Fundamental Premises – II April 30, 2013April 29, 2013 If you get this column emailed automatically, you get the “early edition,” when I click publish. Invariably, I then realize I’ve misspelled something . . . “piqued” when I meant “peaked” . . . and in redoing it I realize I could have better said something else, so I tinker . . . and then maybe I boldface parts of an except to help guide a busy reader’s eye . . . and then I click update, so at least those who come here manually get the better version. I don’t resend the email because I can’t figure out how; and because even if I could, I wouldn’t want to clutter your inbox. (In an emergency, if I’ve REALLY screwed it up, I would re-post altogether; but that’s different.) In case you ever want to forward a post, the online version will always be the better one. As yesterday’s — renamed “Fundamental Premises” — was. (Overnight, I even figured out how to insert the photo — in case you’ve never seen what can be done with bathroom tissue and an exhaust grate at one a.m. on Barcelona’s Gran Via in the drizzle.) BARCELONA Chip Ellis: “I highly recommend that you use the PocketGuide App for iPhone. I used it last year when in Barcelona (other cities also available). Download next time you have WiFi service. PocketGuide gives you walking tours of the city as if you are in a museum with a headset. The GPS feature always knows where you are and describes buildings and sites as you approach. It also has a public transportation map feature to get you where you need to go. The GPS worked on my phone even though I had no Verizon international data or phone service. I had no data or phone charges.” MARRIAGE Jeff: “You wrote: ‘This is the ultimate conservative position: why should the government interfere with your freedom to marry the person you love?’ The ultimate libertarian position (which is what I think you meant to offer) is that government shouldn’t have anything whatsoever to do with a religious issue like marriage.” ☞ Not quite. Civil marriage is not a religious issue. No religious blessing is required or involved. Just go down to the taxpayer-funded courthouse and get hitched, with all the mundane secular government-granted and enforced rights and responsibilities that entails. Lots of atheists marry without having in any way to hide their atheism. But I do see that “conservative” can be defined I more than one way – I chose conservative as in wanting a “small government” that doesn’t try to tell you how to live your life.
Fundamental Premises April 29, 2013April 29, 2013 Barcelona rocks. Even if your trip coincides with nonstop chill drizzle. (And, today, chill thunderstorms.) We’re relying on Let’s Go: Barcelona, written by Harvard students, which is a bit of a kick as, back before you could phone home for anything other than an arm and a leg — let alone Skype home for free — I was myself such a student, charged with updating the sections on Ireland, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. (There was a country called Yugoslavia.) At the time, there was only one book in the Lets Go series — Let’s Go: The Student Guide to Europe — and our “editors” for those three countries had, as far as anyone could tell, “gone missing” (not, presumably, in any sinister way . . . more like falling in love or discovering hash or who knows why they hadn’t mailed in their copy). Off I went to Ireland, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia, speaking passable English and laughable Russian, to update the restaurant and hotel listings. The quality of the effort has improved significantly since then. I’ll spare you any kind of ordered account, but just to give you a sense of it, my friend and I went out for an 11pm dinner last night (Sunday night) and, after deciding that the mussels place recommended in Let’s Go looked a little peaked so close to midnight, walked along the drizzly Via Grande or whatever it’s called (only one of us speaks Spanish and he is not me, por favor), one of the city’s many spectacular tree-lined boulevards (but wait til you see the many spectacular narrow shop-lined medieval alleyways or ride the spectacularly pleasant modern metro), and came upon a large and lively two-level tapas place, ordered a dozen amazing little items and a couple of Bitburgers and, as things were winding down, noticed from our second-storey perch a couple of streamers blowing up from the street outside. We were well back from the windows so couldn’t see what was causing their ends to be fluttering skyward from the wet pavement perhaps 15 feet below. So now the beers are drained, we’ve finished photographing and eating our tapas (my friend photographs everything he eats), the 41,35 Euro bill is paid (they use decimal commas instead of points; that much Spanish I speak), it’s one-ish, and back out on the chilly and drizzling street in front of the restaurant we see the source of the streamers, which had been knotted and were no longer streaming: a man holding a roll of bathroom tissue, with a hat for coins by his feet, had constructed an elaborate and rather appealing 13-foot sculpture, sturdy in its way, and somehow withstanding the light drizzle (could Charmin do this?), upflated by virtue of its having been anchored to a