Jonathan Chait caught something important buried in a long (pay-walled) report in Congressional Quarterly, You’ll Never Guess What Just Happened to Paul Ryan’s Promise to Tackle Poverty. It seems that Ryan’s new budget will contain policy proposals that he supposedly researched in his 204-page poverty report. Chait is one of the most insightful writers when it comes to Ryan, and he concludes that the problem is just that Ryan (along with his Republicans colleagues) has irreconcilable contradictions.

I am not inclined to be so nice. To me, Ryan’s poverty report was no kind of honest look at the research on poverty. It was an effort at propaganda. He went through all the research with no intention but to show that poverty programs don’t work and to argue that the best thing for the poor is to abandon them. Chait even mentioned this, saying that “it used selective, one-sided methods to indict the safety net.” There was no way that when Ryan started work on his report that he was going to find that safety net programs work.

The whole thing reminds me of those cargo cult tribes. After World War II, the people built replicas of airplanes and other things associated with war activity to bring back the cargo. Understandably, they were confused about correlation and causation. We get the same thing from Paul Ryan. Serious people study issues and write reports. He wants to be seen as serious so he goes through the motions of doing serious work.

Image via Atlas Obscura

That’s the thing about all of Paul Ryan’s supposed “wonkery.” Long ago, he decided that his budgets and reports didn’t need to add up or make sense. It is just the idea that he has a plan that impresses the reporters. And indeed, his budgets are not only cruel to the poor, they would be catastrophic for the economy. But they were applauded in the media. And it’s the same thing with his poverty report. The media treated it as though Ryan were seriously looking at the issue of poverty rather than simply justifying his hostility toward poor people.

So it is not so much that Ryan’s commitments to military spending and tax cuts trump poverty elimination. Rather, Ryan’s current interest in poverty is only for the purpose of coming up with justification for cutting it. So his new budget does deal with poverty. As Chait noted, “At least two thirds of the cuts in last year’s Ryan plan come from programs for poor people.” From Paul Ryan’s perspective, that is a poverty program! Because what the poor really need is a kick in the butt, not a helping hand. And that goes double for those freeloading kids.

Having fought with a major networking problem all weekend long, I’m kind of tired. So you must forgive me for taking the easy way out and noting that Vincent van Gogh was born on this day in 1853. I put it that way, because van Gogh is probably the most overrated painter in history. I don’t say that because he wasn’t a great painter; he was very much a great painter. Nor do I say it just because his paintings commonly sell for around $100 million dollars a piece. I say it because of which paintings sell. It is generally his weaker paintings.

Of course, it is a matter of opinion. I like van Gogh most when his painting is more like Gauguin. The less impressionistic his work is, the better. When he was doing his usual style—the one that people seem to like so much—he was incredibly repetitive. I especially don’t like his explicit lines in most of that work. But things like Bedroom in Arles are transcendent. And I’m especially impressed with The Zouave (half-figure) (although the full-figure is arguably even better):

I am especially interested in van Gogh’s relationship with his brother Theo. I think it is wonderful that the two were so close and that Theo was so dedicated to Vincent’s art. But then, I have a tendency to romanticize van Gogh. I saw a documentary that proposed what is probably an unlikely theory: that some boys accidentally shot van Gogh, and he didn’t say anything in order to cover for them. So: no suicide, just an honorable man doing his best for some youths. Even if it’s just a story, I prefer to believe it.

Here is Jonathan Richman doing his very sweet homage to the artist:

Happy birthday Vincent van Gogh!

Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, FBI Smashes Alleged Radical-Right Terror Plot in Texas. It told the story of Robert James Talbot Jr, who seems to be a right wing nutjob. He was soliciting people via Facebook to recruit men “to restore America Pre-Constitutionally and look forward to stopping the Regime with action by bloodshed.” His rhetoric is all like that. For example, he wrote, “[W]e will send that white house worthless piece of dirt and his Muslim brotherhood a message they will never forget.” Charming stuff.

