Real Atheists in Foxholes

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Atheists On AirIf there is one thing that all atheists hate, it is the phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes!” The problem with it is that it implies that atheists haven’t really thought through what they think and that when it comes right down to it, they will turn to God just like the theists. This goes right along with claims that Darwin had a deathbed conversion. He didn’t. But this is a whole genre of stories Christians tell about noted atheists. Voltaire did not convert. David Hume did not convert. Interestingly, Oscar Wilde did, although not on his deathbed and he wasn’t really an atheist.

Given this, I was very pleased when Nice Atheist Girl tweeted out a photo from Atheists On Air. It is a podcast about… well, guess! On their Facebook page, it says, “The Explicit, Honest, Humorous, Heathen Podcast with Cash & Love.” Here it is, especially for Veterans Day:

Atheists in Foxholes

Also along the same lines of military people who are not as you normally think of them, Frank Conniff tweeted out the following:

Diversity in the military is a very good thing. Now we just need it in our politicians!

Update (11 November 2013 1:14 pm)

This is via Reed Richardson:

First Female US Soldier Statue

Now I think this article should have a different title: Military Diversity.

Remembrance on Veterans Day

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Veterans DayI got this picture from Wikipedia. The caption reads, “Joseph Ambrose, an 86-year-old World War I veteran, attends the dedication day parade for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, holding the flag that covered the casket of his son, who was killed in the Korean War.” This is not just how I think about Veterans Day; it is how I think our country should think about it. Let us honor veterans but let us also regret that we have them.

In most countries, today is Armistice Day: it marks the armistice that ended World War I in 1918. It is also referred to as the more appropriate Remembrance Day. It is a day to remember those who have died in our wars. It is a solemn occasion. And it should be. Even the “good” war, World War II, should not be looked back on as a great adventure. It was a tragedy for the world. Over 60 million people were killed in that war. And for what? A bad economy that allowed a megalomaniac to gain power in Germany?

It’s my opinion, based upon nothing but a fair insight into human nature, that most people just want to live their ordinary lives with their families and friends and the occasional barbecue and backyard party. And that’s as true of people in the army as anywhere else. I put the number at 95%. It’s that 5% of the population that fucks everything up. And I’m not just talking about Hitler here. Why did we started the Iraq War? It certainly had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction—that was just a cover. And I don’t think it had to do with oil either, but that doubtless played some role. I think it was just another example of a small group of men who thought it would be super keen to take out big bad Saddam Hussein.

In the United States, of course, we celebrate Veterans Day. The idea of it is not bad. We need to honor our veterans, although I think better than a single day would be an everyday approach to providing them their earned benefits. But it seems that Veterans Day to most people is just another day to celebrate what a kick ass country the United States is. Except because it references veterans, there is more explicit jingoism. To most people, it is a time to celebrate the fact that the United States spends 46% of what all the 171 countries of the world spend on military. It ought to be our great national shame, especially when even the Democrats want to cut food stamps for the poor.

But back to that picture. That’s how we should think of Veterans Day: an old veteran from one of our many useless wars with a symbol of his son who died in another of our useless wars. To call the wars useless is not to disrespect the veterans. It is no disrespect to Achilles and Hector to note that the Trojan War was useless and tragic. To see wars clearly is a reminder of what a precious thing life is and how we should value it just as much before the war as after it.

Have a safe and thoughtful Veterans Day.

Crime and Dostoyevsky

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Fyodor DostoyevskyOn this day in 1863, the French neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac was born. He was most clearly influenced by Georges Seurat. But it is taken to extremes. What’s more, there are more modern aspects of his work—designs that remind me of Paul Klee but also that 1960s San Francisco sunburst kind of art. And his use of light in landscapes is like Monet, but again, taken to extreme. I think he is one of the most interesting artists of that period.

The great American general George S Patton was born in 1885. He was a fascinating guy—very much in the mold of Sherman. On the one hand, he was a terrible human being who thought that war was the ultimate expression of human creativity. On the other, if you’re going to have wars, you need men like him around. He is much better than the men who get us into war but claim that it is the last thing they want. I’m talking to you every president of the United States ever! As much as I like George C Scott’s portrayal of him, I think that it gives the wrong idea about him. It makes him coarser than he was and also more of a loose cannon. But I think as a society, we want to see great generals like that. It has certainly been done to Sherman and Grant, although in Grant’s case, it’s probably right.

The Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire was born in 1915. He was a great Senator, but his legacy is a pernicious one: the Golden Fleece Award. The idea was to point out government waste. Before getting to it, however, let’s just be clear: there really isn’t much waste in government. People always think there is because they don’t realize just how much the government does—including a lot of things for them. Do projects go over budget? Could the system be even more efficient? Of course! But we’re talking marginal stuff here. What’s more, most of the waste in government contracts is in the military. That’s the one area where conservatives never want to even think about cuts. Regardless, the Golden Fleece is used most every year to make fun not of wasteful spending but mostly just research contract titles with little or no understand of what the work actually is. I recommend checking out, Fighting William Proxmire with Golden Gooses.

Other birthdays: film director Rene Clair (1898); the great writer Kurt Vonnegut (1922); comedian Jonathan Winters (1925); my good Senator Barbara Boxer (73); President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega (68); and then a bunch of actors: Stanley Tucci (53); Demi Moore (51); Calista Flockhart (49); Adam Beach (41); and finally the really annoying Leonardo DiCaprio (39).

The day, however, belongs to the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky who was born on this day in 1821. It’s always hard to discuss authors who wrote in a language you don’t read. But I’ve never gotten the impression that the sound of his writing was terribly important. In fact, I’ve always wished that translations would anglicize the character names. It can be hard to keep track of people. The main thing in his works, however, is the depth of the characters he creates. I’ve never read any of his early work. But the later stuff clearly shows the influence of his hardly rosy life. My preference is for those who find humor in tragedy, but there is nothing more compelling than men who stare into the abyss and explain in detail exactly what they see.

Happy birthday Fyodor Dostoyevsky!

Why Does Anyone Listen to S&P?

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S&PFor decades, I’ve wondered just why we have credit ratings agencies. They clearly aren’t good at their jobs. There is no real reason that we should listen to them. There is a real chicken and egg aspect of it. We seem to invest confidence in them because we invest confidence in them. Of course, over the last decade it has been so much worse. First, they all gave AAA ratings to garbage mortgage backed securities. After the financial crisis showed them for the useless institutions they are, they all sat in front of Congress saying that it wasn’t their fault; they were just expressing an opinion. Fair enough. But then everyone went back to pretending that they actually knew something and weren’t just exercising their First Amendment right to talk out their asses.

The second big event was in August 2011, when S&P downgraded the US federal government’s credit rating. It was a funny thing, because at first it was based on some bad math by S&P. When the government pointed out the error, S&P decided to downgrade the credit rating anyway. It showed that the downgrade wasn’t about reality so much as S&P sending some kind of a message to the world. But here’s the funny thing about that downgrade: it didn’t seem to change the cost of borrowing for the US — at all. It is as though bond buyers — who have actual money on the line — knew that S&P was full of shit.

Well, as you may have heard, last week, S&P downgraded France. Paul Krugman wrote an excellent article about this on Friday. He argues quite convincingly that the issue here is not economics at all, but rather politics. Looking at France’s economy, all he sees is that it is doing rather well — better than countries that have a AAA credit rating with S&P. In fact, France has also brought down its deficit. The problem, for the standpoint of S&P and others, is that France didn’t do it the right way:

Two months ago Olli Rehn, Europe’s commissioner for economic and monetary affairs — and one of the prime movers behind harsh austerity policies — dismissed France’s seemingly exemplary fiscal policy. Why? Because it was based on tax increases rather than spending cuts — and tax hikes, he declared, would “destroy growth and handicap the creation of jobs.”

In other words, never mind what I said about fiscal discipline, you’re supposed to be dismantling the safety net.

He even quotes the S&P justification and, although it is written in finance jargon, it says the same thing. Not that it matters. Again bondholders don’t seem to care. The French government can borrow at pretty much the same rate as they could before.

