With New Year’s Eve only 163 shopping days away, I submit this apt tune, a demo Halie Loren and I recorded for songwriters Ande Rasmussen and Donna Valentine.

I Resolve

Halie brought the whole band to the Oregon coast for a concert at beautiful Eden Hall. Here is a bootlegged recording from the set. It’s an obscure song by an obscure band that merits no lengthy introduction here.

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (live at Eden Hall)

Halie and I recently performed on a KLCC radio broadcast of the Front Porch Revue, where we were joined for a couple of number by the Front Porch Band. Live radio is an energizing experience, and our in-house audience made it special.

Summertime (with Front Porch Band)

Blue Skies

Girl from Ipanema

God Bless the Child

I Don’t Miss It That Much (live on Front Porch Revue)

Finnish cities are filled with universally well-maintained and high-quality schools, hospitals, buses, trains, and parks. While most Finns might never be able to own a well-appointed SUV or a big house, they value the less-tangible assets they do have, which add up to quality of life and peace of mind.

Finland doesn’t pay lip service to providing a level playing field for all its citizens. It really does give the vast majority of its citizens a fair and equal chance in life, in a way that the US just doesn’t, no matter how much Americans like to think it does.

(Thanks, ratchick, for the link.)

Ready, aim … fail

IN THE EARLY years of this decade, General Motors had a goal, and it was 29. Determined to boost its flagging profits and reverse a long, steady fall from postwar dominance, the automotive giant did the natural thing: it set a goal. The company pledged to recapture 29 percent of the American market, the share it had ebbed past in 1999. The number 29 became a corporate mantra, and some GM executives took to wearing lapel pins with the number emblazoned on them.

It didn’t work. GM never did regain 29 percent of the market, and today, facing the possibility of bankruptcy, it looks even less likely to do so. The lapel pins are gone, and that number isn’t much heard from the company.

And while the causes of GM’s woes are many — from poor design to high labor costs to a prostrate economy — industry analysts argue that one of the most damaging things the company did was to set that goal.

In clawing toward its number, GM offered deep discounts and no-interest car loans. The energy and time that might have been applied to the longer-term problem of designing better cars went instead toward selling more of its generally unloved vehicles. As a result, GM was less prepared for the future, and made less money on the cars it did sell. In other words, the world’s largest car company — a title it lost to Toyota last year — fell victim to a goal.

Andrew Sullivan:

It is very rare to get someone with the same stratospheric levels of arrogance and incompetence as you find in Dick Cheney. Let’s go to the tape: A war launched on false premises, a trillion dollar debt in a period of growth, a destruction of America’s moral standing, the loss of one major city (New Orleans) and the devastation of another (New York City), two horribly bungled military campaigns that have trapped his successors for decades, a political party decimated for a generation, his closest aide in jail for obstruction of justice, his own daughter and grand-child targeted by his own party as second-class citizens in the state they live in. And a war criminal. Did I miss anything?

So bad, I won’t even display it here…just point to the link.

The most interesting science read I have come across in recent weeks. I’ve excerpted the phenomena from the article below, but the real fun is in actually reading it.

Update: From my practical and personal perspective, the two most interesting phenomena that do not make sense are the placebo effect, which is now known to be biochemical but remains as yet unexplained, and the Belfast homeopathy results, in which a scientist aiming to discredit homeopathy’s claim that a chemical remedy can be diluted to the point where a sample is unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water and yet still have a healing effect, instead produced striking evidence affirming that the homeopathic effect exists, despite no known mechanism for how or why it might work.

