My friend Will and I discuss computers a lot. This is mostly because Will is only really interested in computers (and for the last couple of months beer brewing). And one thing we discuss a lot is privacy and the fact that after the lives that we have led, we don’t worry about it all. We worry about it for our clients, of course. Some of their lives might be private. And that is why I really liked this new commercial from Microsoft:

My first wife[1] was a privacy freak. And as with most people who are really hung up on privacy, she had very little of interest to hide. Compare this to me—I have a public enough background that I can’t get a regular job. Oh well. You either embrace it or embrace it. I choose to embrace it.

Anyway, I think this ad works because it is true. Google does do that. In fact, they are constantly offering me opportunities to get my MBA—probably because I write a lot about economics. And the truth is, I used to be bothered by it. And I think more people probably should be bothered by it. Of course, there a much better (And free!) alternatives to Microsoft.

Think different. Not Apple, silly! Non-corporate!

[1] This is from The Girl’s On Fire:

I can’t explain why I’m writing this article. Too much caffeine? Maybe. Feeling intellectually insecure? Always. Or is it just that people as brilliant as Matt Yglesias should be spanked publicly when providing the smallest of justification? Yep! I think that’s the one.

Yglesias is one of my very favorite bloggers because he writes on a lot of different topics and I find him by turns insightful and oafish. I very often disagree with him but he usually makes a pretty good argument and never has uninteresting opinions. And sometimes, very rarely, he makes a math error that allows me to pounce! Ha ha ha!

I’ll bet Mr. Yglesias didn’t think twice when he wrote this earlier this morning:

This is so delicious that it is hard to even write about it. Yglesias first notes the error that Maker’s Mark made: they didn’t know the difference between percent and percentage points. The fools!

I’m sure you know people who are grammar pedants. They tell you that “irregardless” isn’t a word. (It is.) Or that it is wrong to start a sentence with a conjunction. (It isn’t.) Well, there are also math pedants. And they will correct you if you use “percent” when you meant “percentage point.” It really doesn’t matter, although in writing, I try to get it right.

Let me explain with the Maker’s Mark example. If they had reduced the alcohol content by 3%, that would have reduced it by 0.03*45% or 1.35%. Instead, they reduced it by 3 percentage points: from 45% down to 42%. Percentage points are simple: no multiplication!

But this raising a question: what the hell was Yglesias getting at when he said that 3 percentage points was “still a substantial change”? He is implying that a 3% change would have been more! So he just embarrassed himself publicly! Feel the shame, Matt?

Neener neener neener!

I don’t think that someone who goes on a killing spree is necessarily crazy. At least, I don’t think they are crazy as we normally define it. After all, we don’t call CEOs who destroy the lives of thousands of people crazy. They’re just evil. And so too are people who go around killing others. As a result, I have come to no particular conclusions about Christopher Dorner, the ex-LAPD officer who has apparently killed three people thus far. The man is clearly evil. If his beef is with the LAPD, why isn’t he killing them instead of bystanders? Anyway, bottom line: crazy? I needed more information.

I got that information this morning. Charlie Sheen provided a video to TMZ over the weekend. In it, he appeals to Dorner to call him, “Let’s figure out together how to end this thing.” I know that Sheen has a bad (and much deserved) reputation as a crazy guy. But you have to admit that he has a good heart. This, after all, is the guy who turned the police onto the producers of Flower of Flesh and Blood because he thought it depicted an actual on-screen murder. And now, he is trying to help out in this Dorner tragedy. I absolutely don’t believe that Sheen is doing this for publicity. He really cares and it is adorable.

You may ask, “Why is Charlie Sheen getting involved in this?” Because in his Facebook manifesto, Dorner wrote, “Charlie Sheen, you’re effin awesome.” And so now we know: Christopher Dorner is also crazy. Only crazy people think Charlie Sheen is awesome. Even when he’s “Winning!” Sheen is at best interesting in a clinical sense.

But you have to ask: where is Ellen Degeneres?! Where is Larry David?! Where are any of the other celebrities that Dorner praised. Not a peep from them! Only Charlie Sheen cares enough to look silly for our sins. Maybe he really is the second coming of the Chris. If so, that would be effin awesome!

