Category Archives: Politics

Conservatives on Inequality: But, But, But

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Majestic Equality

But, but, but! That’s what the conservatives will say because that is what the conservatives have always said. Here in the United States, in the “land of opportunity,” we have less opportunity than pretty much every other advanced economy. If you want to grow up to be rich in the United States, the most important thing you need is a rich father. But if you want to grow up to be rich in Denmark, it really isn’t that important to have a rich father. So the United States is like the bad old times in Feudal England. It ought to be an outrage and indeed among some, it is. But among conservatives: nothing.

All we get from conservatives is, “But, but, but!” But what, we might ask. They have lots of reasons for this. My favorite is the most common reason—the racist reason: well those other countries are all homogeneous. They won’t say this, but the subtext is clear enough, “How can we be as equal was Denmark when we have all these black and brown people who are dragging us down?” Or there is Avik Roy’s definition of equality as simply the lack of explicit laws saying someone can’t do something. So as long as a law doesn’t say African Americans can’t be rich, there is equality. Neat trick, huh? But more and more, the conservative answer to inequality is that it doesn’t matter. As Josh Barro puts it:

One conservative message on inequality is to say that it doesn’t matter, and we should accept rises in both pre-tax and post-tax inequality. This is the implication of studies periodically put out by the Heritage Foundation, arguing that poor people aren’t really poor if they have microwave ovens.

This is why the work by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is so important. Yesterday, I posted a TED Talk by Wilkinson that provides a summary. But below is a full hour and a half lecture by both of them that I encourage everyone to watch. The basic picture is that once a society gets to a certain level of wealth, it doesn’t help them out on average. It’s very much like studies that have shown that above a certain income, people don’t get happier. But the more inequality there is inside a country, the worse off it is. And it doesn’t just affect the poor. The rich in a country with more equality live longer than the rich in a country with less equality.

But, but, but! I can just hear the conservatives come up with their reasons for why this is not a problem. Americans, even rich ones, are fat! Americans are just more violent! And then finally: death is good!

Wilkinson and Pickett look at a lot more than that, though. On just about every measure you can think of, inequality makes a society worse. And they’ve controlled for just about everything you can think of. It is really amazing work. They also looked at the 50 United States. They found that the more unequal the states are, the more people they have in jail. Now one has to ask, “Is that not because there is more crime in high inequality states?” Well, that is 30% of the effect. But 70% of it is just the fact that states with more inequality that put more people in jail for longer periods of time.

Their hypothesis, which goes along with work in other fields, is that it has to do with how people are valued in society. In Wilkinson’s TED Talk, he provided this very nice graphic:

Valued or Devalued?

In societies that are more equal, people feel they are more valued. They don’t feel the need to look good or clever or, not to put to fine a point on it, worthy. I’ve often heard conservatives rant about the status symbols of poor kids: tennis shoes, iPads, whatever. I look at that and I think it’s sad—a social pathology indicating that society has not provided these kids with a feeling of self-worth that goes beyond them being consumers. But the conservatives look at it and think it just means they can’t manage their money and no wonder they’re poor. But, but, but!

Income inequality is killing us. We are the most unequal of the “advanced” countries and we have by far the most social pathologies. I have solutions—things like guaranteed minimum incomes, equality of education, and far more and higher tax brackets. I will be talking about them in the future. But you can bet that the conservatives won’t. They’ll have “solutions” of course—the same “solutions” they have to every “problem.” They’ll want to gut the social safety net because it has become a hammock, keeping poor people down. And they’ll want to cut the top tax rates because poor people look at them and think, “Why should I work hard when I’m going to be taxed so much!” Look forward to conversations like this:

“At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, … it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?”

“Plenty of prisons…”

“And the Union workhouses.” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“Both very busy, sir…”

“Those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

And most of all: but, but, but!

Same-Sex Marriage Marches On

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Same-Sex Marriage MilitaryMy father’s favorite lines is, “What’s wrong with these people?” This is usually applied to how people drive. But it’s a good general question, because as I go on my way each day I wonder the same thing, “What’s wrong with these people?”

As you may remember, that great defender of liberalism, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law in 1996.[1] There are two important parts to the act. Section 2 says that if any states allow gay marriage, the other states can ignore them. Second 3 says that marriage is defined as the union of one man and one woman. Second 3 was found unconstitutional, but of course, four of the justices thought it was just fine. So DOMA is pretty much a thing of the past.

Side note: the whole one man and one woman thing is truly bizarre. The reason marriage is currently defined that way is because that is the way it is currently defined. Historically, powerful men had many wives and weak men had none. This is certainly the case through most of the Bible, which is where most conservatives get their ideas about what marriage is. Look at Lot: after his wife was turned into a pillar of salt, he effectively got two wives: his two daughters. (The Bible is very creepy.) So there’s no historical or religious precedent for this whole one man and one woman definition. What it all comes down to is what people are used to, and therefore, what they are comfortable with.

Same-Sex Marriage in the Military

So DOMA is off the table. And another of Clinton’s great liberal policies is gone too: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT). So Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel declared that same-sex married couples could apply for benefits at state National Guard bases. And it all went fine, because after all, what’s the big fucking deal? It is just paper work. There are no physical examples—no one had to watch the couple copulate. But, of course, for some people it was a big deal. Six states balked:

  1. West Virginia
  2. Oklahoma
  3. Texas
  4. Louisiana
  5. Mississippi
  6. Georgia

First, I want to state for the record: it wasn’t the people actually doing the processing of paper work. I’m not saying that some or even a lot of them weren’t against same-sex marriage. But they were just doing what they were told, just like at any job. No, it was the political demagogues who were trying to make a point. That point is a little vague, I think it has something to do with standing up for stupidity, injustice, and the bigoted way.

