This is just sad. I’ve been reading Matt Yglesias for a long time and one thing I know (And like!) about him is that he’s an iconoclast. Just this morning he was making what I thought a very weak but iconoclastic argument against fiscal stimulus. But when it comes to computers, I guess he just has to be one of the gang.

Yesterday, he wrote an article complaining about the fact that Apple is keeping its products unreasonably expensive because of unreasonably high profit margins. I’m not sure he’s right. The main problem I have with Apple products is their snob appeal. There are markets where higher prices increase demand. It is certainly possible that if Apple started selling their products at more reasonable prices, they would lose customers who wanted Apple products because only the “cool” people have them. Regardless, Yglesias made a totally reasonable argument.

But the Apple devotees (the worst aspect of Apple snob appeal) came after him. And rather than just ignore it as he usually does when people make cogent, much less ridiculous, points against him, he wrote:

Really everybody: I’m one of you! Don’t cast me out! I love love love Apple! Honest I do!

It’s just sad.

Afterword

There is a serious point that Yglesias is getting at: Apple could make huge inroads into the computer market if they, say, cut their prices by 20%. There is another way to look at the situation, though. Apple could use all of its profits to actually, you know, do some R&D. The company spends a shockingly small amount of money on technological innovation. Apple seems to think it can get by forever on its branding and packaging. I think not, and so do a lot of other people. Apple stock is down, even though they continue to make a lot of money.

I am often reminded that I’m not a very nice person. Most recently, this came to mind because Jonathan Bernstein wrote at Post Partisan, How Do We Keep from Torturing Again? This is coming off the Constitution Project report stating unequivocally that after 9/11, the United States, as a matter of government policy, tortured people in our custody. As I reported in an update to that story, Andrew Sullivan has called for a truth commission or something similar to address this unacceptable behavior.

Bernstein said much the same thing, but with a political scientist’s eye: the only way we can prevent future episodes of government torture is to admit what we did. We can’t be a nation where one party is against torture and the other is for it. In fact, that is exactly what we now have for reasons that should be clear to readers of this site. But this gets to the point about my not being a nice person. Berstein wrote:

I think he is right, and yet I have trouble offering those generous expressions of understanding. But it isn’t because I’m not forgiving—I am very forgiving. It is just that I remain resentful as long as the wrongdoer does not admit his error. I think most people are like this.

So as long as Bush Jr continues to act like everything he did in office was just great or at least done with the best intentions, I cannot offer understanding. As long as Cheney goes around the country talking about how right he was to lead our country into the “dark side,” I cannot offer understanding. As long as torturers and their apologists continue to be represented at the highest levels of government and media, I cannot offer understanding.

That’s my failing. But maybe better men than I can get a truth commission going and convince Bush to admit to his torture policies and accept that they were wrong. If he does, my opinion of him will improve and I will offer him generous expressions of understanding—I know I will, because I know how I am. But until then, I will think of him as just another unpunished criminal who should be spending the rest of his life in a cage, not attending his own art shows.

Any time now, the Senate will vote down the Toomey-Manchin gun purchase background check compromise. I can’t say I’m sad about this. Even under the best of circumstances, the law would have been so watered down as to be almost meaningless. And that was very little gain in return for the possibility that the law would have been far worse than nothing. What I find interesting about the whole exercise is that it shows how little power senators have.

Yesterday, David Firestone over at Taking Note tried to explain, Why the Background Check Bill Is in Trouble. He gave as an example the freshman Republican from Arizona, Jeff Flake. Flake said he was against the bill because it could cause sales between friends and relatives to require a background check. Now, this is not true; Flake was just making this up to give himself an excuse for voting against the bill.

That’s the thing: in a reasonable world, Flake would have no trouble with this bill. After all, it is only fixing a long extant law that is not at all controversial. But I think I’m fair in divining that he is only voting against the bill because he is afraid of the specious charge that he voted for “gun control.” And so Senator Flake does not actually have the power to vote as he wishes.

