Plagiarizing a song that itself “plagiarizes” a classical composition

Last Eurovision song festival [an event I normally pay no attention to] was won by Israel, with a tune called “Toy” by a very Rubenesque DJ and singer named Neta Barzilay.

Some people at the time noted the striking similarity between a phrase in the composition (such as it is) and the main riff of The White Stripes’s 2003 chart-topper “Seven Nation Army”. [Apparently, the title is how TWS frontman Jack White misheard “Salvation Army” as a child.] I didn’t think much of it — as I thought that riff pretty clichéd to begin with — But Universal Music Group subsequently sued Neta Barzilay on “behalf” of Jack White.

Now Mrs. Arbel forwarded me an article from Haaretz English Edition [archive link] according to which a settlement has been reached. The financial terms are undisclosed, but Jack White will receive a co-writing credit.

However, the Haaretz article [*] also points out that a very similar phrase appears in Bruckner’s 5th symphony. Listen to the YouTube below at 21:30 (the video embed should start playing 1 second before that if clicked):

Yup, substantially the same phrase, in Bb minor instead of E. Does this make it “plagiarism of plagiarism”? In the eyes of a random observer, perhaps yes. In the eyes of the law, no — because Bruckner’s composition passed into the public domain long ago, and hence Jack White [**] quoting it does not amount to a rights violation. (I would not want to feed all the rock and pop composers who have recycled bits of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Borodin,… as main melodies or riffs without as much as a hat tip. I am not talking about brief “salute” or “tribute” quotes in passing.)

So this adds a very interesting wrinkle to the case. I would have assumed that a song element that is itself lifted from a public domain source would not be copyrightable as such — the whole (which would be a derivative or [presumably in this case] a transformative work) would be, or any original material in the song. Perhaps that is the argument the defendants should have made—I am not a lawyer, but it would seem that this case would be winnable in court. (It is quite possible, however, that the defendants feared being bankrupted by a protracted legal battle against a plaintiff with very deep pockets and a “seven-nation army of copyright lawyers” on retainer.)

I cannot help being reminded of an anecdote from my HS years. A punk rocker was caught shoplifting from a record store. When the beat cop caught and arrested him, his defense was: “That record is mine! I stole it fair and square!” [Dutch original: “Die plaat is van mij! Ik heb ze eerlijk gestolen!”]

Some will rightly point out that composers like J. S. Bach had a much breezier attitude about quoting material than today’s music industry. However, here is the catch: when Bach recycled a popular song as a fugue theme, the material recycled was maybe 1% of the composition, and the contrapuntal edifice he built upon it the other 99%. Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” makes broader use of borrowed material (a Russian Orthodox hymn as the theme for the Russian defenders, and the Marseillaise as the theme for Napoleon’s invasion troops) — but again, there was a ton more music to it.

Bands like Dream Theater quote/steal bits of thematic material like magpies, but again use them as jumpoff points for more elaborate compositions and virtuoso improvisations.

But when your whole composition (such as it is) consists of a simplistic song built up from repeating one or two riffs and/snatches of melody —and then you are then discovered to have “borrowed” them — then I think the true problem is the simplistic, formulaic, and inspiration-less character of the “products” of today’s music industry, not plagiarism.

[*] credit where credit is due — regardless of my disgust with Haaretz’s editorial stance and general oikophobia, this was a good catch.
[**] According to Jack White’s wiki bio, he was a classical music aficionado before turning to rock. It is thus quite probable that he was familiar with the Bruckner original. (1970s German progressive rock band Novalis recorded this tribute to Bruckner’s 5th.) And again, I wouldn’t want to feed all the classically-raised musician turned rockers who mined classical compositions for riffs and hooks. I often quip that J. S. Bach was the greatest jazz cat in history, Mozart the greatest pop composer, and Beethoven the greatest hard rocker 🙂

“Black Propaganda” during WW II

I used to think that “black propaganda” was something like “propaganda pushing a black legend” or “libelous propaganda”. But like so often, there is a difference between (often vaguely defined) usage of a phrase in ordinary conversation, and its precise definition as a “term of art”.

This paper on propaganda during WW II was highly informative. Briefly, in the “business”, “white propaganda” is defined as propaganda “under true flag”: it reveals its origin and does not purport to come from a neutral or opposing side. Examples on the Axis side are the Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally radio broadcasts, as well as the “Germany Calling” broadcasts of the pseudonymous Lord Haw-Haw.

In contrast, “Black Propaganda” is defined as propaganda under false flag: originating from the opponent’s side but disguising itself as friendly, for the purpose of sowing misinformation, confusion, demoralization, or all of the above. The term “Grey Propaganda” is used for cases where allegiance of the propagandist is deliberately made vague or ambiguous.

The uncontested masters of the art of black propaganda/”false flag” propaganda in WW II were Sefton Delmer and his PWE (Political Warfare Executive). Delmer was born and mostly raised in Berlin: his Australian father had been a professor of English literature there until he and his parents were interned as enemy aliens during WW I, then released to England in a prisoner exchange. After getting a degree in modern languages at Oxford and working as a freelance journalist, he was recruited as the Berlin bureau chief for the Daily Express (1990-1933). There, he befriended top nazis (particularly SA leader Ernst Röhm) and in fact became the first British journalist to be allowed to interview Hitler (y”sh). He was also present at the scene of the Reichstag Fire (and kept arguing all his life that it was a Nazi “false flag attack”): shortly after, he was reposted to Paris, and later reported on the Spanish civil war as well as on the invasions of Poland and France. In the nick of time, he and his wife made it to England, where he briefly worked as an announcer for the BBC German-language service.

Delmer spoke flawless German, both formal and colloquial, and was intimately familiar with German mores. These qualities came to serve him well when he was recruited by the PWE to run psychological warfare broadcasts.

