Ray Collins of the two really great Mothers of Invention albums died on 24 December 2012 at Pomona Valley Hospital in Claremont, California. He left the band because of its increasing commitment to comedy over music. Zappa did have that problem. Unfortunately, the comedy wasn’t that good. And certainly the albums from We’re Only in it for the Money onward are weaker than the first two.

Collins had been living in his van off Social Security and songwriting royalties the last few years. The Associated Press reports that he was a “well-known character and conversationalist on the streets of Claremont.” He was 74.

Here is Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder, a song that Collins co-wrote with Zappa on the first album, Freak Out!

The other great album (the best of The Mothers, and Collins’ favorite) is Absolutely Free.

Wonk Blog put together the favorite graphs from the last year of various policy wonks. It has some great graphs. Most I’ve seen, but some were quite new to me—especially about the environment, because frankly, I don’t keep up on it enough.

They did, however, not ask Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. And I think I know what his favorite graph would have been. Not only has he used it many times, but so have I. It compares how changing demographics (people retiring) will affect our standard of living versus how productivity growth will do so. Bottom line: productivity growth (even assuming an unrealistically low rate) swamps demographic changes:

One of the most striking graphs is from Chrystia Freeland who offers The Great Gatsby Curve. It shows what I talk about often: a society cannot have great inequality and great opportunity. The more equal a society is, the easier it is for the poor to advance. As the United States gets more unequal, it turns more and more into a caste system where people are stuck wherever they start:

The following graph is from MIT economics professor Michael Greenstone. It deals with the true economic costs of various energy sources. Note that when they are all taken into account, coal becomes an extremely expensive fuel. But as I wrote earlier today, we have a system that cares only about short-term profits. All of these costs should be taken into account:

And there is this great chart from XKCD, offered by Princeton neuroscience professor Sam Wang:

Check out the whole article. There are a lot of interesting graphs. There is also a really not interesting graph offered by fucktard Glenn Hubbard to show that we shouldn’t worry about taxing the rich. I would have thought that by now he would be too embarrassed to even leave the house. Wait! I forgot: he’s a conservative. They can’t feel things like embarrassment and shame.

Afterword

If you don’t know Glenn Hubbard, check out this two and a half minute clip from the great documentary Inside Job:

He was also Mitt Romney’s economic adviser.

Update (27 December 2012 3:15 pm)

Here is Thom Hartmann interviewing Glenn Hubbard. The man can’t even justify his own beliefs. He just talks rubbish.

Are you worried about the Fiscal Cliff? I am! I’m worried that I will have to read another hysterical article about how we are going to go into recession if we don’t reach a deal this week. And I’ll tell you this: I won’t even go into a Starbucks until this is over. I don’t want to see “come together” written on coffee cups. In fact, I’ve decided to boycot Starbucks for the rest of my life. They have a terrible tea selection anyway. But more to the point, the whole “come together” campaign is just a way to push Democrats to yield when they have the upper hand. After all, the Starbucks CEO is part of Fix the Debt.

It appears, as usual, that the only ones who are really worried about the Fiscal Cliff are the elites. Dean Baker reports on the most recent Conference Board Index of consumer confidence. They report two indexes. One is a very reliable measure: current conditions index. This measures how much stuff (seasonally adjusted and all that) people are actually buying. This is way up: 62.8 this month, up from 57.4 last month.

And then there is a kind of black magic measure: future expectations index. It is way down: 66.5 this month, down from 80.9 last month. But this is just an indication that most of the people in the media are screaming about the Fiscal Cliff. Armageddon! Be afraid! Be very afraid!

So when you see news stories that say that consumer confidence is down, you will know it is wrong. The base index is more or less the average of these two numbers. What people are hearing is that the future looks bleak. What people are doing indicates what they think the future is bright. And it is, as long as the politicians and other powerful people don’t screw it up.

Update (27 December 2012 11:16)

Suzy Khimm over at Wonk Blog quotes Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s open letter to his employees:

This indicates that Schultz doesn’t even understand what the Fiscal Cliff is. That’s the bizarre thing about all this hysteria: it is mostly by people who are normally hysterical about the budget deficit. This is exactly the opposite. If they really cared about the deficit, they would welcome the Fiscal Cliff. I’ve argued before that what they really care about is killing entitlement programs. That’s why the first step in the Simpson-Bowles proposal was a big tax cut. But it also seems that these people just want to be upset about something. Too much debt? Horror! Too little debt? Horror! Whatever? Horror!

Last night I watched Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Generally, it is your usual kind of 1960s style science fiction romp. It has dorky over-lit sets, silly science, and way too much plucky American can-do attitude. But there are fundamental problems with the story that it tells.

The biggest problem is its full-throttled support of American Exceptionalism. Admiral Harriman Nelson goes to the United Nation to discuss what to do about the Van Allen belts having caught on fire. (This, by the way, makes no sense.) He tells them about a plan to fire a nuclear missile at the belts, thus extinguishing the fire. A scientist from Vienna has calculated that the fire will burn itself out. The other scientists accept his calculations and dismiss Nelson’s idea as too dangerous. Nelson tells them that he will only listen to the President of the United States.

This is pretty bad, but it is entirely American. “The only reason I came to the UN was to look good. Now rubber stamp my idea and let me go do what I’m going to do anyway!” And Nelson does. He rushes back to his sub and takes off, very likely drowning some cops who were trying to stop him. When it comes time to shoot the nuke, he cannot contact the president and so just goes ahead without the okay. (Note: he didn’t try to contact the president right away when he left New York.) But what’s the big deal with exploding a nuclear bomb in the magnetosphere? What could possibly go wrong?

Generally, a character like Nelson is a villain or an object of pity. He shows all the signs of being crazy, and that is clearly where the plot indicates it is going. I figured that eventually Nelson would determine that the scientists at the UN were correct—that the fire would burn itself out—and he would abort. He seemed a little crazy, but I figured he was a positive enough character for the film to ease him back from the abyss. That is not the way it went.

Instead, there was a saboteur on board. And, of course, it turned out to be the female scientist (Joan Fontaine who was surprisingly good and who is still alive at 95). She was trying to stop Nelson because (1) she agreed with the scientist from Vienna and (2) Nelson did show all the signs of being crazy. But he wasn’t! Instead, he was just a plucky American who knew what was best for the world. In the end he shoots his wad and saves the day.

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!

I am as fond of the romantic hero archetype as anyone. But if Achilles was wrong, Hector would kill him and the Trojans would have won the war. In this case, if Nelson is wrong, everyone dies. But note: there is no indication that the fire would not have burned itself out. So even in the context of the film, Nelson is not necessarily right. And the science is such that roughly half of the radiation would have come back down to earth. So unless Nelson was right that the fire would not burn itself out, his solution was indeed bad even though it succeeded in its primary purpose.

The film is a good example of American hubris. In certain ways it is the Zero Dark Thirty of its day. And just like it, it doesn’t shape public opinion; it is shaped by public opinion. Because the base idea in both films is what Americans always think: we are always right and thus the means are always justified.

I think death is, gratefully, final. It’s no different from the state that we were in before we were conceived. Even though life is very short—I’m fond of pointing out to people that the average human life is less than 1,000 months long, which is a good reason for not wasting time if one can help it—that fact provides a definite and useful terminus ad quem. It means that the things that you want to achieve must be achieved here. You must work: “work while you have light,” as the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Henri-Frederic Amiel said. But it also means that in the end there will be a wonderful rest from it all. You will survive in the way science tells us, which is that our constituents return to the elements, and become part of nature, and remain permanently part of nature, because that, after all, is what the conservation-of-energy law tells us. We’re not going to disappear entirely—in the form of the bits that we’re made of.

—A. C. Grayling
Interview in Philosophy Bites

The following video has over 4 million views, so you may well have seen it. I’m only putting it up so that I don’t lose it. Noah Kalina is a photographer (he seems to do collages). He took a picture of himself every day from the age of 19. He is now 32. You get to watch him grow (?) from a boy into a man. After watching it, I felt 12.5 years older.

Don Cupitt is my kind of theologian. Of course, I generally like theologians. What I don’t like are apologist. In other words: I’m keen on the search for God, I’m not on the process of trying to shoehorn God into some existing dogma. To Cupitt, God is an invention: first there was Man and He created God. This is discussed in the chapter “Non-Realism About God” in Philosophy Bites.

What I most like about his thinking is the idea that God is an evolving concept. He argues that Christianity managed to evolve well enough up to the 17th century, but it has had trouble since then. This is understandable. After all, life wasn’t all that different between the time of Jesus and the middle of the 1600s. But I have long wondered why it is that people in the modern world continue to cling to a religion that was developed for people 2000 years earlier. Certainly we have very different needs.

Just look at the diversity of our culture. The 2000 year old solution to dealing with neighbors who were gay or worked on Sunday was to stone them to death. Admittedly, modern Christians have chosen simply not to abide by their religion on these points. But they continue to stick with it in less drastic ways. This is what leads to Christian calls to deny gay rights and close liquor stores on Sunday.

There are much more fundamental ways that Christianity fails the modern believer, however. To me, the greatest modern problem is social alienation. And to this, Christianity offers nothing but the shared belief of the one belief people most distinctly do not share. And this leads to things like new age mysticism, which may lack much depth, but at least is devoid of dogma.

I’m not sure why the modern era lacks any important theological movement. A 2000 (or 1400 or 3000) year old religion has little to offer us in concrete terms. But it sure is great for justifying the worst kind of bigotry. And that’s another issue we could use some help on.

If you step back from this for a second, you realize that what they are saying is “we are not for marriage equality, but we are for tolerance.” So, quite literally, what is being suggested is that certain people will be tolerated instead of made equal. And that is the way tolerance has operated for most of its history in the modern West: it is always a kind of substitute for equality, or supplement to equality. Now, again, that is not the worst possibility if the alternative is extinction or persecution or death or exclusion from basic rights. Again, I am not against tolerance, but I do think that our tendency to just get sleepy and happy when we hear the word “tolerance” is a problem.

—Wendy Brown
Interview in Philosophy Bites

The following chart was put together by Todd Lindeman at the Washington Post. It shows the top causes of violent death by age group in the United States. The most striking thing is that for people over 35 years old, gun suicide is by far the most common cause of death. And for adults and teens less than that, gun murder is by far the biggest cause of death. It is a sobering chart:

Click on the image to see in at full resolution.