But let’s be clear. There certainly are senators who will vote against the bill because it is really what they believe. Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, I think, are against the whole background check system. But most senators are not like them. I’m sure at least 30 of the senators who vote against the very mild Toomey-Manchin bill will do so not because of their power but because of their lack of power.

And this is the way power works. Flake could use his power to vote as he sees right. But he won’t. He’s (rightly) afraid that if he uses his power, he will later lose it. But truly, this makes no sense. It is just a recipe for holding onto a pointless job. And the truth is that using political power will not necessarily lead to its destruction. But in my experience, those who seek power are morally weak—and that includes the true believers like Paul and Cruz. So it isn’t surprising that they will forfeit today to assure they will be around to forfeit tomorrow.

The English playwright John Ford was born on this day in 1586. The inventor of baseball (more or less), Alexander Cartwright was born in 1820. J. P. Morgan was born in 1837, and we’ve been paying for it ever since. The great playwright Thornton Wilder was born 1897. William Holden was born in 1918. Director Lindsay Anderson was born in 1923. The great Japanese film critic Donald Richie was born in 1924 (and just died back in February). And concert promoter Don Kirshner was born in 1934.

Author Nick Hornby is 56 today. And actor Sean Bean is 54.

But the day belongs to the great ventriloquist Señor Wences who was born in 1896 and lived to be 103 years old. He was an amazing performer. In the clip below, you will see, however, that he is hardly a ventriloquist at all. But note that he is 70 years old in it. Ventriloquists lose their technique as they get older. I recommend just sitting back and enjoying the comedy. The truth is that it is almost impossible to not look at his various puppets as they talk anyway.

Happy birthday Señor Wences!

Paul Krugman’s last two columns have been about the obsession of conservatives (especially libertarians) with gold backed currency. On Friday, he wrote, Lust for Gold. In it, he discussed the recent fall in the price of gold and how it will not affect the way that goldbugs think about the commodity. And then on Monday, he wrote, The Antisocial Network. In it, he wrote about Bitcoin and how its proponents are basically obsessed with the same thing that motivates the goldbugs: “The government is devaluing my money!”

Then yesterday, Wall Street analyst Barry Ritholtz wrote an amusing article about the culture of the gold devotees, 12 Rules of Goldbuggery. Basically, he says that goldbuggery is a cult. People who are members of it are (like so many things that are political in nature) not responsive to evidence. The 12 rules come down to this: the price of gold can never go down and if it does go down, it isn’t economics, it is government manipulation.

As regular readers know, I used to be a libertarian. But even at my most fanatical, I never understood the gold standard obsession of the movement. (Actually, there were a lot of other things I never understood.) It was all based upon a kind of paranoia that the government was just itching to devalue the currency to impoverish the money of rich people. That’s a shocking claim when you consider the the government is run by a bunch of rich people. And that’s even more true of the Federal Reserve. In theory, it is supposed to maximize employment and minimize inflation. In practice, it minimizes inflation.

There is another side to the gold standard obsession—one that is a lot harder to understand. These people think that the value of gold is fixed. I think this is standard conservative thinking that the way things have long been is the way things ought to be. You see this all the time with the “under God” phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance. Many conservatives I’ve talked to will simply not accept that it is a fairly recent addition or that if it wasn’t always there, it should have been. In other words: whatever the world was like when I was a kid is what is right. So with gold, conservatives have this idea things must have been perfect in the long ago past because currencies have “always” been based upon it.

The truth is that gold is not that useful a metal. And its supply can certainly be manipulated. I remember reading about a king of what is now more or less Chad. This is many hundreds of years ago. He took a trip to the Middle East. In the process, he spread so much gold around the it created a years-long inflation shock. But we don’t have to go back that far to show the instability of gold. Since August, the price of gold has gone down 25% (most of that in the last week). In that same time, the dollar has been quite stable and inflation has been moving at about 2% annually.