After a few false starts, GS-1 or (in the German radio alphabet of the day) Gustav Siegfried Eins emerged. In modern net-speak, it was what we would nowadays call a massive “concern trolling” operation. GS-1 was a shortwave station on which “Der Chef” supposedly reached out to his network of “patriotic opposition”. Supposedly, Der Chef was an old-school senior army officer who was loyal to Germany and even to the Führer, but disgusted with the corruption and perversion of party and SS officials, which he collectively referred to as the Parteikommune. From his perch, he told tales of nest-feathering, pocket-lining, living high on the hog while troops and regular citizens suffered, as well as of sexual licentiousness, orgies. and “Violations of Paragraph 175” (i.e., homosexuality). (While a fair amount of this was written by amateur and professional pornographers, not all of this was fictional: Sefton Delmer was privy to many a dirty secret the Nazis wished he wasn’t.)

Eventually, when GS-1 had outlived its usefulness, “Der Chef”s lair was supposedly overrun, live on the air, by the Gestapo, with the broadcasts ending in bursts of sub-machinegun fire.[**]

GS-1 made way for Delmer’s greatest achievement: the creation and operation of two subtle “false flag” radio stations working in tandem: the high-powered Soldatensender Calais on the AM band, and its shortwave companion station Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik (targeted primarily at German naval personnel, which by that stage primarily meant U-boot crews.)

Soldatensender Calais purported to be a German military entertainment broadcaster operating from Calais in occupied Northern France: in fact, it was being broadcast from a 500 kW (!!) station Aspidistra [*] in Southern England. Its programming consisted of what Sefton Delmer would later describe as “cover, cover, cover, dirt, dirt, cover”: a mixture of music popular with the German troops, sports coverage, and — for additional cover — speeches by Hitler and other top Nazi officials, the better to make the listeners receptive to disinformation and demoralizing propaganda items. For example, a broadcaster posting as a soldier would give tips on how to be declared unfit for onerous duty, how to avoid being transferred to the Eastern Front, etc., while others would detail scams Wehrmacht men might fall prey to, or arouse the age-old anxiety of the deployed soldier about his wife’s fidelity, his family’s welfare, or both.
The station made its last broadcast on April 30, 1945, the day Hitler committed suicide.

After the war, Delmer served as chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Daily Express for fifteen years, until forced into retirement over an expenses dispute. He would go on to write several volumes of memoirs, an archive of which can be found here.

I cannot resist mentioning that when Labour MP (and British ambassador to Moscow) Stafford Cripps found out about Delmer’s operations, he was so scandalized that he wrote to Anthony Eden (Foreign Secretary and de facto Churchill’s deputy) that “If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, why, I’d rather lose it.” This is of course precisely the sort of thing that inspired Churchill’s famous quip about the ascetic Cripps: “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

[*] This has originally been built for WJZ radio in Newark, NJ — yes, Steely Dan fans, the station namechecked in “The Nightfly” — until an FCC regulation limited individual stations’ broadcasting power to 50kw. RCA was only too happy to resell it to the British government.

[**] Unfortunately, the broadcast technician, who did not understand German, ran the segment twice.

Can you legally use a historical classical music recording in a video or book trailer?

I have previously blogged about “fair use”  in copyright law, and mentioned there in passing that both law and jurisprudence are much more permissive about short textual excerpts from long written works than about, especially, audio or images. If you want to use a Beatles song (or a Rush song) for a book trailer, you’d better pay the licensing fee (which can range from reasonable to astronomical) or be prepared to fight a lawsuit. (Noncommercial music theory/appreciation videos, which include an element of scholarship or criticism about the music itself, tick off a couple more boxes and are comparatively safe. Even so, veteran record producer Rick Beato has suffered DMCA takedowns for some of his marvelous “What makes this song great?” episodes on YouTube.)

But what about a classical piece of music — and specifically, a composer who has been dead for over 70 years? The music itself — i.e., “just the notes, ma’am” — is without a doubt in the public domain. But what about a historical performance? Say, you’ve decided a theme from a Beethoven or Bruckner symphony is just what you need for a book trailer.  It is quite easy to find an online source for a performance by, say, the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler from the 1940s — for example, this gem here. Better still: in Europe, recordings that old have passed in the public domain.

Under German law, the copyright term for recordings which were made prior to January 1, 1963 has expired, meaning they have entered the public domain. Recordings taken after that date were given extended protection in 2013 and thus cannot be digitized. Aware of this rule, I only undertook to upload recordings which were taken before the 1963 date in order to fully comply with the law. Despite that precaution, the process that followed presented a number of unexpected challenges[…]

The 1963 cutoff date would imply that, for instance, Herbert von Karajan’s 1962 Deutsche Grammophon recordings of Beethoven’s nine symphonies are now in the public domain, at least in Germany (and the rest of the EU, presumably).

However, as discussed here at great length, the situation in the US is rather different. Audio recordings were treated very differently from other media, and public domain for them effectively did not exist in the US (except, of course, if the artists themselves placed the work there and the composition was not otherwise copyrighted). Only very recently was a form of public domain established (following a 3-year transition period to end in 2021) for recordings prior to 1922.

1923-1946 recordings will have an effective copyright term of 100 years (95+5), and 1947-1956 recordings a 110 year term (95+15). Recordings made between 1957-1972 will go into the public domain in 2067, as previously.

For so-called “orphaned works” (i.e, works for which no copyright owner can be located or identified, e.g., the record label is long out of business and nobody else picked up the rights at auction), the new law

Includes provisions to allow non-profit streaming of recordings which are verified to be out-of- print. This is a start …

But we are still out of luck for our hypothetical example. So what are your options?

If you have a specific reason to use that historical recording, you may need to go through the process of buying the license rights.

But if any decent performance of that specific piece of orchestral (or choral) classical music will do, then your options are basically:

(a) Try to locate a modern recording released under a Creative Commons license. (That would usually be an amateur orchestra.)

(b) Try to locate a “library music” recording for purchase from a site like PremiumBeat or Pond5. Such sites work much like stock photo sites: you pay a onetime fee, and the recording is a “work for hire” from a copyright point of view: once you’ve paid the fee, you own the recording and may do with it as you please. (Usually, this is a non-exclusive license: exclusive licenses will set you back more money.)

(c) Produce your own synthesized version using digital music production software. This requires at least some musical skill though, and the result may sound, well, “synthetic”, but this may actually be quite OK for a book trailer.