Real Patriotism

Regardless, this is the United States armed forces. It amazes me. Let me say that again with feeling: it amazes me. The conservative idea of patriotism is that you support your country, except when you don’t want to. These people don’t love America; they love some idea of America that they made up in their own little pea brains. I’m not saying “America right or wrong.” But I am saying that breaking the law needs to be based on a hell of a lot more than the fact that you find gay sex icky.

Right now, we have a young lady named Chelsea Manning serving 30 years in prison. She saw that the United States military was misbehaving and lying about it. So she went to her supervisors and they were in on it too. They told her to just ignore it. But she did what a good solider is supposed do. She disobeyed those unethical orders. But in the case of processing same-sex marriage benefit claims, these states were not protesting the military doing something it claimed it was not. They just didn’t like the policy. It is as if Manning had released those files because she just didn’t think we should be at war in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, Chelsea Manning got 30 years, and these bigots get nothing.

But they did lose their battle. After all the tizzy fits and pompous proclamations, they all caved. Now same-sex married couples can file for benefits at state National Guard posts. But I still have the same question, “What is wrong with these people?”

Afterword

Want to write to a patriot? Here is Chelsea Manning’s address, but you still have to use the name “Bradley” on the envelope:

Bradley E Manning
89289
1300 N Warehouse Rd
Ft Leavenworth KS 66027-2304
USA

Her wish is to be referred to as a Chelsea and Ms inside the letter. We have a great deal to be thankful to her for.

[1] Some might defend him by noting that Congress would have easily over-ruled him if he had vetoed the bill. But it was quite simply an act of political cowardice, right before his re-election in 1996. Later, Clinton called for its repeal. I’m sure if he had been allowed, he would have signed up to fight in Vietnam in 1976 too.

How to Not Become a Neo-Nazi

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Neo-Nazi Bill WhiteI have to admit to a certain fascination with neo-Nazis and the like. A lot of them are just angry men who find comradery in their shared anger and hatred. But where does that come from? I mean, I’ve known a lot of violent assholes. And every couple of days some guy goes on a shooting spree. What would make someone grab onto what is about the purest example of evil we have and say, “I’m for that!” I mean, I’ve known young people who dabbled in what they thought was Satanism by reading old books on witchcraft. They just thought they were being naughty. If any adult identifies as a witch, what she means is that she thinks trees and herbal remedies are cool—it is nothing dark, much less evil.

Certainly, the neo-Nazis and the Klansmen depend upon racism. But the whole society is racist in its own way and most people at least try to hide their racism if not actively fight it. So again, we are back to the fundamental question: why do people want to be public assholes? Is it as simple as them wanting attention? I tend to think so. But that isn’t to say that they don’t completely accept all the vile thinking that goes along with the persona.

Bill White

Yesterday, the Southern Policy Law Center reported, Neo-Nazi Bill White Indicted for Internet Threats—Again! Mr. White has been indicted so many times, it is hard to keep track. And to me, he seems just like any number of other loud-mouths. But that’s what these people always seem like until they start acting on their rhetoric. There is, after all, a process. Unless one is actually dealing with arguments, rhetoric just has to get more and more extreme. But there is an end to that. Eventually, that rhetoric must lead to action. Or the people must just drop the whole matter, as I suspect is the more common path.

White’s path is, shall we say, unusual. Wikipedia reports his various political moves over the years:

From 1997 to 1998, White claimed involvement with the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party’s Refuse and Resist, Coalition against Police Brutality, and the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization (ISO). White worked as a columnist for the Russian website Pravda Online, which took its name from the now-defunct newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. In 2000, White joined Ross Perot’s Reform Party and the campaign to elect Pat Buchanan, then running for President of the United States on a Reform Party ticket.

It does have a certain consistency: authoritarianism. And once you reach Pat Buchanan, a neo-Nazism we will go! But it is interesting that it wasn’t until he got in with the “white power” crowd that he started making threats and generally being a real concern to the peace of our society.

Now let me just make a comment about leftist movements in the United States. It isn’t like they are lily white. In the 1960s, there were certainly leftists who wanted to start a revolution. Bombs were made; people died. And there will always be people on the extremes doing crazy things for their own crazy reasons. But the left learned valuable lessons from the 1960s that it has never forgotten. You just don’t get the kind of violent rhetoric from the left that you get from the right. The left seems to understand that violent rhetoric leads to violence while the right continues to pretend there is no connection.

I wouldn’t call Bill White a member of the political right in this country, although that is most certainly where he came from. I don’t think people like him have real political agendas anyway. “The Jews are greedy and lie” is not really a political statement. But clearly, he’s a searcher. And as such, he’s an example of our society not providing people with constructive ways of finding meaning. Regardless of whether White makes good on his threats and spends the rest of his life in prison, or reforms and becomes an advocate against racism, he has become “someone” in our society.

Finding Positive Meaning

Most of the people in the United States are “nobody.” In the old days of unions, people had that to identify themselves: they were members of a collection of workers who were making the country a better place. Remember “Union Strong”? There are lots of ways for people to feel valued, but work is one of the most important. But for most people, work has become nothing more than a paycheck. Being part of a union was being part of something. Despite the “We Are Walmart” ads, the workers there know that they are not Walmart. And the moment Walmart gives them their most recent paycheck, their connection with the company is over until their next hour of work.

Increasingly, I see the decline of unionization as a much bigger problem than just economics. The decline of unions in America is part of a larger problem where people don’t see where they fit into society and they certainly don’t see how it is they matter. So it is not a surprise that a man like Bill White, who has clearly spent much of his life looking for his place, has turned from one radical group to another, only to land in a world where his most vile and hateful tendencies have made him a star of sorts.

Our Cultural Cancer

As a society, we can deal with the Bill Whites of the world. We can put them in prison. Or we can at least keep tabs on them enough to stop them from physically hurting anyone. But he’s symptomatic of a larger and more difficult problem. How will our people find their places in our society where they can make things better? Part of that answer is increasing unionization and decreasing income inequality. But fundamentally, it is about our society abandoning its obsession with wealth as the ultimate gauge of a person’s value. I don’t think this problem can be cured. But it can be treated; it can be less harmful. Currently, it is metastasizing and will destroy our society if we don’t treat it.