Update (12 Februrary 2013 11:15 am)

The Young Turks discusses the issue. I agree with Cenk. I think Anna is wrong:

Marco Rubio represents the old Republican Party. Not in the Richard Nixon sense of being kind of a social liberal, because Rubio is anything but. No. He represents the old Republican Party in the Richard Nixon sense of the Southern Strategy: getting enough people who totally disagree with your policies to vote for you, which in combination with those whom you truly represent will put you in power. Unfortunately for Mr. Rubio, this is not the way forward for the Republican Party.

Jonathan Chait has an interesting article this morning that discusses the evolution of the party, White Republican Debate Continues to Rage. But unlike most discussions, this one is actually useful. Normally, people talk about the Republican Party as though it were an institution trying to change by being more in line with what the electorate wants. This is ridiculous just on its face. If Republicans wanted to be anything near to appealing, they would become Democrats. So the question now and forever is: how does the Republican Party take power without changing.

Chait and others offer us the example of John C. Calhoun, the big South Carolina slavery proponent from Amistad. But more to the point, in the later part of his career, Calhoun was basically a royalist. That is to say, he didn’t believe in majoritarianism. The people are too stupid (or whatever) to be trusted to run the country. This is now the primary philosophical basis of the Republican Party. (Remember Glenn Beck pushing for the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which made senators directly elected? Can’t trust the people now can we?!)

In the late 1960s, the Republicans figured out a way to win majority support: racism! “Those Democrats are taking from you deserving white folk and giving to those undeserving coloreds!” And as an electoral tool, that was the Energizer Fucking Bunny. It just kept going and going and going. But it was always a short term solution. Those brown folk were were multiplying like, well, bunnies. What’s more, the young ‘ons increasing disliked the Republicans, and young people enter the country all the time!

And that’s where Mr. Calhoun comes in. Why be a popular party when you can get power by other means? Chait sums it up nicely:

But remember, Republicans must know that even this is a short term tactic. They are figuring that they will be able to find something like the old Southern Strategy that will allow them to get enough people who fundamentally disagree with them to vote for them anyway. I would like to think this isn’t so, but history indicates otherwise. This is the biggest reason why liberals cannot depend upon demographics. And anyway, politics is a strange business and Marco Rubio could actually be our next president.

Update (11 February 2013 12:33 pm)

Sam Tanenhaus article in The New Republic, Original Sin: Why the GOP Is and Will Continue to be the Party of White People is excellent. I suggest reading all 6000 words of it, but here is a taste:

Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show is best known for the song The Cover of the Rolling Stone, a humorous Shel Silverstein song about the excesses of rock stars. “We sing about beauty and we sing about truth… at ten thousand dollars a show.” But Dr. Hook’s first hit was almost as popular, and also a Silverstein tune: Sylvia’s Mother. On its surface, it is a very sweet song of a man trying to get back together with a woman, only to be politely stonewalled by her mother.

But here’s the thing: I’m not sure how to take the song. It simultaneously makes me laugh and cry. It is too much like Please Do Not Go by the Violent Femmes, which although sweet in its way is clearly making fun of of its over-wrought singer. In Sylvia’s Mother the singer is being told he can’t talk to Sylvia, even as her mother is talking to her. And to make matters worse, the operator is asking for more money.

When done by Bobby Bare (who may have done it before Dr. Hook), it is, of course, a sweet and serious song. But the Dr. Hook version is so overdone that it is hard to escape it as being anything but a joke. And I think that is the brilliance of the song. The truth is that the greatest heartbreaks of our lives are, in an objective sense, hilarious.

I seem to talk a lot about once great directors losing their edges. Most recently, I mentioned David Cronenberg. Last year around this time, it was the Coen Brothers. Ridley Scott is another example. I could go on and on.

Another good example is Gus Van Sant. Like all of the directors I’ve mentioned, it isn’t that what he does today is bad. Far from it. But all of these directors have polished their art to the point where it is dull. Van Sant’s first three films were marvelous—seething with the passion that he felt for his subjects. Mala Noche is kind of hard to watch these days because of its technical problems and narrative discontinuity, but it is also about as pure a piece of art as you ever seen. Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho are as fresh today as they were 20 years ago.

Then things started to go wrong. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was a worthy effort. To Die For really started to define a new style for Van Sant: polished and distant. And then Good Will Hunting came along. It wasn’t so much the direction. The fact that Gus Van Sant had decided to do such a trite piece of work is why it was so disappointing. Up to that point, Van Sant could be depended upon to make cheap films that performed pretty well at the box office. Good Will Hunting was a mega-hit. After that, we got bigger budgets and more of the same. Now if you go to see a Gus Van Sant film, you can bet it will be some variation on Finding Forrester.

