Margaret Thatcher was an evil woman. Now she’s dead. At the end of her term in office, Elvis Costello released a song about her, “Tramp the Dirt Down.” In it he sang, “And when they finally put you in the ground; I’ll stand there laughing; And tramp the dirt down.” I agree completely about that sentiment. It would be one thing if Thatcher had only ruined the United Kingdom, but she had a pernicious effect all over the globe. Nowhere was the effect greater than in the good ol’ United States of America under Ronald Reagan. Thatcher England led the western world into the abyss of free market authoritarianism (fascism without the explicit racism). It hardly matters that she’s dead now.

It would have helped so much if she had died at 50, say. Of course, I tend to think that the world was destined to go through this proto-fascist phase that (on good days) I think we are slowly clawing our way out of.

I’m glad she’s dead, but I do not look forward to all the hagiographic obituaries. Because you know how it goes in American papers. The obituaries of leftists have to be evenhanded and talk about the good and the bad. The obituaries of rightists only talk about what good men/women/gargoyles they were.

I love the anger in this song; it is Costello at his best:

Thatcher was a good example of the kind of person I wrote about last night, Cynical Son of a Bitch.

Mary Pickford was born in 1892 on this day. According to Wikipedia, she was an alcoholic. But if she was, how did she live to be 87? Really. The definition of alcoholic has really gotten out of hand when it is applied to Pickford. The great economist John Hicks was born in 1904. And another alleged alcoholic, Betty Ford, was born in 1918. She lived to be 93.

Comedian Shecky Greene is 87 today. The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is 76. Special effects master Douglas Trumbull is 71. John Madden, director of Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, is 64. And actresses Robin Wright and Patricia Arquette are 47 and 45.

But the day belongs to the great Jacques Brel who was born in 1929, but died unacceptably young in 1978. Like many musicians who died young, he left us much to remember him by.

Adieu Jacques je t’aimais bien tu sais!

For my analysis of this song, see It’s Hard to Die in French.

I just read the Philip K. Dick short story “The Minority Report.” I’ve seen the film that is based upon it a number of times before. But as with any written story, reading gives you time to think. In this case, I began to think about the metaphysics of precrime. For those of you unaware of the plot, it revolves around the existence of so called “precogs.” They can predict crime—hence “precrime.” As a result, the police arrest assailants before they commit crimes that the precogs have predicted. This creates all kinds of metaphysical problems that I will get to shortly.

Dick wrote the story when he was just 28, and I don’t think he really understood what he had come up with. Both the story and the film have a fundamental paradox. It is a little less troubling in the story, so let me lay it out as it occurs in the film. Anderton is accused of killing a man he has neither met nor heard of. In the process of trying to prove his innocence, he comes into contact with a man who claims to have killed Anterton’s son. Anterton then (more or less) kills the man.

But this begs a very big question: how did the precogs know that Anterton would meet this man when it was only because of their prediction that he did? The answer is that the whole idea of precrime is even more aggravating than time travel! But there’s more, because there is no way that precrime could work in any philosophically justifiable way.

When the precogs predict a crime, there are two possibilities:

1. They are predicting the crime that would take place given all of the ways that their prediction will alter reality.
2. They are predicting the crime that would take place without the many and assorted ways that their prediction will alter reality.

If it is case 1, then the prediction itself is altering reality. There is no way to say that the crime would have been committed without the prediction. This is the case in the story and the movie. There is no way to truly see Anderton as culpable given that he would never have committed the crime without the precrime system causing him to do it.

If it is case 2, then the precrime system is arresting people who might well be guilty in another universe, but who are very clearly not guilty in the universe in which they are found guilty. The precrime system does exist. Predictions that depend upon it not existing are not valid for the universe in which it does exist.

I know that all of this metaphysics may strike some as ridiculous. Yet this is exactly what the story is about. There could not be an ethical precrime. It is quite literally a system that punishes thought crimes. There is no way around this. If you think in terms of wave equations: until an event occurs, the future is just probabilities. Now, I am enough of a mystic to believe that multiple (even infinite) strands of time may branch off at each instant. And someone outside of time might be able to map each of branches. But no one inside that time can do so because in doing so they change the branch.