The Bill Whites of the nation are just the most obvious symptoms.

More on Politics First Religion Second

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Republican JesusLast night I discussed Ross Douthat’s commitment to his conservative ideology over his commitment to Christianity and the Catholic Church. And look, I know that I’ve been writing a lot about Pope Francis these days. But it’s important stuff. In a nation that is 80% Christian, it highlights not only our hypocrisy (not that interesting), it highlight the paucity of theological thought on the part of a people who claim that religion is very important to them.

As others have noted, Pope Francis is not the first Pope to talk about the immorality of our economic system. He’s just the first one who the media has paid attention to. Remember the last on, Pope Benedict, who everyone thought was just a mean old curmudgeon? In is encyclical Caritas in Veritate he wrote:

Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers’ associations. Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labour unions. Hence traditional networks of solidarity have more and more obstacles to overcome. The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum[60], for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level.

Oh my God, and I do mean that God—that Catholic God who made Pope Benedict infallible! The (infallible) man is talking about the importance of labor unions! Where was Stuart Varney when we needed him?!

But let’s be perfectly honest with no exaggeration: Stuart Varney is an idiot who no one with any sense takes seriously. Ross Douthat, however, is taken seriously. He’s one of the non-ranting conservatives who holds up his Catholic faith as a badge of honor. He even wrote a whole book about how we needed to get back to traditional religion, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. But as Michael Sean Winters, a writer for the National Catholic Reporter wrote in his devastating review of Bad Religion:

My problem with Douthat’s book is not that his opinions differ from my own. My problem is that he does not seem to have any idea what he is talking about. In the West, there has been no universally accepted authoritative voice on orthodoxy since the Reformation. “What am I to do when many persons allege different interpretations, each one of whom swears to have the Spirit?” asked Erasmus in 1524. But Douthat does not see the larger picture that he aims to explain, and his treatment of his subject is so pitifully mistaken in things large and small that what we are left with is a meandering, self-serving screed. The book has the same reliance on private judgment that anyone who was really concerned with heresy would recognize as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Ouch! But it goes right along with my argument that Ross Douthat should not be considered a Catholic thinker. Garry Wills he is not. He is first and foremost a conservative and then he uses his religion to justify that. Douthat’s big gripe is that religions are liberalizing to appeal to modern people. He is against such “accomodationism.” Winters calls him out on that issue:

Of course, not all accommodationisms are equal in Douthat’s rendering. He may not like the “prosperity gospel” as preached by Pastor Joel Osteen, but he has many nice things to say about the accommodation to laissez-faire capitalism that American Catholic conservatives have been championing. He labels Michael Novak’s works a “breakthrough” and approvingly quotes this passage:

It is wrong to imagine that the spirit of competition is foreign to the gospels, and that, in particular, competition for money is humankind’s most mortal spiritual danger. Under God, a wealthy nation faces an especially harsh judgment, but that judgment will not be aimed so much at the existence of wealth as at the character of the uses made of it. On Judgment Day, the rich may find it especially hard to get through the eye of the needle, but this will not be because they had money but because their use of it will be subjected to an accounting on different ledgers from those scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service. The rich have reason to tremble. If their wealth has been productive for others, though, the world has reason to be merciful to them even if God’s standards are higher.

If that is not accomodationism, I do not know what is. Collapsing Catholicism into capitalism is as much of an “accommodation” as collapsing it into the counterculture. Novak is so eager to pour the Scottish Enlightenment into the Gospels that he fails to note that it is a spirit of gratuitousness, not competition, that must characterize a Christian culture.

What I’m getting at here is not that Ross Douthat or any of the other conservatives who claim to be Christians are horrible people. And I’m not saying that a righteous Christian cannot be a conservative. But if you are a Christian, your religious should come first. But for most Christians I talk to, their politics come first and they use their religion to justify their politics—mostly with regard to reproductive and same sex marriage rights. And this to me means they are pretenders.

I like to think of myself as an interfaith atheist. I love the best that religion is and I take great joy in talking to peoples of all faiths about their beliefs and what they think of the great questions of life. But I have no tolerance for dogma. We are living through a dark ages of religion. More people than ever claim to have faith and all that, but it means less than it ever did. For most people, God is just the trump card, “I’m right because God says I’m right.” That’s all Ross Douthat does, although admittedly, he does it with much skill and obfuscation.

I may be an atheist, but I do have a creed: inclusion, equality, empathy, compassion. And my politics follow from it. I do not follow the teachings of the power elite and then justify them by cherry picking from a three-quarter million word tome. But I too can point to literature to justify my creed. Here is one by Emma Lazarus that you will perhaps recognize:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand that
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

That is a real welcome, not a theoretical one. That is a sincere desire for equality, not nice words hiding the granite that separates them from us. That is real empathy because I and mine have struggled too. And that is real compassion and not the tidy platitude that all are equal in America. My creed may be wrong, but it is my creed. Ross Douthat’s creed is that of the American Enterprise Institute covered over with platitudes about peace and good will toward men.

Racist Conservative Youth Complains About Racism

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Amy KremerIt’s a sad old world. In general, I don’t comment on YouTube videos, except to reply to comments on my own videos. But there was a video I commented on recently, Tea Party Leader Destroyed. The “leader” in question was our friend Amy Kremer, who you may remember prompted me to create the video, Tea Party Idiot.

Anyway, so I commented on this video that was a more recent vintage of Amy Kremer:

I’ve been watching her for years, and I’d thought she would get better. But she’s as ignorant and flustered as ever. In general, Republicans are more racist than Democrats, but Kremer doesn’t strike me as any more racist than other Republicans. She clearly hates Obama with no real reason, though. Mostly, she just thinks there was a time when America was something it never was. Unless you mean overwhelmingly white. If she’s the best that [the] Tea Party has to offer, they are in trouble.