large rectangular metal exhaust grate cut into the sidewalk: Home by two, write my column, and off to bed. It’s barely midnight East Coast time, though six a.m. in Spain. And while we’re at it . . . VIVA LA FRANCE Spain has long had marriage equality. France wrote it into law last week. This is the ultimate conservative position: why should the government interfere with your freedom to marry the person you love? That would be as anti-libertarian as interfering with a religious group’s freedom to condemn those government-issued licenses as unholy. Both should be free to do what they want. There are now 14 countries, I think, and nearly as many American states, recognizing this. Whom you love is not really a choice. So any nation dedicated to liberty and the pursuit of happiness — as some think ours should be — might want to hop on the bandwagon. The idea that you can change your sexual orientation was propounded perhaps most impressively by a psychiatrist named Charles Socarides. His son Richard, as irony would have it, was this nation’s first openly gay White House liaison to the LGBT community. The New York Times once profiled them jointly. Charles has passed on, but Richard reminisces on the relationship in this recent six-minute clip. FAULTY PREMISES Charles Socarides was wrong. You don’t get to choose your sexual orientation. Yes, there is an “ex-gay” movement that argues otherwise. But for quite a while it was led by John Paulk, who now writes: A Formal Public Apology by John Paulk For the better part of ten years, I was an advocate and spokesman for what’s known as the “ex-gay movement,” where we declared that sexual orientation could be changed through a close-knit relationship with God, intensive therapy and strong determination. At the time, I truly believed that it would happen. And while many things in my life did change as a Christian, my sexual orientation did not. So in 2003, I left the public ministry and gave up my role as a spokesman for the “ex-gay movement.” I began a new journey. In the decade since, my beliefs have changed. Today, I do not consider myself “ex-gay” and I no longer support or promote the movement. Please allow me to be clear: I do not believe that reparative therapy changes sexual orientation; in fact, it does great harm to many people. I know that countless people were harmed by things I said and did in the past, Parents, families, and their loved ones were negatively impacted by the notion of reparative therapy and the message of change. I am truly, truly sorry for the pain I have caused. From the bottom of my heart I wish I could take back my words and actions that caused anger, depression, guilt and hopelessness. In their place I want to extend love, hope, tenderness, joy and the truth that gay people are loved by God. . . . John Paulk Funny how fundamental premises, long and firmly held, can be so wrong. The premise that the Earth is flat. (Well just look at it!) The premise that you can choose your sexual orientation. The premise that the wealthy should be lightly taxed because they are the job creators (irrefutably debunked here). The premise for the Republican insistence on austerity, which turns out to have been based on a series of Excel spreadsheet errors that no one disputes were errors. Toilet-paper sculptures all, supported by hot air.
Hurray for America, Mankind, and Satire April 26, 2013April 25, 2013 If all went as planned, I hurtled through the sky last night and am now ensconced in a foreign land trying to figure out how the electrical outlets work. Not entirely clear whether there will be posts next week or — if there are — how timely they may be. If you see a post about kittens even as the world appears to be ending (say), it’s not that I’ve lost my mind — just my Internet connection. Meanwhile, four videos: RABBI FELDMAN’S BAR MITZVAH SPEECH Here. An uplifting tribute to America. (And yes, not all rabbis have been bar mitzvahed — unless this guy was the last one left to be and now they all are.) And by the way? Just as he wondered throughout his boyhood why he was being punished simply for having been born Jewish, so must countless millions of kids wonder even to this day why they are being punished simply for having been born black or poor or gay or in any number of other ways “less than.” Of course, to Americans — when we don’t lose sight of our founding principles — we hold it to be a self-evident truth that they were born equal. GOOD NEWS! You are 35 times less likely to be murdered than you were in Medieval times. And the fun doesn’t stop there. Here. (This is a year and a half old, but that may be because it was based on an 800-page book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, it may have taken my pal Matt Ball, who just sent me this, a while to finish.) MORE GOOD NEWS! Matt also sent THIS — centuries of snappy, upbeat global perspective in just four minutes. ALPHA HOUSE As noted Wednesday, but you might not have had time to watch . . . Amazon has started producing TV shows (minus the TV). For example, watch the pilot for Garry Trudeau’s new series, Alpha House. With John Goodman, no less. By Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau, no less. Free! Funny! No commercials! Have a great weekend.