The fundamental problem is that a gold-based currency is valuable only in as much as people think that gold is valuable. And this is the same thing as for so called fiat money. Think about it this way: what would you rather have: part ownership of Samsung that is actively exchanging products for other valuables or gold that very few people want? The truth is that gold is not much more valuable than tulip bulbs. In the end, you can’t build houses with gold and you can’t burn gold for energy and you can’t eat gold. So the belief that gold has intrinsic value is just wrong.

If you were preparing for life after some horrible tragedy, would you hoard gold? Of course not! You’d hoard food and batteries. I just don’t get why the goldbugs don’t see that this fact destroys their arguments that gold has some intrinsic and stable value.

Juliet Lapidos at Taking Note reported yesterday on Defensive Gun Use. In it, she wrote about a new study from the Violence Policy Center (VPC) that counters the claim by the NRA that there are over 2 million defensive uses of guns every year. The VPC finds that there are less than 70,000.

The NRA number (actually 2.4 million) comes from a 1995 journal article by Gary Kleck & Marc Gertz, “Armed Resistance to Crime: the Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun.” Here are the basics: it is based on 5,000 telephone surveys. And that seems reasonably solid. On the other hand, Kleck seems to have an ax to grind. We see this on this faculty page and his Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia page is a good example of why we can’t have nice things when it comes to gun research. The page presents criticism of the study with an almost point by point refutation of these criticisms. Then there is a whole long section on Kleck’s responses to the criticisms. I tend to think (as I’ve seen elsewhere on Wikipedia) that the NRA crowd is gaming the page.

The main problem with the study seems to be that it has sampling bias. All the other similar studies have found the number to be more in the range of one million. A good example of this is found in Table 1 of the paper where respondents are asked how likely their use of a gun was to have stopped a murder. Of the respondents, 15.7% said “almost certainly would have.” That means without these defensive gun uses, there would have been almost 400,000 murders in any given year. If we include “probably would have,” the number goes up to almost three-quart million. This is not credible. This is not even close to credible. And I have to add that the gun nuts I’ve known, have been paranoid and highly likely to think there are threats everywhere when they are usually nowhere.

In fairness, however, Kleck and Gertz admit that their number is is likely an upper limit. But that doesn’t stop Kleck from going around the country calling for more guns (I heard him in a debate about 10 years ago). Nor does it stop him from claiming on his faculty page, “Other recent research has found that higher general gun ownership rates reduce homicide rates, probably because the violence-reducing effects of guns among noncriminal victims and prospective victims outweigh the violence-increasing effects of guns among criminals.”

The biggest refutation of Kleck and Gertz was done by David Hemenway of Harvard in his book, Private Guns, Public Health. If you are interested in the subject, you ought to read it. I’ve requested it, but who knows when I’ll get it.

The VPC research paper (pdf) is based upon the National Crime Victimization Survey which has data going back to 1973. They looked at the data from 2007 through 2011. Using these data, they find their very small number of defensive gun uses. But they back this up with an interesting statistic. In the period they studied, there were 1,031 justifiable homicides. There were 45,328 criminal homicides in that time. That’s 2.2% justified homicides. Given the roughly 9,000 criminal homicides each year, what are the odds there are huge numbers of murders stopped by just waving a gun around?

Let me be clear: I don’t accept the 2.4 million number at all. But I’m not convinced about the 70,000 number either. I think that the mere presence of a gun can prevent crime—especially property crime. I’d like to see more studies on this stuff. In general, I don’t think a well armed society is a safe or polite society. But I am open to discussion. Because I’m a liberal. And I think that is one of the worst things about political debate: conservatives are not open to discussion. In fact, my experience with conservatives is that they think if they can just explain what they think, I (and everyone else) will agree with them. Normally, they find that I do not because they have not thought very deeply about their opinions. And then they go off and don’t talk to me again, for the same reasons that Christian fundamentalists don’t talk to me twice: I erode their certainty.

But here’s the thing. It used to be reported that 40% of all gun purchases in America are made without background checks. I heard that this is an old number and that now it is only 20%. I haven’t checked, but I assume the 20% number is correct. I don’t go around quoting the 40% number because I am no longer think it is right. The truth matters to me. And it ought to matter to everyone. But if I’ve learned anything over the last couple of years, it is that the truth only seems to matter to liberals—be it in politics or religion.

