Friday nights as an undergrad to catch it regularly, I remember really enjoying the episodes I did catch.  What sticks the most is a very long sketch called “The Ronny Horror Show”, which combined Ronald Reagan with a certain cult movie to marvelous effect.  Dennis Perrin points to some web videos of the show being made available by one of the writers, and hints at a possible DVD set.  I’ll be handing over my hard-earned shekels.

Matthew Stewart started out as a philosopher and end up as a management consultant.  He calls “shenanigans!” in a most entertaining way.

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?

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That Taylorism and its modern variants are often just a way of putting labor in its place need hardly be stated: from the Hungarians’ point of view, the pig iron experiment was an infuriatingly obtuse way of demanding more work for less pay. That management theory represents a covert assault on capital, however, is equally true. (The Soviet five-year planning process took its inspiration directly from one of Taylor’s more ardent followers, the engineer H. L. Gantt.) Much of management theory today is in fact the consecration of class interest—not of the capitalist class, nor of labor, but of a new social group: the management class.

I can confirm on the basis of personal experience that management consulting continues to worship at the shrine of numerology where Taylor made his first offering of blobs of fudge. In many of my own projects, I found myself compelled to pacify recalcitrant data with entirely confected numbers. But I cede the place of honor to a certain colleague, a gruff and street-smart Belgian whose hobby was to amass hunting trophies. The huntsman achieved some celebrity for having invented a new mathematical technique dubbed “the Two-Handed Regression.” When the data on the correlation between two variables revealed only a shapeless cloud—even though we knew damn well there had to be a correlation—he would simply place a pair of meaty hands on the offending bits of the cloud and reveal the straight line hiding from conventional mathematics.

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The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

The idea that philosophy is an inherently academic pursuit is a recent and diabolical invention. Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, and most of the other great philosophers of history were not professors of philosophy. If any were to come to life and witness what has happened to their discipline, I think they’d run for the hills. Still, you go to war with the philosophers you have, as they say, not the ones in the hills.

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The bidness press - as if there were such a thing as a non-bidness press not in the bidness-propagandizing bidness - has noticably throttled back the usual background din about privatizing social security.  They’re too busy running the sort of stories excerpted by Leo Kolivakis in Pensions’ death spiral, wherein they strike the careful, even-handed balance between the situations of management and labor that’s been the hallmark of such “reportage” since the nascent Gypper years (and marginally if not significantly less so before that).  A typical case in point is the NYTimes piece that Leo leads with.  With just the title and the first two paragraphs the proper tone is set.  We learn that the “plight of the carmakers” - i.e. the plight of management  (and the fucking bondholders) who signed the contracts promising pensions to their workers and then “managed” the plans into the ground, except, of course, for their management fees and bonuses for doing such an exemplary job -  is forcing them to abandon the pension plans “for competitive reasons”.  But wait, there’s more!  Not only will the inexorable forces of history and logic force Chryster and GM to do so, but the big invisible hand holding the giant pistol of inevitably will additionally “spur other auto companies and all types of manufacturers” to do the same.  You can assume that the word “competition” is being used in the same surreal, orthogonal and, yes, Orwellian sense in which the oligarchs and their loyal propagandists have (ab)used it since about five minutes after worms nibbled away the last bits of Adam Smith’s flesh.

Next we learn how “the prospect of a grueling grind through bankruptcy court” has deterred companies “that might want to rid themselves of pension obligations.”  That’s rich.  The translation of “a grueling grind” from corporate propagandaspeak into English is basically “management and the fucking bondholders having to suffer through a haircut while the proles enjoy their amputations.”  Sure enough, in the next sentence we learn how “specialists” are all antsy and anxious waiting to hear whether the Executive Branch unit of Goldman Sachs “will give either of the auto companies an easier way to shed their huge pension funds, blazing a simplified trail for others to follow”.  That’s richer. You can almost see and hear the ominous, dark, looming, grim pension fund being defeated by the brave and resourceful frontiersman - the sort of mythic figure the geniuses of high finance imagine themselves to be - with the sun cutting through the ominous darkness as John Wayne Geithner rides his gleaming, white steed down a newly blazed trail into a braver, happier future.  Too bad for the proles that the reality is closer to John Wayne Gacy.

The Times hack manages to do more reporting than mythmongering over the next several paragraphs, with only another brief flogging of the “iron law of competition forcing companies to nuke pensions” crap interrupting the narrative until we come to this gem:

For years, traditional pensions — those that shield workers from market risk — have been in a slow decline, with troubled sectors like aviation and steel shedding their plans in bankruptcy court as new types of individually managed benefits like 401(k) plans have taken hold.

But big sectors, particularly manufacturing and financial services, have clung to the old plans.