(d) If you have some experience conducting, assemble a pickup orchestra from a local conservatory and produce your own amateur recording. (This is hard work but not as hard as it sounds, since typically you could limit rehearsals and recordings to a short excerpt of the whole work.)

(e) As a last resort, find and buy a piece of library music that is similar in mood.

Solo instrumental or chamber pieces are much less of a challenge, since you are more likely to find it under (a,b), while option (d) — hiring one or a few students from your local conservatory to play a couple of takes for you to record — is much more practical than for something that requires a whole symphony orchestra. And of course, if it’s a solo piano, violin,… piece and you can passably play the piece yourself, recording yourself and (if need be) cleaning up the recording a bit in GarageBand or Logic Pro may be the simplest and cheapest option of them all.

Embedding Spotify playlists on WordPress

Hmm, thanks to this article (via Instapundit), I went digging in the wordpress.com support database and found this helpful explanation. Basically, you just need to enclose the link to the track or playlist in HTML view with leftsquarebracketspotify yourlinkrightsquarebracket. Examples below, taken from the WP support article:

UPDATE: and here is one of my own:

Happy Moon Landing Day

 

Forty-nine years ago. This tribute is reposted from last year:

Book of note: “The Personalized Diet” by Eran Segal and Eran Elinav

I have blogged earlier about the book by neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt and have discussed there in passing the pioneering work by Weizmann Institute scientists Eran Segal and Eran Elinav on the individual microbiome (our “gut bacteria population”) and how it affects blood sugar levels. Now the duo has teamed up with editor Eve Adamson, and together they have put out a popularized book:

I am familiar with some of the original papers in top scientific journals—the book is of course much more readable, and the authors and editors have done a good job of presenting their work in lay language while preserving the broad strokes of their work.

The bottom line of their research is this: each of us carries a whole ecosystem of bacteria in our intestines, which help us digest and absorb food. The specific mix of bacteria varies between individuals, and hence so do our responses to different foods. While weight gain/loss is best seen as an outcome—one aspect of overall health—glycemic response, the changes in blood sugar levels after a meal (“postprandial glucose response”) are sufficiently rapid that they can be monitored in real time (e.g. with a continuous glucose monitor) and correlated with what the person ate (logged in a smartphone app). Doing this for thousands of people is a big-data project par excellence, and this is how computer scientist Segal teamed up with gastroenterologist Elinav.

But this isn’t where it ends. Gut bacteria populations can of course be obtained from stool samples, and subjected to analysis—another aspect of the massive big-data puzzle. Moreover, some of what they infer from the data can be checked in an animal model—for instance, certain gut bacteria can be administered to sterile mice and their weight gain (or lack thereof) in response to certain food mixtures tested on a much shorter time scale than would be possible in slow, relatively large, and long-lived mammals like us.

The duo brought different, complementary perspectives to the problem, not just scientifically but personally. Elinav always loved to take machines apart and see how they fit together (fittingly, he did his military service aboard a submarine), then became fascinated with living organisms. He ended up studying medicine, then specializing in internal medicine. During his residency, he was exposed to the human suffering caused by “metabolic syndrome” (the term given to the combination of severe obesity, adult-onset diabetes, fatty liver, hyperlipidemia, and the complications thereof). He realized that they spent all their time as doctors dealing with the consequences and complications rather than with the root cause.

Segal, on the other hand, was an avid long-distance runner in his spare time. He started experimenting with different nutritional approaches to improve his endurance as a runner, assisted in this pursuit by his wife, a clinical dietitian. As he dove deeper into this and observed diets of fellow runners, it became increasingly clear to him that there was no one-size-fits-all, and that recommendations that were held to be gospel truth (or Torah from Sinai, in our case) were, in fact, counterproductive for some. Why do some runners who eat dates before a run become energized and others exhausted? Who do some do best with carb-loading, and indeed thrive on high-carb diets, while others quickly pack on the pounds and suffer from low energy?

Segal was already involved in the computational study of the human genome at the time and then started reading about the emergent field of study of the microbiome. One thing led to another, a mutual acquaintance put Segal and Elinav in touch with each other, and together they embarked on the collaboration that eventually morphed into the personalized nutrition project.

One factor that facilitated their research was that rapid, reliable, and minimally-invasive blood glucose monitoring technology has become relatively inexpensive. And here some of their first surprises came. Anybody who has followed a Gary Taubes-type diet, or who is trying to manage diabetes, is aware of the ‘glycemic index’ (GI) of foods—the increase in blood sugar levels caused by eating a given amount of the food, compared to the same amount of pure glucose (for which GI=100 by definition). But how uniform are these values really?

Segal and Elinav found that the GI for some foods (e.g., bananas) differed very little between their test subjects (say, 60-65), while others (e.g., apples) were all over the place (40-90). Moreover, the variation was not random but correlated with the person.

One would expect glycemic response to go up more or less linearly with the amount of the food consumed was a given. They found that this is indeed true for smaller amounts, but at some point saturation sets in as the body manufactures more insulin, and the glucose response levels off. (This, of course, does not mean you can just eat ten times as much: the insulin will cause the excess energy to be stored as fat!)

More surprising, however, was that higher fat content in the meal on average caused a minor decrease in glycemic response. For a nontrivial number of their participants, eating toast with butter or olive oil actually did less glycemic harm than eating the toast on its own.

Now trying to keep blood sugar levels on a more even keel has two major benefits. In the short term, yo-yoing blood sugar levels lead to a reduction in energy, a feeling of exhaustion as the body pumps out insulin in response to a sugar spike and blood sugar dips. As for the long term: Segal and Elinav found across their sample that glycemic response after habitual meals is strongly correlated with BMI. Keeping blood sugar levels on a more even keel turns out to be a win-win on all counts.

And here’s the catch—”thanks” to our microbiome, glycemic response is highly individual. Segal himself ‘spikes’ after eating rice, while Elinav does not. One person spikes after ice cream, while another does not—and the same person who spikes after an evening snack of ice cream can safely have chocolate instead, go figure.

This addresses a seeming paradox. It’s not that diets don’t work—in fact, many do for some people, though long-term compliance can be an issue—it’s that there is no diet that will work for everyone, or even for most people.

