The Knights of Columbus freely admit to admiring an initiator of genocide and the trans-Atlantic slave trade

Like many people, my first introduction to the real Christopher Columbus was via Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." The blogger responsible for this excellent summary of the atrocities that resulted from the "discoveries" of Christopher Columbus also acknowledges that book. However, the blogger mentions something I either didn't know or had forgotten - that we have the Catholic men's organization, The Knights of Columbus, to blame for our nation having a federal holiday for him. As Wikipedia notes:

The first statewide Columbus Day holiday was proclaimed by Colorado governor Jesse F. McDonald in 1905, and it was made a statutory holiday in 1907. In April 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, Congress and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made October 12 a federal holiday under the name Columbus Day.

The Knights of Columbus freely admit to honoring Christopher Columbus, and they don't only honor him on Columbus Day, as this page from their web site demonstrates:

The Knights of Columbus today [May 20, 2006] remembers the death of Christopher Columbus. It was Columbus who opened the Americas to Christianity, and we pause to remember why it is that we bear his name.

So because Columbus "opened the Americas to Christianity" he is to be regarded as a hero. Because the societies he destroyed were not Christians.

And the KoC are not unaware of the charges of atrocities - they give Carol Delaney the opportunity t deny Columbus's responsibility for them.

Columbia: The popular view today is that Columbus is responsible for countless atrocities against the native peoples. In your opinion, is this a fair assessment? 

Carol Delaney: No, not at all. The late 20th century brought a lot of critique about him from the perspective of the natives, and Columbus has become a symbol for everything that went wrong. But the more I read of his own writings and that of his contemporaries, my understanding of him totally changed. His relations with the natives tended to be benign. He liked the natives and found them to be very intelligent. He also described them as “natural Christians” because they had no other “sect,” or false faith, and believed that they could easily become Christians if they had instruction.
Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like marauder or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that. 

A lot of the crew members didn’t like all of the restrictions and rebelled. In his writings, Columbus notes that the crew assumed that they could have slaves, that they could pick gold off of the trees, and that they didn’t have to work. 

Columbia: What was Columbus’ view toward slavery? 

Carol Delaney: As far as I can tell, Columbus never had any slaves, nor did he intend to get slaves when he went across the ocean. There was no possibility of enslaving the Grand Khan and his people. And [Columbus] believed the natives would become subjects of the Spanish sovereigns.
When they later met a different group of natives, whom they believed to be cannibals, Columbus’ brother sent some of these people back to Europe after their second voyage. It was considered morally acceptable at that time to enslave people who acted against their nature, with the hope that they would become good Christians. Slavery was common, even among people in the Caribbean. People ignore that fact and seem to think that Columbus instituted slavery.

The last question above is about Columbus's view towards slavery, and Delany avoids that question by saying that Columbus didn't have slaves, and that in any case in those days slavery was acceptable. But Howard Zinn presents evidence of Columbus's actual views in Columbus's own words:

They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

***

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.

***

So it's pretty clear exactly what Columbus's view towards slavery was. He may not have personally owned slaves, but he had no problem enslaving on behalf of others, or taking natives "by force."

This isn't the first time the atrocities of Columbus's expeditions have been whitewashed of course. Zinn points to another historian doing the same thing:

Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something else. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multi-volume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus's route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide."

That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book's last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus:

"He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great-his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities-his seamanship."

One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.

But he does something else-he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important-it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.

Delany also has high praise for Columbus's seamanship:

Columbia: To what extent can Columbus’ exploration be considered a failure or a success? 

Carol Delaney: I think he went to the grave thinking that he had not accomplished what he wanted to do. He was angry with King Ferdinand for not pursuing the crusade, and he recognized that terrible crimes had been committed. From this point of view, he felt the quest was a failure. In reality, it was a major accomplishment. Columbus went across the ocean four times in small wooden ships, without the use of modern instruments. In the process, he discovered the New World, even though he thought that he had found only the periphery of Asia.

Similar to Zinn's description of Morison's approach, the acknowledgement of "terrible crimes" is there, but it's pushed aside for something the historian considers more significant.

But even more than seamanship, Delaney, and of course the Knights of Columbus, excuse any attempts by Columbus to conquer peoples because Columbus's motive wasn't only gold, it was religious zealotry:

Columbia: You argue that most people misunderstand the purpose of Columbus’ voyage. According to your research, what were his motivations? 

Carol Delaney: Everybody knows that Columbus was trying to find gold, but they don’t know what the gold was for: to fund a crusade to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims before the end of the world. A lot of people at the time thought that the apocalypse was coming because of all the signs: the plague, famine, earthquakes and so forth. And it was believed that before the end, Jerusalem had to be back in Christian hands so that Christ could return in judgment. Columbus actually calculated how many years were left before the end of the world. He seemed to think of his whole voyage as a mission, which was part of this apocalyptic scenario.

Oh, so his motivation was not only gold - he also wanted to conquer Muslims because he was a religious fanatic wacko.

Why wouldn't we want to have a national holiday to celebrate the deranged religious crusader who just happened to initiate genocide and the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

So glad that the Knights of Columbus and Carol Delaney have cleared that up.

When the Knights of Columbus aren't celebrating the cause of religious fanaticism-inspired conquest, they are using the American political system to try to force their evil misogynist religion onto the American public:

Critics like Schneck say many of the questions regarding the funding of the Fortnight for Freedom campaign center on private Catholic groups. 

"The Knights of Columbus are clearly one of the major sources of funding (against the mandate), as well as other fraternal organizations," Schneck said. 

The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charitable group based in New Haven, Conn., says it's the world's largest lay Catholic organization. 

Knights of Columbus life insurance sales neared $8 billion in 2010, and last year, it contributed $158 million to charity, including nearly $4 million to the Special Olympics. Its largesse extends to other causes, too, such as Coats for Kids and Project Medishare which provides prosthetics to Haitian children who lost limbs during the 2010 earthquake. In the last decade, the Knights have donated more than $1 billion to charity. 

The group's 2010 tax forms show that the Knights gave more than $3 million to the Vatican that year, nearly $2 million to the U.S. bishops conference and $25,000 to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has guided much of the legal action against the contraception mandate. 

The group must disclose more recent donations in its 2011 tax forms. But Andrew Walther, the Knights of Columbus vice president for media, said the group has asked for an extension in filing the documents, making them unavailable until the fall. 

In 2010, the Knights were also generous with their contributions to individual bishops, doling out nearly $350,000 for a variety of programs in various dioceses. Of that, $248,700, or 71 percent, went to Lori's Diocese of Bridgeport.

They have the right idea about Columbus in Venezuela.