Someone named idiotfinder911 replied to me. Putting 911 in the name perhaps says everything you need to know. Nonetheless:

Frank, if you had the ability to put aside your racist liberal ways, and see people for who they truly are and represent, you will see that this women is a good person. You would also understand why Obama is BAD for America. Ill equate people like you who are in LOVE with Obama and liberalism to a women who is CONSTANTLY beaten up by her husband, but at the end of the day says “he loves me, which is why I stay”. You are completely BLIND! End of discussion.

I shouldn’t have responded. For one thing, this sounds like an angry teenager. And indeed, he seems to be a fan of professional wrestling. Nonetheless, I tried, as usual, to engage the crazy conservative because good things do sometimes come out of it:

Read my writing. I’m not in love in Obama. In fact, I am writing a book about how the New Democratic movement destroyed both the Dems and Reps. But it is ironic that I am “wrong” because I can’t see Kremer is good but you are “right” because you can see that Obama is BAD. Regardless, I don’t claim that Kremer is anything but a true believer. She is stupid and ignorant, but I don’t doubt she is trying to do what she thinks is right. She is, as the saying goes, a useful fool. She pushes policies that [are] ultimately bad for people like herself.

So I get the next response which is, shall we say, telling:

If you were accurately judge who was the idiots/stupid people here, Kremer would have been the LAST one you called out. Id first call out the “race card” player, the host. Then the black guy, then the fake journalist who claims he came up with the term “leading from behind”. Then I can see you calling out Kremer.

You see, the difference between me and you, conservative and liberal, is that I ACCURATELY assess EVERYTHING. If I do something immoral, I recognize that, whereas you don’t have that ability. This is why medical doctors have classified liberalism as a mental disorder. Which is why I sympathize with you and people like you. You cant help it.

Note the not so subtle racism in his first paragraph. So what we have here is a white guy with racial resentment. He’s one of those 60% of Republicans who think that the biggest racism problem in America is against whites. And if you look at the videos he likes, you will see some real charmers like, Top 60 Ghetto Black Names and Teacher sues because racist black kids.

But it was the second paragraph that was too much. It reminds me of this insurance agent I once had who claimed that all knowledge was divided into two categories: things he absolutely knew and things he did not know. In other words: once he had figured something out, it was set in stone; it could never be changed. Even in that conversation, he made factual statements that were wrong, but I guess he was just going to have to live with them for the rest of his life. Similarly with idiotfinder911, he accurately assesses everything. Wow! What perfection in a man! What an Adonis he must be!

So I called an end to it:

Give it a rest. No one accurately assesses everything. You are either delusional or just stupid. Either way, the conversation is over. You have nothing to offer.

I think you can see, I’m just tired. I shouldn’t even have responded. The guy is just ranting. There is no engagement going on. But his final response was the best yet:

Sorry Franky. You lose again. I made valid points vs. your finger pointing. People like you not only have nothing to provide this conversation, but you also have nothing to provide this world but problems.

I’ll admit that I lost; I lost a lot of time talking to this guy. If idiotfinder911 wants to find idiots, he ought to start with a mirror. But I’m really struck by his claim that he made valid points. He made no points at all. The only thing he said that even came close to a point was his listing of who ware the biggest idiots on the video. And in that case, there were no justifications except for his clear racism. But I will remind you once again: his thinking is that of 60% of the Republican party. That’s 30% of the country who are largely guided by their belief that blacks are getting over on them.

If you think that fascism can’t take hold in the United States, you are delusional. All we need is a bad economy and too many people not voting. People like idiotfinder911 have nothing to add to the conversation, they are just an evil minority that will destroy this nation if they get the chance. Please people: vote.

Update (28 November 2015 11:50 pm)

Apparently, Idiotfinder911 did a Google search of his moniker and found this article. Except, Google lists the version that is on our old Nucleus CMS, which no longer allows comments. So he commented on whatever article was recently up, Give Thanks for Thanksgiving — You Might Not Have It Much Longer. It’s classic Idiotfinder911: ranting and raving, claiming that no one addresses his “arguments” — which consist primarily of calling other people names because, you know, conservative gooooddd, liberal baaaddd:

Frank, you cant help yourself but to somehow tie in “conservatives” into this story, can you? I seen that you wrote an article about me some time ago, but as a typical helpless liberal, you tried to smear me without providing the full story. Anytime you want to debate me on liberal vs conservative or racial issues, let me know. I will say you have already put your foot in your liberal mouth by calling me a white racist [I never called him a white racist. -FM] while not even knowing what my race is… Would you refer to me as an Uncle Tom if I am black?? [Clearly, Idiotfinder911 has never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. -FM] Just like a good little liberal, you randomly call people racist who don’t see things the way you do. That in itself is WORSE than racism. Bring it unless you are a coward. Which from your previous story about me, you totally are.

James and Elizabeth gave him much more of what he deserves. I find such people exhausting. The interesting thing is that there are thousands of Idiotfinder911s out there. It isn’t surprising that they think all liberals are the same, given that they are walking, talking cliches. To call them conservatives is an unwarranted criticism of the movement.

What Shall We Do with Our Old?

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D W GriffithD W Griffith deservedly has a bad rap as a racist. But I don’t think he was a bad man. I can’t remember who right now, but there was some southern Republican Congressman who admitted that he grew up thinking slavery wasn’t bad and that the slaves were mostly fine with it. And just look at all the happy slaves in 1939’s blockbuster Gone with the Wind. So I think that we are being a bit harsh on Mr. Griffith.

But I fully admit, I want to find a way to wash away his racist beliefs and the story of Birth of a Nation. But I don’t want to wash away the film itself, because it is one of the greatest achievements in any art form ever. I’m not talking Mona Lisa great; I’m talking Chauvet Cave paintings great. Regardless, the man did have a heart.