So the next step, then, was to have a computer analyze the data for some of the participants in depth, and have it plan out a personalized diet that would keep blood sugar levels as steady as possible for that patient. Guess what? Yup, you guessed it.

Now some people might be discouraged by the idea of carrying around a blood sugar monitor for two weeks and carefully logging every meal (and physical activity). But once a large enough dataset has been established, and correlated to analyses of the gut flora composition in all the test persons, it becomes possible to predict glycemic responses to different foods with reasonable accuracy based on a bacterial population analysis of stool samples. A startup company named DayTwo is offering to do exactly that. [Full disclosure: I have no financial interest in DayTwo or in any of Drs. Segal and Elinav’s ventures.]

We are at the dawn of a major revolution in healthcare—a shift away from a paradigm of statistical averages to one of detailed monitoring of individual patients. Call it ‘personalized medicine’ or any other buzzword: it does seem poised to radically change healthcare and individual health outcomes for the better.

 

Saturday musical delight: Well-Tempered Clavier in MuseScore animation

Via YouTube channel “gerubach”, which has been presenting “scrolling score” youtube videos of musical compositions for many years, I stumbled upon the following gem of a playlist:

All of Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is being rendered there in MuseScore animation: as you hear the audio, not only do you see the score on screen (two systems at a time) and a pointer scrolling across the notes being played, but at the bottom of the screen, you see the notes currently sounding displayed on a piano keyboard.

Especially in combination with YouTube’s ability to play back videos at reduced speed without altering the pitch, this is a marvelous self-tutoring tool for keyboard playing as well as music theory.

The audio is taken from the performance by pianist (and former competitive weight lifter!) Kimiko Ishizaka [official website]. The MuseScore team could legally do so as the (IMHO excellent) performance was released in the public domain (!)

The onetime child prodigy pre-funds her recordings through Kickstarter campaigns (most recently, she ran one for a “Libre”recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue), then releases them online under PD or Creative Commons licenses. The word “Libre” she uses has some currency in the open source software developer community: It refers to one of the two words in French (and other Romance languages) that correspond to the English “free”, namely libre (without restrictions, “free as in speech”) vs. gratis (without cost, “free as in lunch”).  She does not work gratis, but on what I have been calling a “massively distributed commissioning” model, and what is becoming known as a “threshold pledge” model: she sets a funding goal, solicits pledges from patrons on Kickstarter, and if her threshold is met, the work is performed and the money collected. For her last campaign, the threshold she set was 20,000 Euro, and the minimum pledge was 10 Euro — the price of an album at a CD store (remember those). Larger pledge amounts (20 Euro, 50 Euro, 100 Euro) get various extra goodies, such as live recordings from recent concerts, a physical CD of the music, and admission to one of three “meatspace” live concerts.

D. Jason Fleming has been talking a lot about the “Open Culture Movement”. I believe this is an interesting example, and may actually point a way toward the future for classical performers. The big losers here, of course, are the classical music labels, who in this model are about as profitable as illegal CD bootleggers….

 

RIP Jerry Pournelle, 1933-2017

The great Jerry Pournelle, political scientist, technological visionary, prolific science fiction writer (often in collaboration with Larry Niven), and computing pioneer all in one, just passed away after a brief respiratory illness. He had appeared at DragonCon only days earlier.

I’ve been following Chaos Manor on an off since it was first a print column in BYTE magazine, back in the Early Tertiary era of computing. The online version has a serious claim to being the world’s oldest blog.
Novels like “Fallen Angels” (with Niven & Flynn) or “The Mote in G-d’s Eye” (with Niven) would have made the reputation of a lesser man. But aside from being a prolific science fiction writer, he was also a compelling thinker and technological visionary. Even with half his brain zapped by radiation treatments, he could still out-think most soi-disant “intellectuals”. Pournelle suffered no fools intellectually, but by all accounts was a generous and solicitous human being in private.
Here is a taste of Jerry Pournelle in his own words. (He was, by the way, apparently the first writer to write a published novel entirely on a [then primitive and monstrously expensive] personal computer.)

HOW TO GET MY JOB

The question I get most often, both in mail and when I speak, is, “How do I get your job?” Usually it’s done a bit more politely, but sometimes it’s asked just that way. It’s generally phrased differently by computer audiences than by science fiction audiences, but both really want to know the same thing: how do you become an author?

I always give the same answer: it’s easy to be an author, whether of fiction or nonfiction, and it’s a pleasant profession. Fiction authors go about making speeches and signing books. Computer authors go to computer shows and then come home to open boxes of new equipment and software, and play with the new stuff until they tire of it. It’s nice work if you can get it.

The problem is that no one pays you to be an author.

To be an author, you must first be a writer; and while it’s easy to be an author, being a writer is hard work. Surprisingly, it may be only hard work; that is, while some people certainly have more talent for writing than others, everyone has some. The good news is that nearly anyone who wants to badly enough can make some kind of living at writing. The bad news is that wanting to badly enough means being willing to devote the time and work necessary to learn the trade.

The secret of becoming a writer is that you have to write. You have to write a lot. You also have to finish what you write, even though no one wants it yet. If you don’t learn to finish your work, no one will ever want to see it. The biggest mistake new writers make is carrying around copies of unfinished work to inflict on their friends.

I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that’s another story.

The late Randall Garrett, one of the most prolific writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, used to have a number of rules, many of them scatological. One of them was that no professional writer ever got anything from formal courses in writing. I think he was wrong, in the sense that a good formal introduction to the rules of grammar and spelling can be extremely useful; but he had a point, which is that there aren’t any secrets to be learned from creative-writing courses. If the only way you can force yourself to write that million words of your best work is to take a class in creative writing or attend a writers’ workshop, by all means do it; but do it understanding that the good comes from the writing you do, not from the criticism or theory or technique taught in the class.

May his memory be blessed. The science fiction field and the blogosphere are truly a poorer place without him.

