I’m Official in Love with Barbara Buono
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Carl Sagan and the Cosmos
Today’s birthdays are way worse than they were yesterday. At least we had some good songs then.
On this day in 1731, the surveyor and astronomer Benjamin Banneker was born. He wrote a number of the most popular almanacs of his day. But he is most notable for being a free black man. His father was a former slave and mother was free born. He was self-taught in science and no doubt brilliant. It’s the anti-Tagg-Romney syndrome. No one hires a poor black man unless he’s brilliant—then or now.
Other birthdays: Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818); mathematician Theodor Kaluza (1885); British film director Anthony Asquith (1902); Futurama politician Spiro Agnew (1918); the murderer (who shall remain nameless) of Medgar Evers (1920); poet Anne Sexton (1928); chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal (1936); singer-songwriter Tom Fogerty (1941); actor and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno (62); one of the decent politicians Sherrod Brown (61); and character actor Tony Slattery (54).
The day, however, belongs to the writer and scientist Carl Sagan who was born on this day in 1934. If you ask 10 scientists of my generation, 7 of them will tell you they went into science because of Sagan. It wasn’t just Cosmos. (Which is still quite watchable today!) His books were great, especially The Dragons of Eden. He was, I would say, the Mr. Rogers of teen nerds. Science has moved on since he was around, so his books are kind of out of date. But they are still good reading. He had a happy talent for composition and singular felicity of expression. Here is the opening of Cosmos for those who have not seen it:
Happy birthday Carl Sagan!
Smartphones and Productivity
Against my will, I was forced to get a smartphone. My friend and partner Will wanted to get a new phone so he decided to give me his old phone. It is some kind of a Samsung unit, but of course, compared to what I’ve had, it is awesomely amazing. I think what I had before is 0.0001g or some version of SLIP. (That’s old hacker humor!) This thing seems to do all the things I see people doing with what must be much better smartphones. I’m on Twitter, getting updated about what drunken atheists are up to. And I can check my 15 different email accounts. But it makes me wonder about the people who tweet and email throughout their days.
How do they do it? I’m a really good typist. In fact, I’m so good that I’ve forgotten where the keys are. My fingers know, my eyes don’t. The little keyboard comes up and I’m thinking, “Now where is that H character?!” It does, however, have this little microphone gadget that does a surprisingly good job of converting my voice into text. It makes obvious mistake. It is hopeless with homophones. It puts numerals into sentences when I don’t want them. And most of all, it is hopeless with punctuation and doesn’t know how to capitalize the beginning of a sentence. Still, it’s pretty amazing. I can get a tweet completed a lot faster than I could type it in. Of course, it is nowhere near as fast as I type on a proper keyboard.
The way I used the internet on my old phone was that I would enter a website and then put the phone in my pocket. After a few minutes, I would check to see if it had loaded. Mostly it did. Sites like Wikipedia do an excellent job of spitting out bits of pages to phones like mine. But even after regular pages would load, it was a hassle. It was very much like the old days using the text-based browser Lynx. If there was a left sidebar, you would have to scroll all the way down it because the page didn’t do any formatting. And worst of all, the phone’s browser would only load so much of a page. So the Frankly Curious page (which is hardly long) would only make it upwards of half way down the page.
Still, the whole thing makes me wonder. How is it that the whole society is going toward tablet computing. Maybe I’m just biased because I’m a writer, but I find a traditional setup with a keyboard and mouse far easier to use to get work done. Even for reading, I would rather just hit page-down than zip my finger across the screen, which seems always to cause the screen to move more than I wanted. Admittedly, I will doubtless get much better at that. But I wonder: does anyone get actual work done with these devices?
I’m afraid that the answer is no. My experience in corporate America is that very little work ever gets done. And I suspect that the hyper-connectivity in modern business is just a way for management to convince itself that it is accomplishing things. I don’t mean to suggest that these tools can’t or even don’t help people be productive. But I think at this point, it would take me about four times as long to create an article on my phone—and that’s assuming I could use the microphone function. I could use the phone to tweet as I go about my life, but that would likely turn me into one of those sad people who tweet things like, “Just bought a BBQ chicken at Whole Foods. Yum!” And I can’t imagine anything but the tersest of responses on email.
The way the phone helps me greatly is that it will allow me to read my standard websites while I’m out. And I assume it will also work as a book reader. Also: the microphone function on the text messages is great, although Andrea has already complained about typos in the three texts I’ve sent her. But there’s no doubt that this is a major advance. It is just that its a major advance in the ways that I was already using my phone. And I don’t think those were making me especially more productive. In fact, I think that computers generally have made me less useful to society. So I curse them generally.
Of course, now that I’ve downloaded Q*bert, all bets are off.
Sympathy but Not Disease for Rob Ford
Clare Malone has an interesting piece that I half agree with, Rob Ford’s Tragedy, Our Shame. At base, it is a call for a little understanding—not just for Ford but for all people who have allowed drugs to get out of control in their lives. And I’m totally on board with that. I wrote just that on Wednesday, Sympathy for Rob Ford. All of us have faced personal humiliations and, if we’ve thought about it, are grateful that they weren’t more public. I don’t know if I could deal with having animated gifs all over the world infinitely repeating even my most minor humiliations.
Where I differ with Malone is over her hand wringing about addiction as a disease. She even writes that addiction “is treated by doctors as a disease, classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” That’s true. And homosexuality was also once treated as a disease and classified in the DSM. I have no doubt that the inclusion of “addiction” as a mental disease will one day be as embarrassing as “homosexuality” is today.
Doing drugs is an extremely common human behavior. I know of no culture that does not have socially acceptable intoxicant use. Thus to take drug use out of its social context and label it as a dysfunction, much less a disease, makes no sense. Like any activity, drug use has good aspects and bad aspects. In moderation, the good aspects swamp the bad aspects.
But what of one who has seemingly lost all control, or at least a large part of it? That strikes me as an incredibly naive question that only occurs because our culture is so very screwed up about the use of intoxicants. It should be very clear that Rob Ford has problems. I don’t know what they are. I’d guess that he suffers from feelings of inferiority and self-hatred. But it hardly matters. There are reasons that a sitting mayor of a major city allowed himself to be publicly shitfaced and at least once commit felony drug possession. And none of those have anything to do with the psychoactive properties of alcohol or cocaine.
The reason this is important is that our society’s current approach to drug problems is mostly useless and often harmful. Many years ago, I read Pathways from Heroin Addiction: Recovery Without Treatment. It was on the leading edge of work that showed that the vast majority of people get off even the mother of all addictions without any help from anyone. And the key for pretty much everyone was changing their self-images. There was no disease and there needn’t be.
So sympathy for Rob Ford, of course! The man clearly needs help. But what he doesn’t need is to be taught that he has an alcoholic gene and that he’s powerless against the demon brew. His life is out of control, but that could have manifested in any number of ways. In fact, it did! What kind of reasonable person goes into politics? I think that’s a red flag for any number of behaviors that do belong in the DSM. And we should show sympathy for all the mental baggage that each of us carries around.
Huge Black Vote In Virginia a Trend?
Ed Kilgore has been following an interesting bit of demographics from Tuesday’s election, More on VA and the African-American Vote That Saved Terry McAuliffe. In comparing the 2009 election where the Republicans in the top spots won big, the 2013 electorate looks the same. Except: the turn out of African American voters was very high: more like the 2012 election. And this is the only reason that Terry McAuliffe will be the next governor of Virginia. Both Asians and Latinos voted at their 2009 levels.
The question is why this is and the truth is that no one knows. But Kilgore mentions a tantalizing possibility, “I’ve heard a few random folk cite the pre-election voter purge executed by Virginia as a provocation to black voters.” Ah yes. I talked about this a few months back with regard to Ross Douthat’s idea that Voter ID laws will, in the end, hurt Republicans. Given the southern history of voter suppression, African Americans especially will push back hard. It is one thing to not vote in an election where all the candidates are losers. It is quite another thing when people are actively trying to stop you from voting for those losers. And guess who they’ll vote for? The Democratic loser!
Or it could be that African Americans are just really pissed off. After all, this recession has hurt them far more than it has whites. As usual. That is a cheery thought: the poor might be coming to terms with the fact that we may not have money or individual power, but together through the profound act of voting we are the most powerful entity in the nation. The interesting thing is that as a group, African Americans don’t want that much—mostly just a reasonable chance at a decent life. Meanwhile, conservatives are obsessed by the thought that the government will have to pay reparations for slavery. That is how big a gulf there is between the thinking of the poor and the rich. Clearly, being rich does not generate clarity of thought.
Throughout American history, there has been a balance between the direct power of the rich and the electoral power of the poor. It has moved one way and then the other. But for the last 35 years, we have seen the pendulum swing toward the rich. Now we are at a point where income inequality is as bad as it has ever been. The time for the pendulum to swing back the other direction is long overdue.
Regardless of the reason that African Americans voted in large numbers in this off-off-year election, it is a good thing. And I hope that it is part of a trend. This nation has long been held back by conservative gains in off-year elections. The American people are center-left. The Democratic Party is center. The American voter is slightly center-right. And the Republican Party far right. Anything that makes the voting public more like the actual public is a very good thing.
Dracula and Three Music Women
It’s another one of those crappy days with very few good birthdays. But at least we’ll get a few good songs.
On this day in 1710, the writer Sarah Fielding was born. I’ve never read her. I never even knew she existed. She was the great novelist Henry Fielding’s younger sister. But she is important in her own right. She wrote the first children’s novel, The Governess, or The Little Female Academy. If you read it, let me know how it was.
Singer-songwriter Bonnie Bramlett is 69 today. Here she is with then husband Delaney Bramlett and a couple of other people you might recognize, doing a tribute to Robert Johnson, “Poor Elijah.” It is joyous music like all of Delaney & Bonnie:
Singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt is 64. I was going to put up her beautiful version of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery,” but I thought I might get complaints. “Not that song again!” So here is her breakthrough cover of Del Shannon & Max Crook’s great “Runaway”:
Rickie Lee Jones is 59. It’s really hard to find any decent video of her other than “Chuck E’s In Love.” But here is a nice version of “The Horses” (which she wrote with Walter Becker):
Other birthdays: Milton Bradley (1836); psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884); novelist Margaret Mitchell (1900); and the evil NRA head Wayne LaPierre (64).
The day, however, belongs to the great novelist Bram Stoker who was born on this day in 1847. At 50, he published the novel Dracula. The history of the novel is quite interesting. When it was first published, it received good reviews. And it sold modestly well. It didn’t stop Stoker from dying in poverty in 1912. It was only ten years later that the novel started to achieve its iconic status. In 1922, F W Murnau made the film Nosferatu based upon the novel without permission. Stoker’s widow was not please and she sued. As a result of that lawsuit and the movie, the book became very popular. Then came the stage play. And then came Bela Lugosi.
Happy birthday Bram Stoker!
Obama and Buono and Christie
I just thought of something while reading Patricia Murphy’s excellent article, Why National Democrats Rolled Over for Chris Christie. As I’ve complained about before, President Obama did not endorse Barbara Buono in the New Jersey’s governor’s race. I’ve heard it said that Obama did that as a kind of payback for Christie’s behavior during Hurricane Sandy right before the 2012 presidential election. I don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t doubt it.
But here’s the thing. Christie quite pointedly said at that time that Romney has his man and that he still thought that Romney was the better man for the job than Obama. So why is it that Obama didn’t endorse Buono? Not doing so says that he doesn’t have a preference. Or not much of one. And that may be! Christie’s economic conservatism and social moderation may be exactly what Obama thinks.
I know: the standard line is that Obama is a real liberal but the Republicans just won’t allow him to govern that way. He’s against taking money away from the old and food away from the poor. It is just all those nefarious advances and pools that stop him from doing what he thinks is right! But I really question that narrative. In fact, I know it’s not true. It isn’t that Obama is secretly conservative. I don’t really know. But he definitely leans conservative on economic issues and is too spineless to lead on liberal social issues. This is a man who would have felt right at home in Reagan’s cabinet. And, I mean, that man was forced into supporting same sex marriage by that liberal firebrand Joe Biden!
So it is telling that Obama couldn’t even bother to endorse Buono. She is hardly a liberal firebrand herself. But it could be that Obama finds himself exactly halfway between her and the extremist conservative policies of Christie. Or it could be that he is just a political amateur who somehow thinks he owes Christie something. Or it could be that Obama doesn’t now and never has given half a shit about the Democratic Party outside of his own legacy. Or it could be some combination of all three.
Regardless of the reason, Obama’s lack of a Buono endorsement is unforgivable. And the funny thing is that he seems to do all of his work to shore up his reputation as a bipartisan leader who is the “adult in the room.” He wants people to look back on him like they now look back on Clinton and Reagan. But it ain’t gonna happen. People look back fondly on those presidents because the economies were really good when they left office. When Obama leaves office the economy will at best be continuing to struggle ahead. When most people look back on him, they will think, “Meh.” When people like me look back on him, we will think of him as a guy who talked pretty but wasn’t nearly as liberal as he claimed. We will regret the great opportunity cost of his presidency. And we will despise him for not giving a shit about the party that he ostensibly led.
Venezuela Is Still Doing Fine
I am fascinated with the media coverage of Venezuela. I discussed it about a week ago when talking about the new Slate feature, If It Happened There… The idea of it is to report news about America as we would report it if it were happening elsewhere. The problem is that it matters very much where that elsewhere is. Is it Israel where it doesn’t matter what they do, it’s totally great? Or is it Venezuela where it doesn’t matter what they do, it’s totally awful?
Most of the recent coverage of Venezuela is like the article in Business Insider, A Few Bizarre Anecdotes That Show Venezuela Is at the Edge of a Dangerous Precipice. Things are going terribly wrong in Venezuela because for most reporters in America, something is always going terribly wrong in Venezuela. They will wait a hundred years if necessary so that they can finally say, “Told you!”
But the last year really has been bad for Venezuela. During that time, the cost of living went up 49%. But this doesn’t mean that hyperinflation is on the way. The Venezuelan government has things in order. (Amusingly, the Business Insider article claimed, “It can’t be stressed enough—[Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro] is no Chavez.” As if the website was a champion of Chavez!) Mark Weisbrot explains the situation:
What really drove inflation up, beginning a year ago, was a cut in the supply of dollars to the foreign exchange market. These were reduced by half in October of 2012 and practically eliminated in February. This meant more importers had to purchase increasingly expensive dollars on the black market. This is where the burst of inflation came from. The devaluation in February also contributed something to inflation, but probably not that much.
But here’s the thing: during this same period, poverty in Venezuela has been cut by 20%. This is in addition to drastic decreases in poverty over the last decade. So the inflation is not hurting poor people. Inflation tends to primarily hurt exactly the people who American media listen to: the rich.
Given the news on Venezuelan poverty is and has been good, what choice does the mainstream press of this country have? None at all! So they simply don’t report it. But if Venezuela were doing as bad a job on this issue as the United States, you can be sure that it would get major coverage. Here’s a graph of our poverty rate:
Notice how its been pretty much increasing over the last 40 years thanks to Republicans and New Democrats. Compare it to Venezuea:
That’s the difference between the “beyond the pale” radicals in Venezuela and the Very Serious establishment types in the United States. When the status quo is wrong, the sober managers are evil.
Fear Mongering at Wonk Blog
This doesn’t help. Over on Wonk Blog, Sarah Kliff caught my attention with the headline, Uh-oh: Techies Are Finding New Problems With HealthCare.gov. But there was exactly nothing of importance in the 200 word article. And what is the big news? The team located problems further down the user experience path.
Kliff claims that “they didn’t know about” these new problems. Well, yeah. When they started on the project they didn’t know about the vast majority of problems. The hard part of fixing computer code is not the actual fixing; it is the finding. I’m sure that the people working on HealthCare.gov suspected that they would run into problems further into the process. I’m sure that when they estimated completing the fix by the end of the month they weren’t basing that on fixing just the problems they were currently working on.
What is going on is actually good news. As the developers are fixing problems with the website, they are allowing users to get further into the process. This, in turn, is allowing them to run up against problems further in. In other words: the website is becoming more usable. New problems have become apparent. Now the developers are working on these newly found problems.
This is all about framing. The Wonk Blog article could have been headlined, “Progress Made on HealthCare.gov as Developers Move to Previously Hidden Bugs.” But I guess the scare headline generates more clicks. I’ve watched as Wonk Blog has tried to burnish its nonpartisan credibility by hammering away at the healthcare website. But this one is just a cheap shot. Although new problems have been found, the developers claim that it does not change their timeline.
Sarah Kliff can “uh-oh” all she likes. But the fact is that finding bugs is what the developers are there to do. If they weren’t still finding problems it would either mean that the problems were overblown or the developers weren’t doing their jobs. And we know the problems weren’t overblown.
Chris Christie Is an Exemplar of Something
No one knows Wisconsin like John Nichols, so when I got a tweet from him, I clicked over, The Scott Walker Effect: Helping Democrats Win and Republicans Lose. It has a lot of fun details about the big rally that Walker did with Ken Cuccinelli that only managed to attract about 150 supporters. That was the weekend before the election! But it isn’t exactly news. Republicans tend to have difficulty getting people to their events because so few people actually like them. They would be better off holding events at abortion clinic protests and corporate boardrooms; that’s where their supporters will be found.
What most struck me in the article was this sentence, “Walker was not invited for a final weekend surrogate swing in New Jersey to campaign for Republican Governor Chris Christie.” That’s not surprising; Scott Walker is not popular anywhere, and certainly not in New Jersey. But the thing is, there is no real difference between Walker and Christie on policy. What’s there is around the edges. For example, Walker is a climate change denier. Christie is not. But Christie’s affirmation of climate change has been so weak as to be useless.
The main thing is that when it comes to workers and their rights, there is no daylight between Walker and Christie. All that nonsense of Christie yelling at teachers is not just about him being an asshole to people generally. He hates teachers because, like pretty much any conservative anywhere in this country, he hates teachers unions. It can’t be said enough: the only difference between the Republicans who are supposedly beyond the pale and those who are “mainstream” is how they talk and not what they think. If Christie could, he would destroy all unions, but he’s smart enough to know you don’t say such things.
Nichols wrote another article yesterday, Don’t Get Too Excited About Christie’s Politics of Style, Not Substance. It follows along with what I’ve been saying. The people of New Jersey don’t agree with Christie on much of anything. And that was highlighted Tuesday when the people voted in the same numbers for a new minimum wage law that Christie was very much opposed to. But I’m not sure that the issue with Christie is his great style. It is more that a narrative has been accepted about him that he is one of those reasonable Republicans who was there during Hurricane Sandy and so he ought to be rewarded.
Regardless, Nichols is right on about how Christie’s “style” (such as it is) will play outside the Goodfellas state. In reference to all the media personalities who are swooning over Christie, he writes, “Just do what Chris Christie says and talk about Chris Christie—at least until his ridiculous reach for the Republican presidential nomination crashes and burns after he yells at the first teacher in Iowa.” Of course, that may not happen. I’m sure there will be many advisers around Christie for the next couple of years trying to mold him into a presentable candidate. But I don’t see how he does this while maintaining his claim to being a “tell it like it is” politician.
I don’t actually care about Christie as a politician. I fully expect him to self-immolate long before he becomes president. But I’m very interested in Christie as exemplar of the “reasonable” or bipartisan Republican. There isn’t anything reasonable or bipartisan about him. What he is instead is a corrupt politician who does very well in a corrupt political system. Richard Daley was really good at that same thing. But reporters were smart enough to never call him “reasonable” or bipartisan. And the voters were smart enough to never call him president. I think the voters are still that smart.
Fun With Penises and Inspiration Posters
For whatever reason, I am feeling very lazy today. So I was trolling around FARK looking for anything that would relieve my boredom. And I came upon an interesting headline for an NPR story, “Despite the Rise of Electronic Keyboards, the Penis Still Popular Among Aficionados.” Now maybe you are quicker than I am. Actually, it’s almost certain you are. I consider myself a pretty good thinker, but my I/O chip is very bad and I’m often the last person to get something like this. All I could think is that both keyboards and dildos (in the shape of penises) are both made of plastics or rubber or something. It also occurred to me that “penis” was the name of some kind of input device. You know, like a joystick.
So I clicked over. I had to know. I already feel bad about not knowing anyone who who shows up on TMZ. If a penis is a new technology, I wanted to know! It turns out that the penis is not a new technology. Actually, the story was one that I’m very interested in. You see, FARK wrote “penis” when they meant “pen is.” (Or many not; the people at FARK are a bunch of devils!) It was about the fact that people don’t use many pens anymore, but there are still freaks like me who love them. It made me think of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and how maybe he meant, “The penis mightier than the sword.” This is not true, of course. Just ask John and Lorena Bobbitt. (Oh my God! I just saw a picture of “it”; I don’t deal well with that kind of stuff.)
Moving on, I was led to a great article at Buzz Feed, 14 Motivational Posters That Inspire No One. They are mostly very common posters, but the snarky comments are great. I highly recommend clicking over because I laughed a whole bunch. Here is my favorite:
Under this image, the writer offered, “…but I am just a pole, so don’t place too much value on my opinion.” It’s not the funniest by a long shot, but it is a very important perspective on sign admonitions.
That article led me to another, 17 Really Awful “Keep Calm” Things. These are based on the famous WWII British signs, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Apparently, over in England they love to play with the saying. Unfortunately, they are all just pathetic. Except this one that I know Andrea will like:
A long time ago, Andrea created a cartoon with a vulture dragging a dead deer to an airport boarding gate. The flight attendant at the gate said, “I’m sorry sir, no carrion.” See what I have to put up with?
The Singer and the Physicists
Two of the greatest female physicists of the 20th century were born on this day. First up, Marie Curie was born in 1867. She is known for the discovery of both polonium and radium. I’m sure you know all about her. Second up, Lise Meitner was born in 1878. She was one of the people responsible for the discovery of nuclear fission. Like Rosalind Franklin, she is one of the great examples of the sexism of the Nobel Prize committee. Curie probably wouldn’t have got one if she had been working alone.
Russian revolutionary and thinker Leon Trotsky was born in 1879. Was he a great guy? I wouldn’t say that. But we hold him in high esteem because he was the anti-Stalin. He’s most notable for being against Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Hitler. That was the last straw for most of the leftists who were still holding positive opinions about the Soviet Union. And then, of course, Stalin had Trotsky murdered.
Herman J. Mankiewicz was born in 1897. He was a major screenwriting hack in the 1930s and 1940s. But he is best known for co-writing Citizen Kane. In fact, he got an Academy Award for writing it—the only one the film received. That’s typical. All That Jazz lost to Kramer vs. Kramer. Pulp Fiction lost to Forrest Gump. Whatever.
Other birthdays: Baroque painter Francisco Zurbaran (1598); cartographer James Cook (1728); railroad builder Thomas Brassey (1805); philosopher Albert Camus (1913); nefarious Christer Billy Graham (95); trumpet player Al Hirt (1922); and pundit Lawrence O’Donnell (62).
The day, however, belongs to Joni Mitchell who is 70 today. She is an amazingly great singer and songwriter. I never tire of her. Here is one of her album Court and Spark:
Happy birthday Joni Mitchell!