1. The placebo effect
2. The horizon problem
3. Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
4. Belfast homeopathy results
5. Dark matter
6. Viking’s methane
7. Tetraneutrons
8. The Pioneer anomaly
9. Dark energy
10. The Kuiper cliff
11. The Wow signal
12. Not-so-constant constants
13. Cold fusion

Andrew Sullivan:

The torture techniques were all the more brutal in order to push back against the reputation of the US even in the minds of Qaeda or alleged Qaeda members. What Mukasey and Hayden are arguing for today is a scheme whereby, in secret, the US government credibly allows captives to believe they are in an endless, bottomless pit of extra-legal terror. This is the state of mind they are trying to construct by torture. That’s the point of the sensory deprivation, the disappearances, the sequestering from the Red Cross, the endless solitary confinement, the IRFing, the hoods, the nudity, and all the other sadism. It is precisely to persuade the barbarians that we are as bad as they are and have no limits and no qualms in doing to them whatever we want.

Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured.

Bill, I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?

That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!

Time’s Joe Klein:

The U.S. is, by far, the most “criminal” country in the world, with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public.

At the same time, there is an enormous potential windfall in the taxation of marijuana. It is estimated that pot is the largest cash crop in California, with annual revenues approaching $14 billion. A 10% pot tax would yield $1.4 billion in California alone. And that’s probably a fraction of the revenues that would be available — and of the economic impact, with thousands of new jobs in agriculture, packaging, marketing and advertising. A veritable marijuana economic-stimulus package!

David Pogue of the New York Times interviews Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, on the important but little-noted issue of data rot:

Making lots of backups is good advice, and on different formats, different places; consider paper as an archival medium. Some paper we have has lasted thousands of years. If Moses had gotten the Ten Commandments on a floppy disk, it would never have made it to today.

In celebration of my visit to the Leadership Alive! conference in Asilomar, I’ve pulled out a song from the archives and remixed it. Here, then, is Connection to the Heart. I wrote the song as a modern-day doo-wop, modifying but mostly preserving the words of an affirmative prayer by Diane Moen. Paul Wurster’s on guitar, Jeremy Gibons on bass, and Jim Reinking on drums. I’m rocking out on synth strings, electric piano, and organ. Also backing vocals. Big fun.

Connection to the Heart

Summertime — From the 2009 Metropolitan Rhythm & Blues Revue, a fundraiser for Cottage Grove school music programs. My solo begins at about 2:50.

Why the smartest people have the toughest time dating

Dr. Alex Benzer: I have a mini-confession to make: I wrote the Tao of Dating books specifically for really smart people. The writing of the books was precipitated by the endemic dating woes on the Harvard campus, as I observed them as an advisor and earlier, indulged in them as a student.

Those kids graduate and pretty much continue to have the same dating woes — only now with fewer single people around who happen to live in the same building and share meals with them every day. So if they had challenges then, it gets about 1000 times worse once they’re tossed from the warm womb of their alma mater.

From my observations, the following dating challenges seem to be common to most smart people. In fact, the smarter you are, the more clueless you will be, and the more problems you’re going to have in your dating life.

A quarter of a trillion dollars, if it comes to that, is an astounding amount of money to hand over to one company to prevent it from going bust. Yet the government feels it has no choice: because of A.I.G.’s dubious business practices during the housing bubble it pretty much has the world’s financial system by the throat. … A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners — which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.

Halie and I were recently featured on local TV. Halie talked for a bit, then sang one of her songs.

I’ve made some long-intended additions to my home page, including reviews, my résumé, and my musical bio. The Music section, while by no means complete, has gotten more organized and user friendly. As ever, I look forward to your thoughts and comments!

After the trials and triumphs of his tumultuous first weeks, President Obama appears increasingly focused on ends, not means.

In a conversation early Friday evening with a small group of columnists, Obama was flexible about tactics and unwavering in his goals. He signaled that he’s open to consultation, compromise and readjusting his course to build inclusive coalitions, but fixed on the results he intends to produce. “My bottom line is not how pretty the process was,” he said, looking back at the congressional fight over his economic recovery package. “My bottom line was: Am I getting help to people who need it?”

. . .

