Sorry for being gone all day, but I had to do some paying work and since then, I have been feeling rather ill. In fact, I still do. But I thought I would do a quick birthday post. On this day in 1678, Antonio Vivaldi was born. I have always loved his work. This started when I was rather young and playing the flute. His Concerto in D was one of the first real pieces I ever learned. You don’t hear it played very often because, I think, because it is so easy to play.

Here we have 9-year-old Emma Resmini (she is now 12) playing the first two movements of of the piece. It is a strange version of it: ornamented in what I think of as inappropriate ways, but what do I know? I’m an old man. The performance of it is wonderfully confident. And Resmini has a beautiful tone. It is a bit sloppy in the Cantabile, but I’m not complaining: I never played it nearly as well, much less at 9.

I have no doubt that Resmini will one day become a world class flutist (She may already have!), but she isn’t quite there yet in this performance. For a perfect performance of the Concerto in D, listen to Czech flutist Jiri Valek. Regardless, happy birthday to Vivaldi!

Afterword

When it comes to Baroque, I still prefer daddy Bach. But one thing Vivaldi understood that Bach never did was that the flute is not the same as a violin. In general, flutists cannot play while they breathe. See for example, that great torture piece, Partita for Flute Solo.

You know I have a love-hate relationship with Sam Harris. Well, in the following short video, he makes an excellent argument. While debating innumerate William Lane Craig, he asks the audience to imagine that Islam is true. He is speaking primarily to Christians. If Islam is true, and the Koran is the literal word of God and you don’t believe it, then you are going to hell. What kind of god would do that? What kind of god would make Dr. Craig go to hell, just because he happened to be born in a Christian country?

Harris brings this up to show that pretty much all of Craig’s arguments come down to special pleading. (It is interesting that from Craig’s standpoint, he has won all the debates against Harris, Carrier, and Price; to me, although I don’t think any of them were that great, he was without exception terrible; he lost all the debates.) In fact, Harris even brings up the concept of compassion. This is very interesting knowing Harris. He really has a soft spot for Tibetan Buddhism, which I totally understand. And this, I think gets to the heart of Harris’ argument in a broader context.

There aren’t any strong arguments against something like Tibetan Buddhism. The problem with the Abrahamic religions is that they say: do these things that God told you and get into heaven. In other words, they are dogmatic systems. And thus, they are not spiritual systems. They are the paint-by-numbers approach to religious insight. If there really is only one way to salvation, then God is evil. What’s more: we can’t have been made in his image. Moral thinking like that found in the Bible is anathema to us. If a man had two sons from different women, would we say the man was moral to spoil one of the boys and torture the other? Of course not! Yet that is exactly what the (for example) Christian God does to billions of people who made the mistake of not being born in the right place.

More thoughtful Christians are fond of telling me that they have given up trying to understand God. They just know that he has a plan and that it is all good and all makes sense. But if that’s the case: why all the stupid laws? Why is the basis of the Christian religion the ludicrous idea that all anyone has to do is believe in Jesus and all their sins will be washed away? This is childish nonsense. Remember in Peter Pan when Tinkerbell dies and we all have to say we believe in fairies and this brings her back to life? Does that sound familiar?

If God has a plan for us, surely it must be a little more personal and inscrutable than following a few culturally specific laws and believing in a demigod. The universe is a great contradiction. It allows for all kinds of thinking. But that just isn’t allowed when we limit ourselves to accept cutting edge spiritual thinking from the Iron Age. Why fill in numbered sections on a canvas when we can create our own Renoirs?

Buzz Feed reported Friday that Red State founder and all around fucktard Joshua Trevino was given almost $400,000 to create propaganda for Malaysia and generally slime people in the pro-democracy movement there. In one way, this means very little. As the story makes clear, mostly Trevino just funneled money to other anti-democracy conservatives who naturally shill for the authoritarian Malaysian government. But in the other way, these people should have said something like, “This authoritarian screed was financed by the authoritarian Malaysian government’s propaganda department.”

One part of Trevino’s behavior was totally unacceptable. Back in 2011, he lost his gig at the Guardian over allegations that he was working for the Malaysians. This caused Ben Smith at Politico to ask him directly if the charges were true. Trevino replied, “I was never on any ‘Malaysian entity’s payroll,’ and I resent your assumption that I was.” This is kind of like it being disclosed that a nanny had been previously convicted of child endangerment. The main difference is that such a nanny would never work in the field again. In Trevino’s case, this complete ethical failure will be at most a blip in his career. The worst you could say is that he probably won’t be asked back on Up with Chris Hayes.