But I have a broader question. All the credit ratings agencies seems to be useless. S&P in particular seems to have some kind of conservative ax to grind in addition to being useless. Actual buyers of bonds indicate that they know the credit ratings agencies are useless. So why do we still grant them any respect? Why do we allow banks to use them to justify their actions? And most of all, and to the point, why is a ratings change from S&P given any more credence than an RNC announcement?

Frankly Curious Four Year Anniversary

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Frankly CuriousToday is the four year anniversary of Frankly Curious. On this day those many years ago, I wrote, Everything Interesting for Everyone Interesting. The next day I wrote an article about kitchen knives. And then I waited another month before I posted anything else. I was exhausted! Then there were a couple of months of binge posting. And then the blog came almost to a standstill. Then I discovered politics. Through the 2010 election, I did a news roundup every day. And then I stopped. I was exhausted! But it did up my productivity to 10-15 articles per month.

Things went on like that. I continued to get more comfortable with the format. Also, I stopped explicitly marking my political rants as such. I had always felt that writing about politics was slumming. This strikes me as strange, given that everything I was doing was slumming. Looking back, I’m shocked that I was writing so little. Just what was I doing with my time? Well, actually, I know: I was reading books. But even still, it seems strange to me now that I didn’t find it necessary to write about the books I was reading. Now I can hardly move to a different room without writing about it.

Something strange happened on the morning of 8 July 2012. I was reading Crooks & Liars as I did every morning at that time. And then in the morning blog roundup was, “Frankly Curious evaluates the very serious Ezra Klein.” I was shocked. No one had ever linked to me before. I had never commented on the site. I still have no idea why they noticed me. But it did encourage me along the path of political writing. So if you don’t like my political focus, you can blame it on Crooks & Liars.

What I find amazing about the whole process of running this blog for the past four years is how the work gets better over time. In the early days, I fretted over every article. They took lots of thought and lots of time. And when I go back and read them, they are weak. And even more, they are thin. An early article that I quite liked at the time was, The Sound of One Hand Clapping. But there’s almost nothing to it. It strikes me as a bad freshman essay. The tone is wrong, for one thing. But more important: it touches on issues without getting into them. It deserves 10,000 words, not 500. But clearly, I didn’t see that at the time.

Now I dash off stuff that is far better than things I worked very hard on even a year ago. And I hope I’m able to say that next year and four years from now. Because as much as my work is better now that it has been, I still think that much of it is dreck. I often finesse articles into a presentable state that ought to be either abandoned or reworked. So I look forward to reading this article sometime and thinking, “Yikes!”

I have a feeling that I’ve taken this blog as far as I can. At this point, I really need to publish a book that will give me a wider audience and credibility beyond being yet another blogging ranter. And I am working on a book. It’s political, of course. And it brings together a lot of my thinking from writing this blog over the years. It is also making me do work that I do not feel comfortably doing—like actual political science. But it could be good. I’m just not sure my style, which could be charming over the course of 500 words, is all that readable over an entire book.

Regardless, thanks to all of your who have been around these last four years and who have put up with all this. I assume you all must have a good sense of humor…

Why Are Republicans the Wrecking Crew?

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The Wrecking CrewAfter reading a lot of nonfiction books — especially on politics — I’m not clear what I’m supposed to have learned. I’ll often go back through the book to figure out the theme. Part of this is just that I’m a bit scattered, and I’m very good at putting new data into an existing (or if the book is really good) alerted narrative. But it’s also the case that most books aren’t that well written. People do not make clear and direct arguments. And they often write 300 pages when 100 would have done the trick.

One writer I never have this problem with if Thomas Frank. Whereas other writers may see themselves as constructing an intricate web, Frank is a man with a hammer who is going to bang on the same issue page after page. Now, that would be tiring coming from a dull writer, but Frank is constantly smart and funny. And the fact that he tends to see the world the way I do probably doesn’t hurt.

I just read his 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew. He starts the book with the observation that Republicans manage the nation really badly whenever they’re in power. And his thesis is that they do this on purpose so that when the Democrats are in power, they won’t have the time or resources to enact any liberal policies. What’s more, the Democrats will be too focus on cleaning up the Republicans’ mess to do anything else.

