There are two bits of sex in the news that I think I had better address. Because, you know, I’m normally the person people seek out when they have questions about sex.

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket, Jonah?

The first is the man with the world’s largest penis. Jonah Falcon, the man with said penis, was stopped at the San Francisco International Airport by TSA agents for the bulge in his pants. Apparently, there was no foreign object in his pants; it was all him.

According to Falcon, he was not erect. What’s more, his flaccid penis is so large that he has to strap it to his left leg. Frankly, I feel sorry for the guy, but he seems to be very happy with all the attention he is receiving.

The folks at The Young Turks had a very funny discussion of it. (Sorry, the link is gone.) I thought that Ana Kasparian made some excellent points, but probably just because she said more or less what I thought and more or less what I want to think women ought to think about all this.

I have a few questions:

• At 13 inches, is the penis ever truly erect? Isn’t the torque on it so large that it droops down? Would this not be something of a turn off to a sexual partner who wants to feel that they are exciting Mr Falcon?
• I assume that the extra length goes along with a larger girth; does that mean that fellatio is out?
• Is any woman’s vagina 13 inches deep? Doesn’t this mean that coitus could be dangerous—like jamming a pole into the vagina? And doesn’t this mean that there would be little bodily contact—especially clitoral contact?

I don’t mean to be excessively graphic or analytical, but these are the questions that come to my mind.

I would think that the guy might well be able to attract a large number of lovers who would be into sex with him for the thrill of it — just like they might want to do a bungee jump once. But I would think this guy would have to possess other characteristics to make a lover stick around.

With all due respect to everyone involved, Mr Falcon would seem to be very similar to a hermaphrodite: a person who wants to be in a long-term relationship with one of them would either love them despite their physical characteristics or because the person had a fetish.

I would prefer the former. At this point in my life, I would hope that anyone would love me despite my body, not because of it. And would have to be the case!

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket, Fred?

Fred Willard was arrested at a porn theater in Hollywood. Frankly, who cares? I have a hell of a lot more respect for that than I do for drunk drivers.

But according to The Sacramento Bee, Larry Flynt has offered Willard a free online subscription for Hustler. He said, “We think Fred should join millions of others and enjoy porn in the privacy of his own home, and, what better way to do that than with a free subscription to our popular Website?”

I think that’s a fine offer. I hope Willard takes him up on that. Fred Willard could be a serial killer and I would still always love him for Fernwood 2Night:

Image cropped from Image of a Clear Dildo by Nzdilf under CC BY-SA 4.0.

I just tuned into the beginning of The Rachel Maddow Show. She was talking about tests of leadership and mentioned that John McCain passed his test of leadership in this 28 second video clip from the 2008 campaign:

I am so tired of McCain getting credit for this. He said this on 10 October 2008. By that time, he was 90% certain that he had lost the presidency. His countering this woman was his effort to save what little dignity he had left. Had the race been a dead heat, John McCain would have pandered as much as, say, Mitt Romney this last year.

John McCain gets far too much credit for reasonableness that he does not exhibit. People think he goes against his party, but the only time he did that was to get back at George W. Bush for his “black baby” whisper campaign. John McCain is a standard Republican senator. I can understand why conservative news outlets like him. What I can’t understand is why centrist news outlets treat him as anything other than another conservative. And I really can’t understand the honor showed him from liberal outlets.

John McCain. Orrin Hatch. Chuck Grassley. There all interchangeable.

Back in 2009, Jonathan Chait wrote a substantial article about Ayn Rand for The New Replublic. In particular, he discussed how Rand has changed the modern conservative movement, even as she was never a part of it.

As most people know, Paul Ryan is an Ayn Rand devotee. On the surface, this seems kind of strange because Ryan is a Roman Catholic and Rand was a hardcore (and not very thoughtful) atheist. But as I think you can tell from Ryan’s famous budget, he has much more faith in Ayn Rand than Jesus Christ.

Paul Ryan is the perfect person to illustrate the influence of Ayn Rand today (although Chait doesn’t discuss him in the article—probably because Ryan wasn’t that notable in 2009). I say this because he is the very embodiment of these two aspects of Ayn Rand’s thought that live on.