Here is a short film, What Shall We Do with Our Old? Yes, it is melodrama. But it was also very true of life in 1911 when the film was made. And it was true in 1912 and 1913 and 1914 and well past 1940 when the first Social Security checks went out. This is the kind of film that should be made:

Today, conservatives want to take us back to those days. Of course, they won’t admit it. They just want to take benefits away from the “wrong kind” of people—the kind of people who “abuse” the system. But even if there are lowlifes who are scamming the system, you absolutely cannot stop them from getting benefits without stopping worthy people from getting benefits. As it is, the programs to help the poor are riddled with red tape while the programs to help the rich are given away with a smile and a handshake.

And who are these people who want grandma to starve to death while grandpa sits in jail for stealing some bread? These are people who have huge amounts of money. But they are committed to a weird idea of Darwin’s theory where only the big and the smart survive. But that doesn’t even happen among lizards, much less humans who have only thrived because of their social instincts. Humans have been taking care of the sick and weak for tens of thousands of years. What conservatives think is “natural” is anything but.

Pete Peterson and his ilk are not just determined to destroy the social safety net. They are determined to destroy human civilization. They’ve bought into the thinking of people like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. In the social “Darwinian” world they want, we don’t end up with Mad Max. We end up with Planet of the Apes.

As confused as D W Griffith was about the history of America, the Pete Petersons is far more so. And far more dangerous too.

One Great Idea and Unimaginable Harm

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John LennonI’m not a huge John Lennon fan. He wrote some great songs, though. “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” and “Across the Universe” come immediately to mind. Just the same, he demanded a great deal of charity from the listener. I know I am pretty much alone on this, but “Imagine” is a terrible song. I can’t think of a work of art that is so exclusive. John Lennon’s there to help us become enlightened, which is bad enough, but then, “Imagine no possessions; I wonder if you can?” Had he been a more serious songwriter (there is no doubt of his enormous talent), he would have written the song as a self-indictment. The people listening to that song could imagine no possessions a hell of lot better than that pretentious multimillionaire. (Yoko Ono’s net worth is a half billion dollars.)

Still, it is a profound sadness that he was murdered 33 years ago today at the age of 40. I think he had one more great creative period left (and no, Double Fantasy was not part of it). It’s interesting that Mark David Chapman appears to have been inspired by his conversion to Christianity to killed Lennon because of Lennon’s statement (15 years earlier!) that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. I don’t mean to suggest that Christianity is to blame for the actions of Chapman. But it is certainly true that most Christians blame Islam for violent acts by individuals of that faith. I know that Christians respond that Jesus taught peace. But he also taught violence (eg Matthew 10:34-35). These old holy books can justify pretty much anything you want to do.

Good God, what a day for birthdays!

Eli WhitneyOn this day way back in 65 BC, the great Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to us English speakers as simply Horace, was born. Most people know of him because of one line from one of his poems Odes Book III, Poem 2: Dulce Et Decorum Est. The line itself is, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” A straight translation is, “Sweet and decorous it is for the fatherland to die.” Now Horace is exhorting his fellow Romans to man up. You can read the whole poem in English at Poetry in Translation. Today, we know the line from Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name where he quotes the line. This is how he ends his poem:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I learned a great deal about Latin from reading Horace. All my life, I had heard that Latin was a perfect language. Yet here was this famous line that ends with an infinitive. It sounded vaguely like German to me. What I learned is that there is no such thing as a perfect language. And no language is superior to another. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I run into grammatical problems all the time that simply can’t be solved simply in English, but that is built right into other languages. It is very much like programming languages. The best language depends upon what you want to say. And that can change clause by clause. But one cool thing about Latin: it really isn’t that hard. If I had a child, I would encourage him to study it.

The great French filmmaker Georges Melies was born in 1861. You probably know of him from the hit children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret and the film based upon it, Hugo. He was a professional magician who got into films very early. He is more or less the father of film special effects. But his films are generally quite charming. And they were certainly better than what was being done in America at that time. Of course, over time, his creativity was worn out. He came from the stage and his films continued to be constrained by that paradigm. But it is hard to say if that is the result of lack of ability or of the extreme demands placed on him by that great villain of early filmmaking, Thomas Edison. Regardless, it would take D W Griffith some years later to fully realize that stories on film could be told in an entirely new way. None of this takes anything away from Melies, of course. In the end, France treated Melies very much like the United States treated D W Griffith as well as Orson Welles. He was praised and honored. Young filmmakers consulted with him. But he was not able to make a single film the last 25 years of his life and much of that time he lived in poverty. Here is The Impossible Voyage from 1904:

Another Frenchman, mathematician Jacques Hadamard was born in 1865. I don’t begin to understand his work. But I like what he had to say about mathematics. You see, to me, mathematics is the most creative thing that a human being can do. I get a lot of pushback from people who just don’t get math. This is like people who can only draw stick figures claiming that the great Renaissance painters were not creative. This is how Wikipedia describes it:

In his book Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Hadamard uses introspection to describe mathematical thought processes. In sharp contrast to authors who identify language and cognition, he describes his own mathematical thinking as largely wordless, often accompanied by mental images that represent the entire solution to a problem. He surveyed 100 of the leading physicists of the day (approximately 1900), asking them how they did their work.

Hadamard described the experiences of the mathematicians/theoretical physicists Carl Friedrich Gauss, Hermann von Helmholtz, Henri Poincaré and others as viewing entire solutions with “sudden spontaneousness.”

Hadamard described the process as having four steps of the five-step Graham Wallas creative process model, with the first three also having been put forth by Helmholtz: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification.

