You all know that I like rats — a lot. And I’ve certainly told you the story about the study that showed rats exhibiting altruism. In particular, if given a bunch of chocolate chips (which rats love), they will generally save some of them for another rat that is in another cage. But then I found out something unfortunate. All the females rats did this. But only 30% of the male rats did it. The other 70% of the male rats ate all the chocolate chips. I mean, rats don’t have to be altruistic. Having a selfish rat as a pet is perfectly fine because rats are awesome regardless.

But ever since learning that, I think about it every time a man does a horrible thing. It’s really not hard to conclude that 70% of men are selfish jerks. This does go along with my general sampling of male behavior. The one place that it breaks down is in that I also think about 30% of women are jerks. But I should be clear, because I’m implying that there are certain people who are just jerks. Well, sure: some are. But mostly, I think it is that 70% of the time, any given man is a jerk. Certainly I am not perfect. But the point is that because of the mix of chemicals swimming around in our bodies, women really are better then men.

Well, I was over on We Hunted the Mammoth. Why do I do that? It just upsets me. When I say that men tend to be jerks, I’m talking on the small scale. I’m talking about them doing things that I can see myself doing — in many case have done. But it’s nothing too bad. A trip to We Hunted the Mammoth is the gender politics equivalent of putting on NAZI Death concentration camps Germany August 28 1945. It’s really upsetting. But given that Nazis are mostly gone and MRAs are still around, very vocal, and I think, dangerous, it is necessary.

So yesterday, David Futrelle offerred up, Richard Dawkins, Lindy West, and the Cartoon Video of Great Hatefulness. It is about Richard Dawkins, because Dawkins was recently in a fight that is just like so many others that he’s been in. And that means in many ways it hardly is worth writing about. It’s more the backstory that bothers me. But before I get to that, allow me one sort parenthetical paragraph.

(What’s with the MRAs? Do they think people mistake them for “real men” or something? My direct experience with them is that they are a bunch of man-boys who are mostly just upset because they can’t get dates. It really is all about scapegoating women. I suppose for the older ones, it is about all the other things in their lives that suck. But the younger ones clearly need girlfriends — which they won’t get because they are such misogynists. I would be willing to provide training for the young ones, though. I’m no Don Juan, but it really isn’t that hard to get women to like you. Hint: don’t be an MRA.)

There is a woman named Chanty Binx who made the mistake of yelling at some MRAs on video. This went viral, at least through the Mammoth community. Which led to the usual rape and other violence threats. And then came a video that equated fundamentalist Islamists with feminists. The feminist in the video was a caricature of Binx. Richard Dawkins then tweeted out a link to the video saying that he didn’t think all feminists were like this but some where.

Ultimately, Dawkins backed down. But his back-down position I find truly repugnant. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. What Richard Dawkins is pushing as a good thing in fact destroys lives. So apparently, as a society, we should allow absolutely anything so long as it doesn’t threaten violence. This is beyond absurd. Has Dawkins never heard of bullying? It very often has nothing to do with violence or threats thereof.

But what’s sad is Richard Dawkins is — relative to the MRAs — reasonable. He even calls himself a “feminist,” even though he seems to think that as long as women somewhere are having forced clitorectomies, women elsewhere can’t complain about anything. And this is, remember, one of our greatest scientists. I guess we can just place him next to William Shockley. But it does remind me of all the New Atheist nonsense of, “I only believe things I have evidence for!” I’m sure that Dawkins and Shockley would claim the same thing.

Regardless: rats. Love ’em or hate ’em, they are not very different from us. I’m not against men. My rat was a male and he was wonderful. But we men tend to be worse than women. And at our very worst, we are terrible.

My friend Kristen McHenry recently wrote about, That Oddly Existential Bernie Sanders Ad. It reminded me that I had wanted to write about the spot. When I first saw it, I cried. Now that’s not terribly surprising, given that I’ve written before, On Sobbing and Being a Blubbering Fool. But the ad is amazingly effective.

The song, Simon & Garfunkel’s “America,” is the perfect choice. And the spot gets 15 seconds in before we see a Bernie Sanders sign, and then the man himself is incidental. But it turns suddenly different at the line, “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. They’ve all come to look for America…” Part of this is because they cut from the early quiet portion of the song, right to the end when it is most energetic. Then we see Sanders and his wife walking into an event and the sound of crowd rises. I’m not much for joining things, but it’s hard not to stand up and shout, “I want to be part of that!”

The commercial was designed for the Iowa caucus. And I assume most of the footage is from that state. And I have to say: it is really white. The state is 91% white and less than 3% black. It really is a hell of state to start our only national election. But I would assume that the Bernie Sanders campaign will continue to use the ad outside Iowa, and I assume they will cut a little diversity into it. I understand Ta-Nehisi Coates’ argument against Bernie Sanders, but what I think Coates fails to understand is that Sanders might be interested in shaking things up, but he’s also interested in winning. Sanders’ not being more radical on racial issues and having a pretty white commercial for Iowa are pretty much the same thing.

