The other night I watched the Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a 1955 filmed version of what is essentially a stage production starring Cesare Siepi in the title role. He’s somehow perfect for the role, even though it is a baritone part and Siepi is a bass. The rest of the cast is equally good. But I was especially impressed with Otto Edelmann, who plays the part of Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello. It wasn’t that his singing was especially great. He just has a great stage presence and is perfect for the likable but easily led character.

What most struck me in the film, however, is not the production per se. It was simply that it was a theater performance. I’ve seen a couple of actual film productions of it. But I’ve always been a little disappointed because the cinematic qualities tend to distract from the experience. In particular, there is a good too much moving about in the play. For example, the play effectively ends in Don Giovanni’s house and that is the first time we’ve been there! Unity of time, it has. Unity of place, not so much.

In a proper film, there is a strong tendency to explicitly move from one scene to the next. But it isn’t just that. It isn’t enough for actors to just stand and sing. That would largely be boring, so directors have them moving to and fro. But on the stage, the characters are allowed to stop moving around and sing. And I thought it worked remarkably well.

There is another aspect of it. It’s all kind of silly. Don Giovanni is not in any way a realistic character. And the climax of the play is when the statue (of a man Don Giovanni killed earlier) comes to dinner, asks Don Giovanni to repent his evil ways, and than drags him down to hell. Moralistic talking statues work a whole lot better on the stage than they do on the screen. (The same thing can be said about the ghost of Hamlet’s father.)

So here is the whole thing via YouTube. I will have to check out other stage versions. It is, after all, a hell of a fun opera.

Over at New Republic yesterday, Danny Vinik wrote, John Boehner’s Ridiculous Excuse for Blocking the Deal on Unemployment Benefits. You probably know at least part of the story. And you can probably guess the rest. Extended unemployment benefits ended in December. This is a huge problem because we have a huge long-term unemployment problem. Well, after months of wrangling, the Senate has managed to put together a compromise bill that is expected to pass next week. Hooray!

But not so fast. Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner announced that it was a no go. As Vinik notes, in the past, there have been two things that the Republicans have complained about. First, there is the idea that extended unemployment benefits make people lazy, refusing to take all those jobs that aren’t available. This is rubbish, but that hardly matters. What is more important is that while Republicans generally think this, only people like Rand Paul are going to make a big public deal out of it. The second thing Republicans always claim is that the benefits must be paid for. Well, this bill is paid for. (Note: as soon as Republicans are back in charge in Washington, this business of paying for everything will be gone gone gone.)

Now Boehner has two all new complaints. One has to do with a National Association of State Work Force Agencies report that claims the law would be unworkable. But it proposes a fix. The other is that it does nothing to strengthen the economic recovery. That one is a howler! Over the last three and a half years, the Republican controlled House has not been interested in anything that helps the recovery. Quite the opposite. Remember Sequestration that is still dragging down the recovery? And for that matter, letting extended unemployment benefits lapse is a drag on the economy. No: we haven’t gotten any legislation from the House to improve the economy, unless you think that 50 votes to repeal Obamacare would stimulate the economy. (It wouldn’t, although in RepublicanLand, it would do that and so much more.)

What these new demands from Boehner are really all about is the desire to cause as much pain and suffering on the American people as possible. As long as a Democrat is in the White House, the Republicans know that their best course of action is to harm the economy. The Democrats will get the blame, even though John Boehner has an effective veto on everything. What’s more, this gets into the whole “of course—if only” approach to legislative obstruction. Of course John Boehner is for extending unemployment benefits, if only these two problems were fixed. Note that one of the problems is open ended: create more jobs. He will say that anything that actually would create jobs won’t. And his idea of job creation will just be a bunch of Republican wish list items: tax cuts for the rich, spending cuts for the poor, more oil drilling. But even if somehow his demands were met, there would be another. There is always another.

You may be wondering why it is that Republicans will allow nothing to get done when a Democrat is president, but Democrats do get things done with Republican presidents. It is quite simply that the Republicans are now a revolutionary party. What conservatives say about Obama is exactly what conservative extremists said about Clinton. The Republican Party is now almost nothing but those old conservatives bomb throwers. Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is now what the vast majority of congressional Republicans believe. You don’t negotiate with evil, you destroy it and that is why the Republicans now have this all-or-nothing approach to legislation.

