I don’t hate Chris Christie because he’s fat. I actually feel sorry for people who are fat. To a large extent, I don’t think they have too much choice. Although I will admit, Christie allowing his weight to get as out of control as it did doesn’t speak especially well of him. But I have the same kinds of tendencies for letting my own life get out of hand. So I understand. But someone like Christie who has such public evidence of his imperfection would cause most people to have a bit of humility. But of course it doesn’t have that effect on Christie.

That’s what gets to the core of why I hate Chris Christie. He’s a jerk. He’s a bully. He’s a guy with lots of power and he abuses it. In my perfect world, we would put people like Chris Christie in jail. All the drug addicts could go on their merries and they could be replaced by people like Chris Christie and Dick Cheney. Well, Cheney should die soon enough—in fact, he should have died a long time ago. Who knows how many people died for lack of healthcare while Cheney has gotten all his extra healthcare that no one deserves—much less a man so directly responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people. But enough about Dick Cheney.

It looks like we may get to see Chris Christie in jail after all. Scott Raab and Lisa Brennan reported today, Exclusive: Prosecutor Is Closing in on Gov Christie. It’s a fun article. It starts by quoting Christie in Utah last Saturday saying, “It’s over, it’s done, and I’m moving on.” That’s good PR, I guess. But with the new information, it sound a bit more like, “You ain’t never gonna get me, copper!”

US Attorney Paul Fishman has been quietly building a number of cases that circle around Christie. Much of it is not especially illegal, just sort of the typical stuff that we know that goes on when a bully is put in charge of anything. And at this point, nothing makes it quite to Christie. But the big news is that Fishman seems to have David Samson. You may remember him as the walking and talking conflict of interest who Christie trusted because he talked to him and Christie just has the power to know when people are telling the truth. Except when he doesn’t. According to one of the authors’ sources, “They’ve got him cold. He got sloppy, arrogant, and greedy.”

It all sounds like typical case building. From David Wildstein and Bridget Kelly, they’ve got Samson. Will Samson rollover on Christie. Well, he’s 74 years old and reported suffers from Parkinson’s disease. If he doesn’t rollover on Christie, he’s going to die in jail. So it’s looking pretty good that we will see Christie in jail. It’s an experience he richly deserves.

I have nothing against Chelsea Clinton. In fact, when she was growing up, I felt a bit sorry for her. The modern right-wing media echo chamber had only just come of age and its hatred of the Clintons went all the way down to the young girl. As I remember it, Rush Limbaugh seemed to take some relish in pontificating about her looks. That’s nothing especially surprising from that well known misogynist, but Clinton was only a young teen at the time—and one who her parents seemed to take care to keep out of the spotlight. So I’m inclined to like her.

But I was less than thrilled when she was hired by NBC News two and a half years ago. It was an especially ironic choice given that her mother had written a syndicated column when the younger Clinton went off to Stanford University (Of course!) asking that journalists leave her alone. But instead of using her history degree to do something useful like write books or teach people or even do original research, she decided to be on air “talent” for Brian Williams’ pathetic Rock Center where she did “serious” reporting like this interview with the Geico gecko:

Now friends, don’t get me wrong. I like fun. But this is a pathetic excuse for what someone who had literally every advantage in life has decided to do with her life. And now, according to Politico, we learn that for the first two years of her time interviewing animated corporate spokes-characters, she was paid $600,000 per year. They recently changed it to a month-to-month contract so I’m gonna guess $50,000 per month. Or is that too low? After all, she doesn’t have the job security that she had before.

Ain’t it great to live in a meritocracy?! Remember when she graduated from Stanford with honors and how that was a big story? Is it genetics? She has two smart parents after all! Or could it have something to do with the fact that she had every advantage growing up; she had the best teachers; and in college, she didn’t have to work one or two jobs?

Of course, NBC News doesn’t come out of this looking rosy either. Remember when they hired Jenna Bush for the Today show? But it is sad that America has an aristocracy that runs around telling us that we don’t have an aristocracy. You can do anything you set your mind to—if your father was President of the United States. And what do you set your mind to? Interview an animated gecko.