Obama was relaxed, responsive and, as usual, seemed preternaturally calm and unruffled. He understandably celebrated his legislative victory; the scope of the economic plan and the speed of its approval were equally unprecedented. The plan funds the public investments (like scientific research, infrastructure and education) that Democrats consider essential to long-term growth with more new money than Washington has provided at one time since at least the 1960s and maybe the 1930s. And the vote demonstrated far more unity among congressional Democrats than Bill Clinton was able to generate for his economic agenda in 1993. “The end product is not 100 percent of what we would want,” Obama said. “But I think it is a very good start on moving things forward.”

Yet Obama held no illusions about the scale of the challenges he faces, both economic and political. One of those challenges was the overwhelming Republican resistance to his plan, which frustrated his campaign hopes of quickly bridging Washington’s ideological and partisan divides. Obama seemed to split that opposition into several categories. Some of it was ideological: “I think that there were some senators and House members who have a sincere philosophical difference with the idea of any government role in boosting demand in the economy. They don’t believe in [economist John Maynard] Keynes and they are still fighting FDR.” Some was tactical: “I also think that there was a decision made… where [Republican leaders] said… ‘If we can enforce conformity among our ranks, then it will invigorate our base and will potentially give us some political advantage either short-term or long-term.” He paused. “Whether that’s a smart strategy, I think you should ask them.”

Obama said the near-unanimous Republican opposition, after all his meetings with GOP legislators, would not discourage him from reaching out again on other issues. “Going forward, each and every time we’ve got an initiative, I am going to go to both Democrats and Republicans and I’m going to say, ‘Here is my best argument for why we need to do this. I want to listen to your counterarguments, if you’ve got better ideas, present them, we will incorporate them into any plans that we make and we are willing to compromise on certain issues that are important to one side or the other in order to get stuff done,’” he said.

Cooperation on the economic agenda, he suggested, may have been unusually difficult because it “touched on… one of the core differences between Democrats and Republicans” — whether tax cuts or public spending can best stimulate growth. He predicted there may be greater opportunity for cooperation on issues such as the budget, entitlements and foreign policy. And if he keeps reaching out, he speculated, Republicans may face “some countervailing pressures” from the public “to work in a more constructive way.” White House aides suggest that regardless of how congressional Republicans react on upcoming issues, Obama will pursue alliances with Republican governors and Republican-leaning business groups and leaders.

Yet while promising to continue to seek peace with congressional Republicans, Obama also made clear he’s prepared for the alternative. “I am an eternal optimist [but] that doesn’t mean I’m a sap,” he said pointedly. “So my goal is to assume the best but prepare for a whole range of different possibilities in terms of how Congress reacts.”

Obama displayed the same instinct — clarity about his goals, flexibility about his tactics — in discussing the plan Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled this week to stabilize the banking and credit system. In the conversation, Obama reprised some of the arguments he’s raised to defend the plan from the widespread reaction on Wall Street and Capitol Hill that it lacked specifics. But most interesting was the way he described the proposal as a work in progress that inexorably will evolve as conditions do. “Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “We will do what works. It is going to take time to lay out every aspect of this plan, and there are going to be certain aspects of any plan… which will require reevaluation and… some experimentation — [a sense that] if that doesn’t work, then you do something else.”

In that spirit, Obama refused to close the door on a broad range of possibilities. One of his interviewers asked him to compare his approach to the responses to earlier banking crises in Japan — which faced an economic “lost decade” after failing to intervene forcefully enough — and Sweden, which temporarily nationalized its failed banks before selling them off. Obama said the administration was trying to find the “sweet spot” between those alternatives. Japan offered no model, he said, because “they sort of papered things over and never really bit the bullet.” And while many on the left are urging Obama to follow Sweden’s example, he thinks the scale of the U.S. problem argues against that course. “You can make a good argument for the Swedish model except for this fact: They only had a handful of banks; we’ve got thousands of banks,” he said. “The scale, the magnitude, of what we’re dealing with is much bigger.”

Strikingly, the president would not rule out more direct government intervention if his initial approaches fail. “What you can say is I will not allow our financial system to collapse,” he said forcefully when asked if he was excluding a Swedish-style solution. “And we are going to do whatever is required to get credit flowing again so that companies and consumers can do their business and we can get this economy back on track.”

