I don’t think people appreciate just how much of a Luddite I am. I am a pretty good programmer—c++, php, all that—but I have little idea what things like Twitter are all about. I do, however, know that tweets are occasionally hilarious. Here is a screen shot of one by Bill Maher yesterday that I would re-tweet if I knew what that meant:

I caught this via Crooks & Liars. The video contains a lot of information, mostly documentation that Romney has the standard Republican ideas about education: public schools baaad, private schools goood; teacher’s unions baaad, vouchers goood. These are the same ideas they had 30 years ago. If the media were as balanced as they claim to be, they wouldn’t even pay attention to this conservative non-thinking. But since the media are in fact highly conservative when it comes to so called education reform, they continue to accept the idea that charter schools are going to save us.

The payoff line comes at the 45 second mark. “At one point, I said to him, ‘I have an answer for that.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t ask you a question.'” There are a lot of ways that this is bad: obviously, it is just plain rude. But what I think is most important about it is that Romney doesn’t seem to notice. This is not just an example of the entitled rich guy who is never challenged. This is also the CEO mentality. If you question him, you’d better be a VP of Something Important. A mere teacher should know not to challenge him. He does not need teaching; he is the teacher.

It’s remarkable:

Update (24 September 2012 8:44 pm)

Regarding my response to MadKane, this is too much like Mitt Romney:

I just read The Myth of Choice by Kent Greenfield. Unlike Free Will by Sam Harris, this book looks at the question of choice from a higher vantage—particularly the law. This is no surprise given that Greenfield is a law professor who clerked for Justice David Souter.

Greenfield’s primary argument is that any choice we make is simply the last of a series of innumerable other choices by ourselves and others. Think of it this way. Imagine a line of 40 men face-to-back from the edge of a cliff. If the man furthest from the cliff trips forward, he will push the 39th man toward the cliff. And so on until the second man pushes the first man off the cliff. Is it right to say that the second man is responsible for killing the first man?

You might think that things don’t work that way in real life. But they do. People are often in positions where they seem to have choices but they really don’t. Take for example, this from real life:

Of course, the rack collapsed and the painter was badly hurt. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and fucktard Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. found that the employer wasn’t responsible because the employee had a choice: he could have quit.

This, of course, is a false choice. It goes right along with the cover of The Myth of Choice, which has a goldfish in a bowl with 7 fishing lines. Another good example were the people who jumped out of the Twin Towers rather than be burned alive. We can all empathize with these people and that fish. But apparently Holmes couldn’t empathize with a man who wasn’t rich.

This all has to do with what Greenfield refers to as “intellectual empathy.” This is the ability to understand people’s choices within the context of their life stories. This is very important for explicit judges to have, but we ought all to strive for it. He writes:

I have a great example of this that I try to remember when people annoy me. When I’m driving and I cut someone off, I feel terrible. In most cases, it was because I screwed up. Sometimes it is because I’m in a rush and I’m being an asshole at that moment. But I’m not an asshole in general. My occasional bad behavior does not define me. The fact is, I’m a really nice guy and I always feel bad when I act rudely.

On the other hand, when someone cuts off me, well they are assholes—then and forever! It could not possibly have been a mistake and no emergency is so important as to require such behavior. In fact, I bet they do this all the time just to piss off people.

I try to remember how ridiculous this thinking is. I think it helps me to keep things in perspective. Of course, it has also made me more annoying to my friends. Now when they tell me about some guy who cut them off, I respond, “I’ll bet he did that just to piss you off!” That one always goes down well.

The book is well worth reading. In fact, it is great fun. There are two problems with it. First, I am much more interested in choice as a philosophical question. The Myth of Choice does discuss this at some length, but it isn’t the main focus. Second, the last chapter is a great disappointment. While the rest of the book is smart and funny, the last chapter is a cloying self-help essay on how to make better choices. It probably isn’t that bad in an absolute sense, but compared to the rest of the book, it doesn’t work.

But don’t let these minor complaints stop you from reading The Myth of Choice. It grabs you from the first page. I only picked it up while I was in line at the library and found that I couldn’t put it down. Kent Greenfield has a very interesting mind and time spent with it is well used indeed.

Will sent me this photograph of his computer screen. I think he sent it because of the length of time: 292 days. I find it interesting because of the implied accuracy: 292 days and 0 hours! If it had been 292 days and 1 hours, well, that’s be outrageous.

You’re getting sleepy…

I was talking to Will earlier about the Stanford football team. Many people mistakenly refer to them as the “Cardinals” but they are actually the “Cardinal.” It seems weird to people, but it just means that Stanford is such a badass team that it only takes one of them to fuck you up. Or it could be that they are named after the color, which just so happens to be the school and team color.

