After a lazy week, some more links to ponder:

• Igor Bobic: Obama Promises to Hold IRS Accountable on 'Outrageous' Targeting: Given the history of the federal government harrassing left-wing political organizations, "outrageous" isn't the first word that pops into my mind regarding the revelations that some IRS personnel singled out "tea party" group applications for review of 501(C) status. My reaction was more like a giggle, but then I found out that none of the "targeted" organizations were actually denied. I'm not expert in the relevant law, but I do know that a peace organization I'm close to has both a 501(C) fund that is strictly non-political ("educational") and another funding stream that isn't tax exempt but can be used for more political activities (although in practice it isn't used for anything partisan or electoral). So it doesn't exactly surprise me that "tea party" groups would skirt that law: they are primarily political propaganda outlets, funded by rich right-wingers who can use the tax-exempt feature to stretch their self-interested bucks. Unlike most of the people who donate to our little peace group. (We haven't itemized deductions in many years, so our donations don't save us a dime on our taxes.) Obama is right that the IRS should be non-partisan, but his reaction shouldn't be an outrage that feeds into enemy talking points. (For instance, I see Glenn Beck now claiming that the "IRS scandal" is "all connected" with the Benghazi attack and the Boston bombings. On the Republicans' ability to keep these pseudo-scandals in the news cycle, crowding out real issues, see Julian Rayfield: Sunday Shows Round-Up: All About the IRS and Benghazi. As for real but ignored issues, see Conor Friedersdorff: The Biggest Obama Scandals Are Proven and Ignored -- a list Republicans don't care about or even applaud.)

  See Connie Cass: A Look at Why the Bengazi Issue Keeps Coming Back for a useful review of what happened there and who said what when. Of the various facts, the one that jumps out at me was that the "US consulate" in Benghazi was actually a CIA station, and aside from Ambassador Stevens the people involved were CIA agents and contractors, so the instinct to lie and cover up is deeply ingrained. The other key point is that the real political issue here was Obama's decision to intervene in Libya's civil war and help ouster Moammar Gaddafi. Obama promised not to put US military forces on the ground in Libya, but it seems inevitable that the CIA were active, routing guns and information to anti-Gaddafi forces -- some of which were bound to be anti-American Islamists (proving again how little the CIA learned from Afghanistan, where US clients included future leaders of the Taliban and indeed Osama Bin Laden himself).

  Of course, intervention in Libya isn't on the Republican's own "talking points": they'd rather attack the administration for trying to substitute "extremists" for "terrorists," mostly in the belief that their language is a more potent stimulus to further US-backed wars in the region. Even there, what they loathe Obama for isn't that he hasn't been belligerent enough for their taste -- excepting McCain and Graham, of course, who never met a war they didn't want to plunge into -- but that Obama isn't jingoistic enough.

• Paul Krugman: How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled: Book review of: Neil Irwin: The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire (Penguin); Mark Blyth: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press); and David A. Stockman: The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (Public Affairs). But starts off with the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco -- the paper that claimed that when a nation's debt/GDP ratio crosses the 90% mark the economy sinks into catastrophe, but turned out to be wrong in so many ways:

  The real mystery, however, was why Reinhart-Rogoff was ever taken seriously, let alone canonized, in the first place. Right from the beginning, critics raised strong concerns about the paper's methodology and conclusions, concerns that should have been enough to give everyone pause. Moreover, Reinhart-Rogoff was actually the second example of a paper seized on as decisive evidence in favor of austerity economics, only to fall apart on careful scrutiny. Much the same thing happened, albeit less spectacularly, after austerians became infatuated with a paper by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna purporting to show that slashing government spending would have little adverse impact on economic growth and might even be expansionary. Surely that experience should have inspired some caution.

  So why wasn't there more caution? The answer, as documented by some of the books reviewed here and unintentionally illustrated by others, lies in both politics and psychology: the case for austerity was and is one that many powerful people want to believe, leading them to seize on anything that looks like a justification.

  Here's a very good explanation of how recessions (depressions) happen, especially following a prolonged expansion of debt:

  All that was needed to collapse these houses of cards was some kind of adverse shock, and in the end the implosion of US subprime-based securities did the deed. By the fall of 2008 the housing bubbles on both sides of the Atlantic had burst, and the whole North Atlantic economy was caught up in "deleveraging," a process in which many debtors try -- or are forced -- to pay down their debts at the same time.

  Why is this a problem? Because of interdependence: your spending is my income, and my spending is your income. If both of us try to reduce our debt by slashing spending, both of our incomes plunge -- and plunging incomes can actually make our indebtedness worse even as they also produce mass unemployment.

  Krugman could have extended these paragraphs into a tutorial on how [Keynesian] macroeconomics has learned how to ameliorate and reverse recessions, but he wound up illustrating the principles negatively, by showing how actual central bankers ignored standard prescriptions and made their economies worse. The key insight is that if my income is someone else's spending, and others in the private sector aren't spending, that deficit can be made up by having government spend more. In other words, all it takes to avoid disaster is the political will to deliberately do something constructive about it. That will power was undone by a coalition of bankers and conservative politicians, partly because they fixated on threats (to them, anyway) that were mostly imaginary, and mostly because they didn't give a damn about the hardships their welfare forced on everyone else.

  Krugman notes how many advocates of austerity see it as a morality play -- as Andrew Mellon put it "to purge the rottenness" from the system (nor is this view limited to curmudgeonly bankers; see Alex Pareene: Kinsley Loves Austerity Because It Is "Spinach") -- and he finds examples in Stockman's book (a tirade against one "spree" after another). Krugman then adds:

  So is the austerian impulse all a matter of psychology? No, there's also a fair bit of self-interest involved. As many observers have noted, the turn away from fiscal and monetary stimulus can be interpreted, if you like, as giving creditors priority over workers. Inflation and low interest rates are bad for creditors even if they promote job creation; slashing government deficits in the face of mass unemployment may deepen a depression, but it increases the certainty of bondholders that they'll be repaid in full. I don't think someone like Trichet was consciously, cynically serving class interests at the expense of overall welfare; but it certainly didn't hurt that his sense of economic morality dovetailed so perfectly with the priorities of creditors.

  It's also worth noting that while economic policy since the financial crisis looks like a dismal failure by most measures, it hasn't been so bad for the wealthy. Profits have recovered strongly even as unprecedented long-term unemployment persists; stock indices on both sides of the Atlantic have rebounded to pre-crisis highs even as median income languishes. It might be too much to say that those in the top 1 percent actually benefit from a continuing depression, but they certainly aren't feeling much pain, and that probably has something to do with policymakers' willingness to stay the austerity course. [ . . . ]

  I'd argue that what happened next -- the way policymakers turned their back on practically everything economists had learned about how to deal with depressions, the way elite opinion seized on anything that could be used to justify austerity -- was a much greater sin. The financial crisis of 2008 was a surprise, and happened very fast; but we've been stuck in a regime of slow growth and desperately high unemployment for years now. And during all that time policymakers have been ignoring the lessons of theory and history.

  It's a terrible story, mainly because of the immense suffering that has resulted from these policy errors. It's also deeply worrying for those who like to believe that knowledge can make a positive difference in the world. To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Papers and economists who told the elite what it wanted to hear were celebrated, despite plenty of evidence that they were wrong; critics were ignored, no matter how often they got it right.

  It would take a much longer piece, but at some point it would be worth breaking out the things that constitute "immense suffering": the unfairness of so much unemployment; discrimination against all sorts of marginalized workers, especially the old (who policymakers expect to work longer and longer) and the young (who face extra difficulties in starting careers, and in many cases start with unprecedented debt burdens); and much more. Nor is public spending only needed to counterbalance the drop in private spending -- the need for infrastructure and public goods has never been greater, and the austerity fixation is crippling us (physically, mentally, aspirationally).

Music: Current count 21406 [21383] rated (+23), 622 [617] unrated (+5). Not sure what accounts for the fall off, but then don't remember much of last week.

A-list records continue to accumulate at a dizzying pace, a far cry from a couple months ago when they were scarce as hen's teeth -- clever triangulators will note that in addition to the two featured in this rather short week there are two more in the unpacking list that were first uncovered on Rhapsody. Thus far I have 41 A-list records this year, so we're still not quite on track to getting to last year's 125, but not so far behind either.

Rodrigo Amado Motion Trio + Jeb Bishop: The Flame Alphabet (2011 [2013], Not Two): Bishop is the Chicago-based trombone player who left the Vandermark Five about five years ago, and has kept busy since then mostly guesting on projects where he easily adds to the noise level -- his tour with Cactus Truck is fresh on my mind -- but here he takes the lead without the least bit of slop in a showcase of avant-trombone that would turn the heads of Steve Swell, or for that matter Roswell Rudd: a huge improvement over Bishop's previous album with Portuguese tenor saxophonist Amado's trio, Burning Live at Jazz ao Centro. And Amado is sharp as ever, ably backed by Miguel Mira on cello and Gabriel Ferrandini on drums. A-

Jerry Bergonzi: By Any Other Name (2012 [2013], Savant): Tenor saxophonist, from Boston, has a long list of records since 1983 but has never sounded better than in his recent streak -- I have four of his last six albums at A-, the other two just a hair under. So I was surprised when this didn't kick in, but I blame Phil Grenadier's trumpet, which ties the sax up in unison work and takes solos that add up to very little. In his own spots the saxphonist is as brusque as ever -- there just aren't enough of them. Songs are all originals, but parenthetically refer to standards. B+(**)

Jonathan Finlayson & Sicilian Defense: Moment & the Message (2012 [2013], Pi): Trumpet player, first album after quality side credits with Steve Lehman, Steve Coleman, Tomas Fujiwara, and -- most likely; still haven't heard the album -- Mary Halvorson. Quintet with Miles Okazaki (guitar), David Virelles (piano), Keith Witty (bass), and Damion Reid (drums). No second horn keeps his out front, while the guitar and piano players are rising stars, sparkling soloists with an intriguingly complex interplay. A-

Hush Point: Hush Point (2013, Sunnyside): Postbop pianoless quartet, the two horns John McNeil's trumpet and Jeremy Udden's alto sax, with Aryeh Kobrinsky on bass and Vinnie Sperrazza on drums. I initially assumed this would be McNeil's show -- he's about 30 years senior -- but Udden outwrote him 4-to-3, Kobrinsky pitched in, and they picked up two Jimmy Giuffre tunes that seem like a shared connection. The hornwork is tight and sly, the rhythm slippery. Nothing spectacular, but could well grow on you. B+(***)

Steven Lugerner: For We Have Heard (2013, NoBusiness/Primary): Plays double reeds, clarinets, flutes, saxes. Second album, after his ambitious 2-CD debut (also has a group record, Dads, by Chives). Quartet with Darren Johnston on trumpet, Myra Melford on piano, and Matt Wilson on drums. Strong soloists in their rare spots, but the compositions come first, with most of the album is woven around the leader's intricate reeds. B+(***)

Jackie Ryan: Listen Here (2012 [2013], Open Art): Standards singer, six or seven records since 2000; has a deep, flexible voice that over an album gains stature and authority. Arranged by bassist John Clayton, features pianist Gerald Clayton, with Graham Dechter on guitar and selected horn spots -- haven't heard much from him lately, but Rickey Woodard sounds splendid. B+(*)

Alex Snydman: Fortunate Action (2012 [2013], self-released): Drummer, lives in Los Angeles, debut album, mostly piano trio with two cuts adding tenor/soprano sax (Cari Clements). He uses three pianists -- Doug Abrams (4 cuts), Chris Pattinshall (3), and Miro Sprague (2) -- and two bassists, with the pianists writing a bare majority of the songs; Snydman has 3.5 credits, plus covers of Ellington/Strayhorn and Herbie Hancock. Despite the credits jumble, it all sounds remarkably consistent. B+(**)

Al Thompson Jr.: City Mainstream (2012 [2013], Alcalgar): Plays piano/keyboards, sings a bit, based in Connecticut. First album, a high energy groove thing, the horns stronger than anything the smooth jazz crowd favors -- gives it some appeal. B

Jacob Varmus: Terminal Stillness (2012 [2013], Crows Kin): Trumpet player, from San Francisco, studied at University of Iowa, based in Brooklyn. Second album, six tracks cut with guitar (Nate Radley), piano (Kris Davis), bass (Ike Sturm), drums (Brian Woodruff); two with accordion (Jacob Garchik), bass (Gil Smuskowitz), and drums; the closer Varmus himself on piano. B+(*)

Renée Yoxon/Mark Ferguson: Here We Go Again (2012 [2013], self-released): Singer and her pianist, based in Ottawa up in Canada, second album; original songs, slight edge to Yoxon with about half credited to both. Band selectively adds trumpet, trombone, sax, and/or guitar, and they flesh out the sound nicely. She likes to scat, and isn't bad at it. B+(*)

Some corrections on a recent Jazz Prospecting review:

Clipper Anderson: Ballad of the Sad Young Men (2008-10 [2013], Origin): Bassist, originally from Montana, based in Seattle since 1992. Third album, if you count an Xmas with Greta Matassa's name first, plus a lot of side credits going back to 1984. Anderson sings as well as plays bass, moldy standards done in the old Sinatra mold, except that he's not Sinatra, and Darin Clendenin's piano trio doesn't pack much punch. B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Chris Amemiya & Jazz Coalescence: In the Rain Shadow (OA2)
• David Arnay: 8 (Studio N)
• Lynn Baker Quartet: LectroCoustic (OA2)
• Diego Barber/Hugo Cipres: 411 (Origin)
• Black Host: Life in the Sugar Candle Mines (Northern Spy)
• Will Calhoun: Life in This World (Motéma)
• Ceramic Dog: Your Turn (Northern Spy)
• Etienne Charles: Creole Soul (Culture Shock Music): advance, July 23
• Corey Christiansen: Lone Prairie (Origin)
• Amos Garrett Jazz Trio: Jazzblues (Stony Plain)
• Christian McBride & Inside Straight: People Music (Mack Avenue)
• Bernie Mora & Tangent: Dandelion (Rhombus)
• The Rempis Percussion Quartet: Phalanx (Aerophonic)
• The Rosenthals: Fly Away (American Melody)
• Colin Stetson: New History Warfare, Vol. 3: To See More Light (Constellation)
• Wheelhouse: Boss of the Plains (Aerophonic)
• Zs: Grain (Northern Spy)

Another last-minute link grab:

• Nicholas Blanford: Hizballah and Israel Spar as Syria's Conflict Threatens to Spin Out of Control: Israel's 2006 war against Hezbollah (effectively Lebanon) should have yielded several clearcut lessons. One is that Hezbollah is a very effective defensive fighting force against Israeli land assaults. Another is that Hezbollah's cache of Iranian or Syrian rockets aren't worth a thing, either as a deterrent against Israeli attack -- if anything, their existence provoked that attack -- or as an offensive weapon. Yet Hezbollah is evidently so concerned about maintaining their Syrian weapons pipeline that they've joined Assad's Syrian army in fighting against the rebels. Hezbollah's presence in Syria, in turn, gives Israel all the excuse they think they need to fly into Syria and bomb targets they think are related to Hezbollah -- presumably pro-Assad forces, although they've also claimed to be neutral in the Syrian Civil War, and some Israelis have argued they would prefer Assad (you know, "the devil you know"; see Israel has no desire for Assad to fall) to stay in power, so they may not care who they bomb. Needless to say, both Israel and Hezbollah are making the mess in Syria worse, adding dangerous factors that make it very likely to spill over into Lebanon, while Israel is just stirring the pot in Syria, giving all sides more reason to hate it and plot revenge.

  Also see Robert Fisk talk about Syria, attesting to the extreme brutality of the war, also questioning the logic of Israel's intervention:

  Are they really bombing missiles going to the Hezbollah, the so-called Fateh-110 missile, which was first test-fired by Iran, what, 11 years ago? Conceivable. But when you consider the Syrians have also used these missiles, according to the Americans, last December against rebel forces, why would they use armaments, which they use against -- in this ferocious life-and-death battle against the rebels, why should they be shipping them out of Syria en route to Lebanon, where the Hezbollah don't appear at the moment to have any need for them, since they have thousands of other weapons, a weapon which I would have thought the government would want to keep in Damascus?

  Fisk also says something about the state of journalism:

  And I think one of the problems is, as I say, this parasitic, osmotic relationship between journalists and power, our ever-growing ability, our wish, to -- you know, to rely on these utterly bankrupt comments from various unnamed, anonymous intelligence sources. And I'm just looking at a copy of the Toronto Globe and Mail, February 1st, 2013. It's a story about al-Qaeda in Algeria. And what is the sourcing? "U.S. intelligence officials said," "a senior U.S. intelligence official said," "U.S. officials said," "the intelligence official said," "Algerian officials say," "national security sources considered," "European security sources said," "the U.S. official said," "the officials acknowledged." I went -- boy, I've got another even worse example here from The Boston Globe and Mail [ sic ], November 2nd, 2012. But, you know, we might as well name our newspapers "Officials Say." This is the cancer at the bottom of modern journalism, that we do not challenge power anymore. Why are Americans tolerating these garbage stories with no real sourcing except for very dodgy characters indeed, who won't give their names?

• E Douglas Kihn: The Political Roots of American Obesity:

  It was during Reagan's first term that the phrase bean counter came into prominent usage. These were the efficiency experts whose job it was to increase profits for the major corporations, mainly by introducing speedups, job consolidations, forced overtime, the hiring of part-time workers -- along with artful and ruthless union-busting.

  This was also the beginning of the "War on Iran," the "War on Drugs," the war against the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador (all of them Marxists doubtless bent on rampaging through the streets of US cities) and a dangerous escalation of threats against the Soviet Union/Evil Empire.

  As social fear and insecurity rise, mental health declines.

  Apparently, so does physical health. According to a new study from Rice University and the University Colorado at Boulder in Social Science Quarterly, despite modest gains in lifespan over the past century, the United States still trails many of the world's countries when it comes to life expectancy, and its poorest citizens live approximately five years less than more affluent people. The United States, which spends far more money on medical care than other advanced industrialized countries, has the sickest residents in every category of unwellness.

A little over two years ago the "Arab Spring" pro-democracy movement broke out in Syria, a nation that nearly everyone agreed could benefit from more political freedom, seeing as how it's been ruled by the Assad family since the 1960s and by one military clique or another even further back. Similar dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt fell quickly; struggles against the dictators of Yemen and Bahrein dragged out inconclusively; but in Libya and Syria demonstrators were met with violence and some fraction of the military establishment broke against the regime, plunging those nations into civil war. Demonstrations in Jordan faded quickly with a few token reforms. And nothing much happened in Saudi Arabia, probably the one nation in the region most in need of a democratic overhaul.

One prism into understanding how these movements played out is to map them against US influence in the region. US interests and actions in the Middle East have been schizophrenic since the late 1940s when US administrations found themselves not just allied but in love with two conflicting suitors: Israel, and Saudi-Arabian oil (although any oil would do, especially Iran's from 1953-79). One problem was that those paramours came with a lot of baggage: Israel was constantly at war with its Arab neighbors and its own [Palestinian] people, forging an elite militarist culture that thrives on conflict, foments hatred against everything Arab, and has turned most of world opinion against them -- the major exception America's own fundamentalist Christians and militarists. The Saudi ruling family, on the other hand, is joined at the hip to the most extremely reactionary Salafist Muslim clergy, and has spent billions of dollars attempting to export their religious orthodoxy throughout the Middle East and into Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it turned virulently anti-American. But America's true obsession was the Cold War, in service of which no tyrant or ideologue could be found too unsavory. The Israelis and Saudis became expert at camouflaging their own obsessions as anti-communist fervor, so the US could embrace them both.

But another facet of America's Cold War obsession was promotion of democracy, not so much for allies as for countries on the other (or no) side, but as a contrast to the "unfree" Soviet-style regimes. So when masses of people demand democracy, our natural tendency is to applaud. In the cases of Tunisia and Egypt -- secure military allies with tired and unsavory leaders -- Obama had little reason to resist, so the US subtly nudged their power structure to go with the flow. In Yemen, one of Obama's favorite drone-shooting ranges, and Bahrein, with its Shiite majority possibly tilting toward Iran, the US was more reserved. But Libya and Syria were rarely US allies, and most of the "brains" behind US policy in the region -- especially the "neocons" -- have spent most of their careers bashing their leaders, so the US had no interests in maintaining them, but also no influence or leverage that could be used to democratize them. Consequently, the more the US leaned against them, the less then had to lose by suppressing their revolts violently. In hindsight, the best way the US could have helped to democratize those nations would have been to develop normal relations with them. (It is worth noting that the only Soviet bloc states that didn't democratize are the ones the US fought wars against, followed by long, grudge-filled periods of isolation: China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba.)

