Jonathan Chait made an interesting point today, Today’s Obamacare Non-Train-Wreck News. One of the many Obamacare scare stories was about how after the exchanges got going, the insurance companies would see that they were losing money (or whatever) and would head for the hills. Of course, exactly the opposite has happened. Insurance companies who are not already involved are seeing gold in them thare hills, and are jumping on board.

There’s nothing surprising about this. As much as conservatives have made a big deal about Obamacare, the law itself is really not that big a deal. It is an extremely modest effort to improve our existing healthcare system. It is no kind of takeover of the system. The vast majority of the people in the United States will not be affected in any way other than indirectly in good ways like seeing their insurance costs go down. So conservatives were doomed in their predictions from the very start by pretending that Obamacare was some kind of big bad socialist conspiracy.

The people who had an actual complaint where the people like me on the left. But we haven’t been shown to be wrong again and again. This is because we never claimed that Obamacare was something that it wasn’t. Although I will admit, we were more negative than we should have been—especially on the issue of cost containment. I know of no one on the left who has ever claimed that we will just have to scrap Obamacare and replace it with a single payer system—even though as a practical matter that would be far more possible than replacing it with the handfull of conservative ideas like tort “reform.” Regardless, we are happy to be wrong. Liberals are not an all-or-nothing group. If we can’t get a much better system, we will take a marginally better system. But most of all, we are willing to admit when we have been wrong.

In general, conservatives are not willing to admit when they are wrong. I still remember hearing the head of the Cato Institute saying that if some of their research found that government intervention was the best policy, they would bury it. Up until that time, I had admired Cato and thought that they were an honest think tank. But honesty in research is not just about getting the research right. This is a matter of telling the truth—the whole truth—and nothing but the truth. The head of Cato seemed to be completely unaware that he was saying the whole place was nothing but a propaganda mill. I could easily see them doing research and finding that a 20% increase in the minimum wage actually created jobs while a 50% increase destroyed jobs. So would they just cut out all the information about how raising the minimum wage by 20% helped the economy? Apparently so. And Cato is one of the most intellectually honest conservative groups.

Chait summed up what is going on in the Obamacare debate:

But it isn’t just on Obamacare; it is on everything. All the time I see conservative articles online that turn out to be dead wrong. But instead of updating them and admitting error, they simply disappear. When Fox News gets something wrong, they just stop talking about. In some cases, like when Bill O’Reilly causes a fire storm over something he said that was wrong, he will do a segment on it. But the segments really aren’t corrections. They define the error in the most mild way imaginable and more or less claim that he was right all along. Or consider Rand Paul who was caught multiple times lifting exact passages directly from Wikipedia and then pretended that those complaining thought he should be “footnoting” his speeches.

The problem on the right is that everyone seems to think that politics, reporting, and advocacy is just a game where there are no ethics—everyone just tries to win any way they can. Unfortunately, they are largely right. The media are supposed to hold them accountable for this. The people ought to know that half of the political spectrum will say absolutely anything to further their cause. But the media uses the most fatuous form of postmodern relativism to claim that there’s no way to say which side is right. And it is made all that much worse by the self-proclaimed fact checkers who seem to go out of their way to nitpick the left just so they can seem balanced. That’s not journalism; that’s apologia for whoever lies the most.

But when it comes to healthcare policy, I always come back to Avik Roy. He’s a smart guy. He really does know a lot about our healthcare system. Yet he uses that knowledge just to batter away at Obamacare. This week he tells us we should be more like Switzerland. When it turns out that Switzerland is actually more socialized than Obamacare, he just stops talking about it. Then he tells us that we should be more like Singapore. When it turns out that Singapore is actually more socialized than Obamacare, he just stops talking about it. Yet he is considered serious in our media landscape—even among liberals.

This is why people who listen to Fox News and hate radio are so ill-informed. It isn’t just that they get bad information—everyone makes mistakes. It’s that they get bad information pushed over and over and then they hear nothing. So they assume that that really important story about whatever must be yet another example of the “lamestream media” just letting Obama hand the country over to the terrorists. And this is why people that barely pay attention to any news are better informed. They may not know much, but what they do know is actual news and not just conservative propaganda masquerading as news.