Current state (June 6, 2006) of the Columbus Walk in Caracas.
The statue was knocked down by activists after a "public trial"
during the celebrations of the newly instituted
"Day of the Indigenous Resistance" (October 12) in 2004

Stand firm, Mr. President

Our President, standing firm against seditious,
extortionist, blackmailing, democracy-hating traitors.

It really isn't surprising that Republicans have shut down our government. Republicans, especially the nihilist quasi-libertarian extremists infesting the House of Representatives thanks to the gerrymandered monster factories throughout Red State America, hate government. Especially democracies.

The present government shutdown is their latest attempt to destroy our government completely.

They hate the democratic form of government that voted in the Affordable Care Act, re-elected the ACA's champion, and declared it Constitutional.

And make no mistake, if Obama were to break the solemn oath he swore on his inauguration, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America" by caving into these evil freaks we can all kiss democracy good-bye. It will be a government by crises, designed to bring about a plutocracy to serve the Koch-led overlords.

The Koch brothers, craven weasels to the end, have the utter shamelessness to deny their ultimate responsibility for the shutdown.

A commenter on this NYTimes article makes an excellent historical analogy:

Abraham Lincoln nailed Mr. Boehner's stance in his speed at Cooper Union in 1860:
"In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!'"

And even Thomas Friedman calls it what it is: "blackmail." He also appears to have identified the very worst Fringe Festival ever.

President Obama is leading. He is protecting the very rules that are the foundation of any healthy democracy. He is leading by not giving in to this blackmail, because if he did he would undermine the principle of majority rule that is the bedrock of our democracy. That system guarantees the minority the right to be heard and to run for office and become the majority, but it also ensures that once voters have spoken, and their representatives have voted — and, if legally challenged, the Supreme Court has also ruled in their favor — the majority decision holds sway. A minority of a minority, which has lost every democratic means to secure its agenda, has no right to now threaten to tank our economy if its demands are not met. If we do not preserve this system, nothing will ever be settled again in American politics. There would be nothing to prevent a future Democratic Congress from using the exact same blackmail to try to overturn a law enacted by their Republican rivals.

Yellin' for Yellen!

J-Dawg's high school yearbook entry

Woohoo!

Obama Names Yellen for Fed, Just as Fiscal Battle Heats Up

President Obama on Wednesday announced one of his most important economic decisions, nominating Janet L. Yellen to lead the Federal Reserve system and be his independent co-steward of the American economy. He called her “one of the nation’s foremost economists and policy makers.” 

Ms. Yellen, 67, who would be elevated from her current position as the Fed’s vice chairwoman if the Senate confirms her nomination for a four-year term, would be the first woman to lead the Fed. She joined Mr. Obama before the cameras in the State Dining Room of the White House for the formal announcement. With them was the retiring chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, whom the president hailed for helping to guide the economy through the worst recession and financial crisis since the Depression. 

“I could not be more grateful for his extraordinary service,” Mr. Obama said. 

As for the woman he has chosen to replace Mr. Bernanke, the president said that Ms. Yellen was “renowned for her good judgment,” and that she sounded early alarms about the financial and housing bubbles that caused the economy’s near-collapse in 2008. 

“Given the urgent economic challenges facing our nation, I urge the Senate to confirm Janet without delay,” Mr. Obama said. “I’m absolutely confident that she will be an exceptional chair of the Federal Reserve.”

The NYTimes Cityroom section has the info about Yellen's high school career

...the editors of The Tower, the yearbook of Fort Hamilton High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, did not think Janet Yellen — who is poised to become the first woman ever to lead the Federal Reserve — merited the designation “Most Likely to Succeed.” Instead, she was named “Class Scholar.”

Boo hoo Smurfette

Someone writes to me about the NYCPlaywrights web site:

Thanks, Nancy, for all your good work.
 But I find myself getting really ticked when I read "Opportunities" and find myself excluded because of my race, sexual preference, or gender. Do the excluded have no imaginations? Shouldn't a play be judged on its merits rather than by the profile the author fits? NYC Playwrights really shouldn't let those who exclude place notices in its listings.

It really must be difficult to be a straight white guy who believes that the reason that plays by straight white guys are far and away the most-produced, to this day, is because plays are always selected based on merit and it just so happens that the best plays are by (mostly straight) white guys. And now here are all these theater organizations having the temerity to try to include work by the non-white, non-straight and non-male. 

Clearly this seeks to deny the reality that most of the meritorious plays are by white males.

My first impulse was to advise him that if he finds himself getting ticked off when he visits, just stop visiting the web site.

Although it's absurd that it should bother him enough to write to me and inform me that I shouldn't post such things - there are plenty of calls for submissions that don't specify ethnicity or gender or sexual preferences on the NYCPlaywrights web site. 

If only some of the members of our government were straight white men, maybe this demographic wouldn't be so horribly excluded from all opportunities.

But in my guise as mild-mannered NYCPlaywrights proprietor I just wrote back "thanks for your feedback."

Move fast or get outta da way

Republicans are the scum of the earth

Ted Cruz: Scumbag

Per the New Yorker:

Once House Republicans refused to pass a spending bill on Monday night, the N.I.H. had to stop enrolling new cancer patients in clinical trials, among them some thirty children. This was such an indictment of the shutdown that the G.O.P. had suggested a micro-appropriation—part of a “piecemeal” funding tactic to keep anger at bay. Reid, talking to reporters, called it cherry-picking and said that he wanted the whole bill, sticking to that after Dana Bash, of CNN, asked why he wouldn’t help just one child with cancer if he could. If you listen to the exchange, something Reid then says—“Why would we want to do that?”—clearly refers to the pitting of different people hurt by the shutdown against each other. But he did give Fox a line, if one dependent on the idea that Reid would think that caring for children was an alien concept. “Pretty sick,” Hannity said, as Cruz tried to look sad. Also, “cold, callous, heartless, mean-spirited, hateful.” Guest after guest was outraged. 

So many Republicans consumed by the idea that politicians ought to make sure that sick children get the care they need—one might call that novel. Do they plan to live out that conviction? The G.O.P. has shut down the government because it considers a law that will make health insurance far easier to get for the forty-eight million Americans who don’t have it—including millions of children, many of them sick—a threat to America. Will this talk of children with cancer lead them to read the provisions of the Affordable Care Act and, for once, think about what the law means for real people?