Substitute Teacher April 25, 2013April 25, 2013 HEROES – Part II Abe: “Back in the fifties they were renovating the White House and President Truman was living in Blair House across the street. A group of Puerto Rican nationalists disrupted the Congress one fine day and one of their number shot the GSA guard at the Blair House and started up the front stoop to assassinate Truman, who was napping within. The guard, dying in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, brought the guy down with his service revolver, firing from the prone position, before he died himself. Probably a wage board three in salary. Don’t know what sort of pension his widow got, if any. I have measured everybody put up for hero status by this man from that day to this. Not many measure up.” VENEZUELA – UPDATE My friend writes: Update one week later. Venezuela continues in a real state of tension and discordance. A wave of persecution has broken out against public employees (including teachers, doctors, police, government clerks etc) who are suspected of having voted for the opposition candidate Capriles — which obviously many many did. People may lose their jobs, and houses are being searched, violently and in some cases planting incriminating evidence. Sporadic government violence continues, some of it even perpetuated by people disguised as opposition. The short term looks grim, even while a semblance of a “vote recount” slowly proceeds. On the evening of the election (April 14th), and the next day, the current government agreed to a recount, given the closeness — 235,000 votes out of 15,000,000 — remarkably close in a system that totally favors the government in every way. They agreed to this in order to get all the presidents of Latin America to come to Maduro’s inauguration, which many of them did, on the pretense of a recount. Most of these governments owe Venezuela varying amounts of money owing to Chavez´s petroleum largess over the boom years of high oil prices — loans, aid, all with the condition of supporting his government, very effective (This was called Chavez’s Petrol Checkbook.) Very few of these heads of state now want to stop receiving these boons, much less have to pay back what they owe the people of Venezuela, so they were inclined to allow Maduro to assume the presidency, which happened, more or less. But now the electoral commission and the government is putting all kinds of creative limiting conditions on the agreement about the recount, as it is becoming increasingly clear that there was methodical fraud, and that Capriles indeed won the election by a significant margin. These officials have even stated that legally, no matter what the results of the recount, it will not change their proclamation of Maduro as the winner. Of course, all this only increases the conviction of fraud. The opposition carefully monitored the election with very different results which are beginning to come out. The government cannot afford to open this Pandora’s Box, as it will directly reflect upon earlier elections as well. The United States (among others, including the European Union) has correctly not recognized Maduro as the legitimately elected president of Venezuela to date, unless there is an adequate recount. Venezuela is threatening with oil and business sanctions against the USA – their usual style against many lesser countries – but we all really hope this non-recognition continues — it is the right thing to do. As many people say here, if the government committed fraud to keep Maduro in power, then this is no longer a democracy. And these comments, incidentally, are coming from the “pueblo,” low income people in the “barrios,” very many of whom finally rose to vote against this oppressive, ineffective government. They now use the word dictadura = dictatorship. It is unlikely that Capriles will be able to turn this around, despite the clarity of fraud, but on the other hand, he has already turned it around. Chavismo will never be the same, and we can anticipate its steady ungracious decline into the future, possibly (hopefully) dramatically. This is one situation where the United States can play a significant benign role, simply by not recognizing an acting president unless and until a careful vote recount establishes who really won. The USA has an opportunity to gain real stature in the eyes of the democrats of Latin America, especially given its dubious past of unfortunate interventions down here. CULTURE CLASH For a laugh. (Thanks, Alan.) The one about the substitute teacher — three minutes.
Amazon’s New Hit Show April 24, 2013April 23, 2013 HERO ABC News interviewed the extremely nice guy who found a terrorist bleeding to death at the bottom of his boat and called 911. So far, I’m with you. Certainly interesting to hear what that must have been like. But for two minutes the chyron beneath the story read, HERO BOAT OWNER BREAKS HIS SILENCE; while the correspondent said, “people are calling you a national hero.” And that is where I just felt like mentioning — no disrespect to this truly nice fellow (who I am certain sought none of the praise), but out of respect to actual heroes, and out of regard for the English language — well . . . really? A hero? For going outside to get some air once the police sounded the all clear, as he described he did? For noticing something funny about the adjustment of his boat cover? For taking a look? For seeing a body? For calling 911? What kind of idiot, seeing a body lying at the bottom of his boat, wouldn’t call 911? For heroism to be invoked, it seems to me, two conditions must be met: first, that something of consequence was attempted and/or achieved for the good of others — be those others the football team (and thus the school or the city it represents) or the man who’s fallen onto the subway tracks or potential polio victims (wasn’t Jonas Salk a hero for coming up with a vaccine?) or all of mankind, more or less, as when Alan Turing broke the Enigma Code and turned the tide of World War II. Which brings me to the second condition: that it’s got to be dangerous. Or difficult. Or both. Running into a burning building? They may say it’s just part of the job — and maybe it is — but if you ask me, the men and women who do it are heroes. Riding a rocket into outer space? Not me, friend. I’m barely brave enough to go to Brooklyn. (Though having done so I can report: Brooklyn’s terrific.) Cracking the Enigma code? Not dangerous but virtually impossible — until one brilliant man, to the benefit of hundreds of millions of others, did it. I expect the lovely guy with the boat would agree. (And while we’re at it, would it make sense to find a word that conveys deep sympathy for and common humanity with — but not automatic heroism on — the victims of tragedies?) ALPHA HOUSE Amazon has started producing TV shows, minus the TV. For example, watch the pilot for Garry Trudeau’s new series, Alpha House. With John Goodman, no less. By Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau, no less. Free! Funny! Pilot length (no commercials)! Don’t be late for work . . .