I’ve gotten to the point where I would like to see if I can get some articles published at a higher level—places like Washington Monthly. Nothing too big, but a lot bigger than Frankly Curious. And so I’m working on some longer articles with original research. As part of that, I’ve been reading a lot of political science on the effect that the economy has on presidential elections. I’ve read various estimate that about 40% of the results of these races can be explained by the economic trend leading up to the election. This is an idea that Ray Fair did a lot of work on in the early 1970s. (You can get an overview of his work in a pdf, Reflections on Macroeconometric Modeling.) But that is rather complicated. I’m not interested in predicting the size of the wins. Just looking at it from a binary standpoint (who won), I’ve noticed something quite simple.

I looked at the unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1948 onward. At this point, I haven’t done a detailed statistical analysis, but I’ve done enough work to note a startling result: if the unemployment rate is going up, the incumbent party loses and if the rate is going down, it wins. I’m not going to go into exactly how I did the calculation because it is rough and I’ve already improved upon it. But I think the results are pretty clear.

In that period, there were 17 presidential races. If the unemployment rate changed by less than 10% (Not percentage points!) I called it a tossup. There were four of those races: 1948, Truman-Dewey (Dewey had a slight edge but lost); 1956, Eisenhower-Stevenson (Eisenhower had a slight edge and won); 1976, Ford-Carter (Ford had a tiny edge but lost); and 2000, Gore-Bush (Gore had a slight edge).

The 2000 election is a special case that I should be be more clear about. When I get to a slightly more coarse discussion later, I put this in the win category for Gore. This isn’t because Gore won the popular vote. I don’t think the popular vote matters. Politicians know the popular vote doesn’t matter, so they don’t campaign to win it. The electoral college is what matters. But in the case of Gore, I believe he did win the electoral college. Just because the Supreme Court stepped in and nullified an election result does not mean that the election result didn’t occur. I fully accept the fact that this model is useless if the Supreme Court steps into a presidential race and just proclaims one of the candidates the winner. (I can come up with a model for that too.) So keep that in mind. But remember, it was a tossup election regardless.

The one example of a presidential candidate losing when the tend in unemployment said otherwise was 1968, Humphrey-Nixon. Humphrey had a good, but not overwhelming economic advantage. He also had some disadvantages. The biggest I think was the civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration. The race was close, but if George Wallace had not run, it might have been a blowout. It is hard to imagine that many Wallace voters would have gone for Humphrey, but I really don’t know enough about the election to say. But let’s not forget that this was the election when the Republicans invented the Southern strategy that they are locked into to this day. The Democrats did not yet have an answer for it. It was the political Rumble in the Jungle when Ali beat the stronger Foreman by inventing the “rope-a-dope” strategy.

One thing I can say about that race was that this was a time when the American economy was booming. The month before the general election, the unemployment rate was 3.4% and it had not be as high as 4.0% for two and a half years; it hadn’t be consistently at 5% since Johnson ran in 1964. So it’s possible people didn’t care so much about the unemployment because it was already about as low as it could go. Regardless, my little model is wrong about it.

Removing the tossup contests, the model predicts 12 out of 13 races, or 92%. If we use the tossups, the model predicts 14 out of 17 races, or 82%. These numbers seem pretty good to me, and hardly surprising. Political scientists have long claimed that the economic trend is the biggest single effect on presidential elections. But the metrics they use like GNP and inflation rates are not things that directly effect most voters. But unemployment affects everyone, even they aren’t unemployed.

What’s especially interesting about these results is that from the 1980 election onward, the model is perfect. This is why I’m studying these data. Both of the major political parties are convinced that they win elections for reasons that have little positive, perhaps no, and very likely negative effects on their political fortunes. For example, Republican elites are certain that raising taxes is the worst thing in the world; people hate taxes and so they must never raise them. Democratic elites are certain that the only way to win the White House is to be a moderate.

Since I don’t want to get into the other article I’m writing, let’s look at the 2008 election. Did Obama win because he was a moderate? Did McCain lose because he was too moderate? Not at all! The unemployment rate at the beginning of 2008 was 5.0%. By October it was 6.5% and it was clear to everyone that it wasn’t leveling off. McCain could have promised to eliminate all taxes and made a credible case for having a secret plan to cure cancer and the Republicans still would have lost. On the other hand, if the Democrats had nominated Karl Marx himself, the Democrats still would have won.

