Brava The Financial Diet - well done

This woman may well be the heir to Paul Krugman. Really good work here.

Strange bedfellows

Kathy Griffin posted this photo to her Facebook account and wrote

Anybody recognize the guy peaking his head out at the far right edge of the frame? Surprise! We are pals. Or frenemies😎🥰😎. #ImpeachmentHearings

She's talking about George Conway, who, I am convinced is the anonymous author of "A Warning" along with his wife Kellyanne and possibly other members of the Trump administration. It's not as crazy as it sounds - it would certainly explain why the Conways haven't divorced. 

I recognize the woman on the left of this photo, E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of rape and is suing him.  Next to her is, I think, Molly Jong Fast, daughter of Erica Jong. And I recognize Michael Ian Black in the back. But who is the standing directly in front of Black - IS THAT PAUL KRUGMAN???

What an interesting collection of people in this photo.

How did I not know about this? Paul Krugman and Nancy Pelosi

Krugman is a huge fan.

KRUGMAN MASTERCLASS WHOOHOOOO!

Anybody reading this blog (now in its fourteenth year!) knows how much I admire Paul Krugman.

So of course I absolutely had to sign up for the Krugman Masterclass which was advertised on Youtube videos for Rachel Maddow. It was a little pricey at $90 but I decided to treat myself for my upcoming birthday (I share the date if not the year with Krugman.)

Zak Morgan: tomorrow belongs to him

I am a Facebook friend of John Gorka, author of the immortal "I'm from New Jersey" and Gorka posted a message in opposition to Trump's policy of kidnapping children and then holding them hostage so he can achieve his anti-immigration policies.

Turns out Gorka has more MAGAt fans than you would expect for a singer-songwriter.

And one of them is a folk musician, by the name of Zak Morgan, who seeks to demonize immigrants as drug runners, human traffickers, gang members and terrorists.

This is a man who has regular contact with children. He has gigs coming up all over Ohio and Kentucky.

He has an obligation to inform the parents that he supports the policy of kidnapping children. Especially if any of them are Latino, because if Trump is able to suspend due process as he wants to, the children of citizens who "look" illegal might very well be snatched as Krugman pointed out.

I told Morgan he has the obligation to inform parents of his position on child-snatching but he declined to say he would. I believe it's because he's a sniveling chicken-shit Trump supporter.

 I wonder if Morgan will ever perform at a Trump rally. He could sing this volk ditty:

Is alt-right Claire Lehmann ghostwriting for Bari Weiss?

Sam Harris: "look at what a bad-ass I am!"

I was blissfully ignorant of the existence of Bari Weiss until a few months ago. Now she's shilling for alt-right Quillette in the NYTimes:

“I’ve had to update Quillette’s servers three times now because it’s caved under the weight of the traffic,” Ms. Lehmann said about the publication most associated with this movement.

So basically the "renegade" "Dark Web" is attempting to repackage alt-right beliefs as "centrist" - just like alt-right Quillette.

And Weiss lies, in the "Renegade" tradition about the Southern Poverty Law Center:

What’s more, this frog-kissing plays perfectly into the hands of those who want to discredit the individuals in this network. In recent days, for example, Mr. Harris has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a bridge to the alt-right: “Under the guise of scientific objectivity, Harris has presented deeply flawed data to perpetuate fear of Muslims and to argue that black people are genetically inferior to whites.”

The SPLC didn't simply "label" Harris as a bridge - they demonstrated the empirical reality of that fact. Did Weiss even read the article?

Of course Steven Pinker approves.

I did enjoy many of the responses to Weiss:

Jamelle Bouie

Krugman

Pseudonymous Twitterer - this might be the best.

The Koch brothers own the American Right

The Koch brothers have devoted themselves to making the United States a tax-free haven for the wealthy and a pit of despair for the non-wealthy. And they are not afraid to use stealth to get their way.

As the NYTimes reports today:

The group, Transparent GMU, had sued the university and its fund-raising foundation last year after it was denied requests for documents that it suspected showed how deep-pocket donors were given undue influence over academic affairs. After a recent court hearing in the case, the university released those documents, some of which appeared to affirm the group’s suspicions.

So it turns out that what the Kochs and other right-wing zanies were doing was this:

As early as 1990, entities controlled by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch were given a seat on a committee to pick candidates for a professorship that they funded, the records show. Similar arrangements that continued through 2009 gave donors decision-making roles in selecting candidates for key economics appointments at the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded think tank on campus that studies markets and regulation. The appointments, which also created faculty lines at George Mason, were steered to professors who, like the Kochs, embraced unconstrained free markets.

It is stealth moves like this that makes me suspect media outlets like Quillette get money from the Koch brothers too. Quillette already has a mutual-admiration society with one of the Koch's biggest hacks, Christina Hoff Sommers. And then there is Quillette's far-right leaning content. Here's someone named Nicholas Phillips attacking Krugman. He also defended Kevin "let's make abortion a hanging offense" Williamson.

So who is Nicholas Phillips? According to his Quillette bio:

Nicholas Phillips is a research associate at Heterodox Academy and president of the NYU School of Law Federalist Society.

