America’s Vague Caste System

Posted on 11 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

America's Caste System Normally, I would be writing my birthday post now. In fact, normally, I would have already written it, but I just had to say something about the YouTube “conversation” I had, Racist Conservative Youth Complains About Racism. The truth is that the birthday posts take hours to write. I would really enjoy doing them if I didn’t feel under such time constraints. And this has been a bad morning. All night last night I dreamed that I was working at this gas station that I once worked at for about six months. It was not a pleasant experience. The way economics works in the real world is not the way it works in economic models. And it sure the hell isn’t the way that it works in the minds of conservatives.

At that time, I wanted to get a grunt job. I was working on my first novel then. My thinking was: get a minimum wage job—just enough to get by on—and I’d be free to do my real work in my spare time. Well, that didn’t work out exactly that way. Mostly, the job was exhausting from an emotional standpoint. The customers could be trying and I was often faced with situations where there was no “correct” way to act. But that wasn’t the biggest problem. What made the job almost debilitating was how management treated me and everyone else who worked there.

I thought it would be more like, “We don’t pay you much, but we don’t expect much of you either.” That wasn’t true at all. Instead, it was, “We are taking food right out of the mouths of our children to pay you, so you had better be busy all the time!” What’s more, if anything went wrong, it was always our fault. Management made snap judgments based upon no evidence. It must be the wage slave’s fault, otherwise, he’d have a good job. At that time, I made $9 per hour ($18,000 per year) and my immediate supervisor made something in excess of $50,000 per year.

Finally, I had had enough and I traded in my $9 per hour job for a $65,000 per year one at a start-up. And the wonderful thing about that change was that management treated me with respect and dignity. And the work was different, but certainly not harder and far less stressful. That’s when I realized that the more an employer pays you, the nicer they are to you. It’s a class thing. As a computer programmer, I was part of the educated class and thus I demanded to be treated with dignity. But the same person working in a gas station is just lowlife scum.

And indeed, there were some lowlifes who worked there. One woman had stolen $700, which was caught on video. Oh, didn’t I mention the video cameras? There were 26 of them, almost all of which were trained on the employees. The employers’ greatest concern was their employees, not their customers. But most of the employees were incredibly dedicated to the business. For example, they worked double shifts at a moments’ notice. They showed far more loyalty to the employer than the employer showed to them. But these older employees were not treated any better than the new hires that tried to steal from the company. Well, no different except that they were paid about one dollar more per hour.

In our culture, how an employee is treated and how he is paid is dependent upon what class he belongs to. For example, Scooter Libby is not only a convicted felon, he is also a traitor to this country. But he never spent a day in prison. He was disbarred, but he has likely gotten his license back by now, or at least is in the process. Not that he has to work. In 2004, his net worth was estimated to be $15 million. And if he had to work, there would have been people around to give him a “job” that would have paid the bills.

On the other hand, some poor kid who got nicked for selling cannabis will have a hard time finding any legitimate work after getting out of that prison that Libby never went into. It’s very simple: there are the right kind of people who may make “minor” mistakes by harming national security for political gain but really aren’t bad (e.g. Scooter Libby) and there are the wrong kind of people who may make “major” mistakes by ingesting prohibited vegetable substances (that is: drugs) and are really bad (e.g. basically any poor kid).

Inequality in America is about a lot more than money. I have no doubt that Bernard Madoff would have received a slap on the wrist if it weren’t for the fact that he defrauded other rich people—other of the “right” kind of people. As for the “wrong” kind of people: they just don’t matter. That’s one of the reasons that conservatives don’t care about getting them health insurance. The sooner they die, the better.

Welcome to the American Caste System. Where do you fit in?

Racist Conservative Youth Complains About Racism

Posted on 11 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I called an end to it:

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

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

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

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

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

Update (28 November 2015 11:50 pm)

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

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

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

Ross Douthat’s Politics Before Religion

Posted on 10 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

Let’s leave Ross Douthat’s Catholicism aside for the moment. In his most recent column he is skeptical, Obamacare Turns a Corner? He has noticed that now that HealthCare.gov is working pretty well, liberals are optimistic about Obamacare’s future. Not so fast, says Douthat. The law still depends upon young and healthy people doing the “right thing” by buying health insurance to subsidize the old and sick. He says that this is what happened in Massachusetts, but they are a bunch of liberal people who want to “do the right thing.”

