One hundred and twenty-two years ago, Mississippi John Hurt was born. But I gave the day to him last year. And just a couple weeks ago, I wrote, A Little Mississippi John Hurt. It isn’t just his music that I love, although that would be more than enough. He also has a great life story. But I can’t write yet another article about him. So instead, let’s talk about a man who I don’t have such nice things to say about. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr was born on this day in 1841.

Most people have an overall good impression of Holmes. He was known for his wit, and he wasn’t on the Supreme Court until after Plessy v Ferguson, so there was no opportunity for him to completely embarrass himself over that issue. But he did write the opinion in Schenck v United States. This is where he wrote his most famous sentence that the First Amendment was not absolute allowing for one “falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” I think that logic appeals to a lot of people. But it is pernicious.

I remember some time ago, a friend of mine told me about being in a crowed theater when the fire alarms went off. Everyone looked around and saw that there were no flames and no smoke. So they ignored it until the management got the alarm turned off. Even Holmes’ analogy is wrong. People don’t get panicked just because of an alarm. But I understand that this was not what Holmes meant. So let’s talk about that.

What exactly was Charles Schenck doing that Holmes thought was akin to shouting fire in a theater? He was sending out leaflets to men facing conscription for World War I. In fact, it argued that the daft was “involuntary servitude,” which had been outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment. I think that is entirely a correct reading the amendment and I’ve never understood how it is that conscription is constitutional other than the fact that powerful people want it to be so. Regardless, if Schenck was doing anything, he was shouting fire in a theater that was on fire.

The overall decision, which was unanimous, found that the First Amendment did not extend to encouraging insubordination. This sounds so much like the Animal Farm ending, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The Supreme Court decided that people could say anything they wanted, as long as the power elite didn’t mind. And what that means is that we only have freedom of speech as long as our leaders decide we do. And that means we have no freedom of speech.

In his later years, Holmes tried to finesse his opinion. He took every opportunity to say that the opinion in Schenck was razor thin. I think this indicates that he knew he had blown it. But by and large, the other justices did not see the ruling as problematic. What this shows is that even honest and good men like Holmes crumble to the desires of their class under the smallest of pressures. The United States was only in World War I for a year and a half. The biggest thing that came out of the war was that the United States repudiated one of its most cherished founding principles.

Happy birthday Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr?

You’ve probably heard about the kerfuffle between the House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and the ranking minority member Elijah Cummings. It was quite a show with Issa breaching protocol by ending the session without Cummings getting to speak and then killing Cummings’ mic and walking out. It was such a blatant act of disrespect that it was hard not to be shocked. What’s more, given Issa is a Republican, it is hard not to assume that there isn’t some racial animus thrown in for good measure. If you haven’t seen it, I’ve embedding the incident below.

At first, Issa was unrepentant and acted as though he was the one harmed. This kind of conservative thin-skin cry baby behavior is getting tiring. Right after the incident, Issa said, “He was actually slandering me at the moment that the mics did go off by claiming that this had not been a real investigation.” But this didn’t fly and it looked like everyone was against him. The best he could get was Fox News just ignoring it. There were no segments with Hannity celebrating how Issa had struck a blow for the straight white conservative non-IRS employed man.

On Thursday, Mediaite reported that Issa had personally appologized to Cummings for the incident. Issa said, “As chairman, I should have been much more sensitive to the mood of what was going on, and I take responsibility.” So the whole thing is over. Right? Well, not really. What happened is typical of how Republicans manage to avoid a lot of bad press. By acting so horribly, most of the press managed to miss the deeper meaning of that House hearing.

Joan Walsh explained the situation last week. IRS supervisor Lois Lerner was slated to testify for the committee. At this point, it is well established that there is no IRS scandal. But early on, Lerner took the Fifth to avoid becoming a scapegoat in all of this. That’s not at all a bad idea. After all, Steven T Miller was fired as head of the IRS, even though he wasn’t in the position during the supposed scandal. But Issa was in search of some more coverage on Fox News, so he brought back Lerner to provide some more video of her not answering questions.