Yep. It seems that all right-wing and libertarian public intellectuals in the US are connected, one way or another, to the Koch brothers. Phillips is the president of the NYU School of Law Federalist Society and on its web site is a link to The Federalist Society as one of its "partners." The Federalist Society, according to its Wiki is supported by:

Donors to the Federalist Society include Google, Chevron, Charles G. and David H. Koch; the family foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Mercer family.[12]

Wow, the three top right-wing politicos - the Kochs, the Mercers and Richard Mellon Scaife. 

Meanwhile, Trump's Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Kevin A. Hassett is also attacking Krugman. So what was Hassett up to before he joined the Trump administration? He was working for the Kochs at the American Enterprise Institute: 

Which is of course owned by the Kochs.

David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."[17] Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.[18]

No surprise, given that he's working for the Trump administration, that Hassett is an oafish asshole. Per Krugman:

I’m still thinking about Kevin Hassett’s appearance at the Tax Policy Center, where he repaid his hosts’ graciousness by gratuitously impugning their integrity. But insults aside, he offered a new analysis of corporate tax incidence – an approach that is novel, innovative, and completely boneheaded. Oh, and it just happens to say what his political masters want to hear.

But back to the Federalist Society - they're part of the George Mason corruption as mentioned in the NYTimes article:

More recently, in 2016, executives of the Federalist Society, a conservative national organization of lawyers, served as agents for a $20 million gift from an anonymous donor, and were given the right to terminate installments of the gift at their discretion. Emails disclosed by the university show that Federalist Society officials were also involved in hiring discussions and had suggested a student for admission. In turn, a professor at the law school wrote the society asking for help securing recommendations for prestigious federal judicial clerkships for students active in the society.

 If you're working for a right-leaning media outlet or a right-leaning university, chances are you're working for the Koch brothers.

Evo-psycho bros and wingnut welfare

Not the logo for the racist Pioneer Fund -
this is an expired trademark from a mutual fund
but I thought the evocation of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade made it appropriate. As far as
I can tell the Pioneer Fund responsible
for supporting so much of the racist science that
ended up in The Bell Curve doesn't have a logo
 

The evo-psycho bros are seemingly baffled by the fact that their ill-supported claims and their professional connections to white supremacists could lead anybody to accuse them of racism.


In A social science without sacred values the Winegard brothers write:

(Charles) Murray is still hounded by accusations that he is a racist and an anti-poor elitist. In fact, Murray’s reputation was so thoroughly besmirched by the “bell curve wars” that those who cite his works today are also vulnerable to accusations of racism. 

In 2014, Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, was blasted simply for quoting a Charles Murray book (in this case, Losing Ground, not The Bell Curve). For example, Josh Marshall (2014) wrote that, “When you start off by basing your arguments around the work of Charles Murray you just lose your credibility from the start.” 

Marshall then lists a few reasons one loses credibly for quoting Charles Murray, including that Murray “is best known for attempting to marshal social science evidence to argue that black people are genetically not as smart as white people.”

As I have shown over the past month in this evo-psycho bros series: "black people are not as smart as white people" is exactly what Charles Murray, Linda Gottfredson, Arthur Jensen, J. Phillipe Rushton, John Paul Wright, Richard Lynn, Steve Sailer, Razib Khan, Kevin M. Beaver, Stefan Molyneux and Bo and Ben Winegard believe.

Murray got much of his information from studies made by people supported directly by the Pioneer Fund, including Gottfredson, Lynn, Rushton and Jensen.

For the record Murray seems to be making a very nice living as an author. In spite of the evo-psycho bros constant whining about their opponents' machinations against them, their leading lights, including Steven Pinker have all gone onto pretty sweet careers, by most people's standards. The Winegards also whine about poor Larry Summers in this paper. A few years after the NBER controversy Summers went to work in the Obama administration.

Phillipe Rushton did just fine too. According to Barry Mehler in 1997:

Despite Rushton's controversial race theories, he has been embraced by the scientific mainstream, having been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations. He has published six books and nearly 150 articles, one of which appeared in the October 1986 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, under the sponsorship of Academy member E. O. Wilson.

And then Rushton went on to become the president of the Pioneer Fund, which also funded the organization responsible for American Renaissance.

Thanks to publications like American Renaissance, those pushing scientific racism, but without science credentials like Steve Sailer can make a living writing racist bullshit. And of course Steven Pinker gave Sailer scientific legitimacy by including a piece of barely scientific writing by Sailer in a collection of the "best" science writing.

And if nothing else evo-psycho bros can fall back on the Right's sugar daddies like the Koch brothers. The Kochs have deep pockets to hire lots of hacks, just ask Christina Hoff Sommers.

Economist Paul Krugman has a term for it - wingnut welfare:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available. 

Obviously this reality has important incentive effects. It encourages conservatives to espouse ever-cruder positions, because they don’t need to be taken seriously outside their closed universe. But it also, I’ve been noticing, makes them remarkably lazy.

We can see wingnut welfare happening in real time.