Moral Superiority

Rand didn’t believe that capitalism was necessarily the most efficient economic system (Efficient Markets), nor did she necessarily believe that capitalism was better for our species in the long run (Social Darwinists). To her, capitalism was a moral system. Ludwig von Mises once told Rand, “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” And this is exactly what Paul Ryan and his conservative peers believe. Chait writes:

Hysteria!

Rand’s other great contribution to modern conservatism is her use of hysteria. You know the stuff: “The government wants to ban machine guns; if they can ban machine guns they will ban all guns; if they ban all guns we won’t be able to protect ourselves; if we can’t protect ourselves the government will put us in concentration camps.” Observation: government suggests banning machine guns. Conclusion: Nazi Germany.

What we most see—including from Paul Ryan just about anytime he speaks at length—is to jump from “I disagree with that policy” to “Socialism!” Again, Chait:

Some people may wonder about my keen interest in Ayn Rand. There are a few reasons. One is that I have read the majority of her work. And I have given it serious and prolonged thought. It is, on the whole, shockingly bad. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that liking Any Rand depends not on being intelligent and thoughtful, but just the opposite. Rand offers mediocre and undisciplined minds the choice to shut down and parrot her easily understood dogma. And I am most definitely talking about the supposed intellectual Paul Ryan.

I wish to understand why Rand has been so successful, and that is my main reason for being interested. Rand’s writing is far more popular than most people think. Over 50 years after she published it, Atlas Shrugged still sells over a half million copies every year. And as Chait documents, a lot of very powerful people like Paul Ryan take seriously her “two-dimensional characters serving as ideological props” in plots so superficial and boring they would make Pollyanna cynical.

Rather than trying to be the Romantic heroes of Rand’s limited fictional universe, it would be better if Paul Ryan had done the honest thing: shrug.

Aaron Carroll is a doctor and a healthcare blogger. I wrote to him about a year ago about trend changes in healthcare. He was nice enough to write back that he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Ah, the trials of a PhD scientist![1] Anyway, he takes on Tyler Cowen’s column in the New York Times, The New Tug of War Over Medicaid. Carroll is nicer than I am; he starts his article by going out of his way to say that he normally thinks very highly of Cowen. I’m just truthful: Tyler Cowen is a dick.

But once Carroll gets going, he is as blunt in his appraisal of Cowen’s argument as I am of Cowen himself. He starts each of the center paragraphs, “I get a bit annoyed…” There are five of them.

1. when people claim that we can’t “afford” more government intervention
2. by the claim that an expansion of government insurance leads to lines and waiting
3. by blanket claims that doctors won’t accept Medicaid
4. when people just claim government programs are “unpopular”
5. at the blanket acceptance of the awesomeness of the free market in health care

He provides information that debunks each one of these claims. Mostly, he is just annoyed that thoroughly debunked ideas show up in columns in major American newspapers.

He ends:

What Aaron Carroll doesn’t understands is that conservatives (including libertarians like Cowen) are not intellectually honest. Their ideology is fact-proof. This is because ideology always trumps new facts. As John Maynard Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” What conservatives do is ignore the facts. I know this. But when they do this, I, like Aaron Carroll, get a bit annoyed.

[1] I noted something really interesting, but no one is going to spend an hour listening to me talk about trend lines and their derivatives. If anyone starts making a big deal out of this, I will be really pissed off.

Did you know that on average, blondes are more intelligent than brunettes? And yet, we think of blondes as being stupid. I don’t know how this started, but I know a big factor in perpetuating this myth: blonde conservative female pundits.

Now, I’m not thinking about people like Gretchen Carlson. I don’t know why, but she’s just the wrong type. I’m talking more people like Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter. But again, that’s not quite right because they are smart, just horribly, horribly (Is two enough?) evil. Really the best example is Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who not only plays the conservative on The View but also the stupid, petulant schoolgirl.

The clip below is not new, even to me. But I just came upon it again and I was blown away. It is an appearance of Bill Maher on The View last November. Almost the entire segment is taken up with Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s insolent questions to and statements toward Maher. It is amusing to watch the other hosts of the show’s embarrassed attempts to get Hasselbeck to stop her clearly unacceptable behavior. Just to be clear: it isn’t her attacks on Maher, it is the childish way that she does it and continues to do it long after the subject has been changed.