The great Irish flutist James Galway is 74 today. My opinion of him has really gone up over the years. I think when I was younger, I was put off by his flashiness. But the truth is that he does everything just perfect. There are flutists as good but no one is better. Here he is doing the Allegro from the fourth Bach Flute Sonata:

Other birthdays: the tragic Mary, Queen of Scots (1542); French composer Claude Balbastre (1724); Czech composer (and friend of Mozart) Frantisek Xaver Dusek (1731); French playwright Georges Feydeau (1862); sculptor Camille Claudel (1864); composer Jean Sibelius (1865); the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886); cartoonist E C Segar (1894); Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1902); poet Delmore Schwartz (1913); singer Sammy Davis Jr (1925); comedian Flip Wilson (1933); non-Chinese actor David Carradine (1936); singer Jim Morrison (1943); musician Gregg Allman (66); actor Kim Basinger (60); comedian Sam Kinison (1953); pernicious provocateur Ann Coulter (52); and Sinead O’Connor (47).

The day, however, belongs to the inventor Eli Whitney who was born on this day in 1765. Known for his invention of the cotton gin, he made all his money manufacturing guns for the United States government. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that he was an evil man, but he had a profoundly evil effect on the history of the United States. Slavery in the United States was not originally a racial institution. The problem from the standpoint of the slave-owners was that the black and white slaves had this nasty tendency to bind together and upset the “natural” order. At times, they were joined by the native tribes. So a kind of caste system was developed. The blacks were the slaves, the former white slaves just became the working poor, and the slave-owning aristocracy stayed the same. Divide and conquer. For the slave owners, this was not about racism; it was about money. But the poor whites had to be sold on the idea that the blacks ought to be slaves because they were inferior. Otherwise: there could be more binding together. Over time, I’m sure the slave-owners convinced themselves that the blacks were inferior. But it was always, always, always about money.

By the end of the 18th century, slavery was dying out in the south. Understand: it costs money to own a slave. You have to feed and cloth and house him. It only makes economic sense to keep a slave if he produces more than he costs. And at that time, all the south was producing was rice and tobacco which were not high margin crops. They were producing cotton too, but because of the seeds that had to be removed, it was labor intensive and thus not very profitable. Some slaveowners were giving away their slaves. Until the cotton gin was invented in 1793. In the 20 years after its invention, cotton production increased almost 100 fold.

This was not just a catastrophe for the slaves themselves. It was terrible for the southern economy. For the next 60 years, instead of industrializing and diversifying its economy, the south became dependent upon a single product. It was, in effect, a banana republic. Slavery was going to die regardless, because eventually cotton demand would go down and anyway, others, more inclined toward modern manufacturing processes would have out competed the south’s slave labor approach. Slavery is just bad economics. It is the most extreme example of income inequality. But Whitney—a northern industrialist—allowed the south to diminish its economy and destroy the lives of millions of black Americans both before and after the Civil War. It’s sad, because I’m sure Whitney meant well.

Happy birthday Eli Whitney, may God be as merciful as many claim!

The Bald Soprano Economy

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The Bald SopranoI was thinking of of the movie The Paper Chase today. It was released forty years ago. I’ve watched it a few times over the years and each time it is different. When I first saw it, it was the story of Hart trying to get the grade and graduate Harvard Law School. Later, it was the story of a man learning what matters in life and how to juggle all the complexities that go along with that. But most recently, it is the story of the futility of attainment. Law school, like almost everything else that we are taught to value is pointless.

You may remember an episode of the cartoon The Flintstones. In it, Fred lost his job and so Wilma is reading the help wanted ads from the morning news “tablet.” She read, “Wanted: man to put cotton balls in glass bottles.” This was followed by, “Wanted: man to take cotton balls out of glass bottles.” It’s a funny gag, or at least it was when I was a kid. Once I found myself as an adult working in the corporate world, I found that was about right. The vast majority of what people are paid to do is busy work.

When I worked the graveyard shift at a gas station, they wanted me to get a certain amount of work done each night—cleaning and stocking—because there were very few customers. I could get all that work done in 45 minutes because I was young and capable. This allowed me to read and write much of the rest of the night. But as soon as they found out I did that, it became verboten. I had to spend my whole night very slowly doing my work.

I’m sure most of you reading this have experienced the same thing. It took me a long time to figure out why this was so. My employer—and I dare say most employers—did not think I was being paid for the work that I did. I was being paid for the rental of my body, although I’m not sure that they understood this. For that time I was on the clock, they owned me. And this isn’t just the case with crummy jobs like running a gas station. A number of times, I’ve had to have writing contracts changed because the standard contracts claim that they own everything that the artist creates. This was very strange when I was, for example, signing a contract to write software but the fine print claimed to own the novel I was writing at night. In general, employers don’t have a problem making these changes for employees observant enough to point them out. In fact, that are often visibly embarrassed. But the default position is that a worker is signing on to be a slave—temporary though the contract may be.

What we, the non-power elite, are taught, however, is something totally different. The following clip from The Paper Chase is from the middle of the film. Hart is finally starting to understand what Susan has tried to teach him, “They finally got you, Hart, they sucked all that Midwestern charm right out of you. Look, he’s got you scared to death. You’re going to pass, because you’re the kind the law school wants. You’ll get your little diploma. Your piece of paper that’s no different than this [toilet paper roll] and you can stick it in your silver box with all the other paper in your life. Your birth certificate, driver’s license, marriage license, your stock certificates, and your will… I wish you would flunk, there might be some hope for you.” Well, Hart fights back. He sees the absurdity of the system and he refuses to play:

It’s a great scene. It is also a lie. It is the modern version of the Horatio Alger myth: if you stand up to power, it will respect you. That’s not the case. If you stand up to power, it will crush you.

