Matt Yglesias wrote a great economic deconstruction of the film Goldfinger, Economics of Goldfinger: James Bond as the Enforcer for Harold Wilson’s Doomed Austerity Policies. In it he argues that Goldfinger is basically a good guy, pushing against the bad gold policies of the western powers and James Bond is just a rube being used in a kind of “wag the dog” operation. I’m not going to say more about it. You should read it.

I bring it up only to mention that it got the song “Goldfinger” going through my head. I’ve always liked the song, especially the great singing by Shirley Bassey and the dense production by George Martin. So I found it on the internet and listened to it. Here is a live version. Check it out and pay close attention to those raspy trumpets:

It was only when I listened to it that I realized that one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 bits was a parody of this song. It was a hosted segment for the film Secret Agent Super Dragon. It was a 1966 Italian spy movie very much in the tradition of Goldfinger. In fact, the filmmakers may even have seen the film as a kind of parody like International Secret Police: Key of Keys. It is certainly true that the film on its own is amusing.

On MST3K, Tom Servo has written this song and he gets Joel to play bass and Crow to play trumpet. At one point, Crow mentions that he only knows two notes. If you listen to “Goldfinger” again, you will hear that the trumpet refrain in that song is only three notes. Anyway, the sequence is funny and the music is really good. I never tire of it:

Chop on this, pal!

Jonathan Bernstein made a great point over at his blog about the naming of the Washington Redskins, The Question Is Etiquette, Not “Racism.” The title says it all: it doesn’t matter whether or how the term “redskin” is offensive, if our native American brothers and sisters don’t like the term, we shouldn’t use it. After all, as a group, have they not suffered enough? The United States government committed a genocide against them. Not naming mascots after culturally offensive stereotypes sounds like the least we could do.

Bernstein brings up another point that we may refer to as, “Why does mom get to call you that?” This is in reference to situations like that where my mother calls me Frankie, but I prefer to be called Frank. Why does my mother get to call me that but not you? I don’t know and I don’t have to provide you with an answer. It’s just the way it is. If you call me Frankie, it’s not going to kill me. But it does mean that you’re an asshole. (For the record, it is fine to call me Frankie, although those so inclined make my name cuter tend to go with Frannie.)

He doesn’t mention it, but he’s clearly talking about the surprisingly common conservative lament that African Americans can use the word “nigger” but whites can’t. (I actually think that the words that they use is “nigga,” which is a different, although derivative word.) This has always struck me as a bizarre complaint. Do such people think they are missing out by not being able to use that word? I dare say most of these people go their whole lives without the more useful “pulchritude” and never seem to miss it. But the more important point is that I’m sure that any African American would be willing to trade use of the word for just a fraction of the privilege that whites have in this country.

This all follows the announcement by Slate that it will no longer refer to the Washington team by “Redskins.” This is just a change in their style guide, but such changes are important. (Grammar is important!) After all, newspapers changed their style guides in the 1960s to remove “negro” and “colored.” So this stuff really does matter and it really does make a difference. This is all part of the fight against the offensive name and the bigger the battlefield gets, the more likely the name will change. And eventually, the name will change, if only because Daniel Snyder dies or sells the team. (Note: I’m sure he doesn’t see himself this way, but Daniel Snyder is an asshole and likely a bigot as well.)

Bernstein’s insight is an important one. Most of what is important in life is just about acting like a decent human being. Perhaps the biggest argument against libertarianism is simply that all its talk of marginal increases in freedom (an abstract concept under most circumstances) is nonsense in comparison to the needs of people who are literally starving thanks to a system that may tend to maximize freedom but doesn’t come close to fairness. So maybe we should all just treat each other with the dignity that all humans deserve. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop calling out people like Daniel Snyder for the assholes they are.

As you’ve probably heard, Jeff Bezos has purchased the Washington Post. And I’ve had nothing to say about it because, really, could the Washington Post get any worse? I like Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent, even though they often irritate me. But that isn’t primarily what the Post is. When it comes to straight news, I most certainly do not go to them. And now the Post is by subscription and it costs the same amount as the New York Times! That’s outrageous to me. So who really cares who owns the paper?