Claire Lehmann's Quillette is a place for racialist science and all other alt-right predilections to find a home, as I have discussed in this evo-psycho bros series. Lehmann's priorities are clear when she bashes Justin Trudeau, a good man, politican and leader, while promoting a laughable whack-job like Jordan Peterson. As always the right-wing mind confuses shit for Shinola and vice-versa.

So of course Lehmann publishes a hack like Bo Winegard. It's clear he took the main idea from his paper A social science without sacred values and repurposed it for Quillette while making sure to promote his other work with links in his Equalitarianism” and Progressive Bias. And that's how wingnut welfare works.

One of the Winegards shared this evolutionary psychology "study"with a sample size of 20 on Twitter. One commenter speaks for many others, I suspect.

Although really the sample size hardly matters. They could do it with a sample size of two or twenty or twenty thousand and the result would be exactly the same because it's a foregone conclusion. The behaviors in question were determined in advance to be indicative of evolutionary adaptation. So whenever evo-psychos write one of these papers, all they are doing is cataloging their victories.

And while the world is full of the gullible and the ignorant and therefore people who are impressed by their work, including people in the press, the evo-psycho bros are nevertheless beleaguered by meanies who won't just STFU and accept that whites are smarter than blacks genetically, and that blacks are more criminal than whites genetically.

So how will the evo-psycho bros neutralize these charges of racism?

The Winegards have a plan. I will talk about that next.

Chapo Trap House: KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!

Felix Biederman is the Zod in the middle

Back in November 2014, on my very first encounter with Doug Henwood, I knew what a shithead he was.

And I found it bizarre that Katha Pollitt, who had written a column defending the Great Satan of brocialists, Sheryl Sandberg, considered herself a friend of his, in view of Henwood's contempt for "lean-in" feminism - code word for feminism which considers the actual lives of women - all women - important, rather than the kind of feminism Henwood considers appropriate:

“The side of feminism I’ve studied and admired for decades has been about moving towards that ideal [of a more peaceful, more egalitarian society], and not merely placing women into high places while leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged.

The idea that putting women in high places is the same as "leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged" is typical addled-brain misogyny of the Dirtbag left, and one of the reasons why they hate Hillary Clinton so much. They don't accept that a woman as president means anything at all as far as the hierarchy of power. Because women's lives mean nothing to them - except the lives of their romanticized concept of the proletariat and 20-something Sanders-supporting earthmothers and of course brocialist helpmeets who have attended private colleges and never get their hands dirty doing anything except changing their laser printer cartridges.

Well I don't think Pollitt is friends with Henwood anymore - I found him attacking her on Twitter this past June.

Now the thing is, there is nothing in Pollitt's column that Henwood should have any problem with - but Henwood reflexively attacks any real feminists in favor of his Dirtbag left ladies auxiliary who claim to be the real feminists - you know the feminists who care about things that Dirtbag men care about, not that women shit.

The reference to Zod in the graphic at the top of this post is pretty funny. It's in reference to the article by Jeet Heer I talked about yesterday, which begins:

On a recent episode of the popular podcast Chapo Trap House, co-host Will Menaker used a memorable metaphor in addressing calls for unity on the left. “Republicans in control of politics, that’s the problem,” he began. “However, to the pragmatists out there and the people who don’t like purity in politics, yes, let’s come together. But get this through your fucking head: You must bend the knee to us. Not the other way around. You have been proven as failures, and your entire worldview has been discredited. You bend the knee to us and then let’s fucking work together to defeat these things, not with fucking means testing or market-based solutions but with a powerful social democratic message.”

LOL - you must bend the knee to us. KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!!

It's no surprise that Henwood would be involved with these people - his seething hatred for liberal women makes him a perfect fit.

No surprise, Henwood also attacks Joy Reid. 

Henwood and his gang are awful human beings. 

Unfortunately the screen cap at the bottom of this post doesn't show Henwood chiming in because of course he would, but Henwood had long since blocked me on Facebook for being too non-compliant and so when I'm logged into my Facebook account I can't see anything he writes. I only know he participated in the shit-fest because someone else posted their screen cap of the same thing on Twitter. 

I didn't know who Felix Biederman was at the time I took the screen cap, but now I do - he's one of the three Zods shown in the New Republic article about Chapo Trap House and the Dirtbag left. And Biederman's hatred for any liberal who does not kneel before Zod is crystal clear in his comment in support of the sniggering middle-aged mean-girls Amber A'Lee Frost and Liza Featherstone cackling over the possibility of one of their Dirtbag gang trolling Sady Doyle. Biederman says: "that's cool. she got really upset." 

David Duhalde, Deputy Director at Democratic Socialists of America also chimes in: "I want to troll her bad..."

Here is Biederman attacking a woman for talking about being raped. No doubt Amber A'Lee Frost, Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood and all the gang at Chapo thought this was hysterical.

Does anybody think that if these assholes managed to achieve the socialist regime of their dreams we'd be any better off than with capitalist misogynists and sociopaths?