In such comments, and his remarks about his willingness to work with or without Republican support in Congress, Obama may be revealing much about his conception of leadership. He was insistent that a president’s responsibility is to resist the daily (if not hourly) scorekeeping of the modern political and media system and keep his eye on the horizon. “My job is to help the country take the long view,” he said. Obama portrayed himself as willing to consider a broad range of perspectives for responding to the country’s daunting problems — “We’re going to… work with anybody who wants to work with us constructively,” he said at one point — and open to adjusting his own course to bring others along or simply to respond to evidence that his ideas aren’t working. But repeatedly he declared that no one should interpret that to mean he lacks any clarity about his goals: “My consistent bottom line is: How do we make sure that the American people can work, have a decent income, look after their kids and we can grow the economy.” Any compromises or course corrections, he argued, must serve those overriding priorities.

That’s an elastic and responsive vision of the presidency which doesn’t quite match the preferences of either the ideological warriors of left and right, or those who define consensus as simply the midpoint between each party’s traditional answers. It contrasts markedly with the style of George W. Bush, who too often viewed rigidity as proof of resolve. Bill Clinton came closer to Obama’s approach, but even he seemed more intent on proving certain fixed assumptions — that opportunity could be balanced with responsibility, for instance, or government activism squared with fiscal discipline. Ronald Reagan likewise shared an instinct toward compromise, but he operated within a more constricting ideological framework than Obama.

Obama’s determination to elevate ends over means could bring him closer in temperament to presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt (who pledged “bold, persistent experimentation”) and Abraham Lincoln, who often insisted, “My policy is to have no policy.” That doesn’t mean either man lacked identifiable goals, much less bedrock principles. It did mean they were willing to constantly recalibrate their course in service of those goals and principles — as Lincoln once put it, like river boat pilots who “steer from point to point as they call it — setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see.”

Drug offenders represent the largest source of our prison population growth, and more than half of federal inmates are drug offenders. More than a half-million people are currently serving prison time for non-violent drug offenses and one third of all women in jail are serving time for a non-violent drug conviction. One out of every nine young black men in America lives in a prison. The direct cost of this imprisonment exceeds $14 billion annually, and the additional law enforcement support costs drive the yearly tab to well beyond $40 billion.

This year, about two million people will be arrested for a drug offense.  . . .  These policies have amounted to nothing short of a genocide. Millions of supposedly free Americans – most of them poor black Americans – have been arrested, imprisoned, and had their hopes and futures destroyed – all for possessing the moral equivalent of a bottle of wine.

A little musical bed I composed using Logic and Native Instruments Komplete. I enjoy sounds that meld or morph into unrelated sounds, as I tried to do here.

Euro Transit

In case you’re wondering, we’re on the teal trajectory…

Here’s a good example of Spong basically throwing out the baby, bathwater, and tub — then expressing hope for the future of Christianity. For the uninitiated, Spong is an Episcopalian bishop, since retired, who has written books such as “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism” and “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” He writes:

In many of its details, the Bible is simply wrong! Epilepsy is not caused by demon possession. David did not write the Psalms. The earth is not the center of the universe. On other issues of great public concern, the Bible is no longer even regarded as moral. Its verses have been used to affirm war, slavery, segregation and apartheid. It defines women as inferior creatures and suggests that homosexual persons be put to death.  . . .  The idea that the Bible came into being in some sort of miraculous way and is either the literal dictation of God or even the “inspired message of God” is simply not supportable on its face. The Bible is a profoundly human, deeply flawed, tribal history that has created as much pain as blessing in our world.

I find this kind of Christian writing refreshing, insofar as I can disagree with little of it, but I wonder what keeps a thoughtful person like Spong in the fold, when he himself has eloquently expressed a hundred reasons to run screaming into the waiting and loving, not to mention sarcastically anthropomorphic, arms of secular humanism.