Douthat could not be more wrong. By his logic, young healthy people working for large corporations would not take the health insurance they are offered. After all, their premiums are exactly the same premiums as the old sick people who work there. There is far less unfairness in Obamacare. Young and healthy people want health insurance for the same reason that good drivers want auto insurance. We all want to feel safe. And just as a good driver can have his car totaled by a bad driver, a young and healthy person can go into bankruptcy because some idiot accidentally shot him.

Conservatives are irrationally obsessed with the cost benefit analysis of insurance. It’s as if before Obamacare came along, they’d never heard of insurance. If everyone got out of insurance exactly what they put it, there would be no point to having insurance. Insurance is a way of buying peace of mind. It is a way of paying a little constantly to avoid the possibility of having to pay a lot later. And with health insurance, it’s a win-win. Either you get more from your insurance than you paid in, or you are healthy. That’s a hell of a deal!

Douthat’s article is just seething with conservative anger and the hope that Obamacare will destroy itself. He’s talking to liberals and warning them that the game isn’t over yet. But he isn’t doing it as someone who’s on the team. He’s Tanner from the end of The Bad News Bears, “Just wait until next year!” He doesn’t want to provide healthcare for 50 million uninsured people. That would go against his idea of the American Way.

But would it go against the Roman Catholic way? Douthat is not a cultural Christian. He takes his faith very seriously as we saw in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, even if he was wrong about everything. So I find his clear distaste for Obamacare offensive. The healthcare law is, after all, a way to provide insurance to tens of millions of people with almost no social costs. But in as far as he can do it while retaining his pretense of being a “reasonable” conservative, he is cheering for its defeat.

A couple of months ago, Douthat wrote about Pope Francis. From his perspective, everything the new Pope is doing will be judged on the basis of whether it brings more people into the Church. In other words, to Douthat, it is all marketing and the Catholic Church is just a business. And that, I’m afraid is the edge of the water for Douthat’s Christianity. He’s not as bad as Stuart Varney, but his conservative politics come first. And he will tie up his religious beliefs in knots to justify whatever conservative policies he approves of.

Stuart Varney’s God Is Money

Posted on 10 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

I remember some time ago, Stuart Varney, the Fox News business guy, noting how he had to fight adversity. According to him, it is hard to become on-air talent with a British accent on American television. That’s like saying it is hard to become a world class sprinter because you run so fast. But Varney is an idiot—a very common idiot. I run into his type all the time. He understands economics entirely from a Chicago School standpoint. In his mind, economics is very simple. If you raise the minimum wage, there will be mass layoffs. If you increase the corporate tax rate, prices will go up. It’s very much like the logic of someone with a little physics education thinking that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building will crush someone’s head. It’s strange that anyone could think that prices are set based upon how much something costs to make rather than how much people are willing to pay for it. But that’s what you get when all your knowledge comes out textbooks and an ideological desire to believe.

Most recently, Varney had some very harsh words for Pope Francis. He doesn’t like the fact that the Pope is discussing economic issues. Varney said, “I go to church to save my soul. It’s got nothing to do with my vote. Pope Francis has linked the two. He has offered direct criticism of a specific political system. He has characterized negatively that system. I think he wants to influence my politics.” Oh my God! Say it ain’t so!

Note that Varney never had anything to say about the far more political questions of marriage laws and family planning. While the last two popes went all around the world making the AIDS epidemic worse because nothing was so important to God than that people not us condoms, Varney thought nothing of it. That wasn’t political! It didn’t bother Varney, I suspect, because it didn’t affect Varney. Varney isn’t gay. Varney doesn’t have to listen to the Pope anyway, given that he is an Episcopalian. What’s more, Jesus didn’t say a single fucking thing about homosexuality and birth control. But when the popes who Varney liked focused on these very political issues that are at best on the periphery of Christianity, it was just fine.

