On this day in 1898, the great lithographer Maurits Cornelis Escher was born. As a young man, he was sickly in ways that I don’t like to think about. In college, for example, he failed some of his courses because of skin infections. Nonetheless, he seemed to get past this, attract a wife, have children, and live what seems to have been a fairly normal life.

He was born in the Netherlands, but moved to Italy in his early 20s. Everything was fine there. He liked the scenery. But with the rise of the fascists, he could stand it no more. Escher saw himself as non-political, but I doubt that’s really true. He was an artistic bourgeoisie and wasn’t political because the system worked for him. But fascism pushed against that. So he moved the family various places before ending up back in the Netherlands where he spent the rest of his life.

Escher is known for his mind-bending lithographs, but his early work wasn’t like that at all. He did a lot of landscapes. Very pretty stuff. There is no doubt that the man was a master of his trade early on in his career. Here is an example from 1930, Castrovalva:

Later in his life, he dismissed all of his work before 1935 as merely practice exercises. But that’s clearly not true. As with Magritte, I think sometimes the conceptual aspects of his later work distract from its beauty. But we definitely see his work evolve over time. In 1934, he created Still Life with Spherical Mirror, which contains some elements that will eventually become a recognizable part of his repertoire:

And the rest is history. I’m sure you’ve seen all his famous works, so I don’t feel the need to present them here. He did important work very late into his life.

Happy birthday Maurits Cornelis Escher!

The fact that things are going badly in Iraq would not normally be news in the United States. In a fundamental sense, it is not news regardless. The Shiite and the Sunnis are fighting? That’s not surprising. And this is a reality that knowledgeable observers warned about when we decided to invade the country 11 years ago. But the civil war that seems to be starting in Iraq is news because it is an opportunity for the neocons who got us into the war to say, “See! We were right!”

How this does not cause the entire nation to howl with laughter, I do not know. The argument is something like, “This wouldn’t be happening if Bush were still president!” That might even be true. But a far stronger argument is, “This would be happening if Bush had never been president!” It sickens me to even think about. Yesterday, Paul Wolfowitz of all people was on Meet the Press. Paul Wolfowitz!

Jamelle Bouie sums up my feeling exactly, Fool Me Once:

Of course, Wolfowitz isn’t the only one. They are crawling out of the woodwork. Apparently, being disastrously wrong about something makes you an expert on it. Asking people like Wolfowitz, writes Bouie, “is like asking Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for advice on disaster preparation.”

Matt Yglesias, the nerdy economics and finance writer at Vox, laid out the situation in Iraq in the most clear way that I’ve read, The Mess in Iraq Proves Obama Was Right to Leave. Basically, he says that as soon as we invaded, this was all to be expected. But he made a really good analogy to (What else?!) the world of finance:

That’s right. The Bush administration had planned to defeat Iraq, set up a government, and leave. But instead, it found itself in a world of trouble with a country that was in chaos. And we stayed, year after year, hoping that something good would happen. We were hoping that we would “strike it lucky and end up back in the black.” But whether that happened or not was not going to be because we had 200,000 troops on the ground.

But now we have all the fools that got us into that war in the first place back on television telling us that Obama was wrong to end the war. He wasn’t. But I would be in favor of a limited engagement. Let’s put Paul Wolfowitz through boot camp, give him a gun and drop him into Tal Afar. Maybe he’d have better luck this time.

You probably have heard about Judge Rolf Treu finding that California teacher tenure was unconstitutional because it violated the students’ equal rights to a good education. What is hilarious about this is that students in Calfornia do not have equal rights to a good education regardless. School funding is based upon local property taxes, so students who live in poor areas get far fewer resources. But conservatives like Treu are not at all interested in the children. They are interested in breaking teachers’ unions, just like they want to break all unions.

