Author Archives: Frank Moraes

About Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor online and in print. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, throughout the computer industry, and as a college physics instructor. Find out more at About Frank Moraes.

Not the Last Record Store

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Matt YglesiasAfter Matt Yglesias came back from Singapore, the first thing he did was write an article about how old I am, Someone’s Opening A Record Store. You see, I have a pretty big music library that spans many different genres. It ranges from Devotchka to Jacques Brel to JJ Schultz to various Mozart Operas. But I haven’t purchased a single song as an MP3 or through iTunes. I just don’t trust it. I like my little discs that have the songs stored on them. Yes, these discs can be destroyed, but I have no children and I’m not an animal. So I have decades old discs that look brand new. (And yes, I also have vinyl.)

I take these discs, convert the songs and put them on my phone. And I am happy. And if something goes wrong and my micro-SD card destroys them all, I still have my discs. It’s very nice—very comforting for an old man. But do you know what I like most of all: the total lack of licensing software. I assume that what I’m doing is legal, but there is no doubt what I’m doing is ethical. I don’t rip the music and then sell the disc. For one thing, that would destroy my whole old man anxiety prevention program based on the fear that that I will lose my music because of a computer malfunction.

So where do I buy these old man discs? Well, I’m not that old so I often buy them online, sometimes directly from the artists themselves but more often from Amazon. But I also buy them at my hometown shop, appropriately called The Last Record Store. I first visited that store 30 years ago, within days of its opening. And the first album I bought was The Velvet Underground & Nico. They’ve moved since then, but they still run the store the same way. And the main thing about it is that the guys love music—in particular, they love the kind of music that I love. I remember commiserating with Hoyt Wilhelm about the death of D. Boon, the guitarist of Minutemen:

I suppose we could have commiserating over twitter. And there is nothing at The Last Record Store that I can’t find online. But there is something electric whenever I’m there. It’s nice to be surrounded by people who love music. And the physical experience of browsing is something that has never really worked online. That’s especially true in their $5 or 3 or $10 CD bins or their $1 vinyl bins where there is no ordering at all.

I think that Matt Yglesias understands all this. But he’s still being tongue in cheek when he writes:

On my recent trip to Hong Kong I saw a fascinating business in the Pacific Place Mall. It was kind of like a music store, except it was a physical shop. Instead of searching for the songs or collections you wanted, you would browse physically through their inventory. They stocked digital music files the same as any music store, but the files were encoded on optical disks that you could use to transfer the files to your computer. They also had a certain amount of what initially looked like large-format optical discs but were actually a kind of analog music storage format that could be used with specialized equipment.

Yes, I suppose that to the 20 somethings, such a place would seem unusual. And Yglesias can sit back and have a bit of a laugh at the stereotypes of the young and the old. But if physical music stores are really coming back, that’s a great thing. It’s a shame that they have to be combined with “coffee sales.” But that’s probably just my reaction to the musical dreck that Starbucks sells. The main thing, though, is that corporate physical music stores are not going to cut it. Music is a special kind of consumer good. Purchases really do say something about you, and not in the way that AXE Body Wash has sold you the idea that using it will turn you super cool. Music is personal, and I (at least) want to buy it from people who understand that.

I’m not sure that Matt Yglesias understands that, though.

Pennies from Heaven, Roses from Cairo

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Pennies From HeavenA couple of weeks ago, Will mentioned to me that he had seen Pennies From Heaven. He asked what I thought of it and I told him I wasn’t that fond of it. I didn’t think it worked. But I began to think back on the film and reconsider it. After all, I was only 17 when I saw it. So I picked up a copy and finally got around to seeing it last night. I really wasn’t wrong about the film. It is a worthy effort and often brilliant. It isn’t perfect, of course, it has minor problems. The story is too episodic and the murder subplot was entirely the wrong way to go. But these are minor. There is really only one major thing wrong with the film and it is fatal.

Steve Martin.

He’s just terrible. He does to this film what Bruce Willis did to Last Man Standing. But it is much worse here. Whereas Willis plays his usual stilted action hero character, Martin delivers lines like the understudy at a bad high school play. And then there is the dancing where he is obviously outclassed by everyone else. It’s a real shame.