Hidden Gems April 23, 2013April 22, 2013 COULD THE WORLD RUN ON RENEWABLES ALONE? So asks Scientific American. Here. And this good stuff doesn’t even take into account the “passive cooling” panels described yesterday that would lower demand significantly, should they prove viable. HOW ABOUT ON STREB ENERGY? STREB is gymnastics meets modern dance meets professional wrestling (the body slams, but from greater heights) meets the circus meet Mechanics 101 — all for $25 a seat, if you can find your way to a hole in the wall in Brooklyn when they’re performing . . . or just scroll down their home page and watch the video. Amazing. COULD IT POWER THIS MALL? It’s a quite small mall . . . constructed in the basement of a Malibu mansion . . . and it has just one occasional customer — Barbra Streisand. It’s a one-man play called Buyer & Cellar that is so brilliantly conceived, written, and performed — with a top ticket price of $55, I think — that you won’t mind the somewhat ratty 99-seat theater. No special interest in Streisand is required, just a sense of humor.
Two Academic Papers April 22, 2013 “NEVER MIND” – PART III I won’t let this go, because, really, it seems kind of important: . . . Bottom line: The foundation of the entire global push for austerity and debt reduction in the last several years has been based on a screwup in a [single academic paper] . . . What’s needed is not Republican austerity. What’s needed is Democratic investment in our future. There’s so much that needs doing; so many able and eager to do it; so much cheap money available to fund their doing it. All that stands in the way are the Republicans who control the House and who — by their unprecedented use of the filibuster — paralyze the Senate. It’s madness — and it was based on a single economic paper that now proves simply to have been bogus. (Sound familiar? Our invasion of Iraq was based on intelligence from a single source we never directly interviewed code-named Curveball.) Is there any chance the Republicans, confronted with this new information, will change course? The fact that you and I both doubt it does not bode well. AND YET THERE’S SO MUCH THAT DOES! For example, this report from Stanford: A Stanford team has designed an entirely new form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. Such a panel could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by radiating sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. . . . [and that] may be able to supply air conditioning without using electricity to poor and off-the-grid areas. . . . Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more. . . . Their paper describing the device was published March 5 in Nano Letters. . . . Granted, this is based on “science,” which Rush Limbaugh brands one of the “four pillars of deceit” (the others: academia, the media, and government). Really, you should trust only Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber, not physics, Harvard, the New York Times, or the President. Still, I find it pretty thrilling. . . . Radiative cooling has profound advantages over other cooling equipment, such as air conditioners. It is a passive technology. It requires no energy. It has no moving parts. It is easy to maintain. You put it on the roof or the sides of buildings and it starts working immediately. Beyond the commercial implications, Fan and his collaborators foresee a broad potential social impact. Much of the human population on Earth lives in sun-drenched regions huddled around the equator. . . . Too cool for school.
