Lizzie Borden: a Bad Columbo Episode

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Lizzie BordenOn this day in 1860, Lizzie Borden was born. She is famous not so much for killing her father and step-mother, but for getting away with it. And, of course, the rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

The history of this rhyme is not known, but I’m rather fond of the belief that it was made up by a newspaper seller. You know, like those people you see in the old movies selling papers yelling, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” For the record, she gave her step-mother 19 whacks and her father only 11. Whatever else you can say about about Lizzie, she wasn’t excessive!

When I was younger, I really loved the television show Columbo. In those cases, the murderers take such great pains to provide themselves alibis. But in the case of Lizzie Borden, she didn’t much take any pains whatsoever. It was a frightfully planned murder plot. For example, two days after the murders, she was caught burning one of her dresses. Even still, as with the O J Simpson trial, the prosecution and police work was very bad. There are really only two reasons I feel certain she did it: she had a huge and multifaceted motive and she was pretty much the only person who could have done it.

There is one interesting aspect of the trial. They cut off the heads of the victims for use in the trial. Since the trial took place about a year later, the bodies had already been buried. So after the trial, the heads were buried at the foot of each grave. It just seems strange to me that they didn’t dig up the coffins and put the heads back in. I mean, these were extremely rich people.

They were also, not surprisingly, all a pretty vile bunch. Daddy, for example, killed all the pigeons in the barn with an ax, because they were attracting kids to hunt them. Lizzy apparently had built a roost for them and was very upset about him killing the birds. That may have been the ultimate cause (but there was lots of money as a sweetener). As Columbo would tell you, it is always the little things.

Regardless, I think people should stop fretting about whether she really did it. I like this line from Verbal in The Usual Suspects, “To a cop the explanation is never that complicated. It’s always simple. There’s no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all. If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you’re gonna find out you’re right.” Regardless, the only other person it could possibly have been would have been the maid and the best motive that anyone has had for her is that she was angry about being told to clean the windows on such a hot day. I’m sure that the maid was used to doing whatever the vile Borden family told her to.

Happy birthday Lizzie Borden—you got away with it!

Selfie Toaster Dumber Than You Think!

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Selfie ToasterAs regular readers know, on the first of April each year, I write an article that is silly and (what I think is clearly) untrue. And I was really pleased with this year’s entry, Miracle Reagan Toast Discovered. I’m still kind of amazed that no one seemed particularly taken with it. While it’s true that some of jokes are groaners, and most of the jokes are too sly by half (“the companion piece of toast, which interestingly contains an image of Jane Wyman”), the very idea is funny. We’ve seen images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on toast. So I was very pleased when I came up with the idea that conservatives would find Reagan on a piece of toast.

Well, friend of the site Madeleine “Mad” Kane brought my attention to this article, This Selfie Toaster Can Burn Your Portrait Onto Your Morning Toast. I was immediately skeptical. It just had to be from a satirical website. As I’ve noted before, they aren’t always that clear and if it isn’t The Onion, no one really knows. But it is true: for just $70, you too can have a selfie toaster.

But don’t get too excited. The toaster is probably not what you are thinking. It isn’t like you plug in an SD card, select and image and it burns it. Not at all. Instead, you send the company an image, it creates a special metal plate that is put in the toaster and sent to you. So you can create a toast with your image on it and your image alone. I guess for $70, that’s about all you could expect. But it strikes me as kind of pathetic.

How I originally figured it worked was that you stick an SD card into the toaster, select an image, the computer inside converts it to grey scale, and burns whatever image you want on the toast. Is that asking too much? I don’t really think so. I’m already working on a far more interesting project, but I don’t think it would be hard to make such a toaster. You would simply have to design it such that instead of one continuous heating coil on each side, you’d have to have perhaps a thousand that are controlled by the computer. That would make the toaster expensive. But if one could bring it to market for $500, I’ll bet it would sell.