There is much to like in the film. Gordon Willis’ cinematography is just perfect for the film. Of course, the whole art crew does a great job with the realism of the period and the fantasy numbers. Jessica Harper as the long suffering wife with homicidal fantasies is fantastic. Bernadette Peters and Christopher Walken burn up the screen. And Vernel Bagneris gives the best performance of the film. Sometimes, I thought that Danny Daniels’ choreography was uninspired, but at other times it was as good as anything I’ve ever seen. And Herbert Ross directs the hell out of the film. This is my favorite scene:

The Purple Rose of CairoAs you may know, this film is based upon a BBC television mini-series of the same name. I haven’t seen it, but I do know that Bob Hoskins played the Steve Martin role. And all I can do is sigh for the lost opportunity. It didn’t have to be Hoskins, of course, just about any decent actor would have saved this film. But this was Steve Martin’s second starring role. He made The Jerk right before Pennies From Heaven, and he brings the same level of acting to each film. That level, of course, is the level that one sees on Saturday Night Live.

Interestingly, just four years later, another film was made that addressed the same themes. And it too was shot by Gordon Willis: The Purple Rose of Cairo. There is a difference, of course. In Pennies, Arthur wants to make his life like the popular songs he sells. In Cairo, Cecilia just wants to escape from her life into the Hollywood movies she watches. Thus, even though Cairo is explicitly a fantasy—actual magic happens in the story—it is the more realistic. And so I think we get a film that speaks to us much more profoundly. The ending of Pennies from Heaven doesn’t really work. The ending of The Purple Rose of Cairo is one of the greats, right up there with the best of Vittorio De Sica:

Afterword

Artistically, I think the ending of The Purple Rose of Cairo would have worked better if Allen had left it vague. As a viewer, I like the sweet ending; I like watching her get drawn into the movie and smiling. But it strikes me as a little heavy handed. I imagine that the money people were pushing for that happy ending. It’s hard to say, of course. I would have been crushed if the dog had not come back in Umberto D. Regardless, Allen’s ending to Cairo is still artful. It’s a choice is all; and a hard choice at that.

After Afterword

To end The Purple Rose of Cairo with an explicit unhappy ending where she, for example, just cries would have been a mistake. I really think there were only the two options: happy or vague.

Magic Then and Magic Now

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Robert-HoudinOn this day in 1886, the poet Joyce Kilmer was born. You know him because of his very famous and oft parodied poem “Trees.” You know: I think that I shall never see… By the time he was sent to fight in World War I, he was considered the leading American Catholic poet. And then, like millions others he was killed in that senseless war.

George Nelson (Real name: Lester Joseph Gillis.) was born in 1908. He is better known as “Baby Face” Nelson, a moniker that was given to him because of his youth. It was in reference to the song “Baby Face.” It was meant to be an insult and Nelson hated it. It made him angry. And you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. This is largely because he was a psychopath. Most people in his line of work were more desperate than evil. I don’t think you can say the same thing about him. Just the same, as he traveled across the nation robbing banks and murdering people, he maintained a rather normal life for his wife and child. Of course, that’s along the lines of, “Hitler was kind to his dogs.” But still, he was a fascinating guy.

Dave Brubeck was born in 1920. Alright, I admit it: he was great. It is just that Paul Desmond was greater. And, of course, he was no Bill Evans. Here is “Blue Rondo a la Turk”:

Comedian Steven Wright is 58. I really like his work. Below is a 49 second clip of a couple of his jokes. I just want to point out that the question about what would happen if you were traveling at the speed of light and you turned on your lights is exactly the question that Einstein asked. Let me answer Mr. Wright’s question. First, you could not travel at the speed of light, so let’s assume you are traveling just under the speed of light. If you turned on your lights, from your perspective, the light would stream out at the speed of light. That is the theory of relativity.

Other birthdays: astronomer Niccolo Zucchi (1586); painter Frederic Bazille (1841); poet Evelyn Underhill (1875); lyricist Ira Gershwin (1896); comedian David Ossman (77); actor JoBeth Williams (retired); actor Tom Hulce (60); musician Peter Buck (57); animator Nick Park (55); and film director Judd Apatow (46).

The day, however, belongs to one of the greatest magicians of all time, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, who was born on this day in 1805. He is widely considered the father of modern magic. Indeed, magic has not changed a great deal since then. In fact, up through Mark Wilson, it looked very much the same—in style and substance. Robert-Houdin was born to be a watch maker. There is a very famous story about how he got into magic. He went to a book seller and bought a two-volume set on clock construction but was accidentally given a two volume set on conjuring, Scientific Amusements. He became fascinated with the art of magic and the rest is history. Of course, it mightn’t have ever happened. Pretty much everything we know about Robert-Houdin comes from his own Memoirs of Robert-Houdin. And magicians are known to be liars.