First some background. Three of the Ivy League schools are named after colors: Cornell (Big Red), Dartmouth (Big Green), and, most notable, Harvard (Crimson). There is also Brown. Boy, do I crack myself up! I kid the Bears! Anyway, back to Stanford.

Throughout the 1960s, Stanford was the Indians. So in 1970, they decided that maybe it was insensitive for a bunch of rich white kids (plus the football and basketball teams) to have a stereotypical if not fully racist mascot.

What are a bunch of pretentious third basers to do? Being smart, they thought, “What are we?” Unfortunately “Entitled Rich White Kids” didn’t really work. Plus there was the eternal question, “Glasses or no glasses?” So they asked again, “What are we like?” The answer to this was obvious: other entitled rich white kids. And where are other entitled rich white kids? Why in the Ivy League, of course!

Clearly, Stanford wasn’t going to be the “Big” anything. I mean, let’s be real: Cornell? Dartmouth? Please! But Harvard: that had possibilities. But rather than go with a color that at least all girls know, Stanford went with one that was not only obscure, it was confusing!

So when you hear “Cardinal,” think “Clever but Entitled Rich White Kids.” (Not quite so white any more.) Gooo Cardinal!

I Almost Forgot

That wasn’t what I was writing you about. After doing a little research online to make sure what I remembered about Stanford was right (it was), I moved on to other things. So I opened a new webpage and there was a Google Ad staring at me regarding, wait for it… Stanford Continuing Education. The bastards!

But what did I do. I clicked! Because it is always right to click! Read my article: Ad Revenue. It’s important.

Will was at K-Mart tonight and he sent me a couple of pictures of… Chia Obama and Chia Romney.

This is part of the Chia Freedom of Choice™ series. You aren’t limited to Obama and Romney. Oh no! There is a Chia Gingrich and a Chia Ron Paul too. Sadly, no Chia Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, or Rick Santorum. And shockingly, there is no Chia Herman Cain. I mean, honestly, if there was one nationally known politician who you’d like to grow plant hair on, wouldn’t it be Cain? Wouldn’t that just be perfect?!

All four candidates are all still available at the low low price of only $17.99 (or less for Obama). Collect them all!

• Mitt Romney
• Ron Paul
• Newt Gingrich
• Barack Obama

I know if they cost less, Will would have bought me one.

Digby speculates that for Mitt Romney, “Charitable giving to a church that primarily operates highly successful commercial businesses is just another tax dodge.” I think this is true. Romney doesn’t strike me as a particularly spiritual person. He seems incredibly materialistic, and I just don’t believe that one can accumulate great wealth if he is truly interested in the soul.

Mitt Romney does have a religion that he’s passionate about. He is also a Mormon. The religion of his passion is Greed.

I thought about this earlier while reading a new article by Robert Reich, What Mitt Romney Really Represents. He notes that we’ve had rich Presidents before, but that they were explicitly working against their own class interests. Romney’s only clear policy proposal is to lower taxes on himself and others like him. That makes him different from the Roosevelts and the Kennedys.

Evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Romney couldn’t have become the Republican presidential nominee in 1968, for example. Philosophical groundwork had to be laid, not just for the Republican base, but for Mitt Romney himself. And it has been a long time coming.

I always think this whole thing started with Gordon Gekko, but that’s not true. Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser were just picking up on a trend that was already well underway. In fact, Ivan Boesky once gave a famous speech with the line, “Greed is right.” Although everyone remembers the line “Greed is good,” Gekko follows that immediately with “Greed is right”:

What I’ve always found fascinating about this scene and Wall Street generally, is how opinion on the film is bifurcated. Many people think that Gekko is a cool character. He has shaped a couple generations of young, mostly poor but aggressive, men. The men of Romney’s social class never needed Gekko because they that their Ivan Boeskys to look up to.

Many pundits have bemoaned the fact that Romney hasn’t had an opportunity to talk about his Mormonism. I think this goes back to the Gore 2000 campaign where he also was considered stiff. Many people claimed this was because his handlers wouldn’t let him talk about his environmentalism. This may be true, although I think the whole observation is questionable because I didn’t find Gore stiff. The idea is that if Romney were allowed to talk about his Mormonism, he would show what a passionate man he is. What rubbish!

Romney has been allowed to talk about his passion excessively—the whole election cycle! He has only been constrained by the fact that most people find his one true religion—Greed—repugnant. And this, I think, is why he seems so much less “stiff” when talking in private to his donors.

[1] Yes, I know that “good” does not rhyme with “food.” Tell that to the idiot who wrote “God is great”!

