Art theorist and painter Gian Paolo Lomazzo was born on this day in 1538. French master Eugene Delacroix was born in 1798. American impressionist Edmund C. Tarbell was born in 1862. And everyone’s favorite Nazi Rudolf Hess was born in 1894.

Carol Burnett is 80 today!

But the day does not belong to painters, comedians, or even Nazis. No, today belongs to the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It’s hard to know what to say about him. His work was largely analytical—more math than philosophy. What I find most interesting is his discussions of how language maps to reality and how we can transcend the limits of language. Umberto Eco in his essay “Absolute and Relative” puts it well:

It’s that kind of stuff. But harder.

Happy birthday Ludwig Wittgenstein!

Last night, I tried to watch two films. I’ve been putting off watching Three Kings for some time, so I finally sat down to watch it. It seems partly based upon Kelly’s Heroes, which I don’t much like. But I have to say, Three Kings made me appreciate it more. This isn’t because of the film. It is about how the characters act. Regardless of how actual soldiers acted in World War II versus how they acted in the Persian Gulf War, the representations indicate that we are devolving. Put simply: we apparently don’t have to bomb a people back to the stone age to show them that we are assholes. After about a half hour I stopped watching the film. It isn’t that the film is not well made, I just wasn’t in the mood for it.

So I put on In the Loop. It is a comedy about the lead up to the Iraq War. It isn’t in any way accurate in the details, although I tend to think it is exactly right broadly speaking. Basically: there were a bunch of powerful people who really wanted to go to war so we did. The first two acts are very funny. Actually, the third act is very funny, I just didn’t laugh. It got too real and I got increasingly angry that these assholes pushed us into war and then managed to screw over everyone who showed the least sign of a soul or backbone. It does not have a happy ending because the Bush-Blair days were not happy. (I still have a great deal of anger toward Blair because I tend to think without his help, Bush could not have gone to war in Iraq; but I might be overestimating Bush.)

The highlights of the film are two actors. First, Peter Capaldi is Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed alpha male Director of Communications. I first saw him in Local Hero where he played such a nice young man. Since then, he seems to have been type cast as a profane Scot. He is hilarious here, although you might want to put on the subtitles so you don’t miss any of the great writing. The second actor is the always wonderful Tom Hollander, who plays Simon Foster, the Secretary of State for International Development. He is a man who really believes in things. Except when he doesn’t. And he goes back and forth on this quite a lot. Here is perhaps the high point of the film where Simon is (quite rightly) chewing out his assistant for showing up at a meeting in his slept-in clothes after a hard night of drinking:

If you like British comedy, you can’t help but enjoy In the Loop. But if you are sometimes offended by the language I use on this site, you should avoid it. The film relishes in its obscenities.

Afterword

On a related note, the much maligned film War Inc. is very good. My guess is that it will become popular over the next 20 years as people realize that if they don’t approach it as “the sequel to Grosse Pointe Blank” that it is brilliant social and political satire.

Last night, Obama was speaking to a group of wealthy donors. Unlike Republican politicians, Obama did not tell them what they wanted to hear. Instead, he told them, “Occasionally I may make some of you angry because I’m going to reach out to Republicans, and I’m going to keep on doing it. Even if some of you think I’m a sap, I’m going to keep on doing it because that’s what I think the country needs.” He also said, “Whatever our political differences, President Bush loves this country and loves its people and shares that same concern.” Let me put this into perspective.

When Romney was talking to his donors, he told them they were everything that is good about America and that people vote for Obama because they’re welfare scum who are just looking for a handout. In other words: pander to your base and attack the other side.

Obama’s strategy is different: tell your base you don’t care what they think and compliment the other side. This is, of course, nothing new. My favorite political slogan (which I think is quite true) is, “Republicans fear their base and Democrats hate their base.”

Obama doesn’t call us “fucking retarded” but he clearly does hate us and all our demands for liberal policy.

The Sidney Hillman Foundation is a liberal organization that gives out prizes that honor “journalists who pursue investigative reporting and deep storytelling in service of the common good.” So what did they do? They gave a prize to Andrew Sullivan who is (1) a conservative, (2) not a journalist, and (3) does no reporting or deep storytelling. It is a scandal.