What’s bothersome, but hardly surprising, is that there is nothing very different from what he wrote than what one hears on right wing hate radio. He is talking about armed rebellion. But otherwise, it is filled with the same nonsense about the Muslim Brotherhood and how the current government—”Regime”—is invalid. And most of all, there is just a loony amount of anger.

It all reminds me of the end of Pulp Fiction, where Jules tells Pumpkin, “The truth is you’re the weak.” I see Talbot as the weak—a lost soul who doesn’t know what to think or to do. And he’s been marinating in a toxic stew of conspiracy theories and anger. What, in the end, are Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage ranting about? If things really are as terrible as they say, is Talbot so wrong to think that revolution is the answer?

None of this is to apologize for Talbot. There is little doubt that he is a very bad guy. I can well imagine him torturing small animals as a child. But one doesn’t become a revolutionary in a vacuum. How long as a society are we going to allow the conservative rage machine to continue on? I’m not talking about laws here. I’m talking about making such rhetoric socially unacceptable.

Two years ago, after Andrew Breitbart died, I wrote, Death as Public Good. In it, I criticized those liberals who said, “Sure, he published vile things and made society a worse place. But in person, he calmed down and was a nice guy.” That’s the problem. Look at Bill O’Reilly. He pays no social price for the venom he spews publicly. He’s still invited onto The Daily Show and accepted as a normal member of society. And when someone like Talbot goes on tilt, no one blames O’Reilly or the social system that created him.

Conservatives are fond of ranting about radicalization of Muslims. But every day on television, radio, and the internet, there are very loud voices radicalizing conservatives. And it is generally not mentioned. It is off limits because those doing the radicalizing are not clerics or politicians; they are celebrities making millions of dollars. O’Reilly claims he is just “playing a character.” And that’s why we all have to pretend that he’s a good man, whereas Talbot is supposedly just a bad apple. While it may be true that Talbot was born bad, the billion dollar right wing outrage machine made him worse.

Afterword

There is another, and quite different, aspect of the story that bothers me. Talbot only managed to recruit three guys—all of them undercover agents. In this case, I’m glad they got him and that now he’s in a jail cell where he can’t hurt anyone. He could easily have become another nut with a gun murdering people at a shopping mall. But this is hardly a terror plot that was foiled. For example, the acts of terrorism Talbot was plotting depended upon the agents providing the tools—in this case C-4 explosives. This is what we see in almost all such cases. It would appear that potential terrorists are also quite incompetent.

Paul Krugman is surprised about, The ACA Surge Blackout. In it, he noted that the media were all over the website problems as they should have been. But they seem especially disinterested in covering the fact that the website was fixed and enrollment is way up. It is quite possible that the program will meet its initial (pre-website) projections for signups. So there ought to be celebration about this and instead there are only yawns.

I know why the media don’t care about the story. It’s the same reason that we generally have bad coverage of political issues: false equivalence. Since reporters don’t want to be accused of bias, they report every issue as though the Democrats and the Republicans are equal and opposite ends of the debate. The problem is especially bad on economic issues, where the Democrats aren’t anywhere close to being liberal. But even accepting the two ideological poles, it is rarely the case that they are both equally valid.

In the case of Obamacare, the two poles are reasonable because we are talking about a specific government policy. On one side, the Democrats point out that there has been a surge in enrollment and it is close to the original projections. On the other hand, we have Republicans literally screaming that these numbers are all lies. There are many ways they do this like claiming that just because someone signed up, doesn’t mean they are actually going to pay for the insurance. And then there is the largely contradictory claim that the signups have only been for the Medicaid expansion and so they don’t count. And on and on.

Reporters see this and figure, as they always do, “Who can know the truth?” After all, on one hand, you have government statistics that have been quite accurate over the last 200 years. On the other side, you have partisans who hate Obamacare and throw everything at it hoping that something will stick. These people have been shown again and again and again to be spouting nonsense. How could a reporter ever figure out what the truth is?!