What I find frustrating is that I think all the political elites (at least on the Democratic side) know this. But they want the conservative policies they advocate for their own reasons that have nothing to do with winning elections. But they have the voters cowed. We are told it would be terrible to nominate Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. And the Republicans are told it would be terrible to nominate Ted Cruz. But the truth is that if the economy improves throughout 2016, the Democrats will win pretty much regardless of who they nominate. And if the economy tanks, the Republicans will win; it won’t matter whether they nominate firebrand Ted Cruz or “moderate” Chris Christie.

On this day in 1831, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell was born. He is one of the “big three” in physics, along with Newton and Einstein. He died of abdominal cancer at the young age of 48, yet he did an amazing amount of work. There are three fundamental things that he did: color analysis, statistical mechanics, and electromagnetism.

His work on color analysis was not limited to physics. He determined that a color photograph could be created by taking three identical photographs of the same subject each with a different color filter: red, green, and blue (RGB). Six years after publishing this work, he became the first man to demonstrate a color photograph (photographer Thomas Sutton did the actual mechanics of it). This alone would be enough to have made him a very important physicist and inventor. He did much else on the subject including work on color-blindness and other aspects of color perception.

His second great contribution to science was in the field of statistical mechanics. His contribution here was to show how thermodynamics was really just the macro-scale behavior of countless particles doing their own things. The most important part of this was to explain the second law of thermodynamics which states that the entropy of a system always increases. He also showed that the temperature of gas (a thermodynamic measurement) represented the velocity distribution of the gas molecules. This work would later be generalized by Ludwig Boltzmann who more or less invented what we now know as statistical mechanics, a subject that terrorizes physics students to this day.

On a personal note, I never took thermodynamics as an undergraduate. I studied statistical mechanics with a professor known only slightly better for his mathematical brilliance as for his seeming cluelessness about the terror these subjects produced in the young students. In fact, I think he was responsible for this mass change of students from the far more rigorous BS program to the BA. I loved him, of course, even while I struggled—most of all in statistical mechanics. But in graduate school, I was forced to take a course in thermodynamics, and I found it almost trivial. If you understand the micro-scale well, the macro-scale becomes so much easier because your intuition has changed. Or at least, that’s how it worked for me. Thermodynamics without statistical mechanics is kind of like trying to memorize the behavior of a black box. My mind just doesn’t work that way.

Maxwell’s third and greatest contribution to physics was in the field of electromagnetics. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to put it, because Maxwell invented the field. Certainly people before him understood that changing electrical fields could create magnetic fields. But Maxwell was the first to see and quantify how electricity and magnetism were essentially just different manifestations of the same thing. This work was eventual reduced to the four Maxwell Equations, although their modern simple beauty was the result of work done by Oliver Heaviside a couple of years after Maxwell had died. That is the way science works: it is a group effort. Maxwell’s work came directly out of his trying to understand Faraday’s lines of force. But Maxwell was still very much living in Newton’s world. It would take another three decades before Einstein fixed the one problem with Maxwell’s theory: it’s need for a medium in which electromagnetic waves propagated. That is, by the way, what Einstein was doing in Special Relativity: his interest was in Maxwell’s work.

I do, however, think that while great people like Maxwell should be celebrated for their great work, there is much luck to it. Would Maxwell have made such great contribution if he had been born 50 years earlier or later. He was the right person at the right time. And what if he had been born in a small village in Kenya to poor fishermen? That’s not to say that his brilliance wouldn’t have shined greatly. (He might have revolutionized the fishing industry!) But there wouldn’t be t-shirts and coffee mugs celebrating him today:

I have always thought of Maxwell as more of a mathematician than a physicist—at least in his orientation toward the world. And indeed, he did have some opinions that seem rather mystical to me. Had he lived longer, I suspect we would have seem more of that. He was certainly not an empiricist when it came to the mind and social interaction. This is especially interesting as we are now making great progress in learning how micro-scale phenomenon in humans explain macro-scale behaviors of individuals and groups—work very similar to what Maxwell did with statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.

Those who knew him, said that Maxwell was socially awkward. But he was also a Romantic. He wrote many poems and set them to music. He sang and accompanied them on guitar. I find that wonderfully sweet, especially since I always imagined him as this great brain that did one thing really well. You can check out some of his work on Poem Hunter. Many of them are quite charming. And some of them are about physics!

Happy birthday James Clerk Maxwell!

In this article, I’m talking about individual racism—the feelings that we all have toward others who we don’t see as our tribe or whatever. I focus on African Americans, because I think that’s the biggest problem in this nation and the biggest problem for me, having grown up among a lot of whites and Latinos, but very few blacks. What I am most definitely not talking about here is the much more important issue of systemic racism and the way that our country in various ways keeps down the African American community especially. For that, I would refer you to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ excellent article, The Case for Reparations.