Back in January, Eric Alterman provided an excellent rundown of his career, The ‘Sully’-ing of American Journalism. He points out some of the people Sullivan has championed. First, there are the plagiarizers Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit. Then there is the totally dishonest creator of the “death panel” myth, Elizabeth McCaughey. But best (worst) of all, there is racist and eugenicist Charles Murray.

More than this though, Sullivan was a neocon when it mattered and was considered “cool.” He was not only a big proponent for our unfortunate wars, he was very big on calling anyone who disagreed a traitor. He suggested that “the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts” would constitute a fifth column in our noble fight against the vaguely defined bad guys of the world.

So why would Hillman give him an award? They claim it is for this tireless work promoting gay rights but they note that he’s been a strong supporter of President Obama. Obviously, support of the president isn’t necessarily liberal; it’s just not crazy. I will yield the point: Andrew Sullivan is not crazy. As for this work to promote gay rights, so what? This is just the Rob Portman effect. Sullivan is gay. He thus supports gay rights. Does this justify looking past everything he has stood for his entire career? Hillman thinks so:

This is so sad. If there is one political issue I care most about it is this: liberals are bought cheap. We think getting a middle of the road president is a victory. Sullivan is indeed what we often accept as a liberal: someone who has socially liberal beliefs. But as I noted yesterday regarding healthcare, Sullivan is and remains a conservative. He says so himself. The Hillman Foundation clearly suffers from the liberal disease of low expectations.

King Edward II was born on this day in 1284. It is not known if he was really gay, but Christopher Marlowe certainly thought he was. His play is excellent, and the only reason I’ve even included the king today. Villain or hero Oliver Cromwell (I lean more toward hero) was born in 1599. The great physicist Wolfgang Pauli was born in 1900. I would have featured him today but I did Max Planck just the other day. Too many AustrioGerman theoretical physicists! Ella Fitzgerald was born in 1917. Blues guitarist Albert King was born in 1923. And songwriter Jerry Leiber was born in 1933.

Director Paul Mazursky is 83 today. Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon is 82. With a name like that, he ought to be a blues man. Al Pacino is 73. Idiot pundit Dinesh D’Souza is 52. Hank Azaria is 49. And Renee Zellweger is 44.

The day belongs to Edward R. Murrow who was born in 1908. I don’t know much about him. All I know about him is from watching Good Night, and Good Luck. Well, I know a bit more. He was a great man. Too bad about the smoking, which took his life at 57.

Afterword

Here’s one of Leiber’s songs (co-written as always):

Tonight, Rachel Maddow had a great opening sequence on conspiracy theorists and the thought that they are becoming more mainstream. I don’t know about that. But I have known a lot of conspiracy theorists and I think I know how they think. One thing you have to remember about these people is that they are generally pretty smart. Truly dull people would not be able to follow all of the clever thinking that most conspiracy theories are based on. They are also people with an admirable ability to question authority. Unfortunately, they don’t take it far enough.

I’m very open to conspiracy theories. There are actually a lot of conspiracies. But they don’t often have to do with the government. Well, perhaps it is better to say that the government conspiracies are out in the open. Insider trading for congressional staff? Check! Legal bribery? Check! You get the idea. But faking the moon landing? Well…

You know, during the moon landing, a physicist who watching TV at home, timed how long an astronaut’s belt took to swing back and forth. Based upon that, he calculated the force of gravity on the surface of the moon. That is, to say the least, one of the coolest things ever. But more to the point, I don’t think conspiracists are that good. They would have to have created a special device that looked like a belt swinging. And then they would have had to predict that some nerdy physicist (Redundant, right?) would do the calculation. Or the physicist would have to be part of the conspiracy. And every person you add to a conspiracy adds to the likelihood that someone is going to publish a tell-all book.

When I look into conspiracies, I always find that I’m buried in data that goes against them. The problem, I think, with people who accept conspiracy theories is that they latch on to small inconsistencies. But that’s entropy. If you collect enough data, some of it will be contradictory. And the more you collect, the more contradictory information you will find. And if you are digging for data thinking you’ll find things that go against the official narrative, you will find them. But science (and investigation in general) is about the preponderance of information, not every detail fitting. But it isn’t hard to understand how people become true believers when there are in fact pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit.