Even more annoying is how much coverage of the sale there has been in the Washington Post itself. So I guess we can add Jeff Bezos to the Posts‘ other obsessions like deficit reduction and entitlement cuts. Many of those articles came from the Ezra Klein group itself. Based upon his own twitter feed, there are nine articles with “Bezos” in the title. And I’m sure they’ve written about the sale without putting his name in the title. Very wonky!

Outside the Washington Post blog ghetto, it is also big news. Tricia Duryee wrote, Five Myths About Jeff Bezos. Dean Baker—a longtime critic of the paper—took no time in noting that with the article the Post was already starting its disinformation campaign. Two of the five myths are not, in fact, myths.

According to Duryee, the first myth is that Amazon is destroying independent bookstores. With online sales now at 48% of all book purchases, this one is hard to take. But the idea that independent bookstores are just destined to disappear is a typical canard of a certain kind of upper middle class journalist who works for places like the Post. It goes right along with globalization: there’s nothing that can be done! But while they think that, they ignore all the ways that the government allows globalization to affect the poorer classes while protecting the upper classes. The mechanism by which Amazon has been helped by government policy is the basis of the second non-myth.

According to Duryee, the fourth myth is “Amazon’s key advantage is that it doesn’t collect state sales tax.” As Baker noted, through most of its existence, Amazon has effectively received a 7% subsidy from the government that other companies did not have. That’s huge because this is more than the profit margins of big retailers. For example, Walmart’s margin is just 6%. Thus, the government has provided a huge advantage to Mr. Libertarian’s bookstore.

Duryee even went into some big apologetics on this point. She wrote, “Amazon says it is not opposed to the collection of sales tax—as long as there’s a simple, national system that is applied to all sellers, no matter their business model, location or level of sales.” But that is the standard way that one justifies beings against laws that are clearly right. Of course Amazon is for all companies paying sales tax. They just can’t support the current system because of some problem. And that problem bounces around to wherever it needs to so that Amazon never has to be for it.

It has been an embarrassing week for the Washington Post. I just hope it improves next week. No one really cares who owns the newspaper. Articles like Duryee would appear with or without Jeff Bezos.

Update (11 August 2013 9:27 pm)

CounterSpin has a great interview about this with David Cay Johnston where he refers to the Washington Post editorial page as having, “An incredible odor of white privilege.” That’s about right!

The early Classical period composer Joseph Schuster was born on this day back in 1748. He was mostly known for his operas, but he also wrote a lot of music for small string sections. In fact, his Milan Quartets were long thought to be by Mozart. Here is his String Quartetto No. 5:

Actor Lloyd Nolan was born in 1902. He is best known for his role as the father in Hannah and Her Sisters, even though he was dead of cancer at the age of 83 by the time of the film’s release. The great Japanese film composer Yuji Koseki was born in 1909. Here is a classic of his, “Mothra’s Song”:

Novelist Angus Wilson was born in 1913. Historian Alex Haley was born in 1921. Talk show host Mike Douglas was born in 1925. Cool Hand Luke director Stuart Rosenberg was born in 1927. Evil Christian Jerry Falwell was born in 1933.

More or less the inventor of crystallographic electron microscopy, Aaron Klug is 87. Marilyn vos Savant is 67. She is said to be very smart. I’ve never gotten that impression. She is, however, a pretentious asshole. Apple co-founder (the living one) Steve Wozniak is 63. He’s the guy who said, “Apple is not a computer; it’s a lifestyle.” And he said it as if that were a good thing. Computers are tools. The whole “Apple lifestyle” business makes me sick. And the idiotic conservative affirmative action case, David Brooks is 52.

The day, however, belongs to Hungarian electrical engineer Otto Blathy who was born on this day in 1860. He is best known for co-inventing the modern electrical transformer. So in a sense, the modern world is his fault. He invented a number of other important things, mostly having to do with alternating current. He also created chess puzzles. Truly a great man.

Happy birthday Otto Blathy!

Kathleen Geier does not hold with all this hand wringing about modern conservatives, or so she claimed in What’s Different About Today’s Conservatives? As she wrote, “When people, usually liberals, compare today’s conservatives unfavorably to conservatives of previous generations, I often get annoyed.” And she went on to explain that when looking back at old conservatives, we liberals have a tendency to cherry pick. Some of this is overstated, but in general, she’s right.