I’ve also been in a very different situation in corporate America, where I had actual power. I was the head of IT at a medium sized real estate investment company. When I started, it had net profits of about $2 million per year and when I left two years later, it had net profits of $20 million per year. Its sudden growth required huge increases in telecommunication and computing resources. But since the growth wasn’t expected, the infrastructure grew in an ad hoc manner. By the end, it was very complicated and I was the only one who really understood the system. I have no doubt that this made me kind of a pompous dick. But the management hated me because they needed me. It would have all been fine if I had simply contracted with some million dollar consultant who had come in and created the system. That would be one of them. And I would have remained the cog I was hired to be—rather than becoming half their whole machine.

At no time did the company I worked for think that I ought to be rewarded. Being productive is not the point in our economy. And it is not the point of American business. It is all a kind of theater of the absurd where every person comes to work each day to play a part. There is no plot. The point of the play is to create a static image of what society is. And what our society is, is a caste system with just enough mobility to allow for the illusion of a meritocracy.

The ending of The Paper Chase sums us up perfectly. Hart gets his grades in the mail. Susan says to him, “Aren’t you going to open your grades?” Hart says nothing. He makes a paper airplane out of the letter and sails it into the ocean. He did his best and he doesn’t care what the power elite have to say about it. But Hart is a mythical figure. And the filmmakers know this. Because we were shown what Hart was not: Professor Kingsfield writing down his grade of A. We care, you see.

At the beginning of the film, Kingsfield gives his great speech, “You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush; you leave thinking like a lawyer.” But in the end, society doesn’t care if you have a mind full of mush or the mind of a lawyer. It wants the graduate with his grade of A. He can be depended upon to play his part and do his busy work. He won’t upset the type casting.

It isn’t your fault. We have an economic system that is desperately in need of an overhaul. But everyone spends so much of their time performing their parts that they don’t have the energy or the inclination to rewrite the play.

Afterword

Since I am often criticized for being too oblique, The Bald Soprano is the first play of absurdist Eugene Ionesco. It is a good analogy of our economic system because the characters are pretty much interchangeable. In fact, the traditional ending of the play has it start over at the beginning with the two main couples switching parts. I wouldn’t take the analogy too far. Someone suffering from Down syndrome could not be interchanged with Persi Diaconis. But generally speaking, the genetic material that goes into the rich goes into the poor and what differentiates them is the casting of birth and other accidents.

This will give you a feel for the play:

Noam Chomsky and Other Greats

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Noam ChomskyOn this day in 1598, one of the greatest sculptors of all time, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born. He was also a great painter and architect. Oh, and he was involved in the theater and wrote plays. He’s not as well known as Michelangelo, but he is at least as good and I would say better. He pretty much invented Baroque sculpture. Of course, that is why he isn’t terribly well known outside of art circles. With the rise of the Neoclassical movement, Baroque art fell out of favor. I much prefer the Neoclassical period myself. But it does show how stupid art criticism tends to be. The old saying is all you really need to go by, “I may not know art, but I know what I like!” Caveat: that doesn’t mean what you don’t like is bad.

The composer Pietro Mascagni was born in 1863. He composed in that wonderful period between Romantic and Modern, where the music was crisp but beautiful. He is mostly known as an opera composer. Indeed, his one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana is still one of the most performed to this day. What follows is the Intermezzo from that opera. I dare you not to love it.

The great actor Eli Wallach is 98 today. Good God! And he’s still working. I just saw him in two recent films Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and The Ghost Writer. I once worked with his nephew on a short film that I was making. His name was Marz, and was an ND. And a horrible actor. All he did was mug at the camera. I gave up after two days. But he was a very nice and smart guy. Regardless Uncle Eli and Aunt Anne are great actors. Here is Wallach in his iconic role of Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly:

The great Tom Waits is 64. Here he is doing “Heart Attack and Vine”:

Other birthdays: poet Allan Cunningham (1784); composer Ernst Toch (1887); actor Ted Knight (1923); actor Ellen Burstyn (81); musician (who I really don’t like for a couple of reasons) Harry Chapin (1942); and basketball player Larry Bird (57).

The day, however, belongs to Noam Chomsky who is 85 today. He is one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century. But unlike other linguists who I can understand, I don’t really understand his work. The basics of it are simple, however: linguistic syntax is built into our biology. If you want to know more, check out the Wikipedia page on, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Chomsky is mostly known for his political writing. He had a profound impact on my thinking. But actually, he’s pretty hard to read. A colorful writer he is not. But I am with him on his analysis of American imperialism and neo-liberalism. And I too consider myself a libertarian socialist, which he explains beautifully in the following audio file:

Happy birthday Noam Chomsky!

We Lost Detroit

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Matthew 25

With Detroit being screwed, and more specifically, Detroit’s public employees, it seems appropriate to start the day with Gil Scott Heron’s “We Almost Lost Detroit.” The song is about the first commercial breeder reactor in the United States. But it applies well enough to what’s going on there now. There are long term, systematic problems that have hurt Detroit, but the real crisis has happened because the Republican controlled state legislature has forced it. How long will the people of America think, “We ought to give the Republicans another chance.” It is always a bad idea.

Today, I don’t see it as “almost” anymore. But as it is, Rick Snyder is still quite popular in Michigan. His numbers against his most likely challenger Mark Schauer have been falling, but he’s still ahead. Regardless, how does a man who leads a state with an unemployment rate that is almost two percentage points higher than the nation’s maintain the approval of roughly half the population? I understand that as far as Republican governors go, Snyder is nowhere near the worse. But he has been terrible to Detroit.

What is wrong with our great “Christian” nation? Does it take a weirdo Taoist atheist like me to remind our nation of Matthew 25:

[31] “But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. [32] All the nations will be gathered before him; and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; [33] and he will put the sheep on his right, and the goats on the left.

[34] “Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. [35] For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in; [36] naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me.’ [37] Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you, or thirsty, and give you something to drink? [38] And when did we see you a stranger, and invite you in, or naked, and clothe you? [39] When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?’ [40] The king will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.’

[41] “Then he will also say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; [42] for I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink; [43] I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in; naked, and you did not clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.’ [44] Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ [45] Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ [46] These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Meanwhile, we lose Detroit.