But Stuart Varney has a net worth of about $10 million. So when the Pope starts talking about income inequality, well, them’s fightin’ words! Varney wants his soul saved—but on the cheap. The very cheap: the free. The truth is that our modern idea of the soul is very different than it used to be. Now we think of it as some kernel that’s inside us. The Greeks, for instance, thought of the soul as the essence of who we are “that which decides how we behave.” But Varney wants to divorce that from his soul. Like most thoughtless modern Christians, all he thinks he has to do is “believe” in Jesus and his soul is in perfect order. It’s like The Great Pumpkin, but less believable.

What Varney really wants is the good old corrupt Church. The Church that never does anything to offend those who have money or power. And that’s fine. It is clear that Varney’s true God is money. But it is offensive for him to claim to be a Christian. It is even more offensive for him to think that he has any right to lecture the Pope about what his job description is.

The Best Birthday Post Ever

Posted on 10 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

Ada Lovelace This is a really great and varied day for birthdays. Really some days have a lot of the same kind of people. But as I think you will see, there are some really fascinating people today.

On this day in 1787, educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was born. He was a pioneer in the education of the deaf in the United States. As you can well imagine, deaf children at the beginning of the 19th century were largely ignored (and abused). He began teaching a neighborhood deaf child and this eventually resulted in him studying in France where the education of the deaf was far advanced. When he came back to the United States, he founded the American School for the Deaf, which is still in operation with 200 students. It will turn 200 years old in 2017.

The mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi was born in 1804. Now he actually did work that I understand: elliptic functions and differential equations. He has the distinction of being the first Jewish mathematics professor at a German university. It’s kind of creepy to think about that given what happened there just a hundred years later. But it wasn’t just Germany. Throughout Europe, Jews were seen as some kind of horrible creatures. Remember what Martin Luther thought of them just 200 years earlier. As much as I have my problems with the Israeli government, their paranoia is about a lot more than just the Nazis. And there is a sad irony that I’ve seen with other races. Jacobi basically worked himself to death. I think that is part of trying to prove to the majority that they ought to accept you. But instead, it is used as yet another reason for the majority to hate you.

The great Romantic composer Cesar Franck was born in 1822. Over time, I’ve had to reevaluate my distaste for the Romantic period. What I don’t like about it is the average material. Mediocre Baroque or Classical music is generally quite listenable. Mediocre Romantic music is annoying in the extreme. It tends toward sentimentality and when a composer doesn’t know what else to do, he simply adds unnecessary harmonic complexity. To be fair, the situation gets even worse in the Modern period. But I don’t rant about mediocre Modern composition, because it is rarely played. Anyway, Franck is no mediocrity. I’m sure he had his bad work, just like everyone. But I’ve never heard anything of his that I didn’t quite like. Here is his Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano, which is one of the greatest works of the 19th century. The whole piece is about a half hour long, but I highly recommend listening to it all. You can’t fully appreciate it by listening to just one movement. Unfortunately, I can only locate one live performance of it, which is good, but it is recorded at such a low volume that you miss much of its subtlety. Here is Joshua Bell & Jeremy Denk performing it brilliantly:

It was hard not to give this day to Emily Dickinson who was born on this day in 1830. I feel a great kinship with her because of her agoraphobia. I would rather conduct my relationships through letters. (I’m not saying this is a good thing.) But Dickinson was also interested in a lot of the same things that I am and her thinking of metaphysics certainly parallels mine. Regardless, I thought I would present “The Mystery of Pain.” I found a version online for teachers where it comments, “This poem is suitable to be taught for Junior High School students because it has a great moral value of life. It notices to be patient when we are in a pain, and we have to realize that everything will change, there is no everlasting pain. Since the language used is quite hard to understand, the teacher should assist students to find the correct interpretation of the poem.” All I can say is that I hope the teachers understand the poem better than whomever wrote that! Let me give you my interpretation. We tend to not be able to imagine that we will always feel the way we now do and that’s a drag when we are feeling pain. But the enlightened mind will know that the pain will go away, only to be replaced by another pain. I would find that a depressing thought if it were not exactly what I know to be true.

