Monthly Archives: August 2015

Wonderful Terriers in Film

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UggieIt’s been almost two weeks since Uggie was put to death. He was the dog actor who charmed the hell out of the world in the film, The Artist. He was suffering from prostate cancer. He was 13 years old. I’m told that is 91 in doggy years, but I wonder. The average life expectancy for a dog is 13 years. And according to The Jack Russell Terrier Canine Companion Or Demon Dog the life expectancy range for Uggie’s breed is 13 to 16 years. So Uggie did okay, but he was hardly like a 91 year old human.

Terriers (not just Jack Russells) are probably my favorite kind of dog. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that I used to have a friend who had such a dog. And I took care of him often. And I loved him. I don’t think there has ever been a dog that I’ve been so fond of. He seemed very much like me: excitable and smart — for a dog. In addition to this, terriers don’t especially look like a breed; they look like muts. And that is especially true of the ones like Uggie who have the much better rough coat.

But ultimately, I like terriers because they’ve been used in so many movies I like. And I thought that I would share a few of them with you. The first, and greatest terrier was Skippy. He was a Wire Fox Terrier, born in 1931. He played in some of the best films of the 1930s: The Thin Man, The Awful Truth, and Bringing Up Baby. Here he is as George in that last film:

Then there is Milo in The Mask. He was played by a dog named Max. But I haven’t found much information about him. That seems pretty strange, given that the film is basically a buddy picture with Max getting the good part and Jim Carrey playing the straight man. This has a translation on it, but it doesn’t matter:

And to finish it out, how could we forget Flealick, the handicapped terrier in Babe: Pig in the City. He exhibits all the qualities we expect in a terrier (except working back legs). “Feeling good! Feeling peppy!” (Point of order: I don’t think the dog in the dream sequence is not a good double for the animatronic Flealick.)

Rest in peace Uggie!

GOP Can Get Down to Business Without Gilmore

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Jim GilmoreCNN is hosting a Republican presidential debate, and everybody’s invited! Everybody but Jim Gilmore, who is supposedly the former governor of Virginia. Hadas Gold reports the debate will include “the entire GOP field, minus Jim Gilmore.” According to CNN, it’s nothing personal, just that Gilmore is polling at 0.0 percent.

The 16 candidates will probably use the debate to make fun of Gilmore behind his back.

—Jonathan Chait
CNN to Host Non-Gilmore Presidential Debate

Federal Courts Done With Obamacare Challenges?!

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John RobertsFor many years, I’ve been arguing that the New Democrats’ idea of pushing the Democratic Party to the right is the actual cause of the Republican Party going completely insane. It’s very simple. The Democratic Party’s push right makes the Republican “tent” smaller. They have no choice but to bunch up in a smaller and smaller group on the far edge of conservative ideology. But this has very broad applicability. Since the mainstream news is all about defining acceptable discourse as whatever is between the Democrats and the Republicans, reality itself is distorted.

We’ve been seeing this with the recent Planned Parenthood hatchet job, where there is no scandal, but still the press has treated it as though it were news. And we’ve seen this regarding Benghazi, the IRS non-scandal, and “Fast and Furious.” But most of all, we’ve seen it in the courts with Obamacare. First there was National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius. That was a case that most legal experts thought was a joke. It was just something that allowed hate radio hosts to use ridiculous slippery slope arguments, “Could the government force you to eat broccoli?” And then, the broccoli question was asked by Scalia at oral arguments. Unbelievable.

And then more recently, we had King v Burwell, again a joke of a case — but one where the minority found that their previous positions on laws having to be read in their totality didn’t matter. If there was a single phrase that allowed them to destroy a law they didn’t like, they would do it. This is not ultimately about the courts, however. This is about a political system that has gone off the rails, because it depends upon a two party system with each side being reasonable. We now have a system with a conservative party and a proto-fascist party. It’s no wonder that things are so screwed up.

Ian MillhiserWe have a little good news, however. Ian Millhiser wrote, Conservative Federal Judges Wave the White Flag on Obamacare. This doesn’t come as a shock. When the King decision came down, a lot of people commented that Chief Justice Roberts was sending a message that he wanted all these stupid lawsuits to stop. As it was, there were hundreds of them. It was like shooting randomly at a target — some arrows would hit the target by chance. And as we saw, the two anti-Obamacare cases that got traction really were ridiculous.