 

On Google and doublethink

The new Google slogan has been unveiled today (hat tip: Marina F.):

For those who have been living under a rock: Google fired an employee for having the temerity to write a memo [draft archived here][full text here via Mark Perry at AEI] questioning the “diversity” (what I call “fauxversity”) and “affirmative action” (i.e., reverse discrimination) policies of the company. Said employee had earlier filed a labor grievance and is taking legal action. Now quite interestingly, here is an article in which four actual experts discuss the science underlying the memo, and basically find it unexceptional even though they do not all agree with the author on its implications. One of them, an evolutionary psychology professor at U. of New Mexico, has the money quote:

Here, I just want to take a step back from the memo controversy, to highlight a paradox at the heart of the ‘equality and diversity’ dogma that dominates American corporate life. The memo didn’t address this paradox directly, but I think it’s implicit in the author’s critique of Google’s diversity programs. This dogma relies on two core assumptions:

• The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;
• The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink.

The obvious problem is that these two core assumptions are diametrically opposed.

Let me explain. If different groups have minds that are precisely equivalent in every respect, then those minds are functionally interchangeable, and diversity would be irrelevant to corporate competitiveness. For example, take sex differences. The usual rationale for gender diversity in corporate teams is that a balanced, 50/50 sex ratio will keep a team from being dominated by either masculine or feminine styles of thinking, feeling, and communicating. Each sex will counter-balance the other’s quirks. (That makes sense to me, by the way, and is one reason why evolutionary psychologists often value gender diversity in research teams.) But if there are no sex differences in these psychological quirks, counter-balancing would be irrelevant. A 100% female team would function exactly the same as a 50/50 team, which would function the same as a 100% male team. If men are no different from women, then the sex ratio in a team doesn’t matter at any rational business level, and there is no reason to promote gender diversity as a competitive advantage.

Likewise, if the races are no different from each other, then the racial mix of a company can’t rationally matter to the company’s bottom line. The only reasons to value diversity would be at the levels of legal compliance with government regulations, public relations virtue-signalling, and deontological morality – not practical effectiveness. Legal, PR, and moral reasons can be good reasons for companies to do things. But corporate diversity was never justified to shareholders as a way to avoid lawsuits, PR blowback, or moral shame; it was justified as a competitive business necessity.

So, if the sexes and races don’t differ at all, and if psychological interchangeability is true, then there’s no practical business case for diversity.

On the other hand, if demographic diversity gives a company any competitive advantages, it must be because there are important sex differences and race differences in how human minds work and interact. For example, psychological variety must promote better decision-making within teams, projects, and divisions. Yet if minds differ across sexes and races enough to justify diversity as an instrumental business goal, then they must differ enough in some specific skills, interests, and motivations that hiring and promotion will sometimes produce unequal outcomes in some company roles. In other words, if demographic diversity yields any competitive advantages due to psychological differences between groups, then demographic equality of outcome cannot be achieved in all jobs and all levels within a company. At least, not without discriminatory practices such as affirmative action or demographic quotas.

So, psychological interchangeability makes diversity meaningless. But psychological differences make equal outcomes impossible. Equality or diversity. You can’t have both.

Weirdly, the same people who advocate for equality of outcome in every aspect of corporate life, also tend to advocate for diversity in every aspect of corporate life. They don’t even see the fundamentally irreconcilable assumptions behind this ‘equality and diversity’ dogma.

[“Jeb Kinnison” draws my attention to another article.] I just saw in an essay by Christina Hoff Sommers [see also video] on the AEI website that the National Science Foundation [!], as recently as 2007, sent around a questionnaire asking researchers to identify any research equipment in their lab building that was not accessible to women. In 2007. Seriously, I don’t know whether whoever came up with this “go find the crocodile milk” policy was gunning for a Nobel prize in Derpitude

 

or trying to create sinecures for otherwise unemployable paper-pushers, or trying to divert bureaucratic energy into a Mobius loop that would minimize interference with serious decisions.

But on a more serious note: even before I saw the “paradox” remarks, I could not help being reminded of this passage in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. The protagonist, Winston Smith, retorts to his mentor turned inquisitor:

‘But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.’
‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:
 ‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’ 

Precisely: doublethink. Thus it is possible, for example, that certain biological differences between men and women, or between ethnic groups, can be at the same time out of bounds for polite discussion,  yet entirely taken for granted in a medical setting. I remember when Jackie Mason in the early 1990s joked about wanting an [Ashkenazi] Jewish affirmative action quota for runners and basketball players: nowadays, that joke would probably get him fired at Google, while a sports doctor treating top athletes would just chuckle.

The root of evil here is twofold:

(1) the concept that even correct factual information might be harmful as it might encourage heresy [hmm, where have we heard that one before?];

(2) considering people as interchangeable members of collectives, rather than individuals. If one considers the abilities of a specific individual, then for the case at hand it does not matter whether the average aptitudes for X differ significantly between groups A and B, or not. (There is, in any case, much greater variability between individuals within a group than between groups.)

I would add:
(2b) overconfidence in numerical benchmarks by people without a real grasp of what they mean.

Outside the strict PC/AA context, it is the fallacy in (2b) which gives rise to such pathologies as politicians pushing for ever-higher HS graduation or college enrollment rates — because they only see “the percentage has gone up from X to Y” without seeing the underlying reality. They are much like the economic planners in the (thank G-d!) former USSR, who accepted inflated production statistics of foodstuffs and consumer goods at face value, while all those not privileged enough to shop inside the Nomenklatura bubble knew well enough that they were a sham. Likewise, those of us educated in a bygone era realize that the “much greater” HS and college graduation rates of today were achieved by the educational equivalent of puppy milling:

• the HS curriculum has for most pupils been watered down to meaninglessness;
• supposedly “native-born and educated” college students often are deficient in basic arithmetic and reading comprehension;
• a general education at the level we used to get at an Atheneum or Gymnasium [i.e., academic-track high schools in Europe] nowadays requires either a college degree or an expensive private prep school.

But simplistic numerical benchmarks are beloved of bureaucrats everywhere, as they are excellent excuses for bureaucratic meddling. As Instapundit is fond of remarking: the trouble with true gender- and ethnicity-blind fairness — and with true diversity, which must include the diversity of opinion —  is that “there isn’t enough opportunity for graft in it”.