I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about Ronald Reagan over the past couple of months. And I have to admit, he does come off as a decent guy. His big problem was that when he saw things for real, or at least placed in a narrative he could understand, his impulses were distinctly liberal. Unfortunately, he was an ideologue. And not a very smart one. What’s more, what people now remember about him was all the radical ideology and absolutely false ideas like it was his buildup of our military that caused the Soviet Union to fold. But he did a lot of good in one way: he helped to lessen the threat of nuclear weapons. And that’s great.

But I still have a problem with the personable guy who everyone loved. And it all comes down to an issues that I’ve been thinking about a lot more over the last couple years: racism. But not just racism in a general sense, my own racist tendencies. I think anyone who claims that they aren’t at all racist are just lying—most likely to themselves. And the bad thing about that is that what we all need to do is fight against our racist tendencies. And that’s the thing about Reagan. Everyone admits that he was not a racist. But I think that’s just based upon the old definition of racism that really isn’t the way this disease usually presents itself. Of course Reagan didn’t use the n-word and of course he had friends who were wealthy and successful African Americans.

But just as I’m sure of that, I’m sure that if he found himself walking down a lonely street and saw a young black man approaching him, he was at least a little more anxious than if it had been a young white man. But it is primarily conservatives who won’t admit to this kind of thing. And I think it is because they think they can wish the problem away. Tim Wise tells an incredibly affecting story in his book, White Like Me. He’s on an airplane and he sees in the cockpit that the two pilots are black. And he starts to panic. “Oh my God! Black pilots! Are they any good?!” Now Wise spends his entire working life thinking about nothing but this kind of stuff. But still, that panic hit him, even though it was just for a moment. Then his rational mind came in and he realized that the fact that these black pilots were flying for a major airline indicated that they were almost certainly two of the best pilots flying.

So I don’t blame Reagan for the reactions that he certainly had, just as I don’t blame myself. I try to use all of these instances as learning experiences, just as I would like to think that Reagan did. These reactions come from deep down in our brains and we don’t have as much as control as we believe. Plus, they aren’t all bad. Having a tribal identity has a lot of good aspects to it. But it is mostly bad in the modern world. And it is mostly just our evolutionarily developed fear of anything that is different. The truth is that like most white people, most of the people I know are white. If I had more black friends (and that starts to get into the whole issue of systemic racism), these lower brain reactions would lessen at a much faster rate than they have with my very active efforts to think like a human and not like a reptile.

What I come back to again and again with Reagan, however, is how he used dog whistle politics. At the beginning of his 1980 general election campaign for president, he went to the Neshoba County Fair, just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi where the KKK notoriously murdered three civil rights workers in 1964. And he told the crowd:

That’s not just an appeal to Jim Crow; that’s an appeal to slavery; that’s a not at all subtle argument against stopping the southern states from seceding from the nation. It is one of the most vile things I’ve ever heard Reagan say.

And his states’ rights speech was hardly some outlier. Remember the “welfare queen”? The truth is that Reagan never used that term. You could possibly say that had no racist content. But during his 1976 bid for the Republican nomination, he talked about a woman from “Chicago’s South Side” who was arrested for welfare fraud. That signals about as clearly as you can that he’s talking about a black woman. He said:

It turned out the woman was not quite the criminal mastermind Reagan indicated. She was only charged with $8,000 in fraud and was convicted and given a prison term of 2-6 years. But Reagan wasn’t talking about that. He was implying that (1) all people on welfare are black and (2) they are all committing fraud.

So okay, Reagan was nice to black folks he met. But he pushed an ideology and policies that were extremely racist. And it is so much worse than that.

He wasn’t just hurting the African American community in the myriad ways that his ideology harmed them as a group. By using that kind of dog whistle politics, he was hurting everyone—regardless of their race and regardless of where they land on the racism number line. Because he was pushing fear and intolerance. He was making racism more acceptable. And he was making America more divisive. And he was making Americans more fearful. And he was doing it only in the service of gaining political power.