The newest case in this is Sissel v Department of Health and Human Services. It is a technical challenge to Obamacare, which claimed that the law was invalid because it violated the Origination Clause that says that bills to raise revenue must originate in the House of Representatives. But that doesn’t stop the Senate from taking any House bill and totally rewriting it, which is what it did in this case — just as it has done many other times like in 1986, when it did this to push through a Reagan tax cut. The entire DC Circuit Court said no to this challenge. And that included very conservative justices, including one who said yes to King (actually, it was Halbig at that time — same case).

It seems that John Roberts’ message has been received by the conservatives in the federal court system: no more! The conservatives have had their chances to manipulate the judicial system to destroy Obamacare in a way they haven’t been able to do legislatively. They’ve failed. It is time to get on with other things. And I still think that in another ten (maybe even five) years, even the vast majority of Republicans will see it as untouchable. I expect to start seeing conservative articles with titles like “Actually: Obamacare Is a Conservative Law” and “Is Obamacare Really the Free Market Healthcare Choice?” And then the Republican Party can get on to the serious business of rewriting history about how they were always for Obamacare. Maybe they will start calling it Boehnercare.

If You Care About Results Don’t Vote Libertarian

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Rand PaulPaul Bibeau wrote a great short article, Liberals, Not Libertarians, Are The Ones Helping Us Avoid Getting Incinerated. It’s an issue that I’ve thought a lot about over the years. His focus was on Rand Paul. He noted, “He talks a good game, but when the Iran deal comes up for a vote, he’ll oppose it like any other Republican.” That’s right. Rand Paul is always in favor of libertarian policy in the abstract. He’s all against the idea of Guantanamo Bay, but against any actual policy that would close it. He’s against government surveillance, but when there is actual law to fight it, he’s against it. And he’s against foreign wars in the abstract, but is just as belligerent as the rest of the Republican field.

Bibeau makes a glancing blow to the common libertarian complaint that Paul isn’t a “true” libertarian, calling him “Libertarianesque.” But when exactly have we seen a “true” libertarian anywhere outside a Libertarian Party meetup? The “true” modifier is just a way for a very insular group to claim that its philosophy is only ever failed, it never fails. If libertarianism was anything like its proponents claim, then there would be an equal mixture of libertarians in the Republican and Democratic parties. But there aren’t.

My own experience in the Libertarian Party was that the vast majority of people were just disenchanted Republicans. In fact, there were almost no libertarians who came from the left. The ones who did were all there because they wanted drugs legalized. I was one of them. And it was telling seeing people in the party deal with the issue. They were clearly in favor of certain ideas: taxes are slavery; property rights are inviolable; the poor are losers; unions are terrible. And if the subject came up, they would grit their teeth, sigh, and admit, “Yes, our philosophy also says you should be able to have drugs.”

My issues were not just drugs. I cared deeply about civil rights and a humble foreign policy. But whenever any libertarian got traction, it was not because of issues like that. On the left, much was made of Rand Paul’s reluctance to say that he would support the Voting Rights Act. But the truth of the matter is that this position probably made Paul more popular, not less. Libertarianism owes most of its support in this country to neo-Confederacy. Many libertarians may not mean to imply oppression of minorities when they talk about “states’ rights,” but it is still a racist dog whistle.

My real break with libertarianism came when I saw that there was actual movement on drug laws: they were getting less harsh and cannabis was on its way to becoming legal. This certainly wasn’t due the Republicans. And the arguments being made were practical, so the changes weren’t even coming out of the intellectual framework of libertarianism. It was good old-fashioned liberalism that was improving the world. The high minded rhetoric of the Libertarian Party was fine, but it wasn’t moving society in a positive direction.

It was worse than that. By the time of my change, I had already noticed a problem with libertarianism: “Vote for libertarian rhetoric; get conservative policy.” This is something that immigrants especially fall for. They hear the Republicans talk about “freedom” and “small government.” So they vote for them. But somehow, they rarely manage to ever get past the rhetoric to seeing what the Republicans actually do. I don’t doubt that Rand Paul would be better on foreign policy than, say, Jeb Bush. But would he be better than Hillary Clinton? Almost certainly not.

I’m the first to admit that the Democratic Party is imperfect. But if a would-be libertarian is actually interested in better drug laws and less war, she should turn away from the Libertarian and Republican parties and accept that the Democratic Party is the best game in town.