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Melvil Dewey was born in 1851. He was my kind of guy. I really like coming up with structures for things. Of course, I’m the worst person in the world to implement those structures. He is, of course, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. In my opinion, the Dewey Decimal System is better than the Library of Congress System. This is nothing especially against the LCS, but it is designed for a particular purpose and is focused on making libraries useful for specialists. For the generalist (and that’s most people), the DDS is more consistent. The way that “religion” (100s) is subdivided is the same way that “technology” (600s) is. No attempts at all are made to make different categories of knowledge consistent. Intellectuals tend to prefer the LCS, because that is what college libraries use. But that’s not a good reason. What’s more, ethnocentric and sexist aspects of both systems have been demonstrated, but only the DDS has made major improvements in this regard. Melvil Dewey was also a big proponent of the metric system. Like I said: he was my kind of guy!

And the great Shakespearean actor (and much more), Kenneth Branagh is 53 today. I don’t have a lot to say about him, except that I’m a huge fan. Here he is as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, the film I use to introduce Shakespeare to those who do not like him. Here is a very funny part:

And then a more serious scene:

Unfortunately, I can’t find the scene after that where Benedick challenges Claudio. But don’t just think of Branagh with regard to this film. His Hamlet is excellent. And he turns the awful Love’s Labour’s Lost into a fine little film. He was also excellent as Iago in Othello. I’m also quite fond of him in How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog. Why he has taken to directing things like Thor and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, I cannot say.

Other birthdays: astronomer Johannes Stoffler (1452); botanist George Shaw (1751); composer Olivier Messiaen (1908); comedy writer Douglas Kenney (1946); Indian sculptor Jasuben Shilpi (1948); and actor Susan Dey (61).

The day, however, belongs to Ada Lovelace who was born in 1815. She worked on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. She developed the first algorithm for the machine. This makes her the first computer programmer in history. The programming language Ada is named after her. She was, incidentally, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron (hey, the man got around).

It is interesting (Profoundly so!) how much sexism still exists in academia. This first program was created to compute Bernoulli numbers. A number of (male) scholars have tried to claim that Lovelace did not really write the program because Babbage provided her with the mathematics for the calculations. There is all kinds of stupid and bigoted in that contention. First, Babbage himself notes that he provided Lovelace with the mathematics to save her the trouble. It wasn’t as though the mathematics had never been worked out. And when Lovelace got his notes, she found and corrected a major mistake he had made. (None of this should be taken as a slight against Babbage who was brilliant and extremely generous in giving Lovelace credit.) Second, computer programmers use the work of mathematicians all the time. It is not a trivial matter to convert even simple equations (which is not the case with the Bernoulli numbers) into modern computer languages on modern computers, much less on the Analytical Engine.

I think the wish to disregard Lovelace’s contributions comes not just from her sex but also because she was manic-depressive. That is not the picture of the Romantic scientific hero that many (men) want to accept. One scholar claimed that Ada’s correspondence indicated that it was “obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter.” I would note that many mathematicians were pretty far out. Kurt Godel could certainly be described as “mad as a hatter.” The same could be said of that other great computer pioneer, Alan Turing, whose fascination with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs caused him to kill himself by eating an apple he had poisoned with cyanide. There is no doubt of the importance of Ada Lovelace, and the attacks on her are typical of just how small the minds of big brained people can be.

Happy birthday Ada Lovelace!

Search Engine Optimization Nightmare

Posted on 09 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

Bing No I’ve recently become obsessed with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The reason is simple: Bing. Basically every article on this website is cataloged by Google and I get a lot of people coming to this website via it. I get nothing but a trickle from Bing and Yahoo!, which now uses Bing for its search engine, apparently because it wants to become even more irrelevant.

But the issue isn’t even that so little traffic comes here via Bing. I understand that few people use Microsoft’s monstrosity that they have clearly spent more money on marketing than coding. The problem is that very few of the pages on Frankly Curious are even in the Bing database. Google holds over 3200 pages, which is about the number of pages on this site. (A couple of days ago, the Frankly Curious blog posted its 3000th article.) Bing has traditionally had less than 200.