Of course, he’s not alone. When Bush the Elder ran for president, his most effective weapon was the infamous “Willie Horton” ad. And it continues to the present. Let’s not forget Newt Gingrich calling President Obama the “food stamp president.” The fact that Bush and Obama increased the food stamp rolls by an equal amount didn’t matter. Nor did the obvious reason that the economy had suffered through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Mitt Romney didn’t use the term, but used the issue against Obama. And why? It’s meaningless. It makes more sense to talk about unemployment or job creation. But “food stamps” skews black in the minds of most Americans, even though it most certainly doesn’t in fact.

I feel like I’m a victim of racism in the sense that I have some automatic reactions to different races that I’m not in control of. (One odd bit of this: I like the Japanese more than the Chinese more than the Indians, which is bizarre because I’ve only ever had close friendships with Indians.) And the more racist someone is, the most of a victim he is. When I see white supremacists, a small addition to all the harm that they do to our people and our culture, is the harm they do to themselves by living small, pathetic lives where they never have the pleasure of reading James Baldwin.

I will end with a question and my answer—but I’m interested in others’. Is the most important thing about individual racism just actively hating or feeling superior to other races? I don’t think so. I think those reptilian brain reactions we have that we struggle to control actually have a more pernicious effect on all of us. And politicians who use these individual weaknesses to gain power are the worst racist we have. And it doesn’t matter how nice they may be to individual blacks or how much money they may raise for the NAACP.

On this day in 1929, Anne Frank was born. Had she not been murdered at the age of 15, she would be 85 today. I figure that she would be alive to celebrate that birthday, because she had good genes. Her father Otto Frank lived to be 91 years old—the only family member to survive the Holocaust.

In the end, Hitler taught a lot of people a very important lesson: you should trust what people (especially politicians) say and write. There were a great many people throughout the world who brushed aside many of the things that Hitler said and wrote. There were even Jewish apologists for him in Germany during the 1930s. But many people did not have to learn that lesson. After the Nazis took power in 1933, the Frank family immediately began work to leave the country. Eventually Otto received an offer to to start a business in Amsterdam and within a year, the whole family had moved there. In total, between 1933 and 1939, 300,000 Jews left Germany. Sadly, the Franks did move far enough away.

In 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. At that point, the Frank family was trapped. And the Nazis methodically applied their anti-Jewish policies there. But the family was able survive through the first half of 1942. On her 13th birthday, Otto bought Anne an autograph book, which she used as a diary to chronicle here life for the next two years, The Diary of a Young Girl. These were the years that the Franks, along with the van Pels family lived in an annex of the Opekta warehouse that Otto Frank had been running.

Over the years, many people have questioned the authenticity of the diary. I haven’t read it in Dutch, of course, but it is very well written for one so young. And of course the Holocaust-deniers had their own vile reasons for questioning it. Regardless, the suggestion was always that Otto Frank had written it. That idea never made sense. It is so clearly the work of a young woman. And if its purpose was for propaganda, it would have been written differently. What I most remember from the book is how much joy comes from it despite an unimaginably difficult and terrifying ordeal. In the end forensic studies of the original diary have determined that of course it is authentic.

It’s shocking. The most concentrated, intense genocide in the history of the world, and some people claim it never happened. And not only that: it was a meticulously documented genocide. The Nazis weren’t trying to hide it from history. They figured they would win the war, all the Jews would be dead, and it would be a point of civic pride. And in addition to everything else that the Holocaust deniers do, they try to deny this murdered Jewish girl her rightful place in the history of great literature. She might well have been the Harper Lee or the Flannery O’Connor of her generation, if it were not for the large scale outbreak of the very worst that humans are. But it is a great contrast to the diary that is the very best of what we are.

Happy birthday Anne Frank!

Afterword

Hatred comes in many forms, some less organized. Fifty-one years ago today, Medgar Evers was murdered in front of his house and wife and children. He was murdered for trying to organize African American in Mississippi. But more fundamentally, he was murdered just because he was an African American in Mississippi, also known as, the United States of America.

Dave Brat is the guy who beat Eric Cantor yesterday in the Virginia District 7 House primary election. Afterwards, he was talking to Chuck Todd who asked him about a raise in the minimum wage. Brat then proceeded to waffle and do the usual libertarian move of obfuscating. Todd asked, “Where are you on the minimum wage? Do you believe in it, and would you raise it?” Brat did very briefly answer the first part of the question, “Minimum wage, no, I’m a free market guy.” But then he started talking about how Obamacare is destroying the economy. Of course, he totally distorted the law saying, “[T]hrow Obamacare on top of that, the work hours is 30 hours a week. You can only hire 50 people.” This is all right-wing talking point: companies are laying off people and cutting back their hours so they aren’t covered by Obamacare. As Alan Barber at the always trustworthy Center for Economic and Policy Research has noted, Everything You’ve Heard About Obamacare Being a Job-Killer Is Wrong.