It’s a compelling thesis. But I don’t really buy it. It sounds too much like what Republicans tell themselves about their policy failures. I think the situation is far more simple: Republicans are lousy at the jobs we elect them to do. And I believe the reason this is so is the same reason that our federal politics are so much more conservative than the people would want: our two-party constitutional democracy.

One person I greatly respect thinks this is rubbish: Jonathan Bernstein. He claims that the problem is simply that the Republicans have become a radical party. I think we can all agree on that. But the question is why. And I believe the answer is because our system does not force accountability. Neither party ever gets to run the government they way they really want to. During Obama’s first two years, even with overwhelming majorities, the bills that got passed were watered down almost to the point of uselessness.

The reason I think the Republicans have become radicalized and the Democrats have not is because the Republicans have a built in advantage in rural areas and the south. This has pushed the party more and more to the right. But since their policy choices have never been given a clear test, they can maintain plausible deniability. And even more important, the Democratic policies have never been given a clear test to show that they work. So we muddle on and there is no reason for the Republicans to moderate.

Along with the extremism in the Republicans Party has come incompetence. For one thing, a true conservative would find a very nice home in the Democratic Party. So the more reasonable Republicans just become Democrats. Even more important, a Republican who just wants his taxes kept low but doesn’t go along with the other stuff probably won’t even run, but would lose in a primary anyway. So you end up with ideologues who neither care about actual governance nor have the skills for it anyway.

There is one reason in particular that I think that the Republicans screw up government because they are incompetent rather than as an actual policy: Iraq. The Bush administration didn’t care at all that the people they were sending to rebuild the country were hopeless. In 2006, Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote, Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq. For example, “A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange.”

Admittedly, this incompetence is at least partially the result of not caring. But even that pushes against the idea that the Republicans are evil geniuses who are wrecking the country to harm the Democratic Party. There is a powerful lesson here, though. The end result is the same. And we have seen it during Obama’s presidency. He is the first president since Johnson to pass even the mildest of liberal legislation. And this has been met with cries of, “Socialism!” But it is a reminder that the whole process of cleaning up after the Republicans is a bad strategy that only makes the Republicans stronger. Half of Obama’s time in office was spent obsessing about the federal deficit. No time in Reagan and Bush Jr’s terms was spent worrying about the debt. We need to be more like that.

Food stamps pay for themselves!

Lara Logan’s Benghazi Ax

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Lara LoganI’ve written a bit about Lara Logan’s dreadful 60 Minutes segment on Benghazi and how it has been shown to be totally wrong. But Digby puts it all in historical context, Lara Logan in her own words 10/2/2012. It seems that just one month after the attack, Logan was ranting about it. Her response to the attack brings back nightmares of 2002. In reference to the government sending FBI agents to investigate, she said, “I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.” [My emphasis. -FM]

It would seem that Logan is not exactly objective, especially in reference to this issue. In fact, she sounds very much like John McCain who seems to think every real or imagined attack on the United States should be responded to by attacking Iran. “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.” There is nothing wrong with having opinions. Everyone has opinions, and I think we get worse reporting with this pretense of objectivity. But the situation is especially bad here. Logan looks like she would be a perfect fit at Fox News. And on this story, it was a perfect storm of bias and laziness. Digby explains:

Needless to say, the fact that she fell for such a clearly ridiculous hoax was due to her biases. She shows in that speech that she had already made up her mind about what happened. And 60 Minutes should have been professionally skeptical of her story because of that. Logan’s agenda blinded her to the fact that she was being played.

This was well on display Friday on CBS This Morning when Logan officially apologized for the report. One of the hosts, Norah O’Donnell, asks, “How did you vet [Dylan Davies, the basis of the whole story]?” It’s actually a really good question coming from a morning fluff show. Even still, Logan must have known it was coming. But her response was terrible. “We verified and confirmed that he was who he said he was—that he was working for the State Department at the time—that he was in Benghazi at the special mission compound the night of the attack… He gave us access to communications he had with the US government officials… We used US government reports and congressional testimony to verify many of the details of his story. And everything checked out!”