Morning Music: Bright Side of Life

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Life of BrianEric Idle is probably the most American of the Pythons — and I am definitely including Terry Gilliam. Idle is really clever, but very often without substance. He is definitely part of the “silly” faction of Monty Python. But as is often the case, his silliness is linked to great profundity. A good example of that is “Galaxy Song,” which manages to be both scientific and ontological. I would have used the song today if I hadn’t used it for a previous Morning Music.

For the sense of spirituality that I’m going for this week, the better choice is “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from Life of Brian. The lines that most affect me are, “If life seems jolly rotten; there’s something you’ve forgotten…” This touches on a question I ask myself a lot, “If existence were just pain, would it still be worth existing?” At one time, I would have said emphatically: no! But now I’m not so sure. If you want to think of it in a highly metaphorical sense, “God’s love” is existence itself. And if you want to go further, his even greater love is that existence ends.

I don’t think the song is a call for optimism. It is rather fatalistic, “Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it…” I’m pretty sure that all of us are in terrible pain all the time. If you are depressed, you feel every little pain in your body. If you aren’t depressed, all that pain is still there — it just doesn’t bother you. It is a question of perspective — not that I’m saying we have a choice, because ultimately it is all just chemical reactions. For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Anniversary Post: Syncom 3

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Syncom 2On this day in 1964, Syncom 3 was put into orbit around the world. It was the first geostationary communications satellite. That means it was a satellite that stays in the place relative to the surface of the Earth. Or to put it a bit more technically, it orbits the Earth at the same speed that the Earth rotates. It’s really great for communication because it is always in the same place and can service the same part of the Earth.

In 1961, NASA started the Syncom — “synchronous communication satellite” — program. Syncom 1 was launched in 1963 to be in geosynchronous orbit. This kind of orbit moves around but ends up at the same exact location one day later. NASA got it in orbit, but not in geosynchronous orbit. So they moved on to Syncom 2. It achieved geosynchronous orbit on 26 July 1963. But it wasn’t until Syncom 3 that geostationary orbit was achieved.

Interestingly, even though none of these satellites have been used for over 45 years, they are still circling the earth. In the case of Syncom 3, it is orbiting at almost 7,000 mph.

A Brief History of Socks

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Greek foot wrapsPaul Krugman wrote a very brief post about Knitting History, apparently just so he could deliver this groaner, “I know I’m just knit-picking.” I’m not sure I can ever forgive that. But the object of the post was a fabulous article by Paul Spinrad, The Surprisingly Tumultuous History of Socks. I find this kind of stuff fascinating. How did people start wearing shoes? When did they come up with the idea of socks? Sadly, Spinrad doesn’t answer those questions. But I’ll come back to him in a moment.

Shoes themselves are quite a recent invention. The first shoes were actually sandals. The earliest evidence takes them back to about 10,000 years ago. Curiously, this coincides with the Neolithic Revolution — the time when humans settled down and started to farm. That’s not surprising. That probably gave them time to think about things like, “If I covered my feet with leather, it wouldn’t hurt as much to walk on gravel.” Socks came much later. They appear to have been added to give extra warmth — just like today.

The Greeks were using socks made out of animal hair in the 8th century BCE. But they weren’t tubes that people put their feet into. They were just lengths of cloth that were wrapped around the feet and the legs. You can see this in the image above. It’s actually fetching. But I find the five to ten seconds it takes me to put on socks each day onerous. Wrapping my feet sounds like far too much work. Then again, I might not care if I had to actually, you know, go outside every day.

The Knitting Girl - William-Adolphe Bouguereau - 1869It was the Romans who changed the art of foot warmth forever. Fascistic though they may have been, they were good at simplifying things. So in the second century, when the Christians were fighting over what their church would be, the Romans invented the sock as a specific foot covering. But since they didn’t stretch, they had to be specifically fitted to people’s feet. And they stayed that way until knitting was invented.

Knitting came along around the middle of the 3rd century by someone in the Middle East. Whereas weaving uses parallel strands of thread, knitting uses a single thread. Thus, it stretches. Let me just stop for a moment and mention that I find this stuff constantly fascinating. Another example is the invention of pottery. It’s this stuff that we take for granted but which was revolutionary. To me, knitting seems more obvious than weaving, but that’s just because I’ve been watching people knit my whole life.