(Think about it this way. Suppose there was a god or something outside of time and he was able to pump his knowledge into the precogs’ heads. Doing that would change the time branch—the universe. There is no way around that.)

Strangely, the movie Minority Report ends correctly where the short story does not. (The writers had 45 years to think about.) In the movie, the flaws in precrime are exposed and the system is ended. (However, they are not the metaphysical flaws I am discussing here.) In the story, Anterton does as the precogs predicted in order to save the system. It is unfortunate, because Dick explicitly discusses branches of time as the different timing of the precog predictions affect later ones. But the more fundamental problem that I’ve discussed here seems completely to have eluded him. But it’s a really great story!

Afterword

I just looked up the title of this article on Google to see what people had written. I have to say, I’m pretty disappointed. No one seems to be aware of the issues I’ve raised here. These do not strike me as terrible profound or intelligent observations. Maybe it just my peculiar combination of mysticism and science that draws me here. But these metaphysical question are explicitly raised in both the story and the movie. Geez!

I am a cynical son of a bitch. I am the first to push emotion aside for the purpose of the greater intellectual good. So I was surprised how much tonight’s episode of 60 Minutes struck me. The show brought together a group of parents who lost children at Sandy Hook. The cynical side of me was very clear: this was a very manipulative segment; the producers should have been ashamed. And I thought that as someone who agrees with the parents fully on the issue of gun control.

But I thought that with a small part of my brain. The majority of my brain was overwhelmed, desperately trying not to be emotionally destroyed by the stories that the parents were telling. My brain failed utterly. There is just no way to get past the emotional tug (more like a tractor beam) of these very human stories and the tragedy of these deaths. I had to turn it off. I don’t need to hear this kind of thing. After all, I’m the guy who says fuck the assault weapons, let’s outlaw handguns.

It got me thinking. (Of course!)

I understand the arguments of the gun lovers. They says things like, “Rights are more important than lives.” And, “If you outlaw guns, even more people will die.” I have a very clear answer to this: bullshit! Just admit it: you care more about keeping your assault rifles than you care about the lives of these grammar school kids. And may God make you fry in hell for the privilege.

But it’s worse. These gun people are not arguing that gun rights are more important than the lives of these children. They are arguing that the simplest reforms—getting rid of the gun show loophole of a law they claim to be for—is more important than the lives of these children. Are they fucking kidding me? Really: I get the slippery slop argument. It’s bullshit, but I get it! But this isn’t it. I don’t even know what this is. “If we fully enforce the law then the Nazis will come in and take away all our guns”?

I am a cynical son of a bitch. And I just don’t get it.

Few political commentators can call bullshit as well as Melissa Harris-Perry. In the clip below from yesterday’s show, she is talking about the Tennessee bill that would cut welfare funding from families who have children who are not performing well in school. I don’t have much to add to what she says, although I think I would go further. These lawmakers are not interested in improving how well students do in school. This is the same issue that we see elsewhere with conservatives trying to tie welfare benefits to clean drug tests. It is, in fact, the same thing that makes applying for food stamps a bureaucratic nightmare requiring 40 pages of documents while billion dollar bailouts of banks require just two.

It is no longer acceptable to say, “Get the blacks!” or “Get the Mexicans!” But given that conservatives think that all welfare recipients are black or brown, the “Get the shiftless poor person” has been a good substitute for their need to express their latent racist fury. I know that Harris-Perry feels the need to make nice. She is on national television, after all. And I’m sure she (rightly) thinks that calling out these racist shenanigans would be counterproductive.

I am under no such constraints. Anyway, I’m waging a longer-term battle here. It is one where we don’t wait for racist euphemisms to be retired before we call them out. From the passion that she shows on these issues, I know that Melissa Harris-Perry is a fellow (and far more successful) warrior. What this clip. It is a thing of joy.

Afterword

Of course, I don’t want to leave the impression it is all about race. These people also hate the poor as poor. Did I focus on race because it was Tennessee? Maybe. But it doesn’t really matter. In the conservative mind there are two kinds of people: us and them. That’s why Rob Portman suddenly became pro-gay rights. He learned that part of “them” was in fact “us.” But that mentality defines conservatism.