I seriously doubt that his finding will hold up as it is appealed. Diane Ravitch looked into the case last week and determined, The Vergara Trial Teachers Were Not “Grossly Ineffective.” But even before getting to the heart of the matter, here’s a really interesting thing in the case. Of the nine plaintiffs, four were at schools that didn’t even have tenure. So even if you assume that these teachers were terrible, tenure doesn’t seem to be the thing that was keeping them in the classroom.

But the truth is that the teachers were not “grossly ineffective.” The defense noted that four of the plaintiffs presented no evidence at all that the teachers were bad. Of the other five, nothing was established other than the single student doing poorly. That hardly qualifies as “grossly ineffective.” That’s more along the lines of, “I don’t like my teacher.” The plaintiffs didn’t have administrators testify nor did they look at the teachers’ work history.

Ravitch noted:

I have no doubt that Rolf Treu had his mind made up long before this case ever existed. What’s more, I have little doubt if a case came before him claiming that unequal school conditions violated the the students’ equal rights, he would find that they didn’t. Because again, this is not about the students. This is about taking down the teachers’ unions.

Note also that the whole idea of teacher tenure has been blown out of proportion. Tenure does not mean that teachers can’t be fired. What it does mean is that teachers get to defend themselves. They can’t just be arbitrarily fired. But that’s the world that conservatives want us to live in. It is a world in which all working people live in constant fear for their jobs. People like that are easy to control. They know that their very lives depend upon keeping a low profile and always yielding to the powerful.

I’m all for education reform. But I’m entirely against the “education reform” movement. In this country, “reform” is almost always a euphemism. In this case, it is a euphemism for destroying the teachers’ unions. And the net result of all of this is going to be that our children get an even worse education than they now get.

Afterword

At The Robing Room, a prosecutor said this of Judge Rolf Treu, “Shoddy work. Biased rulings. Will almost always favor those with money, connections and conservative politics.”

Last year’s birthday post was really good. With interesting things to say about the painter John Linnell, novelist Erich Segal (but mostly the whole Al Gore thing), and economist Adam Smith. Humility has never been a great gift of mine, so I highly recommend clicking over. As you may remember, last year, I did a lot of different people for the birthday posts. And if I was into it, I could go into quite a bit of depth. Or I could do little more than a list of people. Well, on this day, I did the former. So rather than repeat myself, I’m going to do someone who probably wasn’t even born today.

During this month in 1829, Bedonkohe Apache leader Geronimo was born. He is best known for fighting against Texas and Mexico because of their expansion into Apache lands. Before getting more into Geronimo, I want to take a moment to talk about Ayn Rand. Almost two years ago, I wrote an article, Ayn Rand and Indians. It was about her claim that the European settlers were right to take the native people’s lands. She had a number of arguments, but the main one was that the natives did not have the concept of property rights. (Objectivists still make this same apologia.) If that is the case, what were the Apache’s fighting for? It’s just a ridiculous argument. Even other species have ideas of property rights. It’s just that people like Ayn Rand are racists with very little understanding of the various native cultures. If there had been CNN in the 19th century, it would have been reported as the genocidal land grab that it was. And now back to Geronimo.

The Apache people are actually made up of a number of groups, most notably the Navajo. They lived in what is now New Mexico. Geronimo was part of the Bedonkohe group. At 17, he married a woman from another Apache band. Four years later, while he and the rest of the men were away trading, a group of 400 Mexican soldiers attacked their village, even though the Mexican government was supposedly at peace with the Apache. Geronimo later described his experience:

Not surprisingly, Geronimo hated the Mexicans for this. For the next 35 years, he was pretty much at war with the Mexicans and then later Texas and the United States. The story of this time is very much a model for the treatment of native peoples throughout America. It is the story of lies and aggression. This isn’t to make the natives out to be some perfect people, but they were greatly wronged for hundreds of years. Geronimo did finally surrender and spent the rest of his life at least nominally a prisoner of war.