I find it interesting to see people’s reactions to modern magic. The truth is that basically, nothing ever changes. The Tarbell Course in Magic, published in 1928 contains basically all the collected knowledge that magicians have today. But each generation dusts off the old tricks and makes them their own. This isn’t to say that there are no innovations. But it is marginal stuff. Consider the Ambitious Card routine. This is a card trick that has been around for a couple hundred years. The magician puts a card in the middle of a deck and it keeps coming back to the top of the deck. Pretty much every card magician has a version of it that suits their style. But check out Daryl doing his version. Everything he does is quite standard, except the very end where he uses a device that Robert-Houdin would have been proud of:

Other than style and some marginal changes, that’s Robert-Houdin. And that is not to put down Daryl at all. I think that’s a really clever, entertaining routine. But it owes a great deal to Robert-Houdin. Magic is history.

Happy birthday Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin!

Conservative Hatred of Nelson Mandela

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Ronald ReaganFor conservatives, a moment like the death of Nelson Mandela is hard. They want to make it clear that they are not racists like that. They aren’t like those people who believed in slavery or Jim Crow or apartheid. It’s just that what minority groups want today that’s all screwed up. Of course, in 20 years, they won’t admit to what they believe today either. That’s just what it is to be a conservative, as I discussed earlier today before I had even heard of Mandela’s death. My colleague Michael Stickings tweeted, “Republicans praising #Mandela should just shut the fuck up, because their politics are pretty much the exact opposite.” That’s absolutely correct.

But I can’t hear the name “Nelson Mandela” without thinking of the conservative icon—and let’s be honest, saint—Ronald Reagan. A couple of years ago, Justin Elliott wrote an excellent interview with historian David Schmitz for Salon, Reagan’s Embrace of Apartheid South Africa. It doesn’t contain a lot of new information for me, because I was around during that time and involved in the divestiture movement. This was the idea that we just shouldn’t do business with an explicitly racist country.

There was a counter argument, called the “Sullivan principles.” But even at the time, it sounded like nothing but apologetics. Reagan and others argued that we needed to stay engaged with the South African government, because there were moderates who wanted to change. Also, it was claimed that American companies were the only ones there who would hire blacks. Well, it turned out that the first idea just wasn’t true. And as for the second, there were lots of whites who employed blacks as servants. That wasn’t exactly moving the country forward. What’s more, by 1987, Sullivan himself had repudiated the idea. Schmitz noted, “The crackdown of 1986 and the reimposition of martial law just made a total lie out of the notion that there were moderates in the Afrikaner government.” But of course, Reagan held firm.

Elliott asked, “Would you argue that Reagan’s foreign policy extended the life of the regime in South Africa?” Schmitz responded:

Yes. It gave it life. It gave it hope that the United States would continue to stick with it. It gave it continued flow of aid as well as ideological support. It delayed the changes that were going to come. Then you had the big crackdowns in ’86 and ’87. So there was harm in the lengthening. There was harm in the violence that continued.

I think a lot of well-meaning people in the United States bought the Sullivan principles and constructive engagement, because it seems reasonable. Reagan would say, “If we’re willing to talk to the Russians, why aren’t we willing to talk to the South African government?” We’re going to encourage them to moderate and reform—it sounds reasonable. But there was no real pressure. It was all talk. And it was exposed as that.

According to Reagan, it was all about the Soviet Union. If blacks got the right to vote, the Soviets would sweep in and take over the country. But I don’t believe that at all. I think that deep down, Reagan was a bigot. He simply thought that whites were better. I return again and again to how he launched his presidential campaign in Mississippi at the Neshoba County Fair where he talked about “states’ rights.” That was a dog-whistle heard ’round the world.

And Reagan repeatedly called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. He put Mandela and the African National Congress on the United States terror watch list. And they stayed there until the last six months of Bush Jr’s presidency. Just in time for his 90th birthday, the United States government admitted that Nelson Mandela was not a terrorist. But today, while supporting policies that go against everything that Nelson Mandela stood for, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor tweets out:

And why not. Now that he’s dead, he is no threat to the unjust status quo, which Cantor and his Republican allies are so committed to protecting.

See also: Conservatives Can’t Admit Reagan Was Racist Because They Are

Angels Sing to Nelson Mandela

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Nelson MandelaOne of my favorite songs is Gang of Four’s “Not Great Men.” It starts:

No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home

It’s not made by great men

They wrote that in 1979, when Nelson Mandela was rotting in prison on Robben Island. I know they would all agree that sometimes history is made by great men. It’s a sad for the world that Mandela has died. But if any man has deserved this just rest it is him.

Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

There will be more later of an angrier nature.

Liberal and Conservative Views of Racism

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Fight RacismJonathan Chait has written a great article about the way that liberals and conservatives look at racism in this country, 12 Years a Slave and the Obama Era. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but I’m going to talk about just one aspect.

The truth is that it is hard for me to talk about racism because I’m well aware of my own racist thoughts. These aren’t rational and I work very hard to fight them. To the racist, every crime committed by a member of a minority group is more proof that “those people” are no damned good. The non-racist may have that initial reptilian brain impulse, but he fights it with his higher brain functions. Statistics are a powerful tool in this regard. You are a racist if your response to a black man saving a kitten from a burning building is, “Well, that’s the exception that proves the rule!” I’ve seen this again and again. When people are racist, they create a filter where all data against their prejudice is discarded as exceptional and all data for their prejudice is accepted as reinforcing.

But except on the edges of society, explicit racism is a thing of the past. As Chait discusses, first it was thought that it was right and fitting that blacks were slaves because they were inferior. Then that was wrong, but it was right and fitting that blacks be legally separated from whites because… Well, actually, I don’t really know why. Now we are at the point where blacks are economically separated from whites because, well, the supposed free market cannot be denied. It’s all the same. It’s all racism.

I am economically poor. But I’m still a walking and talking billboard for white privilege. Given the life I’ve led and the person I am, if I had been born black, I would most likely be dead. And I certainly wouldn’t have what I consider a near idyllic life with thousands of readers and work I find profoundly stimulating—not to mention the many great things in all the other parts of my life.

So I’m not going to sit here and talk about how I understand the plight of the black man and how I’m “evolved” on the topic. I try to be a better man. Always. That, to me, is what it means to be a liberal. I want to fix social injustices and I do what I can. And I want to remain open to social injustices that I’m currently blind to. That is probably the hardest thing.

The conservative way of looking at the world is not the opposite of this—although it is with a small minority that unfortunately seems to be growing in this country. The conservative outlook is that the way things are is just perfect. Of course slavery was wrong. Of course Jim Crow was wrong. But how could anyone think that voter ID laws are racist? How could anyone think income inequality was racist? Because to the conservative, social injustice is always something that used to exist. It never does exist.

Jonathan Chait quotes an interesting statistic, “Republicans, by a 60-40 margin, now believe discrimination against whites has grown to be a larger problem than discrimination against minorities.” So it isn’t just that racism has been solved, now it’s turned around and the whites are being oppressed. That’s not normal, of course. Left alone, conservatives would just think that minority groups have nothing to complain about. It is the Rush Limbaughs, the Michael Savages, the Sean Hanitys who have pushed this idea. And this is more in line with lynching mentality, because otherwise, how do you explain this:

Racial Wealth Gap

There are only two ways that this disparity in wealth can exist. Either we still live in a racist society with a legacy of slavery. (Part of the money my family has comes from the fact that 150 years ago they owned property, they weren’t owned as property.) Or blacks and Hispanics really are inferior to whites. So unless conservatives are going to accept this latter contention (and most absolutely will not), then they must admit that we live with racism today. And it isn’t against the oppressed while folk with all their wealth.

Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertain Reality

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Werner HeisenbergThis is going to be a hard day. My allergies are going crazy. As a result, I had to take one of those pills that puts me to sleep. So we’ll see if I can make it through this article without collapsing on the keyboard. And this is gonna be hard. I have two major physicists today who deserve a lot of attention. They will probably get short shrift. But don’t worry. They’re both dead. No feelings will be hurt.

On this day in 1868, the great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld was born. He did a bunch of stuff that you wouldn’t understand anyway. Do you know what quantum spin is? Of course you don’t. Just give up now. What Sommerfeld is most important for (and you’ll like this because it’s history) is his teaching of other physicists who did work that you wouldn’t understand. One of those people also has a birthday today. (It’s a surprise!) Another is Wolfgang Pauli. What did Pauli do that was so great? Quantum spin. Which you don’t understand. When I was young and smart, I read a manuscript by him. I didn’t really understand it. But above all, Pauli is remembered for having looked a lot like Peter Lorre. Neither Pauli nor Lorre have birthdays today. Sommerfeld does. He would be 145 today, and you have to assume that he would have lost his intellectual edge.

Speaking of Peter Lorre, the great film director Fritz Lang was born in 1890. Apart from M, which oddly made Lorre a star, he is best know for Metropolis, with the inventor Rotwang. That’s important to me, because there is an economist who writes under that name, but no one will tell me who he really is. Here is a scene from M. What I love about the film is that Lang seems to be one of the few people besides me who feels sorry for pedophiles. That’s not an excuse for what they do, but I cannot think of a greater hell than to be sexually attracted to children.