This led me to create a Bing account for webmaster tools, just like the one I have for Google. And I learned about these things called sitemaps. These are XML pages that lay out all the pages that are on this website. Note: Google didn’t need the sitemap. It already did an excellent job of crawling Frankly Curious. But there were some minor problems, and I’ve been doing some major PHP coding on the site to stop some of that. And I provided Google with a sitemap yesterday, which it has already integrated half of.

I did the same thing for Bing. How is it doing? I don’t know. As usual, Microsoft just doesn’t do things as well as Google. I know that they got the sitemap and that they were able to parse it, but that’s about it. Also, Bing doesn’t seem to collect any data about websites until you site up. So it’s been two days and they can’t tell me a damned thing about what activity is going on at Bing regarding this here website.

Thus far this month, Google has directed 3,553 people to Frankly Curious. In that same time, Bing has directed 20. Not 20 thousand, of course; just 20. I’m hoping that in the coming months, now that I’ve spoon fed Bing the contents of my site, this number might go up a bit. But maybe not. Microsoft is a conservative company and they may go along with the Republican belief that it is best to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. In Microsoft’s case, that seems to be especially so when a website isn’t selling something.

Given I was involved with all this, I checked the library and was very excited to find SEO Search Engine Optimization Bible by Jerri L. Ledford. I could hardly wait to get it. In fact, I called in a favor to get it that very day. The first thing I noticed about it was that it had a lot of filler. I so wanted to get to the point. And the book rarely did that. In total, I would say that the book has perhaps 10 pages of actual information. It is highly repetitive. And of those 10 pages of actual information, none of it was new to me.

Well, I’m perhaps being a bit unfair. Half the book, which I skimmed was not about SEO. It was about paying for advertising. In other words, this is a book for someone who plans to hire someone else to do all the work. Generally, when the word “bible” is used in the title of a computer book, it means that the book is long and detailed. In this case, I think it means that it is faith based.

In addition to everything else, it is hopelessly out of date. But I doubt that four years ago, it was really up on what was happening. The computer publishing business is very bad. O’Reilly is kind of an exception, but even they have been putting out a lot of trash lately. Stay away from their more recent “cookbooks.”

The book did get me to go looking at the online directories. You know, things like Yahoo! I’m proud of Frankly Curious and there is no doubt that I deserve to be in directories. So I spent some time looking around Yahoo! and it was like a ghost town. I don’t know who the editors are, but there were all kinds of sites that no longer existed. And even worse, there were sites that have become really vile commercial outfits (I was looking at the politics section). What’s more, many of the blogs have stopped producing content years ago—2007, 2005. There was even Eric Alterman’s blog at NBC. He left there in 2005. What a great resource that is to the web community! The Open Directory Project is better, but not much better. And all of the directories seem to be designed to confuse users more than anything else. It makes me want to become an editor for them. The main thing they all need is a little weeding. Well, a lot of weeding.

Reddit apparently was not big enough at the time to make it into the book. But I’m really interested in all the new kinds of ways that I can get the word out on this site. Because, with the modest humility that I possess, I think Frankly Curious is quite a good website. Visiting it is like visiting me. I mix things up, I generally have an interesting take on things, I don’t belabor issues. I don’t write long and technical term papers. I have a wry sense of humor. And I have the exact correct amount of outrage. Unlike my other website which gets double the total monthly traffic, this site has a surprisingly large dedicated community of readers who stop by every day. And I know there are more people out there who don’t know about the site but who would enjoy it.

And you know what: I think it sucks that it’s my responsibility to find those people. The search engines do a lousy job of sending people to websites they will like. The thousand people who just come directly to the site each day don’t mean anything to the search engines. Unless there is a link on another page coming to this site, or people clicking on website search engine result pages, Frankly Curious might as well not exist. (Fun fact: the biggest search engine referral to this site is “marlene on the wall.)

So while I continue my attempts to alert the rest of the internet to the special place that is Frankly Curious, be sure you tell all your friends. It can’t last forever. My charm is limited.