And then in the 16th century, it becomes automated and it’s all down hill. The rest of Spinrad’s article consists of anecdotes. There is one about William Lee, the inventor of the stocking frame knitting machine. He may have built it because the knitting woman who lived next door to him wasn’t interested in his romantic advances. Spite is a powerful motivator! There is also the story of Thomas Chatterton, a poet who forged some ancient poems but was caught because of some sock related anachronism. He killed himself as a result.

Socks are lovely. It is still chilly in my room, but it should be very hot today. So I’m wearing shorts. My legs are cold, but my feet and ankles are toasting. The power of socks!

We Don’t Need Elon Musk

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Noah SmithSometimes, really smart people get lost in their own brilliance. Luckily, there are lesser thinkers like me around to show them the error of their ways. Our example today comes from Noah Smith, Did Elon Musk Build That? In it, Smith argues against a common fallacy of assigning proportional blame to complementary causes. So he claims that we can’t say, as conservatives do, that innovation is all about “great men.” But he also claims that we can’t say, as liberals do, that innovation is all about social structure.

I accept this in a certain way: you need both the people and the structure. My problem comes with the idea of the “great men.” Great is a relative concept. And no one ever defines it. What it means in practice is powerful men. The best that an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs or even an Albert Einstein brings us is a couple of years. For every Wright Brothers, there is always one or more Glenn Curtisses on their heals — or even in front of them. Intelligence and creativity are not cliffs; they are continuums.

Every time I hear someone talking about this or that famous innovator, it makes me start to twitch. But it isn’t because they didn’t do this or that thing. (Although in many cases, it is, in fact, because they didn’t do anything — like Jobs.) It is the idea that doing this or that was a major accomplishment. This is taken to high comedy when talking about Mark Zuckerberg. That was clearly a case where they were doing stuff just like dozens of other groups and happened to have just the right combination of funding and luck. There is no question but that the world would be exactly the same if Karen Kempner had had an abortion 32 years ago.

The fundamental misunderstanding of conservatives — and this goes way back in history — is their idea that the rich are somehow better. It is built into their entire worldview. In order to claim that the status quo is good, you must believe that there is a reason that things are the way they are. Liberals believe that it is stochastic with a broad trend that depends not at all on the specific individuals that take part. Yes, if Einstein had not been around, the world would not have been introduced to general relativity in 1915. The theory would have been developed soon enough. What’s more, the intellectual breathing room his absence accorded might have led to faster progress in other areas.

There is no reason to think that we would be in a markedly different place (Not to mention a worse place!) if all the “great men” had never been born. If we had missed out on them, there would have been others (for good and for bad) to take their places. And that means that the “great men” just fold into the larger narrative about social change. And that should not come as a surprise. The “great man” theory really only serves one purpose: to justify things being the way they are.

So yes, Noah Smith is right that we need the “great men.” But they could be pretty much any men. And that means that the conservative claim is wrong. It is all about the broader society. We don’t need Elon Musk.

Success Sequence: New Way to Blame the Poor!

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Matt BruenigIt has been fascinating over the years to watch conservative intellectuals (loosely defined) argue that people are poor because of their bad life choices. This is a major part of the writing done by both David Brooks and Charles Murray. It’s a way of looking concerned and high minded while blaming the poor for all their problems. It is just the modern version of classism: claiming that the rich are deserving of their wealth and the poor are deserving of their poverty. But instead of saying it is genetics (although Murray has said that too), they say it is “cultural.”

One way that people have found to quantify this concept is the “Success Sequence.” This is the idea that with three weird tricks, you too can avoid poverty. I’ve never given it much thought, because the whole thing is such question begging. It isn’t as bad as saying, “make a lot of money and you won’t be in poverty.” But it is close. Check it out:

  1. Graduate from high school;
  2. Maintain a full-time job or have a partner who does;
  3. Have children while married and after age 21, should they choose to become parents.

The thing that jumps right out of this is that the second weird trick is as close as one could get to assuming the conclusion as is possible without being laughed out of polite company. Forget high school and children, why not just leave it there at number two? But I think that’s clear enough. If it had been “one weird trick,” it would have been obvious that it was nonsense. But people look at the three and figure each of those must add something to the equation. And all three things are good ideas. So what the hell?

I don’t know exactly how these weird tricks were developed. But I figure, it started with someone thinking of a short list of similar “good ideas.” Then some numbers were crunched, and they determined that these three created the best correlation and they went with it. As it is, there are plenty of people like Rich Lowry who are just itching for anything to use to claim that the poor have no one to blame but themselves.