Walt Disney was born in 1901. Three things about Disney. First, he was antisemitic. Look, I don’t think he was a “kill all the Jews” type. And his thinking (including other racist attitudes) was much more common in those days. But he was sympathetic to the Nazis. There’s no denying that. Second, I think it is very funny that after he died, everyone thought he was frozen, as though we just couldn’t live without him. Personally, I think his early work sucked. And only a few of the later features are truly great. But the biggest reason I hate Disney, and admittedly, it isn’t really his fault, is copyright. For the sake of fucking Mickey Mouse (a really stupid character anyway), copyright lengths just get longer and longer. Personally, I want to see Mickey Mouse in porn films. I want to see him gang raped by a marauding passel of opossums. (Admit it: you didn’t know a group of opossums is called a “passel.” Of course, neither did I until I looked it up. And I’ll probably forget by tomorrow.)

Oh my God! Can you believe that Little Richard is 81 today? Hell, what is there to say?

Humorist Calvin Trillin is 78. He still writes poems for The Nation each week. But I will always love him for the chicken story:

There’s a restaurant in Chinatown where years ago you could play tic-tac-toe with a chicken. I used to take visitors there. You could tell a lot about what kind of people they were. The set up had back-lit letters for signs that said “Your Turn” and “Chicken’s Turn” and “50¢ to Play.” If you beat the chicken at tic-tac-toe, you got a bag of fortune cookies as a prize. Probably worth a total of 40¢.

Anyway, I’d take people there and say, “Why don’t you play?” And they’d say all kinds of things, mostly it went like this.

They’d look at the set-up, then me, and says stuff like, “But the chicken gets to go first!”

“Yeah,” I’d tell them, “but you’re a human being and that ought to be an advantage.”

“So what, the chicken plays every day. I haven’t played since I was a kid.”

Other birthdays: Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev (1803); musician JJ Cale (1938); record producer Frank Wilson (1940); musician Jim Messina (66); and actor Lisa Marie (45).

The day, however, belongs to Arnold Sommerfeld’s student Werner Heisenberg who was born in 1901. He is one of the most important figures in the development of quantum mechanics. The most important person was Max Planck, who never accepted the theory, but that is the subject for another day (namely, 23 Apr 2013). There are two standard formalisms of quantum mechanics, one is Heisenberg’s and the other is Erwin Schrodinger’s. Most people know of Schrodinger’s, which probably explains why people are so confused about quantum mechanics. Schrodinger used a “wave equation.” But this is all about statistics and probability. Unfortunately, people think it has something to do with particles acting like waves. Particles do in fact act like waves, but that’s not what the wave equation is all about.

Heisenberg used infinite matrices. This puts people off. First, they don’t understand matrices and second, they don’t understand infinity. In general, theoretical physicists like Heisenberg’s formalism because it is easier to work with. I can tell you that this is only true of really smart people, because I had to learn that stuff and “easy” was not a word I would ever apply to it.

Heisenberg’s formalism did, however, have the advantage of leading to the uncertainty principle. This is the idea that you can only know the product of the velocity (actually momentum) and location of a particle to a certain accuracy. So the more accurately you know the position of a particle, the less accurately you know the velocity. This does not come out of Schrodinger’s formalism. For years I thought this was just a limit to the theory. But there does indeed seem to be a physical basis for this. The universe really is bizarre and unknowable. Of course, I’m not even certain that I exist. But that is a very long discussion for another time. Anyway.

Happy birthday Werner Heisenberg! (Insert Breaking Bad joke here.)

We Lost Detroit

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Matthew 25

With Detroit being screwed, and more specifically, Detroit’s public employees, it seems appropriate to start the day with Gil Scott Heron’s “We Almost Lost Detroit.” The song is about the first commercial breeder reactor in the United States. But it applies well enough to what’s going on there now. There are long term, systematic problems that have hurt Detroit, but the real crisis has happened because the Republican controlled state legislature has forced it. How long will the people of America think, “We ought to give the Republicans another chance.” It is always a bad idea.

Today, I don’t see it as “almost” anymore. But as it is, Rick Snyder is still quite popular in Michigan. His numbers against his most likely challenger Mark Schauer have been falling, but he’s still ahead. Regardless, how does a man who leads a state with an unemployment rate that is almost two percentage points higher than the nation’s maintain the approval of roughly half the population? I understand that as far as Republican governors go, Snyder is nowhere near the worse. But he has been terrible to Detroit.

What is wrong with our great “Christian” nation? Does it take a weirdo Taoist atheist like me to remind our nation of Matthew 25:

[31] “But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. [32] All the nations will be gathered before him; and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; [33] and he will put the sheep on his right, and the goats on the left.

[34] “Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. [35] For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in; [36] naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me.’ [37] Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you, or thirsty, and give you something to drink? [38] And when did we see you a stranger, and invite you in, or naked, and clothe you? [39] When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?’ [40] The king will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.’

[41] “Then he will also say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; [42] for I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink; [43] I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in; naked, and you did not clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.’ [44] Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ [45] Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ [46] These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Meanwhile, we lose Detroit.

Martin Bashir Fired, MSNBC Sucks

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Martin BashirJust in case you didn’t know it, liberals are a bunch of spineless fucks who have no loyalty at all. MSNBC has fired Martin Bashir for his comment about Sarah Palin. I’m sure the network will claim that he is resigning or whatever, but we all know the truth. As you all know, after the incident, I wrote, Martin Bashir Was Wrong to Apologize. And I noted in that article that Bashir offered the best public apology I had ever heard. That should have been the end of the story.

But MSNBC has always been a terrible network. They have some good people, but the network does not support them. They are also not very smart. It was a bad idea to move Chris Hayes from Up, where he was the perfect host. Steve Kornacki, who now hosts the show, is ill-suited to it. He is much better on a weeknight hour-long show like All In. Then, of course, there was MSNBC‘s unconscionable treatment of Ed Schultz. The firing of Alec Baldwin after five episodes was just pathetic. Meanwhile, they hold onto Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the most self-important and annoying people on cable news. They allow Rachel Maddow to focus on gay and reproductive rights almost to the exclusion of anything else. Not to mention her schoolgirl naivete about sex scandals. Apparently, they are tutoring Chris Hayes to be more combative to bring up his disappointing ratings. And don’t get me started about The Cycle.

I’ve been having problems with MSNBC for some time, but this is the last straw. I simply will not watch the network anymore—ever. And I encourage everyone else to do the same. Al Jazeera America is now widely available on cable. Go to their site and see if it is available for you. It does a much better job than any of the big three American cable news channels. Also, check out Sam Seder’s Majority Report and The Young Turks. These are both excellent resources.

There is another problem with MSNBC. I never learn anything. They just cover stories that I’ve read about earlier in the day. They were fine background noise for the time that I was cooking. But they certainly didn’t present stories that provided new insight. And when there was breaking news, they turned into a slightly more boring version of CNN. Oh! And have you noticed how much they hock all the pathetic books they publish? Most recently it’s been, Tip and the Gipper—a book with the intelligence and gravitas of Sarah Palin’s Good Tidings and Great Joy. Hard hitting journalism that!

MSNBC is dead to me. Maybe Martin Bashir can move to Al Jazeera America.

Afterword

It is also true that since MSNBC changed its website, everything is fucked up. All In can go days before posting shows. No one on MSNBC has any right to complain about HealthCare.gov.

Update (4 December 2013 6:30 pm)

I just found an excellent article by Justin Baragona that said much the same thing I did when Bashir apologized, Did Martin Bashir Really Need to Apologize to Sarah Palin? It makes it all the more ridiculous given that even after a very real apology—the kind we never get from the right—Bashir is fired:

Bashir contritely and professionally offered a full apology to Sarah Palin. He seemed legitimately sorry for his choice of words and stated that he would make sure to carry himself in a more mannered, adult way in the future. The sad thing here is that Palin’s idiotic statements get swept under the rug, as she now continues with her well-worn brand of victimology. It is always about poor little Sarah getting picked on by the big, bad liberals. It doesn’t matter that she is a polarizing idiot that says dumb, offensive things and helps push the Tea Party’s barely-masked racist agenda against this president.

No, the main thing here is to make sure that Palin is treated with respect, even when she never shows any herself. It is perfectly fine for Palin to constantly insult and denigrate POTUS, liberals, Democrats and anyone that just doesn’t agree with her. Why? Because they deserve it, that’s why! However, let anyone truly dig into her and take her to task for the ignorant, hateful a-hole she really is, then out comes the victim mentality. Her and her supporters immediately cry ‘sexism’ and immediately blame the ‘lamestream’ media for allowing this to happen. And then she gets her apologies. It has all grown so tiresome.

Maybe Bashir was right on Friday. Perhaps he shouldn’t have apologized yesterday. Maybe someone does need to take a big sh*t in Sarah Palin’s mouth. At the very least, it would keep her quiet for a bit.

Update (7 December 2013 7:14 pm)

Here is a discussion on Democracy Now! about the firing of Phil Donahue that I discussed in the comments:

The Myth of Modern Christian Persecution

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The Myth of PersecutionI haven’t read Sarah Palin’s new book, Good Tidings and Great Joy. But I’ve skimmed it. It’s hard to take. Yet another book from a Christer claiming to be oppressed because the clerk at Target says, “Happy holidays!” Oh, if Saint Sebastian were alive today, how could he endure? Arrows are one thing, but this is war. If nativity scenes aren’t allowed in state courthouses, the baby Jesus pees blood. It’s a God damned shame!