PS: apropos the calling the original author of the essay names that essentially place him outside civil society, a must-read editorial in the Boston Globe by historian Niall Ferguson. His wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, knows a thing or two about what real hardcore misogyny looks like, and how useless the Western liberal left is facing it. Moneygraf of the op-ed:

Mark my words, while I can still publish them with impunity: The real tyrants, when they come, will be for diversity (except of opinion) and against hate speech (except their own).

PPS: the Beautiful but Evil Space Mistress weighs in on the controversy and applies some verbal ju-jitsu.

P^3S: heh (via an Instapundit comment thread): 

P^4S: Welcome Instapundit readers!

P^5S: Megan McArdle weighs in (via Instapundit) and reminisces about her own early years in tech.

Thinking back to those women I knew in IT, I can’t imagine any of them would have spent a weekend building a [then bleeding-edge tech, Ed.] fiber-channel network in her basement.

I’m not saying such women don’t exist; I know they do. I’m just saying that if they exist in equal numbers to the men, it’s odd that I met so very many men like that, and not even one woman like that, in a job where all the women around me were obviously pretty comfortable with computers. We can’t blame it on residual sexism that prevented women from ever getting into the field; the number of women working with computers has actually gone down over time. And I find it hard to blame it on current sexism. No one told that guy to go home and build a fiber-channel network in his basement; no one told me I couldn’t. It’s just that I would never in a million years have chosen to waste a weekend that way.

The higher you get up the ladder, the more important those preferences become. Anyone of reasonable intelligence can be coached to sit at a help desk and talk users through basic problems. Most smart people can be taught to build a basic workstation and hook it up to a server. But the more complicated the problems get, the more knowledge and skill they require, and the people who acquire that sort of expertise are the ones who are most passionately interested in those sorts of problems. A company like Google, which turns down many more applicants than it hires, is going to select heavily for that sort of passion. If more men have it than women, the workforce will be mostly men.

She explains how she then moved into a field — policy journalism — that is also heavily male, but that she found she could get as passionate about as her former colleagues about [then] bleeding-edge technology.  Passionate enough, in fact, that she did it for free for five years (under the blog name “Jane Galt”) until she was hired by a major national magazine on the strength of her portfolio. Passion combined with talent can move mountains—or, if you pardon the metaphor, shatter glass ceilings.

P^6S: in the libertarian magazine Reason, David Harsanyi: By firing the Google memo author, the company confirms his thesis and “The vast majority of the histrionic reactions on social media and elsewhere have misrepresented not only what the memo says but also its purpose.” In the same magazine,  Nick Gillespie adds that “The Google memo exposes a libertarian blindspot when it comes to power: it is not just the state that wields power and squelches good-faith debate”.

P^7S: now this is Muggeridge’s Law in action. (Hat tip: Marina F.) I was certain this was satire when I first saw it…

 

The beached whale ORCA: a campaign consultant con job?

I am a firm believer in Hanlon’s Rule (actually Heinlein’s Rule): “Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity/incompetence”, but at times that faith gets shaken. Such as by the ORCA fiasco (see Ace, BusinessInsider, WaPo , CNET, ComputerWorld, Politico, and Breitbart) which may very well have cost Romney the election. RedState (via Althouse) now has more on how the campaign acquired this turkey. Go read it all and weep: it is a horrifying story of nest-feathering by consultants, arrogance, and campaign decisions based on bogus statistics and poll numbers from the turkey’s droppings.

The result of all of these false numbers and inaccurate ground reports is simple: Mitt Romney was ill-prepared for the actual numbers on election day and his false sense of confidence directly translated into how the campaign operated in the closing weeks. In the words of one source, it was a con job. As David Mamet famously said, “If you’re in the con game and you don’t know who the mark is … you’re the mark.” Mitt Romney had no idea what was coming.

And thanks to the greed and hubris of a few we are now stuck with four more years of the worst administration in living memory. Thanks for worse than nothing.

UPDATE: More here from Bethany Mandel. And more on the company: seems to consist of a bunch of execs and marketers and… two coders, one of which actually used to work for Al Gore. I might have been able to overlook the latter, but on principle I avoid IT companies that are “all hat and no cattle” (or all jacket and no bomber) like the plague.

Bill Whittle interviews Glenn Reynolds on the birth of Instapundit

(via C2). Enjoy!

Jerry Pournelle on Japanese nuclear disaster

I have been too busy in real life to do more than post links to my twitter feed over the last week or so, and reports from Japan about the nuclear incident following the tragic earthquake (thus far the 5th most intense in documented history) and resulting tsunami were too conflicting and sensationalist to write about. Let me however give the word to the inimitable Jerry Pournelle (on what is arguably the original weblog, now in its 666th week):

We are now down to an absolute worst case of two Tsar Bomba fallout equivalent from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Note that we are talking about fallout only: there is no danger whatever of an actual nuclear explosion. The media are breathlessly telling of a nuclear cloud approaching the United States. NPR proclaims that no nukes is good nukes. The Union of Concerned Scientists will cheerfully furnish you with as gloomy a forecast as you’d like whether you ask for their view or not.

In fact the situation is slowly coming under control. Fukushima Daiichi sits on the coast amidst a scene of almost unimaginable destruction, in freezing weather, with high winds. Every road, water pipe, and power line is gone. Debris litters the passageways to the plant. Fukushima Daiichi was protected by a 20 foot sea wall. Most of the surrounding countryside wasn’t protected by a sea wall at all.

At reactor four the fuel rods were in a spent fuel pond: the reactor was shut down in December. The pond was on the roof of the reactor building, which seemed like a good idea at the time, and could withstand an 8.0 quake, and being on the roof had a really short path from the reactor to the storage pond. All was well, until the quake cracked the pool wall. Well, that’s all right, we pump in water. Only there’s no power because the reactors scrammed at the first large tremor. That’s all right, the diesels kick in and the water pumps start up. Only now there’s a tsunami. Well, that’s all right, there’s a twenty foot sea wall. Only the tsunami is 23 feet, and maybe there has been some subsidence of the land level due to the quake. Water rushes into the complex. Back at reactor 4: the water is flowing out of the spent fuel rod pool. The rods stand on end, 14 feet tall, with about 40 feet of water in the pool. The water is flowing out. Everyone is worrying more about the three reactors which are scrammed but which still contain the fuel rods. Those rods are really hot: they are full of just created fission products, some with half lives in minutes to hours so producing a lot of heat. Over in four all the really hot stuff — fission products — has decayed out. But the water is leaking. Temperatures are going up.

