SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING

The world is filled with oddities and wonders. And a small oddity, if not a wonder, is that I received an invitation to a lunch for Condoleezza Rice that was part of her November 30 th speaking engagement at Claremont McKenna College.   The lunch itself was held at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, in the hotel’s Tiffany Ballroom—rather than here in Claremont.    Though the intended invitees to the lunch were “a special group” of donors to CMC, I had received an invitation—despite not being in that “special group”—due to a connection to CMC that goes back many, many years. The lunch was, then, exclusive, but only on a limited scale.   There were, after all, some 500 other guests.   And for the record, the lunch cost $50 per person—with a signed copy of Rice’s recent memoir, No Higher Honor , included in the cost.       My reason for attending the lunch was to circulate, as widely as possible, criticisms of...

Tomorrow, the 30 th of November, Condoleezza Rice, will be speaking here at the Claremont Colleges, specifically at the invitation of Claremont McKenna College.   Before and during her talk, I will be joining the “Un-Welcome” protest for, and teach-in about, her.  I will do so because I believe Rice is responsible for crimes against democracy and crimes against humanity.   In this regard, two aspects of her government service under George W. Bush are particularly noteworthy:  ● In July of 2002, Condoleezza Rice, as National Security Advisor, conveyed authorization to waterboard to CIA Director George Tenet . [1]   Waterboarding is torture and thus a violation of international law [2] and a violation of basic human rights.    Condoleezza Rice is thus responsible for this crime against humanity. ● In late 2002 and early 2003, Condoleezza Rice, as National Security Advisor, played a central role in circulating and accrediting f...

One of the few things that seems certain about "Occupy Wall Street" and related protests is that these are the most positive and hopeful political events in the United States at this time.  Beyond that, I find myself curious and uncertain. I do believe, however, that those of us who embrace these protests should be thinking and talking about how to make them better--or more precisely, how it might be possible to build on them to foster a robust social justice movement in our time.  Such a social justice movement would work to build a society--indeed, a world--in which the pursuit of profts and pursuit of economic growth (as measured in GDP or other monetary terms) are subordinated to insuring universal access to high quality health care, high quality education, and food security. In terms of thinking and talking about how to build on the Occupy protests with this g...

I had the odd good luck about a week ago (reminder: this is a slow blog) to have a conversation with Chris Thile -- the extraordinary mandolinist and composer -- about musical transcriptions.  In January 2010, I had had the even greater good fortune to hear Thile play -- on the Mandolin -- Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor.  It was a revelatory experience; indeed, I'd say that listening to that performance was one of a small handful of the most compelling musical experiences I have had over my lifetime. Thile's comment about transcriptions last week was that he found that a succesful transcription of a musical work exposed the "music" of a source piece more clearly or fully than did different "performances" of the piece on the instrument the piece had been written for.  What for me was helpful in Thile's comment was the idea that our sense of the "music" of a piece was heightened when the comparison we had was between versio...

It is worth listening to what commentators are saying about Steve Jobs today, upon his death, for the sake of thinking about "Steve Jobs," the mythology. According to Matt Bai, "Mr. Jobs understood, intuitively, that Americans were breaking away from the last era’s large institutions and centralized decision-making..."  Really, Matt Bai?  Are Americans really breaking away from large institutions and centralized decision-making?  The last time I looked, for example, the U.S. military was an institution that has remained frighteningly large.  So too, the decisions to torture people (by the Bush-Cheney administration) and the decisions to use high tech drones to kill people (by the Obama administration)--I think those are very much cases of "centralized decision-making."  What am I missing?  And to give one more example: when oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for three months in 2010, BP (formerly Brit...

A recent news story that has gotten too little attention is that in September, Mitt Romney's campaign announced that Professor Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University had signed on to lead candidate Mitt Romney's economic policy team.   Hubbard is one of the "anti-stars" of Charles Ferguson's searing polemic, Inside Job .  The most surprising section of that movie is its revelation that disciplinary economics has a problem akin to that of medical school faculty who have take unacknowledged payments from Big Pharma for medical "research" they publish.  In his interview in the film, Hubbard stands out for his resistance to transparency about his financial connections to the financial service industry, despite the fact that he was a prominent academic advocate of the deregulation of derivitives, and other highly complex financial products, prior to the Great Recession that began in 2008.  Now Hubb...

The killing last week of Anwar al-Awlaki by a high-tech drone makes abundantly clear what was not, in fact, stated clearly enough when President Obama ran for president in 2008--which is that the Obama alternative to the type of wars waged, with gusto, by G. W. Bush is to greatly expand the use of drones to kill persons identified as US "enemies."  In this context, I do not find myself overly moved by the idea that the rightness or wrongness of such a killing hinges on the citizenship of the person killed.  I get that there is some value in holding up the ideal of the rule of law, but there is also a risk that this concern with the rule of law will take the place of--rather than bolster--a commitment to act ethically (and not merely "legally"). One point that does seem crucial to me is to note just how willing both the Obama administration and the media have been to replace asking whether such ...