As soon as Libya and Syria broke into civil war, the neocons -- most vociferously, Senators McCain and Graham, who never miss an opportunity to plunge us deeper into hell -- and their "liberal hawk" cronies started crying for the US to intervene. How anyone could think that inserting the US military into a conflict would save lives is beyond me. (The historical basis for that idea was probably the NATO intervention in Bosnia. After just two weeks of bombing, the Serbs accepted a ceasefire and signed the Dayton Accords ending a war between Serbia and Bosnia that had dragged on for more than two years. That intervention surely did save lives, at least if you don't factor in the subsequent Kosovo War, which was made all the more likely by the expectation that NATO would again intervene against Serbia -- as it did.) But you can't judge interventions by simply balancing deaths on one side versus the other. US intervention means that people who wouldn't have been killed otherwise are now being killed by the US -- a fact that won't be easily rationalized by the people the US attacked.

Obama did finally agree to intervene in Libya, but only after France and the UK had committed to do so. US firepower quickly degraded Libya's military power, and the civil war turned against Gaddafi, ending after about three months. Obama was careful not to land US troops, or to put the US into a position where the US would have any responsibility for postwar administration and reconstruction. Nonetheless, last September a group of Islamic jihadists attacked the US consulate in Benghazi -- the center of the anti-Gaddafi resistance, presumably the most grateful city for the US intervention -- killing four Americans, the sort of blowback that should always be expected. The Benghazi attack has since become a cause celebre for the Republicans, who have gone so far as to argue that Obama should be impeached for his "cover up" of the attack. (As far as I can tell, that "cover up" consisted of nothing more than Susan Rice making some erroneous statements the day after, confusing the violent attack in Benghazi with non-violent anti-American protests elsewhere. I would write more about this if I could make any sense out of it, but I can't. The one thing I can say is that attacking Obama for something bad happening after he intervened in Libya isn't likely to be the most effective way to convince him to intervene in Syria, where the number of bad things that can happen is much greater.)

Dexter Filkins has a long article, The Thin Red Line, on Syria, the pressures put on Obama to intervene there, and some of the risks. Filkins is one of those reporters for whom war is just business -- booming, as his book, The Forever War, shows. He recounts much of what I wrote above on Yugoslavia and Libya, while only glancingly mentioning less "successful" US interventions like Iraq and Afghanistan. The title refers to Obama's casual warning to Assad that Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" leading to US intervention. ("Red lines" have been much in the news lately, especially regarding Iran's "nuclear program" -- what degree of offense would "justify" Israel and/or the US to preemptively attack Iran.) Consequently, advocates of going to war with Syria are scouring the data for any evidence of poison gas use, under the theory that having drawn a red line there, Obama will have no choice but to intervene -- the entire credibility of the US is put at stake by Obama's careless use of jargon.

The Syrian Civil War has resulted in, to pick two recent estimates, between 70 and 120 thousand deaths, with more than a million refugees, and many more internally displaced. Those are substantial numbers, even if they are still less than the death-and-refugee toll of the Civil War in Iraq that was triggered and abetted by the US invasion and occupation. (At least no one was so stupid as to urge anyone to intervene to "save lives" in Iraq. Of course, enforcing a "no fly" zone against the US would have been difficult, but we are talking about genocide here, something the world has committed to tolerate "never again.")

Filkins reports on three options for US intervention: establishing a "no fly" zone; arming the rebels; and somehow securing Syria's chemical weapon sites. The "no fly" zone is regarded as more difficult than it was in Libya because Syria has more sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses, although they don't seem to cause Israel much trouble. The bigger problem is that in itself it's unlikely to have much effect -- e.g., on artillery and missiles. One suggestion is to use the "Patriot anti-missile system" to intercept Syrian SCUD missiles. (Is this the source of the adage that "Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels"?) So it's very likely that a "no fly" zone will be a stepping stone to deeper involvement, as indeed it was in Libya.

Arming the rebels is relatively easy to do, and is already being done by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and possibly others. However, this gets real tricky real fast. There are multiple groups of rebels, and some of them are friendlier to the US than others, and the last thing you want is to send arms to Al-Qaeda-types in Syria -- which are a formidable part of the resistance -- who might wind up using the arms against American targets, so you want to pick and choose who gets what, but in doing so you're not only arming the rebels against Syria, you're arming them against each other. And while you might argue that a "no fly" zone is a neutral way to level the battlefield, arming select groups of the rebels ends any pretense at neutrality or disinterest. You now have a "dog in the fight": which is not only bad news for Assad, it's a challenge for anyone who is wary of American power in the region -- a short list which includes Iran and Russia, even before this revolt provided Syria with arms. The result is surely an arms race, escalating even further the level of violence.

Arming the rebels also means forgoing the alternative, which is to negotiate an arms embargo with Syria's suppliers, and enforce comparable limits on the rebels' suppliers. The desired effect would be to let the conflict degrade into a stalemate, which would give both sides reason to negotiate a power-sharing agreement and move toward a democratic scheme which protects interests allied with both sides. If the US goes in and arms the rebels, that option disappears. The rebels become more convinced in their eventual triumph, cementing their resolve to fight on. From that point the only way to long-term suffering is to shorten the war by increasing the rebels' firepower and leverage, which not only helps them defeat Assad, it also allows them to more completely dominate the social, ethnic, and tribal groups that had favored Assad. And it also makes more likely an internecine war between rebel groups -- as happened when the Russians finally quit Afghanistan.

Even Filkins admits that the third option -- securing Syria's chemical weapons -- is a fool's errand. Nobody knows how many sites there are, how many munitions there are, where they all are, or much of anything else about them. What you really need is a UN disarmament team to set up camp in Syria and track them all down, but for that to happen you have to stop the shooting, in which case you might as well solve the conflict. As for the US doing it directly, Filkins reports an estimate that it would take 75,000 troops: the basic scheme there is to conquer the country, then look for the illicit weapons -- for lessons on how this "works," see Iraq. Even if you could magically wipe the country clean of chemical weapons, it's unlikely that the conflit would be less deadly. They wind up being nothing more than a side-thought: a problem people should have thought of before starting a war that makes their use much more likely.

Obama has managed to frustrate virtually every side in the conflict. He never offered any pretense of neutrality, and has gone out of his way to offend Assad backers from Iran to Hezbollah. He's had better relations with Russia, but not much. Saudi and Qatari arms shipments inevitably smell of US approval, as does Israel's recent bombings of Syria -- one thing the latter does is to test Syria's air defenses, useful research for that "no fly" zone. The CIA is reportedly on the ground in Syria, feeding intelligence info to the rebels. On the other hand, it's hard to tell who's "winning" the war, and nothing Obama has done is likely to tilt the balance, so he's not winning points with the neocon crowd -- nor should he, given the way they've lashed out at him over Libya, which he finessed about as elegantly as any American president could.

As far as I'm concerned, Assad's extremely violent counterrevolt is inexcusable, ensuring his future as an international pariah. However, the more I read of the rebels, the less sympathetic I am to them, and the more I fear their possible triumph. Andrew Bacevich makes an interesting point:

Whatever Obama does or doesn't do about Syria won't affect the larger trajectory of events. Except to Syrians, the fate of Syria per se doesn't matter any more than the fate of Latvia or Laos. The context within which the upheaval there is occurring -- what preceded it and what it portends -- matters a great deal. Yet on this score, Washington is manifestly clueless and powerless.

History possesses a remarkable capacity to confound. Right when the path ahead appears clear -- remember when the end of the Cold War seemed to herald a new age of harmony? -- it makes a U-turn. The Syrian civil war provides only the latest indication that one such radical reversal is occurring before our very eyes. For Syria bears further witness to the ongoing disintegration of the modern Middle East and the reemergence of an assertive Islamic world, a development likely to define the 21st century.

Recall that the modern Middle East is a relatively recent creation. It emerged from the wreckage of World War I, the handiwork of cynical and devious European imperialists. As European (and especially British) power declined after World War II, the United States, playing the role of willing patsy, assumed responsibility for propping up this misbegotten product of European venality -- a dubious inheritance, if there ever was one.

Now it's all coming undone. Today, from the Maghreb to Pakistan, the order created by the West to serve Western interests is succumbing to an assault mounted from within. Who are the assailants? People intent on exercising that right to self-determination that President Woodrow Wilson bequeathed to the world nearly 100 years ago. What these multitudes are seeking remains to be seen. But they don't want and won't countenance outside interference.

If Assad falls, either democratically or by arms, the successor state will very probably be more conservative, more devoutly Islamist, and very likely more aggressively anti-American and anti-Israel -- in other words, it will be a state that most Americans who reflexively clamored for Assad's ouster will find disappointing. And as such it will ratchet America's frustration with the region even deeper. It will also be a war-torn wreck, with few prospects of reconstruction any time soon. Barring US occupation, it is unlikely to become as corrupt as Iraq or Afghanistan, but like those two disaster areas, its people has already fragmented into many conflicting identities, which will continue to tear at the social fabric even after the war ends. Moreover, as far as the US is concerned, Syria will always be on the wrong side of Israel, and for that matter the wrong side of Lebanon, and if those features fade it will revert to no meaning at all. The only reason McCain and Graham and their ilk care at all about Syria is that they smell war there, and they see in every war an opportunity for the US to assert its omnipotence.

I too see war in Syria as a test for the US, and especially as a test for Obama: the test is whether we can finally see clear to stay out of a conflict where in the long run we can only hurt ourselves. The US is so infatuated with itself that it is a sucker for the likes of McCain and Graham, and Obama has repeatedly allowed himself to be seduced by American power -- partly, no doubt, because the Republicans so delight in trash talking to him, taunting him as an apologist, impugning him for every irresolute doubt. Obama once said that he wants to change how America thinks about war, but he seems unable to even change how he himself thinks. Syria is a test of his ability to pit sanity against jargon, for rarely has a course of action -- intervention -- loomed so temptingly yet been so clearly fraught with folly.

This edition started with Spin's recent feature, "Top 100 Alternative Albums of the 1960s" (list only, original link, which gets you short reviews if you're patient enough). When I originally collected the list, I tacked on my grades and found that I had only heard/rated 42 of the 100. I took that as a challenge, and have since reduced my unrated list from 58 to 22. I've heard at least some of the remaining music on compilations (e.g., Desmond Dekker, Mulatu Astatke). I was able to come up with a couple items not on Rhapsody, and sometimes used Rhapsody but working back from later reissues. The reviews below sometimes consider more than one reissue, but often just focus in on the original release (in whatever state of remastering is current, not that you can tell much listening to mp3s on a computer).

Any list can be nitpicked, and this one is especially vulnerable. There's no obvious meaning for "alt" -- a term that Spin treats as its calling, almost a synonym for interesting -- in the 1960s, so they've picked a lot of things that are just obscure (and the top of the list isn't even that: the Velvet Underground, Stooges, Flying Burrito Brothers, Mothers of Invention, MC5, Captain Beefheart, and Pink Floyd were at least semi-popular and by now legendary, as is virtually everything on the Nuggets compilation. Their picks among singer-songwriters are a very mixed bag (Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Van Dyke Parks, Scott Walker, but no Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, or Randy Newman). They picked up some krautrock but paid very little attention to England, missing proto-prog (Soft Machine, King Crimson) and much else (Love Sculpture, The Move). And while they did a fair job of rummaging through American garage rock, they missed the start of a postmodern retro movement -- I'd say the best really alt-rock record not on the list is the Flamin' Groovies' Supersnazz (1969), a fully-realized masterpiece at a time when Alex Chilton and Dave Edmunds were only beginning to get their shit together.

Still, less than half of the list albums were rock. And, needless to say, stayed well clear of black music -- exceptions were proto-rap Watts Prophets, New Orleans funk band the Meters, and if you want to be generous, Rotary Connection -- and didn't touch country or blues (although they picked up a few folkies). Most of the rest of the list was filled out from three slices (13-16 records each): avant-jazz, postclassical electronica, and world music.

The latter is limited by availability, especially from Africa where only Babatunde Olatunji and Mulatu Astatke got noticed (no Franco? Sunny Ade? Rochereau? Fela? Nico? Bebey?) -- Miriam Makeba was the best known African star, but not exactly alt. Desmond Dekker was the only Jamaican listed, but Bob Marley, Toots Hibbert, Gregory Isaacs, and many others finally noticed in the 1970s were already active. So what did make the list? Three albums each from France and Brazil -- the latter much more alt than the bossa nova craze of 1963-65, the former less so -- plus two boogaloo albums from New York and some field recordings on Nonesuch's Explorer Series.

The avant-jazz list hits a lot of the decade's high points, including five Penguin Guide crown albums (Ayler, Braxton, Brötzmann, Coltrane's Ascension, and Dolphy), and many more picks will be familiar to Penguin Guide followers -- even obscure ones like AMM and Spontaneous Music Ensemble. (But had they followed Penguin Guide more closely they should have picked better records for Taylor -- Nefertiti vs. Unit Structures -- and especially for Sun Ra (and for that matter Ornette Coleman).

On the other hand, they missed lots of things too, especially near the dividing line (no Andrew Hill? Sam Rivers? Archie Shepp? Don Cherry? Steve Lacy? Horace Tapscott? Joe McPhee?). Amalgam's Prayer for Peace was one of the decade's best (and another crown album). I'd have been tempted to include Coltrane's A Love Supreme, which broke a lot of new ground, but they most likely left it out because everyone so admires it now.

The other big category remains obscure: early electronic music, mostly done by modernist composers brought up in the euroclassical curriculum -- Harry Partch is only a partial exception in that he didn't go in for electronics much, but invented his own instruments to explore his unique microtonal tunings. Riley and Reich went on to gather fairly large followings (as did Philip Glass, whose first record was 1973), but most of these names remain obscure. Some interesting records made the list, although you might be better off searching out OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music (1937-82 [2000], Ellipsis Arts, 3CD) for a more systematic intro.

I mostly spent the month trying to catch up with the Spin list, but I couldn't help but follow occasional threads. In some cases I didn't find the listed record but reviewed something else that I did find (Axelrod, Hardy, Oliveros, Sonics). In others, I helped myself to an extra record to get a broader idea (Sanders, Subotnick, 13th Floor Elevators, Walker). In most cases I tried to focus on the original LP rosters, although in a couple cases I cite more recent reissues and try to break them down. In the process of doing this, I also ran across non-alt records I felt like checking out -- e.g., early LPs by Cream, the Lovin' Spoonful, and the Who -- so I saved them for a second 1960s-themed Recycled Goods, probably next month. And in a case like Clifford Thornton makes more sense here -- not that I won't run across more like it next time.

Special thanks to Cam Patterson for helping me track down some of this music.

The Balinese Gamelan: Music From the Morning of the World (1966, Nonesuch): An early entry in Nonesuch's Explorer Series, and as such one of the first serious attempts to discover world music beyond the usual Latin and Irish confines, David Lewiston's field recordings from Bali have an anthropological purity to them: clanging, jangly percussion; odd-pitched strings; occasional high-and-lonesome vocals. Reissued twice with different covers and subtitles, the prize is the 1988 Nonesuch CD with two extras, notably the 22:08 "Ramayana Monkey Chant," but Rhapsody has the 2003 Nonesuch reissue, Indonesia: Bali: Music From the Morning of the World, which reverts to the LP lineup, time 41:20. A- [R, dl]

Can: Monster Movie (1969, Mute): My brief experience with the Krautrockers spanned three overly regarded 1972-74 albums -- Ege Bamyasi, Future Days, Soon Over Babaluma -- when they were turning into the continent's Yes, so I was surprised by all the variety shown in The Lost Tapes surprised me, and this first debut album shows why those were outtakes. The guitar is derivative, but from the Velvet Underground, and Malcolm Mooney's vocals offer a frenetic if not fully integrated cross between Lou Reed and Syd Barrett, but what was uniquely their own was the drumming that drives the second side to 20:27. A- [R]

Karen Dalton: It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best (1969, Capitol): Folk singer, of Cherokee descent, born in Oklahoma, had two kids by 19, when she ran away to New York. This was her first album (although some earlier tracks were eventually released as 1966, and there's a live tape from 1962) and she didn't last long, living on the streets, dying with AIDS; there is a bit of Billie Holiday in her voice, but her guitar rarely connects with it -- best chance is on simple blues like "It Hurts Me Too," otherwise this takes a lot of effort. B- [R]

Love: Forever Changes (1967 [2001], Elektra/Rhino): Los Angeles group led by singer-guitarist Arthur Lee, third album, widely regarded as a landmark -- number 40 on Rolling Stone's 2003 list of 500 among numerous others (see Wikipedia for pages of such testimony) -- reputation enough that I gave it a second spin after being dismayed by the first. I didn't (well, still don't) get why someone with his guitar chops would drape most of the album in strings, a sort of ornateness that gets dubbed baroque pop -- not that you really wind up thinking he's so prissy. More like he just wants to let the melodies sneak up on you. My CD has bonus cuts I could do without, and, bought used, lacks a booklet I wish I had. A-

Conlon Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano (1969, Columbia Masterworks): Avant composer from the Arkansas side of Texarkana, joined the CP in the 1930s and fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War against Franco -- those who did were branded "prematurely anti-fascist" and regarded as security risks by the US, so he moved to Mexico, where he lived until his death in 1997. These piano pieces are richly abstract, the speed and difficulty handled by punching them into a player piano -- the result kind of like Jerry Lee Lewis pounding his way through Varèse, or Cecil Taylor playing boogie woogie. 1750 Arch Records reissued this in 1977, followed by three more LP volumes, Complete Studies for Player Piano, and Wergo came up with a fifth volume in 1988, followed by CD reissues. Rhapsody's version is the 4CD 2008 release on Other Minds: too much for a single setting, but I can't say as there's any drop off in quality. A- [R]

Tropicália: Ou Panis Et Circensis (1968, Philips): Mark Kurlansky covered the various student revolts in eastern and western Europe in his book 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, and paid heed to tumultuous events in the US, but one important place he missed was Brazil. Tropicália was as politically charged as any music in the world, with Caetano Veloso the theoretician and Gilberto Gil the melodist -- they dominate this compilation. While I can't vouch for the lyrics, I will venture that this builds on MPB like Sgt. Pepper and Their Satanic Majesties Request moved beyond the early Beatles and Stones. I wouldn't attribute any of those leaps to psychedelics, when revolution was so much more mind-blowing. A [dl]

Briefly Noted

Amon Düül II: Phallus Dei (1969 [2006], Inside Out/Revisited): First album from the Krautrock band, split off from the original Amon Düül commune, a mix of layered guitars and keyb, violin and vibes, percussion from all over, chants, charges, and choirs; the title track runs 20 minutes, complex and enchanting; the reissue moves it up front, balancing it off with two bonus tracks, 10 minutes each, extending the vibe. B+(***) [R]

David Axelrod: Songs of Experience (1969, Capitol): A producer at Capitol in the late 1960s, this was the second album he put his name to (after Song of Innocence); instrumental, the sort of high schmaltz you often get with movie music, with at least one cut ("The Fly") transcending the level of dreck. B [R]

Ray Barretto: Acid (1968, Fania): Congalero from Spanish Harlem, with over sixty records a major figure in salsa and Latin jazz from 1960 to his death in 2006; this is widely lauded, as good a place to start as any; two English lyrics don't spoil the fun, but what you need to hear are the intense rhythm rolls. A- [R]

Blue Cheer: Vincebus Eruptum (1968, Philips): Blues-rock band from San Francisco, sort of an American version of Cream although none of the trio were musicians of the same caliber; starts with a dense "Summertime Blues," good for a cheap hit; no real hooks in the rest -- they just grind it out. B+(*) [R]

Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: Gorilla (1967, Liberty): Art school/trad jazz refugees, originally the Bonzo Dog Dada Band but they decided to go for parody and/or oom-pah -- probably too many tuba players in the band; not sure how interesting a band can be that credits Adolf Hitler on vibes and wastes one of their longest songs boring you with a complaint about being bored. B+(*) [R]

The Joe Cuba Sextet: Wanted Dead or Alive (Bang! Bang! Push, Push, Push) (1967, Fania): Born in New York in 1931, of Puerto Rican descent, Cuba played congas and developed an abbreviated, upbeat strain of salsa, making him "The Father of Latin Boogaloo"; the refrains here are almost cartoonish, which works for novelty, but the rhythm is lightyears beyond what we're used to. A- [R]

Tod Dockstader: Eight Electronic Pieces (1961, Folkways): Musique concrète pioneer, took his fascination with radio noise as a start and came up with machines to orchestrate those noises; like much early electronic music, the emphasis is on sound over melody or rhythm -- that he comes up with any is part of the surprise. B+(*) [R]

The Electric Prunes: I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) (1967, Reprise): The title cut was a minor hit (and future nugget), by far the most impressive thing here, although the trad jazz throwback "Tunerville Trolley" is a hoot, and the filler attests to the band's integrity, even where the psychedelic fuzz is muted. B+(**) [R]

The Electric Prunes: Release of an Oath (1968, Reprise): Nominally the group's fourth album, but the original musicians had all been swapped out, replaced by composer David Axelrod and producer Dave Hassinger, who built this out of Jewish and Christian liturgy, like their previous Mass in F Minor but this 24:46 album has a much loftier reputation; B [R]