I’ve found a lot of people avoid watching the videos that I embed. I understand that it is hard to compete with my brilliant insights, but I only embed things that I think are really worth watching. In most cases I try to only embed short things; one video I posted and embedded was only 7 seconds long! But this one is kind of long: 9:04. Still, it is worth it:

And people say Bill Maher is a dick!

Anyway, if I were a woman or blonde, I would be embarrassed by Hasselbeck. Of course, I’m constantly embarrassed by my own sex. I guess we all just get used to it.

Update (9:54 pm)

YouTube is very addictive. I’ve watched a lot of great stuff, but this one I had to share. The poster titled it “Phil Donahue kicks NAZI Bill O’Reilly’s ass on the Factor” and that does nicely sum it up. What is most interesting about it is that this isn’t like when Jon Stewart is on Billo’s show. It is like a fist fight, but O’Reilly is in a much lighter class than Donahue. By the end it is clear that Billo is scared. And what I most like is at the end, Donahue doesn’t offer some glib, “It was good being on your show.” Donahue clearly hates O’Reilly.

But if you wonder who watches The Factor, copy the following link into your browser:

You might as well be reading Martian; I don’t have a clue what makes these people tick.

Back in 1902, the most important magic book ever was written. (This is debatable, but it’s what I think.) It was self-published with the title “Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge At the Card Table” by a man identified as S. W. Erdnase. It is now known as The Expert at the Card Table and is said to have been a bible to many magicians, most notably Dai Vernon. And no one knew who wrote it.

There was, however, a hint in the author’s name. If you reverse it, the name reads E. S. Andrews—a much more recognizable last name than Erdnase. And in the late 1940s, the mathematics writer Martin Gardner determined that the writer was one Milton Franklin Andrews. This man was already quite famous for something else.

Around the turn of the 19th century, Andrews was a globe trotting poker cheat—perhaps the best of his day. In 1905, three years after the publication of his magnum opus, he and his girlfriend tried to kill and rob one of his disreputable colleagues in Berkeley, California. Andrews and the girl fled to San Francisco to hide out. In the mean time, the SFPD determined that Andrews was wanted in the murders of three other people in different cities across America. Eventually, the police located Andrews, who killed his girlfriend and then himself.

Or not. It is possible that Andrews was innocent of these murders. It is even more possible that the police killed Andrews and his girlfriend. But there is no doubt that Andrews was not what we normally consider a “good guy.” But it is ever so much more pleasant to image him as a lovable rogue who was wronged by law enforcement, rather than a serial murderer. One thing cannot be taken away from Andrews, however: his great accomplishment in writing his book. Or so it would seem.

In the foreword to the Dover Edition of The Expert at the Card Table, Martin Gardner tries to take away this accomplishment from Andrews—at least partly. He writes:

I found this paragraph so upsetting that I had to get the book, The Man Who Was Erdnase by Barton Whaley with Gardner and Jeff Busby. I knew that even though I am a decent enough writer, if I were hand scrawling a letter to the police while worried about my life, my skills as a writer might disintegrate.

Yesterday, I got the book. At over 400 pages, is quite an act of research. It is, unfortunately, not well written—ironically, showing all the signs of lacking any editor, much less a good one. And it includes the entire 18 (?) page letter in an Appendix. Here is just a taste of it:

This is certainly not the writing of an idiot or ignoramus. It is also worth noting that Andrews wrote his book over a couple of years whereas he was only in hiding for a couple of days. But this is not really the case that Whaley makes in the book. Instead, a kind of deconstructed literary theory is used to sell the idea that Andrews was rewritten (or edited):

It is established in The Man Who Was Erdnase that Andrews hired a professional magician, James Harte, to add patter to the card tricks in Expert at the Card Table. Harte was most famous for his excellent, flowery, Victorian patter. Four of these words are taken from the patter of the very first trick that Erdnase explains (The Exclusive Coterie): “Beau-monde,” “patrician,” “plebians,” and “entree.” That’s 4 out of 15! What’s more, it seems unlikely that anyone in Andrews’ business would not know the word “chicanery.” What’s more, we don’t even have to depend upon the alibi letter, because many people who had met Andrews commented on how well spoken he was.