I suspect when the official numbers come out, they will get a decent amount of coverage. But it will be filled with caveats about how Republicans say the program is doing poorly. Unfortunately, we will have to deal with this until they give up their disinformation campaign. Of course, after that happens (and it will take years), those involved in the campaign will not pay a price in reduced credibility. The media will still listen to the garbage they spew and pretend that it is just one completely valid side of the debate.

As you may know, I am a big fan of rats. And now, the long maligned animal may finally get justice. The Guardian just reported, Black Death Was Not Spread By Rat Fleas, Say Researchers. According to a number of different studies, it seems that the “rat flea” theory is wrong. The plague moved much too fast to be transmitted via bites.

I was interested to find out that “bubonic” refers to the location that the disease manifests. The actual bacteria is Yersinia pestis. Bubonic refers to “bubo,” which is “an inflammatory swelling of a lymph gland especially in the groin.” The scientists claim that what killed all those people in the late 14th century was actually pneumonic plague, meaning it attacked and was transmitted through the lungs. You know: the normal way.

There are many other unusual things about the Black Death. According to research on wills, fully 60% of the residents of London died due to it. They say that so many people died largely because they were already very unhealthy. “The skeletons at Charterhouse Square reveal that the population of London was also in generally poor health when the disease struck. Crossrail’s archaeology contractor, Don Walker, and Jelena Bekvalacs of the Museum of London found evidence of rickets, anemia, bad teeth and childhood malnutrition.” Without the poor health, the plague would not have been nearly as bad.

Another amazing thing is that there was a recent outbreak of the disease in Madagascar that killed 60 people. When they compared the disease with that of the 14th century strain, they found no difference in terms of its virulence. That is a critical element. It seems before it was thought that the 14th century strain of Yersinia pestis was so virulent that rat fleas explained it.

In the end, I suspect that rats will not be exonerated regardless. Even the “rat flea” theory includes the potential for air transmission. And let’s face it: people love to hate rats. I think it is that they are too much like us: too successful. If we looked at humans from the outside, we would hate them too. Some of us on the inside aren’t too keen as well.

Today, Brendan Gleeson turns 59 years old. He is a great Irish character actor. He has the distinction of being the only living Irish character actor to never appear in an episode of Ballykissangel. I really like him because he’s so amazingly likable up there on the screen. And that’s even true when he’s playing hard characters. Some kind of humanity always comes through.

Most recently, I saw him in In Bruges, where he played the thoroughly decent assassin Ken. As I wrote earlier, “I felt very connected with him: an older man who has lived a mixed life and who now just wants to enjoy the little things that are left.” Gleeson also puts in layered performances, although he usually doesn’t have such rich material to work as Martin McDonagh’s script. Here’s a nice bit:

Gleeson is probably best known for playing Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody in that worker’s project for English-ish character actors known as the Harry Potter films. I think there are 29 of them now, but Gleeson is only in three of them, and he dies at the beginning of the third. Here he is in the only one I’ve managed to get all the way through, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, although all is not as it appears:

Happy birthday Brendan Gleeson!

If there is one thing that binds all the rich together it is their obsession with inflation. The situation is very simple. If you work for a living, you need a job. Modest inflation is good for the job market. But if you own for a living, then inflation is bad. That’s because the stuff you own loses value. A reasonable society would balance those two interests. Indeed, the Federal Reserve is explicitly supposed to keep both inflation and unemployment low. This is its “dual mandate.” But in practice, as long as unemployment isn’t ridiculously high, the Fed doesn’t seem to care. Effectively, they have a single mandate and that is to keep inflation at 2%.

Given that the power elites want low inflation, there is a whole pundit industry that is constantly searching for any signs that inflation is on the rise. What’s especially awful about this is that the Fed has almost magical powers to stop inflation. So there is no real need to stop inflation before it starts. But to listen to these people, we will go from 2% inflation to Zimbabwe overnight and all the bonds of the rich people will be worthless.

This actually demonstrates what’s going on. If inflation is allowed to tick up one percentage point for a couple of months, it will cost bond holders a bit of money. But that doesn’t even begin to offset the huge damage done to workers when the Federal Reserve slams the breaks on the economy to head off the rich losing a few pennies. I think it is really important to remember this the next time you hear someone ranting about inflation being just around the corner.