But the question is, “What is the meaning of the Bernie Sanders spot?” I’m with Kristen, it isn’t about nostalgia. She thinks it is about “our growing sense of alienation and loss of identity.” I think she’s definitely onto something there. But it’s clear that the identity to be found is not some sense of conformity. Looking for America is an odd kind of thing because we are all different. What binds us together must be something more nebulous. America is not a people but an idea. This is how I put it in my comment to Kristen’s article:

I am tired of — angry about, even — this idea that the sum total of my civilization can be quantified by the GDP — or even worse, the wars we’ve “won.” To me, the ultimate symbol of America is YouTube where people of great talent and little post their videos. They express themselves in all their idiosyncrasies. Yet we live in an economic system that not only doesn’t provide proper compensation, but also no sense of security. It’s as if our greatest cultural desire is to make the lives of ordinary Americans the same as the natural world where the strong thrive and the weak die.

I like Hillary Clinton. But I’m with Robert Reich:

That’s as good a textual description of that video as anyone could make.

I think that certainty can be an extremely dangerous thing. Having a healthy dose of doubt is really important. Personally, I work on having a constant background thought that I might be totally wrong — that I am not the keeper of The Truth. I try on things like “tax cuts for the rich help the economy” and “same sex marriage harms society.” In almost all cases, I don’t just find the fit bad, I can’t even fully squeeze into their absurdity before ripping them off. But it is good to try because there are little things you can learn and you can evolve on questions. Some issues I do find vague and difficult to take absolute stands on.

But I wonder about conservatives on this issue. I’m not talking David Brooks here. He’s an idiot and a hack, but some intellectual sunlight really does make it to his brain. But you have to wonder about the conservative truth believers — and that is most of them. And then you really have to take a look at people like David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt. They were two of the people behind the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) — the group that staged a “sting” against Planned Parenthood, using the usual tactics of highly edited footage made to look like something that wasn’t going on was — in this case that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue.

I read a really good Dahlia Lithwick article about it, The Anti-Abortion Activists Targeting Planned Parenthood Have a Slew of Legal Troubles. Thus far, there have been 11 investigations of Planned Parenthood and all of them found that the group was (as expected) squeaky clean. But the most recent out of Texas turned the whole thing on its head, “The Harris County district attorney, announced the surprise indictments against the Center for Medical Progress’ David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt for the felony of tampering with a governmental record; Daleiden received a second indictment for the misdemeanor prohibition on the purchase of human body parts.”

Not that it matters. In the end, this will be just like it has been with James O’Keefe. These two will get a slap on the wrist. Maybe they will even go to jail for a while. But the money will continue to flow in and they will continue to be stars in the conservative movement. But this whole movement of young “sting” operatives has yet to result in a single actual discovery. In the case of the CMP, an enormous amount of time and energy was put into the effort. And like always, they found nothing. This is normally the case when one investigates an outrageous claim. When you shoot for the moon, you almost always miss.

But conservatives don’t seem to care about the truth. The nicest way you can put it is that they think they already know the truth. So it really doesn’t matter that they take dozens of hours of video, cut it up to make it look like something bad is going on, and then release it. The ends justify the means because they just “know” that Planned Parenthood is selling fetal tissue. But I suspect I’m being far too charitable. Knowing conservatives it is just a matter of their side winning. (What continues to amaze me is that the mainstream press takes these adolescent pranksters seriously; have journalists no pride?)

Lithwick goes over in exhaustive detail all the legal problems that David Daleiden and CMP are having. At every turn they lose. As she put it, “The law is — we forget — different from politics, and even as politics becomes ever more a fact-free enterprise, the law is not.” This, of course, hasn’t stopped Congress and various state legislatures from acting as though CMP were on the level. But then, they are just looking for any excuse to end reproductive rights.

What it does all mean is that American conservatism is a kind of cult. Everyone in it just “knows” the truth and they will believe everything that confirms their beliefs. In fact, things that push against their beliefs make them believe it all the more strongly. It’s a very dangerous situation, given that these people will eventually be in control of this country and along with it by far the biggest military in the world.

Well, as of Wednesday, Ammon Bundy is in custody and the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is more or less over. One man ended up dead, which is sad. But given the situation, I think we need to be thankful. We aren’t talking about the most stable people here. It could have been Waco all over again. They could have decided to burn themselves alive. What I hadn’t known was that these guys had been coming and going from the refuge to have meetings with the press and so on. As a result, the FBI and local officials decided to just pick them up on the road. It looks like everything went okay until LaVoy Finicum panicked and drove away. When his vehicle got stuck, he charged at police and was shot dead. Ammon’s brother Ryan was apparently shot in the arm.

The supporters of these domestic terrorists are defending them. In fact, Nevada Assembly member Michele Fiore tweeted out, “My heart & prays go out to LaVoy Finicum’s family he was just murdered with his hands up in Burns OR.” Was she there? Of course not! She just heard it from someone else who wasn’t there. I’m not saying that Finicum wasn’t murdered in cold blood — police certain do that. But it’s typical of a conservative to just gab any liberal rhetoric and go with it, because they are postmodern and they define the truth.