At some point the water in the four tank boils furiously near the zirconium rod containers. Superhot steam plus zirconium metal produces very fast rusting. This is also known as oxidation. Rapid oxidation is often called burning. The oxygen in the water is stripped off to become zirconium oxide. That leaves hydrogen (contaminated with some tritium since we still have neutrons and beta products coming from the radioactive decay of the fission byproducts). Hydrogen gets out into the room enclosing the spent fuel pool. It mixes with oxygen from the outside. It ignites. There is an explosion that blows off the roof of the rooftop spent fuel enclosure building. Water continues to leak from the pool.

The remedy is to get water into that pool, but we still don’t have much power for pumps, nor water supply, because we are still surrounded by devastation, and we still have the problem of the reactors that have just been scrammed and are really really hot because they have recently created fission products in them.

But we can call in helicopters to drop water into the now-exposed pool.  That ought to work only there is a 20 knot wind, so not all the water dropped can get into the pool, and much goes downwind in a televisible display plume.

And there we are. The good news is that the wind is blowing the results out to sea. The bad news is that a plume hundreds of miles long develops and in that plume are detectable — not dangerous but detectable — levels of radiation, and out there away from the destruction, not hampered by the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami, are a lot of  news people desperate for a story, and —   I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader. Detectible soon becomes potentially dangerous levels, and it’s hundreds and hundreds of miles, and a Union of Concerned Scientists expert will now tell you about it all.

I can’t say that this won’t be worse than Chernobyl, but so far we have no stories whatever of anyone off the plant site injured, which makes this a TMI story, not a Chernobyl story. And that’s the way things are at Noon on Thursday as best I can tell. Here’s the headline:

Japan nuclear crisis deepens as radiation keeps crews at bay

Race is on to restart cooling systems with emergency power after dropping water on damaged reactors has little effect

To the best of my knowledge the Japanese crews are winning the race. This will end up worse than TMI because many of those in the plant will be injured, and some may be killed: I understand that some workers have voluntarily exceeded their annual badge limits and by a lot because they thought their work was critical. At TMI there were no off site injuries, and the worst to the workers was that they exceeded their badge limits and were sent away. At Daiichi there have so far been no off site injuries, but some to many of the plant workers have exceeded their badge limits. In addition six or more have mechanical injuries, some from the hydrogen explosions, one from a heart attack. Pray for them.

Indeed. Jerry puts in a well-deserved plug to the MIT Nuclear Information Hub. weblog, which is now frequently updated with lots of relevant info. Get thee over there.

And just to give some perspective on the scale of the disaster caused by the tsunami, have a look at this video sent to me by Mrs. F2. At first the combination of new agey background music and what deceptively seems like shots of a peaceful tide rolling will throw you off, but as the images zoom in the devastation is revealed for what it is, and the continuing background music creates a chilling, Lalo Shifrin-esque emotional counterpoint.

 

Declaration of Independence, Twitter style

Depressingly, a Marist Poll revealed that 40% Of 18-29 Year-Olds Don’t Know Why We Celebrate The 4th Of July. [http://shar.es/m96bA]

So perhaps, it has to be explained in a way that will “reach” the Twitter/SMS generation. In honor of Independence Day, Slate started a contest on Twitter to summarize the Declaration of Independence in 140 characters or less. (That length would also fit an SMS.)

You can see the results in real-time here: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23TinyDeclaration

Some personal picks:

badanes Our Rights from Creator (h/t @JLocke). Life, Liberty, PoH FTW! Your transgressions = FAIL. GTFO, @GeorgeIII. -HANCOCK et al #TinyDeclaration

chrispreilly Dear king, you are fired. We will govern ourselves. God created us & gave us rights. We have our reasons. #TinyDeclaration

scotters Hate to do this publicly and to this extent King George, but we’ve had enough of your high taxes. We’re done. Bye. #TinyDeclaration

FreeRangeMom We are reluctant to take this step, but because the King is grievously unfair, we declare ourselves to be independent #TinyDeclaration

ericinva Dudes…@KingGeorge is totally killing our buzz. So, like, everyone unfollow him, ‘kay? #TinyDeclaration

mpsever England, bro, we’re breaking up the band. Gonna work on a solo project for a bit. May tour Europe in 1940s. You can open. #tinydeclaration

prmros RT @TheIncumbent: @TheRealKingGeorgeIII We’re closing our @13colonies acct. We’re now @USofA. PS ur off our #ff list. #TinyDeclaration

dr_bombay yes, we can haz Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness etc. – Independence FTW! PS: bring it, @KingGeorge3 — it is ON, buddy. #TinyDeclaration

dmataconis Hey @KingGeorge, we got these rights that even a blind man can see. You violated them. So, f**k off. #TinyDeclaration

bdeak17 We both knew where this long distance relationship was going. Face it, we are different pple now, we want to try new things #TinyDeclaration

ericinva Hey, @KingGeorge, we’re done with you. #blocked #TinyDeclaration

danielstroud Dear G III R- We get MPs or you get the business end of our muskets. Now put that in your cup & drink it. (Not) Yours, TJ #tinydeclaration

CatRey We’re not gonna take it. No! We ain’t gonna take it! We’re not gonna take it- Anymore. #twistedsister #tinydeclaration

NEHgov Dear George, it’s not you. It’s U.S. #TinyDeclaration See T.J’s rough draft at NEH-funded PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON http://tiny.cc/crrb8

Happy Fourth of July Weekend!

Is there a Soros connection to the offshore drilling moratorium

The Sea of Syrah has the goods.

Three words: The Chicago Way.