Late in his life, Geronimo became a celebrity, even appearing at the 1904 World’s Fair and participating in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 inaugural parade. He died at the age of 79. He was riding home when he was thrown from his horse. I guess he broke some bones, because he was unable to continue on and spent the cold night out in the open. This led to his death from pneumonia a few days later. A fighter to the end, his last words are said to have been, “I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.”

Happy birthday Geronimo!

On this day in 1941, the great singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson was born. He was an amazing talent, known primarily for the song “Everybody’s Talkin’,” which was uncharacteristically not written by him. All my life I thought it was a song by Glen Campbell. So for years I was looking for records of Campbell’s looking for the song. Finally, my friend Andrea straightened me out and I was introduced the world of Nilsson. I already knew a lot of his songs like “Coconut” and “Without You” and “Me and My Arrow.”

He was a very unique songwriter. For example, he wrote “One” which was a big hit for Three Dog Night and “My Best Friend” for the television show The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. But he also had a very unique pop voice. A long time heroin addict, he did eventually get clean, only to die of a heart attack at the age of 52. But he left an enormous catalog of music.

Here is his novelty hit “Coconut” that I’m still not tired of after all these years:

Happy birthday Harry Nilsson!

Jared Bernstein put together the great graph below that shows the rate at which wages are going up, Wage Mash Up: No Pressure, No Matter How You Cook It. What it shows is that wages are barely going up. The rate before the financial crisis was twice as high and even during the recession of the early Bush years the rate was 50% higher.

The reason people worry about this stuff is because of the wage-push theory of inflation. If workers’ wages go up without corresponding increases in productivity, it will increase the rate of inflation. Currently, inflation is low—too low, in fact. But there is a whole class of people who always want the Federal Reserve to pull back to keep inflation as low as possible. This class of people is the rich class. People who have lots of dollars want them to hold on to their wealth. If they own bonds that pay 6%, the lower the inflation rate, the more money they are making on the bonds.

The down side is that the lower the inflation rate, the less reason there is for people to make purchases. They might as well sit on their cash. And this means that there is less demand in the economy and so less jobs. If inflation is moderately high, businesses have an incentive to make capital improvements and to hire people. So for people in the lower classes, modest inflation is a good thing.

But as I said, inflation is already low. So the people who want the Fed to raise interest rates (which is how the Fed fights inflation) must come up with reasons for thinking that inflation is about to go up. Thus they look at things like how much wages are going up. And they cherry pick data. What Bernstein has done is put together five different measures of wage changes and of course, he finds that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to be concerned about inflation.

It is pathetic that serious economists like Bernstein have to do this kind of thing. What we do is pretend that these people who are now wringing their hands about inflation are honest brokers. But they aren’t. They are always wringing their hands about inflation. They want the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates so that all the stuff they own will make them as much money as possible.

It is indicative of the fact that we live in an oligarchy that we don’t shame these inflation proselytizers for looking out for their own interests at the direct expense of the best interests of the country as a whole. But instead, we pretend that they are just looking out for the country. And great economists like Jared Bernstein have to spend time to show that, just like last year and the year before and the year before and on and on for decades, they are wrong and we have no inflation problem.

On this day in 1726, the great geologist James Hutton was born. Like most scientists of that time, he worked a large number of fields. But he is most remembered for his work in geology. He is often referred to as the “Father of Modern Geology.”

He came up with the idea of uniformitarianism. This is the idea that how the environment changes now is how it always has. So by looking at the effects of things like erosion, he saw how the crust of the earth changed over very long periods of time. It’s important to remember that at the time he was working, the vast majority of people were young earth creationists. So that alone was a big deal. Obviously, he didn’t know about plate tectonics, but he did understand that rock was created in the oceans and then pushed up onto the land.

Most interesting, Hutton was the first scientist to suggest that the earth itself was a living organism. This, of course, is the basic idea of the Gaia hypothesis. He also applied his ideas of uniformitarianism to changes in species. He did not come up with the idea of natural selection, but it is known that a young Charles Darwin had read his work, and it undoubtedly affected the way he saw the world.

Happy birthday James Hutton!