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.

In Search of… God

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God - MichelangeloFor a while I was discussing the nature of God with an old friend who had since become a Christian. This is always a dangerous thing to do. I am very interested in spiritual matters, but I am actively hostile to religious dogma. Nonetheless, I tried to find common ground by introducing the idea of negative theology, something I find compelling and useful.

Negative theology is the belief that we can only say what God is not—never what he is. It is very useful for dispensing with the most primitive—and the most commonly held—ideas that God is some thing. The stereotype is a man with a white beard which Beckett has so much fun with in Waiting for Godot.

My friend dismissed negative theology as something that he had abandoned. He derisively referred to it as “easy.” Contrast this reaction to negative theology with his answer to some of the following most difficult questions regarding Christianity:

  • Why does God allow suffering of the righteous?
  • Why did God not care about those born more than 2000 years ago?
  • Why did God send his son to a backwater where word would travel slowly?
  • Why does God hate the children of Buddhists and other religious followers?

To these kinds of questions, my friend responded, “I long ago gave up trying to figure out God”! So negative theology is easy, but throwing up your hands and proclaiming God’s inscrutability is tough minded? This gets to the heart of my problem with all religions: they don’t start questions about God, they end them.

I think that the teachings of every religion can be useful in a spiritual quest. But once you accept that a particular dogma is right, you stop being a seeker and become an apologist.

I’m not suggesting an à la carte approach to spirituality: a little reincarnation here, a little redemption there. For one thing, I think these ideas are barren. The main thing is that these religions can help in the journey to understanding. But they are not the destination.

So I think that one can self-identify as a Christian.[1] He can use the Bible as a primary source. But the moment he starts reading the Bible like a Gypsy reads tea leaves? The moment he thinks he has found the key to God’s love? The moment he gives up on understanding God? He is lost in a world of fake certainty.

[1] Take for example Anglican priest Don Cupitt (from an interview in Philosophy Bites):

We invented all the theory [of God]. We gradually built up our own picture of the world, and we have also gradually evolved our own religion and our own values. I would say Christian theology was just about right for the historic period between about the first and the seventeenth centuries, during which it flourished. But gradually, as the world has changed in modern times, we have become more aware of our own world-building activity and we have begun to see that we have got to move on. We can’t stick for ever with a late medieval world-view.

Bill Maher and False Equivalence

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Goldie TaylorLast week Bill Maher pitched in to help out with the false equivalency nonsense coming from the mainstream media and the right.

Ever since the last debate, the Romney campaign has been pretending that it is winning in order to convince the chattering class. The Obama campaign is too. The problem is that a lot of idiots in the mainstream media are believing the Romney campaign. Jonathan Chait called this early on, Romney Says He’s Winning—It’s a Bluff.

The column includes a quotation from one of Romney’s closest aides, “We’re going to win… Seriously, 305 electoral votes.” This is a very interesting claim, because it is almost impossible. According to Nate Silver, there is perhaps a 5% chance that Romney would get that many or more electoral votes.

Last week on Real Time with Bill Maher, Goldie Taylor was the only liberal on the panel. She predicted that Obama would win with 330 electoral votes. The conservatives laughed at her—that’s no surprise. But Maher too dismissed her claim, even going so far as to say it was an indication of the “liberal media bubble.” But Maher is completely wrong.

While it is almost impossible for Romney to get as many as 300 electoral votes, the situation is much better for Obama. The three most likely electoral vote counts for Obama are 335, 305, and 345 with 13.5%, 9.0%, and 7.5% likelihoods. So Taylor is very likely wrong that Obama will get that many votes, but she isn’t crazy, stupid, or ignorant. She is making a good guess. There is a greater than 21% chance that Obama will get 330 or more votes.

I expect false equivalence from the mainstream media. I expect it from conservatives. But Bill Maher is supposed to be the thoughtful guy who gets past all the bullshit. And he often is that guy. But last week, he was just helping to smear the bullshit around.

Update (24 October 2012 11:41 pm)

Since this article is getting a little traction, I want to be clear on the numbers: they are all rough. I did my best to read Nate Silver’s graph. The vote totals could be up to 3 votes off either way. So when I reported 335, it could have been anything from 332 to 338. The percentages are good to the nearest half a percentage point. None of these errors take anything away from the argument I’m making. Goldie Taylor was making a very reasonable vote total prediction. Note that she didn’t say anything about the popular vote. That will likely be close. But that doesn’t matter—as we learned in the most painful way in 2000.

