On this day in 1707, one of the greatest mathematicians ever, Leonhard Euler was born. The great novelist Henry James was born 1843. Muralist Thomas Hart Benton was born in 1889. Nikita Khrushchev and Bessie Smith were born in 1894. The iconoclastic psychologist Thomas Szasz was born in 1920. And Elizabeth Montgomery was born in 1933.

Conductor Neville Marriner is 89 today. Roy Clark is 80. And Emma Thompson is 54.

But the day belongs to Leonardo da Vinci who was born on this day in 1452. Truly, I would have liked to give the day to Euler, but really, it’s da Vinci. Just look at that image above: in addition to everything else, he studied fetus development. What could I do?

Happy birthday Leonardo da Vinci!

Have you seen the opening to this weekend’s Saturday Night Live? The skit makes fun of what I wrote about last week: The Great Liberal Gun Policy Victory. In the end, I argued, what we would get is a law that is almost useless. I’m never one to avoid accountability, so let me lay it on the line: I was wrong.

The law will be worse than useless.

Karen Tumulty and Ed O’Keefe reported at the Washington Post, Gun Debate in Senate Likely to Feature Amendments to Weaken or Strengthen Laws. They pointed out that the gun lobby and their pals “are working on a series of amendments that could have the opposite effect—loosening many of the restrictions that exist in current law.”

What kind of amendments? Things that far outweigh anything positive in the bill:

You may be wondering, what are those amendments that could “strengthen” the law that the title of the article refers to. Well, in the article, they only mentioned one: the assault weapons ban. And they noted that it has effectively no chance of passing. But that concealed carry reciprocity? Last time the Senate voted on it, it got 58 votes.

Things are not quite as bad as it seems, however. Everyone thinks that if these amendments get passed, it will just kill the bill. And maybe that is for the best. As Jonathan Chait noted this morning, “Any real effort to address the plague of mass gun violence will require not a catalyzing event, or even a string of them, but years of organizing and effort.” I would only add that the liberals have to stop meeting conservatives 90% of the way. The worse case scenario, as we see with concealed carry reciprocity, is much worse than 100% failure. Wouldn’t it be sad if our response to Sandy Hook was to make such tragedies more likely.

Found this on the Doonesbury site:

“Our campaign bumper sticker: If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.” —Rep. Steve Stockman

Of course not. An armed fetus is a murder-suicide waiting to happen.

When I was a kid, I loved the film Zulu. I still do. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to be painfully aware of its ethnocentrism. So when I saw that Zulu Dawn, the film about the events that led up to the Anglo-Zulu War, was available for Instant Watch on Netflix, I was very pleased. Cy Endfield, the man who directed Zulu, was lead author of the screenplay for Zulu Dawn. And as much as there are historical inaccuracies in Zulu, it was exceptionally accurate for its time. Zulu Dawn, produced in 1979, is still considered historically accurate.

I’m not that interested in the film itself. It isn’t that well made. The dialog scenes are not recorded well, and it is hard to understand what is being said without subtitles. The battle scenes that make up most of the second half of the film are well done, but not all that important if the viewer doesn’t understand what went before. I think it is a problem of direction. And I say this with due respect to the director, Douglas Hickox, who made one of my very favorite films, Theatre of Blood. (Admittedly, from my perspective, it would be hard to go wrong combining Shakespeare and gore.)

For those of you not familiar, I guess I should clarify. The film takes place in 1879 in British South Africa. The colony there is surrounded by Zululand. But the Zulus and the colonists are happy doing their own things. They get along fine. Unfortunately, Sir Henry Bartle Frere and Lord Chelmsford (Peter O’Toole) want to start a war. So Brere sends a letter to Cetshwayo, King of Zululand. It says, more or less, we don’t like how you run your country so do things our way. Or else.

Cetshwayo responds: screw you. But he says he won’t do anything as long as they don’t come into his territory. Anyway, Cetshwayo has more important things to do: it’s harvest time. But of course, Chelmsford (who is also a general) uses this as a pretext to invade. Chelmsford thinks that the Zulu army is just going to move around and refuse to engage him. But he’s wrong. And the locals tell him so. Colonel Durnford (Burt Lancaster) tell him that Cetshwayo wants to push the conflict so he can get to the harvest. But the general doesn’t believe him. What’s more, rather than trusting Durnford’s intelligence about where the main Zulu forces are, Chelmsford splits up his army and goes after what turns out to be a Zulu feint. Need I note that the insightful colonel is where the big attack comes and the foolish general is where all is calm?