To give you some idea of just how ridiculous this all is, on 21 January, Ammon Bundy went and met with the FBI to negotiate an end to the standoff. They was supposed to meet the following day, but Bundy left when the FBI refused to negotiate in public. It’s all too clear what this is all about. Ammon Bundy and company want publicity. Their demands are ridiculous: that the federal government doesn’t own any of its own land. Thus, according to these bozos, the land belongs to them. It seems to me that if federal land were to just go back to the people, it ought to be proportioned, which means that none of these people would get enough land to graze their animals in his new world. It’s just because they want to define the new world so that it benefits people like them — rich people who don’t need any help.

It is sad that Finicum is dead. But the whole thing is frustrating. All these guys have acted like spoiled five year olds. They don’t respect the law and they deserve to be put in jail for a very long time. But that’s not what will happen. Because they have a lot of money, this will all go on for a very long time. They will get slapped on the wrist. And if they get any kind of major penalty (and even if they don’t), they’ll just take over another piece of property that they don’t own. Personally, I think they should all be denied bail because the probability of this is so great.

Right now, perhaps a half-dozen people remain at the refuge. And they are talking tough. But now the FBI is not letting anyone in. It seems kind of strange to me that they ever did. I really do think the whole thing would have been better dealt with the way you deal with a spoiled brat. Let them whine in their rooms and don’t let them have any snacks. Soon enough, they’d get bored and give up. What they never should have been allowed was a major platform to air their petty grievances.

One thing that is ironic is that the Bundies and their followers have always claimed this was about the federal government. But it was the people of the local area who most wanted these guys to get the hell out. The FBI was getting a lot of pressure from the local people to end the standoff. But of course, Ammon Bundy has always hidden behind the “silent majority” rhetoric — claiming that the people in that area were totally behind them. They weren’t.

The whole lot of them should spend a long time in a jail or mental hospital — whichever is appropriate. And they should be watched. Because these are exactly the kind of people who blow up federal buildings — with day-care centers. These are bad people who the society needs to be protected from.

Just as recently, I’ve been going on and on about liberal attacks on Bernie Sanders, a month and a half ago, I was going on and on about the impending rise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve. And I know it’s annoying. It is so much better to mix things up. That’s why it’s so great to have James around to write things like his most recent, Minnesota Advice for Those Suffering the Cold Weather in the East. My understanding is that the women back there are strong and James is good looking. Anyway, I am going to rant about the things that I’m going to rant about. And today, it is back to the Fed.

As you may have noticed, Wall Street has been going wild. And it seems that the economy has slowed sharply over the last month. (Please: don’t ask me about Christmas; they take that stuff into account.) And so now it looks like the Fed’s brilliant idea of raising interest rates even while the inflation rate continued to be below its target seems like a bad idea that was seen by pretty much everyone who didn’t have a vested interest.

Robin Wigglesworth at the Financial Times wrote, Talk of Fed “Policy Error” Grows.[1] He quoted JPMorgan Asset Management officer Bob Michele saying what I seem to have been saying for the last few years (ever since the Fed started publicly itching to raise rates), “Historically the Fed has raised rates because either growth or inflation was uncomfortably high. This time is different — growth is slow; wage growth is limited; deflation is being imported.” So why did they do it? I guess in a sense, it is like asking why the Mad Hatter and the March Hare keep changing seats: by the rules of normal people, they are insane.

But none of this means that our current problems are due to the Federal Reserve. It is just that the rate hike worked in exactly the opposite direction that we needed to go. Lots of people like Paul Krugman have argued that the problem with the rate hike was the asymmetric risk. There was basically no risk of putting off an interest rate increase, but there was a huge risk of raising too soon. We can’t say just how all of this is going to turn out. But here is a chilling bit of reporting from Wigglesworth, “Most economists maintain the risk of a US recession this year are slim, but markets are now pricing roughly even odds of one, and that in itself has consequences.”

Could Federal Reserve Get Trump Elected?

Tim Duy (the Fed Watch guy) thinks that we won’t have a recession because it is a “sector-specific shock” and not an “economywide shock.” That means something to me because Duy is a brilliant guy who does tend to understand this stuff. Just the same, another economist who I listen to, Brad DeLong, wrote:

If you asked Tim Duy, the answer would be that the Federal Reserve thinks this is likely a temporary disturbance and that it’s very likely that far from reversing course, they will be able to continue raising interest rates, even if they can’t do it quite as fast as they had hoped. But I’m more focused on that asymmetric risk. What if the economy does go into recession? That almost certainly means President Trump or President Cruz. The Federal Reserve really does determine whether millions of people have jobs or not — and if tens of millions of workers gets raises. But what it does also affects who gets elected.

This stuff matters — a lot. And it terrifies me. It is perhaps the best example that we have that we don’t live in a democracy. We are all of us dependent upon what the plutocrats at the Federal Reserve do. And it affects us all the way down to the smallest city council.

[1] The article is behind a paywall. But I suspect you all know how to get around that if you need to. You could also, of course, subscribe.