Obama’s “Grand Bargain” Idiocy

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Obama NopeMost of my liberal friends get mad about how much I complain about Obama. I understand this. Obama is a damn good President by historical standards (which doesn’t say much) and he is infinitely better than what the Republicans have on offer. Yet I can’t shake the idea that Obama doesn’t much believe in liberal principals. What’s more: I think he doesn’t really care about me and everyone else who doesn’t have $8 million in assets.

Digby has written about a recent interview of Obama by the Des Moines Register. In it, Obama is again talking glowingly about a “grand bargain” where the Democrats give up $2.50 in spending for every $1.00 that the Republicans allow in raised taxes. There are so many things wrong about this, I want to scream. Now I’m think that I would not vote for Obama even if I lived in a swing state.

There are two fundamental problems with this “grand bargain”: the bargain itself and future legislation. On its merits, this is a terrible deal. The people in the upper class (the top 20%) get 54% of all the income in the United States. (The top 1% get 21%!) So this “bargain” makes the rich pay for 29% while the poor and middle class pay 71%. What a fair bargain! Way to go, Mr. President!

The other problem—which is arguably even worse—is that it will be pretty easy for Congress to cut taxes at a later time. They’ve done this a lot and there is no reason to believe that they will not continue. But the lost Social Security benefits? The lost Medicare benefits? These will be gone for good. So even if this “grand bargain” were equitable now—at it’s not—it would be inequitable soon enough and forever more.

Fortunately, Matthew Yglesias points out something important: liberals are not going to continue to take this shit. The President and his allies think that all they have to do is make a deal with the Republicans and the Democrats will fall in line. However, the political calculus has changed:

But the closer we get to the actual fiscal cliff the less sense it makes as a genuine bargain for people who think Social Security and Medicare cuts are bad on the merits. That’s why you see things like AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka loudly hopping off the grand bargain bandwagon. It’s not clear to me how much this substantively matters. The left-wing of the Democratic caucus rarely gets its way on anything. But the political system has an enormous inaction bias built into it, and objectively speaking the incentive for liberal wing of the Democrats to sign on to a grand bargain is vanishing fast.

Indeed. Liberals have to ask themselves, “Do I really want to gut two of the greatest accomplishments of modern liberalism just for the sake of Obama’s legacy?” Because that’s what it comes down to. Debt is not killing us. Someday we will have to get it in line. But not today. Not in the middle of a depression. Not on the back of our social safety net. No way, Mr. President!

Update 24 October 2012 (1:28 pm)

The Des Moines Register article filled a whole segment on Martin Bashir. Were they talking about this issue? Of course not! No Serious Journalist cares about these matters. Why would they? They’re in the upper class.

Third Party Debate

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ObamaFree & Equal put on the 3rd Party Presidential Debate, which was broadcast by NBC. Just kidding. It was Al Jazeera English, of course. When you need real news, you really need to go outside the country.

There were four candidates debating: Jill Stein (Green Party), Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party), Virgil Goode (Constitution Party), and Rocky Anderson (Justice Party). Two of them were good, reasonable candidates. And two were total fucktards.

There is not that much that separates Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson on the issues. Anderson seems a bit more restrained than Stein. This goes with his actual experience as Major of Salt Lake City. But there is something really compelling about Stein; she seems on the edge of cracking—such is how palpable her passion is. I would gladly vote for either of these candidates.

It wouldn’t be a debate if there wasn’t a fucktard or two. Virgil Goode is your typical conservative 3rd party candidate: running because the Republicans just aren’t bellicose and racist enough. Gary Johnson is a typical libertarian freak. It is the same old thing: big government baaad, big corporations goood!

When asked what constitutional amendment they would most like to see, both Goode and Johnson said term limits. I could hardly believe that! Term limits!? Jill Stein hit back on this idiocy in a big way. She noted that limiting terms wouldn’t keep corporations from simply controlling a long string of politicians. The fact that this came as a surprise to Goode and Johnson shows that these guys (and people on the right generally) are just not that serious.