When I saw that Ezra Klien had written an article titled, The Strange Alliance Between John Boehner and Liberals, I knew just what he was talking about. Basically, over the last couple of years, John Boehner has saved the liberal cause by refusing to accept rather conservative deals on things like Chained-CPI. Of course, Boehner is nixing these deals because they aren’t conservative enough. But that hardly matters; the fact remains, he has been saving the liberal cause from the Bipartisan President.

In the actual article, Klein suggests that if the Democrats could have created a “Manchurian Speaker,” he would be John Boehner. Clearly, such a person could not actively be in favor of liberal policies. If that were the case, Boehner would have been voted out of his speakership, and soon out of office all together. But just by being ultra-conservative, Boehner is doing what liberals want. Klein isn’t seriously suggesting that this is what is going on. But the theory is valid and it points to an important problem in the modern American Democratic Party.

The “Manchurian Speaker” works so well for liberals because he protects us from our rather conservative president. In this reality, obstruction is a good thing because the only policy changes coming from the top people in the Democratic Party are conservative. Yes, they are not as conservative as what the Republicans want, but they are more conservative than the legacy that the Democratic Party willed to us.

So we have three groups: the liberals on the left, the Republicans on the right, and the Democratic Party elite in the middle. You know the Democratic Party elite: they supported the Iraq War; they gave us the insurance industry give away that is Obamacare; and they pushed “tighten our belts” economic policy that has kept tens of millions out of work. That party. They’re the ones we’re fighting with. And that’s why they call us “fucking retarded.” We’re just too stupid to give up on the great liberal project that is the United States of America.

So yes, we really are grateful to John Boehner and the rest of the Crazy Caucus. But that will only work for so long. We should take this respite, when Boehner is doing yeoman’s work, to change our party into the 21st century equivalent of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society. We can only play defense for so long. And let’s not forget: Republicans don’t need to win elections as long Democrats keep electing people like Clinton and Obama. It would be worth it to lose some national elections if it might move the center of American political debate a bit to the left.

Remember: Boehner isn’t really the Manchurian Speaker. And if Democrats continue to be “Republican Lite! (Nothing you want in a party; but less!)” we will start losing national elections anyway.

On this day in 1770, William Wordsworth was born. (I named one of my puppets after him—surely there is no greater honor.) The visionary philosopher Charles Fourier was born in 1772. The great sitar player Ravi Shankar was born in 1920 and only died last year. Alan J. Pakula, director of the exceptional To Kill a Mocking Bird, was born in 1928. And the great make-up artist Stan Winston was born in 1946.

James Garner is 85 today. The Bradley Manning of the 1970s, Daniel Ellsberg is 82. California governor Jerry Brown is 75. Francis Coppola and David Frost are both 74. Janis Ian is 62. And Jackie Chan is 59.

There are a number of people I could have picked to win the birthday contest, but the day goes to Billie Holiday, who was born in 1915. Few people have given so much to this country but suffered so much at its hands. I watched Lady Day—The Many Faces of Billie Holiday just a couple of days ago. It’s a bit of a whitewash of her life, but a loving tribute nonetheless.

Happy birthday to one of the greatest singers ever! May the producers of American Idol rot in hell.

Update (7 April 2013 8:04 pm)

I’ve been listening to Edith Piaf this evening (A sign of depression?) and I noticed that she was born the same year as Holiday. And only lived a couple of years longer. Sad. But like Holiday, she left us so much. This, of course, the most obvious:

I’ve also been listening to Madeleine Peyroux, who often sings just like Billie Holiday. I’d hate her for it, but she’s so damned good!

Dudley Nichols, screenwriter of Bringing Up Baby, was born on this day back in 1895. The great saxophonist Gerry Mulligan was born in 1927. And Kinch from Hogan’s Heroes, Ivan Dixon was born in 1931.

The great geneticist James D. Watson is 85 today. Merle Haggard is 76. I like him for songs like “Mama Tried” and “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down.” But “Okie From Muskogee” is one of the most vile examples of in group/out group politics I’ve ever seen. It really tarnishes the man. Billy Dee Williams is also 76. Barry Levinson, director of Good Morning Vietnam and Bandits, is 71. Marilu Henner is 61. Documentary filmmaker Rob Epstein is 58. And Paul Rudd is 44.