What I was most taken with was Cetshwayo. This isn’t in the movie, just history. He knew that he was screwed. Even though he needed to defeat the British and get on with what really matters in life (eating), he knew that a British defeat would only make the British attack them all out. He was doing his best to avoid this, however. He gave strict instructions that his people should not cross the river into the colonial land. So he was extremely angry at the following attack on Rorke’s Drift that is dramatized in Zulu. But as he predicted, the British later attacked with a well-armed force of 15,000 men and deposed him.

The postscript is that the British actions threw the region into civil war. Only four years later, the British tried to put Cetshwayo back in power, but it was too late. As they say in the military, it was FUBAR. And one way or another, it stayed that way for over a hundred years.

I don’t mean to be too hard on the British. For one thing, it wasn’t the people generally (or even the government) who wanted the war. But that’s how it usually is, right? Very few people in America wanted the Iraq War—at least until it was sold to them. But what we see in both wars is what we see in all wars: going in it seems like a great idea; coming out it seems like a catastrophe. And only this week, we had a liberal historian calling for a new glorious war in North Korea. Will we ever learn?[1]

[1] No.

When we find we must spend time disabusing students of Christian origins of the red herrings strewn about with gleeful abandon by apologists, we critics of traditional supernaturalism find ourselves in a strange and seemingly ironic position. We view ourselves, contrary to the perspective our own critics and debating opponents have on us, as the true champions and friends of the Bible. We are viewed as insidious villains seeking to undermine the belief of the faithful, trying to push them off the heavenly path and into Satan’s arms. But this is not how we view ourselves at all. Whatever religious or nonreligious convictions we have, we find ourselves entering the field, as we see it, as the champions and zealots for a straightforward and accurate understanding of the Bible as an ancient text, and of the resurrection accounts as natural accoutrements of such literature. In our opinion, it is the fundamentalist, the apologist for Christian supernaturalism, who is propagating false and misleading views of the Bible among the general populace. We are not content to know better and to shake our heads at the foolishness of the untutored masses. We want the Bible to be appreciated for what it is, not for what it is not. And it is not a supernatural oracle book filled with infallible dogmas and wild tales that must be believed at the risk of eternal peril.

There was a generation of Bible debaters who naively took for granted that the Bible made the claims that its misguided proponents made for it. But we belong to a newer generation. We do not hate the Bible or view it as another version of Mein Kampf, as some critics of religion have. We do not seek to debunk it, for it is not bunk, any more than the Iliad or Beowulf is bunk. To frame the issue in such terms is itself a foolish fundamentalism in reverse. The arguments of this book are not attempts to debunk the Bible but to understand it better as what it is: a great ancient text of mythology. When we attack the arguments of apologists, we believe ourselves to be doing the same sort of thing our Classicist colleagues would be doing if they had to reckon with an eccentric movement of apologists for the Olympian gods, zealots who wanted to convince people they must believe in Zeus and Achilles. Classicists would rally to the cause precisely because they loved the old texts and did not want to stand by and allow them to be distorted and made to look ridiculous by grotesque demands that they are literally true!

—Robert M. Price
The Empty Tomb (pp. 15-16)

Helen Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan was born on this day back in 1866. I didn’t realize it, but Keller outlived Sullivan by 32 years, but I suppose she was more critical at the beginning than the end. The great Shakespearean actor John Gielgud was born in 1904. And you thought he was just the butler in Arthur. Rod Steiger, actor in On the Waterfront and my favorite Sergio Leone film Duck, You Sucker! was born in 1925. Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson was born in 1929. And Richard Jeni was born in 1957.

Game theory economist Thomas Schelling is 92 today. Loretta Lynn is 81. Honest cop Frank Serpico is 77. Julie Christie is 72 (I loved her is McCabe & Mrs. Miller). And baseball great Pete Rose is also 72. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling is 59. And actor Robert Carlyle is 52.

But the day belongs to the creator (more or less) of the wave theory of light. On this day back in 1629, Christiaan Huygens was born. But like many of that day, he did a lot more. I don’t feel like going into it, but click over. He was a very interesting guy.

Happy birthday Christiaan Huygens!

Jeremi Suri wrote a remarkable op-ed in the New York Times on Friday, Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late. What I find so interesting is that Suri is not some Fox News shouter. He seems to be more or less a liberal, or at least what passes for one in modern America. He is also a history professor at University of Texas, Austin—despite what many people seem to think, one of the best schools in the world.