John Cassavetes

Posted on 09 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

Most likely there will be less posting today. I’m working on the technical side of the site. Some of it is going well, but other aspects are really frustrating. Also, I think I’m badly in need of a day off.

The great chemist Fritz Haber was born on this day in 1868. Knowledge can be used for good or for ill. He invented the process for synthesizing ammonia, which is important to fertilizers and is why we are able to feed the billions of hungry people around the world. But ammonia is also used to build bombs. And he used chlorine and other gases to create the first modern chemical weapons used in World War I. So he is often referred to as the father of chemical weapons. We humans are a mixed bag.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr was born in 1909. He was okay. I’m not a fan or anything. But I am rather fond of the racist but still very fun Gunga Din:

The great Lee J Cobb was born in 1911. He was the original Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. He also did a great job in On the Waterfront. But it’s his performance as Juror 3 in 12 Angry Men that blows me away. Estranged from his son, he wants to convict out of his latent pain of his personal loss. The scene where he tears up his son’s picture only to weep at the horror of the act is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in a movie. Here it is; watch it:

Kirk Douglas is 97 today. I’ve never been a huge fan of him as an actor. He’s okay. But apart from his acting, he’s been an impressive guy. In particular, he’s not a bad writer. He’s just a whole lot more interesting than the characters he played. I think most old people die out of boredom. There just isn’t much that interests them anymore. Douglas has kept his life interesting and I have little doubt that helps him to carry on. But the clock is ticking. He has a maximum of 27 years left.

Singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading is 63. I just love her song “The Weakness In Me.” We cannot control ourselves, especially in love. It isn’t rational. “I need to see you!”

Other birthdays: anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin (1842); Tip O’Neill (1912); comedian Redd Foxx (1922); actor Dick Van Patten (85); comedy writer Buck Henry (83); actor Judi Dench (79); musician Junior Wells (1998); actor Beau Bridges (72); and kind of an asshole, actor John Malkovich (60).

The day, however, belongs to the great filmmaker John Cassavetes, who was born on this day in 1929. He was an actor of note, but I really don’t care. He wrote and directed some of the greatest films of the 1960s and 1970s. Forget the French New Wave (which I think is over-rated, but interesting). Cassavetes did revolutionary work. I especially like Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. What’s most important in his films is that people matter. Character is primary. And that’s important in a media (even going back to theater) where character really doesn’t matter. Characters are never pawns for the sake of Cassavetes’ plots. All kinds of filmmakers followed his lead, but in their own ways. Nothing is quite like the work that he left. Here is a scene I’ve used before but it shows the power of his work:

Happy birthday John Cassavetes!

The Stupidest Fucking Sentence Ever

Posted on 08 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

Usain Bolt Perhaps the stupidest sentence in the English language is this:

I didn’t come here to lose!

The last time I heard it was when I was over at a friend’s house and we were watching one of those cooking shows. The sentence is stupid on so many levels. To begin with, are we to believe that some people do show up to competitions to lose? Is there a runner who wins the Boston Marathon and is pissed off? “Fuck, I came here to lose!”

The sentence doesn’t say much either. Okay, so he didn’t come here to lose. Did he come here to enjoy the weather? Did he come here because it was a free trip? Did he come here to embarrass himself? I’m sure everyone really wants to know. But we all figure what he means is that he came here to win. He just wants to say it in a clever way. So why not, “I didn’t not come here to not lose”? That one sounds good. Instead of one double negative, it has two. And as an added bonus, it is almost impossible to figure out what it means!

Geoffrey Mutai But what makes the sentence so terrible is the testosterone fueled subtext that the speaker can simply will his victory. That’s just bullshit.

Consider Geoffrey Mutai, one of the best marathon racers in the world. He holds the title for the fastest unofficial marathon time, 2:03:02. That’s an average of 4:42 per mile. For 26 miles. He’s an amazing man. He is also quite small. He is 5’7″ and weighs 119 pounds. I’m sure he is not dumb enough to ever say (in whatever language), “I didn’t come here to lose!” But I’m equally sure he comes to every event intent on winning.