Under normal circumstances, Dr. Watson would win the birthday contest. But maybe because I can more see myself discovering the structure of DNA than I can drawing anything more complicated than a stick figure, I have to give the day to the great Italian painter Raphael who was born on this day back in 1483. He is usually paired with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, but unlike them, he died very young—at 37 on his birthday. (Or not; he may have been born on 28 March.) He produced a remarkable amount of work given that da Vinci had 30 years on him and Michelangelo had almost 50.

Happy birthday young man!

One thing that this last week has shown is that Chris Hayes’ new weeknight show All In is certainly as good as his weekend show was. So you will forgive me for writing twice about it in as many days.

Last night, there was a discussion of the recent NPR attack on Disability Insurance. And Hayes brought on Avik Roy to play the part of the evil and stupid conservative. It was type casting. As regular readers know, I am no fan of this man. And he showed why on this appearance yesterday. He is supposedly a policy wonk. And yet, like most conservatives who are supposed to be policy wonks, all we ever get from him are tired conservative canards and talking points.

In this case, he brought up Jonah Goldberg’s specious argument in The Baltimore Sun that our disability program must have huge amounts of fraud because the program in the United Kingdom did. Former Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue blew that argument out of the water. I suggest watching the segment below (five minutes). But the point is, rather than bring up actual evidence, Avik Roy just quotes National Review propaganda from Jonah Goldberg.

We very rarely get any policy discussion from Avik Roy. That would be fine if he were just another conservative pundit. But he works at a think tank. He is supposedly a policy guy. And this is what the conservative movement has come to. It has been decades since their think tanks actually worked on any policy. Now, they just look for better ways to twist facts to justify policies that are givens, based upon their political ideology.

I know the pickings are poor when it comes to conservatives who can do anything more than rant. So Hayes can be forgiven for inviting Roy on his show. And I’ll admit, Avik Roy is far better than most conservative pundits. But it shows just how intellectually vacuous the conservative movement has become. Up against even reasonable opposition, Roy is pathetic.

I just saw a very annoying thing on Chris Hayes’ new Show All In. There was a panel discussion of Judge Edward Korman’s smack down of the Obama administration over their repellent handling of the youth exclusion to allowing Plan B to be sold over the counter. The problem was Karen Hunter on the panel. She was arguing that it was wrong to allow 11-year-old women to buy a birth control drug from a pharmacy without their parents’ approval.

The panel did not address the hateful nature of Hunter’s argument. They claimed that the issue was that requiring the drug to be behind the counter meant that women over 17 had a harder time accessing it. And others noted that they had no problem with 11-year-old women being able to buy birth control medication. I am completely in agreement with these arguments. But they don’t really counter what Hunter was saying.

Karen Hunter misses the entire issue. She even mentioned that we should be concerned about these young women getting STDs. Indeed we should! But stopping them from getting birth control medications will not stop them from having sex. Clearly, these young women have already had sex. So Hunter’s argument is the same as the anti-abortion arguments that I discussed in On Hating Women. She wants to punish women for the sin of having sex. If we care about 11-year-olds having sex (and I think we ought to), then we should care about 11-year-olds having sex. Stopping them from mitigating the harms associating with having sex will not do anything to stop them from having sex.

I agree with the other three members of the panel. But I really wish they had called out Karen Hunter on her hateful attitude (which is the same as President Obama’s, by the way) toward these young women.

Afterword

Note also what a mature act it would be if an 11-year-old took it upon herself to purchase and use Plan B after having unprotected sex. That’s the kind of behavior we should applaud, not punish with an abortion or poorly timed motherhood.

Everyone seems to pretty much agree with me regarding the administration’s announcement that they are going to put Chained-CPI into their new budget: bad policy, bad politics. But I’ve reached a new place with regards to Obama. I now think that there are two things he wants to accomplish in budget negotiations: he wants to raise taxes and cut entitlements. He does not want one more than the other. So this budget isn’t a compromise; it really is what he thinks of as ideal.

Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo was perhaps the most hopeful with an article titled Bad News Friday. He pointed out that at least this makes everything solid. As he put it, “The question is whether this is a sign that Obama’s willing to go negotiate further toward the right, or whether he’s just re-cementing his final offer.” But that would only be true if Obama’s offer actually moved the Republicans.

This morning I wrote, “When the president tries to actually get something for the concession, the Republicans will rebel, ‘But Chained-CPI is already part of the baseline!'” Well, right on cue (in fact, while I was writing that sentence), Beutler wrote another article, Boehner: Not Good Enough. Here is what John Boehner thinks of Obama’s offer:

Obama is committed to being reasonable and if that requires that he give Boehner 100% of what he wants, so be it!

Matt Yglesias put the point delicately, calling it, “a risky strategy.” But he noted very clearly that the Republicans have already rejected the deal Obama is offering both in a general, philosophical sense and in a specific sense. There really is nothing to be discussed:

And then he notes, “Inside the Beltway, Republicans can say ‘well, look, we disagree about taxes but why don’t we just do these entitlement reforms that even the president thinks we should do.'” And within three hours, John Boehner said:

Jonathan Chait said that this whole thing is not news, but that it was bad politics. The truth is, however, that it is news. As Jonathan Bernstein countered, “The budget is usually the president’s opening offer in the budget game.” The president put cuts to Social Security in his budget. This is the first time that a Democrat has ever done this. That’s news!

But as usual, no one agrees with me quite as perfectly as Digby. In trying to answer why the president wants to cut entitlements, she wrote:

Chain-CPI is his preferred policy. That much is clear. Again, John Boehner:

And you have ask yourself, “Why should this ‘reform’ be held hostage for more tax hikes?” Really! It is clear that Obama really does want these benefit cuts. Sure, he also wants tax hikes. But why should Obama and Boehner not move forward on this one bit of policy they most clearly agree on? I’m beginning to think the Republicans are right when they say that Obama is greedy—that he wants to get everything. We’ve been mistaken to think of Chained-CPI as a concession to get what the tax cuts that he wants. He really wants both Chained-CPI and tax cuts. In that case, he should take Boehner’s offer.

I’m not being sarcastic here. This is what Obama wants. The only way to stop him is to pressure the Democrats in Congress. Please: contact your representatives and make it clear you will not accept any cuts to Social Security. You might add that doing so will fatally wound the Democratic Party for the next generation. Of course, that wouldn’t bother Obama. In fact, he would likely see it as a good thing. It would prove what a transformational figure he has been. Only Nixon could go to China. Only Obama could destroy Social Security.

The remarkable map below is from health researcher Bill Gardner via Sarah Kliff at Wonk Blog, This Map of America’s Female Mortality Rates Is Pretty Terrifying. The reason that Kliff refers to the map as “pretty terrifying” is that 43% of US counties are seeing rising levels of female mortality. In the red counties, the life expectancy of women is going down. In the light blue-green counties, it is increasing slowly. And in the blue counties, it is increasing substantially. The map is indeed striking:

But there is an elephant in this map that neither Gardner nor Kliff even mention. For that, we must turn to economist Dean Baker who wrote this morning, “I hate to be partisan here (seriously—I criticize the Obama administration all the time), but this map showing declines (blue) in mortality rates for women and increases (red) looks a lot like voting patterns.” And in fact, the correlation is shockingly clear:

As Baker notes, this isn’t as simple as “the Republicans did it!” For one thing, there are many factors that affect healthcare that are not determined by state policy. But there are still a great many. How Medicaid is run in one such factor. But there are lots of others. Just think about reproductive healthcare. A state can (and increasingly does) make it harder to get birth control and abortions. What’s more, red states simply make it harder to be poor, and poverty is a killer even under the best of circumstances.

It is interesting that Kliff didn’t even mention this correlation, especially when the colors (red and blue) correspond exactly to the traditional (Republican and Democratic) party colors. And I don’t expect many outlets to pick up on this correlation. It will be seen as too partisan, even though it is just a fact—and one that has broad implications. But as Baker notes, “Needless to say, if the color pattern were reversed we would be hearing this as the lead news story for the next century.”