Of course, Boehner isn’t exactly one of these revolutionaries—at least anymore. He’s calmed down a lot from the 1990s. I think of him more as the banality of evil. Like a lot of older politicians, he is only interested in hanging onto power for as long as he can. Of course, power that you wield only to hang onto it is not real power. I wrote about this before, Boehner’s Paradox of Power. So in the name of his futile efforts, the nation suffers. And as far as his caucus is concerned, that’s just great.

While researching today’s birthday post, I found the video below, Milton Friedman on the Gold Standard. It’s quite interesting. Just on the surface level, listening to Friedman talk, you could predict that he was a libertarian. He comes off as so smug, I really feel the desire to punch him in the face. Even when I was a libertarian, I couldn’t take his writing. But then, his mass market book (with his wife) Free to Choose is typical of popular libertarian titles. They are always so positive, like pep rallies in book form. “And once we have a libertarian society, we’ll all be happy! Goooo team!”

But this video gets to the heart of Friedman’s academic research. It is what got him the Nobel Prize. And it is what made him an oracle of the conservative movement. And he lucked out. He died in late 2006, just before the financial crisis that showed that while he wasn’t wrong in the specifics, he was wrong on the large scale. He came up with a wonderful narrative about the Great Depression that you can see in the video. Basically, the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression by not allowing the money supply to expand when foreign gold came into the country. The only problem is: no.

Notice: it isn’t that the Federal Reserve didn’t screw up. It did! But that wasn’t what caused the depression. It simply made the depression worse. It’s kind of like a guy with endocarditis in 1800. The doctors don’t know what that is so they just bleed him. The guy dies. Well, certainly the bleeding made things worse. But it was the endocarditis that killed him. Unfortunately, we didn’t know this for sure until the 2007-2008 crisis (or the 1990s if you were Paul Krugman). Then, the Federal Reserve did everything right. And to the surprise of conservatives everywhere, it wasn’t enough.

It turned out that Keynes was still the master. Friedman (who is more or less the conservative’s Keynes) spent his life toiling on a minor variation of Keynes’ theory. I said he was lucky to die when he did because he never got to see the scope of his work limited. But the truth is, we all missed out by not seeing him react. Because the fact is that over the course of his life, there were plenty of things that countered what he thought and it never made a difference. This is a problem with being brilliant: you can always justify things that push back against your theory.

This is really well illustrated in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. The second chapter deals with the relationship between Friedman and Chilean despot Augusto Pinochet. Now that relationship might be enough to show what Friedman was all about. He was, after all, supposedly dedicated to freedom. But apparently the thousands tortured and murdered by Pinochet didn’t matter. Regardless, what happened was that Friedman pushed “free market” reforms. When they just made the economy worse and more unequal, Friedman recommended what conservatives always recommend in these situations, “More of the same!” It was never that the free market reforms weren’t good policy; it was that there hadn’t been enough of them. Eventually, Pinochet was forced to liberalize some of his policies, because he might have been a despot but he wasn’t an idiot.

At this point in time, Milton Friedman comes off as kind of a liberal. The conservative movement has moved so far to the right that they want to abolish the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard. And when the economic crisis of 2007-2008 came, what did they say? They said the same thing that Friedman would have said, had he been alive. “The reason for the crisis was government regulation!” You may remember (although the argument is still floating around) that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac supposedly caused the financial crisis. And to top it off, they did it by giving those people loans. At least you can say one thing: Milton Friedman didn’t appear to be a racist.

The video below is great. Cenk takes apart Toure of The Cycle. Go ahead and watch it because I agree with everything Cenk says, but I want to approach it from a slightly different perspective.

Toure is making the standard Democratic argument that we have to nominate conservatives so they will win. As Cenk points out, this just sets up a situation where the Democrats are Republican Lite, “Republican vs Republican? The Republican always wins!”