Chelsea Clinton by Gage Skidmore under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Speaking of football, Jonathan Bernstein has long been making the argument that the Washington Redskins should change their name simply based on the issue of etiquette. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a whole lot of other issues, but you don’t even need to go there. The Native American community finds the name offensive. It’s as simple as that. So change the name.

Well, today I made the mistake of reading the comments of his most recent iteration of this argument, About That Washington Football Team. Well, apparently he has a troll that has nothing better to do than spout his ignorant opinions hour after hour. He goes by “Elesis” (a female name, but I don’t buy it) and I wouldn’t have even noticed him except that he kept making the same argument again and again and again.

And what an argument it is! Basically, “Sure ‘redskins’ can be a pejorative, but it isn’t a pejorative when the Washington football team uses it!” This is kind of like someone calling you “stupid.” When you complain, they say, “Hey, I know ‘stupid’ is generally a bad thing, but I don’t mean it that way when I refer to you that way!” In fact, here is an actual quote:

This made me think of a line from the film Pulp Fiction. What if Daniel Snyder decided that he wanted to name his team the “Washington Hard Pipe-Hittin’ Niggers”? I mean, in the movie, Marsellus doesn’t say that as a pejorative. He means he’s gonna bring in some hardcore guys who are going to “go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.” I can hardly think of a better name for a football team that is going to open up a can of whoopass every time they hit the field!

By Elesis’ logic, that would be a perfectly fine name for a football team, “Rather than denegrating [!] African Americans, the Hard Pipe-Hittin’ N…..s (or just the N…..s for short) are in fact honoring them.” Why would African Americans have any reason to complain?

The only reason that occurs to me is that it is a totally racist name regardless of what Snyder and Elesis claim. And that’s be just as true of the Redskins as the Pipe-Hitters. So I think we can get rid of the whole idea that “Redskins” is an honorific moniker. I’m still with Bernstein: it’s just a question of etiquette. But obviously, for people like Snyder and Elesis, etiquette doesn’t matter. I think I’ve dispensed with the pejorative and racist arguments. I wonder what they’ll come up with next?!

I noticed something interesting in Dean Baker’s vicious but fair review, Stress Test: The Indictment of Timothy Geithner. It is a long and detailed review going point by point over how Geithner is nothing more than a hired gun for the banks who didn’t didn’t give two bits for actual homeowners or the real economy except in the sense that they might hurt his banker friends. Go read his article, or my discussion, Tim Geithner: Grifter of the Power Elite. But here I am interested in one very small thing.

I’m used to politicians cherry picking whatever data is useful to them. But Geithner is supposed to be an economist—sort of a scientist. I understand that in his book, he would want to present himself in the best possible light. But to be actively deceptive? That goes way beyond what is acceptable. He really is an evil little man.

Geithner provided a graph of housing prices up to 2010 and claimed that it was his policies that caused the rapid drop in prices to stop in 2009 and then start rising. But this was actually a bad thing. The reason the prices of houses stopped falling was because the administration provided an $8,000 new home buyer’s credit. I have friends who used this to be able to buy their first home, and that’s great. But what the policy did on the macro-scale is to create another mini-housing bubble. The truth is that home prices had not yet reached their correct prices.

But you would never know that because Geithner decided to end his graph at 2010. He left out the part of the graph that I’ve shaded in grey when prices when down by about 6.5%. And this is just the overall price of houses. As Bake pointed out, Minneapolis saw a fall of almost 29% and Atlanta saw a fall of almost 52%. So a lot of homeowners got really screwed and Geithner is being extremely deceptive about it:

Now to be fair, after 2012, house prices did finally start to increase. But that doesn’t change the fact that many people paid more for their houses than they should have. And it doesn’t change the fact that Geithner is a liar who will say anything and present data in a totally dishonest way just to make himself look good. But lest we forget: Geithner is part of the power elite. Incompetence and outright villainy are rewarded in the power elite because the power elite are always rewarded no matter what they do. See, for example, Paul Wolfowitz.