Perhaps most ridiculous of all: no editor or ghostwriter would change a text in this way. When helping a writer, one always wishes to make the author’s intent as clear as possible. Adding high toned words would tend to make the writing less clear. What’s more, it would explicitly change the author’s style.

The argument seems to be that a regular guy couldn’t have written something as polished as The Expert at the Card Table. But this is nonsense. It could be that Gardner, working most of his life with large publishers, understood how much editors had helped his books. He must have seen that The Man Who Was Erdnase was not turning out to have the kind of polished writing of Gardner’s mainstream books. And so it would have been natural to question whether Andrews could have created the fine writing in his book. But as we’ve seen, Andrews was no regular guy.

Update (12 July 2012 8:30 am)

According to Wikipedia:

After reading The Man Who Was Erdnase, this is very hard to believe. There were a number of people interviewed for the book who knew Andrews when he was writing the book. None of these claims on Wikipedia are referenced. And once again we see this argument that Andrews couldn’t have written it because his alibi letter is not as good as his book.

What the Wikipedia Erdnase pages shows, I think, is the ability of one person with an ax to grind to create a very dishonest page as long as the page is not very popular.

For about three and a half years, I’ve really hated the bumper sticker on the left. There are a lot of reasons. The first was that I saw it within a week of his taking office. Clearly, people were putting “So how do you like Obama now?” on their bumpers because you just couldn’t fit, “I’m an asshole who doesn’t like Obama so I’m going to pretend that everyone thinks the way I do and further that I was smart to see before you what you don’t see now but I’m assuming you do.”

Things were certainly as bad for Bill Clinton as they have been for President Obama. What is different is that when Obama was inaugurated, conservatives didn’t even pretend to give him a chance. It’s like Fox News, which reports every winter snow storm as, “Where’s the global warming, liberals?” In February 2009—February!—people were saying, “The economy sucks, I guess Obama isn’t the miracle worker he claimed to be!”

After a year, the criticism of Obama calmed to what we have come to expect of conservatives. It was at this point that my hatred of this bumper sticker entered a new stage. I could honestly answer the question, “Not that much, but for actual policy reasons that you would make you love Obama if only he were a Republican.” I hated how the bumper sticker implied that the owner knew my original feelings about Obama, which were complicated to say the least; I supported him but I didn’t expect all the much (I was still disappointed). Even more enraging was the idea that if I were unhappy with Obama it was for the same reasons they were unhappy with him. The problem is, I could never figure out why they were unhappy with him, except of course, that he was a Democrat. Go team!

Quite recently, I’ve seen these bumper stickers in a new light—my third stage. I didn’t know many people who were Obama true believers; I run with a cynical crowd. As a result, I hadn’t thought about these people who believed those campaign speeches about hope and change. But I should have. People who can think of the future in terms of hope and change should be honored. They are the best of what we are.[1]

And the bumper sticker’s rhetorical question is offensive. It scoffs at these people. It says, “You are a bunch of naive fools!” But if our culture is to have any hope, we need all the naive fools we can get.[2]

[1] That’s a reference to Bruce Cockburn’s great Nicaragua:

[2] I don’t claim to be anything but a cynic. But I’m smart enough to know that change is needed and that we won’t get it from people like me who don’t believe it’s possible. This is my idea of a bumper sticker: Fuck America!

Julianna Forlano, a stand-up comedian out of Brooklyn, has created a regular (every 2-4 weeks) YouTube show called Absurdity Today or “Ironic News Report.” She’s been doing it for a bit over a year with good results. Her shtick is low key sarcasm—a refreshing change of pace from the fiercely perky demeanor of many of today’s vlog stars.

Despite solid production values, the show has not managed to get of the 5,000 view ghetto that I call, “Things Frank thinks are worth watching that aren’t baby otters.” But unlike Paul Day’s brilliant Billy Bob Neck videos, Absurdity Today would seem to have more potential to go big. She was embedded recently Crooks and Liars, which is huge. We look forward to her success.

The Gini Coefficient is a number between zero and one that measures income inequality, or more generally, how non-randomly distributed a sample is. If everyone in the nation made exactly the same amount, the Gini Coefficient would be zero. If one person had all the money, it would be one. It is defined as follows:

In this equation, y is the income and i is the income bin or “slot.” One interesting thing about this is that although this equation converges to zero as all the bin values approach each other, it does not when all the bins approach zero (except one). As the number of bins increase, the equation does converge to one. Or maybe I’m wrong. I’ve checked it a couple of times and ways. I’ll look at it tomorrow with fresh eyes.