Then came the closing arguments. Virgil Goode made a little sense by back tracking on his term limit claim. Gary Johnson noted that he was an entrepreneur; get that man a government to run! He had a fiery summation: “Vote for me, I’m pre-corporate owned!” Jill Stein is a weak speaker, but she was passionate about all the right things. I really like her. Rocky Anderson looks uncannily like Tom Poston. He was really great—the best politician on the stage.

As I’ve noted before, I won’t vote for Obama because I told him I wouldn’t and I don’t live in a swing state. However, you’d have to be crazy not to vote for Obama if you lived anywhere that was contested. I certainly would vote for the President if my vote counted. But as it is, I would gladly vote for either Rocky Anderson or Jill Stein. Unfortunately, Anderson isn’t running in my state. So I’ll be pleased to vote for Jill Stein.

Would You Jump Off a Cliff?

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Why I Left Goldman SachsYou may remember back many months ago, Greg Smith wrote a high profile OpEd in the New York Times as he stepped down as a VP at Goldman Sachs. This last weekend, he was on 60 Minutes in a plug for this new book, Why I Left Goldman Sachs. Matt Yglesias, for one, doesn’t really care about all that. “But the ferocious anti-Smith push from Goldman Sachs PR and Smith’s critics in the media have me interested again!” he writes.

I’m glad to hear this, because I think what Smith has to say is important. And I especially thought that while I watched the 60 Minutes interview. The way it was cut together tended to minimize his arguments. The segment contradicted him by using Frank Partnoy, a former derivatives trader turned (God help us!) finance professor. His refrain was, “Who cares? Everybody does it!”

What everyone does is screw over their clients. Companies like Goldman Sachs are supposed to help their clients make money. Instead, they just use them to enrich themselves. And the more green the client, the better Goldman Sachs likes it.

This is basic stuff. It is like when you were a kid. Everyone’s heard it from their moms, “If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?” Well, would you?! This is something we are supposed to learn at 5 or 6. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it right. But maybe we’re all supposed to know that people on Wall Street don’t have the ethics of a kindergartner.

Matt Yglesias explains this in the most forceful terms:

Norms matter. People work for money. But people also work for status, and people work because they take pride in a job well done. Ideas about what kinds of financial success merit high status and what kinds of jobs constitute a job well done are important. A doctor who bragged to you at a party about scoring a great deal on season tickets is doing something very different from a doctor who brags to you at a party about scoring season tickets after swindling a woman out of a bunch of money for unnecessary medical treatments. A doctor isn’t supposed to be hustling patients. Everybody knows that. The vast majority of journalists are working for for-profit enterprises that are publishing stuff in hopes of making money, but it’s much better to live in a world where the editorial personnel don’t understand themselves as merely engaged in a transactional quest for money rather than a genuine effort to entertain and inform the public. The idea that there’s a difference between making money by being clever and inventing something useful to sell to people and making money by being clever and inventing a way to persuade people to buy something useless is fundamental.

Amen brother!

Update (23 October 4:47 pm)

Hamilton Nolan has an excellent article at Gawker, In Defense of Being Outraged by Things that Everyone Already Knows:

The backlash, of course, is already well under way. The NYT‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin said he thought Smith “might have conned” the media into paying attention to him, because his book “doesn’t say anything particularly revelatory.” Nathan Vardi at Forbes dismisses Smith’s complaints, saying that clients distrusting their own banks is “precisely what should be happening in financial markets.” The NY Daily News complains that Smith’s book “failed to make his readers care” about the issues he raises. As Bloomberg View put it in its original snide dismissal of Smith’s op-ed, “If you want to dedicate your life to serving humanity, do not go to work for Goldman Sachs.”

…

I would simply like to assert that, no matter whether or not you believe Greg Smith is a hero or an opportunist, he did what we would all hope that our own banker would do: he spoke out publicly about something that was wrong. The fact that his charges are old news to the Wall Street people, the bankers, the financially savvy, and the media figures that cover them is not an indictment of Greg Smith. It is an indictment of everyone who accepted rapacious amorality as the natural order of things. It is not important whether or not Greg Smith is a hero. What is important is the principle that people in positions of power should not grow so inured to corruption or unfairness or the rotten nature of their particular institution that they accept that state of affairs without question. To understand how something works does not mean that we must lackadaisically assume that it should work that way. And we should never become so cynical that we create an environment in which whistleblowers receive more criticism than the institutions they blow the whistle on.