Who Would Want Gold When They Could Have Paper? April 19, 2013April 19, 2013 “NEVER MIND” — PART II Marc Harris: “I’ve read the summation of one of those key critiques of Reinhart-Rogoff, and it’s true that one of the big problems appears to be a spreadsheet-range error. (Whoops! Turns out debt doesn’t ruin economies.) But there appear to be plenty of data issues too. Choosing the starting points and handling spans of successive years appear to be the most serious. I’m not the only one who thinks Reinhart and Rogoff owe it to the rest of us to be candid about their data selection and analysis, especially considering how influential it’s been in pushing politicians toward ‘austerity,’ also known as ‘contractionary’ policy. There should be no surprise that contractionary policy is . . . contractionary.” GOLD Some have asked what to make of the recent sudden drop in the price of GLD — more than 10% — and of course the answer is: I don’t know. Maybe it’s that . . . [Sarcasm ON] “Why would anyone want to own gold when they can own paper money?” [Sarcasm OFF] I’d love to think we’ve seen the top in gold, but for me it remains a sensible hedge. VENEZUELA UPDATE My friend writes . . . “Things have calmed down just a bit — both sides have backed off — we were worried that Capriles and Leopoldo Lopez would be in jail by the end of yesterday, which would have generated a huge commotion and probable bloodshed. It is unlikely that Capriles will be able to turn this around, despite the clarity of fraud; but on the other hand, he has already turned it around. Chavismo will never be the same, and we can anticipate its steady ungracious decline into the future, possibly (hopefully) dramatically so. No complaints whatsoever about Capriles, he has done a magnificent job (indeed, bordering on greatness), but many of us have thought that Leopoldo Lopez (who incidentally has a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School) was the most qualified person to become the next President. Unfortunately, the government thought so too, and so took steps several years ago to ‘administratively’ disqualify him from holding public office for reasons of ‘corruption,’ something they invent all the time now, but he was the first and most prominent victim of false charges. (This was appealed to and 100% discredited in the OAS Interamerican Court of Human Rights, but the government pays no mind.) They will undoubtedly try to do this to Capriles too, except that he has too much political capital to mess with right now. . . . BTW, both Capriles and Lopez are real heart-throbs-gorgeous human beings! This doesn’t hurt, here in Venezuela, where the women win a disproportionate number of international beauty contests, and physical appearance is highly valued.” LIVE LONG ENOUGH . . . . . . and, oh gosh, you become a hypothesis. (See Basic And Applied Social Psychology 35: 176-190.) Have a great weekend.
Both Their Fundamental Premises Are Simply Wrong April 18, 2013April 18, 2013 But first . . . NO-NONSENSE NEW ZEALAND PARLIAMENTARY MARRIAGE HUMOR Four minutes — here. Really: they’re getting it all over the world. And remember: this is government-issued, civil marriage equality we’re talking about. Religions are still free to withhold the rites of holy matrimony from anyone they want. And now . . . When you think about it, the two central economic premises of our friends on the right are, first, that the rich must be lightly taxed because they are “the job creators” and second that we must cut our deficit drastically to get the economy growing faster. The first premise is simply demolished in this six-minute clip by serial entrepreneur and billionaire Nick Hanauer that I keep linking to. And it turns out there’s a bit of a problem with the second, as well: “NEVER MIND” From Salon: Whoops! Turns out debt doesn’t ruin economies A paper justifying international austerity measures had a couple of mistakes that totally undermine its argument By Alex Pareene Read it here. Basically, they screwed up their Excel spreadsheet and thus arrived at the wrong conclusion. We should be stepping on the gas not the brakes. Jim McElwee: “One wonders how many jobs could have been saved, families stabilized, schools maintained if political and economic activists had demanded peer review of the Reinhart-Rogoff data before reacting in an economy busting fashion.” This is a big deal and won’t take long to read. Infrastructure! Put people to work rebuilding our country! The world is throwing long-term money at us virtually interest free to finance this work. Nice side-benefit: it would get our economy booming again, which itself would lower the deficit as tax receipts rose and safety-net payments fell. What are we waiting for?
Up: (a) Cheering (b) Not Mucking It April 17, 2013April 17, 2013 PERSPECTIVE From Matt Ball, who always sends me the best stuff: “To cheer you up.” EVEN BROADER PERSPECTIVE Our planet in context. Let’s not muck it up. MORE FROM VENEZUELA My friend continues: Many of the foreign electoral observers, plus the USA, EU, Spain, France, England, Chile, Columbia etc etc have all encouraged a recount. The USA was one among many, and not particularly emphatic that I saw. Acting President Maduro responded by brazenly threatening to expropriate Spanish companies plus take various diplomatic and commercial measures against other countries. More ironies of life: The head of the electoral commission is strongly refusing to recount the votes, which is of course increasing the suspicion of fraud, and she has cited Bush v Gore in 2000 as an example of a close election where a recount was not needed. (At that time, the populist Chavez government correctly lambasted the USA for its democratic failings.) Acting President Maduro was a leftist student radical in his youth, known for his confrontational style at demonstrations. Yesterday, he warned the thousands and thousands of students demonstrating for a recount all across the country that he would respond with the full power of the state if necessary.