The Myth of Modern Christian Persecution

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The Myth of PersecutionI haven’t read Sarah Palin’s new book, Good Tidings and Great Joy. But I’ve skimmed it. It’s hard to take. Yet another book from a Christer claiming to be oppressed because the clerk at Target says, “Happy holidays!” Oh, if Saint Sebastian were alive today, how could he endure? Arrows are one thing, but this is war. If nativity scenes aren’t allowed in state courthouses, the baby Jesus pees blood. It’s a God damned shame!

Palin’s book is a good companion to a book I actually did read, Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution. Moss is a Christian herself and she thinks all of this nonsense of Christian martyrdom is bad for the religion. A professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, she knows what she’s talking about. It turns out that all that business of Christians being fed to the lions is a myth. Well, it’s a myth in the sense that they weren’t fed to these beasts because they were Christians. Lots of people were so abused. When Christians were killed, it was generally because they broke the law. The early Christians were a radical group, many of them would today be called terrorists.

So I love Bruce Cockburn’s excellent song “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” but it’s a crock:

Consider our old friend Saint Sebastian. His story is so filled with clear folklore, that it is hard to take any of it seriously. He made the mute talk and the blind see. Merely hearing about his acts of healing caused people to be healed. But here’s the thing. He was a captain in the Praetorian Guard, serving under Emperor Diocletian. Now the Christians will have you believe that Diocletian got mad at Sebastian because he was converting people to Christianity. But that doesn’t appear to be what was going on at all. For example, he converted Chromatius who then set all of his prisoners free from jail and resigned. That’s the sort of thing that would get a soldier court-martialed today.

So Diocletian basically sentenced Sebastian to death (or perhaps just torture) by having him tied to a tree and having his men shoot arrows at Sebastian. Left for dead, he survived and was nursed back to health. So Sebastian presented himself to Diocletian to rub his nose in the fact that he was still alive. So the emperor had his men beat Sebastian to death and throw his body in the sewer. God did not heal him from this. Of course, we don’t know that any of this is even true. Sebastian was never even discussed until a century after this all supposedly happened. The point is that the story is supposed to show Christians being persecuted for their faith when, if anything, they were persecuted for being dicks and rabble rousers.

This mythology of the early Christians being persecuted did lead to actual martyrdom later on, because myths matter. If people are told that the best thing they can do is martyr themselves for the cause, there’s no surprise when people do just that. We see the same things today with Muslim martyrs. But when it comes to all of these religious people, any religious persecution was at best isolated and idiosyncratic.

And that brings us back to Sarah Palin. Because of this myth of Christian persecution, she and so many others like her, practice their faiths by pretending that they are some oppressed religious minority. They do this at the same time that they want to claim that America is a Christian Nation. They also love to point out that roughly 80% of the country self-identifies as Christian. I wrote about this last year, Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas. As I said then:

The substitution of “happy holidays” implicitly relegates Christmas to the level of all other seasonal holidays. Christians want to be told that Christmas is more than just their holiday—an expression of their religious belief. They want to be told that Christmas is true—an expression of what God really is and not just their opinion.

A moment’s thought on this issue will show that this is true. But notice how the deconstruction lays bare the absurdity of the request. It is not enough to include Christmas in a greeting, the greeting must single out Christmas because, you know, unlike those other religions, it’s true! Now, I’m as deluded as the next man, but I don’t require that others pander to my delusions.

So that’s what Sarah Palin’s new book is all about. Christmas is not everyone’s holiday. It is the holiday that belongs only to those chosen people who happen to believe in the right God. And the rest of us who are not Christians and who really don’t care are waging a war on Christianity through our indifference. So the myth of the persecution of Christians lives on, but now it has been so debased that cable “news” networks spend whole segments whining about the fact that non-Christians don’t celebrate the winter solstice the “right” way. Proving one’s love to God comes pretty cheap to the modern Christian.

A Better World Without Hitchens

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Christopher HitchensThis is amazing. It is an hour long debate between Eric Alterman and Christopher Hitchens. It is mostly a discussion of Hitchens’ support of the Iraq War. The debate takes place right before the 2008 presidential election. It is really worth watching. Alterman is great as usual, and quite reasonable. I don’t completely agree with him; he’s quite a bit more conservative than I am. But Hitchens is just amazing. In this one video, he shows how he had lost all credibility toward the end of his career.

The last decade he was alive, he spent it using his considerable intellect and erudition to avoid admitting that he had been wrong to cheerlead for that war. I won’t take the time, but there must be at least thirty times when he simply lies. (His comment about the Bush administration having to be forced into going to war is contradicted by just about everyone who was around at that time. See, for example, Richard Clarke.) And when he’s not lying, he’s brushing aside important questions with snarky comments. This is a great example of why his death had absolutely no effect on the level of public intellectual discourse. He had long ago gotten out of that business.

It’s interesting that he was an outspoken atheist. First, it was the only thing that kept him relevant in the public. The atheist community found him too amusing to throw away, even though his thinking on religious topics was pathetic. Second, his previous writing in favor of the Iraq War became his own personal Bible. He effectively became an apologist for that corpus. Remember, this is a man who to the end would savage the Ronald Reagan presidency. But he couldn’t say anything bad about Bush. Bush could have been decapitating babies and it would have been okay because he killed that very dangerous man Saddam Hussein. (Funny how the CIA couldn’t be trusted because they over-estimated the strength of the USSR, but Bush is great despite the fact that he over-estimated Hussein hundreds of times worse.)

I’m glad Hitchens is gone (he wouldn’t have to be dead). As a public figure, he was a disaster. He made the world a worse place. Plenty of people do that, of course. But few of them have the brilliance to do good. Christopher Hitchens used his gifts to push for an unnecessary and evil war. And then he spent the rest of his life trying to justify it. He should have either admitted his error or just shut up. We are so much better off without him.