Where this photo comes from is a bit of a complicated story, and if you want the details, you can go to my sources, David Atkins’ article, Two of the Most Heartbreaking Photos You Will See All Year. The picture of two of the fathers of boys involved in the Isla Vista killings—one of the perpetrator and the other of one of his victims. Both boys are dead now, of course. They met on 1 June and the photos were just released. They are already working together to end gun violence. And the photos are heartbreaking.

Atkins wrote, “Any politician who looks into the eyes of these two men and does nothing to curb the proliferation of guns in America deserves universal scorn and public shaming.” Of course, we all know that. Sadly, we also all know that they will not get universal scorn and public shaming. In fact, it will work the other way around. Any politician (Republicans most especially) who even suggests that the smallest thing be done about gun violence will be publicly shamed. And as usual, the NRA will get their folks out to vote while the vast majority of people who want sensible gun restrictions will sit at home and watch as any politicians who does anything is thrown out of office.

This isn’t just an issue of the NRA being a lobbying group for gun manufacturers. It is also the case that there is a sizable group of people who are not only single issue voters, they are single letter voters. The NRA rates the candidate and the members vote for whoever happens to have a higher rating, even if the politician would get an F on every other issue that the NRA member cares about.

There were seven people killed at Isla Vista. There were 27 at Sandy Hook. And not only was nothing done after that shooting, there are a whole bunch of people who claim the shooting never took place. Really, enter “Sandy Hook” into Google, and it will offer you, “Sandy Hook conspiracy.” Enter “Sandy Hook shooting,” and it will offer you “Sandy Hook shooting fake.” The same thing doesn’t happen when you enter “Isla Vista shooting.” But give it time.

As I’ve argued for a long time, this isn’t about gun rights. After all, there isn’t a mass movement calling for the right to own flame throwers, bazookas, and nuclear bombs. This is a mass movement developed by the gun manufacturers’ lobby. This is all about profits. And it isn’t just guns. It’s everything. The rallying cry of the conservative movement ought to be, “Profits Before People!” Because that is what they think. Just to take a single example at random: over the last four decades, almost 2,000 coal miners died each year of black lung. Yet all we hear about is how coal companies might lose profits if we modernize our power plants.

I ask you: what are 30,000 gun deaths per year in this country compared to the $30 billion gun industry? That’s only a million dollars per person. Is a human life really worth a million dollars? To the people who make that money, the answer is clear enough: no.

Dean Baker is back with another one of those great snarky headlines, Is Uncertainty Delaying Hiring or Is This Just Another Make Work Project for People Who Write About the Economy? This is the ultimate zombie idea: it has been killed countless times but just keeps shambling on. Apparently, it is back.

Over at the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell has noticed that there are more job postings but still companies are not increasing their hiring. She thinks this must mean that the companies know they need more workers, but they just can’t bring themselves to hire because of “uncertainty.” Who knows? Tomorrow, Obama may nationalize every business in America. Then where would they be? Seriously though, no one is ever clear as to what these companies are more uncertain about now than they ever are.

Dean Baker, of course, is addicted to simple math and he showed that even now, employee turnover is high enough that even if an employer were wrong to hire an employee, within a few months another employee would quit or be fired and so the new hire would be needed. Every six months, almost 20% of all employees leaves a job for one reason or another. What’s more, if this “uncertainty” claim were true, it would be apparent because companies would be working their existing employees more hours. And they aren’t.

So why are there more job listings even though there really are no more jobs? Bake explained:

In other words, the labor market is slack, so employers know that they can always get acceptable workers on a moments notice. This would not be true in a tight labor market. So they list jobs, hoping that they can find a really great employee at a really great price. Meanwhile, the fact remains: there is low demand in the economy. Businesses are not hiring because businesses do not need to be hiring. None of this is difficult to understand, but I’m not in favor of firing economics writers. A make work program is a very good thing right now. We could use a lot more of them in other fields that actually matter.

Sarah Kliff over at Vox wrote an excellent article, Five Ways the American Health Care System Is Literally the Worst. It is based upon a new Commonwealth Fund report that is based upon three different report looking at the healthcare system from the perspectives of sick people, healthy people, and doctors. It compares only the rich countries, and the United States comes out at the bottom of the pack. So what? The United States always comes out at the bottom of the pack. I agree: this is not news.