In fact, I’ve made the exact same argument. It’s true that when it came to domestic policy, Richard Nixon was pretty good. But that was because of the liberal environment in which he had power. If he were in politics today, he’d be one of the extremists calling for a government shutdown. The same goes for Reagan. There is no doubt about that. But I don’t think when people look back fondly on Nixon, they are so much looking to the man as they are the time.

Geier thinks that the modern conservative movement is different, however: it no longer has a power elite that guides it ideologically. In other words: it’s mob rule. She noted that in the 1950s and early 1960s, the National Review purged certain undesirables like the John Birch Society out of the ranks of the movement. But I don’t think she’s right to say that this isn’t happening now. She’s just taking too short a view of it. For one thing, it isn’t like the National Review scowled at the Birchers and so they went away. To a large extent, the group just lost its appeal with many people because of its paranoid conspiracy theories like the Communist’s water fluoridation attack on us. Similarly today, there are lots of conservative intellectuals who have successfully pushed back against cranks like Michele Bachmann.

To me, there is a major difference between the conservative movement of old and today: the party has become Nihilistic. This isn’t a new idea to me. As far as I know, Johnathan Chait was the person who first put forward the idea. But I don’t think it happened as suddenly as he does. I think it started in the Reagan administration. But it really gained steam thanks to Bill Clinton and the New Democrats who co-opted the only good ideas that the conservative movement had. As a result, from Bush Jr onward, the movement has turned into a kind of anti-party: anything the Democrats are for, they are against.

The first very clear indication that nihilism had overwhelmed the Republican party came with the election of Obama. I understand the opposition being against many of Obama’s initiatives. But Obamacare was long touted as the kind of healthcare reform that the country needed. For a time, Romney was a conservative hero for roughly the same program. But the entire conservative movement turned 180 degrees on a dime regarding the law. It not only said that law was bad; it claimed that the law was socialism. Politics is a nasty business, but when the opposition gives you exactly what you want, you don’t continue to play politics. You take the offer and declare victory. But they didn’t do that, because it wasn’t a policy they wanted; there is no policy that they want except those few goodies they can give to their two remaining constituencies.

So Kathleen Geier is right that in most ways conservatives are the same as they’ve ever been. But she’s wrong about how they are different. And the one way in which they are different is even more disturbing. It means that as they are now, there will be no compromising—no getting along. The only way forward is total defeat. And that is a very bad thing.

Afterword

More and more I worry that the Republican Party is at the same point that the Federalist Party was in 1800: on the verge of becoming irrelevant and then nonexistent. In the long run, that would be fine, because the Democratic Party already has the diversity to create fine liberal and conservative parties. But it would be highly disruptive. And it would be—until the eventual split—bad for the Democratic Party. In general, this sort of thing does not happen, but I’m not sure the Republican Party still has the intellectual firepower to reform. So much of their time and money has been put into self-delusion that there may be no going forward.

Renaissance composer Hieronymus Praetorius was born in 1560. He is actually quite interesting. Here is Tota Pulchra Es:

French mathematician Gilles de Roberval was born in 1602—shortly before the invention of calculus, which he really could have used. Light opera composer Samuel Arnold was born in 1740. Here is a fun little song “Polly”:

Physicist Aleksandr Stoletov was born in 1839. Russian Romantic period composer Alexander Glazunov was born in 1865. He is very romantic and very Russian. Just listen to this Concert Waltz No. 2:

More or less the creator of the game Monopoly, Charles Darrow was born in 1889. Actor Norma Shearer was born in 1902. Actor Noah Beery Jr—best known for playing the father on The Rockford Files—was born in 1913. And Bobby Hatfield of The Righteous Brothers was born in 1940.

Poker legend Doyle Brunson is 80 today. Singer Ronnie Spector is 70. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is 66. Here is he is with the band doing “Locomotive Breath”:

Actor Rosanna Arquette is 54. Actor Antonio Banderas is 53. And whiny fucktard Andrew Sullivan is 50.

The day, however, belongs to the great Ukrainian neoclassical painter Anton Losenko who was born on this day in 1737. He was probably more important as an educator. His painting textbook was used for 200 years after he wrote it. But I put him here because I find his work so compelling, like Miraculous Catch:

Happy birthday Anton Losenko!