Are we as a society safer because of all of our guns? I don’t think so, but I don’t know. The problem is that the pro-gun crowd is certain, and I doubt that a mountain of evidence would ever convince them.

It is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture. That’s not what I say; that’s according to the nonpartisan, independent review performed by the Constitution Project. According to Scott Shane at the New York Times, the group is releasing a 577-page report tomorrow.

I understand that a group with a name like “Constitution Project” sounds like it’s filled with a bunch of libertarian and pacifists who are outside the political mainstream. But that isn’t really the case. It is a think tank that tries to bring the left and right of the political spectrum together to agree on constitutional matters. And the eleven members of panel were well represented by the two major parties. What’s more, Shane explained, “It is the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs.”

What is most significant about the report is that it is so unequivocal. When Dianne Feinstein et al, wrote their letter criticizing the film Zero Dark Thirty, they were careful never to use the word “torture.” This is because, according the United States government, we never tortured anyone. Of course, this is just a semantic game: you say “torture” but I say “enhanced interrogation techniques”; let’s call the whole thing off?

The following passage from the article includes a key quote from the report:

This is the kind of stuff that members of the panel tend to rationalize, saying that everyone “had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.” I’ve been hearing this for years, and I’ve never bought it. It strikes me as being as believable as Bush’s repeated claim in 2002-2003 that he really didn’t want to go to war. In this case, I think that Cheney and company were looking for any excuse to torture. It wasn’t about keeping anyone safe; it was about being the badasses that these guys imagined themselves to be.

But the report does not only go after Bush. Shane wrote:

It doesn’t too much seem to matter who is in power, although clearly Obama is distinctly better than Bush. But therein lies a major problem. If Obama is the best our country can reasonably expect for a president (which I believe), “slightly better than Bush” does not speak well of who we’ve become. Hopefully, this report will help a little.

Update (16 April 2013 9:42 pm)

Andrew Sullivan has had his problems in the past, but he’s never been a torture apologist. And today over at The Dish, he had a very reasonable proposal:

Blue Texan over at Crooks & Liars brought my attention to the following stupid right-wing tweet. There are stupid right-wing tweets everyday; it is a regular feature on Crooks & Liars. But this one really deserves attention because it highlights something that most conservatives think but that is completely wrong.

But before we get to it, just look at that picture: see him in his camouflage? As far as I can tell, he’s another chicken hawk. Loves to pretend to be soldier, but not enough to actually join.

There are a lot of details here and I’m going to ignore them everything but the elephant in the room: George Bush kept us safe for 8 years accept for that one day when almost 3,000 Americans died from a terrorist attack.

Look: I don’t actually blame Bush for 9/11. The president isn’t God. Bad things happen all the time and I don’t think it is right to blame the president. But the idea that Bush kept us safe for 8 years but Obama has not kept us safe is just ridiculous. Do people like Patrick Dollard have any idea what they are talking about? Are the almost 3,000 dead on 9/11 negligible compared to the 3 that died yesterday?

It seems to me that such people just remove the 9/11 attack from consideration. “Oh, I’m talking about after 9/11!” Well, apart from that being pretty convenient (“Hitler didn’t kill any Jews! I’m referring to after the Final Solution was completed, of course!”), this is not what Patrick Dollard said. He didn’t say that Bush kept us safe for seven years; he said eight years—probably because in some kind of twisted conservative anti-mind trick, 9/11 wasn’t Bush’s fault, even though everything is Obama’s fault.

Man, this kind of shit really makes me mad.

Last night, I tried to convey my feeling that we focus (largely because the media profit from it) on big tragic events while we ignore rapid and endless “mundane” tragedies of life in the United States. And I do feel that way. But I admit: it is a provincial view. But there is no one like Glenn Greenwald to break me out of my provincial haze.

In an article, The Boston Bombing Produces Familiar and Revealing Reactions, he makes many observations. I recommend reading it yourself. But what I think is the most important observation is that people should note that however they feel about this attack on innocents in Boston, it is the same as the people in Pakistan feel about US drone attacks on innocents there.