As it stands, the Selfie Toaster is narcissistic. Do you want to look at yourself on your toast every morning? Or your wife? Or even your kid? Not to mention that the bread isn’t properly toasted. I suspect that people will use the toast to give out as gag gifts or as a form of marketing. And then, within a week or two, the toaster will find itself stacked on a shelf in the garage. Perhaps a better name for them would be Shelfie Toasters.

Soon-to-Be More Knowledgeable

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Ignorance is the Key to KnowledgeI was thinking about a little bit of conservative polemics that I noticed during the 2012 election, although surely it is older than that. It goes something like this: Americans don’t see themselves as rich and poor; they see themselves as rich and soon-to-be rich. Now this is nonsense as politics go. Of course it isn’t true. Most poor people are just trying to get by; they don’t even have fantasies about being rich, unless it involves the state lottery. But even as an aspirational claim (We want poor Americans to think of themselves as the soon-to-be rich!) it doesn’t work. Most people don’t want to be rich. Most people want to become something and while that usually does involve making more money, it rarely involves being rich.

But last night, I was thinking about this bit of polemics in terms of education. My first wife was extremely intelligent and well read. But she was hopeless in college because she was not will to, as she would put it, “look stupid.” She was younger than I and basically just starting as a physics undergraduate when I was in graduate school. But try as I may, I could never convince her that it was fine to look stupid and ignorant and lots more. That is what school is about. In fact, if I were talking to her today, I would tell her that that is what life itself is about.

My wife is sadly not a rare specimen. I see it especially among men who, when younger, were always the smartest kid in class. But somewhere along the line, they stagnate because they think they have a reputation to uphold. They are wrong, of course. People don’t think of me as knowledgeable because I know everything about everything. The truth is that far greater minds than my own couldn’t know more than a small fraction of everything we as a species know. So admitting ignorance does not make one “look stupid.” Well, I suppose he might look stupid if Paul Krugman got up in front of a class and told them that “demand” was the function showing how much of a product suppliers would be willing to supply at a given price.

There is a terrible irony here that a person’s desire to be perceived as knowledgeable leads to them being less knowledgeable than they would be if they didn’t worry about it. So I have an idea that I fully admit that I’m stealing from the Republicans. “People aren’t knowledgeable or ignorant; they are knowledgeable or soon-to-be knowledgeable.” Although the truth is, I’m not even quite happy with that. Because I’m a pretty knowledgeable person, but I don’t think there isn’t a person on the earth who doesn’t have concrete information to give to me. (Well, barring babies and people in vegetative states.) So maybe it is better to say, “People aren’t knowledgeable or ignorant; they are all soon-to-be more knowledgeable.”

One of the most annoying things people say to me is, “I’m not that smart.” It’s also heartbreaking. I always wonder who told them that. I also imagine a lot of people were given tests when they were younger. When I was in school, starting 45 years ago, I remember being tested all the time. We test even more now. But I was always thrown into the advanced math classes and the slow English classes. But I was blessed and cursed with a rebel’s soul, and now I figure I know more about literature and writing than 99% of the all of the teachers in all the pre-college schools I went to (and I went to a lot). Because it doesn’t really matter how smart you are (and I don’t even really know what “smart” means anymore). And it doesn’t matter how much talent you have. If you love learning—and I think we all do naturally—you are soon-to-be even more knowledgeable.

Never fear, let your love make you brave: your ignorance will soon make you more knowledgeable!

Misunderstanding Thomas Kuhn

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Thomas KuhnThe great philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn was born on this day in 1922. He is best know, of course, for his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he argued that science doesn’t so much evolve slowly but rather lurches from one paradigm to another. I think this is often misunderstood to mean that it is random, but that’s not it at all. Scientists create one paradigm like, “radiation is continuous like a river flowing rather than a rock slide.” And we learned much using this paradigm. But then we learned about the ultraviolet catastrophe, where increasing an objects temperature didn’t cause the frequency of light to just get higher and higher. And so, a scientific revolution took place and we moved to a new paradign, “radiation is not continuous; it is like a rock slide and not a flowing river.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything we learned in the old paradigm was now wrong. It all became a special case of the new paradigm. In my example, the truth is that the “rocks” are so small that they usually look like a river flowing. Unfortunately, a lot of people have used Kuhn and people who have followed him to argue for relativism. We see this in the worst excesses of postmodernism. A lot of that comes from a misunderstanding of what science itself is. And sadly, I see this misunderstanding in notable scientists all time. Science isn’t reality or even what causes reality. It is simply an endeavor to create models of how reality works.

