Here is a great video about income inequality that you really must watch. I’ll have more to say about it tomorrow and on into the future. This is because I’m getting less and less interested in the news of the day and more and more interested in talking about those few things that really matter to me in terms of politics. I even have a few ideas of how some of these problems can be addressed. Of course, the number one issue that will stop us from solving any problems is if the poorer classes continue to vote so infrequently. But apart from that the most important issue is income inequality.

This video is from a TED Talk, which is interesting because in general, the TED folk don’t like to talk about things that make rich people uncomfortable. This talk is by Richard G Wilkinson. The only thing I have to add to what he has to say is just that you should notice that no matter what he talks about the United States is always the worst. According to conservatives, this is the best country in the world. What they mean is that this is the best country in the world if you are rich. And I don’t doubt that for a minute. But I’m not rich. And if you’re reading this, you’re not rich. So this is not the best country in the world. In the most important ways, this is the worst country of the advanced world. That’s something to think about very carefully, especially if you are a liberal. How did we allow this?

H/T: Kathleen Geier

On this day in 1546, the great observational astronomer Tycho Brahe was born. In fact, before the advent of the telescope, he was certainly the greatest. That’s pretty amazing: doing observations of the stars and the planets without the help of any optical instruments except, you know, the two we are born with. He is most known for two things. First, while in college, he had part of his nose cut off in a duel. This duel was over the solution to a mathematical problem. Yep, that was the way in the 16th century: my equation is right because I’m better with a sword. The two duelers made up, but the nose did not. So Brahe wore a false nose made of silver and gold for the rest of his life.

The other important thing about Brahe is that Johannes Kepler came to work as his assistant the last couple of years of his life. Apparently, Brahe didn’t really trust Kepler though. So it wasn’t until Brahe died that Kepler got his grubby little hands on all the observational data. And this resulted in one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time: Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. Basically, Kepler found that planets did not move in circles but in ellipses. What’s more, the closer they got to the sun, the faster they moved. It’s all basic conservation of energy that any high school physics student can explain. But it was a huge breakthrough! And beautiful mathematics.

The English writer Aphra Behn was born in 1640. Like Cervantes, she was one of those people who were perfecting what would become the modern novel. In her case, you might say she invented the romance novel. She was actually more of a playwright, however—and quite a successful one. Unfortunately, Shakespeare sucks just about all the oxygen out of English language plays until the 19th century.

I only know the names of two porn stars. One of them is that girl who caused the freak out when it turned out that she had been making porn films when she was 16 or something. And even now, I can’t remember her name. The other is Ginger Lynn who is 51 today. Now, I haven’t seen either of these women performing. And I have no idea why the name “Ginger Lynn” has stuck in my mind all these years. Anyway, I’m not very much into video pornography. It strikes me as too much like gynecological exams—with all the sexiness that goes along with them. I’d much rather read porn where I can picture sex the way it ought to be rather than the way it is. But I think that’s why there is this trend in video porn to have all gentles shaved. I used to think it was trying to turn adults into children—which is extremely creepy. But now I think it is trying to turn humans into simple functional devices. This too is creepy, but not nearly so much so. I’m glad I came up with that theory; it makes me feel a lot better. Eventually, it will get to the point of having me just “hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick.” That’s right, folks! Only at Frankly Curious do we start with porn star Ginger Lynn and end with Shakespeare! (Extra points for naming the play!)

Other birthdays: French painter who I really don’t like Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824); Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta (1853); English painter I really like Roger Fry (1866); comedian Morey Amsterdam (1908); choreographer June Taylor (1917); 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt (1922); actor Patty Duke (57); and chess grandmaster Jan Timman (62).

The day, however, belongs to the great comedic bandleader Spike Jones who was born on this day in 1911. He did some very funny things. Let me just share a few with you. First there is “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” which caused the American Federation of Musicians to ban him from making commercial recordings for two years. I don’t actually see the problem. It is a very silly song that seems to be saying that we fart in Hitler’s face. But maybe in 1942, it was too silly.

The whole band was made up of a bunch of nutcases. Here is “Cocktails for Two”:

And here is “My Old Flame,” the second part of it sung by “Peter Lorre”:

And finally, here is a song that is not by Spike Jones’ band, because Spike Jones died the year before. But it’s his gang, primarily Doodles Weaver, doing a very confused version of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”:

Happy birthday Spike Jones!