Another part of this story that is remarkable is Trevino’s claim that he didn’t know about the Foreign Agents Registration Unit (FARA) and that he had to file with it. Most people seem to be accepting him at his word. The problem is that even I knew about this (although I didn’t know the name of the agency). He said, “I asked a lawyer friend, my counsel. I said, hey, is there anything I need to comply with? He came back and said no.” A “lawyer friend”? What, over drinks, at one o’clock in the morning? He mumbles out, “Ya thin I’d a fila sumtin wit da gobment?” And his “lawyer friend” replied, “No! What?” If Trevino were a liberal, Fox News would be asking why the government isn’t prosecuting him. And they’d be right to ask.

There is a broader issue here. Why is it that conservatives are so much more likely to be caught doing this kind of thing? I think the reason is clear: there is not really an ideological base for modern conservatism. The movement has turned into a kind of cult that worships money and power, and in a very literal way, those people who have money and power. So to someone like Trevino, opinions are just commodities to be exchanged for money and power. As I’ve written about before, there is an amazing amount of affirmative action for conservatives in the media. I think someone like Trevino would turn liberal if he thought he could sell it. Unfortunately, the field is heavy with talent. But apart from that, the conservative agenda that he shills for is more in keeping with his beliefs. A liberal who got caught doing what Trevino has done would take a big hit on this because other liberals would know that it went against everything that liberalism stands for. There is no such problem with conservatism, as I said.

Joshua Travino is now the Vice President of Communications at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. I’m sure his days are numbered there. If he stays more than five years, I’ll be surprised. Let’s face it, with all this great press, I’m sure that Breitbart.com will be eager to get him.

Dean Baker goes after Pew this morning. His problem is with a Pew report that determined how much wealth different age groups had. This has been widely reported and Baker has complained about it before. The problem is not the numbers, which Baker agrees with. The problem is the implication that our seniors are stinking rich at the expense of the young.

The Pew report says that the median wealth of people over 65 is $170,000. This includes all of their wealth: house, car, furniture, savings, stocks, whatever. As Baker points out, this is a little less than the value of the average home in the United States: $180,000. So if these people sold everything they owned, they could reduce their mortgage to $10,000. In that case they would have nothing else, other than their Social Security checks. This doesn’t sound like the definition of wealthy.

There is a ridiculous contrast to this. When discussing raising taxes on the wealthy, we are told that making $250,000 per year is not wealthy. In fact, if we look at the Fiscal Cliff deal, apparently even $400,000 per year is middle class. How is it that reports manage the cognitive dissonance that says that a quarter million a year is middle class while a low mortgage and $1200 per month is wealthy? I think I know: reporters aren’t retired. Most of the people we hear from are in Washington in high profile (and well paid) positions. They know people would make these kinds of salaries and so it doesn’t seem unusual. Most of them do not rub elbows with the 40% of retired Americans who live solely off Social Security. Anyway, as a lump non-taxed sum, $170,000 sounds pretty good; I don’t think it occurs to them that it is all the wealth these people have.

The problem with making a big deal about seniors’ wealth is that it is used as a reason to cut their benefits, as though that will help the young. What the young need is a good economy so they can get good jobs. But cutting government programs for seniors will just hurt the economy and make it harder on young people. The deficit scolds are forever talking about all the debt we will leave to future generations. But the future generations are here now and what they most need is a job.

Yesterday, I was invited by Fix the Debt to write a letter about my fears about the debt. I used the opportunity to tell them that my biggest fear was that groups like them would destroy the economy. I also pointed out that they don’t care about the coming generations. They care about the rich now. The deficit scolds are all about keeping inflation low and the dollar high. These are the policies that the rich want. They what their piles of money to keep their value, and these two things do that. The rest of us want reasonably high inflation so that our debts will go down in value. We also want a weak dollar so that other countries buy things from us and thus we have jobs.

Pew’s report about the “affluent old” is part of this push to destroy the social safety net. It even notes that the total wealth of the young has decreased while the elderly’s has increased. So again: this is pushing things that the rich want in the name of the young. The whole campaign is bad enough. The fact that they use the young as the reason for their concern is disingenuous and repugnant.