I’m very interested in the uncertainty principle, which states that we can only know an object’s velocity and position to a certain level. It is named after Werner Heisenberg, because it falls out rather simply from his formalism of quantum mechanics. Does that mean that there is an inherent uncertainty in the universe? No! (But as far as we humans living inside the universe it probably does.) What it means is in the very best model we have of mechanics, there are limits to how accurately we can measure objects.

So Kuhn was not arguing for relativism. In fact, he argued just the opposite and pushed back against that reading of his work. It is funny, though. In the world of normal people who don’t deal with the philosophy of science, it was initially the liberals who were most interested in relativism. In the conservative Paul Johnson’s book Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s, he spends much time attacking relativism among liberals. (Johnson is also a Catholic.) But if you look at modern America, you will see that it is the conservative movement that has fully embraced relativism. The conservative argument against global warming is the same as The Dude’s in The Big Lebowski, “That’s just like, your opinion, man.”

What is perhaps most interesting about Thomas Kuhn’s work is that it created a revolution in the history of science. So it was an example of what it was talking about. It has done an enormous amount to increase our knowledge of how we advance intellectually. It has also had a bad effect on the way some people look at the whole intellectual endeavor. But I certainly don’t think that Kuhn can be blamed for people misunderstanding his work.

Happy birthday Thomas Kuhn!

Sad About Johnny Winter

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Johnny WinterI just heard the news that Johnny Winter died last night. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to beat the odds and live to be at least as old as William Burroughs. But he was 70, which is probably longer than I’ll last, so that isn’t too bad.

I learned so much about playing the blues guitar from him. Not the solos—he was too good, too creative, and too fast for me. But his great blues rhythm guitar work was just so clear, and beautiful, and profound. Listening to him as like taking a master class.

We celebrated his last birthday here, Johnny Winter’s Mississippi Blues. Here he is doing “Sound the Bell” and making it all look so easy and sound so impossible:

I’ll miss knowing he is still out there doing what he was clearly born to do.

Paul Delaroche as He Ought to Have Been

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Paul DelarocheOn this day in 1797, the great French painter Paul Delaroche was born. He is known as a “historical” painter, because he painted scenes from history. As a result, there are some complaints that sometimes his history wasn’t quite right. Or maybe it is more likely that some pedantic graduate student had his way with Delaroche’s Wikipedia page. It is said he cared more about creating dramatic paintings than in portraying history accurately. And I say, “Thank God for that!”

He was an amazing talent. Just check out this painting Napoleon Abdiquant a Fontainebleau (Napoleon Abdicating in Fontainebleau). Was that the way it was? I don’t know. I don’t care. It is the way it ought to have been!

One painting the Wikipedia page has special criticism for is, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. It says, “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey is represented as taking place in a dungeon, which is badly inaccurate.” Oh my God! It turns out she was actually executed in the open air. We should just burn the painting! After all, look at how poorly it is rendered:

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey - Paul Delaroche

Delaroche is best know for painting the Hemicycle, which is an almost 90 foot long mural at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. It was supposed to be in the style of Raphael, and it is; and as a result, I think it is some of his weakest work. It is still, however, insanely great. This is the middle of three sections with Phidias, Ictinus, and Apelles sitting up there like the kings of architecture, sculpture, and painting:

Hemicycle - Delaroche

It is also said that he was so in love with his wife that he never got over her death, and confined himself to religious painting after that. I think that is largely true. Regardless, we shouldn’t remember Delaroche as he was but as he ought to have been. That’s how he would have wanted it.