What is news is that this is a rather new and more thorough way of looking at the question. And the rankings of the other countries are quite different from what other studies have found. So it is of some note that it doesn’t really matter how you look at healthcare systems, the United States always does the worst and it is never close. It is also interesting that the conservatives who want to defend the United States will always point to some kind of anecdotal evidence that even if true only shows that if you can afford it, you can get the best healthcare in the United States. This, by the way, gives the wrong idea. It is also true that if you can afford it, you can get the best healthcare in just about any advanced country.

What I want to focus on is cost. Here is a table of the eleven countries studied, their overall ranks, and the per capita healthcare costs:

Impressive how the great “free market” system we have works! But it’s not just that. Of the top four most expensive systems, three are multi-payer systems. The only multi-payer system on the list that has a low cost is France, and it is rated pretty poorly.

Of course, it isn’t just the fact that we have a multi-payer system that causes our healthcare to cost so much. As Dean Baker likes to point out, there are enormous protectionist tendencies in the US system. For example, we limit the number of doctors who can practice here and as a result, doctors make a whole lot more money in the United States for doing the same work doctors do elsewhere. And the drug patent system makes medications far more expensive than they need to be.

The point is that conservatives may claim that they are out there trying to protect capitalism and the free market. But what they are really protecting is just the status quo. They are protecting a healthcare system that is just a legacy of wage controls during World War II. But most of all, they are protecting the unreasonably high wages of doctors and the ridiculous profits of drug companies. And a little appreciated thing they are protecting is the health insurance industry, even though it isn’t that profitable. It adds a lot to the cost of healthcare, but it doesn’t make much money.

The great irony of this list is that the top rated country, the United Kingdom, has actual socialized medicine. The doctors work for the government; the hospitals are owned by the government. And as a result, they seem to provide great care at 40% of the cost of our system. And here’s an even greater irony: people in the United Kingdom report the lowest amount of dealing with paperwork. And the countries with the most “free market” approaches are the ones where people complain the most about paperwork. This is something that conservatives (Libertarians especially!) can’t seem to understand: bureaucracy is bureaucracy. Whether you are fighting with your insurance company or you are fighting with the government health services. Except it seems that there is much less fighting with the government health services.

The three reports that the data were taken from were from 2011, 2012, and 2013. With the full implementation of Obamacare, things will improve modestly. But I suspect we will still rate at the bottom of the pack. And we will continue to pay a lot more for our inferior care than people do in other countries. The only thing special we get in this country is a bunch of fools who go around saying, “America has the best healthcare system in the world!”

Some time ago, a friend of mine asked me if I thought I was a genius. She was interested because her husband, who is in many ways like me, was going through a tough time and she was trying to get a better understanding of him. I’m not sure of the specifics, but it is definitely my experience that people who are mathematically oriented do tend to have fairly specific kinds of problems. I think reading between the lines, you can kind of see that in my article, Numbers, Narratives, and God. A lot of us are both introverted and intuitive and this can leave us cut off from reality in a profound way. As long as everything is going fine “out there,” we manage just fine. But when our environments change, we don’t respond as well as some others do. I think this is because those changes “out there” aren’t real to us. As a result, we can really lose our bearings—we aren’t good at managing that reality. That’s what I assume she was looking for from me, but I really don’t know. I think her husband is a whole lot more together than I am, but it’s very possible that he has to deal with the same kinds of things.

But what struck me in the exchange was that she said she didn’t consider herself a genius. That shocked me. She is one of the smartest people I know—and I don’t exactly hang out with an intellectually diverse group of people—it is skewed toward what are traditionally called “smart” people. I wondered if it could be that she had one of these ridiculously limited definitions of intelligence. Or worse: she been given an IQ test somewhere along the line. I can’t think of a worse thing to do to a child than to label them as dumb or smart. There are so many things wrong with IQ tests anyway. I discussed this a little bit in, What’s Wrong With Jason Richwine? But it is worse than that.