Adrianna McIntyre wrote a very good article over at The Incidental Economist, Read the Fine Print Before You Burn Your Obamacare Card. It is a response to FreedomWorks and other conservative groups who are trying to undermine Obamacare by getting young people to refuse to sign up. This is beyond cynicism: this is straight out villainy.

Look at what they are trying to do. The fundamental idea behind Obamacare is shared risk: by requiring all Americans to carry health insurance, the risk pool is larger so costs go down. The conservatives are trying to get the healthiest (young) people to opt out of the program. This would, in theory, poison the risk pool and increase costs. And look at who would pay those increased costs. Individuals with employer-provided health insurance would pay more. Those buying insurance on the exchanges would pay more. And the government (that is: all taxpayers) would pay more than they otherwise would for programs like Medicaid.

Meanwhile, those who FreedomWorks would have opt out, would also suffer. As McIntyre noted, open enrollment is only three months per year. So it isn’t like young people could just opt in as soon as they had need. What’s more, their use of emergency rooms rather than normal doctors visits would increase the health costs of the nation.

Now is the time that we hear from conservatives that everyone has health insurance because you can, as indicated in the last paragraph, “Just go to the emergency room! It’s free!” But it is most definitely not free. This was exactly what libertarian idiot Michael Cannon was tweeting out last week. Harold Pollack countered this nonsense brilliantly:

What all of this shows is that the conservative movement in this country really does not care about the health and welfare of the people. There seems to be no amount of harm that is too much to stop them from seeking political advantage. And Obamacare is, as I’ve written again and again, a conservative program! The only reason that Republicans and their allies are against it is because Obama was for it. In the name of scoring a political point or two, they would encourage people to put themselves in unnecessary danger.

Of course, it is far worse than that. Aaron Carroll at The Incidental Economist wrote about a Wall Street Journal editorial, Death Panels in Oregon. Oregon, as they have done for years, is planning to limit care that isn’t effective. When I lived there, for example, they de-prioritized the treatment of babies born without brains (Anencephaly). According to the WJS, this is an outrage! Strangely, limiting treatment is terrible, but simply denying it to millions of people is a-okay. Carroll responded:

But that is the conservative movement in a nutshell. There is much talk about how the Republican party spawned a base of voters who they now can’t control. But there is a similar problem with the conservative media outlets and think tanks. They make no sense. They spew up thoughtless editorials and reports that demonstrate that the movement itself doesn’t believe in any of the things that they claim to believe in. It is just a status quo party meant to make the wealthy ever richer. Added to that is pandering to social conservatives so that they have enough people to get elected. The rich get all the branches of government and the social conservatives get the judiciary. (Strange how socially conservative judges are always pro-business!) And other than these two aspects of their base, they don’t care at all about this country or its people.

It is logical to ask what is wrong with Jason Richwine because in a column today in Politico he asks what is wrong with the reporting on intelligence testing. It is disappointing, but no more so than the reaction, if I can judge based upon Steve Benen. Benen dismisses Richwine out of hand and I think that’s very dangerous. Richwine needs to be addressed. Sadly, I am not the person to do that, but I do (as usual) have a few thoughts.

The first issue is that Richwine tries to have it both ways. He complains that mainstream, popular news outlets just dismiss his work as racist rather than getting into what the science of intelligence testing is all about. But then he goes to those very same news outlets and publishes his own simplistic overview of the state of the science. I’m no expert on intelligence testing, but for the last couple of decades, I’ve been fascinated with it and I continue to read actual papers in the field. (This is one of the few advantages of a physics education.) And what I see is a field that is in chaos—one that is still very confused about the basis of what they do. There are, for example, lots of ways to measure intelligence. Listening to Richwine, you would think that whatever happens to be trendy right now must be what’s right. Even more, there is some kind of weird glitch in IQ tests that causes later generations to test unreasonably higher (Flynn Effect). It is simply the case that there remain big questions that people like Richwine and Murray brush aside.

The second issue is that those pushing this whole line about race and intelligence in the public square do not seem primarily interested in the issue of intelligence. People don’t generally remember that Murray’s The Bell Curve was pushing a political point: we shouldn’t worry about inequality because it is just a reflection of the fact that the brown-skinned people are generally stupider.