Happy birthday Paul Delaroche!

Humans, Swallows Equally Delusional

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SwallowI gotta get this off my desk. For a month, I’ve wanted to talk about this amazing video, Swallows Suss Out Motion Detectors, Learn to Open Doors. Some college campus added motion detector doors to their “Campus Bike Centre.” There were swallows who nested in there, but they still needed to get in and out. Almost immediately, they learned how to activate the doors. In the video below, you will see them. They fly past the detector and then do small circles until the doors (which are slow) open.

What bugs me about this is that a lot of scientists say, “Oh, this is just stimulus and response. They aren’t necessarily learning the way humans do.” I used to accept this kind of thinking. You hear the same thing about Koko, the sign language using gorilla. It sounds Very Serious to make such pronouncements, “We can’t know that they are really doing what we are!” But then two things occurred to me.

First, this is an anti-evolutionary idea. It is the idea that somehow humans aren’t just yet another great ape that has a large brain and an over-sized frontal lobe. This is just a dressed up version of what you read in the Bronze Age Bible. Yes, we are so different from other animals. But if you accept evolution, you can’t think there is some kind of quantum leap between us and swallows, much less us and gorillas.

The ThinkerSecond, this is a weird form of solipsism. The normal kind is where we can’t know if anything outside of yourself exists. But this form is that we can’t know what’s going on in a bird’s brain. Well, that’s true. But I also can’t know what is going on in other humans’ brains. Maybe they actually think like I do, or maybe it’s just stimulus-response. Maybe other humans seem to think like I do, but they are really more like alligators without as many teeth. Who can say?

The truth is, we can’t say for certain. And as Bertrand Russell noted, we can’t say for sure that there isn’t a teapot orbiting the sun between the earth and Mars. We have to take some things on faith, like the idea that there is an external reality. But I tend to think things are actually the opposite of what I’ve been arguing. Swallows opening doors is just stimulus-response. And so was Rodin’s actions when he was carving the first version of The Thinker. I’m more than willing to believe that. But there is something in the wiring of brains that tricks us into thinking that we are actually, you know, thinking. And I don’t see any reason to “think” that swallows don’t suffer from the very same delusions.

See also: Monkeys Do Math as Expected.

Steve Israel Should Become a Republican

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Steve IsraelJonathan Chait wrote a very thorough and important article today, Why Democrats Can’t Be the Party of Business. It is about how Democrats, like “little brain” Steve Israel, are reaching out to the business community because the fact of the matter is that the Republicans are doing everything they can to destroy the economy. According to such Democrats, the business community ought to embrace the party. Chait’s response is basically: grow up!

He makes it more complicated than it really is, however. It is as simple as this: it isn’t about the business community. This is about rich people who own one or more businesses. The United States Chamber of Commerce is a ridiculously conservative group. But local chapters of the Chamber of Commerce are generally pretty middle of the road. That’s because most businesses are small and their owners aren’t rich. So the US Chamber of Commerce will always be for the Republican Party alone for one simple reason: it will cut their taxes.

So Democrats mope around complaining that they are pro-business and yet they don’t get nearly as much of what Gil Fulbright calls, “Those sweet, sweet campaign donations.” And that’s what was so crazy about the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and it’s creation of the New Democratic movement. Being more anti-poor and more pro-business didn’t gain the Democrats anything. I’m working on a longer piece regarding this, but what I am able to show is that Clinton didn’t win because he was a “new kind of Democrat.” Given the economy, Dennis Kucinich would have beat Bush the Elder in 1992. The same is true of Obama in 2008. It is just a myth that Democratic elites have convinced themselves that “moderating” the party is what got them into the White House.

But just look at how much smarter the Republicans have been. Bush the Younger didn’t “moderate” his policies; he just claimed that he was a “compassionate conservative.” As far as I could tell, that just meant someone who claimed to feel bad about all the ways that he was hurting the poorer classes. But it was Clinton and not Reagan or either of the Bushes who did the most harm to welfare in this country. What?! Did Clinton think we would always have as good an economy as we had in the late 1990s? The Republicans have learned who their allies are and that eventually, they get into power by hook (a bad economy) or crook (the Supreme Court).