On Being a 21st-Century Peasant – Reason Magazine

Ron Bailey fisks an article in which a jounalist without scientific qualifications (not automatically unqualified — except the New Class uses this argument often against the rest of us) calls for humanity to return to a subsistence farming lifestyle: On Being a 21st-Century Peasant – Reason Magazine.

Commenter “John” nails it:

The other thing that amuses me is that we end up in some kind of subsistence peasant lifestyle either way. If we ignored these clowns, [yet] all of their gloom and doom predictions turned out to be true, we would end up in the same place that we would be in if we had followed their advice, except of course that they wouldn’t be in charge.

Exactly.

“We con the world” and the parody defense

Last week the “We con the world” video by the Latma.com team (lama she-tit`atzben levad/why should you get aggravated by yourself?) became a viral success. Following complaints by Warner Music for copyright infringement, YouTube took down the video, only to be rewarded for its effort by dozens of copies elsewhere (including on PJTV.com and on YouTube itself [example]).
Clearly, YouTube has never heard of the parody defense — this type of parody for nonprofit (in this case, political) purposes has long been recognized as “fair use” in US jurisprudence.
Turns out, there is even a Supreme Court ruling that explicitly recognizes even for-profit parodies as fair use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._Acuff-Rose_Music,_Inc.

The story in brief: the rap group 2 Live Crew requested permission to record a parody of Roy Orbison’s classic “Pretty woman”. Permission being denied, they went ahead and recorded one anyhow, adding their trademark raunchy lyrics. Only after the recording became a hit were they sued. Eventually, the case made its way to SCOTUS.

The court found unanimously for 2 Live Crew. Under US copyright law, four criteria determine whether “fair use” applies:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The Supreme Court then found the aforementioned factors must be applied to each situation on a case by case basis. ‘”The fact that parody can claim legitimacy for some appropriation does not, of course, tell either parodist or judge much about where to draw the line. Like a book review quoting the copyrighted material criticized, parody may or may not be fair use, and petitioner’s suggestion that any parodic use is presumptively fair has no more justification in law or fact than the equally hopeful claim that any use for news reporting should be presumed fair.”

When looking at the purpose and character of 2 Live Crew’s use, the Court found that the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of the other three factors. The court found that, in any event, a work’s commercial nature is only one element of the first factor enquiry into its purpose and character, quoting Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417. The Supreme Court found the Court of Appeals analysis as running counter to this proposition.

Justice Souter then moved onto the second § 107 factor, “the nature of the copyrighted work”, finding it has little merit in resolving this and other parody cases, since the artistic value of parodies is often found in their ability to invariably copy popular works of the past.

The Court did find the third factor integral to the analysis, finding that the Court of Appeals erred in holding that, as a matter of law, 2 Live Crew copied excessively from the Orbison original. Souter reasoned that the “amount and substantiality” of the portion used by 2 Live Crew was reasonable in relation to the band’s purpose in creating a parody of “Oh, Pretty Woman“. The majority reasoned “even if 2 Live Crew’s copying of the original’s first line of lyrics and characteristic opening bass riff may be said to go to the original’s ‘heart,’ that heart is what most readily conjures up the song for parody, and it is the heart at which parody takes aim.” The Supreme Court then looked to the new work as a whole, finding that 2 Live Crew thereafter departed markedly from the Orbison lyrics, producing otherwise distinctive music.

Looking at the final factor, the Supreme Court found that the Court of Appeals erred in finding a presumption or inference of market harm (such as there had been in Sony). Parodies in general, the Court said, will rarely substitute for the original work, since the two works serve different market functions.

A case could be made that the 2 Live Crew version is a crime against music: however, it is not the function of the courts to regulate taste. The point of all this: if a parody defense was successful in this case, a fortiori the “We con the world” video should not have been a problem.

Quite amusingly, the majority opinion has the lyrics of both the original and the parody attached. Thus the “2 Live Crew”s sophomoric doggerel can be found in any major law library 🙂

Jordan Rudess’s “Morphwiz” virtual instrument for iPad

Wow. Just wow.

iPad: First impressions

The iPad contains no technology that did not previously exist. Yet, now having used oe for about a week, i am prepared to say it’s a game changer.

Biggest minus point for me: the virtual keyboard doesn’t have arrow keys, which makes editing text difficult unless you have very thin, delicate fingers. There is also the lack of Flash support, but i knew that going in.
Otherwise, it’s become my permanent sidekick. Use it for reading (iBooks as well as Stanza, which finally got updated for iPad support), browsing, note-taking,… Pretty much everything that doesn’t involve major writing and editing. And it’s a great music player too.

WordPress blogging mostly works: still cannot post on Correspondence Committee, owing to this site being coded in ASP.NET (yikes).

Battery life is more than adequate for my needs. And the most striking feature, perhaps, is how easily non-tech minded people take to the interface. (It’s quite a people magnet in public.)

Spain’s “green jobs” fiasco

Via Ed Driscoll guest-blogging at Insty’s:

“I HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO,” Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute writes at PJM, “but I revel in it:”

As predicted was inevitable, today the Spanish newspaper La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.

Breaking the Spanish government’s admission here at Pajamas Media probably didn’t hurt their interest in finally reporting on the leaked admission. Obama’s obvious hope of rushing into place his “fundamental transformation” of America into something more like Europe’s social democracies — where even the most basic freedoms have been moved from individuals and families to the state — before the house of cards collapsed has suffered what we can only hope proves to be its fatal blow. At least on this front.

La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: “Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster.”

A scanned PDF file of the La Gaceta article, as well as an English translation are included in Horner’s post.

Israel and the singularity

Via Instapundit, the “transhumanist” magazine H+:

Imagine this sci-fi scenario: A small tribe with unique literature, customs and myths believes they’ve been “chosen” for a glorious destiny. But they’re driven out of their native land, forced to wander the globe for aeons, persecuted and annihilated, until they’re impelled by a utopian novel to return to their homeland. They name their new city after the inspirational book and their country becomes a technological powerhouse… but still, they’re surrounded by enemies. They wage eternal war, they hover between hope and apocalypse… their contributions to humanity are astounding but they continue to fear total extinction.[…]

Read the whole thing.