But what Cummings was going to say was that Lerner’s attorney was willing to tell them what she would say if they granted her immunity. This is a standard legal practice, which Issa surely knows. But he didn’t want to find out what Lerner knows and what she did. Most likely this is because she will say the same thing that everyone else has said: there is no scandal. So that is what Issa wanted to stop from happening. He didn’t want to get all the way through his media circus and then have Cummings point out that it wasn’t necessary and that Issa wasn’t interested in actually getting the information.

Darrell Issa is a great embarrassment in the House. And that says a lot for a House led by John Boehner and filled with people like Louie Gohmert. Issa has used the Oversight Committee in as reckless and self-serving a manner as Joseph McCarthy. Unfortunately, Issa is in a very safe Congressional district. He won the 2012 general election by 16 percentage points. But hopefully he won’t be in power for much more time because I know of no one on the national level who so abuses his power.

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber wrote a very interesting article last month, Macroeconomics Made Easy? In it, he discusses a new book by Kartik Athreya, Big ideas in Macroeconomics: A Nontechnical View. Athreya is a “freshwater” economist, which basically means that he’s a conservative who doesn’t believe that recessions are caused by a lack of demand. I’m being mean, but Quiggin is actually rather nice to Athreya and his book. That doesn’t mean that I’m wrong, however.

Back in 2010, Athreya wrote an article called “Economics Is Hard.” He attacked people like Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong as being the “patron saints of the ‘Macroeconomic Policy is Easy: Only Idiots Don’t Think So’ movement.” His point was then that “real” economics is about teasing out aggregate behavior based upon individual actions. Now this is what statistics does and no one feels the need to run around complaining that lay people use concepts like means and standard deviations.

In order to back up his argument, Athreya seems to have written his book where he discusses what sounds like a lot of interesting economic concepts. And according to Quiggin, it is really well written. But it is not what we normally talk about in terms of economics, because it is highly theoretical. What we talk about is what might be called “practical economics.” And it is in this distinction that Quiggin thinks he might have found how all those very intelligent and learned freshwater economists could spout such rubbish:

I’ve seen this in a lot of academic fields—most notably climate change science, although the problem is nothing like it is in economics. The freshwater folk are so focused on the intricacies of their models that they don’t really care that they have little relationship to what is going on in the real world with its real markets. As Quiggin says, “[I]t’s OK to assume full employment, and ignore inflation, but not to omit rigorous microfoundations for your model.” That is: it is fine to make assumptions that render your models useless, as long as they are built on first principles.

That would all be fine and noble academic work. There is no doubt that such work does increase our understanding of economic systems. The problem is that people who think in this very limited way also want to be taken seriously in the policy debate. But when it comes to actual people who depend upon having useful results—people at the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Budget Office and Goldman Sachs—they use Keynesian models. They do not use these freshwater models because they can’t assume full employment; they can’t ignore inflation.

But the total practical uselessness of the freshwater economists’ models does not make them irrelevant to politics. Politicians who want to push policies for totally different reasons (for example, enriching the rich at the expense of the poor) are more than happy to use these economic theories. And all too many freshwater economists like Greg Mankiw and Ken Rogoff are more than willing to help out. This seems to be because they are political ideologues first and foremost. So at least Kartik Athreya is being honest: his economics is hard and mostly useless on the macro-scale. His work for the Richmond Fed is, after all, microeconomics, not macroeconomics. But why he thinks he should be talking about macroeconomics is unclear to me. The point seems to be to define actual macroeconomics out of existence so that we are all forced to bow down to the freshwater folks and believe in the faith-based ideology of expansionary austerity and other freshwater fantasies.

Yesterday, Media Matters for America reported, CBS’ Face the Nation Turns Exclusively to GOP for Ukraine Discussion. The announced lineup for tomorrow is Dick Cheney, James Baker, and Paul Ryan. It still amazes me that anyone talks to Cheney. He should be a national embarrassment, yet people still treat him like a wise elder statesman. It is shocking. Baker is okay, I guess; but I’m not clear why the almost 84-year-old former Secretary of State is important to the discussion. And Paul Ryan doesn’t even claim to know much about international affairs. If we base our expectations on his incredible ignorance about economics—the one area he claims to know something about—we can reasonably predict that he won’t have anything to add to the discussion other than Republican talking points.

Every couple of years, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) puts out an analysis of guests on the Sunday politics shows. And every times it shows the same thing: Republicans, and conservatives more generally, dominate the guest lists. When the Republicans are in the White House, the skew is very large and the shows claim that this is understandable because the Republicans are in power. That in itself is ridiculous—as though the purpose of the news media is to reflect the existing power structure. But when the Democrats are in control, Republicans still dominate the Sunday talk shows.

Of course, the shows always have an excuse for their conservative skewing. For example, in 2011 they claimed it was skewed because of the Republican presidential primary. But when Media Matters for America looked at an equivalent period in 2003 when the Democrats had a primary and the Republicans did not—What a surprise!—the Sunday political shows still had more Republicans than Democrats.

But it is much more than simply the guests. This last week on Meet the Press, David Gregory asked Marco Rubio an incredibly leading question, “Do you agree with some of your colleagues who say it’s the weakness of President Obama and the United States right now that has emboldened President Putin of Russia?” This false narrative was repeated a number of time. Eventually, Chuck Todd said, “This is not the first time with Putin. Putin acts, Obama warns. Putin acts, Obama warns. This is a pattern that he can’t afford to stay in there and just continue to warn. You heard John Kerry: more warnings.” That’s just a Republican talking point. The reporters really should know about what’s going on and not just repeat what the opposition party is saying—something they would never do if the parties were reversed.

I could accept all this if the standard narrative was that the media were biased towards the Republican Party. That indeed does seem to be the case on all but a handful of socially liberal issues like same sex marriage. These shows kiss up to power. I guess that’s not surprising. But their ideas of power are always the same as an adolescent boy’s ideas. They mistake bellicosity for power. If we went to war in Ukraine just because Putin invaded regardless of our own national interest, that would indicate that Putin had the power, not Obama.

Our media is obsessed with the idea of objectivity. Yet they don’t seem to have a problem with being overly dependent upon the Republican Party, even when said party is in crisis with very little power. At least we all know that Fox News is the propaganda wing of the Republican Party. So it isn’t surprising that Fox News Sunday is highly skewed toward the Republican Party. But the truth is that Meet the Press and Face the Nation are no less conservative. When George Will left This Week for Fox News, he fit right in. He didn’t stand out any less on Fox News than he did on ABC.

All of this is an indictment of the American news media. And they are very much to blame for our terrible political environment. In as much as you can depend upon a news host to be in favor of same sex marriage, you can depend upon them to be against unionization and for globalization. And they’ve been far more successful in pushing the economic policies than they have been pushing the social policies. At least people still realize that there are two sides on the same sex marriage issue. When it comes to the economic issues, there is no other side. Unions baaaad! Globalization gooood! You know: objective news reporting.

On this day in 1875, the great French composer Maurice Ravel was born. What I find fascinating about him is that he is most remembered for Bolero. Yet that piece of music is totally unlike anything else he had done before. What’s more, the work he did throughout his career was incredibly consistent. His melodies were highly modal. And they were supported by complex harmonies. Overall, most people, thinking that Bolero is typical of Ravel, mistake his music for Debussy. And indeed, even though I would never mistake Ravel for Debussy, they are the two major composers that sound most alike.

Here is Ravel’s orchestral arrangement for his solo piano piece Le tombeau de Couperin. It is beautiful and compelling. But most of all, it is entirely typical of his work:

At least it was typical until 1928 when he composed Bolero that must have come as a shock to those who followed his music. It is still a brilliant piece of music. But the main theme, while lovely, is in the major key—not modal at all. Harmonically is is quite simple. Really, other than his use of the woodwinds, it doesn’t sound anything at all like the rest of his work.

And then, there was silence. Ravel completed only a couple more compositions: Piano Concerto in G Major, Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (written for Paul Wittgenstein), and Don Quichotte a Dulcinee. He clearly had some kind of brain disease, which caused a shrinking of the left hemisphere, resulting in aphasia. He died as a result of surgery, but had not been able to work for some time and would have died soon regardless.

It has been suggested the the disease was responsible for the more repetitive nature of his last compositions. But we can’t say. The piano concertos were also rather jazzy. Maybe Ravel was just moving in a different direction. Regardless, although the last part of his life was sad, the little music that he produced extends wonderfully on his earlier works. We are so much the better for it.

Happy birthday Maurice Ravel!

The Pew Research Institute has published an analysis of the Millennial Generation’s attitudes regarding matters political. Jonathan Chait has a rundown of it, A New Report Shows How Young Liberals Own the Future of American Politics. Although that headline is certainly true, the article gives the wrong idea about what the results really say. Put bluntly: it ain’t about age; it’s about race.

The data show that from the late 1970s onward, young people have generally voted the way old people did. But since 2004, this has diverged with the old getting slightly more Republican and the young getting very much more Democratic. And then the polling data indicate that Millennials are much more liberal in their beliefs than older generations. That’s all fine. In fact, for the liberal cause, it is great!

Just looking at whites, the Millennials are distinctly more liberal than the older generations: Silent, Boomer, and Gen X. And this does matter. It is a myth that people get more conservative as they grow older. When it comes to minority and civil rights, they actually get more liberal, as Catherine Rampell reported in, Getting More Liberal With Age. Of course, it is also true that people get more conservative the more money they make. But the bad news for Millennials and good news for the liberal cause is that the modest opportunity that was available to even Generation X is pretty much gone for our younger people today. This generation will get better government services and union rights or the whole society is going to crumble.

What’s most remarkable in the data, however, is that the liberalism of Millennials is primarily a function of race. While white Millennials are more liberal than white Gen Xers, they aren’t that much more liberal. But the Millennial Generation is so much more diverse that it makes the generation as a whole very liberal. For example, non-white Millennials are no more liberal than non-white Gen Xers. This probably also shows that the collapse of opportunity hit the non-whites a generation earlier than it hit whites. But racism is a thing of the past, right conservatives?!

However, I think it is a major mistake for liberals to think that they have a demographic lock on politics going forward. Liberals will always have a big problem: they have to spend time actually governing and coming up with better policy ideas. But as I discussed on Wednesday, conservatives spend all their time and energy coming up with new ways to sell and repackage the same old policies. And they are good at it. And they often get people to vote against their own best interests. Their old racist dog whistles may not work in the future, but I have confidence they will come up with new ones that might appeal to a more liberal and less racist electorate, even if I have no idea what they might be.

Ultimately, the biggest problem that conservatives have is their own success. They have managed to create much of their dystopian future filled with little opportunity and unprecedented levels of inequality. As long as America is at least nominally a democracy, this is a problem for them. We have an extremely unfair society. And society is more unfair the later people are born. Something will have to give. But that doesn’t mean it will result in something good. It might be widespread voter disenfranchisement. And then it won’t matter how liberal the Millennial Generation is.

The other night I watched the not altogether bad film A Beginner’s Guide to Endings. It actually has a fairly clever script, which could have used a few more rewrites. The directing is stylish enough to be interesting but not so much as to be annoying. And the acting is good. Except for Scott Caan; repeat after me, “Nepotism!” But I don’t bring up the film to talk about its cinematic merits. I bring it up to discuss its use of math.

Before I get to my main point, however, I want to discuss this business of hanging. Duke White (Harvey Keitel) says that there is a one-in-three chance of a hanging going right. You could: (1) hang for hours; (2) choke for minutes; or (3) hit the sweet spot and break your neck. One-in-three! I don’t mean to over-think this. But what does “hang for hours” even mean? Hang dead? Because if you aren’t dead, you will chock for minutes and die. So that’s really just two options. I think the writer is totally confused about Newton’s Third Law.

Okay, so on to the real business of this article. Duke says, “My family defies all odds: five kids, all boys. The odds in that: one-in-sixteen.” This is wrong; it is one-in-thirty-two. The odds of one boy is one-in-two. The odds of two boys is one-in-four. And so on: eight, sixteen, thirty-two. Now I understand, maybe the screenwriter is being clever and slyly showing that Duke doesn’t even understand the most basic of statistics. But if that’s the case, it’s a terrible thing to do because almost no one would notice.

Duke goes on and says, “Five boys from three different women: one-in-300.” I don’t even know where this number comes from, whether you assume his mistake or not. I tried various possibilities and none of them came out to anything close to 300. But any way you do this kind of calculation is wrong because women you sleep with is not a random variable in the way that the sex of children is.

The ultimate question is whether there is any greater pedant than me when I write about movie mathematics. I don’t think so. Also check out Innumeracy in Rocky and Numeracy in Shakespeare in Love. Of the three films I’ve written about, the two American films got simple math problems wrong and the one British film got a complicated math problem right. Typical.

Paul Ryan was at CPAC today, and he’s been getting a lot of attention for a story he told about a young man who didn’t want to get a free hot meal from the school but would rather have his parents pack him a brown bag lunch. “He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.” To Paul Ryan, we are depriving this boy of the dignity of his parents work. Or something.

There are a couple of things that really strike me about this story. First, when I was a kid, I was one of those kids with brown bags. And I really didn’t like it. I would much rather have gotten a hot lunch. It wasn’t about the love that my mother was supposedly giving me; it was about the taste of food. Mom was a fine cook, but there is only so much you can do with a sandwich. It got boring.

I also know kids. What this young man is probably getting at is the fact that his friends have brown bag lunches. He’s feels like the oddball, because he isn’t like them. He would feel the same if he were the one with the brown bag when all his friends got hot lunches. Of course, it could well be that this young man doesn’t have any parents close by. He might be a foster kid. Certainly the line “someone who cared for him” makes it sound like the kid is missing a whole lot more than lunch. Regardless: his complaint is not about the fact that he gets a state-paid lunch but that he isn’t getting one from mom. Even as it stands, the story does not say what Ryan claims it does.

But let’s think about this from a conservative perspective. A stay-at-home mom is one who can make a lunch all the time. Do you know who doesn’t have time to make lunch for the kid every night? A mother who works three minimum wage jobs just to get by. Most mothers who are on welfare are still required to go to welfare-to-work programs thanks to that icon of liberal beneficence Bill Clinton. Generally speaking, the problem with parents making their kids’ lunches is not lack of money; it’s lack of time. And conservatives (whether Republican or Democratic) want nothing so much as to force the poor to have no time for anything but work.

As we saw throughout the 2012 election, conservatives are all for the dignity of motherhood. As long as the mother in question is rich. Back then, Ann Romney was very upset when Hilary Rosen said that she had never had a job. How could she say that? Was motherhood not a job?! Well, as far as conservatives are concerned, it isn’t if you are poor. Paul Ryan has been especially clear about this. They need the “dignity of work.”

So if the little boy was asking for anything, it was that his parents be rich. Or that his mother at least be allowed to stay home and take care of her children. But conservatives don’t care about that. Least of all does Paul Ryan. He’s not for a guaranteed income. He’s not for raising the minimum wage. He’s not for decreasing welfare-to-work requirements. What he wants—what all conservatives want—is for the poor to just go away and not bother them anymore. Death is a poverty plan. I just wish conservatives would admit that that is the only one they support.