But the essence of Toure’s argument is that when we ran liberals for president, they lost. This is probably the biggest Democratic myth. It is our version of the Republican myth that Bush the Elder lost because he raised taxes and now no Republican will ever agree to raise taxes. The Democratic myth is based upon three elections: 1980, 1984, and 1988. The 1980 election is fairly hard to analyze because a lot of stuff was going on. But one of those things is that the economy was not doing well. In 1984 and 1988, the economy was booming. The single most important factor in presidential elections is the economic trend.

Look at it the other way. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency. Why? Not because he was a conservative Democrat from the south! And it wasn’t because Bush the elder raised taxes a small amount. It was because the economy had tanked. Clinton won re-election in 1996 because the economy was doing very well. Ditto for Gore in 2000, but with two caveats: (1) the economy had really slowed down; and (2) we don’t live in a democracy when elections are close. Bush won in 2004 because the economy was improving. Obama won in 2008 because the economy was in crisis. And he won re-election in 2012 because the economy was improving, even if slowly.

So the “liberals are unelectable” narrative is wrong. The narrative should be, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The problem is that many Democrats want to believe that we must run mushy centrist candidates to win. Democratic elites do not want to shake things up because they represent the interests of the upper class. This is why journalists who are quite liberal when it comes to identity politics are generally pro-globalization and anti-union. I don’t know where Toure stands in this group, but he is singing its song.

Earlier today, over at New Republic, Leon Wieseltier wrote, The Emptiness of Data Journalism. It is yet another attack on Nate Silver for his comments about the superiority of what he does versus what opinion journalists do. And it is by far the best that I’ve read. I’ve always liked Silver and I was totally in agreement when he attacked the insider-based campaign coverage. It was true that if you want to know how people are going to vote, the best thing to do is to ask them. Asking the campaigns might make for entertaining reading but it doesn’t provide useful information. But now Silver is claiming that opinion journalism writ large is similarly useless. Wieseltier calls him on this.

Paul Krugman also called out Silver—in two posts. The latter is more interesting, Further Thoughts on Hedgehogs and Foxes. In that, he noted that data alone don’t explain anything. They must be applied in a context with a model of what’s going on. We don’t, for example, care about the inflation rate because any inflation rate is good or bad. In an under-performing economy, higher inflation is usually a good thing. In a booming economy, higher inflation is usually a bad thing. What’s more, different levels of inflation affect people differently. The data alone mean nothing and I dare say someone like Silver is likely to apply unstated assumptions about such data.

What I was most struck with in Silver’s interview was his description of opinion columnists, “It’s people who have very strong ideological priors, is the fancy way to put it, that are governing their thinking.” The implication is that Silver is not burdened by such “ideological priors.” I know from experience—and this is one of the biggest problems with American journalism—that anyone claiming to be objective should be watched closely. What such claims mean is, “I’m totally unaware of the huge amount of baggage that I bring to everything I do.”

Krugman linked to an amazing article from a year and a half ago by climate scientist Michael Man, FiveThirtyEight: The Number of Things Nate Silver Gets Wrong About Climate Change. It’s a relatively long article and very much worth the time. But the basics are that Nate Silver may have just looked at the data, but his analysis was way off because he did what supposedly non-ideological centrists always do: he figured that the bad global change work by a marketing professor (You read that right!) was equal and opposite to the work of thousands of climate scientists of the past three decades.

I’ve been wondering what the new Five Thirty Eight was going to do. I understand statistical analysis of sports. And I understand political polling. But what about the rest? And if Silver really thinks he can get good data on important policy issues without understanding the subjects, he’s a far sillier man than I had thought. Wieseltier may have it right in his conclusion:

I’m afraid that Wieseltier nailed it.

Update (19 March 2014 3:29 pm)

I never said that I was original. Ryan Cooper wrote, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight and the Dangers of Being Ideologically Neutral. He said very much what I said:

A couple of days ago, I had an epiphany. We are talking about God all wrong. I still find fascinating the question, “Why does the universe exist?” And a nice short answer to that question is: God. We could have different words for it. But any words or phrases are going to be disappointing. I even have a problem with “the reason for existence.” That implies something I don’t believe: that existence has a cause in the same way that, say, a forest fire has a cause. So I’m fine with God and I’m fine discussing God as him or her.

Where I part ways with the theists is in the conception of God. They all believe in a god with some form of consciousness. What’s more, most of them believe in a god that loves them. Now here I’m not talking about people who explicitly anthropomorphize God. This is understandable, but talking about such thinking is committing the straw man fallacy. Sadly, the vast majority of atheist argumentation is against this kind thinking. It seems to me a waste of time. So I will waste no more on it.

A more sophisticated argument is that God’s love can be seen in the gift of existence. I will admit, I kind of like this idea. Existence is a mixed bag, but even a “short, brutish, and nasty” existence is still an amazing thing. And to be given the opportunity to not just exist but to reflect on that opportunity does strike me as the greatest gift imaginable. (Admittedly, the problem here is with my imagination and not the greatness of possible gifts.)

But the problem with this notion is the idea of intention: that God created existence with me in mind. That strikes me as a height of hubris. And it is unscientific. We know, for example, that we share almost all the same genes with the other great apes. In the end, we aren’t that different from alligators and honey bees. And if you really want to push it, there is nothing that especially distinguishes us from swirling clouds of dust in distant galaxies.

The only way any of this makes sense is for one to fall into solipsism. If I’m all that really exists then maybe God really does love me. But even that isn’t clear. And regardless, solipsism has always struck me as an intellectual trap. It’s akin to thinking that the creation myth is true and that God just planted all that evidence for natural selection just to throw us off base. It is entirely possible, but it is also an entirely useless way of looking at the world. The same logic could be used to never get out of bed or never again eat because nothing exists anyway.

So what I think is that what defines an atheist is not the status of his belief in God but rather the kind of god he believes in. I assume that all atheists accept that there must be some reason or mechanism for existence. Even Lawrence Krauss as an explanation, “Nothingness is unstable.” Personally, I find this definition of God far too concrete. But we would agree on the essence of God being some kind of intentionless process. So we have our gods, they just aren’t anything that would be recognized by theists. And, of course, our gods are totally open to change with new data in a way that theist gods are not.

Afterword

This article is based upon my assumption that the only purpose for a god is to explain existence. Most theists don’t believe that. In fact, I dare so most theists don’t even think about the existential question. But other than that question, I don’t see anything. Science is capable of explaining everything else.

Good morning friends! I’m getting a late start today because I’ve been working very hard on a technical project and I was up really late last night. But it should be a normal day here. I’m trying to be more organized. So there will somehow be five or so posts today.

Yesterday, Andrea sent me to the following video, “Ballad of a WiFi Hero.” It is based on a story by Mike Lacher. It portrays a simple IT procedure as a chivalric quest. But there are two sides of this. First, the truth is that when people have a technical problem they can’t solve, a tech really is like a knight in shining armor. This is why something like Geek Squad is so evil, because desperate people go to them and mostly get abused. Face it, Best Buy is there to sell them stuff, not to fix broken stuff. And their techs are idiots.

On the other side of things, technical work is usually trivial. Once and a while you come upon something that really is challenging. But mostly, people are really grateful for work that you do think is trivial. Of course, things change quite a lot when you are charging them. That’s where we get to Best Buy and Geek Squad. Since people don’t know what techs are doing, they focus on store fronts and uniforms. And their ignorance costs them. But sadly, it also costs us.

A common narrative goes like this. Customer goes to Geek Squad. Customer is charged $195 to be told that their system is destroyed and they need to buy a new computer. Customer comes to us. They plead poverty because they just wasted $195. We take pity because we are bleeding hearts. We only charge them $50 to fix their computer. The next time they have a computer problem, they go to Geek Squad. Wash, rinse, repeat. Why doesn’t someone just stab me in the eye?

This video is narrated by H Jon Benjamin, of Bob’s Burgers fame. Interestingly, Benjamin has a very strong chin while Bob does not. This video is very funny:

I just found this Watch Mojo video, Top 10 Worst Best Picture Oscar-Winning Movies. I thought it would be fun, but it only annoyed me. I probably should have guessed. Because there is one thing that I thought all people who really like movies as an art form agree on: the Academy Awards are a joke. So the video implicitly gives them status as though we should be surprised that they don’t stand up to the smallest amount of scrutiny.

My favorite example of this is that All That Jazz did not get the Best Picture award. What else was nominated? Well, there were three really good films: Apocalypse Now, Breaking Away, and Norma Rae. But the winner? Kramer vs Kramer. You know, the one film nominated that could have been a Movie of the Week or perhaps better, Afternoon Special. What’s particularly wonderful (awful) about the film is how the court finds in the mother’s favor. But then they tack on a happy ending where the mother just gives the kid back. It’s the worst kind of melodrama and that’s what the Academy likes!

But our friends at Watch Mojo didn’t even mention the 1980 Academy Awards. But they did get some that are notable. For example, they did mention 1942. This was the year that How Green Was My Valley won. Actually, it is not a bad film at all. Certainly Citizen Kane should have won. But the video also complains that The Maltese Falcon didn’t win. I love the film, but its candy—not important in any way. I certainly think that two other nominees, Suspicion and The Little Foxes, were more deserving of the award. But the makers of the video seem more concerned about which film is the most entertaining or at least has the best reputation.

That’s especially true for Around the World in Eighty Days. Now I’ll admit that it isn’t a great film. And one of the films up against it was Giant, which is a great film. But the video also complains because The King and I and The Ten Commandments did not win. Really?! What other than the fact that the people at Watch Mojo have heard about the films makes them better than Around the World in Eighty Days? What’s more, they seem to think that Giant is great because James Dean was in it. What idiots!

It says that ET should have beat Gandhi. That may be true. Gandhi is rather an uninspired film. But the other film they mention is Tootsie. Good God! Both the other films nominated are better than it: Missing and The Verdict.

That last example was part of a pattern. The video is quite biased toward certain filmmakers. One is Martin Scorsese. Now he is a great director, but it is notable that they didn’t mention any of his best films. And then there was Steven Spielberg. The video even said that Shakespeare in Love should have lost to Saving Private Ryan. It’s just over the top. Just because a war film is realistic does mean it was good. Give it the Academy Award for best makeup effects.

The implication throughout the video is that the Best Picture Oscar should be for the most popular film. I don’t see the point of that. We already have such an award: it’s called the “box office” and it is a cash award. What’s more, popular by what standards? A lot of really fun films were never popular because the studio killed them for one reason or another. And many films aren’t even noticed by the Academy. Orson Welles won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Othello the year the Academy didn’t even notice it.

I understand that such videos are always going to be, in some sense, silly. But they ought to try not to be boring. Anyone could have made this list—And done it better!—going through each year and seeing what films are now held in high regard. But I will admit, The English Patient is a dreadfully slow film.

Last night, I watched In Bruges from writer-director Martin McDonagh, probably best known for the recent Seven Psychopaths. It’s interesting that his films are so visually interesting when he is, at heart, a playwright. But the thing about filmmaking is that it is a group effort. I know if someone were foolish enough to have me direct a film, I would hire a great cinematographer and carmeraman and listen to them very carefully. And for all I know, MCDonagh does the same thing.

The one thing that really does dominate the film is that it is shot in Bruges, which apparently is one of the most beautiful towns in the world. And great care is taken to make every shot beautiful. This is distinctly different from Seven Psychopaths, which was quite obviously meant to be ugly. All things equal, I’d rather watch a beautiful film. And In Bruges shows that pretty images don’t hurt a black comedy. In fact, I think they heightened the effect.

The plot of the film is simple: after accidentally killing a young boy during an assassination, a rookie hitman is sent to Bruges by a crime boss, where he will be murdered. The film lives in its own moral universe that has nothing to do with our world. But if that isn’t a problem, it’s a charming story. The crime boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), sends the rookie hitman, Ray (Colin Farrell), to Burges to give him a little joy before he has him killed. The hitman hates Burges, however. The other more experienced hitman, Ken (Brendan Gleeson), just loves Bruges. And along the way, they meet up with thieves, drug dealers, prostitutes, and an angry American dwarf who is very racist when he’s on cocaine.

It’s a bit of a problem that Ray dances on the edge of being completely unlikable. I found myself wishing through most of the film that Ken would just kill him so we could get back to our nice holiday with the entirely likable older hitman. But it never got too bad because Ray always seemed to shift back onto the likable side of that line. Even Harry with his queer notions of morality was often hard to dislike. In fact, there is a funny scene at the hotel where Ray and Harry negotiate how they will continue their gun fight outside so that they don’t accidentally harm the pregnant owner.

The problems with the film are confined to the ending. Even by its own terms, it gets far fetched. One character jumps off Belfry of Bruges to save another character before dying. It’s got to be ten stories high! There is no way anyone is going to survive for even a second after that fall—especially after losing most of his blood from a gunshot wound. But that is forgivable. In fact, it almost seems reasonable in the film. But the final couple of minutes change the filming style to make it all seem like a dream. This is done for thematically defensible reasons. But I don’t really think it works. What’s more, it is a hasty ending to a film that was deliberately (and enjoyably) paced.

Despite blowing the ending, I thought the film worked really well. I especially liked spending the time with Ken. 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. Part of that is Gleeson’s performance. And another part is the great chemistry between Ken and Ray. Ray’s constant juvenile complaints and Ken’s responses are what give the film much of its charm. And ultimately, it is a very positive film. Or at least as positive as a film can be that involves three murders, a drug dealer, and a racist dwarf.

Update (18 March 2014 5:27 pm)

I had meant to note that I think the Dwarf’s racist rant was meant to be a parody of Quentin Tarantino. That made it all the funnier to me.

Digby highlighted a National Journal article this morning, Did Social Security Cost Democrats a Seat In Florida? It highlights how the Florida 13th district has one of the highest percentages of people over 65 years old. So the Democrat, Sink, tried to use the Republican Jolly’s support for privatizing Social Security against him. But as the article put it, “Jolly had an easy comeback: he denied wanting to privatize Social Security, and fired back by noting that Sink voiced some support for the Simpson-Bowles debt-reduction plan, which included cuts to Social Security.” Ah yes, the Grand Bargain!

What Digby focused on is that support for the Grand Bargain is bad politics. Social Security and Medicare should be a winning issue for Democrats. Remember during the vice-presidential debate in 2012? Joe Biden delivered what I think of as the best line of the whole campaign, “Folks: use your common sense! Who do you trust on this?!” But that doesn’t work when the Democrats run around everywhere pretending to be Very Serious People wanting to cut benefits with absurd mechanisms like chained-CPI. As Digby noted, there is no political advantage to such a deal “unless you count Villagers extolling them for being ‘grown-ups’ which should get them at least a hundred votes in Virginia.”

Last year, I wrote, The Terrible Bargain. It is mostly about how the Grand Bargain is a bad idea just based upon the economics. As usual, what all the Very Serious People just know to be true isn’t. It all comes down to the idea that if something is painful for you, it must be good. Of course, note how cruel these people are: the pain suffered is never by the people pushing these policies. And the notion is ridiculous. Hacking off your hand with a meat cleaver is painful and does no good unless you are in Evil Dead II.

But more to the point, the politics are even worse than the economics. The idea of the Grand Bargain is to raise taxes in exchange for lowering entitlement spending. So it is a lose-lose. No one likes raising taxes and no one likes cutting benefits. And it is especially stupid given that the Republicans will never swap tax increases for entitlement cuts. Now I’m not at all convinced that Sink lost the election because she didn’t have the Social Security issue with which to beat up Jolly. But it certainly would have helped.

As Dibgy noted, some Democrats are waking up to the issue. Not only can Democrats be the party for protecting entitlements, they can be the party for expanding them. After all, the Republican argument is that they are protecting the programs by cutting them. And they are always absolutely clear that they won’t cut benefits for people currently on the programs. But the fact is that our benefits are about the stingiest in the developed world. They ought to be expanded. And if Democrats took up this cause, the voters would have a clear choice.