Everybody knows Wall Street rips off unsophisticated clients as a matter of course. One guy complained about it. That’s the problem.

Yes on 30

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Small Business Action Committee FucktardsProposition 30 in California would levy a temporary quarter percentage point increase in the sales tax and a 1 to 3 percentage point increase in the top marginal tax rates (on money made above $250,000 per year). Initially, I was concerned about this proposition, because of the sales tax increase. These taxes are highly regressive and I didn’t want to see those who have suffered the most during this depression be further taxed while those who are doing better than ever are barely touched.

After doing a “back of the envelope” calculation, I am convinced that Proposition 30 is a good idea. Even taking into account the huge and unjust income equality in the state, this is a progressive tax. The amount of money brought in by the sales tax is very small—it was most likely added to argue against claims that the proposition is some kind of class warfare.

Yesterday, I received a mailer from the “Small Business Action Committee.” Calitics has the dirt on this group. It’s leadership team is made up of one guy: Joel Fox. He is the former head of the nutjob group Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the group that brought us Proposition 13 that is a large part of California’s perpetual budget problems.

Other than this, SBAC is just a generic conservative front group formed to take money from wealthy fucktards and use it to subvert the cause of democracy. According to the site, one of its big donors is Charles Munger Jr, who’s given almost $20 million dollars to the group.

Their arguments are exactly the same as the ones in the voter’s manual: this money won’t go to education and even if it did, the government is too damned big! Last night I spoke to a supporter of Proposition 30. I asked why he was against it. He didn’t seem to care at all about giving any lip service to education. It was just that the government was wasting all the money it gets. So I pressed on. What is it the government is spending money on that is wasteful? I got no answer. So I suggested a few things. Roads? Are we spending too much on upkeep of roads? Are firefighters too well paid? Again there was no answer. But this is not a surprise. People like this never have an answer because there is no answer. In general, the government does a good job at what it is assigned.

(This is the same person who bristles every time I suggest we increase the number of elected representatives in order to have a more representative democracy. But no. We can’t have that! That would cost money! How much? Basically nothing. About as much as we spend on NPR. But that doesn’t matter. Waste! Socialism! My hard earned Social Security check!)

The argument against Proposition 30 in the voter’s manual is written by Jon Coupal—the current head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer’ Association. Now he has an idea about government waste. And that idea is (Of course!) public employee pensions. But that isn’t actual waste. That is what people in the legal profession call a “contract.” It is the same thing that conservatives like Coupal used to justify all the bank bailout money being used for executive bonuses. “Those were contractually obligated!” the conservative chorus shouted. But when it comes to teachers and other public sector workers, contracts don’t matter. Contracts are not for the little people, silly!

Afterword

Proposition 30 is not the main issue of the Small Business Action Committee. Their focus is on Proposition 32. This is the proposition that would basically stop all paid political speech except for that by dark money groups. It is a vile proposal. The fact that the SBAC is pushing it is about all you need to know.

The polls indicate that both Propositions 30 and 32 are really close. And there are a lot of undecided voters, so each could go either way. It is important to vote Yes on 30 and No on 32. Also: No on 38, because it conflicts with 30 and is a regressive tax.

See you at the polls!

American Influence is Way Up

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Last night at the debate, Mitt Romney claimed, “Nowhere in the world is America’s influence greater today than it was four years ago.” That sounds like a typical vague statement that a politician might make because they know it can’t be countered. It’s a matter of opinion, right? Well, maybe in a world without policy nerd and Jon Cryer look alike Ezra Klein!

Last night over on MSNBC, Klein was doing what he does best: wonking off in public. Rachel Maddow asked him if Romney’s claim was checkable and for which there ware empirical data. Klein responded, “We not only have empirical data, we have a graph on it. This comes from a Pew Poll that was done in 16 different countries around the world. And it looked at a range of questions about American influence.”

Here is the graph:

<%image(20121023-foreinapproval.jpg|421|277|Approval of U.S. in 16 ForeignCountries)%>

I’m not suggesting that many Americans care about how we are viewed outside the country and how willing other countries are to work with us. But this is striking. This is why Obama was given the Nobel Prize. And it is a very good thing.