Similarly, we only know of Richwine because of his hopelessly sloppy work purporting to show that comprehensive immigration reform would cost the country a fortune. It turned out that it would actually save the country money. Is it any wonder that people would be skeptical about either man’s work on intelligence? It certainly seems that they both have preferred policies and they are using intelligence testing as a way to justify those policies. And that isn’t the way science is supposed to work.

What this all comes down to is that these scientists who put themselves forward as honest truth tellers seem like con artists. Yes, there is actual science that these men certainly know. But their presentation of it is far too tidy and is finessed to make their political points. Meanwhile, the science of intelligence tests trudges on as these men publicly pontificate about the moral decline of the upper class and the cost of immigration reform. If these men were real psychologists, they wouldn’t be working at conservative political think tanks (more known for propaganda than actual policy, anyway). So the answer to my original question is that what’s the matter with Jason Richwine is that he’s a political operative who wants to be taken seriously as a scientist. And I understand that desire. But I haven’t seen anything that makes me think I ought to pay attention to yet another conservative who will say or do anything to push his preferred policies. When it comes to intelligence testing, I think I’ll stick with Jim Flynn.

The Italian mathematician Francesco Barozzi was born on this day back in 1537. Like many mathematicians then and now, he was a bit of a mystic. This caused people to accuse him of sorcery. Eventually, the Inquisition went after him and found him guilty. Twice! The second time it was for apostasy and heresy. Did he burn? Of course not! He was rich. So he bought his way out of punishment with 100 ducats of silver crosses given to the Catholic Church.

Satirical poet John Oldham was born in 1653. British suffragette Evelina Haverfield was born in 1867. Venezuelan composer Reynaldo Hahn was born in 1874. British composer Albert Ketelbey was born in 1875. He wrote kind of syrupy late Romantic stuff like The Phantom Melody:

The great developmental psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget was born in 1896. Poet Philip Larkin was born in 1922. Actor Robert Shaw was born in 1927. Here he is in the best scene from Jaws that he also wrote (the scene, not the movie):

And Whitney Houston was born in 1963.

Perhaps the greatest point guard of all time, Bob Cousy is 85 today. Comedian David Steinberg is 71. Actor Sam Elliott is 69. Hack novelist Jonathan Kellerman is 64. Actor Melanie Griffith is 56.

The day, however, belongs to the variously talented P. L. Travers. She is best known for her book Mary Poppins and its many sequels. She was also an actor; that’s her in the photo above as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here is a nice short video about the inspiration for the character:

Happy birthday P. L. Travers!

Paul Krugman posted a really good article yesterday, Milton Friedman, Unperson. Mostly it is about how Friedman is absent from the current debate about the financial crisis and our continuing economic doldrums. Krugman thinks this is because Friedman tried to straddle two worlds with his essentially Keynesian economic views and his extremist libertarian political views. I think Krugman is mostly right. However, if you look at what Friedman means to people today, it has little to do with his economic theories. It is his extreme views about government always being bad that prevail and we continue to hear echos of that.

But let’s talk about Friedman’s economic ideas. Krugman quotes a very famous speech by Ben Bernanke where he says that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression and that thanks to Friedman, we now know it and won’t let it happen again. That is Friedman’s great economic legacy. And I don’t question that Friedman was a brilliant economist and that he provided great insight into the Great Depression and stagflation and many other economic issues. But when it comes to this one major point, the crisis of 2008 and its results show that Friedman was wrong.

It is doubtless true that if the Federal Reserve had acted differently during the Great Depression, things would have gone better. It is also true, however, that Keynes is the man who got the fundamental nature of the 1930s rights and Friedman was working the weeds. And we’ve seen this since 2008. We are still greatly suffering from that crisis 5 years later despite the fact that Bernanke had learned from Friedman and did everything right at the Federal Reserve.

Now, some would say, but 2008 isn’t nearly as bad as 1929. That’s true. But it isn’t because of the work of the Federal Reserve. In 2008, we had automatic—Keynesian!—stimulus in the form of Social Security, unemployment, and various poverty programs. They are the reason that 2008 didn’t bring on the Great Depression II. And I still find it shocking that so many conservative economists don’t see that.