But then it got worse. Brat went on to claim that the minimum wage could only be raised if productivity went up:

But Brat, the chair of an economics department, must know that the American economy (we can leave aside sub-Saharan Africa for now, given that it is just word salad from Brat) was doing quite well in 1968. If the minimum wage that we had then had gone up at the rate of productivity growth, it would have been $16.54 in 2012. That’s 225% of the $7.25 rate that it actual was and still is. So in as much as Brat is making any sense at all, he is making an argument in favor of a higher minimum wage.

I’m sure, however, that Brat was telling the truth when he first blurted out that he was for no minimum wage at all. He fancies himself a libertarian. But that’s not an opinion that even very many in the Republican base believe. So he will have to massage that position. That’s why he also said, “I don’t have a well-crafted response on that one.” Because despite the fact that he claims to be authentic, he is not inclined to say what he really thinks. Just another politician. Fine. Who cares?

I think Democrat Jack Trammell, who will face Brat in the general election, ought to care very much. Since Brat considers himself a libertarian and he’s an academic, I’m sure he’s written on the issue of the minimum wage many times. It is one of the favorite issues for libertarians. There’s a reason for that: it is an issue of freedom. If you are so inclined, you can see it as simply the government stopping people from entering into voluntary contracts. Now I can dismantle that argument, but that is the theory. If I were working for Trammell, I’d be reading everything that Brat ever wrote so that the campaign could point out what a hypocrite Brat is.

And it isn’t just the minimum wage. The issue that seems to have won Brat the election was his anti-immigrant stance. Again: this is not what libertarians believe. Libertarians believe in open borders. I’m sure a little reading of Brat will find that he’s written some things that are exactly contrary to what he’s been saying recently. And I’ll bet this is just the tip of the ice berg. Libertarians fancy themselves very philosophically consistent and that often leads them to very unpopular places—especially when it comes to Republican voters.

I still think it is unlikely that Jack Trammell can beat Brat. District 7 is supposedly almost 60% Republican. But Trammell can certainly trammel (Sorry, I couldn’t resist!) Brat’s ideological freedom during this campaign. He can make him squirm. And if things go right, District 7 could go Democratic in 2015.

Jack Trammell 2014!

Afterword

Here is Jack Trammell’s entire campaign website:

I do hope the Democratic Party provides him some money for this race. It has real promise. I may even pony up ten bucks myself—which is about the limit of my resources.

I find myself in the unusual position of not being interested in writing anything here. It is probably that I am badly in need of a vacation, but at $300 per night at the Timber Cove Inn, I just can’t afford it. You see, my manic-depressive cycle has turned down. What are you going to do? I don’t mind it. After all, happiness is a relative state. And intellectually, I know that how I feel now will be richly rewarded in the near future. But if I had had a large quantity of barbiturates last night, I might not be writing this right now. Note: I’m not saying that I was suicidal; I don’t do suicidal. But I did want to escape the world and go into a deep sleep and that often ends in death. See, for a beautiful, smart, and funny example, the tragic death of Marilyn Monroe.

But this morning (I did not sleep well last night, regardless) I felt good enough to finally getting around to quantifying my potato pancake recipe. You see, the first thing I ever really learned to cook was potato pancakes. About 25 years ago, I made them out of the recipe in the Joy of Cooking. And I loved them, which was not surprising because my mother made them when I was a kid. So I made them again and again. And over time, I stopped using the recipe because I knew it. And you where that leads! Actually, I didn’t. So recently I made the original recipe and I was underwhelmed. They were not nearly as good as what I now make.

This is not the first time I’ve written here about potato pancakes. The first time was back in 2011, when I wrote, Potato Pancakes. In that article, I put forth two of what I called “mom’s recipes.” This comes from the fact that my mother, who was an excellent cook, didn’t have recipes for anything. So she would say things like, “Oh add some potatoes and onions.” And I would respond, “How much?” And she would say, “Until it looks about right.” I have to admit that this is pretty much the way I am today. I wrote another article called, A Good Idea for Better Latkes. That was mostly a defensive article against another writer claiming that “you” are making your potato pancakes wrong. She was wrong about me, but for all I know you are doing it wrong.