It is that day. One year ago today, a disturbed young man, woke up, killed his mother, shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed almost thirty people. Then, he got down to what was probably his main purpose, he killed himself. These things always make me think of the film Fargo, at the end where Marge Gunderson is bringing in Gaear. She says, “So that was Mrs Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well, I just don’t understand it.” We never understand it.

We also never do anything about it. There was outrage. How could this happen? Everyone had a theory. I think it’s all bullshit myself. Sometimes brains just don’t work the way they ought to. Some attempts were made to tighten restrictions on gun purchases. That was a noble effort, but as the gun lobby correctly pointed out, it had nothing to do with the Sandy Hook massacre. As I noted the day after, its easier to get a gun than mental health treatment, Guns Cheap, Mental Health Expensive. But let’s be honest, America Doesn’t Care About Shooting Sprees. Sure, they make great television. But otherwise, kids get murdered. They weren’t celebrities were they?!

No new federal gun legislation was passed. In Colorado they did something. Very little, but still. They put a “ban on magazines holding more than fifteen rounds of ammunition, a universal background check, and a requirement that buyers pay a fee for the background check.” Oh my God! You’d think the black helicopters had arrived and were taking everyone’s guns. For the gun “rights” crowd the slippery slope is an ice cube you dropped on your kitchen floor. You slip on it and suddenly you’re in Nazi Germany.

So Colorado has some very minor gun control legislation that is hugely popular. Yet two state legislators were recalled. And one more faces recall. And why? Because liberals can’t bother to get off their asses and vote. And most conservatives even agree with the laws but if the NRA tells them they need to vote someone out, they follow in line just like the Brownshirts of old. What I’m saying is that Americans are a bunch of assholes but for different reasons.

Remember two days ago when I wrote, An American Political Allegory. It was the story about a father squirrel who hated his neighbor squirrel more than he hated the cat that killed and ate his son. I’m afraid I was being a bit too subtle. We Americans are big at following right along with whatever the corporations tell us to do. The NRA? That’s not a group that represents gun owners; it’s a group that represents gun manufacturers. It’s members (the people) have pretty reasonable opinions about guns. But it’s like those proposed laws that mandated the labeling of GMOs. They were all hugely popular until Monsanto and its corporate allies got done convincing the people that it would destroy farming as we know it.

I know it sounds like I’m preaching to the choir here. But I’m not. Most Americans agree with me about most political issues. The problem is that a very large fraction of those people can’t be bothered to vote. There are two brave legislators who were thrown out of office (and one that just resigned) not because they did something unpopular, but because the people couldn’t be bothered to support them.

It doesn’t matter how good your politics are, if you don’t vote, it doesn’t matter. And one year on from Sandy Hook, the murder sprees continue. Frequently.

Kevin Phillips is a very keen political observer. Today, he is one of the Republican Party’s harshest critics. But he used to work for Richard Nixon where he was partly responsible for the racist “southern strategy” that has worked so well for Republicans ever since. In 1989, after Bush the Elder had become president, Phillips wrote, The Politics of Rich and Poor. He quite rightly recognized that Bush had skated in on the tail end of the conservative ascendancy that started with Reagan’s 1980 election as President of the United States.[1] And so he predicted that things would swing back in the other direction in the 1990s.

He sees politics about movements. That’s true to some extent. But of course, most people don’t see themselves as parts of movements. They vote the way they vote, and that helps some political movements and hurts others. So in 1989, Phillips wrote:

And indeed, by 1989, that show had reached its peak and it was on its inevitable decline to late night punchline, even if it did survive all the way to 1995. But the country was ready to leave the world of “greed is good” and move back to a more normal world of, “You know, those Wall Street guys really are a bunch of assholes.”

Phillips even predicts a pretty big swing back, “The 1990s could easily be another watershed decade.” Yes. Yes, they could have been. After all, the Reagan years had brought the top marginal tax rate down from 70% to 28%. That’s one big mother fucking pendulum swing. So what kind of counter swing did the left have in store? Well, the “left” nominated the Democratic Leadership Council candidate Bill Clinton, a man so liberal he had been hugely successful in Arkansas. And he pushed back, alright!He pushed that 28% top marginal tax rate (actually 30% by that point) all the way back up to just over 39%! He ended welfare as we knew it, which is a nice way of saying that he fucked the poor. And, of course, he bombed the shit out of the world.

And then came Bush the Younger. He lowered the top tax rate down to 35%. He took us into at least one unnecessary war. He ran on stopping gay marriage and used the “political capital” he had made to privatize Social Security. (Thankfully, he failed.) He ran an administration with so much crony capitalism that the fascist states of the 1930s would have been envious. But again, the people had had enough! The pendulum was ready to swing back the other direction. So the “left” nominated Obama, another New Democrat, who would have felt right at home in the Reagan White House. And after four years and two elections, Obama managed to raise that top income tax rate back up to where it was under Clinton. Except… It only applied to incomes over $400,000 instead of the $250,000 it had been under Clinton. And Obama’s big success—his legacy—is a conservative healthcare plan that simultaneously gives conservatives what they want and an excuse to claim that the plan is, “Socialism!”

There is a bizarre kind of physics that goes on in modern American politics. When the pendulum sings to the right, it swings way to the right. But on it’s return trip to the left, it barely makes it past the equilibrium point. It is no secret why this is. The Republican Party has convinced itself that the nation is made up of a bunch of conservative extremists. And the Democratic Party has convinced itself that they are right.

[1] I don’t actually agree with this interpretation of history. I have a more radical, although numbers based, story to tell. I’m working on a book about it. But in terms of electoral politics, what he is saying is roughly true; it’s just that the cause is wrong.

This is a detail from a very famous The Far Side cartoon. This particular image is from a coffee mug that was made of the cartoon. Everyone seems to think it is funny. And I am very much in agreement. But it was only rather recently that I learned that my reading of the joke was completely different from that of others.

The standard reading of the cartoon is that the singing penguin is a fool. Look at him: he’s just like all the other penguin. He fancies himself special when the only thing special about him is that he thinks he’s special.

I find that reading of the cartoon abhorrent. What a tiny and awful worldview it exposes: we are all the same and the differences are trivial and unworthy of comment.

My reading of the cartoon is the opposite. Here is this one penguin who seems like the others. But he knows—just knows—that he is an individual. It doesn’t matter what it looks like on the outside. It doesn’t even matter how much he is like other penguins. He is willing to proudly proclaim to the world that he is own penguin. And that’s funny, because, you know, he’s a penguin.

But like with most of The Far Side, that penguin is all of us. At least he is when we are at our best. I gotta be me!

Ezra Klein seems to have gotten everyone all talking about how Republicans are suddenly against high deductible healthcare plans, Obamacare Exposes Republican Hypocrisy on Health Care. You see, in the old days (last week), Republicans said, “We need high deductible plans that people can afford but also put the onus on them to manage their healthcare. They’ve been saying this for decades. This is where those lauded health savings accounts come in. This was a great thing to complain about! Obamacare was stopping the market from working it’s magic!

There was one small problem. And from a Republican standpoint, it wasn’t a problem at all. Obamacare didn’t have anything to say about cheap, high deductible insurance plans. Remember: Obamacare is the the conservative “free market” approach to healthcare reform. So the Republicans turn the “problem” into an “opportunity.” They turned on a dime and started shouting, “Obamacare is killing people with these high deductible insurance plans!” Ezra Klein calls this hypocrisy.

Jonathan Chait calls it, The Heritage Uncertainty Principle. You can go over and read his article, if you want. But this is what I’ve been writing about for years. Let’s start with the facts: Republicans do not want any healthcare reform. So when the Republicans turned against Obamacare, even though it was their very own healthcare reform policy, they weren’t being hypocritical. Chait quotes Newt Gingrich saying, “[I]t started as a conservative effort to stop HillaryCare in the 1990s.” And that’s what I’ve been saying: any Republican healthcare “idea” is only one they support so long as it isn’t up for consideration.

My father came to me the other day asking me about this new healthcare reform law by Georgia Representative Tom Price. He saw it on Fox News, but given that everyone was so positive about it, he smelled a rat. Dad’s starting to wake up. Anyway, I didn’t know what the proposal was, but I explained to him that the Republicans had plenty of chances to change Obamacare along the way and they have never taken one. So I was pretty sure this was just a way to kill Obamacare and replace it with the usual Republican policy wish list.

I looked it up, and I was right. What does it do? It allows people to buy insurance across state lines. Then it will enact “tort reform.” And it would have “high risk pools.” I discuss all of this in, Republicans New Healthcare Distraction. So the new healthcare reform bill that Fox News was all excited about was the same old healthcare reform bill that Republicans always bring up.

Now in this regard, Jonathan Chait is wrong. If the Democrats went along with tort “reform,” the Republicans would not turn their backs on it. This is something that the Republicans really want. It wouldn’t improve healthcare or access to it. But it would make the rich richer and poor poorer and the Republicans are always for that! But in general, he is correct. Conservative healthcare reform ideas are just a means by which actual healthcare reform ideas are destroyed. And we are living through that right now: Obamacare is a healthcare law that was created (as Gingrich admitted) only to stop a more liberal law.

But Ezra Klein is right too. The Republicans are hypocrites. But not in the way that he means. They are hypocrites when they say they really want healthcare reform. They don’t. If they would stop lying about that, the rest would just be very honest political tactics. But you may well ask, are the Republicans really that evil. Yes. Yes they are.

Yesterday, Andrea said to me, “Do you know how many times you use the word ‘great’ in your birthday posts?” This was in reference to our decades long argument over the fact that I find the universe constantly fascinating, whereas she doesn’t like Frank Sinatra. Or much of anything. She likes what she likes. But actually, that’s how I am. She’s really into needlecraft, and although I find it interesting enough, I am not fascinated. I am not the person who, through years of thrift shop addiction, has collected (and this is not an exaggeration), a quarter million buttons. But there is a reason I use the word “great” so much in the birthday posts. I only list people in my birthday posts who I find remarkable. If I say great, it is because I think they are great.

What’s more, the birthday posts are the most personal things I write here. Readers get a very good idea of what I care about. You can go lots of other places to find far more rigorous and “objective” listings of famous birthdays. And if that’s what you want, go there. But what is true about these posts and this site in general, is that the only thing that I have to offer that is special is me. Love it or hate it, I will tell you what I think in my own way. When I was a kid, I loved pure foods. As I grew up, I appreciated complexity of taste. This website is like a wine. It has a lot of different flavors swirling around. And you may hate or love it. But it’s the only wine on the list. And with that, I present to you today, the birthdays that suit by palate.

Why don’t we start with a nice German realist painter, known for his portraits. Franz von Lenbach was born on this day in 1836. I know, another realist. Yet Lenbach’s work is rich with contradictions. He plays around with neoclassical techniques and some of his work verges on photorealism. There’s also something dark and melancholy about his work, as if he knows Hitler is coming and what is the point anyway.

I was never a big Family Affair fan, except that I really like English people with the last name “French.” But something has to be said. Kathy Garver is 68 today. She played the teenage niece Cissy. Johnny Whitaker is 54 today. He played the little boy Jody. And Anissa Jones, who played Buffy, is just dead. Now I ask you, where else are you going to get this kind of reporting?

The great singer-songerwriter and founder of Television, Tom Verlaine is 64 today. Here he is all the way back in 1984 without the band doing the title song (which he wrote like all those songs) off the first Television album Marquee Moon:

Other birthdays: Mary Todd Lincoln (1882); silence film director Edward LeSaint (1870); Medal of Honor winner Alvin C York who killed lots of Germans in WWI (1887); Bewitched creator Sol Saks (1910); actor Christopher Plummer (84); shockingly, Dick Van Dyke is still alive (88); while producer Richard D Zanuck is dead (1934); actor Steve Buscemi (56); actor Jamie Foxx (46); and truly talentless “cute” girl Taylor Swift (12).

The day, however, belongs to the greatest rock journalist of all time, Lester Bangs who was born on this day in 1948. He’d still be with us today if he listened to me: don’t mix your drugs. Or if you are going to, check with me first. He mixed Darvon, Valium, and NyQuil. Look: I understand. That would be a hell of a high. But you’ve got to be really careful combining those opioids with GABA drugs. But that’s sad and that’s about death. So what.

Bangs was great because he didn’t buy all the rock star bullshit. Here’s what he said about interviewing, “Well basically I just started out to lead with the most insulting question I could think of. Because it seemed to me that the whole thing of interviewing as far as rock stars and that was just such a suck-up. It was groveling obeisance to people who weren’t that special, really. It’s just a guy, just another person, so what?” And here is his entire review of Black Sabbath’s first album that not only kicks them to the curb but also kicks Cream to the curb:

Here he is complaining about a number of things:

Happy birthday Lester Bangs!

Afterword

I only used “great” twice and “greatest” once. So there!