I always feel weird talking about intelligence. If you look at standard IQ tests, they consist of two parts: general knowledge and moving blocks around. Is that what intelligence is? Being good at Jeopardy! and chess (pattern recognition)? Because if that is what it is, why do we test for it? Computers can now beat the best Jeopardy! and chess players. So who cares? Add to that, this amazing factoid I learned: Richard Feynman had a IQ score of 125. In high school, I tested far higher than that and there is no way I’m as smart as he was, much less smarter. Based upon having read his autobiography, I think I understand why he got that score, though. When I was in college, my “brilliance” often allowed me to do well at courses without really mastering the fundamentals. (Interestingly, I think I was exactly the opposite in my literature classes.) What made Feynman a genius was the clarity and depth of his thought; IQ tests measure what information people have picked up (naturally underestimating introverts and those with dyslexia) and “quick” thinking. (I’m sure intelligence tests have gotten better over time, but they clearly still have the same fundamental problem of testing only what they test, and then placing more value on them than they deserve.)

What I think we ought to be more interested in is cognitive creativity. Are you able to think creatively? But even that strikes me as an awfully limited way to arrange people. An intellectually slow person who has become an expert on kitchenware of the 1950s has far more to offer my life than someone who can do arithmetic quickly in his head. And look at artists. There are a lot of them who are really not very creative. I don’t think van Gogh was very creative. He had a singular vision and it was magnificent and it is important to have people like that. I think the same thing of Paul Klee who I admire a great deal more. I don’t think Hemingway was very creative, but the world is much better because of him. (I loved him when I was young, but I’ve cooled a lot the last decade). I think Steinbeck was creative, but if he had only written variations on Sweet Thursday or The Grapes of Wrath, I would still love him. And it’s not just art. I’d say the same thing about theology or science. Or math, of course! (My sister Kim just sent me My Brain is Open about one of the most creative mathematicians ever, Paul Erdos. He isn’t so well know exactly because he was so creative. I’ve been wanting to read this book since it came out and kudos to Kim for knowing me so well.)

The point is that what matters is how we all add to the cultural ecosystem. Think about Melville. He died thinking he hadn’t made much of an impact on culture. Cervantes died with a vague notion of what he had done, but he could have had no idea just how profound his contribution was. I still find it interesting that I can be reading Don Quixote now in a totally different context than he wrote it in, and get things from it that are far beyond anything he was conscious of. What an amazing thing! What a wonderful gift he has given us all—even those who haven’t read it—yet he was most known in his own time as an ex-soldier, tax collector, and a failed poet.

I’m well aware that to some extent I am fetishizing a certain kind of cultural work. It isn’t that I dismiss those who have made money and built infrastructure. But it seems to me that these people already get way too much credit in our society. And most of them actually do harm, whereas “bad” artists are just ignored. Still, I don’t doubt that there is great creativity in finance. But that’s what brought on the 2008 financial crash. And there is great creativity that went into developing nuclear weapons. That’s what may cause the extinction of the human race. But for good and bad, the products of diversity of creative minds are what determines our culture.

All I’m saying is that we don’t want intelligence or creativity, or whatever you want to call it, to be a species; it is an ecosystem. It is all necessary. And we are stupid and un-creative to hold up one kind of genius as the genius. In my own life, I know that I can be brilliantly insightful about one thing and totally clueless about another—often something that is obvious to other people.

I think we are all this way. I do know that I have a flare for solving differential equations. And that isn’t raw brain power—of all forms of math, it is the most intuitive. It’s closer to theology than science. And although I think there is crossover, mostly it is the case that different minds are good at different things. Imagine a world with only people who were great at venture capital. Or theology. Or even farming. We would have gone extinct long ago.

The issue should never be intelligence or even creativity, but how people can live fulfilling lives as they add to our cultural ecosystem. Clearly, some will find their places better than others. But my friend has found her place. She is not only a great writer, she is perhaps even better at helping others. She’s the only person that really understands my own work and has ideas on how to improve it. I have other friends who are encouraging and even dictatorial—both of which can be helpful. But she understands the process at an incredibly deep level, and zeros in on what works and doesn’t and why. I’ve learned as much about writing from her as anyone, and that puts her in some amazing company: Fowler, White, Steinbeck, and Turow (Don’t laugh: I’ve learned a lot from him). She is, in other words, a genius. And the world is a much better place for her having no clue about how to solve a differential equation.