Let me see if I can break down his argument: (1) North Korea is going to launch a missile; (2) we should bomb it first; (3) Obama should state that this attack on a sovereign country is defensive; and (4) we will never have trouble with North Korea again! He also “knows” lots of stuff: “precise satellite reconnaissance” tells us where the missile is; “civilians face serious danger” from North Korea; the strike would “preserve regional stability”; it is “unlikely that Mr. Kim would retaliate by attacking South Korea”; and most shockingly of all, “the Chinese government would do everything it could to prevent” a counter attack from North Korea.

Suri goes on to admit that, well, maybe North Korea would counter attack, just to save face. But then he write—and this is important—”Under these unfortunate circumstances, the United States and its allies would still be better off fighting a war with North Korea today, when the conflict could still be confined largely to the Korean Peninsula.” You got that? He’s offering Bush’s great Iraq War justification, “We’re fighting them there, so we don’t have to fight them here.” I am shocked that an otherwise reasonable person would make this argument today.

What is most naive about Dr. Suri’s argument is that other countries will accept our assurances. The North Koreans are supposed to believe that we aren’t seeking regime change. The Chinese are supposed to believe that we aren’t going to occupy the Korean peninsula. And the world is supposed to believe that our attack is defensive. I have three answers to this assurances. First, attacking North Korea will make its government look bad and potentially cause a coup or some other form of destabilization. Second, if we go to war and win, we will have to occupy the Korean peninsula, at least for a while. Third, we said the Iraq War was purely defensive too.

It is only too easy for pundits and academics to call for war. They don’t have to fight and die. But given all that this country has been through the last 15 years, I can’t understand where Jeremi Suri is coming from. If bellicose rhetoric was a reason for war, we would have had World War III in the 1950s. People like Suri are dangerous. They need to be countered.

H/T: The Reaction

There’s a little bit of a work slowdown here at Frankly Curious. There are a couple of reasons for this. Primarily, I have been having the worst time sleeping, and even though that means I’m awake a lot, I don’t feel much like writing. Also, I am doing taxes. I think the worst of that is over. So if I can manage to get a decent night’s sleep tonight, I might write quite a lot tomorrow. As it is, I’ve seen a number of films recently—in particular: Identity Thief and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. One of those is excellent; I’ll let you guess which. And of course, there is lots of politics, including the very interesting story of Timothy McKinney who is on death row in Memphis and almost certainly innocent. I also have something to say about plagiarism, Stephen Glass, and Charles Manson.

So forgive my absence but hurry back soon because, as always, there’s lots going on in my scattered brain.

Since I’ve started doing these birthday posts, I’ve never come upon a day like this. I wish I could spread out these birthdays, because normally, I would feature any number of these people.

The last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions, Guy Fawkes was born on this day in 1570. Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743. Butch Cassidy was born in 1866. Scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts was born in 1899. American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O’Hair was born in 1919. Don Adams was born in 1923. Playwright Lanford Wilson was born in 1937. And Christopher Hitchens was born in 1949.

Al Green is 67 today. Ron Perlman is 63. The great Amy Goodman is 56. And chess player Garry Kasparov is 50.

But the winner of the day, by less than I would have predicted, is the great playwright Samuel Beckett who was born on this day back in 1906. In celebration, here is his short (10 minute) play Ohio Impromptu starring Jeremy Irons:

Happy birthday Samuel Beckett!

Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting article today about how conservative pundits are now attacking Obama from the left, Conservatives Decide Obama Is Too Conservative. It had a particularly good catch from Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon who now says that Obama shouldn’t be trying to cut the deficit, but rather be pushing his jobs program. As Chait pointed out, this is a total reversal from what he said when Obama first proposed his jobs program. At that point, Continetti was pushing the same old conservative canard that the government can’t create jobs. It’s fun to read.

But Chait also pointed out something that is important about the mistake which Obama’s budget is: in his column today, Charles Krauthammer wrote that Obama should offer that the tax increases in his budget go half to reducing the deficit and half to reducing marginal tax rates. Jonathan Chait rightly notes that this is (yet another) conservative attack from the left. But here’s the thing: he and the others are only able to make this attack from the left because Obama has moved so far to the right. Just like I (and oh so many others) predicted!

I understand. There is not going to be a budget deal. This isn’t just because the Republicans refuse to do anything. The truth is that the Sequester is just starting to affect the economy. It will keep economic growth slow for the next two years. A Grand Bargain, as much as I am against it, would be good for the economy in the short term. The Republicans do not want that. They are hoping for a replay of 2010 in 2014. And they have a good chance of getting it.