But even after all of this? After 25 years of DLC lunacy, Democrats like Steve Israel think that, surely now the US Chamber of Commerce will start giving the Democrats those sweet, sweet campaign donations?! I have made peace with supporting a tactically stupid and ideologically spineless Democratic Party. But don’t push it! If the Democratic Party continues its march to the right, I’m not the only one who will abandon it.

The only way that the rich are going to start supporting the Democratic Party is if the Democrats start a bidding war. Here’s an idea I haven’t heard that I’m sure they’d like: a reverse estate tax. Instead of paying a tax when you pass on your money to your kids, the government pays you. Let’s make it 25%! So if your estate is $100 million, the government gives your kids an extra $25 million. How about that? The only problem is, I assure you, the Republicans would offer 50%.

So can we please cut the crap? Can we please stop pretending that our enemies—the people who think that no level of inequality is bad—are going to support us? Because when you have a single party that is supported by both the Koch brothers and me, what you really have is a country with only one political party. If Steve Israel wants to reach out to those people, then get the hell out of my party!

Gil Fulbright Ads Are Very Funny But Probably Counterproductive

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Gil Fulbright - Represent.USThe anti-corruption group Represent.US has decided to run a fake political campaign in Kentucky. It is hilarious, as I will show you in a moment. But it does bother me to some extent. The reason is that focusing attention on corruption during a campaign doesn’t cause people to get involved as much as to not even bother to vote. And when that happens, it hurts the liberal cause—at least in the short term. In the long term, who knows? But I’m rather cynical about getting money out of politics. Campaigns like Represent.US strike me as going for a knock out blow when the best bet is always to push back—work for marginal reform.

Our most recent problem with political corruption is that Republican Presidents have appointed Supreme Court justices who have defined corruption so narrowly that it basically doesn’t exist. According to John Roberts, handing a pile of cash to a politician while winking at him is not corruption. According to him, what you need is to have the CEO of an arms contractor hand a politician a pile of cash; the CEO must say, “I’m giving you this pile of cash so that you will give me the contract for blah blah blah; the politician must then say, “Because I am getting this pile of cash, I am going to give you the contract for blah blah blah”; and this must all be done during halftime at the Super Bowl when at least 15 cameras and microphones record it. Then you have corruption. Otherwise, “What corruption? Sure I took plenty of money from that CEO but his company just happened to be the best one for blah blah blah.”

The truth is that in the Kentucky race, if the Democrat Grimes wins, it will only be barely. And ads and other political events that will tend to equate them might be all the difference in the world. And if the Senate goes Republican next year and one of the Supreme Court justices dies, it is almost certain that the Senate will not approve any replacement that Obama proposes. And if a Republican wins the White House in 2016, you can kiss the Supreme Court goodbye for next two decades at least.

On the other hand, Alison Lundergan Grimes seems to have a good campaign, and might be able to leverage this Represent.US campaign. It is very clear that McConnell will certainly have more money over all and more money from outside the state. And, as I show further below, there is some false equivalence going on from Represent.US. But maybe I see things this way just because I’m old and fearful and I’ve only seen this country become more and more of an oligarchy. But given the current state of things, our only hope is a Constitutional Amendment. And I’m not sure this ad campaign leads us in that direction so much as it leads us to, “Both sides suck, let’s not vote!” Because I assure you, the rich know who will cut their taxes, and they will vote.

Having said all that, this videos are great. Here is Gil Fulbright for Senate:

I do actually have a policy problem with this video. Of the three things that Represent.US thinks are beyond question worth doing, I disagree with two. A “Balanced Budget” is not necessarily a good idea ever and it certainly isn’t now. And “Education Reform” has become nothing but a dog whistle for “test more and destroy teachers’ unions.” As for the one I don’t disagree with—”Healthcare Reform”—I’m not even sure what that’s supposed to be, given we just got it and we are watching it work while conservatives continue to claim it isn’t. But otherwise, I agree with it all and it is really funny.