Last week on This American Life the episode was called Back to School. It was very good—as always. It discussed non-cognitive skills and how they are perhaps more important to how well a student does in life than cognitive skills. In fact, one expert noted that the modern testing fascination is geared not to what matters most, but to what is easiest to test. We test math because it is easy to test, even though impulse control (which is hard to test) is certainly as important. It is like the old joke of the guy looking under a street light for his lost keys, even though he dropped them half a block away. “The light’s better here.” Everyone sees the ridiculousness of the joke even while they continue to think that testing is a panacea.

Another point brought up is how students from low income families are harmed by the stress in their lives. And they are particularly harmed in terms of non-cognitive skills. It is hard to have good impulse control when you are stressed to the breaking point. A doctor who has studied this used a peculiar example. She mentioned seeing violence on the streets. I’m sure that’s an issue, but I don’t think it is the main one.

You may have read about the drop in life expectancies of the least educated whites over the last two decades. This is not a small drop; it is 4 years; that’s 5% of a life! It isn’t clear what the problem is, so we get a laundry list:

Kathleen Geier has a different take on this. She notes that the Whitehall Studies of British civil servants found that those at lower pay grades had higher mortality rates than those at higher grades. She continues:

The biggest problem that I see in the lives of poor people I know is economic uncertainty. There may be all kinds of stressors beyond it, but they are fleeting. Economic insecurity hangs over every minute of the day and blankets yours dreams at night. And this is not just true of adults; children feel it profoundly, even or perhaps especially because they don’t understand it.

There is a recent conservative meme to the effect of, “We believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.” It sounds great, right? But what it really means is, “We believe in inequality of opportunity, and inequality of outcomes.” The fact is that there cannot be equality of opportunity if the outcomes are too unequal.

Leave aside issues like local funding of school districts where rich kids have good public schools and poor kids have bad public schools.[1] If a child’s home life is bad, his success in school and life will be bad. If we really care about having some amount of equality of opportunity we must work to provide everyone with a living wage and some semblance of security.

[1] So many things go along with this. The Richmond Public Library, for example, is a terrible place. They have two ancient computers and a very old collection. By comparison, the Sonoma Country Library is the bright city on the hill. Of course, it is nothing like the libraries around my sister in Agoura Hills.

I really don’t like Josh Barro. It’s not just his politics. There is something visceral to my disdain. It could be that in some fundamental way, he’s too much like me. I don’t like to think these things. But whenever I dislike someone more than is strictly reasonable, I have to consider everything. I’ve written about Up With Chris Hayes two times recently, and both times I went out of my way to complain about Josh Barro: in August and September.

Regardless of my feelings toward Barro, I fully admit that he’s a smart guy. And he’s very knowledgeable about one thing I find even more confusing than economics: finance. And earlier today, he pointed out something that shocked me in its cynicism. (I mean that as a compliment.)

As you have probably heard, Romney paid more federal income taxes in 2011 than he had to. He did this so that his promise that he’d never paid less than 13% would be true. But that’s not the end of the story as Barro points out:

There are a couple of notable things about this. First: wow! I knew you could amend your taxes because Romney has done it very publicly a few times. But I didn’t see this one coming. This is like watching a great slight of hand artist work.[1] I love it!

The other thing isn’t about Romney; it’s about Josh Barro. Maybe I was too hasty with that compliment. Maybe he’s just clever and not cynical. At least he’s not as cynical as I am. The first thing I thought after reading that was, “Why would he amend the return only if he loses?”

The truth is that I’m sure that Romney’s accountants are every bit as clever as Barro and as cynical as I am. It’s already in the works. On Wednesday, November 7, Romney’s people will file that amendment. Interest on a quarter million dollars adds up quick. There’s no time to waste!

[1] Another master of chicanery, Ricky Jay:

I think that Randy Newman has been lacking artistically the last many years, but he’s released a new song that I really like. It has an obvious connection to Sail Away. This one is called I’m Dreaming. The whole line is, “I’m dreaming of a white President.” And an AIF version of the file is available for free. It’s worth downloading.

The ad for the new season of The Simpsons is really great. A couple of things stand out.

First, there is Homer’s summation of democracy in America, “Oh man, not another election! Why do we have to choose our leaders? Isn’t that what we have the Supreme Court for?”

One of the best things about The Simpsons has always been the signs in the background. My favorite was a sign at the baseball field that read, “Springfield Savings & Loan: 1903-1991;1992-.” Pretty great. Here we have two political signs:

“Obama: Keep Hoping.”

That is literally the Obama campaign’s message, although (as Mitt Romney would say) inelegantly stated. Here is the other:

“Romney: I Have a House in Your State!”