This is all just a defensive way of saying that she had a preexisting narrative that Davies fit, so she believed him. But notice the great Dick Cheney trick that is going on here. This was something Cheney did in the lead up to the Iraq War. His staff would leak information to the New York Times, which would print it. Then Cheney would do an interview where he talked about the very same “intelligence.” And to bolster his case, he would say, “It’s not just me; the liberal New York Times just reported the same thing.” In this case, Logan had a narrative based on the Republican show hearings going on at the House of Representatives. Everyone knows about those, most especially the guy who is writing a book that is trying to leverage those hearings for a quick buck. So we have an echo chamber that Logan thought was independent confirmation. Or at least that’s what she said happened.

The truth is that I don’t believe Lara Logan was especially trying to push her conservative narrative. She was just looking for a great old-style 60 Minutes scoop. The truth is that the show is mostly useless anymore. Their other big scoop recently was how disability fraud was killing us. That too was just another Republican talking point whipped up into a story of outrage. Since the show doesn’t seem to care much about journalism anymore, they might as well go for eye candy. And Logan is as close as they get to it.

Update (10 November 2013 3:38 pm)

Jay Rosen wrote an excellent timeline of the CBS response, Will CBS News Apologize for the Reckless Denials Before its Benghazi Story Collapsed? He brings up one especially good point:

CBS was not just wrong, it was wrong about an explosive and highly contentious story in which extra care should have been taken because of the risk that a faulty report will be instantly politicized.

Even worse, for about a week after the segment aired, Lara Logan claimed that the reason people were raising questions was because of the politicized atmosphere. Of course, her report was the reason that the Benghazi story came roaring back.

Update (10 November 2013 7:57 pm)

At the end of 60 Minutes, Lara Logan came on for roughly two minutes with a “correction.” All she mentioned was the questions about Davies. Nothing was said about the conflict of interest between the book publisher and CBS. And nothing was said about CBS’s stonewalling for almost two weeks as more and more questions were raised. She also made it sound like just one person in the report was misleading. Nothing was said about the fact that he was the whole thing or that the other two interviewed for the episode were well know hacks who have been everywhere making the same claims. As little as I think of 60 Minutes, I’m still shocked at just how poorly they handled this “correction.”

Ennio Morricone and His Musical Whips

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Ennio MorriconeOn this day in 1483, the religious reformer Martin Luther was born. I actually see him as a villain. Here I’m not just talking about his antisemitic views, which in fairness, were typical of the time. The whole protestant reform movement has done far more harm than good for the world. The Catholic Church of that time was hopelessly corrupt. But the fundamental idea of Luther that the religion was the Bible is an extremely dangerous thing. It naturally leads to fundamentalism. If there is no authority but the Bible, what are people to believe but that what it literally says (a fool’s errand regardless) is what it means. And what it leads to is things like the Jehovah’s Witnesses: a religion that started with a bunch of amateurs trying to figure out the Bible only to have their work ossify into a religion that is far less flexible than the Catholic Church. It also leads to a certain level of terror among Christians who feel they must be the ones to defend their faith—a task they are hopelessly unqualified for. Nonetheless, Martin Luther clearly had good intentions, but we all know where that paved road leads.

Mikhail Kalashnikov is 94 today. He is the inventor of the AK-47, probably the most important gun of the 20th century. It’s a dubious distinction given that almost unimaginable harm that has been done with the gun. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been the AK-47, it would have been some other gun. After all, guns don’t kill people; bullets kill people. In this case, the 7.62×39mm.

Other birthday: the novelist Winston Churchill (1871); actor Claude Rains (1889); actor Richard Burton (1925); songwriter Marilyn Bergman (84); actor Roy Scheider (1932); songwriter Tim Rice (69); film director Roland Emmerich (58); and comedian Tracy Morgan (45).

The day, however, belongs to the great composer Ennio Morricone who is 85 today. He is best known for his film scores of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. Of course, like most film composers, wrote the music for many films. Although it includes short films, the Internet Movie Database lists 517 films he has worked on. Here is the title sequence of A Fistfull of Dollars, which is just great:

Happy birthday Ennio Morricone!

My Life as an Atheist Outcast

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Nice Atheist GirlI don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Andrea has become quite the atheist. She is now going by Nice Atheist Girl. It all started with a conversation we had. I mention it mostly because it is so rare that Andrea finds any idea I have compelling. This is in stark contrast to the way I feel about her, which is basically that if she just decided to work on even her weakest ideas, she would quickly become an internet phenom. Anyway, we were talking about her son who is seeing a Catholic girl. And I made a joke that she ought to be like a Jewish mother, “Why can’t you meet a nice atheist girl?” Before you know it, I’m in charge of making every conceivable change to her new website, which is admittedly really good.

The thing about Andrea’s atheism is that it is so much more pure than mine. For me, atheism is a very complicated thing that is deeply related to what most people would call spiritualism. And indeed, I think that I commune far more profoundly with “God” than almost any Christian I know. Andrea has no tolerance for this kind of nonsense. To her, I think, atheism isn’t so much a rejection of God as it is a rejection of Christianity. And if I could look at it that way, I would be completely on board. Because Christianity is a laughable religion. (Sorry all my Christian friends!) But I feel just as strongly that the nature of existence is a paradox. So my mind reels.

What this means is that most atheists think I’m a squishy kind of proto-agnostic. And that’s not true at all! As far as I’m concerned, most of them are very much like the Christians I talk about. They don’t really engage in the debate at a serious level. But at least such atheists understand that they aren’t engaging. They know that they are simply defining God out of the realm of what is knowable. (Quite rightly!) Christians and other theists think of God as some super powerful friend or father figure in the sky. But the main thing is that atheists don’t much care of my form of atheism. They think of it the way that Baptists think of Unitarians.

To be honest, I feel a lot like the Terry Eagleton of atheism. I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere. (Except probably with Eagleton who considers himself a Christian while no one else does!) So I was encouraged this evening when Andrea sent me a a link to an Abby Ohlheiser article, A Short History of Richard Dawkins vs The Internet. It came along with a text, “It seems that Richard Dawkins is a bit of an asshole.” Being the ever faithful friend, I texted back, “I told you that!” But she said she didn’t know how bad he was. Well, it turns out that I didn’t either.

But here’s the ironic part. I actually kind of agree with Dawkins on his major point. I just don’t think he was making the point well. So I’m going to give it a try here. Religion really isn’t a problem. The key is that you can’t take it that seriously. In the Middle Ages, Islam was an incredibly liberal religion. Now, it is very conservative, by and large. The fundamentalists are in control. That’s a problem. And it’s a problem that hurts all Muslims.

Where I differ from Dawkins is in his focus. It’s true that Islam is coming out of a period of fundamentalism. But I actually think the trend is really good. The Mulsims are becoming more liberal and in another hundred years, I think it will be a force for good. Christianity (maybe with the exception of Catholicism—we’ll see) is moving in the opposite direction. In the United States, 36% of the population thinks that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and doesn’t believe in evolution. In the United Kingdom, the number is only 25%, but another 20% believe in Intelligent Design. Now I understand that there are are a lot of scary Muslims in the world. But shouldn’t Dawkins be more concerned about the bad trends at home?

The article itself gets much worse, with stuff that is an outgrowth of my long held negative opinions about Richard Dawkins. He is very much a man of his social class. And I very much understand: Skepchick is outside his comfort zone. And, most sadly, outside the comfort zone of most male (which is to say simple “most”) “new” atheists. As I discussed a few weeks ago, CJ Werleman quite accurately described the atheist movement as “white, middle class, intellectually smug and mostly apolitical.” But that apolitical part of it is based on the fact that the status quo benefits them. And the idea that women might have a few complaints of their own rankles them.

Of course, Dawkins argument is way beyond the pale. Basically, he claims that western women have nothing to complain about because their clitorises have not been cut off. I’m serious! All I can think is that he was drunk. Because even I don’t think that lowly of him.

Regardless of all this, I continue to find that I mostly agree with atheists. By this I mean “there is no God” and not “you can only complain after an honor killing.” But I still feel very much on the margins of the movement—a man who doesn’t believe in God but understands why people would. There is something good about my position. I’m kind of like the interfaith atheist, or the “intertheist,” if you prefer. And I think the atheist movement could learn a few things from me. Not as much as the theists could. But still.

Muppet Mash

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GroverLook: normally, I’m not that fond of this kind of music. But this is Sesame Street and for whatever reason, I find it really compelling. It could be as simple as this: Grover. He was long my favorite Muppet and I was crushed when he did not show up on The Muppet Show, although I can’t help but seeing a family resemblance between him and The Great Gonzo.

I think my adoration for Grover comes from the fact that he isn’t nasty like Oscar, generally stupid like Bert and Ernie, nor cloying like Big Bird. Don’t get me wrong: Grover is a hell of a nice guy! Or a hell of a nice monster. Whatever. But he’s the kind of nice that you want to hang out with and have a beer. And there are none of those annoying contractions to worry about.

Also in this song is Kermit the Frog. And of course, Kermit is one of my heroes: an intrepid reporter on Sesame Street who went on to manage that gang of loons on The Muppet Show. That’s what I aspire to be: the sane one surrounded by total nuts. I have not succeeded yet. But until then, there is this delightful song:

And Kermit the Frog yells, “Yeeeea!”

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

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BuffaloI don’t know how I missed this all these years. At some point last week, Chris Hayes mentioned the sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Being the kind of guy I am, I went crazy with it. I even dreamed about it. It’s all syntax so it was very much like the kind of math dreams I used to have with ideas and equations bursting into my mind from what always felt like different locations. This sentence is very much like a mathematical equation.

There are three different definitions of “buffalo” here: two nouns and a verb. The nouns are “Buffalo” the city and “buffalo” the animal. The verb is a synonym for “bamboozle.” It is more easily thought of as follows:

Buffalo from Buffalo that buffalo other buffalo from Buffalo also buffalo other buffalo from Buffalo.

It does show the vagaries of the language. One might say, “People other people abuse are often abusive.” It is clearer to say, “People whom other people abuse are often abusive.” But I don’t think anyone has a problem with the original construct. That’s especially true when spoken. In writing, I find it confusing and so I try to not do such things. It is best if the reader can gradually understand a sentence rather than have to figure it out in retrospect.

So given our sentence, it helps to set off “Buffalo buffalo,” which means “buffalo from Buffalo.” I’m going to do that and throw in a couple of commas as well:

(Buffalo buffalo), (Buffalo buffalo) buffalo, buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).

This actually allows us to get rid of “Buffalo” altogether. We’ll just assume that all the buffalo we are talking about are from Buffalo. Now the sentence is much simpler:

Buffalo, buffalo buffalo, buffalo buffalo.

Now let’s substitute “bamboozle” for our verb “buffalo”:

Buffalo, buffalo bamboozle, bamboozle buffalo.

I think the sentence is clear enough that we come to an uncomfortable truth: it is not a very useful sentence. Most likely, all it means that buffalo from Buffalo bamboozle each other. Strictly speaking, it means that there are a set of buffalo from Buffalo who bamboozle each other. So the con artist buffalo are prone to each other. In terms of meaning, it is no great shakes. But the syntax is nice: noun noun, noun noun verb, verb noun noun. It’s fun to play with.

Now maybe I can stop thinking about it!

Afterword

If you want to know the history of the sentence, Wikipedia has a very nice page on it.

An Atheist in the Foxhole

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An Atheist in the FoxholeI just read Joe Muto’s An Atheist in the Foxhole. What a great book! The guy can write. I just tweeted to him that he ought to write a novel. The story he tells in Foxhole is not all that interesting. But his telling of it is constantly exciting and often laugh out loud funny. I also found it personally fascinating because when I was his age, I too felt similarly cocky and similarly learned that it is usually best to tread lightly with one’s political passions.

For those who do not know, Muto was Gawker‘s famous “Fox News Mole.” Sadly, he was outed in only 36 hours. At the time, many of us thought that this was due to the fact that he had gone to Gawker instead of a more reasonable outlet. After reading the book, I feel even more convinced of this. If Gawker really wanted a mole, why even publish the videos? He had little to offer in that regard anyway. A few months of dispatches would have been great fun. Gawker didn’t manage a really good opportunity. And then after it was all over, they abandoned Muto. I think Muto’s biggest act of stupidity was turning to Gawker. Slate or Salon (where he now freelances) would have been better choices that would likely have served him better.

The book offers a great look inside the Fox News operation. The most shocking thing is just how low tech the place was and probably still is. You may remember the great scene in Broadcast News where Joan Cusack as a production assistant has to run through the office to get a tape on time to the live control room. Here it is; it’s a great scene:

The first job that Moto gets at Fox News is delivering the on air scripts to the set of the live broadcast. This is often done at the last minute requiring the production assistants to run through the halls to get them to the anchors. I wondered: why don’t they just have the pages printed directly to the studio? Regardless, all the money seems to go to Bill O’Reilly and company and little is left over for technology. Or staff salaries.

A good example of this is that Muto was hired for $12 per hour as a contractor. After six months, he gets taken on a regular employee. That means he gets benefits, so that’s all good. But they raise his salary to—Wait for it!—$12.74. That’s not a mistype; they raised his wage 74¢. That’s a 6.2% raise. Before he gets “promoted” to regular employee, a vice-president tells him he should be dressing better:

“Right, well, you should buy a couple [suits]. I mean, we pay you enough that you…” He glanced down at the paper on his desk, searching for the correct number. He grimaced when he found it. “Oh, well… you can at least to to Mean’s Wearhouse, right?”

That strikes me as entirely typical of conservatives: they always assume everyone must be well paid and if they aren’t, well, soon they will be. Liberals take it for granted that most employers screw their employees as much as they can. The outrage I hear from people about specific examples of this kind of stuff comes from conservatives. They are the ones who have this fairy tale idea that “almost all” bosses are Milton Hershey.

Most of the book is not an attack on Fox News. It’s just a memoir that I think even conservatives would enjoy.[1] But at the very end of the book, he gets serious. I want to leave you with an extended quote from the book that sums up what is really like to work at Fox News. I took the time to enter it myself, so read it!

About a month after I left, Fox & Friends played a video on their show. Four minutes long, it was a slickly produced package featuring sound bites and graphics, and absolutely throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama—hitting him on everything from the debt to unemployment, to food stamps, to gas prices. It played like an attack ad that had been created by the Republican National Committee. There was a massive uproar after the video aired, with repeated cries that Fox News had finally shed its last vestige of objectivity.

For the first few hours after it aired, Fox seemed poised to stand behind the video, featuring it prominently on the Fox Nation website. Then they reversed course and disavowed it, with an opaque statement that read, in part: “The package that aired on Fox & Friends was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network.”

The associate producer in question was a guy named Chris, a guy who I came up with, a guy who started as a production assistant on the overnights around the same time I did. A good producer, and an honest one. And Fox was letting him twist in the wind, with a statement that left the door open to the interpretation that he had been acting alone when he put the piece together.

But that’s not how Fox operates. Something that long and elaborate would have taken at least three or four long days in the edit room to put together, days when a producer would be unable to do any other work. So unless Fox & Friends changed their operating procedures drastically in the month or so that I had been gone from the network at that point, I believe that Chris’ work on the package had to have been authorized by a senior—or even the executive—producer of the show. Someone had pulled Chris off his regular duties, and said, “Spend all your time the next few days making this tape and we’ll air it when you’re done.” I believe there’s no way that he was acting alone, but that became the narrative: the rogue Fox News producer who created an Obama hit piece! Reports surfaced that CNN—the high-paying promised land we’d all fantasized about as young PAs—had offered Chris a job shortly before the incident, but rescinded the offer following the controversy.

An Atheist in the Foxhole is not profound, but it is a quick and fun read. It’s probably better than most novels for vacation reading. And it answer the burning question, “What is Bill O’Reilly really like?” The answer: exactly what you think.

[1] The publisher must think this too. I noted many occasions when clarifying text was thrown in that I thought wasn’t necessary and burdened the flow. I assume these were editor added.