John Fahey: The Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites (1964 [1999], Takoma): The guitarist's first album, original pieces (plus one by Clarence Ashley) rather than the promised historical dip, not that history doesn't dwell everywhere Fahey picks; the CD adds four covers, offering the taste of recognition. A- [R]

Brigitte Fontaine: Comme à la Radio (1969, Saravah): French singer, her voice (here at least) almost as declamatory as Nico's, a minimalist effect playing off the exotica of the band -- otherwise known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. B+(***) [R]

Kim Fowley: Outrageous (1968, Imperial): Son of a Hollywood actor, good enough to launch a career based on playing off his connections, gaining fame as someone who could get away with crap no one else could not so much because he could conceptualize it as because he was utterly shameless -- one such idea was releasing an LP of blank vinyl; this record took more effort, but once you learn a few blues chords and can claim incoherent screaming as a freak out and drugged out ranting as insight, it's really not what you can call work; and lest he accidentally slipped anything serious in, the title discounts it. C- [R]

The Godz: Contact High With the Godz (1966, ESP-Disk): New York folkie band with a half-dozen albums albums on this "anything the artist wants" label -- no relation to the metal band founded in 1978 in Ohio -- these nine songs run 25:01 including the 1:34 Hank Williams coda, their most memorable message "all I wanna do is lay in the sun," repeated 2:56 with strum, bang, and harmonica. B+(***) [R]

Françoise Hardy: Françoise Hardy (1963, Disques Vogue): French singer-songwriter, a star at home -- the preferred word now seems to be "icon" -- but no one speaks French here so she's exotic enough to be considered "alt"; Spin listed her debut, not this -- the second of five eponymous 1962-65 albums and the only one I could find, but I'm struck by how stock the arrangements sound. B+(*) [S]

Pierre Henry: Messe Pour Le Temps Présent (1967, Philips): Henry's musique concrète mass, co-written by Michel Colombier, starts with "Psyché Rock," then "Jericho Jerk" and "Teen Tonic" -- they rock like "Telstar," earning the sobriquet les jerks électroniques; the other pieces on what was originally 2LP and in 1997 were expanded into 2CD are indeed concrète -- scratchy, abstract, atmospheric, which is not such a bad thing; note that even the Roman Catholic Church, under Vatican II, was hipper than it is now. B+(***) [R]

The Meters: The Meters (1969, Josie): New Orleans funk band, with Art (as opposed to Aaron) Neville they didn't sing much, but pumped the organ, scratched out guitar and bass lines, and had Ziggy Modeliste on drums, and Allen Toussaint producing. B+(**) [R]

The Monkees: Head (1968, Colgems): Soundtrack to a film designed to reinvent the TV mophead group as something else -- you were expecting, maybe, Sgt. Pepper? With its skits and bits of fractured dialogue, more like The Who Sell Out, except more literal, a going-out-of-business sale: "hey hey we are the Monkees/you know we love to please/a manufactured image/with no philosophies." B+(**) [R]

The Monks: Black Monk Time (1965 [2009], Light in the Attic): Garage rock band formed by GIs stationed in Germany, cut one obscure album, turned into a cult item after a 1994 reissue, with tributes and films since; has some definite sonic quirks, but plays like a long joke, and wears awful thin in the bonus tracks (e.g., "Cuckoo"). B+(*) [R]

Nico: The Marble Index (1969, Elektra): Christa Päffgen, a German fashion model who gained 15 minutes of fame as an Andy Warhol superstar, a more on the first Velvet Underground album, and maybe a few more for her bleak recording career; this was her second, with John Cale orchestrating, his high church organ mode at times breaking into chaos, her voice chilled, strucken down. B+(**) [R]

Pauline Oliveros: Four Electronic Pieces, 1959-1966 (1959-66 [2008], Sub Rosa): Long ones, too, running 14-19 minutes, made up of wave generators and variable-speed tape machines, mostly noise, much of it sounding like tuning in radio tones only with a bit less fuzz, and at least some of it headache-inducing, or at least way too cathartic for everyday listening -- a more novel, and more artful, Metal Machine Music; that, of course, was the point. B+(**) [R]

Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle (1968, Warner Brothers): Choir boy turned LA schmoozer-songwriter, played with the Byrds and Mothers of Invention but was better known for his work (and drug recreation) with Brian Wilson during the Beach Boys' darkest (and weirdest) days; first album, twelve songs, some cartoonish, some I'm not even that sure of (there's AMG again, with "Baroque Pop" ready to explain everything, followed by "Psychedelic/Garage"). C+ [R]

Pearls Before Swine: One Nation Underground (1967, ESP-Disk): Singer-songwriter Tom Rapp is basically a mild-mannered folkie, but his use of Hieronymous Bosch details for album covers made quite an impression on the LSD-addled -- turns out that psychedelia, like beauty, is in the pretty much mind of the beholder. B [R]

The Pentangle: Basket of Light (1969, Transatlantic): English folk-rock supergroup, with Bert Jansch and John Renbourn on guitar and Jacqui McShee singing; third album, the guitars gently turning over one another, the soprano vocals sinking deepest into the traditional pieces. B+(**) [R]

Perrey-Kingsley: The In Sound From Way Out! (1966, Vanguard): Jean-Jacques Perrey, from France, and Gershon Kingsley, from Germany, play early synthesizers on jaunty little tunes they wrote, mostly punctuated with extra synth sounds that seem inspired by Spike Jones; electronic music was in its infancy in the 1960s, but rarely has it been done with this much juvenile mischief. B+(**) [R]

The Red Crayola: The Parable of Arable Land (1967 [1993], Collectables): Later Red Krayola, a band which more/less still exists, at least through its latest (2010) release; essential member is Mayo Thompson, the guitarist who also played for Pere Ubu through the 1980s; the usual classifications fall way short here: while the "free form freak-out" pieces here aren't as chaotic as the name suggests, they are very unconventional, the melodic elements skewed, percussion all over the place, atonal and arrhthmic and all that, with quasi-songs slipped in between -- "War Sucks" for one. A- [R]

The Red Crayola: The Parable of Arable Land (1967 [2011], Sonic Boom, 2CD): Consumer options include the bare bones 1993 CD on Collectables, a twofer on Charly that adds their inferior second album, God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail in Her, and this vastly expanded edition; this upholds your interest, a case of "more is more," but caveat emptor: most of the more is redundant, including both mono and stereo mixes of the album, plus one with the songs minus the "freak outs." B+(***) [R]

Rotary Connection: Rotary Connection (1968, Cadet Concept): I'd rather call them an experiment than experimental: bassist Phil Upchurch had some minor jazz cred, and singer Minnie Ripperton was black but didn't sound like it (or much of anything else); mostly they covered contemporary hits -- "Lady Jane," "Soul Man," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Didn't Want to Have to Do It" -- twisting and tweaking them but not into anything very interesting. B [R]

Pharoah Sanders: Tauhid (1966, Impulse): Very much under John Coltrane's spell this early on -- Albert Ayler liked to refer to Coltrane and Sanders as "the father" and "the son," mostly because he saw himself as "the holy ghost" -- struggling on two long pieces (and one short one) spanning the earth and beyond, assisted by a quintet that included Sonny Sharrock on guitar and Dave Burrell on piano. A- [R]

Pharoah Sanders: Jewels of Thought (1969, Impulse): Two side-long pieces, the saxophonist sounding superb except when he occasionally coughs up a chunk of lung, which can be harrowing; the double basses can hold your attention for long vamps, and percussion is suitably exotic, and Leon Thomas alternately warbles and wows. B+(***) [R]

The Seeds: The Seeds (1966 [1987], GNP/Crescendo): One of the Nuggets bands -- "Pushin' Too Hard" was theirs -- managed to maintain their guitar-punk sound through eleven sharp cuts, and the CD reissue doesn't lose much tacking on their second album, A Web of Sound, stretching out to a 14:27 "Up in Her Room." A- [R]

The Sonics: Introducing the Sonics (1967, Jerden): Tacoma, WA, garage band, got a reboot after their 1965 debut Here Are the Sonics!!! stiffed, repeating their local hit singles ("The Witch" and "Psycho") but with different filler -- a couple new originals ("High Time" is the nugget) and some r&b replacing the familiar r&r covers. B+(**) [R]

Alexander Spence: Oar (1969, Columbia): Canadian guitarist, sometimes drummer, played in Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, and Moby Grape before he flipped out on acid, was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and cut his one-and-only solo album; intended as a demo, comes off as a slow countryish plaint, except for moments when it flips into something else. B+(*) [R]

Morton Subotnick: Silver Apples of the Moon (1967, Nonesuch): First album from one of the pioneers of electronic music, the two 15-minute sides are composed of synthesized blips and bleeps, a fairly minimal palette by later standards, yet cohere remarkably, breaking ground both as technology and as music. A- [R]

Morton Subotnick: The Wild Bull (1968, Nonesuch): Second album, less immediately appealing but with lots more drumlike sounds, scattered drones, some entering from far stage left, as the composer is finding more angles to the music; short, a bit less consistent. B+(***) [R]

Morton Subotnick: Silver Apples of the Moon/The Wild Bull (1967-68 [1994], Wergo): But not enough to drag this historically important twofer down. A- [R]

Sun Ra: The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra (1961 [1962], Savoy): The Arkestra lands in New York, if not from Saturn at least from Chicago, and they celebrate with a little bit of everything they do, including an odd vocal, flute solos, boogie piano, and percussion all over the place -- nothing electronic squiggles if that's what you expect by futuristic, but still way ahead of the times. A- [R]

The 13th Floor Elevators: The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966 [1993], Collectables): Legendary garage band from Austin, TX; spawned Roky Erickson, or vice versa, but while Erickson maintained his reputation for idiosyncrasy, this sounds more like a band, the guitar thick and crunchy, the psychedelic fuzz some kind of sonic parlor trick, "You're Gonna Miss Me" the hidden nugget. A- [R]

The 13th Floor Elevators: Easter Everywhere (1967 [1993], Collectables): The sonics are less gimmicky -- just as well, they have their own sound anyway, although it's not solid enough to wholly capture the Dylan cover, but it works when they go long for two of their most remarkable songs, "Slip Inside This House" and "Postures (Leave Your Body Behind)." A- [R]

The 13th Floor Elevators: Bull of the Woods (1968 [1993], Collectables): Third album, "noted for its moody, dreamy, and fuzzed-out psychedelic sound," which means none of the songs particularly stand out or even come through all that clearly. B+(**) [R]

The Clifford Thornton New Art Ensemble: Freedom & Unity (1967 [2001], Atavistic): First piece was named "Free Huey" but the politics were less clear, mostly a desire to compose complexity and redouble it through improv; leader plays valve trombone, which with two bases holds the scattered horns and vibes together, barely. A- [R]

Townes Van Zandt: For the Sake of the Song (1968, Poppy): The Texas singer-songwriter's first album, shows a promising sense of detail but it's as flat and repetitive as the dust-swept plains, the songs all merging into a strange sameness. B [R]

Caetano Veloso: Caetano Veloso (1969, Philips): The second of several eponymous albums (sometimes labeled for its first song, "Irene"), the vocals recorded in jail with accompaniment added later, ranging from rockish fuzz guitar to slabs of string orch, with a few songs in English; despite everything, this has a lot of presence. A- [dl]

Scott Walker: Scott (1967, Smash): Scotty Engel, changed his surname when he joined the Walker Brothers, kept it when he split (given the governor Wisconsin, perhaps he should reconsider, but he has a much larger following in the UK); first record, mostly mordant songs from others (Jacues Brel, Barry Mann, Tim Hardin), given Spector-ish productions and operatic vocals -- not as awful as all that, but sure has the potential. B- [R]

Scott Walker: Scott 2 (1968, Smash): No clue why anyone would consider this "alternative" -- the songs are wrapped in strings, the lushness only cut by the bad attitude of a voice meant for Broadway; worth hearing once is Jacques Brel's "The Girls and the Dogs," although you probably won't like it if you're a girl, or for that matter a dog. C+ [R]

Legend: B+ records are divided into three levels, where more * is better. [R] indicates record was reviewed using a stream from Rhapsody ([X] is some other identified stream source; otherwise assume a CD). The biggest caveat there is that the packaging and documentation hasn't been inspected or considered, and documentation is especially important for reissues. But also my exposure to streamed records is briefer and more limited, so I'm more prone to snap judgments -- although that's always a risk.

For this column and the previous 107, see the archive. Total records reviewed: 3666 (3227 + 439).

Additional Consumer News

Albums on Spin's "Top 100 Alternative Albums of the 1960s" that I had previously rated:

• AMM: AMMMusic (1966, Elektra) [B]
• Albert Ayler: Spiritual Unity (1964, ESP-Disk) [A]
• Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica (1969, Straight) [A-]
• Anthony Braxton: For Alto (1969, Delmark) [D]
• The Peter Brötzmann Octet: Machine Gun (1968, FMP) [B+]
• Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967, Columbia) [A]
• Ornette Coleman: Free Jazz (1960, Atlantic) [A-]
• Ornette Coleman: Town Hall 1962 (1965, ESP-Disk) [B+]
• John Coltrane: Ascension (1966, Impulse!) [B+]
• Eric Dolphy: Out to Lunch! (1964, Blue Note) [A-]
• Nick Drake: Five Leaves Left (1969, Island) [B]
• Fairport Convention: Liege & Lief (1969, A&M) [B+]
• The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969, A&M) [A+]
• The Fugs: The Fugs' First Album (1965, Folkways) [A-]
• The Holy Modal Rounders: The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders (1968, Elektra) [B+]
• The Incredible String Band: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1968, Elektra) [C]
• The Roland Kirk Quartet: Rip, Rig & Panic (1965, Limelight) [A]
• MC5: Kick Out the Jams (1969, Elektra) [B+]
• The Mothers of Invention: Freak Out! (1966, Verve) [B]
• The Mothers of Invention: We're Only in It for the Money (1968, Verve) [B-]
• Nico: Chelsea Girl (1967, Verve) [B+]
• Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era (1972, Elektra) [A]
• Babatunde Olatunji: Drums of Passion (1960, Columbia) [B+]
• Os Mutantes: Os Mutantes (1968, Polydor) [B+]
• Pärson Sound: Pärson Sound (2001, Subliminal Sounds) [A-]
• Harry Partch: The World of Harry Partch (1969, Columbia) [A]
• Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967, Columbia) [A]
• Terry Riley: In C (1968, Columbia) [B+]
• Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969, Columbia) [A-]
• The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World (1969, Third World) [B-]
• Sonny Sharrock: Black Woman (1969, Vortex) [A-]
• Silver Apples: Silver Apples (1969, MCA) [B+]
• The Spontaneous Music Ensemble: Karyobin (1968, Island) [B+]
• The Stooges: The Stooges (1969, Elektra) [A-]
• Sun Ra: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 1 & 2 (1965, ESP-Disk) [B+]
• Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra: Other Planes of There (1966, Saturn) [B+]
• Cecil Taylor: Unit Structures (1966, Blue Note) [B+]
• United States of America: United States of America (1968, Columbia) [B]
• The Velvet Underground/Nico: The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967, Verve) [A+]
• The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat (1968, Verve) [A]
• The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground (1969, Verve) [A+]
• The Zombies: Odessey and Oracle (1968, Big Beat) [A-]

Also on Spin's "Top 100 Alternative Albums of the 1960s," but unrated by me that I also couldn't find on Rhapsody:

• Karlheinz Stockhausen: Kontakte (1964, WERGO)
• Steve Reich: Early Works (1987, Nonesuch): Rhapsody has 3/5 cuts; what I've heard is graded [B-]
• White Noise: An Electric Storm (1969, Island): had this on LP, but didn't grade
• The Sonics: Here Are the Sonics (1965, Etiquette)
• Desmond Dekker: This Is Desmond Dekkar (1969, Trojan): have three compilations that probably intersect this: Rudy Got Soul: The Early Beverly's Sessions 1963-1968 ([2003], Sanctuary/Trojan, 2CD) [B+]; Israelites: The Best of Desmond Dekker (1963-71 [2002], Sanctuary/Trojan) [A-]; and Rockin' Steady: The Best of Desmond Dekker (1963-73 [1992], Rhino) [A-].
• The Watts Prophets: The Black Voices: On the Streets in Watts (1969, FFRR)
• Françoise Hardy: Françoise Hardy (1962, Disques Vogue)
• The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: BBC Radiophonic Music (1968, BBC)
• Pauline Oliveros: Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 (1961-70 [2012], Important)
• Dick Hyman: MOOG: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman (1969, Command)
• Moondog: Moondog (1969, Columbia Masterworks)
• David Axelrod: Song of Innocence (1968, Capitol): have one compilation that probably intersects here, but includes some additional artists: The Edge: David Axelrod at Capitol Records (1966-70 [2005], Capitol Jazz) [B-].
• Karlheinz Stockhausen: Gruppen/Carré (1968, Deutsche Grammophon)
• Brigitte Bardot et Serge Gainsbourg: Bonnie and Clyde (1968, Fontana)
• Back From the Grave Volume One: Raw 'n' Crude Mid-60s Garage Punk! ([1983], Crypt)
• Nihilist Spasm Band: No Record (1968, Allied)
• The Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble: Congliptious (1968, Nessa)
• John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions (1969, Zapple)
• Alan Watts: OM: The Sound of Hinduism (1967, Warner Bros.)
• Mulatu Astatke: Afro-Latin Soul Vol. 1 (1966, Worthy): have two compilations that probably intersect this: Éthiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz and Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974 ([2004], Buda Musique) [A-]; and New York-Addis-London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965-1975 (1965-75 [2009], Strut) [A-].
• Cromagnon: Orgasm (1969, ESP-Disk)
• Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (1968, Columbia)

Update: Changes to David Axelrod.

Music: Current count 21383 [21338] rated (+45), 617 [615] unrated (+2).

Not sure how the huge rated bump happened, but the Rhapsody work doesn't stop with this coming week's rather robust Recycled Goods. Losing a bit of ground on Jazz Prospecting, but also pulled a couple old things out of the queue: the Zingaro was literally under a pile of papers on my desk, something I was vaguely aware of having missed. The old Moffett album was in the wrong queue, and being an advance with no spine was impossible to see without rifling through the discs. Also note two high-B+ piano records (Caine and Taborn).

Clipper Anderson: Ballad of the Sad Young Men (2008-10 [2013], Origin): Bassist, originally from Montana, looks like he's based in Spokane after various stretches in Portland and Seattle. Third album, if you count an Xmas with singer Greta Matassa's name first, plus thirty or so side credits, notably with fellow Montanan Jack Walrath. Anderson sings here, moldy standards done in the old Sinatra mold, except that he's not Sinatra, and Darin Clendenon's piano trio doesn't pack much punch. B

Lary Barilleau & the Latin Jazz Collective: Carmen's Mambo (2009-10 [2013], OA2): Conga player, b. 1958 in Seattle, still based there, first album as far as I can tell, cut in two sessions, with trombonist Doug Beavers the only other musicians straddling both. B

Michael Bates/Samuel Blaser Quintet: One From None (2011 [2013], Fresh Sound New Talent): Bassist and trombone, leaders because they do the writing, 5-3 in favor of Bates if you're counting. Each as 3-5 records already, solid work, as is this. Band includes Michael Blake (sax), Russ Lossing (keybs), and Jeff Davis (drums). B+(***)

Geof Bradfield: Melba! (2012 [2013], Origin): Tenor saxophonist (also credited with soprano sax and bass clarinet here), fourth album since 2003, a tribute to trombonist and big band arranger Melba Liston (noting also that two songs are named after band leaders she worked for: Dizzy Gillespie and Randy Weston). Septet includes two brass (trumpet and trombone), Jeff Parker on guitar, and Ryan Cohan on piano, with Bradfield the sole reed player. The arrangements swing, the horns slide. Ends with a brief Maggie Burrell vocal. B+(***)

Cactus Truck with Jeb Bishop and Roy Campbell: Live in USA (2012 [2013], Tractata): Dutch sax-guitar-drums trio, guitarist Jasper Stadhouders also playing some bass; has a previous album, which got them this US tour, attracting trombonist Bishop and trumpeter Campbell to join in the mayhem. Three sets packed into one long CD, all but the tail end flat-out noisy, something I've never enjoyed unless I managed to find some coherent strand to organize the chaos around. No evidence of that here. B-

Uri Caine/Han Bennink: Sonic Boom (2010 [2013], 816 Music): Piano-drums duet, going by the order on the spine instead of the front cover. Recorded on the drummer's home ground -- "live at the Bimhuis" -- with Bennink's artwork both inside and out. Looks like joint improvs aside from "'Round Midnight," which isn't the only debt to Monk. The drummer is especially superb, and Caine gets hotter and harder as he learns the ropes. B+(***)

Tommy Flanagan/Jaki Byard: The Magic of 2: Live at Keystone Korner (1982 [2013], Resonance): Two major pianists, live, start out with duets on standards (first three: Charlie Parker, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington), later on alternating solos. Bright and tinkly, Flanagan seems more at home with the material. B+(*)

Nick Fraser: Towns and Villages (2012 [2013], Barnyard): Drummer, based in Toronto, has at least one previous album under his own name, several as Drumheller, a dozen or so side credits. Quartet, modeled loosely on Ornette Coleman's recent two-bass quartet, this one with Rob Clutton on double bass and Andrew Downing on cello. They provide an ever shifting substrate for the horn: Tony Malaby on tenor (and soprano) sax gives a bravo performance, one of his finest ever. A-

Noah Haidu: Momentum (2012 [2013], Posi-Tone): Pianist, second album, a trio with Ariel de la Portilla and McClenty Hunter. Wrote 4 (of 9) cuts, covering Keith Jarrett and Joe Henderson along with more standard fare. Postbop, energetic, complex, hard to say more. B+(*)

The Bill Horvitz Expanded Band: The Long Walk (2011 [2013], Big Door Prize): Guitarist, has a handful of albums since 1997; wrote this for his late brother Phil Horvitz (1960-2005), performed by a 17-piece band including a lot of orchestral instruments (oboe, bassoon, French horn, tuba, violin, cello) -- mostly musicians I recognize. Interesting bits here and there. Can't find anything that suggests that pianist Wayne Horvitz is related, but he's in the band here. B+(*)

The Alex Levin Trio: Refraction (2012 [2013], self-released): Pianist, from Philadelphia, based in New York, third album, all standards, none remarkable but the appeal of hearing bits of great songs floating up from the mainstream piano jazz matrix is undeniable. Looks like they manage to make most of their living playing private engagements (first time I've run across Gig Salad). That's a niche they fit nicely. B+(*)

María Márquez: Tonada (2012 [2013], Adventure Music): Singer, from Venezuela, studied at Berklee, moved to San Francisco area; fifth album since 1985, second on this label. Folkish arrangements, mostly guitar, some accordion, although there are more upbeat pieces, even some brass. Has a distinctive voice, slowly grows on you. B+(*)

Charnett Moffett: The Bridge: Solo Bass Works (2011 [2013], Motéma): Bassist, has ten albums since 1987, many more side credits. This is all solo, and rather than searching out the far out sounds one can create with bass -- as, e.g., Peter Kowald and William Parker have done on their solo albums -- Moffett sticks to basics, picking and a little arco, and features a dozen proven melodies, adds in eight originals, and keeps them all short and to the point. B+(**)

Charnett Moffett: The Art of Improvisation (2009, Motéma): Checking on his new record, I noticed that I had never rated this old one, which I only got an advance promo of and file it in a queue that I almost never look at -- a risk that wouldn't have happened had they sent me a final copy. (Actually, this is two records back; never got the intervening Treasure in any shape or form.) Don't have the credits, so I don't know how chores were split up between two guitarists and three drummers, or which bass Moffett plays where -- my impression is that the fretless bass guitar gets a workout here. All originals, except for a Langston Hughes poem spoken by Angela Moffett and a warbly "Star Spangled Banner"; one more vocal is by Yungchen Lhamo -- no clue what the language is. The bass is always prominent, driving the groove, incorporating the world, and elaborating on it. B+(***) [advance]

Craig Taborn Trio: Chants (2012 [2013], ECM): Pianist, from Minneapolis; cut an early album for DIW in 1994, two "Blue Series" albums that established his reputation as one of the few distinctive electric keyb players in jazz, a couple avant exercises on European labels (Clean Feed and ILK), and a very well received acoustic solo for ECM. This trio, with Thomas Morgan and Gerald Cleaver, should be his crowning success, but I keep coming up a bit short with it. B+(***)

Rich Thompson: Less Is More (2012 [2013], Origin): Drummer, third album, basically a hard bop quintet, with Gary Versace in piano and organ, the two horns Terrell Stafford and Doug Stone. One original, the title cut (although bassist Jeff Campbell also kicks in one), two Rodgers & Hart covers, most of the rest from a who's who of jazz in the 1960s (Kenny Dorham, Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson). B+(*)

Carlos Alves "Zingaro"/Jean Luc Cappozzo/Jerome Bourdellon/Nicolas Lelievre: Live at Total Meeting (2010 [2012], NoBusiness): Violin, trumpet/bugle, flutes/bass clarinet, percussion, respectively, a prickly combination. Zingaro, b. 1948 in Portugal, came out of the postclassical avant-garde with a long discography. Cappozzo has a few albums, including one with Herb Robertson called Passing the Torch. Don't know the others, but the drummer is terrific, someone to watch out for. Three long improv pieces, difficult but dazzling, kept a smile on my face all the way through. A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Rodrigo Amado Motion Trio + Jeb Bishop: The Flame Alphabet (Not Two)
• Anomonous (Prom Night)
• Dieuf-Dieul de Thiès: Aw Sa Yone Vol. 1 (Teranga Beat)
• Marko Djordjevic & Sveti: Something Beautiful 1709-2110 (Goalkeeper)
• Satoko Fujii Ma-Do: Time Stands Still (Not Two)
• Satoko Fujii New Trio: Spring Storm (Libra)
• Trilok Gurtu: Spellbound (Sunnyside)
• Harifinso: Bollywood Inspired Film Music From Hausa Nigeria (Sahel Sounds)
• Lynn Jolicoeur and the Pulse: World Behind Your Eyes (self-released)
• Roger Kellaway & Eddie Daniels: Duke at the Roadhouse: Live in Santa Fe (IPO)
• Kenya Special: Selected East African Recordings From the 1970s & '80s (Soundway, 2CD)
• New York Art Quartet: Call It Art (1964-65, Triple Point, 5LP)
• Nick Sanders Trio: Nameless Neighbors (Sunnyside)
• Sedayeh Del (Pharaway Sounds)
• Sweet Talk: Glitterbomb (Prom Night): advance
• Frank Wess: Magic 101 (IPO)

Didn't squirrel away any links last week, but came up with a few anyway.

• Ed Kilgore: America Haters: A recent poll found that 29% of Americans agree with the statement, "In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect out liberties." The poll also found that 25 percent of voters "believe the American public is being lied to about the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting 'in order to advance a political agenda.'" The NRA had a convention last week where the incoming president called for a "culture war" but at least they stopped short of adopting a new slogan like, "Guns: they're not just for self-defense any more."

  Why is revolutionary rhetoric becoming so routine these days? Some of it stems from the kind of "constitutional conservatism" that raises every political or policy dispute to a question of basic patriotism or even obedience to Almighty God. But a big part of it can also be attributed to cynical opportunists who manipulate those fearful (usually without much cause) of tyranny for their own very conventional ends -- usually power and money.

  Wherever you think it's coming from, it needs to stop, and if it can't stop, it must be made disreputable as part of ordinary partisan politics.

  At a minimum, those who toy with the idea of overthrowing our government to stop Obamacare or prevent gun regulation need to stand up to the charge that they hate America. It will make them crazy to hear it, but it's the truth.

  This puts several observations together. One is that nearly everything conservatives put forward these days is objectively damaging to the lives and welfare of large segments of the American public. Austerity is a good example: it directly hurts everyone the government had previously attempted to help, plus it drags down the economy weakening the labor market -- i.e., the job security and prospects of everyone who works for a living. Another observation is that many of the people who support conservatives clearly do hate large segments of the American people. Add those up and you have to wonder whether conservative policies aren't just foolishly misguided but deliberately malevolent. And since then intend to hurt some Americans, how many targets does it take to add up to hating America?

• Robert Kuttner: Austerity Never Works: Deficit Hawks Are Amoral -- and Wrong: An excerpt from his new book, Debtor's Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility (Knopf):

  In today's economy, which is dominated by high finance, small debtors and small creditors are on the same side of a larger class divide. The economic prospects of working families are sandbagged by the mortgage debt overhang. Meanwhile, retirees can't get decent returns on their investments because central banks have cut interest rates to historic lows to prevent the crisis from deepening. Yet the paydays of hedge fund managers and of executives of large banks that only yesterday were given debt relief by the government are bigger than ever. And corporate executives and their private equity affiliates can shed debts using the bankruptcy code and then sail merrily on.

  Exaggerated worries about public debt are a staple of conservative rhetoric in good times and bad. Many misguided critics preached austerity even during the Great Depression. As banks, factories and farms were failing in a cumulative economic collapse, Andrew Mellon, one of America's richest men and Treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932, famously advised President Hoover to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate . . . it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life." The sentiments, which today sound ludicrous against the history of the Depression, are not so different from those being solemnly expressed by the U.S. austerity lobby or the German Bundesbank. [ . . . ]

  The combination of these two trends -- declining real wages and inflated asset prices -- led the American middle class to use debt as a substitute for income. People lacked adequate earnings but felt wealthier. A generation of Americans grew accustomed to borrowing against their homes to finance consumption, and banks were more than happy to be their enablers. In my generation, second mortgages were considered highly risky for homeowners. The financial industry rebranded them as home equity loans, and they became ubiquitous. Third mortgages, even riskier, were marketed as "home equity lines of credit."

  State legislatures, meanwhile, paid for tax cuts by reducing funding for public universities. To make up the difference, they raised tuition. Federal policy increasingly substituted loans for grants. In 1980, federal Pell grants covered 77 percent of the cost of attending a public university. By 2012, this was down to 36 percent. Nominally public state universities are now only 20 percent funded by legislatures, and their tuition has trebled since 1989. By the end of 2011, the average student debt was $25,250. In mid-2012, total outstanding student loan debt passed a trillion dollars, leaving recent graduates weighed down with debt before their economic lives even began. This borrowing is anything but frivolous. Students without affluent parents have little alternative to these debts if they want college degrees. But as monthly payments crowd out other consumer spending, the macroeconomic effect is to add one more drag to the recovery.

  Had Congress faced the consequences head-on, it is hard to imagine a deliberate policy decision to sandbag the life prospects of the next generation. But this is what legislators at both the federal and state levels, in effect, did by stealth. They cut taxes on well-off Americans and increased student debts of the non-wealthy young to make up the difference. The real debt crisis is precisely the opposite of the one in the dominant narrative: efficient public investments were cut, imposing inefficient private debts on those who could least afford to carry them.

  The 1929 and 2008 crashes are more similar than most people recognize: if you look at charts of economic output, they start at almost the same trajectory and spread equally fast throughout the world. The difference is that the latter crash was arrested in early 2009, the result of three things: a much larger public sector which was (at least initially) free from the crash mentality; automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance and welfare; and extraordinary government intervention to prop up failing banks. Perversely, since so much of the recovery was pushed through the banking system, the rich were the first satisfied by the recovery, and they celebrated by engineering an economic pogrom against the middle class: they used the crisis to depress the labor market, and they lobbied for more austere government to cut services and put further pressure on wages. Consequently, the human costs of the current recession rival the 1930s -- the big stories of the last few weeks concern the number of long-term unemployed and the stigma against them, and a sudden increase in the suicide rate of Boomers -- but there is scarcely any viable political effort to help out. To me, the most striking difference between Obama and FDR was that the latter was pre-occupied with keeping both wages and prices up, whereas Obama doesn't seem to grasp that there is even an issue here.

• Jordan Smith: The Real Reason Not to Intervene in Syria: Well, one real reason:

  More generally, a significant body of international-relations scholarship suggests that not only can outside intervention in humanitarian emergencies in places like Rwanda not ameliorate the situation -- it can actually make things worse. Even simply dispensing aid can prolong suffering, in what the former Doctors Without Borders leader Fiona Terry calls "the paradox of humanitarian action."

  Why are humanitarian interventions so difficult? Kuperman theorizes that when rebels are assisted by outside forces, they are unintentionally encouraged to become more reckless in fighting a regime or provoking it, resist negotiations, and expand their ambitions. Intervention can thereby produce a perverse situation of prolonging a conflict that results in more deaths. He calls this the "moral hazard of humanitarian intervention." Even the expectation or the mistaken belief of outside support can encourage rebels to continue fighting or resist settlements.

  Another real reason is that military interventions in other countries is a bad habit that the United States sorely needs to break. The reason is not just because it doesn't work out very well -- Afghanistan and Iraq are recent examples, but you can go back to 1898 and find more examples in Cuba and the Philippines, and most of the cases in between (especially including CIA operations) are more/less as unambiguous. But even if we (or, say, a more appropriate body, like the UN) could push a button and magically bring the conflict to a close, ask yourself what that solution would look like. It wouldn't be to tilt the arms balance so the rebels could take over, since doing that would only create a new regime at war attempting to suppress yet another segment of the Syrian public. No, such a solution would be to arrange a ceasefire, an amnesty, and a democratic path forward with sufficient minority protections. I don't know whether Obama has tried to do that, but many decades of hostilities between the US and Syria have resulted in the US having very little leverage there. (Egypt, for instance, was a different case: the US had a longterm military alliance there which helped to ease Mubarak from office.) Maybe Russia, China, and Iran could have more influence on the Assad regime, but the US doesn't have a lot of influence with them either.

  Smith goes on to write:

  The humanitarian impulse is a noble one, spurred by good intentions. But good intentions, even if they don't pave the road to hell, can sometimes take us a good way there.

  I would caution, though, that not every "humanitarian impulse" is a noble one. Individuals, perhaps, but nations rarely practice foreign policy to attain nobility. They usually have some sort of interest or agenda, and one should be especially suspicious of a nation that claims to be the advocate and defender of free markets, since the only acts expected in the market are ones that advance self-interests.

• Ben White: Sidelining Palestinians in Israel Will Doom Prospects for Peace: Headline's a bit off as there are no "prospects for peace," but the real point to draw here is that the longer Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza continues, the more the brutality Israelis -- both the IDF and settlers often acting on their own -- is reflected back on the second-class citizens of Israel.

  In mid-April, the United States state department published its annual human rights review -- and the country report for Israel makes for interesting reading. An ally praised in public as the embodiment of liberal democratic values in a "tough neighbourhood" is described as practising "institutional discrimination" against its own Palestinian citizens (the so-called Israeli Arabs).

  Even in a far-from-comprehensive summary of Israel's systematic racism, the report notes discrimination in the education system, the land regime and housing, and the legal restrictions on a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza living with his or her spouse in Israel. [ . . . ]

  But it is not just discrimination and segregation that raise concerns. There are those in Israel who would like to be rid of Palestinian citizens altogether -- and see an opportunity to do so in the context of the "peace process."

  Responding to recent protests by Palestinian citizens to mark their expulsion in 1948, the former foreign minister and current chair of the Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee, Avigdor Lieberman, called the Nakba commemoration events proof that "any arrangement with the Palestinians must include Israeli Arabs as well".

Music: Current count 21338 [21302] rated (+36), 615 [618] unrated (-3).

Probably spent more time last week working on Rhapsody Streamnotes (posted) and Recycled Goods (still in progress) than Jazz Prospecting, but got off to a good start when two (of three) Ivo Perelman titles came through, then two more albums got big lifts from their sax players. Result is probably the best quality week of the year so far -- actually even better if I count two Rhapsody A- albums (Allison Miller, already posted, and Roscoe Mitchell, in the file for May). More promising things in the mail, too.

JD Allen: Grace (2012 [2013], Savant): Tenor saxophonist, from Detroit; has a handful of albums since 1999. Originally a hard charger, has backed off quite a bit lately, especially here. Quartet includes Eldar Djangirov on piano, playing with exceptional delicacy. B+(**)

Duo Baars-Henneman: Autumn Songs (2012 [2013], Wig): Ig Henneman on viola, Ab Baars on tenor sax, clarinet, shakuhachi. Henneman tends to lead, pushing the limits of high lonesome. Baars is complementary, especially on clarinet. B+(***)

Michiel Braam: EBraam 3 (2012 [2013], BBB): Dutch avant pianist, just credited with "keys" here, his bassist Pieter Douma on bass guitar, with Dirk-Peter Kölsch on drums, a group he calls "eBraam (in which case the album is just 3). Closes with a Hugh Hopper song -- not sure who does the vocal, but it comes as a surprise. B+(*)

Cristina Braga: Samba, Jazz and Love (2012 [2013], Enja): From Brazil, plays harp and sings, tenth album since 1998 (according to AMG), some classical, but her 2010 Harpa Bossa started to recast classic samba using harp instead of guitar, and this continues in that quest. Group includes trumpet, bass, vibes, and percussion, the harp not all that obvious until your clued in. Voice reminds one of Astrud Gilberto. B+(**)

Kaylé Brecher: Spirals and Lines (2012, Penchant Four): Singer, based in Philadelphia, fifth album since 1992. Don't see song credits but most seem to be originals -- obvious covers are "When Johnny Goes Marching Home" and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," but she segues the latter into a corny patriotic anthem ("The House I Live In") and updates a Mingus blues for the white collar world. Long list of musicians, none I had heard of, shuttle in and out, including four trumpet/flugelhorn players and three trombonists but her favorite accompanist is Jimmy Parker on sousaphone -- mine too. B+(***)

Boyd Lee Dunlop: The Lake Reflections (2012 [2013], Mr. B Sharp): Pianist, b. 1926 in North Carolina and spent most of his life in Buffalo, working in steel mills and railyards and playing piano in clubs at night; a local Hall of Famer but only cut his first album after turning 85. This is his second, solo piano improvisations; doesn't try to dazzle you, but keeps the ideas flowing. B+(**)

Ross Hammond Quartet: Cathedrals (2013, Prescott): Guitarist, based in Sacramento, CA; has a handful of albums. Last cut here is a duet with drummer Alex Cline, a good chance to hone in on Hammond's attractive technique. But the rest of the album is dominated by Vinny Golia (tenor and soprano sax, flute) in an amazing tour de force that reduces Cline to keeping metronomic time. Steuart Liebig plays bass. A-

Barbara Morrison: A Sunday Kind of Love (2010-12 [2013], Savant): Singer, b. 1952 in Michigan, got her start opposite Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson in 1974, toiled a couple decades in the Johnny Otis Show, has a dozen records since 1995. I haven't heard any of them, but would be real surprised if any hold a candle to this one. The secret isn't a fine-but-who-are-they pianio trio -- Stuart Elster? Richard Simon? Lee Spath? -- so it must be Houston Person, who is more than just featured here. But it's the singer who hits one softball after another out of the park: "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," "The Green Door," "A Sunday Kind of Love," "On the Sunny Side of the Street," "Let's Stay Together" -- only "I Cover the Waterfront" is out of her zone. Exquisite: the medley of "Smile/Make Someone Happy." I dare anyone not to. A

New York Voices: Live: With the WDR Big Band Cologne (2008 [2013], Palmetto): Long-running vocal group, down to a quartet here -- Darmon Meader, Kim Nazarian, Lauren Kinhan, Peter Eldridge -- with seven albums since 1989. This is a live shot backed by the WDR Big Band Cologne -- a sharp group we've heard with damn near everyone, and here they provide uniformly solid support, a big help for a group where the voices slide all over the place. B-

Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: The Art of the Duet, Volume One (2012 [2013], Leo): The Brazilian avant-saxophonist has been releasing records at a furious pace recently, including two batches of three each last year, and three more recently. All of this batch include Shipp, who played piano in David S. Ware's now-legendary quartet among much else, including a 1996 duet with Perelman (Bendito of Santa Cruz). Over the last two years no one has produced more top flight music than Perelman, but I'm starting to wonder if we're getting too much of the same thing. At least that's where I was stuck on the two new quartet albums, but the duets here are clear and sparkling, both sides coherent and connected. Not that the inevitable Volume Two won't be too much . . . On to the quartets. A-

Ivo Perelman: The Edge (2012 [2013], Leo): Tenor sax quartet with Matthew Shipp (piano), Michael Bisio (bass), and Whit Dickey (drums) -- Dickey goes way back with Shipp, and Bisio is the current bassist in Shipp's piano trio. Perelman indeed seems on edge early on, where the going is rougher than need be, but he does finds himself by the end. B+(**)

Ivo Perelman: Serendipity (2011 [2013], Leo): Another tenor sax quartet, reportedly accidental: session was originally scheduled to be trio with Matthew Shipp (piano) and Gerald Cleaver (drums) -- that trio was recorded a week later as The Foreign Legion -- but when one was late they called in bassist William Parker and wound up with a quartet. Sometimes hard to judge exactly what Parker adds, but Perelman is remarkably relaxed and fluid from the start, and builds up to some of his most impressive blowing ever. A-

Jan Shapiro: Piano Bar After Hours (2012 [2013], Singing Empress): Standards singer, came out of St. Louis and wound up teaching at Berklee. Has at least three previous albums. This one is almost only accompanied by piano, with five pianists in rotation -- one cut has bass and drums. A very precise, disciplined vocalist, she doesn't need much help, but great songs work better than not-so-great ones. B+(*)

Melvin Taylor: Taylor Made (2012 [2013], Eleven East): Guitarist, sings some -- one song here, with another sung by Bernell Anderson, no better -- has a half-dozen albums going back as far as 1982. Band includes bass (a second Melvin Taylor), keyboard, and drums. Six songs, one from Isaac Hayes. Nice little groove record. B+(*)

Uptown Vocal Jazz Quartet: Hustlin' for a Gig (2012, Housekat): Ginny Carr, Robert McBride, André Enceneat, and Holly Shockey, with all but one of the songs penned by Carr ("This Is the Life"). Third group album, but they (Carr and McBride, at least) claim to have been together for twenty-some years. The spirited interplay and cleverness wears on you (or me, anyway). B-

John Vanore & Abstract Truth: Culture (2012 [2013], Acoustical Concepts): Trumpet player, came up in Woody Herman's band, should explain his taste in bright and brassy. Fourth album with his unconventional big band Abstract Truth. Pieces include a 3-part suite and an arrangement of "Footprints." Strong solos, some interesting quirks in the arrangements. B+(***)

Bob Wolfman: Transition (2012, self-released): Guitarist-singer-songwriter, from New York, first album, produced by Larry Coryell with piano, bass, and drums. Aside from the blues cover ("Born Under a Bad Sign") Wolfman's a truly awful singer. Some nifty guitar work here and there -- until proven otherwise, I'd chalk that up to Coryell. C

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Lucian Ban/Mat Maneri: Transylvanian Concert (ECM): advance, May 28
• Perry Beekman: So in Love: Perry Beekman Sings and Plays Cole Porter (self-released)
• Jerry Bergonzi: By Any Other Name (Savant)
• François Carrier/Michel Lambert/John Edwards/Steve Beresford: Overground to the Vortex (Not Two)
• Freddy Cole: This and That (High Note)
• Steven Lugerner: For We Have Heard (NoBusiness/Primary)
• Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom: No Morphine No Lillies (Foxhaven/Royal Potato Family)
• Sex Mob: Cinema, Circus & Spaghetti: Sex Mob Plays Fellini (The Royal Potato Family)
• Marlene Ver Planck: Ballads . . . Mostly (Audiophile)
• Yellowjackets: A Rise in the Road (Mack Avenue): advance, May 27

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Eric Harvey: Writing the Record: Interview with Devon Powers, author of Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism, which focuses on Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau. Lots of stuff here, and I should probably dig into the book. One comment I have, based on this quote:

  When Christgau talks about monoculture, he's talking about the idea that there was a period before fragmentation. A period before audiences were segmented, where all kinds of people were listening to the same thing, some of it out of necessity just because there weren't other options. When you have people who are listening to the same kind of things, they have something in common to talk about that they simply don't when there is more variance in the media landscape.

  Two problems here. One is that monoculture means something else: not a single all-encompassing culture but an isolated stripe of only one thing -- as in agriculture: wheat, soybeans, oranges, etc. -- which may coexist independently with lots of other monocultures. Music has never been that formally constrained, and never will be, in large part because it's always being mediated and deconstructed, and most often as a social activity. The other is that the idea of integrating most musical strands into a common pool of experience was new in the late 1960s, itself a political project rooted in the newfound equal integration of all divisions in a relatively classless society. It didn't exist earlier because people grew up in a divided (segregated) world, and since then the right-wing counterrevolution with its increasing inequality has done all it could to strain the ideal.

  Paul Krugman and others have made a big point recently about "the great compression" which reduced income and wealth inequality and culminated in the 1960s. I must say that it didn't feel like much of a class-free utopia at the time, but the idea was present, and there was a sense of it being progressively realized -- and that sense of progress helped fuel the great upheavals of the decade, including the civil rights and women's movements. Still, that atmosphere of equality was propitious for critics inclined to jump from genre to genre, to poke into music from all over the world, and who believed that popular music could storm the citdels of "high culture" -- the last refuge of the ancien regime.

  Circa 1973, I dropped out of college, stopped reading critical theory, and took up rock crit. Seemed like the way forward, and was practical at the same time.

• Alex Parrene: Bush Family Furiously Selling Itself to Americans Once Again: As ever, Bush realizes the importance of timing when rolling out a new "product" -- his library, of course, but that's the easy part given that every ex-president (at least from Truman on) has one (and a figure as insignficant as Gerald Ford has two). The harder part is rehabilitating the entire family brand name, but polls indicate the ignorance of the average American is hard to underestimate -- I very much blame Obama and the Democrats for letting Bush off the hook.

  More Bush links:

  • Kathleen Geier: What Was the Single Worst Thing About George W. Bush's Presidency? "Lying was institutionalized to a degree that we rarely see outside outside of explicitly authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes."
  • Paul Krugman: The Great Degrader: "Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover."
  • Alex Seitz-Wald: How to Debunk George W. Bush's Attempts at Revisionism

  My vote for the single worst thing about George W. Bush goes to his instinctive, visceral attrraction to violence as a way of solving problems. Even before 9/11, Bush rejected the Saudi peace plan for Israel-Palestine by saying (as Ronald Suskind reported), "Sometimes a show of force can really clarify things." His green light for Sharon destroyed eight years of fitful progress toward resolving the most intractable conflict in the Middle East. He reacted to 9/11 the same, only with more vigor and ambition, going after Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and threatening wars against Iran and North Korea. Then there was his encouragement of Israel's brutal 2006 carpet-bombing of Lebanon, an act of war that his secretary of state memorably described as "the birth-pangs of a new Middle East."

• MJ Rosenberg: Time to Admit US Policies Can Cause Terrorism: To prevent something you have to have some concept of causation. The Boston bombings again raise the question of terrorism, but we are stuck within an officially sanctioned blind spot.

  There is one change that the United States could make in response to the terrorism threat that is never discussed. That is to consider the part U.S. policies have played in creating and sustaining it.

  I understand that we are not supposed to say this, as if discussing why we are hated justifies the unjustifiable: the targeting of innocent Americans because of the perceived sins of their government.

  But nothing justifies terrorism. Period. That does not mean that nothing causes it.

  Acts of terror do not come at us out of the blue. Nor are they directed at us, as President George W. Bush famously said, because the terrorists "hate our freedom." If that was the case, terrorists would be equally or more inclined to hit countries at least as free as the U.S., those in northern Europe, for instance.

  No, terrorists (in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings Muslim terrorists) target the U.S. because they perceive us as their enemy.

  One reason they perceive us as enemies is that we regard them as enemies. Nor is this just a matter of opinion: the US has, ever since FDR met with King Saud in 1945, backed the most repressive regimes in the Middle East, training and arming their secret police, their armed forces; we've backed wars, and in a pinch we've jumped in and invaded countries ourselves; and we've fomented civil wars, creating massively destructive contagions, such as the Sunni-Shiite divide in Iraq. (For some of this history, see Tom Engelhardt: Field of Nightmares, on Jeremy Scahill's new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.) If we don't like this "blowback," the place to start is in reconsidering our own actions.

  But even if there was no terror blowback, the US record in the Middle East has been an unmitigated mess. Most often we've backed forces based on the shabby enemy-of-my-enemy principle: from the Saudi regime to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, we've repeatedly backed the most extremely reactionary Islamists because they were anti-communist, only to discover that their anti-communism was part of an anti-western agenda bound to bite the hand that feeds them. We've backed Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, then backed Iranian-backed militias against Hussein. We've backed Israel against everyone, even against our own policies -- we even backed Israel when they attacked and sunk a US Navy ship in 1967. Presumably some arms and oil companies have profited along the way, but what has the average American gotten out of this incoherency? Nothing but the task of fighting a series of useless, hopeless wars.

  Yet the right-wing still clamors for more -- see the recent Cal Thomas rant: "How many more Americans must be killed and wounded before we fight back, not just overseas, but here?" As Mort Sahl said about someone else, "if he were more perceptive, he'd be a happy man." Still, Thomas is as incoherent as anyone. He notes the vast size of America's homeland security force, yet bemoans their inability to stop two disaffected young men from "shutting down a major city." Aside from calling for a more bigoted immigration policy and a fevered, nativist witch hunt mentality, how exactly are we supposed to "fight back"? And is it even justified in a democracy to talk about enemies at home? The Tsarnaevs, after all, were US citizens, Americans, entitled to dissenting opinions. When weren't enemies, and when they set off those bombs, they didn't become our enemies -- just criminals.

• Tom Engelhardt: The Enemy-Industrial Complex: Or, "How to turn a world lacking in enemies into the most threatening place in the universe." Out of alpha order, but this follows up nicely on the above entry. Consider 9/11 as a "Wizard of Oz" facade:

  The U.S., in other words, is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century. There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China. It's true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died. When those giant towers in downtown New York collapsed, it certainly had the look of nuclear disaster (and in those first days, the media was filled was nuclear-style references), but it wasn't actually an apocalyptic event.

  The enemy was still nearly nonexistent. The act cost bin Laden only an estimated $400,000-$500,000, though it would lead to a series of trillion-dollar wars. It was a nightmarish event that had a malign Wizard of Oz quality to it: a tiny man producing giant effects. It in no way endangered the state. In fact, it would actually strengthen many of its powers. It put a hit on the economy, but a passing one. It was a spectacular and spectacularly gruesome act of terror by a small, murderous organization then capable of mounting a major operation somewhere on Earth only once every couple of years. It was meant to spread fear, but nothing more.

  When the towers came down and you could suddenly see to the horizon, it was still, in historical terms, remarkably enemy-less. And yet 9/11 was experienced here as a Pearl Harbor moment -- a sneak attack by a terrifying enemy meant to disable the country. The next day, newspaper headlines were filled with variations on "A Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century." If it was a repeat of December 7, 1941, however, it lacked an imperial Japan or any other state to declare war on, although one of the weakest partial states on the planet, the Taliban's Afghanistan, would end up filling the bill adequately enough for Americans.

  Engelhardt then tries to put 9/11 into perspective by bringing up stats for "suicide by gun and death by car" -- numbers which annually dwarf even the 9/11 death toll. Actually, it would make more sense to write off 9/11 as a fluke and look at more typical terrorist tolls. You don't have to look hard. On the same day as the Boston bombings, a fertilizer plant in West, Texas caught fire and exploded, killing many more people. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay attention to terrorist threats -- indeed, one reason we should is that many could be avoided by policy changes that we should implement anyway; but we should keep them in perspective. Even the 9/11 death toll was ultimately topped two times over by the number of US soldiers we sacrificed in post-9/11 wars -- wars meant to do little more than restore the invincible lustre of US imperial power, and perhaps blindly punish people only vaguely related to those who actually planned 9/11.

  Without an enemy of commensurate size and threat, so much that was done in Washington in these years might have been unattainable. The vast national security building and spending spree -- stretching from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency erected its new $1.8 billion headquarters, to Bluffdale, Utah, where the National Security Agency is still constructing a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center for storing the world's intercepted communications -- would have been unlikely.

  Without the fear of an enemy capable of doing anything, money at ever escalating levels would never have poured into homeland security, or the Pentagon, or a growing complex of crony corporations associated with our weaponized safety. The exponential growth of the national security complex, as well as of the powers of the executive branch when it comes to national security matters, would have far been less likely.

  Without 9/11 and the perpetual "wartime" that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit U.S. Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the "drone lobby" that goes with them might never have developed; and the U.S. military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it -- effectively the president's private army, air force, and navy -- and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.

  So there is a lot of money at stake on convincing you that we have to fight such unscrupulous enemies. But it also fits a political agenda: conservatism, as Michael Tomasky explains below, depends on fear to promote its political agenda.

• Michael Tomasky: The Conservative Paranoid Mind:

  The common thread through all of this is the conservative need to instill and maintain a level of fear in the populace. They need to make gun owners fear that Dianne Feinstein and her SWAT team are going to come knocking on their doors, or, less amusingly, that they have to be armed to the teeth for that inevitable day when the government declares a police state. They need to whip up fear of immigrants, because unless we do, it's going to be nothing but terrorists coming through those portals, and for good measure, because, as Ann Coulter and others have recently said, the proposed law would create millions of voting Democrats (gee, I wonder why!).

  And with regard to terrorism, they need people to live in fear of the next attack, because fear makes people think about death, and thinking about death makes people more likely to endorse tough-guy, law-and-order, Constitution-shredding actions undertaken on their behalf. This is how we lived under Bush and Cheney for years. This fear is basically what enabled the Iraq War to take place. Public opinion didn't support that war at first. But once they got the public afraid with all that false talk of mushroom clouds, the needle zoomed past 50 percent, and it was bombs away.

  Conservatism, I fear (so to speak), can never be cleansed of this need to instill fear. Whether it's of black people or of street thugs or of immigrants or of terrorists or of jackbooted government agents, it's how the conservative mind works.

• Matthew Yglesias: The Koch Brothers Might Be Just What Conservative Journalism Needs: Sometimes smart people can be pretty stupid, especially when they let their logic run away from reality. The Koch brothers are rumored to be in the market for the Tribune Company, which would give them control over the largest newspapers in Los Angeles and Chicago, among other cities. Yglesias writes:

  Certain niches -- talk radio and cable television -- are very friendly to a conservative editorial product but others are not. Which is exactly why what conservative media needs is a couple of extremely rich people to buy a newspaper company and lose a ton of money building a great conservative media product.

  After all, the big problem with right-leaning media in America isn't that it doesn't exist. It's that it's terrible. There is a large audience out there that's so frustrated with the vile MSM that it's happy to lap up cheaply produced content from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and you can make lots of money serving that kind of thing up. By contrast, to build a great media company that's top-to-bottom staffed with conservatives is going to be very expensive. The possible talent pool of great reporters is tilted toward liberals. The talent pool of great photographers and graphic designers is probably even more tilted toward liberals. Finding the great conservatives out there and hiring them is going to be relatively costly, and there's no real economic point to doing so. Is your much worse cost structure going to get you a larger audience than Rush? No, it won't. It's a bad bet.

  But the Kochs have plenty of money. If they want to see it happen, they can make it happen. And America would be better off for it.

  The obvious problem here is that there is no latent pool of "great conservatives" ready to move into newspaper journalism at any price, because they simply don't exist. Conservatives in media are hacks, not because they're lazy but because their message is nothing more than a crock of lies and distortions. The net effect won't be "a great conservative media product" -- it will just reduce marginally decent newspapers into ever-deeper hackdom. And America will be worse off on two counts: one is that it increase our current trend toward shoddiness in all manner of work; the other is that it will reinforce the notion that politics is purely cynical -- a fixed game controlled by the rich (the Kochs a particularly egregious example).

  One cautionary note is that the Kochs have never gotten into a business to lose money, which makes it unlikely they would jump on such a losing proposition. On the other hand, they have shown a deep commitment to undermine democracy, both through their political spending and through their use of corporate control as a channel for pushing their political beliefs. Major urban newspapers have a huge "first mover" advantage -- it's impossible to capitalize new competition, so they are effectively monopolies, and as such should be subject to public trust. Allowing them to be taken over by extremist political ideologues like the Kochs will irreparably destroy that trust, and America would be worse off for that.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Kevin Drum: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead.

• Susan Faludi: Death of a Revolutionary: on Shulamith Firestone.

• Jacob Heilbrunn: Israel's Fraying Image: No breaking news here; indeed, this is well behind the learning curve.

• Bill McKibben: Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

• Matt Taibbi: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever: Explains the Libor scandal.

• Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Zionism's Colonial Roots

One thing about the gun debate is the lack of specific case examples, especially for arguments that putting more guns into the hands of "good" people will limit the amount of gun violence perpetrated by "bad" people. The contrary argument, that reducing the number of legal guns -- which, by the way, simplifies the task of enforcing prohibitions against illegal guns -- reduces the overall amount of gun violence, can be argued with gross statistics. That argument, by the way, seems convincing, but we aren't just statistical aggregates. We're individuals, and even if more guns in general endanger us, it seems at least possible that there are some cases where a gun could save one's life or thwart a crime. So why don't "second amendment rights" advocates give us more concrete examples? (Aside, of course, from the fact that it's a lot easier to spout pieties, a form of laziness and sloppiness you hear on all sides of virtually every issue.)

Someone could (and should) do some actual research on shootings: map out what kinds of confrontations happen -- e.g., home invasion where perpetrator is shot by home resident (or vice versa, in which case was resident armed or not?) -- and count them all up. (As I understand it, the government is prohibited from undewriting any such study, thanks to the NRA, which seems to fear any actual research into gun use or abuse.) But not every confrontation has an obvious right and wrong side. For example, consider the case of Dustin Cheever, here in Wichita.

What happened was: Cheever suspected that the son of a neighbor, Robert Gammon, had stolen a motorcycle. Cheever didn't take his suspicions to the police. Instead, he and a friend (Steve Grose) searched for the motorcycle in Gammons' backyard -- they entered Gammons' property without his permission or knowledge. Gammons confronted them, pointing a BB pistol (which plausibly appeared to be a real gun) at them, and threatening them. Cheever, however, was carrying a real gun. Rather than backing away, he decided that he needed to defend himself and/or his friend, so he pulled his gun, shot, and killed Gammons. Cheever is currently being tried for second degree murder, which seems about right.

Had Cheever pulled his gun and Gammons killed him, Gammons would have been in a stronger legal position. He was, after all, at home, whereas Cheever and Grose were trespassing. Gammons misjudged twice that his gun would protect him: first, as is so often the case, the gunfight was determined not by right or wrong, good guy or bad guy, but by who was quicker with more deadly aim (a fact which, by the way, tends to favor the more experienced bad guys); but second, had he not brandished the gun, had he instead just threatened to call the police, Cheever would have had no excuse to defend himself with his gun, and most likely the pair would have just left.

That Gammons' gun was actually a non-lethal BB pistol is pretty much irrelevant here: it looked like a real gun and was given extra credibility by Gammons' threats to kill with it, plus Cheever had no reason to doubt that Gammons could have owned a real gun, since guns are pretty much the norm here in Wichita. Also, Cheever may well have belatedly understood that Kansas's Stand Your Ground law gave Gammons a legal excuse to shoot first -- had Gammons realized that Cheever was in fact armed (something he might reasonably have suspected). It is often argued that the expectation that the other person is armed leads to more moderate behavior -- that seems to be a big part of the argument that all "good guys" should carry guns -- in this case such expectations pretty clearly escalated the conflict.

So this case, at least, doesn't provide much support for the notion that we are better off with more guns: one gun owner, attempting to defend his property from trespass, is dead; another, intent on taking the law into his own hand in searching for his stolen property, faces second degree murder charges. Neither of those outcomes would have happened had either (much less both) parties been unarmed, nor would they have happened had either (again much less both) turned to the police to settle their dispute.

There may be other gun confrontations where it's easier to tell who is "good" or "bad," where it's clearer who's right and wrong, but I suspect this sort of mess is more common. Moreover, it's more reflective of the mentality of people who think guns are an answer for their problems dealing with other people: they overestimate the value and grossly underestimate the risks; and they almost never have the skills and judgment they'd need to make the gun work for them, and often lack the self-awareness to realize when they're getting into trouble. Indeed, the police, who are trained both in the law and the proper use of guns, often screw it up. Why would a random individual expect to do better?

There are simple solutions here, but not practicable ones. The statistics are clear, but no one wants to be a statistic. As long as people think they need guns for self-protection, it's awfully hard to take them away. Moreover, it's hard to say "trust in the police" when the police aren't all that trustworthy, nor can one say "have faith in our system of justice" when that system is far from just. Those are, I'm tempted to argue, bigger and more urgent problems than guns. On the other hand, so many of the reasons that people give for insisting on arming themselves are so patently false you have to argue with them just to attempt to open up a space for public sanity.

No such argument is more ridiculous than the one that you need guns to protect yourself from the government -- although the one that the government needs guns to protect itself from you is every bit as specious, not to mention the one -- which costs us about a trillion dollars a year -- that the government needs armies and navies and air forces to protect us from foreigners. War doesn't protect us from war: war is war. Guns don't protect us from gun violence: aside from a few museum pieces, they create gun violence.

Had promised to post this today, so be it. But I was tempted to slip in something else in its stead. First thing I saw in the paper this morning was a piece on Obama (and Clinton and Carter and the old man, whose face is on a T-shirt I have captioned something like "I wish I had pulled out") saying nice things about the worst president in US history on the occasion of the opening of a library built by the taxpayers in his name. There are lots of reasons to be unhappy with Obama these days, but none galls me more than his utter failure to expound on the incalculable damage that the presidency of George W. Bush did to this country. By not doing so, he let the nation forget, and thereby learn nothing. Indeed, within two years the Republican Party not only recovered as a political force, it did so under much more extremist leadership. And also by not speaking up he tacitly accepted the legacy Bush left as a new norm: hence it became his recession, his deficits, his bloody wars.

Then when I got on the net, I discovered that George Jones died. That would have been worth a post, too -- for now, let me just refer you to my Rolling Stone CD Guide piece on him. My mother was a huge fan of his, so his music became a bonding point -- going as far back as when there weren't many such points. The day Jones wrecked his SUV, I flew home to Wichita, got in real late, and let myself into her house. She had been sleeping but got up to greet me, and all she could talk about was Jones. She was crying, slobbering; I could hardly understand a word, and for the first time wondered whether she was losing her mind. Turned out, she had forgot to put her teeth in. Always wished we could have taken her to see Jones, but by the time we did get a chance to see him, she had passed, and he was barely able to sing -- very disappointing show.

Nothing much to say about the following streamnotes. I've been checking out what I could, not much taken by recent recommendations by Christgau and Tatum (although the African stuff has mostly kept out of reach), doubtful that they will approve of my minor finds. So feeling alone out here. And cranky. Damn cranky.

These are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on March 28. Past reviews and more information are available here (3274 records).

Actress: R.I.P. (2012, Honest Jon's): Darren Cunningham has a new EP I can't find, but last year's album has belatedly appeared. Most songs are built from simple patterns with minor oddities, adding up in interesting ways. B+(***)

Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine: White People and the Damage Done (2013, Alternative Tentacles): Eric Boucher, ex-Dead Kennedys, has nine "spoken word" albums (1987-2006), formed this band in 2009 to record The Audacity of Hype. Guitar heavy, not pop-punk but maybe power-punk, lyrics political though I'm not sure how useful. B+(*)

James Blake: Overgrown (2013, Polydor): Considered electronica for his dewy electroglop, but nothing conveys bathos like the juvenile human voice -- as AMG put it, "the faintest hints of Chet Baker's springtime loneliness buried in Blake's mumbling blue-eyed R&B vocals." Of course, he's less cracked than Baker, and more authentically bereft. What a sad world he portends. B

Bombino: Nomad (2013, Nonesuch): Tuareg guitar hero, goes with an American producer this time, who decides to crank up the guitar (and bass and drums) -- not a bad idea, but a bit limiting. B+(***)

Charli XCX: True Romance (2013, Iamsound): British electro-diva Charlotte Aitchison, age 20, first album (not counting a promo, EPs, and a couple mixtapes). Voice is so-so and her raps barely flow, but the multi-producer synth pop buoys her, at least until the tedious "How Can I." B+(**)

Chicha Libre: Cuatro Tigres (2013, Barbès, EP): Brooklyn group built around the "psychedelic cumbias from Peru" that the label first anthologized on The Roots of Chicha (2007). After two albums, a four track, 14:48, EP, starting with a cover of the Clash's "The Guns of Brixton" -- a signifier that they are of our world, as is their take on the Simpsons theme music, but "Rica Chicha" suggests a more interesting one. B+(*)

Eric Church: Caught in the Act: Live (2011 [2013], EMI Nashville): Country singer-songwriter with three pretty good and pretty popular records under his belt, consolidates them into one 75-minute set here -- the sound cranked up to fill his arena and to keep the crowd psyched. Recorded with a lot of fan cheer, annoying at first, eventually settling into something akin to groove wear. B+(*)

Chvrches: Recover (2013, Glassnote, EP): Glassgow electropop group with singer Lauren Mayberry and two keyb players, tiptoes into the pop arena with an EP, 5 cuts, 21:23, but actually the two longest cuts are remixes of the title cut -- stretches out the undoubted pleasure, but impresses me less. B+(*)

DJ Koze: Amygdala (2013, Pampa): Stefan Kozalla, from Hamburg, Germany, has a handful of albums since 2000, titles like Music Is Okay, All People Is My Friends, and Wo Die Rammelwolle Fliegt. His beats are slight but deeper into the album become hypnotic. The vocals, some in German, are awkward, but ultimately superfluous. A-

Maxmillion Dunbar: House of Woo (2013, RVNG Intl.): "Left-field house" from Andrew Field-Pickering, has a previous album and the usual pile of short forms and DJ mixes, dishes up sparkling synth sounds that hold your interest even when he wanders from the beat. A-

Steve Earle & the Dukes (& Duchesses): The Low Highway (2013, New West): Not sure that hanging around the set of Treme did him much good -- his Cajun comes up a bit shy -- but "That All You Got?" may wind up the most memorable of Katrina songs, and two co-credits with Lucia Micarelli -- Eleanor Whitmore plays the fiddle -- wrap up a tidy package in the midst of an otherwise down-and-out album. He also treads ominously with a loner threatening to burn WalMart down, and other characters are no less sullen, but that's where he finds his purpose. A-

Jonny Fritz: Dad Country (2013, ATO): Formerly known as Jonny Corndawg, whose 2011 album Down on the Bikini Line tried to be funnier, all grown up and sober now, with a dozen songs I don't recall clearly enough, except that I'm pretty sure they don't suck. B+(**)

Ghostface Killah/Adrian Younge: Twelve Reasons to Die (2013, Relativity/Soul Temple): Cover of this mock soundtrack reads "Adrian Younge Presents . . . Starring Ghostface Killah," but I figure go with the big type first. It's another hoary gangster chronicle, replete with 1970s spaghetti western musical effects, so hackneyed it's almost funny, something that could grow on you if you never took it seriously. B+(***)

Greyboy Allstars: Inland Emperor (2013, Knowledge Room): Started out in the mid-1990s during the brief acid jazz boom with DJ Greyboy the organizing force, and while I wouldn't call them stars, at least I've heard of saxophonist Karl Denson and organist Robert Walter. The instrumental funk is not without interest (e.g., "Trashtruck"), but the vocals are. B

The Knife: Shaking the Habitual (2013, Mute, 2CD): Swedish electropop duo, Olof Dreijer and sister-singer Karin Dreijer Andersson (aka Fever Ray). Some confusion: there's a 77:18 single disc version and a 96:19 double, but Rhapsody's comes in at 86:16. Several terrific cuts here, at least when they stay upbeat and oblique, with the slow ones slipping back into the ordinary. Could be that all versions are just a hair too long. A-

The Knife: Silent Shout (2006, Rabid/Mute): The Swedish siblings' second, and probably best-regarded, record: the beats seem a bit better crafted and less exciting, the songs a bit more consistently crafted -- seems to be their level. B+(***)

Lapalux: Nostalchic (2013, Brainfeeder): Stuart Howard, English but attached to Flying Lotus, which shares a lot of the choppy pastiche, but is better at it. B+(*)

Lil Wayne: I Am Not a Human Being II (2013, Cash Money): "I would sing about my dick/but that'd be a long story." Instead, perhaps inspired by his dick, he focuses on pussy. B+(**)

Major Lazer: Free the Universe (2013, Secretly Canadian): Reggae/dancehall/ragga project by Diplo (Wes Pentz) and Switch (Dave Taylor), a bit removed from Jamaica but so is everything since roots reggae got lost in the 1980s. Third album, their most natural and most expansive, and not just because they get help on "Bubble Butt." B+(***)

The Men: New Moon (2013, Sacred Bones): Brooklyn post-whatever band, have started to mix up the punkish formula with countryish ballads and hooks wherever they can find them, but haven't found much, and are better off when they revert. B

Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom: No Morphine No Lillies (2013, Foxhaven/Royal Potato Family): Drummer, third album, her second called Boom Tic Boom a smashing piano trio with Myra Melford and Todd Sickafoose plus "guest" violinist Jenny Scheinman. Some "second system complex" here as Scheinman becomes a regular, giving the group two stars to try to keep in sync, and a new batch of guests, including a Rachel Friedman vocal, Erik Friedlander cello, and a pair of trumpets. Too much to sort out quickly, but the pianist is brilliant as ever, and the closer with the trumpets is deliriously over the top. A-

Willie Nelson and Family: Let's Face the Music and Dance (2013, Legacy): He turns 80 this year, taking it easy by doing what he's done pretty much ever since Nashville, and he's put as little effort into this as he's ever done: just a bunch of semi-standards done Family style -- less likely to tax his voice, which is still remarkably prime at a time when peers like Haggard and Jones are shot to shit. Easy suits him. B+(**)

OneRepublic: Native (2013, Interscope): Arena rock band from Colorado Springs, not something we really need, but their avalanche of synths is tuneful more often than not, and I don't detect any of the ickiness you get with bands like Journey. Sample shallow sentiment: "And if we only die once I wanna die with you." B

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: English Electric (2013, Relativity): New wave synth group from 1980, when their first two albums were fresh and danceable despite the fact that all they could do were variations on their formula -- "Enola Gay" remains the archetype. Having nothing better to do, they regrouped after a 12 year hiatus in 2008. This is pleasant filler until "Helen of Troy" earns a spot on their best-of, then this turns into more interesting filler. B+(**)

Brad Paisley: Wheelhouse (2013, Arista Nashville): What do you do about a guy who'd really like to be smarter, kinder, and more decent than his cohort, but who frets that it may cost him sales and huzzahs down at the local redneck honky tonk? Especially since it probably already has, although more for the way he keeps picking at his self-inflicted scabs than his lack of backbone. Has anyone ever written a lazier, wobblier-kneed anthem than "Southern Comfort Zone"? ("Accidental Racist"? Despite its platitudes, lazy as they are, not an anthem.) Oh, and by the way, the real lesson of Sherman's march through Georgia isn't that Dixie got wronged. It's what the man said: "War is hell." B

Palma Violets: 180 (2013, Rough Trade): British group debut, punk-related, black-and-white cover suggesting their basic approach, but a little fancier, especially with the organ -- more Jam than Ramones. B+(**)

Paramore: Paramore (2013, Fueled by Ramen): Fifth album from a band formed in Tennessee, fronted by singer-songwriter Hayley Williams, the eponymous album a way of doubling down after two other band founders split. Big voice, big beat, grand gestures, a bit of pop sheen, all of which leaves me cold -- unlike the 0:52 "I'm Not Angry Anymore," which suggests a different path. B

Pennybirdrabbit: Safer (2013, Big Beat, EP): Second EP, four songs, 14:13. The hype, aside from citing her appearance on a Skrillex joint, dwells on how cute she is, but her electronica is pretty tasteful, the vocals forthright, and the songs smarter than you had any reason to expect. B+(**) [sc]

Phosphorescent: Muchacho (2013, Dead Oceans): Group alias for Matthew Houck, singer-songwriter based in Athens, GA. Did a Willie Nelson tribute two albums back, but could also do one for Bon Iver, not that he should -- his own songs are better. B+(**)

Salva: Odd Furniture (2013, Friends of Friends, EP): Paul Salva, from LA. Five cuts, 20:04, hard beats and emphatic repetition remind some of Skrillex, not much of a recommendation in my book. B [bc]

Shlohmo: Laid Out (2013, Friends of Friends, EP): Henry Laufer, from Los Angeles, has a couple albums and a handful of EPs, this one running 5 cuts, 26:52. Even the one with the annoying vocal-like samples has a structure that makes use of them; better still when the sounds have their own appeal. B+(**) [bc]

Skrillex: Leaving (2013, Owsla, EP): Showboat techno, at least that's what I concluded after not being able to stomach his commercial breakthrough, Bangarang, although I rather liked his earlier, still extravagant, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. He files everything in his catalog as EP, but this one really is -- 3 songs, 12:41 (Bangarang ran 29:56, and three remixes pushed Scary Monsters even longer). First two bang his gong, although less irritating than before; title track is measured and pleasant. B+(*) [dl]

William Tyler: Impossible Truth (2013, Merge): Solo guitarist, in the mode of John Fahey with all the rich harmonic reverb but less of a sense that he's an authentic primitive. Rumbles a bit early on, then sweetens up: "The World Set Free" is more than a good idea. B+(**)

Kurt Vile: Wakin on a Pretty Daze (2013, Matador): Singer-songwriter from Philadelphia, name not an alias, which helps explain why he is blander -- less witty and less menacing -- than you would expect. He's also lost whatever lo-fi gestalt he started with, winding up here with a rather nice guitar groove album regardless of how the songs break. B+(*)

Charles Walker & the Dynamites: Love Is Only Everything (2013, Gemco): Veteran blues shouter fronting a Motown-tinged r&b group: hard to see what could go wrong there, but now you can construct a catalog of annoying tics, none redeemed by a hopelessly catchy hook. B-

Will.i.am: #Willpower (2013, Interscope): Black Eyed Peas majordomo, has produce some of the catchiest arena funk of the last decade but even when he steps up front he remains a background persona -- perhaps he doesn't have much else. This has been predictably panned, and indeed the rhymes are lazy and the "let's get dumb" party philosophy shallow but "Ghetto Ghetto" isn't shallow -- just a little tongue-in-cheek with the kiddie chorus. B+(*)

Wire: Change Becomes Us (2013, Pink Flag): More than any other 1970s group, the one that engineered the transition from punk to new wave, something they've immortalized in their guitar tunings and bass crunch -- cf. "Eels Sang," a throwback for more than its brevity, a rule "& Much Besides" fruitfully sets aside; other tracks less so. B+(**)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Mosquito (2013, Interscope): Despite all the vampire hoopla of the last decade, the real blood-sucking killer is the lowly mosquito, and their title song plays it up for all the horror you should feel. Half of the songs are equally remarkable -- "Sacrilege" sure is, "These Paths" burbles ominously, "Area 52" destroys the earth, and the ballad helps with the healing. A-

by Michael Tatum

I'm delighted by the symmetry of touting two pick hits from Mali featuring the ngoni (I'll explain in a minute), both distributed by German imprint Out Here. Unfortunately for me -- and, I'm afraid, for you -- Rokia Traoré's CD should have been re-issued stateside by Nonesuch, who as of this writing have pushed back the release date indefinitely. I have no idea if it's a licensing issue, but nevertheless, enough publications have run reviews on the record that I'm justifying its inclusion this month. If need be, do yourself a favor and hunt for a good price on the import -- or at least bug WEA to put it back on their release schedule. Good rock and roll is so hard to find these days.

Dieuf-Dieul de Thiès: Aw Sa Yone Vol. 1 (Teranga Beat) Outshone in their time by a certain nonpareil Dakar outfit, these competitors from nearby Thiès couldn't garner the necessary financial backing to commit these 1982 sessions to cassette, let alone the more expensive vinyl. So even if thirty plus years later the resulting CD is prone to the occasional channel drop out, be thankful Baobab producer Moussa Diallo had the foresight to record them live at the Sangomar Night Club gratis when no else would. Although their name translates to "collective good deeds undertaken in hopes of future profit," one gathers from the testimonials from bandleader/guitarist Pape Seck and singer Gora Mbaye -- both of whom take pains to remind us that they've had no recompense from this project -- this short-lived aggregation was a labor of love that, despite its failure to live up to its nominal promise, has been unmatched musically or spiritually for either man before or since. Mbalax fans will find much to appreciate in Bassirou Sarr's dynamic tenor, but what really distinguishes this band -- and keeps their spellbinding jams going for an average of nine minutes each -- are insinuating, serpentine rhythms that rumble rather than rock, and two wild card saxophonists whose expansive, incisive solos actually go somewhere. In short, for those who covet the idea of garage rock, but are more persuaded by the kind of scrappy upstarts who are too poor to own a car -- let alone a garage. A–

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Jama Ko (Out Here) Showcasing passionate vocal performances not only from Kouyate himself but also lifemate Amy Sacko, Khaira Arby, Kassé-Mady Diabaté, and my favorite, leather-larynxed Zoumana Teretayou, you might be led into believing this is a singer's album. Of course, it is -- inasmuch as so many Malian records are -- but it owes its majesty and power mainly to the ngoni, a lowly stringed-instrument fashioned from wood or calabash and covered by a layer of dried, stretched animal skin: in other words, if one had a hankering to "shred one's ax," no match for a Fender Strat. In theory. But because its string placement makes it ideal for executing dazzling, pirouetting runs, and because this is arranged for not one but four players shadowboxing around each other, this is a guitar workout like few others, and with the help of amplification, effects pedals, and two percussionists who must have at least four hands each, their desert protest blues is powerful rock and roll indeed. Recorded with careful thought to space by Arcade Fire hand Howard Bilerman, Kouyate's leads are as lightning-quick as you'd expect, but he's equally deft at string-bending and one-note freakouts reminiscent of Santana or the Doors, resulting in an album with no dead spots, right down to the Howlin' Wolf tribute and the sprint-to-the-finish-line named after Kouyate's son. And the manic climax to "Ne Me Fatigue Pas" says more about doom and uncertainty about Mali's recent political coup than mere words ever could. A

Kate Nash: Girl Talk [Deluxe Edition] (Ingrooves) Nash's riot grrrl move makes a lot more sense when you work your way back through her discography. Compared initially to Lily Allen because each masked her privileged upbringing by cultivating a Mockney accent and a potty mouth after her egalitarian parents sent her to public school, one could argue the British record buying public cottoned to them because although they swore like Liverpudlian sailors, they remained "proper birds" about it. Even so, Allen herself would never have countenanced the tart homemade production of Nash's Made of Bricks and My Best Friend Is You, nor would Allen's bright, fluttery soprano have been capable of tackling Nash's new material -- hints of the nasal yowl the latter employs here have been hinted at in her darker timbre all along. And most crucially, many of Nash's songs, beginning with the anti-bullying "Dickhead" on the debut, address relationships with women: platonic of course (the phrase "best friend" reoccurs in song after song), romantic up in the air, and either way for you and The Daily Mirror to puzzle out. So while this first sounds like a mess, immersion reveals itself to be both a logical progression and a good way to stick it to the British pop music journalists who would turn their noses at the prospect of putting a "lightweight" on the cover of Mojo. And though the domestic release ends with a whimper -- the fey "You're So Cool, I'm So Freaky," followed by a lullaby that rubs its mawkish orchestral arrangement in old fans' faces -- the import deluxe concludes with three good-to-great tracks, including the self-explanatory "I'm a Feminist, You're Still a Whore," preceded by an ode to Pussy Riot that speaks feminism's universal language ("Meow, meow, meow, meow"). And note how Nash connects to her Russian compatriots: "They're the kinda girls that you'd be friends with/Cause they look cool and they give a shit/About the kind of things you give a shit about." Sisters gotta stick together. Brothers, take notice. A–

Orchestra Super Mazembe: Mazembe @ 45rpm, Vol.1 (Sterns Africa) Although identified with Nairobi benga -- their biggest hit, the lovely "Shauri Yako," appears on the magnificent 1991 Earthworks compilation Guitar Paradise of East Africa, though not here -- the Super Earth Shakers are actually carpetbaggers who came up in the 70s from the Congo, less to flee Mobutu's kleptocracy (one could hardly argue Daniel arap Moi's vile police state as an improvement) but because Kenya promised bigger money. Their basic approach, covering both sides of an affordable, ten-shilling, 45 rpm single, will be familiar to benga/soukous/what-have-you fans: luminescent verses/choruses, followed by a brief caesura, after which the music bursts into a breakneck reverie in which voices and guitar bounce off each other so ebulliently you'll be thankful compiler Doug Paterson, as with the great 2010 D.O. Misiani compilation he also curated, painstakingly fuses both sides together (besides, who wants to get up and turn over a record while he's dancing?). Unlike most Afropop combos, there is no prime mover here: the band had as much a revolving door policy as the Drifters or Parliament-Funkadelic -- the liner notes list twenty members, plus nine confederates of indistinct involvement. And they sung the majority of their material in their native Lingala, a language denizens of their adopted country understand only slightly more than you and I. So with beauty, beats, and Atia Jo's buoyant bass their only non-variables, why do you suppose sold these records like hotcakes? Clues can be found in the included pics, one displaying the band goofing around in hardhats and yellow slickers (their name also translates to "construction workers"), another a group shot in which they lightheartedly mug for the camera. Eager to please any which way, they're almost a little too accommodating -- this isn't nearly as lively, resourceful, or magical as Guitar Paradise of East Africa, which I guess is my way of saying eleven bands are better than one. Or maybe I mean one band is better than none -- the band's lack of cohesive identity is a problem. Beauty against adversity may be Africa's gift to the world, but that's no excuse to make pleasure feel like business. A–

Brad Paisley: Wheelhouse (Arista Nashville) Musically, Paisley's crazed strategy here reminds me of long-dismissed grunge reprobate Art Alexaxis: begin with a genre record, flirt with crossover, scurry to an apology, then heroically stage-dive into a full-fledged, gonzo sellout. The difference is that because he theoretically comes from right field, Paisley risks far more, not just by nodding three times to "rap" (the best by Charlie Daniels, who makes me wonder if "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" was the antebellum "The Breaks"), but with samples, my favorite from a Roger Miller song I'm willing to bet that before this no one who actually own a Pro Tools setup has actually heard. Yet the knee-jerk conservatism of the lyrics shows how much Paisley is hedging his bets. It's one thing to remind red-staters that not everyone owns a gun, another to muse affectionately about "Those Crazy Christians" (Jeff Foxworthy: "If you bless a casserole or pray before a football game, you might be a Christian"). And while I love the gleeful abusive boyfriend revenge fantasy "Karate," songs like that have been staples of the genre long before Garth Brooks. But consider "Runaway Train," where Paisley opines, "When I was a young'un, my momma used to pray/That I'd find me a Christian girl and settle down someday," without revealing what kind of strong-willed woman took that archetype's place, or "The Mona Lisa," who regardless of her status as a ne plus ultra is seen, not heard, or the beer-commercial plots of "Harvey Bodine" and "Death of a Single Man." And while I'd point out that the Bob Doles of the world don't fear Bill Cosby or Ben Carson as much as they do brothers in gold chains and do-rags, you don't have to be Dolores Kearnes Goodwin to doubt the veracity of LL Cool J's closing benediction to Robert E. Lee (!!) and Abraham Lincoln in "Accidental Racist." Next time, Paisley should ring up Chuck D. But somehow I doubt Chuck's gonna return to the calls of someone who spends two "sensitive" verses rationalizing his reasons for proudly displaying the Confederate flag on a T-shirt. B+

Rilo Kiley: Rkives (Little Record Company) Completists complain -- and don't they always? -- why not include the juvenilia from their obscure first EP? Why not "Big Break" (the desultory b-side to "The Moneymaker")? Or the acoustic "Somebody Else's Clothes" (which appears only on the Live at Fingerprints EP) or "Xmas Cake," their bummed-out contribution to Nettwerk's Maybe This Christmas Too? Diligent Youtube research reveals however that these sixteen rarities plus one hidden novelty comprise the cream. Sure, there's Blake Sennett's mealy-mouthed demo "Rest of My Life," as well his petulant title-says-it-all "Well, You Left," which lies stillborn until Jenny Lewis adds a backing vocal to a disingenuously joyous coda. Yet although it took me several spins to suss it out -- the band would never have left a potential radio hit on the cutting room floor -- this is the rare odds and sods deal that can stand with the original records, and with three of the stragglers from 2004's heartfelt More Adventurous and seven more from 2007's slicker Under the Blacklight, what it offers in sonic variety makes up for what it lacks in thematic heft. Jenny is the star -- that goes without saying. But it never before occurred to me how much Sennett brought to the table until I heard how much muscle and imagination he put even into Lewis' second-stringers -- and had the benefit of Lewis' slightly more perfunctory solo efforts with Johnathan Rice and the Watson Twins for comparison. Great singer-songwriters are one thing. Great bands are another. A

Rokia Traoré: Beautiful Africa (Out Here) You won't be disappointed if you backtrack through this Malian singer-songwriter-guitarist's four previous albums, but as a whole they're slightly static: graceful to be sure, but also a tad too subtle, understated, and as deliberate as a piano recital, thus inaccessible to "world music" holdouts who thinks Oumou Sangare's records "all sound the same." This record poses no such hurdles. Beginning with the shotgun entrance of trap drum dynamo Sebastian Rochford, this electrifying set announces itself as nothing less than a rock record -- if you're wondering what might have inspired PJ Harvey confidante John Parish to sign on as producer, Traoré's crunchy guitar riffs, off-kilter time signatures, and awe-inspiring vocal gymnastics (from trilling coo to banshee wail to playful purr) must feel like familiar territory. And with the exception of the regretful "Mélancolie" this doesn't let up, including the two in English, a tough title anthem and a gorgeous song of praise for women. Not that you should let the ones in French and Bamako scare you off -- the killer girl-group backing vocals make the parlez vous ring out like doo wah diddy, hey-ya, hey-ya. A

Wire: Change Becomes Us (Pink Flag) Some bands evolve out of necessity; some evolve out of boredom. These shrewd shell-gamers evolve as to whatever fits their currents needs. If new wave bleaches punk, we'll bleach it even further by hiring Depeche Mode's producer. If our drummer quits, we'll lean harder on the drum machines. When our drummer returns, we'll get back to basics. And when guitarist Bruce Gilbert retires, we'll recycle and renew fragments from 1981's chaotic Document and Eyewitness like we were the Rolling Stones rolling from Some Girls to Emotional Rescue to Tattoo You, though letting thirty years pass by rather than three, well that's just shrewd shell-gamers for you. Their more obscure lyrics still don't signify without memorable melody -- the breakdown in communication theme may finally justify Graham Lewis' penchant for acronymic gobbledygook on "Re-invent Your Second Wheel," but it's still gobbledygook (and no, it's not code, Graham -- I applied a substitution cipher). But especially on the first half, catchier and more propulsive than their similarly-textured 2011 Red Barked Tree, their blast-chilled art punk makes the most out of lines like "How I adore your island/You're the one who should be spared," and a pile-driving anti-anthem that makes the change promised in their album title sound like a threat. And in the embittered opener, Colin Newman re-imagines "Reuters" from the point of view of an "ally in exile": "He breaks down in this theatre, but hopes not under these lights/Specifically those which gain strategic insights/By the best of good fortune, he had provisions in store/He doubles, then trebles the locks on his door." B+

Honorable Mentions

Suede: Bloodsports (Suede Ltd.) Okay I'm swayed, but the word "aniseed" appears in back-to-back songs, and "Like a cause without a martyr/Like an effigy of balsa/Like a hairline crack in a radiator/Leaking life" is from one of the good ones ("Barriers," "It Starts and Ends With You") ***

Atoms for Peace: Amok (XL) Joey Waronker isn't my idea of an Afrobeat drum titan any more than Phil Selway, but for chilly DOR he'll do ("Default," "Reverse Running") ***

Telekinesis: Dormarion (Merge) The question isn't can you be a one man band, but should you? ("Power Lines," "Dark to Light") **

The Rough Guide to Acoustic Africa (World Music Network) In which even songs I liked in other contexts are subsumed by a concept that could use its own change of pace (Syran Mbenza & Ensemble Rumba Kongo, "Mbanda Nasali Nini? (Madeleine)," Shiyani Ngcobo, "Yekanini") **

Justin Timberlake: The 20/20 Experience (RCA) Maybe Smokey belabored the corny metaphors too, but he had the good sense not to stretch them out over an average song length of seven minutes ("Don't Hold the Wall," "Strawberry Bubblegum") *

Trash

David Bowie: The Next Day (Columbia) I have no idea what has taken hold in David Bowie's mind and body -- whether it's psychological, biochemical, or the thought of time waiting in the wings and speaking senseless things -- but whatever it is, it's scaring him to death: "Here I am/Not quite dying/My body left to rot in a hollow tree/Its branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me/And the next day/And the next/And another." Yet as he grips with the thought of his own mortality -- for real this time, no romanticized bullshit -- his Anglophile acolytes pretend, as they have for the last twenty-five odd years, that this represents a new dawning, another phase in a many storied career no one will admit has too many vacancies on the uppermost floors. Both the album title and the Dadaist appropriation of 1977's Heroes cover imply that this record is the one that should have surfaced in 1979 rather than Lodger -- a pretty bold statement, I'd say -- yet nothing here hits as hard as the first three songs on that underrated record's b-side. Meanwhile, Tony Visconti's production (another connection to his lost past) recreates old affects without that fertile period's air of discovery (the disjointed beat of "Dirty Boys" recalls "Breaking Glass," the squishy synth-snares of "Love is Lost" evoke "Sound and Vision"). Only on "The Stars Are Out Tonight" does the artist completely abjure sad nostalgia (the Potzdamer Platz, the Nurnberger Strasse) for directness and Visconti's chilly art rock find a purpose. Read the lyric sheet and you'll find that the celestial bodies in question have curious names like Birgitte, Jack, Kate, and Brad, and spend their time aimlessly wandering, never sleeping: "The dead ones and the living." And, one assumes, those in between. Peace be with you, David. B

Johnny Marr: The Messenger (Sire) You don't need to shoot him because there is no message -- message (and I use that word with reservations) was his old songwriting partner's department. So maybe the title should be Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Guitar Player? Except on the basis of this record, he doesn't have anything interesting to offer in that realm anymore either. Besides, who needs "message" anymore when your sole frame of reference is what Fran Healey and the Gallagher brothers were doing better in the '90s? Although if there's a "Some Might Say" or (ulp) "Writing to Reach You" here, I'll happily scarf up whatever Morrissey's serving up at the Staples Center. C+

Roger Knox & the Pine Valley Cosmonauts: Stranger in My Land (Bloodshot) Proves that "blacks" are alike the whole world over, singer-songwriters too. B–

Josh Ritter: The Beast in Its Tracks (Pytheas Recordings) He just went through a terrible divorce -- can you tell? C+

Bilal: A Love Surreal (Entertainment One Music) Or: A Lunk Supreme: Airhead's Redux. C+

Holly Williams: The Highway (Georgiana) Shows restraint by not mentioning Grandpa Hank until track two, whose own "highway" is more lost than you think -- the title track is a self-pitying plaint about being on tour. C

Jake Bugg: Jake Bugg (Mercury) Or, The Freewheelin' Lonnie Donnegan. C

This is the 29th installment, (almost) monthly since August 2010, totalling 715 albums. All columns are indexed and archived here. You can follow A Downloader's Diary on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Still trying to unpack the overhang accumulated up to the March 14 post, with a second installment on March 16, although this one is delayed about as much as I should normally do -- one result is that the queue isn't getting noticeably shorter. So here's another batch of forty more/less recent book titles, with more to follow relatively soon.

Nicholson Baker: The Way the World Works: Essays (2012, Simon & Schuster): Fifteen years of short pieces by the mostly novelist, including a couple I would certainly want to read ("The Charms of Wikipedia," and "Why I Am a Pacifist," the first of three in the section on War). I haven't read his fiction, but Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization is a great book.

William J Baumol, et al: The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn't (2012, Yale University Press): An important subject, although it's not clear that Baumol has got the answer right: health care is a dysfunctional market with a lot of hidden (and frankly cancerous) monopolies. Other factors may add to this, including some Baumol identifies (labor costs, lack of productivity improvements).

William Blum: America's Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (paperback, 2013, Zed Books): Longtime critic of US foreign policy. Previous books include: The CIA: A Forgotten History (1986); Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2000); West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (2002); Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (2000; revised 2003); Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (2004).

David Byrne: How Music Works (2012, McSweeney's): Talking Heads frontman, Luaka Bop honcho, applies his experience to a big topic, although I can imagine lots of different tangents for "works" to take off in. Most likely: how music works for me. Still, a topic of some interest.

Caitlin Carenen: The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel (2012, New York University Press): The US has lots of reasons for being exceptionally sympathetic to Israel, ranging from the founding bond of both being white settler nations to the symbiosis of our overbloated arms industries, but one of the most important is how Israel has played in protestant thought -- both early on with liberal guilt over the Holocaust and later with evangelicals pining for the apocalypse.

Victor Cha: The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (2012, Harper Collins): Former Bush admin NSC Korea hand -- you know, the folks who concocted "the axis of evil" meme -- tries to explain North Korea, something I'm not sure anyone can do. A couple years ago, when Barbara Demick wrote Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009) there weren't many books, but that's started to change. Relatively new: Andrei Lankov: The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (2013, Oxford University Press); BR Myers: The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (2010; paperback, 2011, Melville House); Bruce E Bechtol Jr: The Last Days of Kim Jong-Il: The North Korean Threat in a Changing Era (2013, Potomac Books). Still, I doubt if any on these shed much light on the latest round of threats and condemnations.

Noam Chomsky: 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (2001; revised paperback, 2011, Seven Stories Press): Right then, right now. Wish he could write better, but decades of being right and ignored have taken a toll on his patience.

Noam Chomsky: Occupy [Occupied Media Pamphlet Series] (paperback, 2012, Zucotti Park Press): Short (128 pp.) pamphlet, meant to advise the Occupy movement. Looks like there will be a series of these things, with additional titles by Stuart Leonard (Taking Brooklyn Bridge), Mumia Abu-Jamal (Message to the Movement), and Marina Sitrin/Dario Azzellini (Occupying Language).

Noam Chomsky: Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire (paperback, 2013, Metropolitan Books): Continues a long series of interviews with David Barsamian, a context which draws out his wisdom without cluttering up the page.

Climate Central: Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future (2012, Pantheon): Written by Emily Elert and Michael D Lemonick but credited to their "nonprofit, nonpartisan science and journalism organization"; with just-the-facts-style reporting, not that they ignore the applicable science.

Susan P Crawford: Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (2012, Yale University Press): Argues that the 2011 merger of Comcast and NBC Universal "create the biggest monopoly since the breakup of Standard Oil a century ago." During much of that time AT&T monopolized the telephone industry, but at least it was recognized as such and tightly regulated -- so much so that it begged for breakup. The new monopoly combines content as well as networking, which is what makes it not just too expensive but far more dangerous.

Guy Debord: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1987; third edition, paperback, 2011, Verso): Debord's original essay was written in 1967. When I first read it (in Radical America, 1970) it illuminated all sorts of things, but the basic idea is simple enough it requires little elaboration. The essay is short, as are the comments (94 pp.); still, I've never figured out what you do with the concept -- more likely than not it just leaves you awestruck.

John De Graaf/David K Batker: What's the Economy For, Anyway?: Why It's Time to Stop Chasing Growth and Start Pursuing Happiness (2011; paperback, 2012, Bloomsbury Press): Good question, one also explored by Robert Skidelsky/Edward Skidelsky: How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life (2012); Juliet B Schor: Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (2010); and Joseph E Stiglitz, et al., Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Ad Up (2010). [link]

Ross Douthat: Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (2012, Free Press): Conservative New York Times columnist, tries to appear reasonable and rarely succeeds, wants to bring back that old time religion, or something like that. We would at long last do us a favor if he helps break the binds between religion and partisanship, but the old time religion never was much good at respecting others.

Peter Dreier: The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (paperback, 2012, Nation Books): Thumbnail biographies, 4-6 pages each (adding up to 512 pp.), political people you should know at least something about, even though one can nitpick the roster coming and going. Only two are younger than me (Michael Moore and Tony Kushner). Three of the last ten are musicians, and two are athletes, so the spectacle seems to have won out, especially over the writers who have provided so much insight and kept the flame going (Chomsky and Ehrenreich are about it since C. Wright Mills).

Jeff Faux: The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class (2012, Wiley): Previous book was The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future -- and What It Will Take to Win It Back, so presumably this returns to American specifics. Lots of recent books on the destruction of the middle class, the ripe corrollary to the same old, same old of rich-getting-richer and poor-getting-poorer.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorm: Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012, Hill and Wang): Much shorter than Richard Rhodes' epochal The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words. I've toyed with the idea of writing graphic histories on the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli Conflict -- critical assumption here is that I can get my nephew to illustrate -- mostly because I wish to sharply focus on key understandings rather than to just spew out a lot of narrative, and graphic histories seem to offer a unique opportunity to state and reinforce basic points.

Robert K Fitts: Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan (2012, University of Nebraska Press): Previously co-edited Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game and wrote Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball, reports on one of the most famous exhibition tours in history: a key event in Japan's adoption of America's pastime as its own favorite sport, but also cover for Moe Berg's espionage. Not sure who got assassinated.

Stephen M Gardiner: A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (2011, Oxford University Press): A philospher's take on the problem, seeing ignorance and inaction as a lapse in ethics, looking into geo-engineering, etc.

Brandon L Garrett: Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong (2011; paperback, 2012, Harvard University Press): DNA evidence has shown that quite a few innocent people have been convicted of serious crimes. Analyzing those cases should help identify how the justice system gets it wrong and winds up creating injustice. Other recent books on this: Jim Petro/Nancy Petro: False Justice: Eight Myths That Convict the Innocent (2011, Kaplan); Daniel S Medwed: Prosecution Complex: America's Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent (2012, NYU Press).

Wenonah Hauter: Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America (2012, New Press): "Local food" farmer, director of Food & Water Watch, explains how agricultural policy has been designed to aid Cargill, Tyson, Kraft, and ConAgra.

Tim Kane: Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution (2012, Macmillan Palgrave): Right-wing economist (Hudson Institute, John McCain), former USAF "intelligence" officer, "startup maven" (to quote Bush economist Glenn Hubbard). I suspect his thesis is right, but I have my doubts that "great leaders" is something the we need the military to have, right now, or just about ever. Bean counters and shrinks, that's another story.

Frederick Kaufman: Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food (2012, Wiley): Starting with Domino's Pizza, hits all the usual stops surveying the contemporary food industry, how it's all related and tied more to finance than to old-fashioned interests like agriculture. Related: Kara Newman: The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets (2012, Columbia University Press).

George Lakoff/Elisabeth Wehling: The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic (paperback, 2012, Free Press): Lakoff thinks we can solve all our problems by coming up with better terminology to frame our arguments -- i.e., something other than what Frank Luntz comes up with. Supposedly this is that.

Chris Lamb: Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (2012, University of Nebraska Press): Previously wrote Blackout: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Spring Training, digs deeper here into the press attitudes that reinforced the color line in baseball, and a few journalists -- mostly blacks and/or communists, by the way -- who thought differently.

Charlie LeDuff: Detroit: An American Autopsy (2013, Penguin Press): Local journalist, has watched Detroit decline from 1.9 million people to fewer than 700,000, as people left the city for the suburbs or beyond while industry crumbled. I recall that when I was visiting Detroit it was hard to find books on the city, but that at least is looking up. For example, another is Mark Binelli: Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis (2012, Metropolitan).

Jonathan Lethem: The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (2011, Doubleday): A novelist based in Brooklyn dumps off scattered essays, mostly lit, some about music. Poking around Amazon's "look inside" I can't get a sense of the whole, but one fragment on "Disnial" is certainly sharp.

Jonathan Lethem: Talking Heads' Fear of Music (paperback, 2012, Continuum): Part of their 33 1/3 series of short books, where a writer picks out a single record and riffs on it. This is number 86, a rare case with a celebrity author.

Audrea Lim, ed: The Case for Sanctions Against Israel (paperback, 2012, Verso Books): Twenty essays here, including Omar Barghouti, Naomi Klein, Ilan Pappe, Joel Beinin, John Berger, Neve Gordon. Sanctions are a relatively non-belligerent way of expressing concern over Israel's manifest unwillingness either to free occupied Palestinians or to treat them equitably. Sanctions helped to tip the balance in South Africa to end the apartheid regime. At some point I fear they will be necessary to make any degree of progress toward peace and justice in Israel-Palestine. Also see: Omar Barghouti: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (paperback, 2011, Haymarket Books).

William Marsden: Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change (2011, Knopf Canada; paperback, 2012, Vintage Canada): Canadian journalist, so good chance this focuses more on Canadian politics than on riper targets in the US, not that the anti-science opposition in both countries isn't driven by the same oil and coal companies. Author previously wrote a book on oil shale: Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesn't Seem to Care).

GJ Meyer: The Borgias: The Hidden History (2013, Bantam): Of interest mostly, I suspect, if you've followed Neil Jordan's TV series and want to fill in some details, although it looks like this book takes some unexpected turns. Also available, and perhaps more conventional: Christopher Hibbert: The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431-1919 (2008; paperback, 2009, Mariner Books).

Loretta Napoleoni: Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do (2011; paperback, 2012, Seven Stories Press): Previously wrote Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality (2008), and ups the snark quotient here. Certainly is the case that China's economic growth has outpaced ever corner of the capitalist world for at least the last decade.

Mark Owen/Kevin Maurer: No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (2012, Dutton): Also subtitled, The Autobiography of a Navy Seal. Second guy up the stairs. First guy to cash in. Isn't that -- making a killing out of a killing -- what America is really all about?

Joel Salatin: Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (2011; paperback, 2012, Center Street): The Virginia farmer who loomed so large in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma speaks for himself -- not for the first time, either: previous books include: You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and Succeed in a Farming Enterprise (paperback, 1998, Polyface); Holy Cows & Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food (paperback, 2005, Polyface); Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front (paperback, 2007, Polyface); The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer (paperback, 2010, Polyface).

Josh Schonwald: The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches From the Future of Food (2012, Harper Collins): Enthusiastic survey of speculations about how food will be engineered and manufactured in 2035.

James Gustave Speth: America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy (2012, Yale University Press): Environmentalist, previously wrote The Bridge at the Edge of the World, which questions growth for growth's sake. Should expand on that here.

John Swenson: New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans (2011; paperback, 2012, Oxford University Press): A rock critic of my generation goes to post-Katrina New Orleans and finds inspiration in the music -- where else would one work?

Gary Wills: Why Priests? A Failed Tradition (2013, Viking): Always an interesting writer, although his commitment to Catholicism has always baffled me, the issue here seeming like someone else's personal fight.

Bob Woodward: The Price of Politics (2012, Simon & Schuster): Another inside-out first draft of history, his second on Obama after four volumes on Bush, the first extolling his genius for leadership and the last wondering where all that went. Focuses on the budget battle with congressional Republicans, not anyone's best hour. New Yorker review: "Woodward, who has here the elements of a devastating study of Washingtonian pettiness, has instead written a book that in many ways exemplifies it."

Luigi Zingales: A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity (2012, Basic Books): Chicago economist, argues that American capitalism is dying as the market gets ever more regulated not just by "anti-market pitchfork populism" but by crony corruption he associates with "Europe and much of the rest of the world." Quick fix: trust the markets.

Still don't have the paperback report together. Maybe next time.

Music: Current count 21302 [21275] rated (+27), 618 [606] unrated (+12).

Big week in that I have three -- count 'em, three -- A- records, but the inside story is that two of them took an awful lot of plays (more than a dozen each) before I set aside my usual rule-of-thumb ("if you can't make up your mind, go with the lower grade"). The exception was Halley, which clicked so fast I didn't get around to writing anything substantial about it. His sax has nearly always been so my minor reservations about past his quartet albums concerned the second horn, but they play less in sync here, with the trombone most often either comping or jumping out front, either of which helps.

Eskelin is doing more of a ballad thing this time, so he's not as aggressive as usual, and Versace doesn't push him much, but the record has some really gorgeous passages. Douglas is just being Douglas: fantastic chops, really explosive at times, but his songs can get strange and veer off in unsettling directions. Irabagon, at least, is too much of a scrapper to get boxed up in a harmony role, so this never goes splat like some Douglas albums have done. I've had an advance (and only that) for a long time, so I was tempted to wait and see if a final arrived.

More plays might help push Snidero over the edge. He's very sharp here, as he was on 2009's Crossfire. The other HMs are certainly just that. Wanted to work in the latest batch of Ivo Perelman records, but it's hard to juggle three at once, and thus far they're all sounding pretty much the same. Also held back potentially good records by John Vanore and Craig Taborn.

Should have a Downloader's Diary this week, followed by a (currently short) Rhapsody Streamnotes -- latter may cut into my jazz time, but got a lot of mail this week.

Berserk! (2013, Rare Noise): Collaboration between singer Lorenzo Esposito Fornasari (aka LEF, has appeared in groups Transgender, Litania, Ashes, Costituto, Somma, Owls, Obake) and bassist Lorenzo Felicati. Extra musicians include some jazz names -- Gianluca Petrella (trombone), Jamie Saft (keybs), Eivind Aarset (guitar) -- but record is rockish, veering toward doom near the end. B+(*) [advance]

Jaimeo Brown: Transcendence (2012 [2013], Motema): Drummer, first album, has a few side-credits going back a decade. Front cover shows an old black church, and features two additional names: JD Allen (tenor sax) and Chris Sholar (guitar, electronics). (Geri Allen might have been a better marketing pick, but she plays on only one track, where Sholar is always there.) The sax is a huge asset here, but everything else is swamped in gospel vocals -- Falu, Marisha Brown, Selah Brown, samples from Gee's Bend Singers -- a meditation on Afro-American history (including a side trip to Ghana) that doesn't seem to resolve much. B+(*)

Dave Douglas Quintet: Time Travel (2012 [2013], Greenleaf Music): Same lineup as last year's Be Still -- Jon Irabagon (tenor sax), Matt Mitchell (piano), Linda Oh (bass), Rudy Royston (drums) -- minus the singer and the solemn tone, which gives them space to repeatedly flare out, even if the compositional matrix is the same fancy, slippery postbop Douglas has honed for years. The main thing you get is chops: he remains in a class by himself, so confident he's game to take on the hottest saxophonist he can find -- Potter, McCaslin, Strickland, now Irabagon, who is having one helluva year. A- [advance]

Ellery Eskelin: Trio New York II (2013, Prime Source): Sax-organ trio, with Gary Versace on the B3 and Gerald Cleaver on drums; second album together, the first dedicated to the tenor saxophonist's organ-playing mother. Likewise, this one is all standards, with a Monk piece, ohers like "Just One of Those Things," "After You've Gone," and "Flamingo." Versace stays clear of the usual soul jazz moves, giving this an odd delicacy, undercutting the spark but bringing out some of Eskelin's most poignant ballad craft. A-

Ken Fowser/Behn Gillece: Top Shelf (2012 [2013], Posi-Tone): Tenor sax and vibes, respectively; fourth album together, songs split 7-3 for Gillece. Backed by a sextet, with trombone, piano, bass, and drums. Postbop, runs fast and slick. B

Rich Halley 4: Crossing the Passes (2012 [2013], Pine Eagle): Tenor saxophonist, has recorded since the 1980s, more so since he's approached retirement age. Quartet adds a second horn -- Michael Vlatkovich's trombone -- to bass (Clyde Reed) and drums (son Carson Halley). A-

Curtis Hasselbring: Number Stations (2012 [2013], Cuneiform): Trombonist, studied at New England Conservatory and played in Boston bands like Either/Orchestra, then moved to New York, recorded in groups as disparate as Slavic Soul Party and Ballin' the Jack, finally recording his own album as The New Mellow Edwards. That band name is "featured" here, on his third album, and they're a motley bunch: Chris Speed (tenor sax, clarinet), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Trevor Dunn (bass), Matt Moran (vibes, marimba), and two drummer/percussionists: Ches Smith and Satoshi Takeishi. Compositions have something to do with numeric codings read off shortwave radio broadcasts, but what you get is a mish-mash studded with brilliant solos, much as you'd expect if a band this talented just winged it. B+(***)

Joe Locke: Lay Down My Heart: Blues & Ballads Vol 1 (2012 [2013], Motéma): Vibraphonist, has close to 30 albums since 1983, most paired off with pianists -- Ryan Cohan here, plus David Finck on bass and Jaimeo Brown on drums. Two originals, seven covers, the most immediately appealing the ones that skip around the edges of the familiar, like "Ain't No Sunshine" (Bill Withers) or "Makin' Whoopee." B+(**)

Chuck Owen & the Jazz Surge: River Runs (2011 [2013], Summit): Composer/arranger, has three albums on Sea Breeze (1995-2004), one on MAMA. Jazz Surge is his big band, introduced on the 1995 album, so it's not like he's jumping on a bandwagon. He subtitles this "A Concerto for Jazz Guitar, Saxophone, & Orchestra," and aside from the prominence of guitar (LaRue Nickerson) and tenor sax (Jack Wilkins), this really is contemporary classical music more than jazz, especially with the added orchestra (flutes, oboes, bassoon and harp, three French horns, and a phalanx of strings, the violin solos reserved Rob Thomas). Seems like I should hate it, and I started to, then lots of little things won me over. Nice booklet. B+(*)

Shamie Royston: Portraits (2011 [2013], self-released): Pianist, first record, piano trio, with Ivan Taylor on bass and her father Rudy Royston on drums, plus a Camille Thurman vocal. Nice piano work, with a gentle swing. Can't say the vocal is a plus. B+(*)

Markus Schwartz/Monvelyno Alexis: Vo-Duo Nou La (2011 [2013], Lakou Brooklyn): Drummer, b. in Copenhagen, Denmark, based for the last twenty years "in the heart of Lakou Brooklyn," "learning the wealth and complexity of traditional Haitian religious music." Alexis, born and raised in Haiti, plays guitar, sings, and co-wrote most of the songs. B

Jim Snidero: Stream of Consciousness (2012 [2013], Savant): Alto saxophonist, 17 albums since 1987, generally a mainstream/postbop guy, but looking for "strong, free-spirited younger players" this time, coming up with Paul Bollenback (guitar), Linda Oh (bass), and Rudy Royston (drums). Actually, he winds up running away from them more often than not. B+(***)

Jacqui Sutton: Notes From the Frontier: A Musical Journey (2012, Toy Blue Typewriter): Interpretive singer from Houston, second album, some kind of concept on discovering America. Starts with an interesting banjo-paced take on "Summertime," then segues to something unsingable. Album continues to teeter like that, with some hot trumpet the high spot. B-

The Verve Jazz Ensemble: It's About Time (2012 [2013], self-released): Five musicians are credited, but only four pictured: Tatum Greenblatt (trumpet), Jon Blanck (tenor sax), Matt Oestreicher (piano), and Josh Feldstein (drums) -- odd man out is bassist Chris DeAngelis. First album, six bop-era standards plus three alternate takes, nice job on each. B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• JD Allen: Grace (Savant)
• Michael Bates/Samuel Blaser Quintet: One From None (Fresh Sound New Talent)
• Han Bennink/Uri Caine: Sonic Boom (816 Music)
• Blue Cranes: Swim (Cuneiform): advance, May 21
• Marc Cary: For the Love of Abbey (Motéma): June 11
• Racquel Cepeda: I'm Confessin' (Peonia Music)
• Michael Dease: Coming Home (D Clef)
• Jonathan Finlayson & Sicilian Defense: Moment & the Message (Pi): May 28
• Ross Hammond Quartet: Cathedrals (Prescott)
• Deborah Latz: Fig Tree (June Moon Productions)
• Liberation Prophecy: Invisible House (self-released)
• Matt Parker: Worlds Put Together (Bynk)
• The Kim Richmond Concert Jazz Orchestra: Artistry: A Tribute to Stan Kenton (MAMA)
• Wallace Roney: Understanding (High Note)
• Alex Syndman: Fortunate Action (self-released)
• Craig Taborn Trio: Chants (ECM)
• Anna Webber: Percussive Mechanics (Pirouet)
• Mark Winkler: The Laura Nyro Project (Cafe Pacific)
• Jon Wirtz: Tourist (self-released)

Some scattered links of special interest. Caught most of them today, which shows it isn't all that hard to find trouble these days:

• Joe Conason: Protecting the 'Second Amendment Rights' of Thugs and Terrorists: The NRA used to push the mantra, "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Now they seem to be saying, if criminals are denied guns, no one will be permitted them.

  As Will Saletan pointed out in Slate last January, the NRA has consistently (and successfully) sought to kill the most basic efforts to keep guns away from convicted criminals and other dangerous characters -- including abusive spouses under court protection orders, drug dealers and even individuals listed on the Justice Department's terrorist watch list.

  In the wake of the Boston bombing, as the nation ponders how to bolster its security, the gun lobby's tender concern for the Second Amendment "rights" of terrorists and thugs ought to permanently discredit them and their political servants.

  Background checks and registration should not prevent people who have legitimate reason for owning guns from doing so, nor establish a "slippery slope" leading to gun confiscation (as is routinely asserted). They would, however, do much to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them, and they would help law enforcement track gun violence. There is, after all, enough gun violence in America to warrant precautions, and it should be clear that there are people who should not be entitled to own or use guns. Reasonable people should be able to find some common ground here, but the NRA has taken a position far beyond reason, and it's time to start calling it what it is: their main purpose is to safeguard the gun-owning rights of criminals, because if criminals can't own guns, no one can.

  As near as I can tell, the NRA is mostly a front for gun manufacturers, and their business is booming because they're able to promote fear -- of crime, of terrorists, and of the government -- into ever more gun sales. For an example of his this works, here's a Wichita Eagle letter from Hank Price, of Goddard, KS:

  I need an AR-15. Furthermore, I need several 30-round magazines to go with it.

  Why, you ask? Well, let's put aside the fact that it is none of your business or, for that matter, none of government's business to ask. (The Second Amendment affirms my right to keep and bear arms.)

  I need an AR-15 because the bad guys have them. I need an AR-15 because the police, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have them. If someone is attempting a home invasion with semi-automatic or even automatic weapons, I don't want to wait the 15 to 20 minutes it takes for the police to arrive with their semi-automatic weapons.

  I need an AR-15 because as long as I and other law-abiding citizens have them, the government will think twice before infringing on the other rights affirmed by the Constitution. That is the real reason we have the Second Amendment. Not so we can hunt. Not so we can target practice. Not so we can defend our home and family until the police come to file their reports. But to protect our rights.

  This is a good example of the NRA business plan: let the "bad guys" have X and "good guys" like Price will have to buy the same thing -- an arms race, which certainly won't stop with AR-15s. Moreover, if the "bad guys" include the US government, Price is already way down the technology curve: they already have helicopters, tanks, snipers, noxious gas, and enough firepower to obliterate your house -- no need to merely "invade" it. Also, that bit about using guns to protect your rights, how's that worked out over time? From the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791 up until any recent example you can cite, not very well. To pick one relatively recent example, Leonard Peltier is in jail for life for allegedly defending himself against federal agents. Why should Price expect to fare better? The fact is that the only way to defend yourself against the government is through the courts -- your best friend there, by the way, is the ACLU. Better still, elect a government that will respect your rights -- shouldn't be that big of a problem, if you really are one of the "good guys." If not, at least you have the NRA working for you.

  By the way, here's today's Crowson:

  

• David Graeber: There's No Need for All This Economic Sadomasochism: More on austerity politics, piling on the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle:

  The morality of debt has proved spectacularly good politics. It appears to work just as well whatever form it takes: fiscal sadism (Dutch and German voters really do believe that Greek, Spanish and Irish citizens are all, collectively, as they put it, "debt sinners," and vow support for politicians willing to punish them) or fiscal masochism (middle-class Britons really will dutifully vote for candidates who tell them that government has been on a binge, that they must tighten their belts, it'll be hard, but it's something we can all do for the sake of our grandchildren). Politicians locate economic theories that provide flashy equations to justify the politics; their authors, like Rogoff, are celebrated as oracles; no one bothers to check if the numbers actually add up.

  Also on Reinhart-Rogoff: New Tools for Reproducible Results.

• Glenn Greenwald: What Rights Should Dzokhar Tsarnaev Get and Why Does It Matter?: When I heard Sen. Lindsey Graham insisting that the Boston Marathon bomber should be declared an "enemy combatant" I thought that was the dumbest thing I've heard him say in, well, weeks. As I understand it, the main purpose of the "enemy combatant" designation is to allow the Feds to hold people indefinitely they suspect but don't have any evidence against, at least that wouldn't hold up in court. Assuming they got the right person, the odds that they wouldn't be able to secure a conviction are vanishingly small -- unless they did something really stupid, like waterboarding him in Guantanamo. Tsarnaev is a US citizen, captured in the US after (allegedly) committing a major crime on US territory. Isn't that what the US justice system is about? Then I read that Obama's DOJ decided not to "Mirandize" him, as if not reminding him that he has rights under the constitution strips him of those rights. To get on top of this, I consulted Glenn Greenwald, and he explains it all here.

  Now, the cheers for this erosion of Miranda are led not by right-wing Supreme Court justices such as William Rehnquist (who wrote the opinion in Quarles), but by MSNBC pundits like former Obama campaign media aide Joy Reid, who -- immediately upon the DOJ's announcement -- instantly became a newly minted Miranda expert in order to loudly defend the DOJ's actions. MSNBC's featured "terrorism expert" Roger Cressey -- who, unbeknownst to MSNBC viewers, is actually an executive with the intelligence contractor Booz Allen -- also praised the DOJ's decision not to Mirandize the accused bomber (if you want instant, reflexive support for the US government's police and military powers, MSNBC is the place to turn these days). [ . . . ]

  Just 30 years ago, Quarles was viewed as William Rehnquist's pernicious first blow against Miranda; now, it's heralded by MSNBC Democrats as good, just and necessary for our safety, even in its new extremist rendition. That's the process by which long-standing liberal views of basic civil liberties, as well core Constitutional guarantees, continue to be diluted under President Obama in the name of terrorism. [ . . . ]

  Needless to say, Tsarnaev is probably the single most hated figure in America now. As a result, as Bazelon noted, not many people will care what is done to him, just like few people care what happens to the accused terrorists at Guantanamo, or Bagram, or in Yemen and Pakistan. But that's always how rights are abridged: by targeting the most marginalized group or most hated individual in the first instance, based on the expectation that nobody will object because of how marginalized or hated they are. Once those rights violations are acquiesced to in the first instance, then they become institutionalized forever, and there is no basis for objecting once they are applied to others, as they inevitably will be (in the case of the War on Terror powers: as they already are being applied to others).

  Also see Greenwald's earlier post, The Boston Bombing Produces Familiar and Revealing Reactions. Greenwald also links to an interesting piece by Ali Abuninah: Was the Boston Bombing Really a "Terrorist" Act? Aside from the specialized legal aspects, I have no problem describing any bombing as an act of terror (including those bombs released by US drones in Pakistan and elsewhere), just because of its intrinsically indiscriminate nature. But at this point there is very little that can be said about the motivations and intentions of the perpetrators. But somewhere I read that this was the first "terrorist attack" on US soil since the November 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood by Major Nidal Hasan -- a statement that overlooks dozens of mass shootings since, many (e.g., the recent murder of schoolchildren in Newtown, CT) truly terrorful. At the very least, we've managed to muddle up the language here: the 9/11 attack were both terrorizing and a radical affront to the image of US power as projected across the world. The Boston bombing and the Newtown shootings were both terrorizing, but what they have to do with US power is still mostly confined to the fevered imaginations of US politicians, who, as always, are happy to use whatever tragedy is at hand to further their own interests.

• Glenn Greenwald: Margaret Thatcher and Misapplied Death Etiquette: Missed this post from April 8, but still timely. The fact is, when you hear that someone has died, you remember what they did. If what you say then usually seems positive, that may be because we are predisposed to forget or forgive the bad and cherish the good. Or perhaps one feels a tinge of relief that the threat of the bad has passed. But the threat of someone like Thatcher hasn't passed with her, and it would be grossly unresponsible to gloss over much of what she actually did. As Greenwald says:

  This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts. I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won't repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here.

  But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms.

• Ed Kilgore: Fertilizer Explosion Update: Weak Inspections and Strong Kolaches: While the nation's media was fixated on the bombings in Boston, a far larger (and deadlier) explosion occurred in the place where you might most expect it, a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, but nobody was looking there:

  The explosion shone a harsh light on the US fertilizer industry and the weak, toothless regulation thereof. One problem Plumer notes is that, "the Occupational Safety and Health Administration tends to be understaffed and inspections are relatively infrequent. The Texas fertilizer industry has only seen six inspections in the past five years -- and the West Texas Fertilizer Co. facility was not one of them." This was despite the West facility receiving a $2,300 fine from the EPA in 2006 for poor risk-management planning. The last time the facility had been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was in 1985. Think Progress reports that the plant had been inspected in 2011 by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which resulted in a $10,100 fine for missing placards and lack of security plans. The fine was reduced in 2012 after improvements were made at the plant.

  Fertilizer explosions are relatively common in history. There have been 17 unintended explosions of ammonium nitrate causing casualties since 1921. The worst of these was the explosion of a cargo ship in the Port of Texas City that killed 581 people and injured 3500.

• Mike Konczal: Mapping Out the Arguments Against Chained CPI: Konczal has been linked to by everyone commenting on Reinhart-Rogoff recently (see Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff and There Are Serious Problems, followed up by Andrindrajit Dube: Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt). Here he analyzes another real bad idea: Obama's budget proposal to cut Social Security by fudging the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). (If you were really paying attention, you'll recall that this has already been done once before, by Clinton as a favor for Greenspan: in the 1990s, the government changed how the consumer price index (CPI) was calculated, nominally lowering inflation and thereby reducing Social Security COLA increases.) With "friends" like Obama (and Clinton) you enemies are already halfway home.

  If you look into the data, the elderly spend a lot more of their limited money on housing, utilities, and medical care. Health care costs have been rising rapidly over the past several decades, and it is difficult to substitute on other necessary, fixed-price goods like utilities. With the notable exception of college costs, the things urban wage earners spend money on haven't increased in price as quickly as what the elderly purchase. As a result, the CPI-E (the index tailored to the elderly) has increased 3.3 percent a year from 1982 to 2007, while the CPI-W (tailored to wage earners) has only increased 3 percent a year. [ . . . ]

  You'll hear arguments that a Grand Bargain is necessary, so it's better to bring Social Security into long-term balance now, with Democrats at the helm, than in the future, when there will be less time and an uncertain governance coalition. You can get fewer cuts and more revenue than you would otherwise and take the issue off the table for the foreseeable future to concentrate on other priorities.

  But if that's your idea, then this is a terrible deal and sets a terrible precedent, because this deal would accomplish none of your goals. You'd cut Social Security without putting in any new revenue. And it wouldn't be sufficient to close the long-term gap, so the issue would stay on the table. Indeed, the deficit hawks would probably be emboldened, viewing this as a "downpayment" on future cuts, and require any future attempts to get more revenue for Social Security, say by raising the payroll tax cap, to involve significant additional cuts.

  Konczal also points out that the longer you live, the more "chained CPI" eats into your check; also the more likely you are to have exhausted your savings. The net result is to plunge the very elderly into poverty. One thing he didn't mention is that some big expenses, like nursing home care, are means-tested. The effect of this is to first confiscate all of your savings before making you a ward of a state that has never been known for generous welfare policies. Over the last twenty-some years, we've done a lot to lighten estate taxes for the rich, never noticing that for the poor the effective tax rate is 100%.

• Matthew Yglesias: Banning Late-Term Abortions Reduces the Quality of Late-Term Abortion Providers: Same for extra-legal bans, like murder. Talks about the Kermit Gosnell case in Philadelphia, but he starts with a more commonplace example:

  I used to buy illegal drugs sometimes and in addition to me, personally, not being a huge fan of said substances I really didn't enjoy the purchasing process. The quality of customer service was just deplorable. And the problem, roughly speaking, was that even though it was not in practice all that difficult to obtain marijuana you still had to get it from a drug dealer rather than, say, a highly efficient global retailer operating with industry best practices and huge economies of scale. And for better or for worse, that's one of the goals of drug prohibition in the United States. It's not simply that making something illegal deters some people from use. It inhibits the emergence of above-board providers with strong franchises and brand value and robust competition between multiple high quality providers.

  It also opens up opportunities for police to profit through bribes or other favors, and it makes it easier for criminals to rob drug dealers, and it opens up drug dealers to further crime, etc. But back to medicine: any operation is more likely to be performed competently by someone who does it often, thereby developing skill and experience. One reason universal health care is better even for the people who can afford whatever you call our health care system is that doctors learn from experience.