The next is Net Neutrality:

That one is just pure genius. The fake download delay indicator is brilliant as is the tag line, “I’m Gil Fulbright; for the right price, I’ll approve any message!”

And the last of the fake campaign ads is, Healthcare Costs:

Whoever the actor is, he’s great. But I have a bit of a policy complaint about this one too. Obamacare is a great thing for the healthcare industry. It is, after all, the conservative healthcare reform law. So the Republicans being against it really isn’t about what their funders are saying. And the bill also puts stimulus into the economy, so it’s good for all businesses, just as the SNAP program is. So it isn’t just about money in politics. The Republican Party really has gone off the ideological north pole where a compass is useless. They don’t know why they believe some things. And that’s definitely the case when it comes to healthcare.

That’s it for the ads. This last one is kind of an infomercial for Represent.US. And it’s kind of pathetic, even dangerous. They say they want people to rise up and pass tough new anti-corruption laws. Well, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court recently overturned just such a law in Montana. It might have been nice if there had been one less Republican appointed justice and one more Democrat appointed justice—regardless of my many problems with the Democratic Party.

But we are told in the video that McConnell and Grimes are just the same. The narrator says, “Three-quarters of both candidates money is coming from outside of Kentucky.” But it actually shows that while Grimes is getting 3/4 of her money from outside Kentucky, McConnell is getting 7/8 of his money from outside Kentucky. I don’t mean to nitpick, but this is the kind of thing that makes matters worse. We’ve seen this time and again: if you claim there is no difference when there is still a notable difference, you benefit the worse person. And note: thus far in the election, McConnell has raised more than double what Grimes has. But there is no indication of that in their little infographic. In fact, their infographic implies that they have as much money.

So the ads are funny and I’m all for satire. But I’m not too keen on Represent.US and I don’t think they are too clear on what they are doing. You are better off giving your money to Wolf Pac, which may not be as entertaining, but has a better plan.

Amazing Predictability of PolitiFact

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Amazing Diversity of Fox News AnchorsPolitiFact seems determined to demonstrate that they are completely stupid and useless. Consider the history of the whole “fact checking” industry. People looked around and noticed that there was a problem with reporting, which tended to just provide what both “sides” were saying in a conflict. So the fact checkers were going to get out there and make actual judgments. But they ran into the same problem that reporters suffered from: how could they be seen as objective, if they didn’t find both “sides” equally to blame for everything. So PolitiFact, along with every other major fact checking source, has bent over backwards to find false equivalence. This isn’t just done with nitpicking liberal claims, it also involves picking really minor liberal claims. Even still, conservatives hate the fact checkers, because even with all the false equivalence, they come off looking worse.

A good example of both fact checking problems was found at PolitiFact last week, Image of 9 White, Blond Women Shows “Amazing Diversity of Fox News Anchors.” Jamal Dajani put up the photo above on his Facebook page with the title, “The amazing diversity of FOX News anchors.” This goes along with the idea that Fox News really like blond women. Everyone knows this is true: Fox News is not terribly diverse, especially when it comes to women.

Now a good counterargument to this is that this is largely true for the entertainment industry generally. But what people are noting when they complain about Fox News is that the only women on the network who any normal person can name—Gretchen Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Greta Van Susteren—all have blond hair. There is no question of that. And the title that Dajani provided for the photo collage was not, “Fox News only has blond haired anchors.” Also, it’s a joke, guys. So that is the second part of what PolitiFact does to be stupid and useless: pick an obscure statement from an obscure person and “study” it.

They also did the first thing: they nitpicked the claim. They also sort of proved that it was true. They listed all the anchors on Fox News and found that of the 26 women, 14 had blond hair and 12 did not. They made no mention of the fact that only about 25% of Americans have blond hair. And over half of the Fox News anchors have blond hair. But it gets worse, because that seems to be a requirement of PolitiFact articles.