There’s a problem with that, of course. It’s like a tinder box. You know how to build a pipe bomb, right? You put a bunch of explosive material in a pipe—match heads will do. Then you close it off with the exception of one small hole. Put a fuse in the hole and there you go. But as long as you don’t light the fuse (and use match heads that are pretty stable), the bomb isn’t likely to explode unless you light the fuse. And that’s kind of what the conspiracy theory community is like: an unlit pipe bomb.

Timothy McVeigh didn’t blow up the Oklahoma City federal building in a vacuum. He was part of a larger community that was obsessed with the supposed tyrannical government that murdered poor Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge. That’s how extremist bombs go off. It is not an overstatement to say that loose talk ends in carnage. There very much is a continuum between Rush Limbaugh and the Oklahoma City bombing. That isn’t to blame Limbaugh, but he is part of the environment. And if the conspiracy theorists are being brought into the mainstream by Republican celebrities, it is a very bad (and dangerous) thing.

Andrea sent me the image above. I’ve been chasing around the original source. She got it off sodahead.com but it is actually stolen bandwidth off Demotivational Posters but is tagged as motifake.com. Unfortunately, I have no idea who created the image in the first place. I’ve been in fights with people on these boards who steal my images (which is fine) and my bandwidth (which is not). Anyway, there you have it.

What I find interesting is that I don’t find the poster at all blue. But I also don’t find it funny. It is just a good example of the madness of US foreign policy over the last decade. But I’m kind of past focusing on the evils of the Bush Administration when there are so many of the Obama administration. In particular, how is our drone program still a response to 9/11? I really don’t know. There are those who claim we must remember the Alamo, I mean 9/11, and that it gives us the right to kill any brown-skinned person anywhere in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But I figure these people already think we have the right to kill anyone they don’t like and are just using 9/11 as an excuse.

But tell me again, why are liberals dropping bombs on these kids?

H/T: Pixabay for the wonderful image

Last night, Politico reported, Sources: Obama Plans W.H.-GOP Budget Group. In other words, it is Grand Bargain time! Don’t worry, that feeling in the pit of your stomach is a normal reaction to the loss of all hope. But maybe it isn’t as bad as all that. Regardless, it is an opportunity for me to discuss some new thinking I’ve been having about Obama’s obsession with making a deal. The news is good! And bad! It depends upon how you want to look at it.

Why does Obama want a deal that will cut Social Security and Medicare in the long term? Because he doesn’t care about the long term. Does that sound harsh? I don’t mean it that way. The truth is that the economy is really bad right now. The stimulus is making it worse. Obama hopes to get a deal that will get the economy back on track now. And if that requires screwing seniors over the next couple of decades, so be it.

There are two ways to look at this. Imagine if Obama could get the economy growing again and create The Wrath of the Conquest of the Planet of the Bride of the Son of the Return of Morning in America. Then in a few years, the Democrats would likely have greater control of the government and would be in a position to fix the harm done by Chained-CPI. They could say (and this is true), “This cost of living adjustment is incorrect for seniors; we shouldn’t have lowered it; we should have raised it!”

Of course, there are other ways that Chained-CPI hurts the Democratic base. In particular, it is a way to raise taxes (slowly, but surely) on the middle class. This is, as they say, something that Obama said very clearly that he would not do. So there’s that. And that brings us to the second way of looking at Obama’s pursuit of a Grand Bargain.

Maybe he just wants things to be good now, since he’s in office. If it all goes to hell afterwards, who cares? In fact, that might be good. Nothing made people appreciate Clinton like George W. Bush. So if seniors in 2018 are eating cat food and the economy is struggling because of lack of demand, people will look back (Republicans especially!) and say, “That Obama was one bad mother f…” (Shut your mouth!) But I’m talking about Obama. (Then we can dig it!)

It may surprise you all, but I actually think it is the first way. Obama thinks that we need to fix the economy now. And he’s right. If we are to have any hope in the future, we need to deal with our problems today.

So take a moment to appreciate these nice things I’m saying about Obama. I assure you, I will be back to complaining very soon!