For some reason, the blog post from January 2016 where I originally posted the image is getting lots of attention lately, based on my analytics statistics. It's possibly due to Frost being mentioned in the recent Jeet Heer article in the New Republic. 

The real disappointment in the image below is Corey Robin, whom Krugman has mentioned with approval on several occasions. Unlike the rest of them, Robin seems to have some things of value to say.

Krugman probably doesn't care, but most of Robin's friends hate Krugman as much as anybody else who refuses to KNEEL BEFORE ZOD.

"

Krugman's prescience & the value of curating

Paul Krugman... veterinarian.

The Baffler, a magazine written and edited by idiots with a superiority complex has two articles in a recent issue ripped right from the NYTimes' favorite genre "liberals are to blame for Trump" as I mentioned a few days ago.

The more ridiculous of the two was about the dangers of "curating" to wit:

A world without fake news might really be awesome. So might a shop where every bottle of wine is excellent. So might an electoral system in which everyone heeds the urging of the professional consensus. But in any such system, reader, people like you and me can be assured with almost perfect confidence that our voices will be curated out.

Curators are the bad guys eliminating the voices of the prosperous centrists like poor Thomas Frank who publishes books and articles for a living.

Frank is a co-founder of The Baffler and of course deciding what will be selected to be included in each issue of the periodical isn't curating, it's editing, so Frank & company are the good guys. Got that?

But I happened to be reading Krugman's brilliant piece, written over twenty years ago, White Collars Turn Blue - the conceit of the piece is that Krugman is writing from the year 2096, a hundred years from the actual publication date - and it got me to thinking about the Frank piece when Krugman writes:

Most important of all, the long-ago prophets of the information age seemed to have forgotten basic economics. When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important.

But actually information does have a big market value, but it depends on what kind, as any insider trading convict can tell you. The world is indeed awash in so much information that filtering is the big problem. That's where editors come in - or, in other words curators.

Curating is basically what I do with NYCPlaywrights - I decide which calls for submissions are included. That's why playwrights come to the site, because not only does it save them the trouble of searching for the information themselves, but I make sure that the opportunities do not charge submission fees. That's a value judgment on my part and no other calls for submissions sites  (there are about four other regular, reliable sources in addition to NYCPlaywrights, by my count) filter those out - they all include submission calls that charge fees just to email or snail-mail your work to somebody.

The Huffington Post includes original work (including the review of my play) but it got its start basically reusing the work of other newspapers as a news aggregator.

So I think it's clear that people who are willing to curate the information tsunami are going to be ever more important to the economy. I just did some calculating and if I had about 50 web sites that earned as much in a year as NYCPlaywrights does I could make blogging my full-time job. It's worth thinking about. The only trick is figuring out what kind of information people need you to curate and whether it's profitable to get it to them. I stumbled upon the money-making aspect of NYCPlaywrights almost accidentally - I started out just trying to share info with members of my group which met up in-person. Then I realized that the international reach of the Internet meant I could make money sharing that information. Although of course we are limited to the anglosphere - until I learn French.

I put about 4 hours a week into running NYCPlaywrights, on average, so if I had 50 sites I'd be working 100 hour weeks, unless I hired help or figured out how to do a site in 2 hours per week in which case I could work a more reasonable 50 hours a week. Hmm... worth thinking about.

Krugman ends his 1996 essay in a way that really hits home for me - he's talking about scientists but it goes double for playwrights:

Luckily, the same technology that has made it possible to capitalize directly on knowledge has also created many more opportunities for celebrity. The 500-channel world is a place of many subcultures, each with its own heroes. Still, the celebrity economy has been hard on people -- especially for those with a scholarly bent. A century ago, it was actually possible to make a living as a more or less pure scholar. Now if you want to devote yourself to scholarship, there are only three choices. Like Charles Darwin, you can be born rich. Like Alfred Wallace, the less-fortunate co-discoverer of evolution, you can make your living doing something else and pursue research as a hobby. Or, like many 19th-century scientists, you can try to cash in on a scholarly reputation by going on the lecture circuit. 

But celebrity, though more common, still does not come easily. That is why writing this article is such an opportunity. I actually don't mind my day job in the veterinary clinic, but I have always wanted to be a full-time economist; an article like this may be just what I need to make my dream come true.

Worthwhile Canadian swearing-in ceremony

JTRU LIVE - Elvis is in the building!

OK I did not plan to watch the live transmission of the swearing-in of new Canadian cabinet members but when I got the CBC email update indicating that this would be shown live in the next few minutes, I admit I was curious - was JTRU back from Christmas vacation, during which he spent time on the private island of the Aga Khan which the right-wingers were so apoplectic over?

Right-wingers don't have any problem with Donald Trump actually charging $500 a pop for people to visit him at Mar-a-Lago.

And Canadian right-wingers are butthurt over any money spent on the Trudeau family's personal needs (the thought of a nanny for the Trudeau children drives them into a frothing rage) so you would think that they would be happy that the Trudeau family did not have to pay rent during their vacation. Oh well, you can't expect anything less than shameless hypocrisy from conservatives.