Once again we have a morality play wherein the darkness of traditional pensions - those evil constructs that needlessly (and probably harmfully) shield the workers from the dispassionate benevolence of a market that will reward all who are truly deserving - yields to the goodness and happiness of 401(k) plans.  The troubled sectors have shed their outworn and outmoded socialist skins to be reborn as bright, shining capitalist butterflies.  Now all the rugged individuals who’ve been shedded can manage their own retirement plans with the help of all the rugged individuals managing the 401(k) plans and ruggedly charging them a dozen or so individual management fees.  They should strive to be at least as rugged and individual as the fucking bondholders, who bravely sail the stormy but fair seas of capitalism and steadfastly refuse to take a penny’s worth of socialist welfare handouts.  Unless, of course, the benevolent and omniscient market unfairly blows them off course towards the Land of Haircuts.

One would think that the whores flogging social security privatization would have sense enough to switch over to their no-tax, anti-abortion or anti-evolution mantras for a while, if only out of a sense of self preservation.  Eventually even the most  thick-headed of the real populists might figure out that the solution the faux-populist demagogues are offering to a non-existent social security problem is the same solution that’s presently nuking all of their other retirement options, or at least the ones that don’t involve cellular reproduction errors. But, I suspect, they won’t.  While it would be nice to see their violent urges turned against those who actually do them harm, they’ll be raptly and rapturously listening to their favorite demagogues until they shoot whoever it is that comes around to repossess their TVs and radios or turn off their electricity - most likely a neighbor desperately trying to hold on to one of the jobs that can’t be outsourced and, sadly and ironically, someone who was probably listening to the same demagogue on the way over.

While there are various arguments advanced about the possibility of a resurgence of reality-based populism - one in which the populace rebels against those who really are reaming them rather than against the straw-men created by those who are reaming them - I’m not sure that’s possible in the post-radio and -visual age of mass information and propaganda. While what Bernays codified in 1928 was known by some long before then (c.f. “The Prince”), an entire science and industry has existed for quite some time whose sole purpose is to convince the public of whatever their clients want the public to believe.  And the images and sound available to broadcast and imprint the (ex/im)plicit propaganda to a passive audience are a whole lot more powerful of a tool than the printed page could ever be.  And if you want to guess just who the clients of the propaganda machine are,  give any of the MSM outlets a call and ask how much for half a minute in prime time.

In an item about the “Nyuck nyuck nyuck!  Pick any two!” nature of the stress tests, Yves Smith calls a spade a spade at the risk of never being invited to Bohemian Grove.

A surprisingly large number of market participants are of the view that the current rally is at least in part the result of market manipulation. I can’t recall ever seeing so much commentary to that effect. It amounts to an open secret. Even during the commodities run-up of last year, if you dared suggest there was a speculative component, you were treated as a conspiracy theorist. Now a fair number of commentators are making more aggressive claims, and they don’t seem terribly far out.

The latest sign of something out of whack is via Jesse, who tells us that insider sales are at high levels. When did that last happen? October 2007. Admittedly, not long ago, but nevertheless not a sign of confidence.

Simple Simon just treated me to an interview with Christopher Buckley on Weekend Edition.  The topic was Buckley’s memoir “Losing Mum and Pup” about losing both of his notorious parents in the same year.  I’m sure Simon thought the interview would even further endear him to the people that matter, as well as increase the number of high society doors that would open for him, and it probably will.  Barely if at all concealed within the lovefest interview, though, were some frightening revelations about the departed Buckleys.  After filtering out the touchy-feely bits, one realizes that mum was a pathological liar whose intimate connection with sonny - or should that be sunny? - was such that the only words he could utter at her deathbed were “I forgive you”, and pup’s contempt for the laws in the nation of laws and not men prompted sonny to deliver a delightful anecdote about pup running 11 red lights on his way to church.  While one shouldn’t leap too quickly to the conclusion that mum and pup were sociopaths, if those are the warmest and most endearing things sonny can extract from his book in a ten minute interview then one indeed wonders.  And using megalomaniacal sociopath Henry Kissinger as a character witness doesn’t exactly discourage the wonderment. Although I’ve now developed a morbid curiosity about the book - who wouldn’t want to read further gems like, say, “with a twinkle in his non-twitching eye and wearing his favorite pair of brass knuckles, puppy entered the room to instruct the maid in the proper way to polish the furniture” - I don’t think I’ll be reading it any time soon.

The Winter Patriot gives aid and comfort to that scurrilous tale about Seymour Hersh being a CIA asset. Where do these sorts of wholly unsubstantiated rumors get started?

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It’s a beautiful thing how we get new leaders every so often but the policies never seem to change very much. It’s beautiful how Bush and Cheney take the rap for being “evil” and now Obama and Biden can do the same sorts of things without being “evil”. That’s the beauty of the imaginary reality, where even the anti-war reporting has a pro-war spin.

But then again, it’s all spin, even from “the best and the brightest” investigative journalists. Any serious observer, certainly anyone worthy of the respect accorded Seymour Hersh, would be able to explain why we get “such bad leadership, so consistently”. He wouldn’t express amazement, because there’s nothing amazing about it. It’s not even remotely surprising anymore.