The article goes on to point that while most of the anchors are white, they aren’t all. There’s Arthel Neville, daughter of Art Neville, who is African America. Well, yeah, I guess, she is. And Uma Pemmaraju is an Indian-American. But both women are no darker than a well tanned English woman—for example, Julie Banderas (half English, I think). Even by local news standards, Fox News‘ lineup is incredibly white and blond haired. They are, regardless, much more white and blond haired than the nation is.

In the end, PolitiFact found the claim “mostly false.” It said, “The Facebook image gives the strong impression that all female Fox News anchors and hosts look alike.” Well, as I said, it was a joke—an exaggeration that made a deeper point, that PolitiFact’s own reporting confirmed. But it does allow the company to put another one in the conservative column, “See: we go after liberals too!”

I am aware of times when PolitiFact has gone after silly conservative points too. But I’ve never seen one this silly. And crazy conservative conspiracy theories are often widely believed on the right. No one looking at that picture thought that all female Fox News hosts have blond hair. And even if they did think that, what does that have to do with politics? Was Jamal Dajani calling for the Labor Department to investigate Fox News for unfair hiring practices? No. I suspect this was just PolitiFact trying to make nice with Fox News that has been at war with it for years.

Afterword

I can’t seem to find any time when I said anything nice about PolitiFact. I hate it when liberals use PolitiFact when it happens to get something right—which in fairness, they often do. But they get things wrong enough that it is best to never grant them legitimacy. If you want to use some of their research or argumentation: fine. But just because PolitiFact says something is true or false means absolutely nothing.

See Also

PolitiFact Has Sucked for a Good Long Time
PolitiFact’s Tweet Patrol
“Fact” Checking Moves to Australia
Art Laffer’s Toxic Prescription

Barbara Lee and Blood Lust

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Barbara LeeIn general, I don’t do politicians for the birthday post, but Barbara Lee is 68 today. I lived in Richmond, California for a long time, so although she was never my representative, I was right on the border of her district, and just across the bay for other times. So I’ve been familiar with her from the start. But then this is mostly true for the rest of America. Just in her second term as a Representative, she was the only person to vote against the ridiculously broad Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).

I remember 9/11 really well. I remember how blood thirsty people were. There is, of course, a direct line not just between 9/11 and the AUMF and Afghanistan, but also Iraq. It took most people years to get over the need to attack anyone who was convenient, because we had been attacked. And that included Barbara Lee, who actually received death threats. That was in addition to causing her Capital Hill phone line to be overloaded with hateful calls. It didn’t matter that her vote had nothing to do with Afghanistan, but was a principled stand about a ridiculously broad law. It was unacceptable not to vote for any bill that was belligerent; to do so was un-American!

On the day of 9/11, when I considered myself a libertarian, I still managed to write:

This is a tragedy on a large scale. What bothers me is that this is only the tip of the iceberg—the real tragedy has yet to come and I am not talking about the death count from New York.

The real tragedy will come with the response by the United States.

Earlier today, the Golden Gate Bridge was closed. For those of you who don’t know, that is a bridge in San Francisco. San Francisco is not an island. What good is closing the bridge? Are we thinking, “We may not be able to stop terrorists, but by God! We can inconvenience them!”

We in the US have a strong tendency to respond inappropriately to any tragedy. Because of the uni-bomber, all packages over one pound in weight must be taken to a post office. Does this make anyone safer? No. We respond inappropriately to tragedy.

What I am expecting from this is a wave of new laws that demolish the civil rights of Americans at the same time that [they] don’t make Americans any safer. Ben Franklin said something to the effect, “Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither.”[1] Now we trade liberty for nothing at all.

Of course, I don’t always agree with Lee. But she is a good solid liberal. And she represents her district better than say, Nancy Pelosi (who I have nothing against) just across the bay.

Happy birthday Barbara Lee!