After making the Joy of Cooking recipe, I decided that I had to share my actual recipe with the world. But it took me a long time, because it’s hard to quantify a recipe that you just know. And so I ended up with a number of batches that were suboptimal. Still, they were all better than the Joy recipe. And the recipe I ended up with not the very best that I make. But it is damned good.

So now you know the secret to perfect potato pancakes. The only question is: are these potato pancakes? At times, I will use a one-to-one ratio of potato to onion. At other times, I will use garlic. You can be very creative with this. At times, I’ve put small shrimp in it. Whatever this is, it is delicious. I call them all potato pancakes.

On this day in 1864, the great composer Richard Strauss was born. It is hard to exactly place his music as he straddles a very turbulent period of music history. But before we get to talking about him, we need to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yes, the theme (if you will) of the film is Also sprach Zarathustra. Or at least the “Sunrise” section of the piece is. The whole thing is over a half hour long. It’s quite an interesting piece of music and you might want to listen to the whole thing some time. It was written by Richard Strauss.

But the other piece of music associated with the film is An der Schoenen Blauen Donau, which is literally “On the beautiful blue Danube,” but which is know as The Blue Danube. It too is written by Strauss. But not Richard Strauss. It was written by Johann Strauss II (not be confused with his father who was also a composer, Johann Strauss I). He was a composer of operettas and other “light” music. And that just shows that you don’t have to be a “serious” composer to be great. In fact, The Blue Danube is one of the most exquisite pieces of music ever written—very fun and yet subtle. But it was not written by Richard Strauss.

I am most interested in Strauss (We’re back to Richard now.) because of his life. By the time the Nazis took over in Germany, Strauss was a towering figure in world music. And Hitler liked his music, not being the “decadent” kind of music from the likes of Arnold Schoenberg. Now Strauss could have just left Germany. He was a star. The problem was that his son had married a Jewish girl. So, because Strauss was a decent person, he spent a good decade of his life protecting his extended family—ultimately succeeding. Although this did force him to schmooze with the Nazis who he found personally repugnant.

Since I know you won’t sit for a whole opera, here is just a little bit of Die Schweigsame Frau (“The Silent Woman”). The libretto is by the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, which caused quite an uproar because Zweig was Jewish. Luckily Zweig escaped Austria. Anyway, it is based on a Ben Jonson comedy. And as you can see in the following trailer, it is a lot of fun and the music is great:

Happy birthday Richard Strauss!

I guess I won’t have Eric Cantor to kick around anymore. As a politician, he has definitely been the enemy. He’s a bad guy, working to make the country worse. But he’s especially noteworthy for being smarmy. Now a lot of politicians are smarmy, but he really made it into an art—he was certainly the best of the national politicians. So I’m not at all sorry to see him go. Anyway, he’ll get a high paying lobbying job and be much richer and happier. So good for him.

But do you know what his loss reminds me of? All those middle class college students in the 1960s who thought of themselves as “revolutionaries.” And among them, there was this tendency to try to out-pure each other. “Oh, you think people ought to be able to own their own toothbrush?! Heretic!” Actually, you see this thing all the time in small groups that don’t have power. Tom Wolfe ridicules this in From Bauhaus to Our House in the early days of the Bauhaus movement. Of course, the ultimate example of this comes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

And that’s all that went on in Virginia’s 7th District today. No one can seriously say that Eric Cantor isn’t conservative enough. Or that he doesn’t pander to his constituency enough. Or that he isn’t a good politician. But his own party effectively said, “Despite the fact that you are one of the most powerful people in Congress and can do all kinds of good things for our district, we don’t think you are quite pure enough.” And the problem? He didn’t hate immigrants enough.

The thing about this purity race is that all it does is cause whatever the movement is to fracture more and become smaller, and thus calling for even more purity. As I’ve long argued, I don’t mind seeing the Republican Party destroyed. I would mind it if the Democratic Party were not so ripe for a split. But on the one issue that everyone really cares about—the economy—the Democratic Party is two parties: one conservative and one liberal. And if the Republican Party went the way of the Nazi Party and the Democrats broke in half, it would be the best thing to happen to this country since the military buildup of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

So enjoy your riches Eric Cantor. And enjoy not having to represent one of the most ridiculous political movements that America has spawned in the last century. And let’s all just see your loss as the hopeful sign it represents for the future of America.