The sad fact — which Hersh won’t touch — is that party politics is nothing more than an intersquad scrimmage, an exhibition game intended to convey the impression that the two “competing teams” are adversaries.

They’re not. They’re partners. They’re working together to put on the big show every four years. And we know this is true because of what happens to prospective players who are not interested in furthering the big show, but would try to change the game. Most of them don’t even get onto the field. And those who do never last very long.

We’ve seen what the Democrats and the media did to Mike Gravel, which was exactly what the Republicans and the media did to Ron Paul. We’ve seen the cold silence — or jeering derision — which has greeted every serious attempt to uphold the rule of law, to stop the war in Iraq, to stop the war in Afghanistan, to investigate the crimes of 9/11, to reform a clearly broken electoral system, to rein in a clearly complicit national media, or even to bring just a little bit of accountability to our government. These were all efforts to change the game in one way or another, and no such efforts will be tolerated.

This is the system. This is what it does. The time for amazement is past.

The Canuck put down the centerfold in the latest Polar Bear Monthly long enough to supply us with a note about how the writer Robert Bloch - who was a spin doctor before it was popular and profitable - helped defeat the socialists and thus free Milwaukee from its long regional nightmare of peace and prosperity.

An interesting sidelight on your Milwaukee story.  The campaign that
eventually defeated  the socialists was largely run by Robert
Bloch and a friend.  An airhead with Hollywood looks and hair was
running against the mayor, and Bloch and a friend, unemployed
at the time, were hired to write his speeches.  Turned out he couldn’t
run a campaign to save his shallow soul, so they wound
up more or less running the thing.  This was done in expectation that
they’d be paid, but the money never materialized.

Next they tried to get the socialist ex-mayor into congress, but I
don’t think that worked.

Mayor goodhair went off to join the military (those were pre-Dan Quayle days).

All this is in his book Once Around  the Bloch, which I have and you
don’t.  Or maybe you do, really worth a read if so.

The Bookslut offers an informative overview and appreciation of Bloch.

Via Mark Atwood, we discover a wonderful bit of krelboyne invective.

At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more.

Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

PSD is not my favourite file format.

John Scalzi, a sciffy writer whose stuff I’ve just started reading and enjoying recently, also has a blog and does a whole lot better job than introspection has in explaining something to me.

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I’m a bit of a packrat, but I don’t think it’s because I was once poor, it’s because a) I’m lazy and getting rid of stuff takes time and thought, and b) I tend to associate things with events around the time I got them, so it’s like getting rid of memories, and I’m sentimental bastard. I sort of need to get over that; at this point I have more crap than clear memories.

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I suspect this “problem” - or, as the Unindicted Co-Conspirator puts it when feeling charitable, “disease” - isn’t uncommon.  When the amateur psychiatric diagnostics are less charitable, I tend to counter with something about how spending too many hours being brainwashed by the self-elected taste arbiters on HGTV - i.e. (sur)real estate TV that lost any practical connection to the G a long freaking time ago - tends to make one a slavering, drooling robot programmed to pathologically and automatically value style over substance.  Hilarity ensues, especially after the first couple of cocktail hours.

When I finally moved out of a place - wanna guess what the UCC called it? - in what are basically the local grad student slums after living and accumulating there for nearly 15 years, the book, music and other collections that were retained and now reside in a densely packed 10×20 storage unit were contained in a collection of shelves, etc. that even I will characterize as disposable.  A goodly portion of the non-load-bearing furniture could be similarly described, and much of the ancillary stuff like cookware was made redundant by the ancillaries at the UCC’s place.  After I’d extracted and stored what the voices told me, er, what I knew I had to keep, there was still a substantial amount of stuff that had to exit the house one way or another.  It only took about 4 hours and a goodly amount of beer to be able to drag the first thing out to the curb to be salvaged by the students in the neighborhood, after which the process got progressively easier (and fuzzier).  Finally, I summoned some of my young, pituitary-laden ultimate frisbee minions to help finish with the emptying of the stables and the job was finished in several dimly remembered hours.  What I do remember is the exhaustion and beer trumping - albeit barely - the aching need to keep a whole lot of stuff whose existence is presently a fading if not faded memory.

The psychic reverberations and aches that remain from that period are increasingly general rather than specific, except for those relating to Shiva the Wonder Dog who dwelled with me for over 13 years but who’s now nearly 7 years gone.  What are now popularly known as the Loody Moner Years had run their course and done their damage, and it was time to move on to discover what damage could be done with more than one person flying the zeppelin.  While the in-flight meal beverages are served variously and unpredictably via both the chalice from the palace and the vestle with the pestle, the flight plan is still there to remind that moody lonerism is neither entirely a choice nor the only viable option.

As we’re getting to the point where even I’m having trouble parsing my twisty passages of metaphors, allusions, litotes and the like, I’ll stop here.

It’s a lot easier to head off to work when you don’t have a couple of pugs endearingly curled up and snoring at your feet.  Separation anxiety is a two-way street.