After so much time watching historical footage of Trudeau, I was intrigued by the idea of watching JTRU in real time. The ceremony was actually as boring as you can imagine, right up there with Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, in spite of Elvis being in the building. But I was multi-tasking, doing some relatively low-brain activity for work with the ceremony on in the  background so it wasn't a big whoop.

I was hoping that JTRU was going to give a speech, but all he did was hug the swearees, have his picture taken, and sign the register (pictured.)

At most me and 90 other people were watching this. And I was probably the only New Yorker, if not the only American. Maybe my JTRU obsession is getting a little much...

Meanwhile Krugman approves of Trudeau's foreign affairs minister:

A terrific choice. But will her anti-plutocrat, pro-freedom cred cause friction with Trump? Let's hope so https://t.co/2LAevOdYi3

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017

But Canadian reporters are concerned how she will get along with Trump's buddy Putin.
(This is the speech I was looking for.)



I recently discovered this parody of an anti-Trudeau attack ad. I thought it was pretty funny.

Other times Doug Henwood sided with Trump

It's well known that Doug Henwood, leading feminist-hating brocialist (with his own ladies auxiliary) and some time writer for The Nation (and friend, or I hope for her sake, former friend of Katha Pollitt) hates Hillary Rodham Clinton more than anybody on this earth.

So it's really no surprise that when it comes to anybody versus HRC, Henwood will pick anybody, every time.

And that includes Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. I already mentioned Henwood siding with Trump a few weeks ago. And here he is back in September.

A bizarre attempt at humor at HRC's expense by Henwood

But it isn't just his hatred of Clinton. Henwood appears to look for opportunities to hate all enemies of Trump. Like this.

And he certainly doesn't want you to think that Trump had any help from Putin. The Far Left apparently loves Putin just as much as the Far Right.

I had wondered how Henwood could live in an expensive place in Brooklyn when he and his wife Liza Featherstone seem to support themselves through careers that consist entirely of blogging, adjunct teaching and writing for Verso books, The Nation and Jacobin. Somebody emailed me recently to give me a heads-up on this - Henwood writes  something called the Liscio Report on the Economy, which charges a yearly subscription of $7500.

So now we know who counts as the real elites in Henwood/Featherstone world - not subscribers to the Liscio Report, not the Koch brothers, whom Henwood has defended, not Trump or Putin. No, the only elites in their world are feminists, Paul Krugman and Hillary Clinton. 

They are the Walrus, goo goo ga joob

It really startles me now, how little the election of Justin Trudeau registered with me. I am a regular reader, as anybody who follows this blog would know (like maybe three people but anyway...) of Paul Krugman and of The New Yorker and both Krugman and the New Yorker wrote about the election win. I must have read both, or at least read the Krugman piece and noted the existence of the New Yorker piece, but I have no recollection of either.

And the New Yorker piece mentions Krugman:

Trudeau is now set to become, among other things, Paul Krugman’s favorite politician, since he promises to follow an economic plan that might have been hatched on the right-hand column of the Times’s Op-Ed page: raise taxes on the rich and unapologetically do some deficit spending in order to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and its middle class.

I would have remembered if I had read that. Being Krugman's favorite politician means quite a bit to me.

Via the New Yorker article I discovered a piece in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, (a magazine I had never read or heard of before) and I was really pleased to see that the author confirmed my own conclusions about the character of Justin Trudeau - and that's pretty significant considering that the author Jonathan Kay collaborated on Trudeau's autobiography "Common Ground." So he probably knows Trudeau better than anybody outside of Justin's family and close friends. Kay writes:

He’s someone who desperately wants to do the right thing. Who believes that what he does and says can set things right; that he can heal people and relationships; that he can make people like him and—a sad fantasy for many children of divorce—one another.

As I blogged a couple of weeks ago:

(I love him) also because he is always trying to do the right thing. He's super-conscious and for the most part carries it off with a fair amount of grace and not too much self-consciousness. And he almost doesn't have to - he's pretty much Canadian royalty, as the son of former Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. The fact that he tries so hard to do the right thing makes him so admirable.

Kay made his observation in reference to a story Trudeau told about his relationship with his mother (I mentioned a couple of others in a previous blog post.) This story jumped out at me too, for its poignance and its exposure of the character of an endearing adolescent:

I spent more than thirty hours interviewing Trudeau. He told me hundreds of stories, not all of which made their way into the book. But there is one, from his young childhood—during the period after his mother, Margaret, abandoned the family—that stands out clearly.
“Whenever I knew my mother was on her way to visit 24 Sussex, I could barely contain my excitement, and began planning my welcome,” is how Trudeau tells the story in Common Ground:

On one occasion I decided to mark her arrival with a musical theme. I had received a small record player as a gift and enjoyed playing the hits of the day—“the day” being the early 1980s—especially Journey’s romantic ballad “Open Arms.” I had heard my mother say how much she liked the Journey song, and I decided that this would be the soundtrack to her entrance at 24 Sussex after one particularly long absence. I waited for her to arrive in her VW Rabbit before cueing up my tiny, tinny record player in my room upstairs. As she opened the door and entered the foyer I cranked up the volume and rushed to the top of the stairs. “Listen, mom,” I yelled down to her. “It’s our song!” Her reaction was to stare up at me, happy to see me but a little confused because she couldn’t hear the music at all. The volume on my record player was about half the level of a modern cell phone. I remember being crushed by that, so desperate was I to inject a sense of magic into every moment that we did have together as a family.

When Common Ground was published in 2014, and the Trudeau camp chose to disclose my role in preparing it, lots of friends asked me some variation on the question: “What’s he like? ” I would say, “Read the book.” And like clockwork, they would roll their eyes and reply, “No—what’s he really like? ” The underlying assumption is that books of this type are mere propaganda. Depending on the politics of the person asking me the question, there usually was some suggestion that, behind closed doors, Trudeau is either a closet socialist or a corporate shill. That he is a thumb-sucking ignoramus who is spoon-fed his lines by Gerald Butts—or a tactical genius who wears his glibness and childlike enthusiasms as a political mask. That he is a tormented scion who is desperate to rise to his father’s epic legacy—or who bitterly detests the old man’s oversized shadow. Since we have spent the last decade trying to figure out the “secret agenda” of Stephen Harper, it was perhaps inevitable that the country would become convinced that there is some “real” Justin Trudeau lurking below the surface.
You can find the real Justin right there, at the top of those stairs, playing his record player.

That last sentence especially is as perfect, concise a summation of a politician's character as any you're likely to see, right up there with another favorite of mine, the line from the New Yorker's David Remnick about Obama: His practiced calm is beyond reckoning.

Kay also addresses the phenomenon of Trudeau being considered just a pretty dummy - or at least less of an intellectual than his father. I could see that was bullshit even before I read "Common Ground" - and Kay of course spent quite a bit of time with Trudeau during the writing of the book and so is in a position to evaluate Trudeau's mind:

Pretty, yes. Dummy, no.

Trudeau probably reads more than any other politician I know. And yet you wouldn’t know this from the way he talks about ideas: His boyish, eager-to-please personality leads him to project publicly in a way that can seem intellectually unsophisticated. Political oratory always sounds best when it’s relaxed and natural. Trudeau’s hyperactive personality makes that a difficult act for him to pull off.

I admit that I am sometimes guilty of idealizing Canada, in light of the election of Trudeau vs. Trump and for other reasons, but Canada is dragged down by anti-intellectuals the same as in the United States - although perhaps not to the same degree. But I think that Trudeau's coming off as more of a regular guy and less of a brainiac serves him well. His being thought of as not-so-bright makes him much more palatable to the know-nothing slobs of Canada. Obama's and Hillary Clinton's obvious intellectual superiority were resented by many Americans and it worked against them.

Obama only squeaked into office, in my opinion, thanks to the overwhelming support of African Americans and the fact that his first opponent's running mate was Sarah Palin and his second opponent was Mitt Romney, who came off as a rich prig, and made Obama look like a regular guy by comparison. Women didn't support Clinton the way blacks supported Obama, since women suffer more from Stockholm Syndrome. But if Trump had gone up against Obama there's a good chance Obama would have lost. In spite of what Obama claims.

But I digress.

Trudeau should keep doing what he's doing.

I have to say, I was surprised by the reason given for the selection of the name "The Walrus" for this magazine. I immediately assumed it was from "Through the Looking Glass."

But no, it's a Canadian thing.

What Krugman said about the second presidential debate

Excellent 2008 financial crisis explanation

I admit I am worried about a potential meltdown happening in the not-too-distant future thanks to low interest rates.

As this video explains, at minute 6:30, the motivating force behind the risky lending that created the 2008 financial crisis was the desire for investors to get a better interest rate on their investments than 1% which is what they can get for investing in Treasury Bills.

Thanks to my recently watching Krugman videos, I'm aware that not only are investment rates low, but Krugman believes that they will remain low for a long time, thanks to aging populations and lower overall rates of investments.

Krugman talks about this at his recent 92 St. Y presentation and points out that 80% of Americans aren't living on the interest of their savings, and older Americans are living on Social Security. But of course it's the people who do have enough savings, so much that they do get a significant portion of their income from interest rate payouts who will drive the next crisis. In addition to pushing the Fed to raise interest rates, they will also be looking for ways to make riskier investments, which pay out a better interest rate. As Krugman noted:

What is the role of interest in this world? Interest, classically (and I do mean classically, as in Mr. Keynes and the), is the reward for waiting: there’s supposedly a social function to interest because it rewards people for saving rather than spending. But right now we’re awash in excess savings with nowhere to go, and the marginal social value of a dollar of savings is negative. So real interest rates should be negative too, if they’re supposed to reflect social payoffs.
This really isn’t at all exotic — but obviously it’s a point wealth-owners don’t want to hear. Hence the constant agitation for monetary tightening.

The video was created by Jonathan Jarvis. Who also has a Twitter account.