Palin’s book is a good companion to a book I actually did read, Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution. Moss is a Christian herself and she thinks all of this nonsense of Christian martyrdom is bad for the religion. A professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, she knows what she’s talking about. It turns out that all that business of Christians being fed to the lions is a myth. Well, it’s a myth in the sense that they weren’t fed to these beasts because they were Christians. Lots of people were so abused. When Christians were killed, it was generally because they broke the law. The early Christians were a radical group, many of them would today be called terrorists.

So I love Bruce Cockburn’s excellent song “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” but it’s a crock:

Consider our old friend Saint Sebastian. His story is so filled with clear folklore, that it is hard to take any of it seriously. He made the mute talk and the blind see. Merely hearing about his acts of healing caused people to be healed. But here’s the thing. He was a captain in the Praetorian Guard, serving under Emperor Diocletian. Now the Christians will have you believe that Diocletian got mad at Sebastian because he was converting people to Christianity. But that doesn’t appear to be what was going on at all. For example, he converted Chromatius who then set all of his prisoners free from jail and resigned. That’s the sort of thing that would get a soldier court-martialed today.

So Diocletian basically sentenced Sebastian to death (or perhaps just torture) by having him tied to a tree and having his men shoot arrows at Sebastian. Left for dead, he survived and was nursed back to health. So Sebastian presented himself to Diocletian to rub his nose in the fact that he was still alive. So the emperor had his men beat Sebastian to death and throw his body in the sewer. God did not heal him from this. Of course, we don’t know that any of this is even true. Sebastian was never even discussed until a century after this all supposedly happened. The point is that the story is supposed to show Christians being persecuted for their faith when, if anything, they were persecuted for being dicks and rabble rousers.

This mythology of the early Christians being persecuted did lead to actual martyrdom later on, because myths matter. If people are told that the best thing they can do is martyr themselves for the cause, there’s no surprise when people do just that. We see the same things today with Muslim martyrs. But when it comes to all of these religious people, any religious persecution was at best isolated and idiosyncratic.

And that brings us back to Sarah Palin. Because of this myth of Christian persecution, she and so many others like her, practice their faiths by pretending that they are some oppressed religious minority. They do this at the same time that they want to claim that America is a Christian Nation. They also love to point out that roughly 80% of the country self-identifies as Christian. I wrote about this last year, Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas. As I said then:

The substitution of “happy holidays” implicitly relegates Christmas to the level of all other seasonal holidays. Christians want to be told that Christmas is more than just their holiday—an expression of their religious belief. They want to be told that Christmas is true—an expression of what God really is and not just their opinion.

A moment’s thought on this issue will show that this is true. But notice how the deconstruction lays bare the absurdity of the request. It is not enough to include Christmas in a greeting, the greeting must single out Christmas because, you know, unlike those other religions, it’s true! Now, I’m as deluded as the next man, but I don’t require that others pander to my delusions.

So that’s what Sarah Palin’s new book is all about. Christmas is not everyone’s holiday. It is the holiday that belongs only to those chosen people who happen to believe in the right God. And the rest of us who are not Christians and who really don’t care are waging a war on Christianity through our indifference. So the myth of the persecution of Christians lives on, but now it has been so debased that cable “news” networks spend whole segments whining about the fact that non-Christians don’t celebrate the winter solstice the “right” way. Proving one’s love to God comes pretty cheap to the modern Christian.

The One Ronnie

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Ronnie CorbettOn this day in 1795, the great historian Thomas Carlyle was born. His The French Revolution: A History was the basis for Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. He was a fascinating man. He is probably best known today for coining the term “the dismal science” for economics. And the way most conservatives approach it, it is dismal. The general idea is, “We can do nothing to limit suffering because markets must be ‘free.'” By “free” they mean skewed as to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.

Paul O’Neill is 78 today. He was Treasury Secretary under Bush Jr. He’s important because he was fired by the Bush administration. No level of incompetence or corruption could get you fired from that administration. But O’Neill did the one thing you just couldn’t do: he told the truth. I don’t actually agree with him. He’s a budget hawk. But he countered the Republicans’ totally unjustified claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. So he had to go. Logic and reason are not allowed when one is down the rabbit hole.