Mitt, Cheney, and the Auto Rescue

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Dick CheneyJonathan Cohn of The New Republic has a very evenhanded column about Romney’s position on the GM rescue, What Romney Wants You (and Ohio) to Forget About the GM Rescue. The title makes the article sound a lot more critical than it is. Let me briefly lay out Cohn’s argument.

Romney’s New York Times OpEd was far more nuanced than its title “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” would indicate. He was not calling for the liquidation of GM and Chrysler. What’s more, it isn’t clear whether he was for or against Obama’s decision to rescue the auto makers. During this period, Romney indicated elsewhere that he did support it.

And then came the primary season, and Romney—Quelle surprise!—changed his position. This is from a CNBC debate:

My view with regards to the bailout was that whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go. I said from the very beginning they should go through a managed bankruptcy process, a private bankruptcy process. We have capital markets and bankruptcy… My plan, we would have had a private sector bailout with the private sector restructuring and bankruptcy with the private sector guiding the direction as opposed to what we had with government playing its heavy hand.

And then he changed his position back during the Michigan primary. And now we hear from him all the time, “Of course I supported the auto bailout!” It’s easy to be on the right side of history when you simply change your opinion to whatever history says.

This is not an isolated incident, of course. Consider Obama’s position on Osama bin Laden. When Obama said that he would go into Pakistan to get him, everyone attacked him. This included Mitt Romney. But after Obama did exactly what he said he would, Mitt Romney was totally on board. “Even Jimmy Carter would have made that call.”

I don’t mind inconsistency; I’m one of its greatest practitioners. But there is a real problem with Mitt Romney’s inconsistencies. It doesn’t come from the shifting tides of his moods and facts. Instead, it comes from his decision about whatever is expedient. But even this I wouldn’t mind if he hadn’t surrounded himself with all Bush’s people on foreign and domestic affairs. There is no doubt that if Romney is elected President, there will be a group of neocons and “free” marketeers who will play him like a fiddle. And we don’t need another Cheney administration.

Update (23 October 2012 9:55 pm)

Here is a more negative take on the Romney claim by the exceptional Martin Bashir:

David, the Gnome

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David the GnomeIt’s another cartoon morning! In response to my Kimba the White Lion article, Mack asked if I had heard of a show called David, the Gnome. I had not, so I looked it up. It turns out to be a series from the mid-1980s produced in Spain, based upon a Dutch children’s book, The Secret Book of Gnomes.

The episode embedded below is from Episode 6: “The Wedding.” There are a few things that stand out. The colors are vibrant, and I really like that because I still work with a 5-year-old’s visual palette. And to be honest, I like that the animation is not Japanese; it’s nice to see more traditional work. Here it is with Christopher Plummer as the narrator and Tom Bosley as David:

What most strikes me about this and Kimba is the in and out group politics. For kids’ shows, I don’t especially care about this. It is an important aspect of learning to be a civilized person. But I do care that we don’t ever move past this. The most popular films are simple good vs. evil allegories. What’s more, pretty much all TV shows are morality plays. But this doesn’t have anything to do with my life. My life is all about moral ambiguity.

Kids’ shows are fine—for kids. As adults, we can do better. And David, the Gnome would tell us that.

Kimba the White Lion

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Real Life KimbaMy friend Will was (and maybe still is) a big fan of Kimba the White Lion. It was a kids’ show when we were, well, kids. (Funny that!) I was reminded of it yesterday when Dependable Renegade published the photo on the left. (It was originally from BuzzFeed.)

I was never that big a fan of the show. I liked it well enough, but I was more of a Speed Racer fan. It had a chimpanzee!

The picture prompted me to go looking for episodes of the show online. There aren’t that many, but I found the following entire episode. It is the one where Kimba starts having “urges”—if you know what I mean:

What is remarkable about this cartoon is how revolutionary it is. It presents humans in a very bad light. All they do is run around and screw everything up. Kind of like in real life. In this episode, a German filmmaker sets the forest on fire so he can get a great helicopter shot of the animals running away. Then he captures Kimba’s girlfriend (Kimba’s got a girlfriend!) and tries to put her in the middle of a fire for the climax of the film.

Kimba the White Lion is a refreshing change of pace from most cartoons today. I don’t think a producer today could get away with making a show that was so explicitly environmental—especially with no “good” humans. Of course, maybe the point isn’t environmentalism. It also works as anti-imperialist. Either way: it’s un-American!