For all of my adult life, I have watched the Democratic Party compromise in the name of being “competitive” with the Republicans. This was always a mistake. Reagan barely won in 1980 and only did win because Paul Volcker created a recession just in time for the election. And then, he lowered interest rates and created a boom, just in time for the 1984 election. Democrats learned the wrong lesson from those losses, just as Republicans learned the wrong lessons from Bush Sr’s loss. But whereas the Republicans obtuseness has only made them more conservative, the Democratic obtuseness has also made them more conservative. And that leaves us with President Obama.

Regardless of what the president thinks, offering compromises like entitlement cuts just moves the political debate further to the right. What he ought to have done is act like cutting Social Security would be as painful for him as sacrificing Natasha and Malia to the gods. But he didn’t do that—because he continues to hold on to the wrong lessons of the 1980s. And in the end, it might be good for his “legacy” (whatever the fuck that is). But it is not good for the liberal cause and it is not good for the Democratic Party.

Just ask Charles Krauthammer.

Afterword

People sometimes complain that I take too much knowledge for granted, so let me clarify my Paul Volcker comment. Paul Volcker was the Federal Reserve chairman appointed by President Carter. Inflation was very high, so Volcker made money less available (by raising interest rates). This threw the economy into recession. After inflation was under control (1982-83), he made money more available (by lowering interest rates). This caused businesses to invest and started an economic boom that we call “morning in America.” That was all Volcker’s doing; it wasn’t Reagan. In case you were wondering.

In gratitude, Reagan replaced Volcker with Alan Greenspan the first chance he got, which was 1987. (Note: the last two Fed chairmen were appointed by Republicans and kept on by Democrats.)

It’s a burden. You know that, right? Being very smart is a burden. I’m not talking about myself, in case you were wondering, because I’m not very smart. But young Matt Yglesias is, and his intelligence leads him horribly astray from time to time. Like today: two different articles really stood out for their very intelligent cluelessness.

First up, Yglesias explains, Why Aren’t There More Employee-Owned Firms? His answer: it’s the managers, stupid! Workers don’t care about owners; it’s the managers who make their lives hell. In fact, he claims that the self-employed are happier because they don’t have to deal with managers telling them what to do. Having spent most of my life self-employed, I can tell you that this is a crock. What you quickly learn is that your clients (or customers) are even worse and more unreasonable than any manager you’ve ever had.

Now, I don’t know why there are so few employee-owned firms, but I have some ideas. First, its about norms. I understand that modern conservatives have become revolutionary and thus inured to norms. But most people are not. I have had a lot of small businesses because my father did. And he did because his father did. I always knew I could start a business, because lots of people who were no better than I did the same thing. Those trailblazers who don’t know any people in business and yet start their own? They are the exception. (Ever noticed that in any given area, the convenience stores are mostly owned by one group of immigrants?)

Second, the reason there are so few employee-owned firms, is that in the real world (not the corporate and Wall Street world), owning your own business is really hard. When it is yours you are much more likely to do all the extra work. When you are just one-five thousandth, not so much. The same thing goes on with group projects in school. In my experience, one person ends up doing all the work. (That person, of course, was always me.)

So Yglesias was wrong about that. But he wasn’t finished! He asked a second question, Do Immigrant Engineers Depress Engineer Wages? His answer: not that I can tell! Now look: I’m very pro-immigration. I would like to see far more immigration into this country. But this is the most basic of economics. If the quantity of the supply of a product (in this case: labor) is increased, it will cause prices to go down. Would it be a catastrophic blow to engineer wages? Almost certainly not. And in the long run, it would be better for everyone.[1] But don’t tell me it will have no effect. That’s just dumb, even though it is doubtless the result of over-thinking.

Again, I have experience with this. Technology films do not like H-1B Visa employees because they are cheap. In general, they’re a little cheaper. But not much because the companies who provide them get paid excessively for it. (Often more than the employee himself gets.) But what is best about them from a corporate standpoint is that they are reliable, work ridiculous hours, and have no choice! That last part is critical. Going along with this is that it divides the labor force and makes it harder for native employees to unionize. That’s what’s going on.

I don’t mean to beat up on Yglesias. It was a slow news day unless you are naive enough to worry about North Korea or especially fond of Jonathan Winters. Just the same, he’s totally wrong about these issues. But in a totally Yglesias way!

[1] For the record, I think if we are committed to the dynamic economy that everyone seems to think is so great (I disagree), then we need to have really strong and well funded programs to provide for dislocated workers. As it is now, we provide almost no support for such workers and it is wrong.