Recently, Dean Baker has been highlighting a new set of arguments, most recently, The Quit Rate, the Fed, and Braindead Employers. It’s about the fact that the rate at which people quit their jobs has gone up slightly. Generally, people rarely quit jobs when the economy is bad because it’s hard to find another. So these people argue that an uptick in the quit rate means that inflation is just around the corner. But as Baker points out, even with the uptick, the quit rate is still below its level during the worst of the 2001 recession.

More important, Baker made an interesting observation. Maybe people are quitting just because employers are being particularly awful during these bad times. After all, high unemployment is great for employers: they get to choose the very best workers and they get to pay them less. Baker goes on to provide a fanciful mechanism by which this might happen: employees feeling mistreated by wage stagnation.

I’m sure you have seen one or more stories about this or that company or industry that just can’t find skilled employees. But the truth is that these complaints are all nonsense. If companies really were desperate for skilled employees, wages would be rising. And we aren’t seeing it, except in a few rarefied areas like sewing machine use. So Baker concluded:

Most likely the uptick in the quit rate means nothing at all. If you sniff around employment and financial data enough, you are bound to find some random bit of information to make your case that the Fed must raise interest rates to slow the economy. That’s what these people do. But they should never be listened to. We should start fighting inflation when the inflation rate really does start to rise. Personally, I think the Fed’s inflation target should be 4%, not 2%. So I think the Fed ought to allow inflation to get quite high before pulling back. But the inflation Chicken Littles really want deflation. They are looking out for their “clients” and not at all for the economy as a whole. And they should be treated accordingly.

Digby sent me to this very interesting study that shows exactly what I’ve known for a long time, The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report. For those who do not know it, The Colbert Report is more or less a parody of Bill O’Reilly’s The Factor. It is to right wing opinion shows what The Daily Show is to news shows. The whole gag is that Colbert is extremely conservative and stubbornly resistant to facts. He says that he thinks with his gut. He also coined the word “truthiness,” which means, “A quality characterizing a ‘truth’ that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’ or because it ‘feels right’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.”

But this is not how everyone perceives the show. With a group of 332 participants, the researchers found that when conservatives watch the show, they thought that Colbert was something like a double agent:

What is especially interesting about this is that Colbert commonly says things on his show that would be considered totally unacceptable if they were taken straight. For example, he recently started the “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” If there were any question whatsoever that Colbert really believed that, I would not watch the show. And that’s but one example. So the fact that people watch him thinking it’s satire of satire is extremely troubling.

But the fact is that I’ve known this about his show. I’ve commented about it to friends. It bothers me that a sizable section of his studio audience seems not to get the joke. The joke they get is the outrageous guy just telling it like it is. It disturbs me because most politically active people can put a nice face on conservatism. Take Paul Ryan: he always claims that his policies that seem to be bad for the poor are actually good for them. And maybe he really thinks that. But the conservative voter is the guy who watches The Colbert Report and thinks that “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong” is a valid attack on Chinese Americans.

Last year on this day, I think I was a little harsh to Fra Bartolomeo who was born on this day in 1472. While I did say that “he is insanely great,” I also said that I wasn’t much of a fan. Even then, though, I admitted that the problem wasn’t with him. It was the times. It was the early days of perspective painting and religious painting especially had lost a lot of its pizzazz. But the truth is that Bartolomeo did amazing work within the constraints of the time. And really: I like him more than Leonardo da Vinci.

Two things really stand out in his work. The first is his absolutely impeccable design. That is something that is sorely missing in other painters of the period. You can see it in Madonna in Glory with Saints above. But it is found throughout his work. In fact, I haven’t seen a single painting of his that wasn’t exquisitely composed. And here is another excellent example, Scene with Christ in the Temple:

What else is clear in this painting is the second thing that I love about his work: the use of light. Here is another example, St Mark Evangelist:

Courtesy Art Prints On Demand

Happy birthday Fra Bartolomeo!