Unfortunately, I can almost hear what people would say in response to this, “But that’s war! The United States isn’t trying to kill innocent civilians.” (I will leave the more vile counters like “They all hate us!” alone.) I find this argument anachronistic. Since at least Sherman’s march to the sea, warfare has not been limited to conflicts between armies. Total war, where civilians are considered a critical aid to armies, is standard now. It is ridiculous to imagine our military leadership as focused on honor like some ossified old British general from the middle 19th century.

But regardless of the argument, I don’t think that we would be too understanding of an army that constantly bombed us, killing scores of civilians, even while it claimed that it didn’t mean it. These people see innocents killed all the time. It doesn’t much matter what the intent (much less the stated intent) of the killers was. And that is one of the most important lesson we can take from last night’s bombing: the people in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan experience this daily with much greater consequences.

We are not the only victims. In fact, we are not the primary victims; not even close.

I am not much of a sports fan, but I do rather enjoy watching the game of baseball—although I would rather watch the minor leagues. But one argument I get into with sports fans (and non-fans) is the supposedly unreasonable player salaries. This is nonsense. And I take particular umbrage at the fact that people almost never complain about the stratospheric profits made by the owners in the congressionally mandated professional sports monoploies. The truth of the matter is that if a pitcher is paid $10 million, it is because the owners believe (quite rightly) that he adds more than that to the profits of the franchise. What’s more, there is a long history in professional sports (Especially baseball!) of owners depriving players of their rightful participation in the profits they create.

I had hoped such nonsense was limited to cocktail parties, but alas, no. Over at Slate, Edward McClelland wrote, The Other Kind of Moneyball. It is a feature length article about how McClelland doesn’t think that Justin Verlander is worth all the money that the Detroit Tigers are paying him. Apparently, we are supposed to care that he has now changed his alliance to the Washington Nationals. (To show you were my head is at: I originally typed, “Washington Senators”!)

Luckily, the voice of reason came thundering back from McClelland’s Slate colleague Matt Yglesias, who asks the sensible question, What’s the Alternative To Sky-High Salaries for Baseball Players? His main point is my own: if you limit player salaries, it won’t change the game; it will just make the owners even more wealthy. Maybe players are too rich, but they aren’t nearly as rich as the owners. And the owners do what for their money? Oh, that’s right! Nothing.

Yglesias points out something else that I haven’t spent much time thinking about: the closed nature of professional sports in the United States. Perhaps you’ve noticed how bizarre the soccer leagues are in other countries: it is hard for foreigners to know what’s going on. That’s because they have free markets in the leagues over there. Try starting a new professional baseball league in America: you can’t do it. MLB is protected against competition. If people want to start complaining about this, I’ll be on board. And the greater competition would likely increase the number of players making a living and decrease the highest salaries. Regardless, if we just focus on limiting salaries, all that changes is that the players make less and the owners more.

Wilbur Wright was born this day in 1867. Actor Peter Ustinov was born in 1921. The great arranger and composer Henry Mancini was born in 1924. Jazz flutist Herbie Mann was born in 1930. And Dusty Springfield was born in 1939.

Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (the Pope emeritus) is 86 today. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was not as good as Wilt Chamberlain, is 66. Billy West, the voice of Philip J. Fry and many others, is 63. Jimmy Osmond is 50 today. I include him only so that you will click over and see what a hunk a hunk of handsome man thing he’s become. Or maybe it’s just the photo. Jon Cryer and Martin Lawrence are 48 today. And Claire Foy of Going Postal is 29.

The day belongs to the great painter, Louise Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, who was born on this day in 1755. As I think that you can see in the self-portrait above, she’s just marvelous. As a result, she was very popular with aristocracy, and almost lost her head because of it. But she fled France and became a cause celebre throughout Europe, eventually returning to Paris in triumph. She died just before her 87th birthday.

Afterword

I can’t end the day without listening to this Dusty Springfield song: