On this day back in 1856, Sigmund Freud was born. I’m not a huge fan of the man, but there is no doubting his importance. And silent film legend Rudolph Valentino was born in 1895. He died at the age of 31 due to complications from appendicitis. In many ways, I think that’s not a bad age to die at. Leave them wanting more. I often think that would have been a good career move for me. Regardless, it worked well for Valentino, although I’m sure he would have preferred to live longer. His life was good.

The great Willie Mays is 82 today. Singer-songwriters Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Bob Seger are both 68. I doubt Seger still has “the fire down below”—if he ever did. Spineless war monger Tony Blair is 60. I still maintain that if Blair had not gone along with the Iraq War, Bush could not have done it. So I blame Blair almost as much as I do Bush. One half of They Might Be Giants, John Flansburgh is 53.[1] And George Clooney is 52.

Before getting to the day’s winner, there are a couple of important events today. The Hindenburg exploded over New Jersey on this day back in 1937. To this day, no one is certain what happened. I’ve always focused on the fact that it was filled with hydrogen, which is explosive around, you know, oxygen. Regardless of what went wrong, there would have been no explosion if it used helium. So why didn’t they use helium? The same reason that people usually die pointlessly: profits. Helium was much more expensive than hydrogen. People come and go, but profits are something a company always has! And speaking of which, three years later to the day, John Steinbeck was given the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath.

But the day belongs to the great film innovator Orson Welles, who was born on this day back 1915. You can’t have read me for long without knowing my fondness for Welles. But that doesn’t mean I’m one of these guys who thinks he was some sort of a god. The truth is that I pretty much go along with Simon Callow who says that Welles was primarily interested in experimenting on film. But that doesn’t mean that Welles was not also a great storyteller. But I will allow that we might have gotten more storytelling from him if he hadn’t been such a master of the art. Here is a little bit of my writing about him:

Falstaff “Railed Against Our Person”?

Rotten Tomatoes for Orson Welles

The Other Side of the Wind

The Magnificent Ambersons

Happy birthday Orson Welles!

Afterword

This is the only cover I ever remember They Might Be Giants doing. It is perfect for them:

[1] Interesting coincidence: In the film They Might Be Giants, Mr. Small thinks that he is Rudolph Velentino.

I always look forward to Mondays and Fridays because Paul Krugman has a column on those days. Even after all these years of reading him, he still has much to offer about what is going on in the world. And this morning, he put together a number of pieces about why our economy is in the mess that it is in. This probably won’t come as a shock to readers of this blog, but it is still edifying.

He offered up a great way to think about government debt. If you look at the ten presidents who served from World War II up until Obama, only three left office with more debt than they entered with. Who were those three? Reagan, Bush Sr, and Bush Jr, of course! And what do they have in common? They are modern Republicans: people who don’t want to make the government a meaner, leaner fighting machine. They want to destroy it. Remember the Grover Norquist quote, “Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub”? That’s what they want.

Or at least, that’s what they claim to want. The truth is that they are just children. When they aren’t in power, they don’t want the government to do anything. When they are in power, they want the government to do all kinds of things (mostly for the rich) and they don’t want the government to pay for it. Krugman sums up this philosophy as it now stands:

Krugman doesn’t really get into this, but there is another issue. The conservatives use budget deficits as a cudgel. A balanced budget, of course, depends upon two things: spending and income. They are always for cutting income—while in power or not. But they are only for decreasing spending when they are not in power because of… the budget deficit! This all goes back to my last article: conservatives don’t believe in economics or any other science, except in as much as it justifies them doing what they were going to do anyway.

It’s all shameful. The question is whether the people will ever figure it out. I fear that by 2016, the people will think, “The Democrats have had their go; it’s time to let the Republicans try.” And I know what we will get: huge tax cuts and a ballooning deficit. And we’ll likely also have a vice-president to assure us that deficits don’t matter. At least until a Democrat is president again.

Crickett, makers of toys that celebrate American traditions, introduces My First BBQ. It’s never too young to start your children on the path of patriotic family values! Don’t let the government take away your right to choose how to amuse your kids. Let your gut be your guide.

On this day back in 1813, Soren Kierkegaard was born. Then, exactly 5 years later, Karl Marx was born. I have much to say about both of these men, but I’m just not up for it. And especially, I’m not up for choosing which of them deserves to win the day, so I decided to give it to neither of them. You know when a person is important: they never referred to themselves by a single name but now we do. Also: Tammy Wynette was born in 1942. I didn’t even know she was dead. Apparently, she had a lot of health problems.

But the day belongs to Michael Palin who is 70 years old today. Here is a little bit of “Tomkinson’s Schooldays” from the series he did with Terry Jones, Ripping Yarns. The opening has a wonderful introduction to the story with Palin playing a grand and serious actor who cannot remember his lines. It is very funny and very Palin:

Happy birthday Michael Palin!

Afterword

Now I’m going back to bed.

I swear I am getting worse. In addition, I think I’m taking too much cold medicine. The combination of the nighttime cold & flu and the cough medicine has made it so I can’t quite walk straight. Nonetheless, the cough goes on and the nose drips like the bathroom faucet. In order to get though this, I’m watching comedy. And generally, I’ve found them very funny. So in what follows, keep in mind what Jim Hogshire wrote about taking a cup of Robitussin. “At four o’clock in the morning I woke up suddenly and remembered that I had to go to Kinko’s copy shop and that I had to shave off about a week’s worth of stubble from my face. These ideas were very clear to me. That may seem normal, but the fact was that I had a reptilian brain. My whole way of thinking and perceiving had changed. I had full control over my motor functions, but I felt ungainly. I was detached from my body, as if I were on laughing gas.” He continued, “While I was shaving I ‘thought’ that for all I knew I was hacking my face to pieces. Since I didn’t see any blood or feel any pain I didn’t worry about it. Had I looked down and seen that I had grown another limb, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all; I would have just used it.” That’s about right.

Yesterday, I watched a stand-up special of Todd Glass. He is what I have come to think of as an “angry comedian.” He’s mad about the way life is. In general, these are not my favorite comics. But there is something so sweet about him that it is almost impossible not to love him. And he gets wonderfully sidetracked. Here he is going three stories deep without even trying:

Then I watched Galaxy Quest. This film has a special place in my heart. As you probably know, the film is a parody of Star Trek and its fan phenomenon. At one point, in the early days of the internet, if you searched for my name, it would take you to the Star Trek FAQ. Apparently, I had helped out the writers of it, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what I did. And yes, I have been to a Star Trek convention: twice. I would normally not have done such a thing, but my first wife was way into the show. Really. I’m not just saying that to avoid looking bad. And I can prove it: I have gone to comic book conventions all by myself. So there you go.

As a result of this, I think Galaxy Quest is hilarious. And even though I had seen it before, I laughed a great deal. Afterwards, I looked the movie up on Wikipedia. It included quotes from people who have been in the series. Now I’m mostly only interested in the original series. The later series are not as playful. So I was naturally pulled to a quote from William Shatner, “I thought it was very funny, and I thought the audience that they portrayed was totally real, but the actors that they were pretending to be were totally unrecognizable. Certainly I don’t know what Tim Allen was doing. He seemed to be the head of a group of actors, and for the life of me I was trying to understand who he was imitating.” You gotta love that guy!

Finally, I put on the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers. I had remembered liking the film when I was a kid. And I suspect that at the time, it was really funny. But I found all the pratfalls forced and rarely funny. In particular, Raquel Welch plays an accident prone wench, but because of the way it is directed, it just doesn’t work for me. It is all too much in long shot. I suspect that it would work a lot better on the big screen. Regardless, it is hard not to love Oliver Reed as Athos. What’s more, I learned that he was banned from the state of Georgia because of his drunken escapades. My hero!

Anyway, that’s my life. I feel marginally better, but my cough is worse than ever. Time for more medicine.

On this day in 1469, the great Niccolo Machiavelli was born. The Hundred and One Dalmatians author Dodie Smith was born in 1896. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was born in 1898. Bing Crosby, who for some reason I just hate, was born in 1903. Femme fatale from The Maltese Falcon, Mary Astor was born in 1906. And magician Doug Henning was born in 1947.

Pete Seeger is 94 today! Physicist Steven Weinberg is 80. Singer Frankie Valli is 79. TV pitchman Ron Popeil is 78. The younger of the evil Koch duo, David Koch is 73. And comedy writer Ben Elton is 54.

But the day belongs to The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, who was born on this day back in 1933. I don’t know that much about him, but his music has been profoundly important to me. Let’s just listen to him with Bobby Byrd doing several songs on Italian TV in 1971:

Happy birthday James Brown!

I’ve been sick and so I’ve been re-watching some movies. Last night, I put on Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. At one point, Mr. Pump says that Moist Von Lipwig has killed many people. Lipwig counters that he never even drew a sword. Pump responds, “You have stolen, embezzled, and swindled. You have ruined businesses and destroyed lives. When banks fail, it’s not bankers who starve. In a thousand small ways, you have hastened the deaths of many. You did not know them. You did not see them bleed. But you snatched bread from their mouths.”

There is a conservative reading of this, of course. It’s the old “get tough on the criminals” line. But that isn’t what Terry Pratchett is saying. The whole of Going Postal is a radical critique of free market idolatry. The point is this: economic crime kills. But in our system, we don’t talk about that. We pretend that physical and economic harm are different. If a criminal tied a victim to a chair and let him starve to death, that would be considered murder. If the same criminal merely prevented a victim from having a job so he could buy food, that would not be considered murder. (See my article Property Rights for a discussion of the myth of freedom in a modern economy.)

We know that poor people have much lower life expectancies than rich people. In the upper half of the income distribution, people live about 5 years longer than people in the lower half. This means that our economic system hastens the deaths of many. When a venture capitalist fires hundreds of manufacturing workers, he lowers the life expectancies of those workers. Let’s suppose he does that to 1,200 workers and takes an average of one month of life away from each. That’s a hundred years of life. That’s a lot more life than your average murder takes away from his victim. Yet we don’t even see what the venture capitalist does as a crime, much less punish him for it.

I realize it is more complicated than this. And I am not calling for a communist revolution. In fact, I am actually a big proponent of a market system. My problem is not with the venture capitalist. He is just doing what society tells him to. The problem is the society itself. We live in a rich nation. If we wanted to, we could provide everyone with a base level of support. There is no reason why Americans need to feel insecure about their futures. But it’s a choice. And the choice that we’ve made is to allow some to become insanely rich while others live under the eaves of the downtown library.

And where might that money come from? I’ve written about this a lot because I think the most important issue we face as a country is economic inequality. The explosion of inequality is the direct and indirect result of government policy. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in the years from 1917-1981, the bottom 90% of income earners received 69% of the gains from productivity increases. In the years 1981-2012, the bottom 90% of income earners received 4% of the gains from productivity increases.

An indication of this can be seen in CEO compensation data from Bloomberg. In 1950, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies made 20 times what the average employee at their firm made. (Average, not minimum.) By 1980, the number had risen to 42. Today, it is 204. This is not all about taxes. There are plenty of other ways that the government over the last 60 years has made owners rich at the expense of the poor. One of the most important is the way that Reagan basically abolished all labor law and allowed unions to be all but destroyed in the private economy. (And Democrats have done nothing but help that along since then.)

Economic crime kills. Legal economic activity kills. The government should do something about that. But as income inequality has skyrocketed, the government has only become more beholden to the rich. It is far more interested in seeing to it that the rich can transfer their wealth to their kids without paying taxes than that the poor can live with a modicum of dignity.

Data were taken from The Young Turks May Day video.

Who knew Stephen Fry was so smart?

Well, I guess we all did…

This is a remarkable catch by Melissa Harris-Perry on The Rachel Maddow Show tonight. Apparently, one of the scenarios you can play at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in their “decision room” is Hurricane Katrina. But it isn’t about helping the drowning and starving people. It is about whether to send in troops to the stop the looting.

This is about what I expect from a presidential library. It has only been in the past couple of years that the Nixon library has been anything close to truthful about Watergate. Eventually, the new Bush library will tell the truth. But as long as he’s alive, it will be all lies and apologia. Because we can’t hurt Bush’s feelings. He’s rich and powerful. We only disregard the feelings of the poor and weak.