The amazingly brilliant Matt Bruenig decided to look at the numbers regarding the Success Sequence, even though it is clear to him as well that it begs the question at hand, The Success Sequence Is Extremely Misleading and Impossible to Code. He concluded:

Given the above, it’s honestly hard to understand why Sawhill/Haskins and Brookings more generally have presented the Success Sequence like this, or indeed at all. Full-time work gets you the vast majority of the way to the low-poverty conclusion and then high-school education gets you basically right up to it. Bringing in the marriage and child-delay stuff is totally unnecesary and then can’t even be properly identified in the data. Adding a condition that does basically no work for your conclusion that you can’t even identify is utterly baffling. I hate to accuse others of bad faith, but it’s very difficult to not wonder if there was an agenda for the marriage/child points that they crammed in no matter how irrelevant it was and how impossible it was to operationalize.

But the more fundamental critique remains. Isn’t it self-evident that if the poor all had full time jobs that most of them would not be poor? The point of the Success Sequence doesn’t seem to be to illuminate the causes of poverty. It seems to be just to excuse poverty — as a way to claim that it is all about the poor being undisciplined and lazy. It’s sad — and totally unacceptable coming from a decent think tank like Brookings.

Morning Music: The Sea Refused No River

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All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese EyesBack in the late 1980s, I was shocked to learn that there were people I greatly respected who hated the Pete Townshend album All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes. How could that be?! I thought it was one of the greatest albums ever recorded. I think that even more strongly today. But I think I have a better notion of why people don’t like the album. It is personal and unapologetic. It is, in fact, a proud statement that stands against the shallow snark and ironic detachment of the modern world.

There really is nothing easier than standing aloof from your art — silently telling your audience, “Don’t worry; I’m not serious; I too think everything is a joke.” The funny thing is, that I agree with the basic idea: everything is a joke. But does that mean that our actual feelings are any less real to us? Hell, I think consciousness is a chemical trick. But I don’t live my life based upon that belief. I really do feel lonely and embarrassed and stupid. And I can wink about it, but that doesn’t make the feelings any less real to me. For all of our society’s ironic detachment, we are still as lost as ever.

For our week of spiritual songs, I could have picked anything off this album. But I decided to go with my favorite: “The Sea Refuses No River.” I love that the metaphor works on so many levels. You can certainly see the song simply as romantic love. A man saying, “If you love me, you cannot deny my love.” But that’s a pretty limited interpretation of it. Better would be death: we all flow into the sea of eternity. But I always think of it as love in the broadest context. The metaphor illuminates the concept, because love is, ultimately, acceptance.

Anniversary Post: Urbain Grandier’s Release

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Urbain GrandierOn this day in 1634, Urbain Grandier was burned to death. It must have come as a relief. He had been horribly tortured up to that point. But what do you expect from good Christians? I know, I know: Christians would tell me that the men who tortured and killed him didn’t actually have Jesus inside them and weren’t “true” Christians. But any religion that does such a bad job of instilling its moral tenets has got to be suspect. And let’s face it: modern Christians don’t do a very good job of being advertisements for God’s love.

Grandier was a Catholic priest in France. He didn’t believe that priests should be celibate. In fact, he wrote a book arguing against it. And he practiced what he preached. He was known to be a hunka hunka burning love. He apparently angered Sister Jeanne of the Angels — who seems to have fallen in love with him from afar. This led to the whole convent that she headed accusing Grandier of evil and impure acts. The church tried him and found him not guilty.

Unfortunately, Grandier had managed to really piss off Cardinal Richelieu. If that name sounds familiar, he is the main villain in The Three Musketeers. But in real life, he was much worse. After Grandier was found guilty, Richelieu just ordered another trial. But by this point, the nuns had calmed down and refused to testify against Grandier. What’s a cardinal to do? Well, they tortured Grandier for a confession. But they apparently never got one, so they just forged a confession.

But I feel a certain kinship with Urbain Grandier. I too once thought that the logic of my own personal obsessions were obvious and if only the beauty of my argument were seen, the world would agree. But I was never burned at the stake. Still, I feel certain that this is just the result of good timing. If I had lived a couple hundred years before now, I would have met a violent and painful end. But I would have provided a confession long before the torture started. I’m not a fool.