There is no doubt that Milton Friedman added greatly to our understanding of how the Federal Reserve can and should be used to stabilize the economy. But his work has been greatly overstated. And as much as it is still part of the debate, it is used by those who only want to enrich the wealthy by doing nothing. Uncle Miltie told us that all we had to do was use the Federal Reserve, and so the only acceptable tool for an economic problem is the Federal Reserve. This is now the “centrist” position. On the right are those who say that the Federal Reserve itself steals money from True Americans. So the centrist position is based on Friedman’s economic work. And the conservative position is based on his political work. In both fields, he was demonstrably wrong. But it doesn’t matter, because his theories always told the wealthy what they wanted to hear. And the wealthy control our nation.

Before we get to the birthdays, it is the 50th anniversary of the Great Train Robbery. In 1963 on this day, a 15-man gang stole what is equivalent to about $100 million off the Royal Mail train. Although most of the men involved where captured, most of the money never was. The most famous of those men is Ronald Biggs. He was put in jail, but escaped in 1965 and managed to avoid capture. In 2001, he turned himself in and went to jail. In 2009, he was released because of failing health, but he is still kicking today on his 84th birthday.

One of the early British liberal philosophers Francis Hutcheson was born on this day in 1694. French Romantic period composer Cecile Chaminade was born in 1857. She is best known today for the Flute Concertino in D Major. When I was a kid, I loved it. And it is popular with flutists today because it is an extremely showy piece. But with maturity, I have come to see that it really is just crap. But here is James Galway performing it and he really does make it work. It shows off what can be done with a flute when someone really knows what they are doing. It isn’t just the speed; listen for Galway’s exquisite articulation of some of the fast passages:

And to make up for that, here is Jean-Pierre Rampal playing Francis Poulenc’s Sonata for Flute and Piano which I believe was written for the flutist. Interestingly, both Rampal and Poulenc had the same birthday, January 7. That has nothing to do with today, of course. We’re just trying to detox from Chaminade:

Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bob Smith was born in 1879. I understand the people who founded AA. They were looking for serious behavior modification. At that time, heavy drinkers commonly died in their 40s from the liver damage. So for those guys, it was a matter of life and death. But as alcohol abuse has become a smaller and smaller problem (I’m not concerning myself with drunk drivers here), Alcoholics Anonymous has become bigger and bigger. Now it is applied to high school students, the very idea of which would have made Bob Smith laugh. Of course, the reason it has become so big is partly because of Hollywood (if someone in a movie has a drinking problem, you can be sure they will end up at an AA meeting to demonstrate the growth of the character). But the bigger reason is the American justice system that forces people who get into trouble to go 12-step meets that may be many other things but that are fundamentally religious indoctrination. Doubtless AA has done much good over the years, but at this point it does far more harm.

Mexican general Emiliano Zapata was born the same year as Smith. French composer Andre Jolivet was born in 1905. Many people find his music difficult, and I hear that. His earlier work is more tonal. But even later, I find him quite enjoyable. Here is (Because I’m feeling a bit mean?) his Concerto for Percussion, which I find captivating:

Hollywood producer Dino De Laurentiis was born in 1919. The great actor and swimmer Esther Williams was born in 1921. She only died a couple of months ago at the age of 91. Here is a montage of scenes from her films:

And physician and reproductive rights activist George Tiller was born in 1941. He was murdered by an anti-reproductive-choice fanatic who has become a hero in a certain part of the death cult (that is, Christian) anti-choice movement.

Singer Mel Tillis is 81 today. Actor Dustin Hoffman is 76. Singer Connie Stevens is 75. Actor Paul Hogan is 74. Actor Don Most is 60. And David Howell Evans, AKA The Edge, is 52. I don’t think much of him as a guitarist. He is more of a sound artist, like Brian Eno. And in that regard, he is brilliant.

The day, however, belongs to the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac who was born on this day in 1902. It is kind of hard to explain why he is important. His work, although recent, is already important enough to be taught in lower division physics. He made fundamental contributions to both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics (relativistic quantum mechanics). He predicted the existence of antimatter (anti-electrons, actually) in 1928. He was also known for being socially awkward—even by the standards of physicists. Some have even suggested that he was marginally autistic. But I doubt that. He was just a little odd.

Happy birthday Paul Dirac!