Krugmania

Krugman is always an enjoyable source of enlightenment on the issue of economics and politics, but I was especially interested in brushing up on my Krugman as a way to get me back into re-writing my play DARK MARKET. Now that I've had a good reading of a fairly good draft of my NORMA JEANE play it's time to get ready for the next DARK MARKET reading - the first in almost a year (!)  in a couple of weeks.

So I've been mainlining Krugman speeches.

Krugman himself, via his Twitter account provided a link to his most recent public speaking engagement at conference in Geneva.

Next I was interested to see that I had somehow missed him speaking - again - at the 92nd Street Y. I caught him in person at the Y in 2009 almost exactly seven years ago, back when I lived on the Upper East Side. I was excited to see he was interviewed by Gillian Tett, whom I first heard of thanks to her interview in the movie Inside Job.

Krugman has also been on Bill Maher's show. I don't think I knew that.

My neighbor Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney can see my house from here! Well, the at least the roof
of the building where I rent a one-bedroom apartment.

I already knew Paul McCartney lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Well turns out he lives directly across the park from me (well, one of his residences) - it's a sixteen minute walk through Central Park. And I've walked past his place several times.

And here's another fun fact - I know somebody who has been in his penthouse - although it was before he owned it - the photographer for this article is Linda Jacquez, a friend of my daughter, who I hired to take production photos of my play two years ago.

Yoko Ono of course lives just thirteen blocks south of me at the Dakota. Really it seems like everybody lives around here, Katha Pollitt, Paul Krugman, Michael Moore, Jerry Seinfeld, god knows who else. At least they live here part time. I figure one of these days I'll bump into one of them in the Park.

Did I forget to mention how cool my neighbor Paul McCartney is?

Die, Tumblr, Die

Although it was very unpleasant to read Aaron M. Renn scapegoating Paul Krugman as a government-bailed out corporation there was something in his piece on City Journal (a media outlet of the Koch brothers-funded Manhattan Institute) that was very cheering indeed:

Most Americans know about corporate executives like Marissa Mayer. She completely failed to turn around the struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo, though that’s what she was hired to do. Her “accomplishments” include buying the now-worthless blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Despite her failure, if she’s not retained in the wake of the reported sale of Yahoo’s businesses to Verizon, Mayer is set to collect a pre-negotiated $55 million golden parachute. Most Americans know that they wouldn’t be treated so kindly if they lost their jobs.

Oh man do I want Tumblr to die. It's thanks to Tumblr accounts that a bunch of identitarian extremists have been able to smear me via Google results on my name - Tumblr allows people to drive up the Google search rankings of their Tumblr postings if they have enough followers, and identitarians tend to have a whole bunch of college-student aged followers with nothing better to do than encourage nut-bars like Mikki Kendall and K. Tempest Bradford to smear random strangers on the Internet.

When I contracted Tumblr to complain about the smear-job their response was basically "tough shit." So I am so happy if they are teetering on the edge of extinction.

I guess vicious Tumblr bullies like Mikki Kendall
will have to save their meanness for Twitter now.

Once Tumblr fails, conscience-deficient mobbers and smear-mongers like Kendall and Bradford will no longer have the power to casually smear people so easily. Hallelujah!

Koch brothers employee Aaron M. Renn hates Paul Krugman

I recently mentioned I was excited that I might bump into Krugman while running in Riverside Park thanks to reading his blog post about the park. Well somebody else took note of that post, but not in a good way:

Most Americans believe in capitalism, but know that a lot of its top beneficiaries are not fully exposed to marketplace discipline. Most Americans are painfully aware that life is good for people like Paul Krugman, and they know that he doesn’t much care what’s happening to them. Charles Murray created his “bubble quiz” to illustrate the degree to which much of the upper-middle class has grown detached from the experience of workaday Americans. When PBS invited its readers to take the quiz, the zip code where this detachment was most pronounced was my own: 10023, the Upper West Side. It’s a far cry from where I grew up, in Southern Indiana.

Aaron M. Renn mentions the unequal distribution of wealth in a capitalist system, not something that generally bothers right-wingers. Then he says that the beneficiaries are "not fully exposed to marketplace discipline" and elsewhere in his article he gripes about government bailouts. Libertarians believe that laissez-faire capitalism is the answer to all the world's problems and are generally against government influence on the market, so he must be a Libertarian. Plus I found him whinging about progressives stealing libertarian ideas.

And then he references Charles Murray, a prominent Libertarian who is most famous for co-authoring "The Bell Curve" in 1994, which argues that black people as a group are less intelligent than all other ethnic groups, so we shouldn't spend money on government programs designed to help the poor because they're too stupid to benefit from it. The book was widely criticized. Including by then civil rights lawyer and writer Barack Obama.

NPR
October 28, 1994
SHOW: All Things Considered (NPR 4:30 pm ET)
Charles Murray's Political Expediency Denounced 

BARACK OBAMA, Commentator: Charles Murray is inviting American down a dangerous path. 

NOAH ADAMS, Host: Civil rights lawyer, Barack Obama.

Mr. OBAMA: The idea that inferior genes account for the problems of the poor in general, and blacks in particular, isn't new, of course. Racial supremacists have been using IQ tests to support their theories since the turn of the century. The arguments against such dubious science aren't new either. Scientists have repeatedly told us that genes don't vary much from one race to another, and psychologists have pointed out the role that language and other cultural barriers can play in depressing minority test scores, and no one disputes that children whose mothers smoke crack when they're pregnant are going to have developmental problems. 

Now, it shouldn't take a genius to figure out that with early intervention such problems can be prevented. But Mr. Murray isn't interested in prevention. He's interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically, the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it's artfully packaged and can admit for exceptions like Colin Powell. It's easy to see the basis for Mr. Murray's calculations. After watching their income stagnate or decline over the past decade, the majority of Americans are in an ugly mood and deeply resent any advantages, realor perceived, that minorities may enjoy. 

I happen to think Mr. Murray's wrong, not just in his estimation of black people, but in his estimation of the broader American public. But I do think Mr. Murray's right about the growing distance between the races. The violence and despair of the inner city are real. So's the problem of street crime. The longer we allow these problems to fester, the easier it becomes for white America to see all blacks as menacing and for black America to see all whites as racist. To close that gap, we're going to have to do more than denounce Mr. Murray's book. We're going to have to take concrete and deliberate action. For blacks, that means taking greater responsibility for the state of our own communities. Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior. Too many of our young people think education is a white thing and that the values of hard work and discipline andself-respect are somehow outdated. 

That being said, it's time for all of us, and now I'm talking about the larger American community, to acknowledge that we've never even come close to providing equal opportunity to the majority of black children. Real opportunity would mean quality prenatal care for all women and well-funded and innovative public schools for all children. Real opportunity would mean a job at a living wage for everyone who was willing to work, jobs that can return some structure and dignity to people's lives and give inner-city children something more than a basketball rim to shoot for. In the short run, such ladders of opportunity are going to cost more, not less, than either welfare or affirmative action. But, in the long run, our investment should payoff handsomely. That we fail to make this investment is just plain stupid. It's not the result of an intellectual deficit. It's theresult of a moral deficit. 

ADAMS: Barack Obama is a civil rights lawyer and writer. He lives in Chicago.

So what's Aaron M. Renn's deal? Well it turns out that he works for the Manhattan Institute...

...a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.[1] It is an associate member of the State Policy Network.

According to the Manhattan Institute, it is "focused on promoting free-market principles" and has a mission to "develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility."[2]

The Manhattan Institute is funded in part by the Koch brothers.

The Manhattan Institute has received funding from the Koch brothers. The Claude R. Lambe Foundation, one of the Koch Family Foundations, reported giving $2,075,000 to the Manhattan Institute between 2001 and 2012, the last year for which data is available. The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave $100,000 to the Institute in 2012.

Take a look at their list of experts - out of 48, only 6 are women and one is a black man. And Renn has the hypocrisy to claim Paul Krugman lives in a bubble.

Infamous racist Steve Sailer sees much in common with the commentary of Renn and his own work.

But going back to Krugman. Is Renn really so stupid that he can't tell the difference between government-bailout beneficiaries and Paul Krugman? Or is deliberate malice behind Renn's using Krugman as an example of someone that the average person should resent? Because Krugman didn't get a government bailout. Krugman should be the kind of person that Libertarians adore - he's risen to prominence through hard work and intelligence like an Ayn Randian ubermensch.

But then Krugman advocates for liberal policies, including higher taxes and government programs. That's why Renn (and Charles Murray and the Koch brothers) want to use Krugman and other urban liberals as the targets for class resentment. It's all about the politics.

Waiting for Krugman

Here is a photo of Krugman vs. Ayn Rand from
the Atlas Society - they hate Krugman, of course
which is one way you know how great
Krugman is. 

Ever since I read Krugman talking about how he runs in Riverside Park I've been hopeful:

If you want to feel good about the state of America, you could do a lot worse than what I did this morning: take a run in Riverside Park. There are people of all ages, and, yes, all races exercising, strolling hand in hand, playing with their dogs, kicking soccer balls and throwing Frisbees. There are a few homeless people, but the overall atmosphere is friendly – New Yorkers tend to be rushed, but they’re not nasty – and, well, nice.

I've walked in Riverside Park on a few occasions but I will be doing it much more often now that I know there's a chance I'll bump into The Mighty Krugman. And yes, I will insist he take a selfie with me. Whoohoo!

Speaking of Ayn Rand and Krugman - yes, I still plan to do something with my play DARK MARKET which focuses on Ayn Rand's influence on Alan Greenspan and how that contributed to the 2008 meltdown of the economy. It's just that with six actors its more expensive than NORMA JEANE which is a two-hander. And not just to produce - since I pay actors to do readings, six actors can add up.

I give Krugman a shout-out in the intro of the play - I quote him from his blog:

After all, what is "Atlas Shrugged" really about? Leave aside the endless speeches and bad sex scenes. What you’re left with is the tale of how a group of plutocrats overthrow a democratically elected government with a campaign of economic sabotage.