[1] The actual quote is, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Christie Pretends to Govern While Running for President

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Chris Christie: No Pain, No GainThe Chris Christie administration has put out a fake movie trailer for, No Pain, No Gain. It apparently has to do with a tour Christie will be doing this summer to push for ever more cuts from public employee benefits. Ed Kilgore says that he considers himself too out of it regarding pop culture to know if “this looks as stupid to other people as it does to me.” Well, as you all know, I’m not much up on pop culture either, but this doesn’t exactly count. It’s really very simple: movie trailers for the kind of film this would be really don’t look this way anymore. So I would say that as a parody, it’s about ten years out of date.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. The problem is who exactly it is going to work for. Take a look yourself:

Before I get to my analysis, however, I want to point out something that is kind of funny. When I went to the page to get the embed code, YouTube alerted me, “This video is unlisted. Be considerate and think twice before sharing.” I understand this. Sometimes, I put up work-in-progress that I only want a couple of friends to look at. But this clearly doesn’t fall into that category. What’s more, I’m generally a nice guy. I don’t go out of my way to hurt people. But Chris Christie does. He’s the last person who would be considerate to some poor guy who is trying to create a video and doesn’t want it to go public. So I found the warning ironic.

The whole trailer is made to sound powerful and important. It is not actually an ad about public pensions, it’s yet another ad for Chris Christie and his hope that come 2017, he will be President of the United States. And as such, it is the kind of thing that will appeal to people who already like him. I think it is a major mistake for Christie to pound away on how “powerful” he is, because it brings up three things about him that most people don’t like:

First, and most problematic, it highlights the fact that he’s really fat. The man has now lost so much weight that I would be dead if I had lost that much weight, and I consider myself somewhat overweight. Yet he is still morbidly obese. And everyone knows he’s lost this weight because of a surgery and not because he turned into Richard Simmons. That’s not to put him down. In my experience, the body wants to be the weight the body wants to be. But the lap-band surgery was clearly only done for political purposes. When most people hear the pounding subwoofers, they don’t really think “power,” they think “fat man walking down the stairs.”

Second, Christie’s entire political career has been defined as his using his power in unpleasant ways. The most obvious expression of this is a term I believe Paul Krugman coined, “Governor Yells At People.” And it is only the weak who he yells at. When he was in the middle of his little scandal, he was much nicer to reporters and regular citizens. When they asked him why he didn’t know what was going on, he said things like, “I should have. I guess I’m just too trusting.” Normally, he would have said, “I’m not going to answer stupid questions.” He rather reminds me of King Joffrey in Game of Thrones: mean and infintile, but a coward when facing anyone of equal power.

Third, Christie’s “power” is combined in this ad with his “bipartisanship.” Well, we all know what that was. That puts him in the same category with J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Except that in public, both of these men were more likeable. So the trailer is really saying, “Give me the compromises I want or I’ll shut down the George Washington Bridge again—or worse.”

I assume that Christie used state money to produce this trailer too. So in addition to everything else, he continues to be the fiscal hypocrite he always was. He’s going to milk this governorship as much as he can in order to fulfill his dream of becoming president. But obviously, Christie’s people aren’t idiots. This trailer is not meant to appeal to me, much less the young people for whom it would seem dated. It is aimed at his base of support in the donor class. It is also a preemptive strike against Scott Walker in the “who hates unions more” contest.

They also put out a fake movie poster, which you can see above. It’s funny, because they couldn’t even get that right. Movie posters are always presented with an aspect ratio of 3:2. But this one is almost square, with an aspect ratio of 6:5. But maybe they felt they had to make it short so as to cut off the worst part of Christie’s gut. It’s also poorly written and the design looks distinctly inferior to things Andrea grinds out for me in about an hour.

So Ed Kilgore is right that the trailer and the poster look stupid. But they aren’t meant for us. And it isn’t meant for anyone who would know any better.

Update (16 July 2014 11:38 am)

I see that the video has been removed. How pathetic!

Update (16 July 2014 1:57 pm)

Found replacement, at least for now.