I’ve never been a good team player. If the side I’m pulling for commits a foul, I call it. Affinity doesn’t mean a great deal to me. That’s why people tend to see me as a political radical. I don’t see any reason to accept our political Overton Window. Indeed, if the Republican Party were not totally insane and divorced from reality, I wouldn’t be a Democrat. But that doesn’t much matter, given that I’m also not much of a partisan except in the sense that the Republicans basically never have any good ideas and the Democrats do.

I wasn’t born this way, of course. But like most people (I think), I was born not liking to be lied to. And all through grammar school, I was lied to. I used to be a true believer in what America stands for. But my disappointment came not because things were more complicated than young minds could understand. My disappointment came about because those in power don’t even try to live up to our ideals. It doesn’t matter if you look at Nazi Germany or Stalin Russia or 1984, the power elites are interested in one thing and one thing only: power and power and more power. I accept that. But no country’s power elite has ever made such a big show of only being interested in the ordinary folk.

Since we are nominally a democracy, it’s important to keep the people focused off what is actually keeping them down and focused on something else. Usually these things are real, just not that important. We saw just such a thing last week where 60 Minutes got the nation to weep for BP because a couple of unscrupulous small businesses conned them out of a couple of bucks. And of course, the Republicans have Benghazi! for all their followers. But the general approach is just to keep the people afraid.

And that brings us to Julius Rosenberg was was born on this day in 1918. As I said, the things were are supposed to be afraid of usually are bad things. In Rosenberg’s case, he really was a spy for the Soviet Union. The information he leaked caused the Soviet Union get get the atomic bomb anywhere from one year to not at all faster than it would otherwise have. My guess is “not at all.” This was from a period where people in the United States thought the Russians were a bunch of idiots. That was a widely held view until Sputnik.

But Rosenberg was a spy. Why did we kill him? And even more: why did we kill his wife, Ethel? There were lots of people involved in the plot, including the guy who actual stole the documents, David Greenglass. And none of them were killed. Why did we kill the Rosenbergs? Certainly, part of the reason that we killed Ethel was they were trying to use death as leverage to roll over on other people. But it doesn’t appear that there were any other people to roll over on. I think it was all panem et circenses. Killing the married couple—the Jewish married couple—was a great show! It was like a magic trick: look at the commie infiltration in my right hand while I take away your union rights with my left!

I doubt Ethel Rosenberg had anything to do with this plot other than knowing about it. Julius Rosenberg strikes me as a naive man at least as far as what he thought about the Soviet Union. But he was clear-eyed as he waited to die. He wrote:

He was 35 yeras old.

Happy birthday Julius Rosenberg!

The eighth level of hell is reserved for the Fraudulent, Malicious Panderers. This is where all the people who work in the right wing echo chamber are going to go. And this is clear in a recent poll by CNN, Should Obamacare be kept or repealed? But before we get to where in hell Sean Hannity will spend eternity, let’s go over what is overall good news.

According to the poll, 61% of Americans think Obamacare should be left alone or some changes should be made to improve it. Another 20% think that the should just be repealed and we should go back to the system we had before. This is bad enough because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but for people who had insurance before, they pretty much have exactly what they had before. So their opinions are largely based upon the usual right wing propaganda that claims that Obamacare is a takeover of the the healthcare system. But I’m sure a lot of them are just people who have theirs and don’t care that the old system was terrible for most people.

What really bothered me, though, were those who thought the law should be “repealed and replaced with a completely different system.” What system might that be? I assume these aren’t the people like me who would like the whole system replaced with a single-payer system. These must be the people who have been fed a constant diet on Fox News about the “just about to be released” Republican replacement plan.

Over the last six months we’ve heard a couple of ideas for what the Republicans might get behind. One is a law that is basically just Obamacare with a couple of tweaks. The other is nothing but a bunch of typical conservative ideas that have nothing to do with healthcare reform and would, if anything, make healthcare in America worse. But they would manage to take money from the poor and give it to the rich, which is why the Republicans are for them.

I’m sure all the folks at Fox News and those producing hate radio feel very good about all the money that they are making by being Fraudulent, Malicious Panderers. But if they really are Christians and they believe all that nonsense about hell, they really ought to be worried about their eternal souls. It ain’t looking good.

“Get your ice cold beer right here!”

I remember that from the Giants games I went to when I was a kid. Now, of course, you have to walk to get your beer at the stadium—I assume it is to keep people from drinking too much and making sure that people can at least still walk. But I still remember those wandering sellers pushing their iced cold beer.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve wondered about that. If the water that comes out of your faucet doesn’t taste good, the thing to do is to create ice water. The colder a drink, the less of a taste it has. So what does it say that people sold “ice cold” beer? Does that mean the beer doesn’t taste very good? In a word: yes.

Last week, I had dinner with a neighbor and the only beer she had was Coors Light. I decided to take a can, because I’d never tasted it. And it wasn’t bad. I wouldn’t call it beer, though. And I can see why people like to drink it really really cold.

A good beer, however, should not be drunk really cold. Something like Arrogant Bastard is highly complex. If you drink it really cold, you miss its wonderful taste combination. I just came upon an article in The Kitchn (Yep, it’s spelled that way!), Why Chilling Your Beer Glass Isn’t a Waste of Time. Of course, that title is totally misleading. All they really mean is that using a chilled glass with a room temperature beer works perfectly for serving beer at the right temperature.

And what is that temperature? According to them, it is between 40°F and 55°F. Personally, I think it is better to get towards the high end of that scale. Beer as cold as 40°F makes for some tasteless beer. So chill your beer and put it in room temperature glass, or chill your glass and put room temperature beer in it.

Now if you like tasteless beer, buy your Coors Like, put it in your cold frig, and pour it into a frozen glass filled with ice cubes. Just don’t do it around me.

In my alternate life as protectors of drug users when I spent years trying to keep them alive (and still spend a fair amount of time helping people detox from drug addictions), I often pointed out an important but counter-intuitive fact about drugs: sniffing and eating drugs can be more dangerous than smoking and injecting. The reason is that these generally more benign drug delivery systems allow people to ingest far larger quantities. After taking one Percocet, the user doesn’t feel it right away, so he takes five or twenty. And before he notices it, he’s passed out and then dead.

This isn’t a reason to encourage people to inject drugs, which has its own problems that are usually even worse. But smoking or vaporizing drugs is actually a good way to deliver them because the effect is immediate at the same time that a very large dose can’t be inhaled at one time. But just to be clear: I’m not saying people should do drugs. But if they do, smoking (or better vaporizing) has the least downside.

The issue comes up today because we are seeing this issue with cannabis. German Lopez over at Vox reported on Friday, Eating Marijuana Is Riskier Than Smoking it. The wide and potent availability of cannabis “edibles” in Colorado has caused a couple of problems recently:

There is no doubt that this is a problem. Not only that, it was a predictable problem that I and others did predict. And the same thing happens all the time with pills. But because everyone is skeptical about the new cannabis law, people are on pins and needles about any cannabis related deaths, even though such things happen regardless of whether the drug is legal or not.

At this point, it doesn’t look as though people are using this small number of tragedies to justify invalidating the experiment. But it does point out the need to inform the public that care must be taken with drugs, even when they come in as benign a form as a chocolate chip cookie.

The French Academy painters have something of a bad reputation today because of their exclusion of the Impressionists. (That’s not true of all of them; some chose to stay out.) I’m all for as much variety in art as possible. But if I had to choose one group, it would be the Academy. The work is so beautiful and interesting, often with classical allusions. Luckily, however, I don’t have to choose because the Impressionists are great too.

On this day in 1824, the great French Academy painter Jean-Leon Gerome was born. Whereas William Bouguereau was mostly a figure painter (An insanely great one!) Gerome was more of a historical painter. He was also quite an accomplished sculptor, and would probably be important if that were all he had done. But I’m most impressed with his painting.

In addition to his artistic output, Gerome was one of the most important educators of his time. He taught some of the greatest painters of later generations. These include the symbolist painter Odilon Redon, the impressionist Mary Cassatt, and cartoonist Georges Ferdinand Bigot. That just scratches the surface, but it provides a good idea of the breadth of his influence.

Like many great painters, Gerome’s life was not that interesting. He showed talent early on and then he spent the rest of his life using it. Here is a really great example of that, The Tulip Folly. It is a representation of soldiers in the Netherlands trampling tulip fields trying to stabilize the out of control tulip market:

Happy birthday Jean Leon Gerome!

The last five years have been something to behold. After the financial collapse, the conservative movement convinced itself that the reason things went so wrong was that the Republican Party had not been pure enough. According to this view, it only pretended to be conservative, but it really wasn’t. As a result, the new conservative movement repudiated all of what conservatives have done the past four decades.

In terms of domestic policy, the Republicans have long been for big spending projects that were not paid for. So when Democrats took control of the government, there really wasn’t any policy that they wanted. They just wanted power back. And they decided that the best way to get it back was just to scream about how terrible the Democrats were, regardless of what they did.

This led us to years during which the Republicans attacked Obamacare—the healthcare reform law that Republicans had been pushing for two decades before. It wasn’t that they actually had anything substantial against the new law (other than that it raised taxes on the rich). It was mostly that it was a Democratic law and the one thing they know that they agree with is that Republicans should be in power and so the Democrats can’t be allowed to accomplish anything.

Now that Obamacare is turning out to be a success and at most a year away from being actually popular, the Republicans have a problem. If “Obamacare” itself isn’t enough to terrify the electorate, they had to find something else. And what could that be? Luckily for them, the right wing echo chamber has kept alive a number of non-scandals for them to use. The best, of course, is Benghazi, because four people died at Benghazi (No one died in Watergate!) even though the supposed scandal has nothing to do with the events that led up to the attack.

As Scandals go, Benghazi is a remarkable choice. It would be one thing if the argument was that the administration did too little to protect our embassies. But they can’t make that argument, because they were responsible for cutting funding. So instead, it is all about what the White House said after the fact. That’s what led to the amazing moment in the second presidential debate where Romney embarrassed himself by claiming that Obama didn’t call the Benghazi an act of terror. He was wrong, but even if he hadn’t been: really?! That’s the scandal? That the administration didn’t talk about a tragedy in the right way?

It is almost two years later and this is still all the Republicans have. If the worst of what the Republicans claim is true, it means that the administration tried to put the best spin on the attack as possible. How this distinguishes it from every other administration ever, I do not know. But of course, it is clear that the worst of what the Republicans claim is not true. As is usual in these cases, after the Benghazi attack there was a lot of conflicting information and the administration didn’t get the story exactly right. If the White House had six months to get their story right (as the Bush administration did before the Iraq War), we might find their error less understandable. But they had four days.

So 2014 is going to be the Benghazi! campaign for the Republicans. We may even see an impeachment attempt. But at this point, what else do they have? Over the past two decades, the Democrats have been eager to embrace any but the most loony Republican ideas. And that includes a lot of really conservative and bad ideas like chained-CPI. So the Republicans really have nothing else to campaign on. If it isn’t Benghazi! then it will be something else crazy, designed to appeal to their crazy base: IRS targeting of conservative groups or ATF coming after your guns or Obama coming after Christian religious rights. These are all untrue, but it hardly matters. The Republicans currently have no actual policies to push.

So Benghazi! it is.

Jonathan Chait wants you to know, You Don’t Hate Monopoly, You Just Suck at It. And he is right that Monopoly is a wrongly vilified game. In particular, the game does not take hours to play. A big part of what makes the game grind on are common extensions like doubling the starting cash and paying $500 for landing on Free Parking.

When I was a kid, I played Monopoly a lot. So although I never made a study of the game, much of my intuition was right. Here are just a few things I knew that are backed up by actual analysis: don’t buy the dark green properties; avoid the purple properties; generally, try to buy the second group on one line; and the properties on the first two lines are better than the second two lines. The first two rules are just my experience. But there is a “go to jail” spot right before the green properties; and the purple properties are right after Go, so they are less likely to be hit. The third rule is just simple analysis: these properties have higher rents but cost less to build on. And the fourth rules takes advantage of the fact that people are so often transported to Go and Jail.

But there is a very good reason that most people don’t like playing Monopoly. And Chait knows about it. He explained, “Trading is the key to the game.” When multiple people are playing, there is always one or more people who think that other players are ganging up on them. This is the reason that pretty much no one wants to play the game Risk. Chait is right, of course, without trading, the game is boring and, in general, long. So players have to be willing to trade.

The problem is that the trading is distinctly outside the set rules of the game. If you land on another person’s property, you own them rent. That is all there is to it. But if two of your opponents trade themselves into monopolies and you are left out, you will not see it as the vicissitudes of the game. You will see it as the other players screwing you. And you won’t be completely wrong.

Personally, I find games of pure skill more edifying: chess, checkers, Go. But they also suffer from what is probably the worst aspect of all games: most people (but men especially) are jerks. The joy is in the playing, not the winning or the losing. I’ve noticed a lot that people (conservatives especially) have this problem with little league games where score isn’t kept. This is like enjoying a book only to get to the end. Games should be fun in the playing and winning should largely be irrelevant.

What Chait discussed is valuable. Because what he’s really getting at is understanding the game. It is only by taking the game seriously that we can enjoy it fully. If Monopoly were just a random game, it wouldn’t be much fun. On the other hand, I never mistook chess to be a random game, but it was boring because I didn’t understand it. I had to teach myself how to play it because chess instruction is so horrible. And I think that’s the case because most people who play it are only interested in winning. To this day, I enjoy chess greatly without being terribly interested in winning.

Chait ended his article in an unfortunate way:

This strikes me as a big problem with people who play games. If you were playing Monopoly with someone who did not understand the essentials of the game, wouldn’t you explain at least the basics? Wouldn’t that make the game more fun? And isn’t that the point?

On this day in 1838, John Wilkes Booth was born. He is one of the great villains of American history. But I think I understand him. He was, after all, only 26 years old when he assassinated President Lincoln. And it isn’t at clear what he thought he was doing, given that the Civil War was over. But how he reached the point of thinking that it was right to kill the president is not so hard to understand. He got lost in his own vision of the world that was, tellingly, dependent upon Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. He saw Lincoln as Caesar—a despot that needed to be destroyed. I think it is also possible that there was schizophrenia involved.

Of course, there is a big difference between hating a man and thinking he is a tyrant, and setting about to kill that man. Booth’s behavior pushed him further and further away from his family. His older brother Edwin Booth was a unionist and supporter of Lincoln. By 1864, he would no longer welcomed his younger brother in his home. Shortly before John died, Edwin wrote to his sister, “Think no more of him as your brother; he is dead to us now, as he soon must be to all the world, but imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit, in another world.”

So the assassin found himself more and more around like-minded people and they managed to whip themselves up to the point where the murder of a president seemed like not just a good idea but an absolutely essential act. It bothers me today because of Cliven Bundy and the militia people. They’ve all convinced themselves that Obama, rather than being just a president of the opposite party, is a despot that must be destroyed. This kind of thinking brought about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and more recently, and pointedly, the Oklahoma City bombing.

I’ve always felt sorry for Edwin Booth. He was a great actor who was on the cutting edge of moving Shakespearean performance toward a more naturalistic style. And the Booths were probably the greatest theatrical family in American history. John Wilkes Booth really screwed that up. Obviously, he did much greater harm to the Lincolns and to the country. But you are supposed to look out for your family. But when ideology gets out of hand, very basic things get lost like love of your family and respect for the law.

Anyway, happy birthday to the very troubled and horrible John Wilkes Booth.

This is from yesterday’s The Colbert Report. Jake Rush is a Tea Party candidate running for Florida’s 3rd District House seat. He is an idiot, but not of the frothing at the mouth variety. He also does role playing as a vampire. That is, by far, the coolest thing about him. And that doesn’t really say anything about him. If I dressed up as a vampire, that would be the coolest thing about me. Of course, maybe that doesn’t say much about Rush given my coolness bonafides. But I love the image above. I would totally watch that show.

Here is the segment:

And here his interview with with the very good natured Jake Rush:

In 1955, Frank Conniff went to the Soviet Union to interview Nikita Khrushchev and other communist leaders. This led the following year to his winning the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. At that same time he was a minor celebrity—frequently appearing on Who Said That?—a game show developed by Fred Friendly, who was later closely associated with Edward R Murrow. Later in his life, Conniff became TV’s Frank on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Wait! That’s can’t be right. The MST3K Frank Conniff was only born on the year that Frank Conniff won the Pulitzer. What’s going on, of course, is that TV’s Frank is actually Frank Conniff Jr. But given that his journalist father died when he was only 14 years old, he didn’t feel the need to distinguish. But it’s very confusing. What’s more, if you look at his Wikipedia page, there is no mention of his father except the usual warning, “For the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, see Frank Conniff (journalist).” And on that page, the only mention of the younger Conniff is under “children” in the boxed information. (Actually, I just noticed that Frank Conniff the Younger has the same information in his box.)

It’s kind of weird because normally there would be some information like, “Frank Conniff was born on 30 August 1956 in New York City, the son of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Frank Conniff…” The only reason I found out about Conniff’s famous father was that he sent out a tweet yesterday:

In related Frank Conniff news, I finally got around to listening to the newest Podhouse 90 (almost a year old at this point), “South by South Satan.” His first episode was “The Wonderful Pundits of Oz,” which I quite enjoyed, even though I thought it could have been tighter. In most ways, “South by South Satan” is as good. But it is primarily a single joke: Satan is responsible for all the terrible anemic songs you hate. It also lampoons the sell-out mentality of modern America and doesn’t have very nice things to say about Christians either. It’s more snark than anything, so if you like that and really dislike Michael Buble, check it out!

I’m just glad I got the Frank Conniffs sorted out.