Actor Jeff Bridges is 64. I like him well enough as an actor. However, it’s an outrage that he received the Academy Award for Crazy Heart. In that film, he played a tired cliche (the sympathetic drunk) in an entirely standard way. Steve Buscemi did a far better and more complex job in Trees Lounge. But whatever; the Academy is made up of a bunch of fools anyway. What really bugs me about Jeff Bridges is his voice acting work for television commercials. Bridges is worth something on the order of $30 million. Does he really need to take work away from all the really talented voice actors who are struggling just to get by? I think it is unconscionable. He should be a social pariah for that behavior.

Actor Marisa Tomei is 49. I have liked her in just about everything I’ve seen. I thought her performance in Slums of Beverly Hills was really subtle and wonderful. But I’ll always love her for My Cousin Vinny. In particular, this scene:

Other birthdays: film director Lloyd Bacon (1889); jazz guitarist Jim Hall (83); actor Max Baer Jr (76); and musician Jay-Z (44).

The day, however, belongs to Scottish comedian Ronnie Corbett, who is 83 today. On the show The Two Ronnies, he did these armchair monologues. The idea was that he would tell a joke, but usually the jokes were old and often not funny. What was funny was his monologue leading up to the joke. For Americans, they can be a bit hard to understand because he uses a lot of British jargon. Still, the humor comes through loud and clear. I never really liked the show, but I watched it just to hear these monologues. Here is “The Parrot Joke.”[1]

Happy birthday Ronnie Corbett!

[1] The other parrot joke he is referring to is as follows. It is taken from the website Planned Parrothood, but I’ve edited it to improve it. (I fancy that I tell the joke rather well.)

There was once a magician on a cruise ship who performed mainly sleight of hand tricks. He was part of the ship’s cabaret entertainment. He was actually quite a good magician, but his routines were regularly ruined by the parrot who was part of another performer’s animal act. The parrot would squawk at him from the side of the stage, revealing how his tricks were done.

“Awk, it’s up his sleeve! He put it up his sleeve!” the parrot would squawk.

Or it would burst out, “Awk, there’s a duplicate card! A duplicate card!”

Or, “Awk, he switched the lemon! Switched it for a prepared lemon!”

The magician was getting pretty sick of this and started fantasizing about killing the bird. The next evening right at the climax of his act, just as he was about to do his best trick—the slow motion card vanish, the ship hit an iceberg and sank in seconds.

Amazingly, the magician was the only survivor. As he was lying on a piece of driftwood in a daze, the parrot flew in from out of the blue and landed next to him. The parrot just stared at the magician. This went on for hours. It was like a staring contest: neither the bird nor the magician looked away.

After several hours of this, the parrot finally spoke, “Awk! I give up. What did you do with the ship?”

Here is the slow motion card vanish:

A Better World Without Hitchens

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Christopher HitchensThis is amazing. It is an hour long debate between Eric Alterman and Christopher Hitchens. It is mostly a discussion of Hitchens’ support of the Iraq War. The debate takes place right before the 2008 presidential election. It is really worth watching. Alterman is great as usual, and quite reasonable. I don’t completely agree with him; he’s quite a bit more conservative than I am. But Hitchens is just amazing. In this one video, he shows how he had lost all credibility toward the end of his career.

The last decade he was alive, he spent it using his considerable intellect and erudition to avoid admitting that he had been wrong to cheerlead for that war. I won’t take the time, but there must be at least thirty times when he simply lies. (His comment about the Bush administration having to be forced into going to war is contradicted by just about everyone who was around at that time. See, for example, Richard Clarke.) And when he’s not lying, he’s brushing aside important questions with snarky comments. This is a great example of why his death had absolutely no effect on the level of public intellectual discourse. He had long ago gotten out of that business.

It’s interesting that he was an outspoken atheist. First, it was the only thing that kept him relevant in the public. The atheist community found him too amusing to throw away, even though his thinking on religious topics was pathetic. Second, his previous writing in favor of the Iraq War became his own personal Bible. He effectively became an apologist for that corpus. Remember, this is a man who to the end would savage the Ronald Reagan presidency. But he couldn’t say anything bad about Bush. Bush could have been decapitating babies and it would have been okay because he killed that very dangerous man Saddam Hussein. (Funny how the CIA couldn’t be trusted because they over-estimated the strength of the USSR, but Bush is great despite the fact that he over-estimated Hussein hundreds of times worse.)

I’m glad Hitchens is gone (he wouldn’t have to be dead). As a public figure, he was a disaster. He made the world a worse place. Plenty of people do that, of course. But few of them have the brilliance to do good. Christopher Hitchens used his gifts to push for an unnecessary and evil war. And then he spent the rest of his life trying to justify it. He should have either admitted his error or just shut up. We are so much better off without him.