Now consider Usain Bolt, one of the best sprinters in the world. He holds the title for the fastest 100 m and 200 m (and the unofficial fastest 150 m). That 100 m race amounts to 25.7 mph. He’s an amazing man. He is also quite big. He is 6’5″ and weighs 207 pounds. In other words, he’s about twice the size of Geoffrey Mutai. And I am equally sure that he is not dumb enough to ever say (in whatever language), “I didn’t come here to lose!” But as with Mutai, I’m sure he comes to competitions to win.

So both men come to whatever competition they enter to win. Now if they competed in a marathon, Mutai would win. If they competed in a sprint, Bolt would win. No amount of will would change the results of either of these races.

It could be that a good mental attitude helps a little, but it is swamped by other factors like Usain Bolt’s enormous stride or Geoffrey Mutai’s low weight or a half percentage point change in humidity. It’s like with cancer: despite what people say, having a good mental attitude doesn’t have any effect on cancer outcomes.

So please, stop saying, “I didn’t come here to lose!” You aren’t going to will yourself to victory, and saying this just means that you’re a dick.

What Shall We Do with Our Old?

Posted on 08 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Great Idea and Unimaginable Harm

Posted on 08 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

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

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

Good God, what a day for birthdays!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pronoun Trouble

Posted on 08 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

Pronoun Trouble I haven’t written much about grammar recently and it has begun to bother me. A few of you will understand this: grammar is a great refuge for me. If politics or my personal life are getting to be too much, I can curl up with Fowler or a number of other great writing writers and escape it all. When I was younger, math would do that for me. But my brain has changed and now math is either trivial or exhausting. But I can lose hours diving into the intricacies of the gerund. Also, there are my continuing efforts to simplify the language and slowly reduce the number of things I have to worry about, like my campaigns to stop using the words annunciate and blonde.

Today, I have nothing so sexy as jettisoning old redundant words and French gender identifiers in English. I came upon a sentence this morning by the fine political writer Martin Longman over at Political Animal, In Colorado, Same As It Ever Was. But before I get to it, please remember I’m not attacking him. Blogging is a fast-paced business with little or no support staff and absolutely no copy editors. What’s more, I think Longman is a better writer than I am. Regardless, he wrote:

I mention this because Ken Buck is running for Senate again, this time against Mark Udall, and he is far ahead in the polls.

What he just mentioned was an article from three years ago by Steve Benen that discussed Buck’s extremist positions. So there really is no context for this sentence and it completely confused me. I didn’t know who was far ahead in the polls. My best guess was that it is Buck, but it wasn’t clear. Even worse, if we assume that Buck is ahead, we can only assume that he is far ahead of Udall. Knowing what I know of Colorado politics, that didn’t sound right. So I clicked over and got the information. Here is what Longman should have written:

I mention this because Ken Buck is running for Senate again, this time against Mark Udall, and Buck is far ahead of his primary opponents in the polls.

I understand why he didn’t write the sentence that way. This is an issue that I struggle with constantly—I think all careful writers do. You don’t want to write sentences like, “Cindy walked up to Andrea, and Andrea looked away, Andrea started to cry and Cindy said, ‘Buck up!'” That’s just awful and there are easy ways to fix it. But it is definitely better than, “Cindy walked up to Andrea, and she looked away, she started to cry and she said, ‘Buck up!'” (Obviously: “Cindy walked up to Andrea who looked away and started to cry. ‘Buck up!’ Cindy said. And then Andrea punched her in the mouth because anyone who ever says ‘buck up’ is an asshole.”)

As I wrote before, All Is Clarity. The first thing we must do as writers is be clear. There are other things we can do, but what I think most writers find is that if they are clear, their particular style will shine through. Now it may be a tired style that no one wants to read. But the constant struggle for clarity will help the style too. For one thing, clarity tends to eliminate cliches, which are the biggest barrier to a compelling style. And don’t think I’m speaking from on high. My work is riddled with cliches, like the way I started the sentence before last, “For one thing.” Yikes!

But pronouns are a big problem for us. We need to watch out for them. And it is always better for a sentence to be clumsy than unclear.

The Bald Soprano Economy

Posted on 07 Dec 2013 by Frank Moraes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword

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

This will give you a feel for the play: