You’re getting sleepy…

I was talking to Will earlier about the Stanford football team. Many people mistakenly refer to them as the “Cardinals” but they are actually the “Cardinal.” It seems weird to people, but it just means that Stanford is such a badass team that it only takes one of them to fuck you up. Or it could be that they are named after the color, which just so happens to be the school and team color.

First some background. Three of the Ivy League schools are named after colors: Cornell (Big Red), Dartmouth (Big Green), and, most notable, Harvard (Crimson). There is also Brown. Boy, do I crack myself up! I kid the Bears! Anyway, back to Stanford.

Throughout the 1960s, Stanford was the Indians. So in 1970, they decided that maybe it was insensitive for a bunch of rich white kids (plus the football and basketball teams) to have a stereotypical if not fully racist mascot.

What are a bunch of pretentious third basers to do? Being smart, they thought, “What are we?” Unfortunately “Entitled Rich White Kids” didn’t really work. Plus there was the eternal question, “Glasses or no glasses?” So they asked again, “What are we like?” The answer to this was obvious: other entitled rich white kids. And where are other entitled rich white kids? Why in the Ivy League, of course!

Clearly, Stanford wasn’t going to be the “Big” anything. I mean, let’s be real: Cornell? Dartmouth? Please! But Harvard: that had possibilities. But rather than go with a color that at least all girls know, Stanford went with one that was not only obscure, it was confusing!

So when you hear “Cardinal,” think “Clever but Entitled Rich White Kids.” (Not quite so white any more.) Gooo Cardinal!

I Almost Forgot

That wasn’t what I was writing you about. After doing a little research online to make sure what I remembered about Stanford was right (it was), I moved on to other things. So I opened a new webpage and there was a Google Ad staring at me regarding, wait for it… Stanford Continuing Education. The bastards!

But what did I do. I clicked! Because it is always right to click! Read my article: Ad Revenue. It’s important.

Will was at K-Mart tonight and he sent me a couple of pictures of… Chia Obama and Chia Romney.

This is part of the Chia Freedom of Choice™ series. You aren’t limited to Obama and Romney. Oh no! There is a Chia Gingrich and a Chia Ron Paul too. Sadly, no Chia Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, or Rick Santorum. And shockingly, there is no Chia Herman Cain. I mean, honestly, if there was one nationally known politician who you’d like to grow plant hair on, wouldn’t it be Cain? Wouldn’t that just be perfect?!

All four candidates are all still available at the low low price of only $17.99 (or less for Obama). Collect them all!

• Mitt Romney
• Ron Paul
• Newt Gingrich
• Barack Obama

I know if they cost less, Will would have bought me one.

Digby speculates that for Mitt Romney, “Charitable giving to a church that primarily operates highly successful commercial businesses is just another tax dodge.” I think this is true. Romney doesn’t strike me as a particularly spiritual person. He seems incredibly materialistic, and I just don’t believe that one can accumulate great wealth if he is truly interested in the soul.

Mitt Romney does have a religion that he’s passionate about. He is also a Mormon. The religion of his passion is Greed.

I thought about this earlier while reading a new article by Robert Reich, What Mitt Romney Really Represents. He notes that we’ve had rich Presidents before, but that they were explicitly working against their own class interests. Romney’s only clear policy proposal is to lower taxes on himself and others like him. That makes him different from the Roosevelts and the Kennedys.

Evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Romney couldn’t have become the Republican presidential nominee in 1968, for example. Philosophical groundwork had to be laid, not just for the Republican base, but for Mitt Romney himself. And it has been a long time coming.

I always think this whole thing started with Gordon Gekko, but that’s not true. Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser were just picking up on a trend that was already well underway. In fact, Ivan Boesky once gave a famous speech with the line, “Greed is right.” Although everyone remembers the line “Greed is good,” Gekko follows that immediately with “Greed is right”:

What I’ve always found fascinating about this scene and Wall Street generally, is how opinion on the film is bifurcated. Many people think that Gekko is a cool character. He has shaped a couple generations of young, mostly poor but aggressive, men. The men of Romney’s social class never needed Gekko because they that their Ivan Boeskys to look up to.

Many pundits have bemoaned the fact that Romney hasn’t had an opportunity to talk about his Mormonism. I think this goes back to the Gore 2000 campaign where he also was considered stiff. Many people claimed this was because his handlers wouldn’t let him talk about his environmentalism. This may be true, although I think the whole observation is questionable because I didn’t find Gore stiff. The idea is that if Romney were allowed to talk about his Mormonism, he would show what a passionate man he is. What rubbish!

Romney has been allowed to talk about his passion excessively—the whole election cycle! He has only been constrained by the fact that most people find his one true religion—Greed—repugnant. And this, I think, is why he seems so much less “stiff” when talking in private to his donors.

[1] Yes, I know that “good” does not rhyme with “food.” Tell that to the idiot who wrote “God is great”!

Last week on This American Life the episode was called Back to School. It was very good—as always. It discussed non-cognitive skills and how they are perhaps more important to how well a student does in life than cognitive skills. In fact, one expert noted that the modern testing fascination is geared not to what matters most, but to what is easiest to test. We test math because it is easy to test, even though impulse control (which is hard to test) is certainly as important. It is like the old joke of the guy looking under a street light for his lost keys, even though he dropped them half a block away. “The light’s better here.” Everyone sees the ridiculousness of the joke even while they continue to think that testing is a panacea.

Another point brought up is how students from low income families are harmed by the stress in their lives. And they are particularly harmed in terms of non-cognitive skills. It is hard to have good impulse control when you are stressed to the breaking point. A doctor who has studied this used a peculiar example. She mentioned seeing violence on the streets. I’m sure that’s an issue, but I don’t think it is the main one.

You may have read about the drop in life expectancies of the least educated whites over the last two decades. This is not a small drop; it is 4 years; that’s 5% of a life! It isn’t clear what the problem is, so we get a laundry list:

Kathleen Geier has a different take on this. She notes that the Whitehall Studies of British civil servants found that those at lower pay grades had higher mortality rates than those at higher grades. She continues:

The biggest problem that I see in the lives of poor people I know is economic uncertainty. There may be all kinds of stressors beyond it, but they are fleeting. Economic insecurity hangs over every minute of the day and blankets yours dreams at night. And this is not just true of adults; children feel it profoundly, even or perhaps especially because they don’t understand it.

There is a recent conservative meme to the effect of, “We believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.” It sounds great, right? But what it really means is, “We believe in inequality of opportunity, and inequality of outcomes.” The fact is that there cannot be equality of opportunity if the outcomes are too unequal.

Leave aside issues like local funding of school districts where rich kids have good public schools and poor kids have bad public schools.[1] If a child’s home life is bad, his success in school and life will be bad. If we really care about having some amount of equality of opportunity we must work to provide everyone with a living wage and some semblance of security.

[1] So many things go along with this. The Richmond Public Library, for example, is a terrible place. They have two ancient computers and a very old collection. By comparison, the Sonoma Country Library is the bright city on the hill. Of course, it is nothing like the libraries around my sister in Agoura Hills.

I really don’t like Josh Barro. It’s not just his politics. There is something visceral to my disdain. It could be that in some fundamental way, he’s too much like me. I don’t like to think these things. But whenever I dislike someone more than is strictly reasonable, I have to consider everything. I’ve written about Up With Chris Hayes two times recently, and both times I went out of my way to complain about Josh Barro: in August and September.

Regardless of my feelings toward Barro, I fully admit that he’s a smart guy. And he’s very knowledgeable about one thing I find even more confusing than economics: finance. And earlier today, he pointed out something that shocked me in its cynicism. (I mean that as a compliment.)

As you have probably heard, Romney paid more federal income taxes in 2011 than he had to. He did this so that his promise that he’d never paid less than 13% would be true. But that’s not the end of the story as Barro points out:

There are a couple of notable things about this. First: wow! I knew you could amend your taxes because Romney has done it very publicly a few times. But I didn’t see this one coming. This is like watching a great slight of hand artist work.[1] I love it!

The other thing isn’t about Romney; it’s about Josh Barro. Maybe I was too hasty with that compliment. Maybe he’s just clever and not cynical. At least he’s not as cynical as I am. The first thing I thought after reading that was, “Why would he amend the return only if he loses?”

The truth is that I’m sure that Romney’s accountants are every bit as clever as Barro and as cynical as I am. It’s already in the works. On Wednesday, November 7, Romney’s people will file that amendment. Interest on a quarter million dollars adds up quick. There’s no time to waste!

[1] Another master of chicanery, Ricky Jay:

I think that Randy Newman has been lacking artistically the last many years, but he’s released a new song that I really like. It has an obvious connection to Sail Away. This one is called I’m Dreaming. The whole line is, “I’m dreaming of a white President.” And an AIF version of the file is available for free. It’s worth downloading.

The ad for the new season of The Simpsons is really great. A couple of things stand out.

First, there is Homer’s summation of democracy in America, “Oh man, not another election! Why do we have to choose our leaders? Isn’t that what we have the Supreme Court for?”

One of the best things about The Simpsons has always been the signs in the background. My favorite was a sign at the baseball field that read, “Springfield Savings & Loan: 1903-1991;1992-.” Pretty great. Here we have two political signs:

“Obama: Keep Hoping.”

That is literally the Obama campaign’s message, although (as Mitt Romney would say) inelegantly stated. Here is the other:

“Romney: I Have a House in Your State!”

I’m tired of the all the discussion about Mitt Romney’s 47% remarks. But I want to say one (hopefully) last thing about it. Earlier this week, Ezra Klein published the graph on the left (click on it to see it at regular size). I know that I’ve been talking about Klein a lot recently, but as I said, he’s been really insightful.

What this graph shows is that the percentage of people who paid no federal income taxes was roughly 20% through the mid-1980s. There are three big reasons why it has gone up: Reagan, Bush Jr, and the Lesser Depression. There isn’t much to say about the Lesser Depression; when economic times are bad, there are more poor people who will not pay any federal income taxes. We see this in the 1970s, when the recession brought the number up and then in the 1980s, the recovery brought the number back down.[1]

What Reagan and Bush Jr did is very interesting. They both wanted to pass tax cuts that were highly regressive: giving the rich far more benefit than the poor. This is an article of faith on the right. About the only thing we absolutely know about a Romney administration is that it would lower taxes on the rich. But there’s a problem with this idea. You can’t get the 90% of the country who would get nothing from a tax cut to support such a proposal. So Reagan and Bush Jr offered minor tax cuts for the poor and middle class. One of the results of these cuts was to increase the percentage of people who paid no federal income tax.

This is just history and one can agree or disagree that these tax cuts were a good idea. But there is an outrage that has been going on for a while—Fox News has been pushing this idea that it is somehow wrong that almost half of the people don’t pay any federal income tax. (They often make matters worse by claiming that these people pay “no taxes” full stop.) Other conservative media outlets have done the same thing. And many Republican politicians have followed suit.

Here’s the outrage: the same people complaining about the poor not paying federal income taxes are the same people who created this situation to push through tax cuts for the rich! The Republicans are abusing the poor on both sides of this issue. First, they give the poor tiny tax cuts to justify enormous tax cuts for the rich. Once that’s done, they claim that the poor don’t pay enough in taxes.

There is more to this, of course. The Republicans who claim to always be for tax cuts are half-in for raising taxes on the poor. I say “half-in” because there are a lot of conservatives who see the trap here. (I don’t think they actually care about taxing the poor.) This is not real hypocrisy, however. The Republicans are clearly only interested in tax cuts for the wealthy. We saw this in the payroll tax fight earlier this year. But their rhetoric is always that taxes are bad for everyone. So they certainly seem to be hypocrites on this subject.

If we let them, the Republicans will raise taxes on the poor to a higher rate than it was in the early 80s when this madness started. But apparently, now is not the time. Romney is back tracking as fast as he can. But don’t think the issue will be dead for long. The poor are too convenient a punching bag for Republicans. You know how bullies love to pick on the weak.

[1] President Carter gets a bunch of blame for the late 70s recession while President Reagan gets a bunch of credit for “Morning in America.” This is wrong. Both the recession and the recovery were due to Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. In order to reduce inflation, he raised interest rates in the 1970s. This pretty much guaranteed that Carter would be a one term president. Once inflation was under control, he lowered interest rates and the economy took off. This pretty much guaranteed that Reagan would be a two term president. See the Wikipedia Stagflation article for more information.

I think this is good advice. But my thinking about consciousness and metaphysics—especially epistemology—makes me believe that better advice would be, “Don’t Believe Anything You Think.”

I just hope that this driver is constantly thinking that he should have bought a Honda. No, no! A ford. No… I know! Damn!

I just read a really interesting, thought provoking, and humane article An Open Letter to My Fat Father, From His Fat, Trans Son: Or, Fatherhood, Fatness, and Family. It is about coming to accept ones weight. But there is a wrinkle: it is by a transgender man.

On one level, I identify with the transgender community. I don’t feel comfortable in my own body—I never have. I wish that there were such an easy solution to my problem as changing my sex. The fact that the very idea seems ridiculous to me makes me think that this is not the primary issue that transgender people face.

All my life, I have battled gender identities. This was not an internal struggle. I’ve never felt particular gender bound. I’m very comfortable with my natural desires which are hardly typically male. On the other hand, although most men see me as effeminate, gay, or nonexistent, in an anthropological sense, I am very male. In fact, when I get manly men alone, I am often shocked by their girly underside. It seems that I am different only in lacking any respect for gender roles. I am a real man because I am a real man.

I would go further. I tend to find manly men pathetic. As I’ve gotten older, I can see very clearly how cowardly they are. Unlike me, they aren’t sure that they are “real” men. They’re like closeted gays, afraid that their friends will think less of them because they like soap operas or knitting. And that’s no way to live.

How is it to feel so completely wrong that you go under the knife? I have no idea. I won’t go to the doctor until my blood pressure is down to 60 over 40. So I’ve got to believe that transgender people are very serious about this. They deserve whatever can be done to feel normal (and not, as is stated in the article, just those who can afford it).

Regardless of this, I can’t but believe that the cultural norms that teach men that they can’t knit are the also partly to blame for people who feel they are the wrong gender. But if only for the male knitting fans, we need to get past our gender restrictions as much as we do our fat hatred.