Today, I watched Promised Land. Stiff characters, feel good theme, and a horribly predictable denouement. What’s not to like? But there is something that I especially didn’t like: the moral journey of Steve Butler (Matt Damon). It has to do with Faust. If we are to accept Goethe, Faust gets out of hell on a technicality. I’ve never liked that. In Dr. Faustus he goes to hell. That’s what a Faustian Bargain is all about. Once you accept it, you accept it completely.

If you spend 20 years screwing people over, you don’t wake up one day and decide to change. That whole period was one big training session for convincing yourself that what you are doing is right. Army Generals don’t wake up one day and decide that they are pacifist. They’ve spent too much time convincing themselves that while war may be wrong, if good men like themselves don’t blah, blah, blah.

I understand that someone can have an epiphany. True believers can react violently when their illusions are shattered. But Butler’s illusions aren’t shattered. He knows from the beginning that what he does is potentially harmful. But more important, he knows that his job is to not give the people all of the information. And what does he do at the end? He gives the people all the information. It doesn’t seem like the path his character was on. It seems like what the plot required for a happy ending.

On the plus side, watching Frances McDormand and Titus Welliver together was fun. Every scene with them lit up the screen. It was also great to see Hal Holbrook working and looking more than ever like Mark Twain. And of course Matt Damon was Matt Damon, and that ain’t bad.

Afterword

There were films named “Promised Land” produced in 1973, 1975, 1986, 1987, 2002, 2004, and of course, 2012. Perhaps a better title would have been, “My Own Private Fracking Rights.”

I’m always interested in how Christians perceive the work of Jesus. When Mary Magdalene was sick, Jesus cured her and she stuck by him throughout the Passion and beyond. But Christians are more likely to send their problems away. Out of sight, out of mind. Who needs that compassion nonsense?

In the late 18th century, institutions to reform “fallen women” started popping up throughout Europe and America. They were called Magdalene Laundries. As with penitentiaries, they started as a way of helping the morally wanting but quickly became just a way of punishing them. Think: forced labor insane asylum.

Not surprisingly, the government colluded to funnel women into the institutions. The Irish government performed an 18 month of study on the issue. The report was released last week, “Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalen Laundries.” It found, “Some 10,000 women and girls entered Magdalene laundries since 1922 with more than a quarter of referrals made or facilitated by the State.”

You might have noticed that 1922 was not that long ago. I think we are all used to this sort of thing in the distant past. Witchcraft, for example, can best be described as the crime of being a bit odd. In the case of the Magdalene Laundries, girls were often sent because they were too flirtatious or just too attractive. And this went on for a long time. The last Magdalene Laundry was closed only in 1996.

According to historian Frances Finnegan in Do Penance or Perish, these asylums ended because of changing attitudes towards sex. But just as important was that they ceased to be profitable after the invention of the washing machine. Upwards of 1000 women died in the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland—life imprisonment for being pretty.

Justice for Magdalenes is an advocacy group for survivors of the Laundries. The government has now apologized for its part in this unjust system. No word from the church.

This came in the mail today. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayer’s Association is a vile organization started by a really vile and ignorant man—a man who has done more to hurt my home state than anyone other than maybe Ronald Reagan. And usually, these mailings that come every couple of weeks offend me because of their content. Here is a sample:

Oh my! First note that they aren’t talking about repealing Proposition 13, because they can’t do that. They are talking about trivial changes that mean nothing. But also, if this is the first time that there is any threat to Proposition 13, then why does the HJTA send me a letter every two weeks begging for money? Even if you are a fan of Proposition 13, you must understand that the purpose of the HJTA is only to continue its own existence. Jarvis himself has been dead for over 25 years!

But the reason I’m talking about it now is that alert, “PETITION ENCLOSED Response Requested By: 48 hours!” If you can’t get your titles right, you are hopeless. “48 hours” is not an event. It is a time period. You may request a response in 48 hours, but you simply cannot request a response by 48 hours.

I know this is pedantic. But this isn’t some small church or something. The HJTA is a big organization. Its president, Jon Coupal, is paid more than a quarter million dollars per year. And not a dollar for copy editors? Of course not! And they are probably right. The people they prey upon probably don’t even notice. But they do notice killer sentences like, “Please sign that Petition right now, Mr. Francis P. Moraes, and return it with a donation of at least $20.” They don’t even need to add, “And it won’t be wasted on any writers or editors!”