Let’s look at a five bin system: US household incomes (the lower bound) in the five quintiles:

1. $0
2. $18,500
3. $34,738
4. $55,331
5. $88,030

Putting these numbers in the equation, we get a Gini Coefficient of 0.43.

How unequal is this? In The Great Divergence, Timothy Noah presents some data from 2005. In that year, the United States had a value of 0.37. (It is almost certainly higher now, but the main issue is that I’ve only done a rough calculation here.) There are only three countries out of the 30 in the OECD that are more unequal: Portugal (0.42), Turkey (0.43), and Mexico (0.47).

We’re number one! We’re number one!

Update 30 June 2012 9:18 pm

This has been bugging me all day, but in fact, the equation really does seem to behave the way I said above. (I can post a proof if anyone is interested. Anyone? Anyone?[1]) I got the equation from Wikipedia. In general, Wikipedia is very good when it comes to mathematics. Anyway, if anyone can figure out the error (which is most likely mine), please let me know.

Also from the same Wikipedia page, this amazing graph of income disparity since World War II. My, what is that country with the long positive trend?

[1] From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Interestingly, as far as I know, Ben Stein believes in supply side economics, otherwise known as, anyone? Anyone? Something D-O-O Economics? Voodoo economics.

The Daily Show often annoys me. Unlike The Colbert Report, Jon Stewart seems to have at least a couple of “conservative” comedians. Or his otherwise liberal comedians really have to strain when trying to produce comedy from a conservative standpoint. For various reasons, The Colbert Report feels no need to pander. (For one thing, many conservatives like the character in the same way many liked Archie Bunker.) As a result, even though the best episodes of The Daily Show are better, The Colbert Report is far more consistent.

Over the last week, Jon Stewart has done three segments on the BATF’s “Fast and Furious” program. He was clearly happy to have the opportunity to tout his cherished even-handed “just the facts ma’am” approach. The problem is that the “Fast and Furious” program was not what it was sold as. Fortune Magazine has an excellent article about it. In it, Katherine Eban tells how the program worked: suspected straw purchasers were allowed to offload their purchases to other buyers, but the weak Arizona state laws prevented (or at least dissuade) prosecutors from indicted the straw purchasers. This contrasts starkly with the cable news meme that the BATF sold guns to straw purchasers who sent them south where one was used to kill Brian Terry.

The Daily Show made the same mistake it often satirizes news agencies for: not waiting until all the facts are in. Here, they threw out the conservative meme that the “Fast and Furious” program was a conspiracy to gut the Second Amendment, but accepted that the rest of the story coming from the conservatives was right.

Those who get their news primarily from Jon Stewart have now had three opportunities to get the conservative myth about the “Fast and Furious” program. And barring the conservatives doing something even more ridiculous, it looks like that’s all Daily Show viewers will know. After the contempt vote in the House today, The Daily Show will have one more chance to set the record straight. My bet is that they’ll pass.

It is somewhat heartening to know that men like Harry Reid are in positions of power:

I’ll update regarding what comes of this.

Update

Today, the Senate passed the Flood Insurance bill without Rand Paul’s amendment. You go Harry!

Nora Ephron, writer and director of many successful “chick flicks,” died from pneumonia earlier today. That’s sad, she was only 71. But I have never thought much of her work. She kind of epitomized professionalism without depth. I rather liked some of her films in that “watch them in bed while you doze off” way. And I was impressed that she made You’ve Got Mail work as well as it did.

I suppose she will always be remembered for When Harry Met Sally—a film that I think really doesn’t work. How can anyone get to the end of this film and think it is a happy ending? The two are bound to break up and if they are very lucky, their friendship will survive. Or they will get married and end up hating each other. Regardless, it is not a happy ending.

But there is this scene:

Personally, I’ve always hated women who make a lot of noise in bed. It makes me feel vaguely violated and pandered to. “You don’t have to shout, I’m right here! What’s the problem? You got somewhere to go?” I will allow that I wasn’t always so wise.

Rest in peace, Nora; your time on this earth was not wasted. Yes! Yes! Yes!