I used to work for a subsidiary of a company that I believed to be involved in a Ponzi scheme. I was never sure and even if it was going on, I didn’t necessarily think that they knew it. The truth is that it is really easy for an investment company to work its way into one of these. Shortly after leaving Italy, Charles Ponzi ended up working at the Banco Zarossi in Montreal. The bank got into trouble with some bad investment and the president started paying interest with the money from new deposits. That’s a Ponzi scheme. But I doubt that Zarossi thought of it that way. He probably thought he was just taking temporary measures to protect his bank.

What is really interesting is that Charles Ponzi didn’t originally mean to scam his investors. He had a good idea to scam the US government—in a totally legal way. This was right after World War I. Ponzi noted that anyone could buy international reply coupons (IRC) cheaply in Italy and sell them high in the US. There was a 400% margin in this deal. But there was a problem: the overhead was huge. You could only buy and exchange the IRCs individually. So in the end, there was no profit.

That’s when Charles Ponzi became the man we all know and love. He used the plausible story about great profits to be made with IRCs to get investors. And boy did they come. He was offering people 100% return after 90 days. People were very impressed with this given that banks were offering 5% per year. The rest is history. In his later years, Ponzi claimed that it was all about the con, “Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.” But I question this. I think this is all historical revision. I suspect that at the time he thought he was just a businessman.

And I think the same thing about Bernie Madoff. I suspect he eased himself into the Ponzi pool slowly. And once he found himself in the deep end, all he could do was tread water. I’m sure when he was pontificating on CNBC that he thought what he was doing was right; to admit that he was billions of dollars into a Ponzi scheme would have hurt investors.

The truth is that Ponzi was right: he did provide a great show. Madoff didn’t. But here’s the thing. At first, Ponzi was a darling of the newspapers. But after a fairly short period of time, he was exposed. In a time when news runs very fast, it took the financial press over a decade to take allegations against them seriously. Harry Markopolos claims that he proved Madoff was a fraud with a 5 minute calculation. The big banks and investors on Wall Street all avoided Madoff because they knew he was a fraud. Yet it went on and on. When it comes to financial matters both the government and the press are hopeless.

But it isn’t Madoff’s birthday today. It’s Ponzi’s. Happy birthday you magnificent bastard!

These really are the times that try men’s souls. And I wonder whether the liberal apologists for this administration will continue to think cheery thoughts while basic levels accountability are abandoned. The sunshine patriot will shrink from holding his country accountable; only those who demand transparency, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Bradley Manning has admitted to releasing classified documents. But he is claiming innocence regarding the more serious charges like aiding and abetting the enemy. This all ends badly for a young man who is the very definition of a whistle blower. The problem is that the United States takes all of this stuff very seriously. And sadly, under Obama it has gotten even worse. What is it about people who become president that they go crazy over secrecy? Such behavior should cause them to be disqualified for the job.

Instead, the government manages to focus all of its power on relatively powerless men like Bradley Manning who just want to get the truth out. Reading parts of his 35 page testimony, it is clear that he is a typical whistle blower: a once true believer who was crushed to find out that the shining city on the hill was a mirage. He tried to get his superiors to act on various aspects of the disinformation campaign that the government seems to think is their primary function. When that failed, he tried to get regular news agencies to listen: Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico. And like the corporate lackeys we know these outlets to be, he got nowhere.

And that brought him to WikiLeaks. Where the major media in the United States are primarily concerned about helping the government, WikiLeaks doesn’t care who they embarrass. And that’s mostly what this is all about. The Manning leaks embarrassed the United States government. There were important stories in the documents, of course. They showed many cases of the government denying actual crimes and generally trying to finesse the news. But there are no troop movements here. There is nothing that should have been classified.

Even the charges that Manning has admitted to could keep him in jail for decades. But the government will almost certainly try to prosecute him for the more insane charges. Yochai Benkler wrote today in The New Republic, The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case. His basic argument is that this isn’t about Manning; it is about sending a single to whistle blowers everywhere: we would have prosecuted Death Throat if we could have. He wrote:

This is a case we should all be very interested in. Will Obama supporters continue to claim that everything is fine as long as such a good and noble president is in office? Will they imagine Obama will pardon Manning before leaving office? If they do, then the Obama administration must be passing out some very sweet Kool-Aid, because these people are guzzling the stuff.