Being very ill in America without insurance is a disaster for anyone. You can easily be left bankrupt, even if you’re cured. Obamacare also addressed the particular ways getting sick could be terrible for children, even those with insurance. First, the law ended lifetime maximums, the catch by which insurance companies could decide that after they’d spent a certain amount they could walk away from a patient. Small children with cancer could, and often did, reach those limits before they’d made it through preschool. Next, provisions in Obamacare mean that these children won’t be kept from getting affordable (or any) insurance because of “preëxisting conditions.” They can also stay on their parents’ health-insurance policies until they are twenty-six. And they are precisely the sort of young people who ought to: they need check-ups to be sure that there isn’t a recurrence of cancer. And their health struggles may have made it harder for them to jump into the job market, or just to sleep at night with the illusion that a twenty-something who doesn’t have insurance is just making a rational bet—being sensible and free.

And they remain in power because we are a nation of ignoramuses and idiots, as Jimmy Kimmel - of all people - demonstrates.

Can I read people's emotions?

I can according to this test in the NYTimes - I scored 33/36.

But after I took the test I saw this and become completely skeptical:

 To find out how well you read the emotions of others, take the Well quiz, which is based on an assessment tool developed by University of Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen.

Baron-Cohen (cousin of Ali G) is the jerk who came up with the whole "men are systematizers and women are emotional" bullshit  so beloved of Steven Pinker, which was handily eviscerated by Elizabeth Spelke.

Of course you haven't heard of Spelke, because unlike science celebrities like Baron-Cohen and Pinker, Spelke spends her time doing actual science, instead of pop psychology for idiots.

"Taken by T-Rex" WTF?

This cannot possibly be a real thing:

...they discovered how lucrative erotic fiction about women having sex with dinosaurs could be. 

I hate Republicans

The Krug-man:

And let’s be clear: the health reform fight has always been about more than health reform. Liberals have long viewed health reform as the opening wedge, a sort of proof of concept, in a campaign to strengthen the US safety net and reduce income inequality; that was basically what I was urging in Conscience of a Liberal, which gave its title to this blog. 

Conversely, the right has long opposed health reform for exactly the same reason: it might, in the public’s mind, legitimate further government intervention to increase economic security. 

But let’s also be clear that these positions are not symmetric. Liberals favored health reform both because it would work and because it might enhance their ability to push for other policies; conservatives were and are determined to kill health reform even though it would work — in fact, precisely because it would work — because it might weaken the rest of their agenda. Basically, liberals wanted to do something good that would enlighten the public; conservatives want to prevent something good because they want to keep voters in the dark.

Ayn Rand's Life web comic

I could have saved myself soooo much time if I saw Webcomic Biography of Ayn Rand back in May.

Here's the comic's telling of the Incident of the Mechanical Chicken...

Kurt Vonnegut's theory on the shapes of stories

How can you not love Kurt Vonnegut?

This article displays the text version from Palm Sunday.

OMG - Krugman was wrong!

But not about economics, of course.

In the 2013 paperback version of his "End This Depression Now!" which I'm finally reading, Krugman says:

If you've ever seen the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" which features a run on Jimmy Stewart's bank, you might be interested to know that the scene is completely anachronistic: by the time the supposed bank run takes place, that is, just after World War II, deposits were already insured, and old-fashioned bank runs were a thing of the past.

Actually the bank run happens before World War II, just as George and Mary Bailey are heading for their honeymoon. George uses his honeymoon money to save the bank.

By the end of World War II George and Mary have four children, the oldest of whom is 12 years old, which means that the Bailey Building and Loan bank run must have happened before 1933.

Also there's a picture of Herbert Hoover on the wall of the Bailey Building and Loan. His term ended March 1933.

I think Krugman's memory of the movie conflated the bank run with the other big bank-related panic in the movie - the bank examiner is coming and Uncle Billy lost $8,000.

Other than that it's a wonderful book, and the chapter "Bankers Gone Wild" is especially relevant to the play I'm working on.

Atlas Shrugged Book Club

At The Atlantic - I'm sorry I missed this when it first came out.

Interesting that in the first installment I agree most with a self-described conservative:

As I began reading, my first thought was that Atlas Shrugged was quite like a comic book. The characters were broadly and boldly drawn. They gave you their essence almost immediately. Virtuous characters and things are described as being angular, made of straight lines, tall, and long. The "shape of" Dagny's "mouth clear cut, a sensual mouth." Unvirtuous characters, like her brother, have "shapeless apprehension" or "muscles evading the responsibility of a shape." But by the end of the fourth chapter I had the disturbing thought that I had been reading a parody of an Ayn Rand novel. I double-checked.

I think its similarity to a comic book is exactly what keeps it popular. It's just as simplistic a tale of good and evil as any super-hero comic books, but the super-heros don't fly around (unaided) or have super strength, just super business competence, which makes it seem realistic to many.

Ayn Rand really missed her chicken

I'm wading through a pile of Ayn Rand-related books I got from the New York Public Library - thank you, collectivists. Rand is a major character - or rather the specter of Rand - in the play I'm working on and I feel like I need to make sure I make no mistakes about her lest I am hounded by a pack of Rand-obsessed Objectivists.

I'd already read two biographies of Rand this summer and now I've read her boytoy Nathaniel Branden's "Judgment Day" and Branden's ex-wife Barbara's biography/memoir of Rand "The Passion of Ayn Rand" (later made into a movie starring Helen Mirren as Rand.) And I also have two collections of Rand-related essays. One, which I haven't read yet, called "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" has essays by Rand, Nathaniel Branden and Alan Greenspan, and a Rand-only collection "The Romantic Manefesto" which I have just read. Or to be honest, skimmed, because it proved to be every bit as tiresome and repetitious as any chapter of "Atlas Shrugged."

But wow, she really missed her chicken. As I've blogged about previously, according to the Heller biography, Rand's mother gave away Rand's favorite toy, a "mechanical wind-up chicken" to an orphanage when Rand was five. That incident shows up, barely changed in Atlas Shrugged, except this time Rand has an answer for her mother:

...the case of a woman with a fractured jaw: she had been slapped in the face by a total stranger, who had heard her ordering her five-year-old son to give his best toy to the children of neighbors.

It's striking how little Rand had to do with children as an adult. Of all the memoirs and biographies of Rand I've read, I don't remember a single instance of her having anything to do with a child, ever. I don't remember any member of her "collective" social circle - which was almost the only socializing she did outside of publishers - having children. And none of Rand's supermen in Atlas Shrugged had children, including Rearden, who was married for nine loveless years to Lillian. Loveless, but they still had sex out of mutual duty.

Anyway, so I'm skimming through one of the many rants by Rand against "Naturalists" of literature - she hated them at least as much as collectivists - when what to my wondering eyes should appear, in the essay "Art and Moral Treason" - Rand is going on about all the wrong ways that children were being raised in This Day and Age - which she must have learned about through magazine articles:

If parents attempt to inculcate a moral ideal of the kind contained in such admonitions as: "Don't be selfish - give your best toys away to the children next door!" or if parents go "progressive" and teach a child to be guided by his whims - the damage to the child's moral character may be irreparable.

Or maybe that child will become obsessed with the incident and attribute it to altruism, and grow up to become convinced that there is an epidemic of parents exhorting their children to hand over their best toys to the children next door.

Jon Stewart forces Richard Dawkins to be a non-asshole, if only for a few moments

I have expressed my admiration for Jon Stewart many times on this blog, and Monday's Daily Show provides another reason for admiration.

To my surprise, Stewart, virtually alone among media people, actually quizzed Richard Dawkins on the possibility that religion might not be entirely the source of all violence and stupidity. Not that I think that Dawkins will learn anything from this - I think that Stewart is such a skillful interviewer, so perfectly genial, that he has produced a virtual miracle - making Richard Dawkins seem unarrogant and non-contemptuous.

Kudos to you, Jon Stewart.

Ode to Joy vs. Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand wasn't content to dislike altruism and socialism, she also hated certain kinds of art - she was fine with modern architecture but she hated all other forms of modern art.

She also hated most classical music including Beethoven, whom she claimed had a "malevolent theory of the universe" which, according to her, was:

...his message is malevolent universe: man's heroic fight against destiny, and man's defeat. That's the opposite of my sense of life.

Rand did not believe in an afterlife, so what does she think death is? Victory? Or did she think one day scientists would put an end to death? But since they hadn't done it as of the 1970s when Rand said this, how could she blame anyone for having a sense of life that includes the heroic but doomed struggle against death?

The Ode to Joy scene from "Immortal Beloved"

All about Blue Willow

The Willow pattern, more commonly known as Blue Willow, is a distinctive and elaborate pattern used on ceramic kitchen/housewares. The pattern was popular in 18th century England, e.g. porcelain designed by Thomas Minton around 1790 and has been in use for over 200 years. The design was inspired by the china England imported from China during the late 18th century. Other references give alternative origins, such as Thomas Turner of Caughley porcelain, with a design date of 1780. Willow refers to the pattern, a specific treatment, either applied transfer, or stamp, known as transferware. Background colour is always white, while foreground colour depends on the maker; blue the most common, followed by pink, green, and brown. Assortment, shape and dates of production vary.

Finally, Autumn

Some autumn haiku by Matsuo Bashō:

The beginning of autumn;
The sea and fields,
All one same green.

In the bitter radish that
bites into me, I feel the
autumn wind

Will you turn toward me?
I am lonely, too,
this autumn evening. 

a strange flower
for birds and butterflies
the autumn sky 

Autumn approaches
and the heart begins to dream
of four-tatami rooms  

A autumn wind
More white
Than the rocks in the rocky mountain.

On this road
where nobody else travels
autumn nightfall

My way –
no-one on the road
and it’s autumn, getting dark 

Chilling autumn rains
curtain Mount Fuji, then make it
more beautiful to see 

Louis CK vs. existential angst

As one of my Facebook friends commented, he's like a philosopher. But really, all the best comedians are.

Perfect parody

Unfortunately not a lot of people will get Caitlin Kelly's brilliant parody in the New Yorker, Janet Yellen's Harvard Speech. I especially loved this part:

There may also be differences between little boys and little girls that bear on fiscal responsibility, and which aren’t just a product of socialization. While I would prefer to believe otherwise, my experience with my own son—who insisted on playing Monopoly highly leveraged and usually ended family game night by flipping the board over, screaming that the rules were stupid, and storming to his room—tells me something.

It so perfectly recalls this section of Larry Summers' 2005 Harvard Speech, given when he was President:

So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. 

And just coincidentally I was just putting a paraphrase of this bit into my play DARK MARKET about the 2008 financial meltdown, in which Larry Summers played such a prominent role.

No Joe for me

Well I inquired about a poster or print of the Joe Dallesandro photo by Victor Shrebneski and received a prompt response - no they don't have posters but I can have a large photo print for $7500.

Oh well. Here's Joe and his tattoo.

Little Joe never once gave it away

Why is it so difficult to find a fine art print of Joe Dallesandro?  Little Joe, as he is known in Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side (for the "Little Joe" tattoo on his right arm) is one of the most beautiful men who ever lived, as is obvious from photos from the early 60s - mid 70s.

I mean, I've been able to buy prints of photos taken by Astrid Kircherr of the very young Beatles. I've had two prints for almost ten years now: I bought a photo of Lennon, and another of McCartney - with Stu Sutcliff in the background of each, at the Hamburg Fun Fair - directly from Kircherr's web site. Although those prints aren't listed on the site anymore, possibly because there's an ongoing exhibition in LA(?)

In addition to being musical genii, Lennon and McCartney were also two of the most beautiful men who ever lived.

I've been looking now for several weeks for a decent fine art photo of Dallesandro and I hope I have a real chance to buy one from Victor Shrebneski who took the photo above, and which I discovered thanks to the Museum of Contemporary Photography web site.

Although the photo I would most love to have a fine art print of is the one below by  Richard Avedon - that's Joe with Candy Darling. It was part of a session with Andy Warhol stars - there was an exhibit at Gagosian Gallery a year ago which I missed. You can't get any of the photos as posters though - the best you can do are these cards. Which I might get anyway. I'm kicking myself for missing that exhibit.

Apparently the mural (which does not include the photo below but a similar one) is also in the collection of the Met, but is not currently on display.

A signed edition print of the mural was offered via Christies and sold for 50K.

Beaucoups de LOLZ

It's so hard to pick a favorite ridiculous indie rock band photo and caption.

These are some favorites...

“It’s a Victrola NOT a Gramophone! Get out of our store.”

“I hid all of my bandmates’ hats and I refuse to tell them where they are.”

“Thanks Miriam, now no one will notice my new fob watch.”

Happy times for me and the Krug-man

Tell it K-man

So Larry Summers has withdrawn from the Fed race. No profound thoughts here, except that it’s really, really hard to see how Obama can justify not picking Janet Yellen at this point. Nobody else is as qualified; any other choice would look like spite.

I like to imagine my anti-Summers editorial last week helped.

More gloating on the Maddow blog.

Finally, there's a tumblr for this

MEN TAKING UP TOO MUCH SPACE ON THE TRAIN


Grrr...

Although the complaint is not new...

Richard Dawkins and the reverential New York Times

Naturally the New York Times Sunday Book Review is too respectful of celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins to mention the defining moment of his late career: his use of his celebrity to attack an obscure feminist atheist when she made a brief comment about being uncomfortable in an elevator with a man.

Just as the media gatekeepers prefer not to mention Christopher Hitchens' infamous Why Women Aren't Funny written for Vanity Fair (a magazine similar to the New Yorker except with half the intellect and twice the advertisements) in 2007; and President Obama prefers to ignore the Why Women are Bad at Science speech given by Larry Summers in 2005; the media overlords are not interested in Dawkins' infamous douchebaggery.

Because like Hitchens and Summers and Dawkins, the media overlords feel that it's a safe bet that you can shit all over women and get away with it, and women will stay shat on and STFU the way it's been done for millennia. Who cares if you insult half of humanity? It's the loser half, the half which doesn't have representation in the old boys media/New Atheist club.

Unfortunately for the media overlords many, possibly most people know who Hitchens and Summers thanks to their dumping on half of humanity, and people are rapidly coming to know who Richard Dawkins is for his contemptuous attitude towards women, as well as his insistence on frequently embarrassing himself in social media.

Like any good public relations firm, the NYTimes wants to present Richard Dawkins in the best possible light, promoting his book and asking him softball questions about his likes and dislikes. I found this section interesting:

Who are your favorite contemporary writers and thinkers? 

I’ve already mentioned Dan Dennett. I’ll add Steven Pinker, A. C. Grayling, Daniel Kahneman, Jared Diamond, Matt Ridley, Lawrence Krauss, Martin Rees, Jerry Coyne — indeed quite a few of the luminaries that grace the Edge online salon conducted by John Brockman (the Man with the Golden Address Book). All share the same honest commitment to real-world truth, and the belief that discovering it is the business of scientists — and philosophers who take the trouble to learn science. Many of these “Third Culture” thinkers write very well. (Why is the Nobel Prize in Literature almost always given to a novelist, never a scientist? Why should we prefer our literature to be about things that didn’t happen? Wouldn’t, say, Steven Pinker be a good candidate for the literature prize?) 

You have written several books on science and secularism. What other books on the subject would you recommend? 

Look at the list of those who obsessively attack Sam Harris and you’ll get an idea of what a dangerously effective writer he is: clear, eloquent, penetratingly intelligent, suffers no fools. Much the same could be said of Christopher Hitchens, and the attacks on him have increased now he is no longer around to fight back. 

First, I find it interesting that Dawkins counts Jared Diamond as a favorite, since Diamond's take on human culture is basically via cultural materialism, whereas Dawkins and his BFF Steven Pinker are both fervent advocates of evolutionary psychology - aka sociobiology. Those two research strategies are mutually exclusive.

Furthermore, Diamond promotes a view of human cultural diversity that is utterly despised by Dawkins' other bestie, Sam Harris:

Diamond's most recent book, The World Until Yesterday, published in 2012, asks what the western world can learn from traditional societies. It surveys 39 traditional small-scale societies of farmers and hunter/gatherers, organized in tribes or bands, with respect to how they deal with universal human problems. The problems discussed include dividing space, resolving disputes, bringing up children, treatment of elders, dealing with dangers, formulating religions, learning multiple languages, and remaining healthy. The book suggests that some practices of traditional societies could be usefully adopted in the modern industrial world today, either by individuals or else by society as a whole.

As for Sam Harris' view of anthropology, as Jackson Lears write in The Nation:

He is especially offended by anthropology. Too often, he says, “the fire-lit scribblings of one or another dazzled ethnographer” have sanctioned some destructive practice (human sacrifice, female genital mutilation) by explaining its adaptive or social function. At their worst, ethnographers have created a cult of the noble savage that celebrates primitive cultures we should rightfully scorn. His scornfulness aside, Harris is not wrong about ethnographic sentimentality, but he thoroughly misunderstands cultural relativism. He seems to think it means cultivating a bland indifference to ethical questions rather than making a serious effort to understand ethical perspectives radically different from our own without abandoning our own... Nor is he aware of the pioneering work of Christine Walley on female genital mutilation in Africa. Walley illuminates the complex significance of the practice without ever expressing tolerance for it, and she uses cross-cultural understanding as a means of connecting with local African women seeking to put an end to it.

It's also interesting that Dawkins implies, in his inimitable contemptuous personal style, that critics of Christopher Hitchens are cowards because they won't STFU while he's all dead; and that because Harris is "obsessively attacked" it indicates what a superior thinker he is.

People attack Harris because he has repugnant right-wing views and is a second-rate thinker. Only a puffed-up media-darling jingoistic old-boys-network intellectual like Richard Dawkins could be impressed by Sam Harris.

I attacked Christopher Hitchens plenty when he was alive. Unlike most people, my first introduction to Hitchens wasn't through his shitting on women in Vanity Fair, it was shitting on his former leftist colleagues by making common cause with George Bush over the war in Iraq.

And as far as Steven Pinker, I agree he should get a literary prize - the literary prize for most times a mainstream writer has called on professional racists to defend his work.

And lest Dawkins think that I will wait until he's dead to attack him, I must step up my critiques - he's 72 so I'd better get to work. 

Now at least I know why Dawkins married his wife:

I’ve been reading autobiographies to get me in the mood for writing my own and show me how it’s done: Tolstoy (at one time my own memoir was to have been called, at my wife’s suggestion, “Childhood, Boyhood, Truth”)

I didn't think anybody could adore Richard Dawkins more than he himself.

In the puff piece Dawkins trashes Jane Austin. Now I'm on the record as a non-fan of Austen, but Dawkins' reasoning is:

“Pride and Prejudice.” It must be my prejudice, and I am not proud of it, but I can’t get excited about who is going to marry whom, and how rich they are.

He then says of all writers he would most like to meet William Shakespeare:

Who are you? And how did a humble country boy like you become the greatest genius, and part creator, of our beloved English language

Presumably Dawkins doesn't like several plays in the greatest genius' oevre, though, since Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Loves' Labour's Lost, Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew,  and Romeo and Juliet are all primarily about who is going to marry whom.

Once again I agree with the Krug-Man

Krugman makes some excellent observations about the general uselessness of Twitter:

But 140-character reflections on what I just ate, or something, not. Why?
One reason is that I have better things to do with my time. Another is that I don’t think my instant reactions to things are especially interesting. But I have to admit that I’ve also been aware for some time how many people end up destroying themselves by tweeting something really offensive.

This is so true as Richard Dawkins is attempting to prove. Although Dawkins has thousands of followers who adore every stupid bigoted thing he says. But occasionally his more obnoxious statements get publicized.

At least he did apologize for making the presumption that although he was OK with one of his teachers feeling him up, he shouldn't have said: "I don't think he did any of us lasting harm."

Now if he would just apologize for unleashing a thousand rabid fan boys to threaten female atheists thanks to his obnoxiousness - and then he never spoke out against those rabid fan boys.

But he won't because Dawkins is a nasty, petty, power-mongering upperclass twit, who promotes both idiotic evolutionary psychology and brutish bigotry.

Krugman provides a link to EconoLOLCats.

I am so over "Castle"

The TV show "Castle" starring Nathan Fillion is not without charm, and some of the mysteries presented in each episode are pretty well thought-out, but I finally became fed up. The Kate Beckett character was really starting to annoy me.

She started out very well - the premise is that she was from an upper-class background but after her mother was murdered she decided to become a cop. And she's a good cop and has a businessness-like and no-bullshit demeanor.

But the show has been chipping away at this character since the first season. It's as if the writers are worried that Beckett is too interesting, too unusual, to make her a worthy mate for the Castle character, so they've gradually been making her as boring and typical as possible. I was incredibly annoyed when a character says to Beckett that she (Beckett) likes to wear high heels so she can tower over the men, since high heels must be so difficult to run around in when you're chasing bad guys (and unlike real cops, Beckett spends a lot of time running after bad guys.) Beckett says she just likes to wear high heels on the job.

What sane human being is so enslaved to fashion that they would cripple themselves with sadistic footwear on a daily basis on the job, so much that they won't be able to do their job nearly as well.

I guess it's so we can all heave a sigh of relief that Beckett is a real woman and not some scary dyke.

And then a few episodes later, I began to really hate both the Beckett and Castle characters. It is an episode where a young male writer arrives on the scene and considers Beckett his muse. But Castle considers Beckett his muse, and so he invites the young writer to his house for the exclusive purpose of being mean to him - he and a couple of old man mystery writers proceed to insult and undermine the young male writer.

So the next day Beckett, instead of disapproving, tells him she likes that. And as if that wasn't enough to make me despise both characters, the young male writer decides to follow around Esposito, another cop at the precinct and the cop says to Beckett and Castle "it isn't weird for a guy to be a muse, is it?" And after he's gone Beckett and Castle agree that it is weird.

Which means that Beckett, Castle and the people responsible for this episode's script are either sexist - because while a male writer can have a female muse, a female writer can't have a male muse because it's weird for a guy to be a muse, or they're goddam homophobic because it's weird for a guy to have another guy as his muse.

And I have other peeves like the way they treat the poor actor who plays Lanie, giving her absolutely nothing to do except look at dead bodies and occasionally play the supportive black woman role to the white woman star, telling Beckett she could wear lipstick once in awhile. Not only is this annoying in itself, but it indicates that Lanie is ridiculously unobservant for a medical examiner, because Beckett's face is always completely done up and her hair is always perfect. And of course she's such a slave to fashion that she wears high heels while chasing bad guys.

The only thing that Lanie gets to do besides play second-banana is have a brief affair with Esposito - and the writers do nothing with it.

This Slate writer thinks that Stana Katic, who plays Beckett, is a bad actor, and maybe that doesn't help, but it doesn't excuse the sexist homophobic assholes who write the scripts.

I may still watch the last few episodes of season three, since I paid for them, but I can't see the point of continuing with this show, especially since this Australian critic thinks it goes downhill in season four.

Beautiful Brooklyn

My recent trip to the antique shops of the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn was technically a success - I located not one but three old-school style desks, all for $200 or less. But then I couldn't decide which one I wanted, and then I started thinking about the cost of schlepping a heavy desk back to Astoria, and then the proprietor of the shop, Yesterday's News, was too engrossed in her conversation about local politics to take my money. So I gave up and headed over to Prospect Park.


The neighborhood between the Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory of Music and Prospect Park has some of the most beautiful streets imaginable. Just amazing. Unfortunately my iPhone camera is crap so I didn't bother taking any photos. But I had some photos hanging out in my iPhone from the Spring, when my iPhone lens was just beginning to get scratched up.

Just look at this door. Amazing. And there were plenty of
other amazing doors just like it in the neighborhood

Entire blocks of amazing brownstones.

And architectural whimsy

 The BQCM is also housed in a beautiful old building - it was once somebody's private mansion, and then a Masonic club house. Check out the stained glass door.

And fancy vahses and stuff.

The subway station in the neighborhood is nothing special. But it does offer
good advice. You do not want to lose your "Blumpkins."

I have to confess that my latest foray into Brooklyn had me thinking, for the first time ever, about moving there. I've already lived in all the other boroughs except the Bronx, if you count the month I lived on Staten Island at my ex-boyfriend's apartment while transitioning from the Philadelphia area to the NYC area. (Is it really fifteen years ago?)

Of course I'd want to live in one of the more beautiful neighborhoods. No sense in schlepping to Brooklyn only to live in an ugly one - I could get that here - there's even a tumblr devoted to the visual charms of my current neighborhood - Astoria Ugly.

Richard Dawkins challenges Steven Pinker for the biggest New Atheist Ass Award

You can never count out the big three horses asses of atheism - they'll always come up with something new and repugnant.  P.Z. Myers reports on Richard Dawkins' latest atrocity:

I’ve strained to pardon Richard Dawkins’ many insensitivities — ‘dear muslima’, the missteps on twitter, the petty snits against other people — but his latest is just a disaster.

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, he said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.
Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”
He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”
“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.
He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

I can think of some lasting harm: he seems to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children. He was a victim of an inexcusable violation; that he can shrug it off does not mean it was OK, or ‘zero bad’, or something trivial.

I think Dawkins has turned into a cranky old man. He needs to retire from the public stage now before he embarrasses himself even more.

I discover Stewart Lee

I learned who Eddie Izzard was around 2004, and I discovered Ricky Gervais in 2007, although I didn't come to appreciate him until 2011.

And now I have finally discovered Stewart Lee, thanks to Rebecca Watson of Skepchick (and mortal enemy of Richard Dawkins), who linked to Lee's brilliant take-down of the Top Gear show (which to be honest I haven't seen.) Stewart Lee is the frustrated bitter politically correct middle-aged liberal of my dreams.

I do find him attractive, but when he was younger he was freaking adorable.

Zombie race on Lon Guyland

I went to Riverhead to see my daughter and some friends participate in the Zombie Race. They had a good time and got covered in mud and had a beer at the end. What's not to like?

I didn't participate - I was there mainly to document the whole thing.

C-Span Videos Research

I checked out C-Span's video archive to see if I could watch some of the videos I've seen of congressional hearings in Inside Job and the Frontline episode The Warning. The most significant of these apparently happened on July 24, 1998, but I haven't found videos of Greenspan or Brooksley Born for that day.

The earliest C-Span video featuring Born is from congressional testimony on Hedge Fund Operations Risks from October 1, 1998.

At the top of this clip, the chairman of the hearing, Jim Leach says:

For a return visit on a similar subject, Miss Born. You're welcome to claim some vindication if you want.

To which Born replies:

I certainly will not do so Mr. Chairman.

The reason Leach says this is because Born had been warning of the lack of regulations in the financial industry, including hedge funds, for years, and the failure and the September 1998 bail-out of Long-Term Capital Management had proven Born had been correct. As it says in Wiki:

Long-Term Capital Management did business with nearly everyone important on Wall Street. Indeed, much of LTCM's capital was composed of funds from the same financial professionals with whom it traded. As LTCM teetered, Wall Street feared that Long-Term's failure could cause a chain reaction in numerous markets, causing catastrophic losses throughout the financial system. After LTCM failed to raise more money on its own, it became clear it was running out of options. On September 23, 1998, Goldman Sachs, AIG, and Berkshire Hathaway offered then to buy out the fund's partners for $250 million, to inject $3.75 billion and to operate LTCM within Goldman's own trading division. The offer was stunningly low to LTCM's partners because at the start of the year their firm had been worth $4.7 billion. Warren Buffett gave Meriwether less than one hour to accept the deal; the time period lapsed before a deal could be worked out. 

Seeing no options left the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a bailout of $3.625 billion by the major creditors to avoid a wider collapse in the financial markets.[23] The principal negotiator for LTCM was general counsel James G. Rickards.[24] The contributions from the various institutions were as follows:[25][26]

• $300 million: Bankers Trust, Barclays, Chase, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, J.P.Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, UBS

• $125 million: Société Générale

• $100 million: Lehman Brothers, Paribas

• Bear Stearns declined to participate.

Much of Born's speech is a rehash of her agency, the CFTC's Concept Release paper.

But even this vindication of Born didn't stop Congress from shutting down the CFTC's attempts to regulate derivatives, through its newspeak-named Commodity Future's Modernization Act of 2000.

Big surprise - Steven Pinker is an ass again

UPDATE: welcome Facebookers - for more of my opinions on Steven Pinker and evolutionary psychology proponents please see the evo-psycho bros series on this blog.



I swear I am not constantly doing Google searches on the name Steven Pinker. Without even trying it seems like at least several times a month I read another story about Pinker being an ass - everywhere from Pharyngula, to today's New York Times:

I don’t want to talk about Colin McGinn. I want to talk about Steven Pinker — or rather, about something Steven Pinker said, in a letter he wrote in June to Professor Edward Erwin at the University of Miami, defending McGinn. Referring to the university’s threatened disciplinary action against McGinn in response to complaints from a female student, Pinker wrote that “such an action would put a chill on communication between faculty and graduate students and on the openness and informality on which scholarship depends.” 

Penalties for bad behavior include dirty looks, explicit criticism and sensitivity training. You may be subjected to blogging. 

What I want to say about this is: Really? For a university to treat lewd conversation as a serious offense threatens scholarship as we know it? Aren’t we being just a tad apocalyptic? 

To be fair to Pinker, a well-known Harvard psychologist and author, his main worry at the time was about the proportionality of the university’s response to the alleged offense — he was appalled that behavior “apparently no more serious than exchanging sexual banter with a graduate student” had been met with the academic equivalent of the nuclear option. Later, as more of the facts emerged, Pinker admitted that the alleged wrongdoing might have been more serious than he had originally thought. (Pinker apparently did not know all of the facts when he wrote this letter; he now acknowledges that McGinn “behaved badly,” but still maintains that “the outcome was too severe.”) But the fact that Pinker had found it plausible that a university would have forced out “a brilliant and distinguished scholar” just for joking around betrays some high paranoia.

Colin McGinn, in case you don't know, resigned over charges of sexual harassment:

In Mr. McGinn’s telling, his relationship with the student, a first-year doctoral candidate who worked as his research assistant during the 2012 spring semester, was an unconventional mentorship gone sour. 

It was “a warm, consensual, collaborative relationship,” an “intellectual romance” that never became sexual but was full of “bantering,” Mr. McGinn said in a telephone interview. The terms of his agreement with the university, he said, prevented him from saying much more. But “banter referring to sexual matters,” he added, isn’t always “sexual banter.” 

The student, through intermediaries, declined to be interviewed for this article, citing concern that it might damage her academic career. 

But Benjamin Yelle, the student’s boyfriend and a fifth-year graduate student in philosophy at Miami, said she had been subject to months of unwanted innuendo and propositions from Mr. McGinn, documented in numerous e-mails and text messages of an explicit and escalating sexual nature she had shown him. In one from May 2012, Mr. Yelle said, Mr. McGinn suggested he and the student have sex three times over the summer “when no one is around.” 

Both Mr. McGinn and the student declined to provide any e-mails or other documents related to the case. But Amie Thomasson, a professor of philosophy at Miami, said the student, shortly after filing her complaint in September 2012, had shown her a stack of e-mails from Mr. McGinn. They included the message mentioning sex over the summer, along with a number of other sexually explicit messages, Ms. Thomasson said.

In Pinker's case I don't know if it's so much paranoia as that it's his standard knee-jerk defense of any form of patriarchy, which he believes is the innate evolved way that humans were meant to live.

And yes, I do mean "meant to live" - although evolutionary psychologists are always banging on about how they are innocent of racism and sexism, just merely describing how things are, not how they ought to be, when you scratch the surface of their rhetoric you almost always discover that not only do they think that humans have evolved to behave exactly as people in the 21st century behave, but it's the best way for us to live.

That's why they suggest that rape victims should be told as part of their counseling that rape is an adaptive behavior, or advise governments to create a two-tier employment system to ensure that men earn more money than women.

How much you want a bet that if you debated Pinker long enough he would eventually admit that the reason we can't ask male philosophy professors to stop preying on their students is because boys will be boys and older men must naturally pursue younger women. Law of the jungle.

At this point I don't know who is the biggest evolutionary psychology/new atheist clown: Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. But Pinker is definitely doing his best to be the biggest.

UPDATE: ten minutes after I wrote this post I read this:

As I walked the ten feet back, I couldn’t hear everything Dave was saying, but I heard the name “Rebecca Watson.” Richard suddenly had a very angry look on his face and I heard him almost shout, “No, absolutely not! If she’s going to be there, I won’t be there. I don’t want her speaking.” and then Dave immediately replied, “You’re absolutely right, we’ll take her off the roster. It’s done.” Richard huffed for a moment, Dave continued to placate him, and then he made the video. 

I was crushed. I couldn’t believe it. Richard Dawkins was my hero. I looked up to him as a beacon of truth and reason in a world of irrationality. I couldn’t believe he would act this way toward Rebecca. Before I left for the tour, I truly, honestly thought that the whole “Elevatorgate” thing was a miscommunication, and if someone (and I was willing to be that someone) would sit down with Dawkins, they could explain to him why it’s uncomfortable to be propositioned in an elevator by a stranger, and then Dawkins could apologize for the whole thing and everyone could move on. I really just thought it was just ignorance, not malice, that caused Dawkins to act that way.

Let this be a lesson - never discount that asshole Richard Dawkins for biggest evo-psycho/new atheist clown.

More observations on Steven Pinker.

If Obama picks Summers he's a damn fool

And he will deserve any grief he gets over it from liberal Democrats.

The Financial Times has an article today about what appears to be the increasing likelihood of Obama picking Larry Summers for Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The article begins:

In March 2000, Lawrence Summers was due to speak to a conference of derivatives traders in Boca Raton, Florida, and tell them how government regulators should have a limited role in protecting and supervising the financial system. 

“Let me be clear, it is the private sector, not the public sector, that is in the best position to provide effective supervision,” according to the text of the then Treasury Secretary’s speech. “Counterparties and creditors have more knowledge of their counterparts, more skill in evaluating risk and greater incentives than any public regulator will ever have.”

Summers appears to have changed his tune somewhat about financial regulation, but according to the article, he's still pretty weak in many areas.

And what the Financial Times doesn't care about - and in fact it's rarely mentioned in articles about Summers' candidacy, is how much animosity Summers garnered by his "women are just not as good at math and science as men" speech when he was president of Harvard. 

Summers was tutored in this standard claim of evolutionary psychology by that idiot Steven Pinker, leading proponent of evolutionary psychology and friend of racists Razib Khan and Steve Sailer.

My first introduction to Larry Summers was his infamous Harvard speech. It was only much later that I realized how responsible he was, along with Greenspan and Robert Rubin, for the deregulation, especially of derivatives, that contributed to the financial meltdown of 2008, thanks to the Frontline show The Warning and the stellar documentary Inside Job.

Summers doesn't deserve to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve for that reason. But for many women it's his blatant sexism that galls the most. Just as many people know the late Christopher Hitchens primarily as the guy who said "women aren't funny", many people know Larry Summers as the guy who said women aren't as smart as men.

Obama would be a damn fool to give Summers the job. The inside job.

UPDATE: What Joseph Stiglitz said in the NYTimes.

Have I ever mentioned how much I despise Republicans?

From Wednesday's NYTimes:

When Congress officially returns to Washington next week, the diets of families like the Rigsbys and the Adamses will be caught up in a debate over deficit reduction. Republicans, alarmed by a rise in food stamp enrollment, are pushing to revamp and scale down the program. No matter what Congress decides, benefits will be cut in November, when a provision in the 2009 stimulus bill expires. 

Yet as lawmakers cast the fight in terms of spending, nonpartisan budget analysts and hunger relief advocates warn of a spike in “food insecurity” among Americans who, as Mr. Rigsby said recently, “look like we are fine,” but live on the edge of poverty, skipping meals and rationing food.
Surrounded by corn and soybean farms — including one owned by the local Republican congressman, Representative Stephen Fincher — Dyersburg, about 75 miles north of Memphis, provides an eye-opening view into Washington’s food stamp debate. Mr. Fincher, who was elected in 2010 on a Tea Party wave and collected nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies from the government from 1999 to 2012, recently voted for a farm bill that omitted food stamps. 

“The role of citizens, of Christianity, of humanity, is to take care of each other, not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country,” Mr. Fincher, who declined to be interviewed for this article, said after his vote in May. In response to a Democrat who invoked the Bible during the food stamp debate in Congress, Mr. Fincher responded with his own biblical phrase. “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said.

So to recap: because an increasing number of people need food stamps to get by, Republicans are responding by CUTTING FOOD STAMPS.

These are evil, evil creatures.

Financial Sector Thinks It’s About Ready To Ruin World Again

From The Onion... or is it?

“Now that the public’s efforts to curtail questionable Wall Street trading practices have all but ceased, it’s time for us to bring the world to its knees again,” said AIG CEO Robert Benmosche. “There are still plenty of opaque financial derivatives, high-frequency trading operations, and off-balance sheet transactions out there, all with virtually no federal regulation. Trust me, we can definitely work with that. And if anything, we can always just lobby for further concessions and deregulation in Washington—which, by the way, is so, so easy to do—and then we can cause as much damage as we want.”

Added Benmosche, “And while we’re at it, we’ll make sure we once again come away from this whole thing scot-free and far wealthier.”

Why are so many playwrights such idiots.

So many playwrights are idiots. Or have a reading comprehension problem. Either way, they shouldn't be a playwright.

NYCPlaywrights put out a call for monologues on the theme of "you put a spell on me" and it was explained in this way:

The theme: You put a spell on me.
The speaker of the monologue can be any age, gender, ethnicity, etc. but must address the theme of "you put a spell on me."
This can be approached in a variety of ways  - it could be in the romantic sense of "I'm so in love with you that you must have put a spell on me" or in the literal sense of "you used magical powers on me" - and this could be true in the world of the monologue, or the speaker could be delusional. Your choice, as long as it addresses the theme in a discernible way.

Is that so hard to understand? How many times do you have to use the words "YOU put a spell on ME" in order for it to sink in that the play has to be a monologue by somebody (ME) addressing the person who put the spell on the speaker (YOU)???

Out of the 21 submissions sent so far, I had to throw out all but 4. The ones I threw out included monologues about:

• A spelling bee; 
• You put a spell on your father;
• She put a lesbian spell on me; 
• A bizarre preacher's sermon; 
• I think I either loved or pitied some guy;  
• He put a spell on her, who is really me;
• He put a spell on this woman I know;
• I'll tell you a story about a guy, he'll put a spell on you;
• I'm drunk and I'm attracted to you;
• I rant to a group of people about men that I hate.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

The greyness

Back in March I talked about a mini-season that I have identified. The season comes between winter and spring, at least in the mid-Atlantic coastal region of the United States. I considered calling it "sprinter."

We are now in the beginning of the other mini-season. Sprinter occurs in the couple of weeks before the vernal equinox. This season is a couple of weeks before the autumnal equinox.

While I really like sprinter, I detest this mini-season. It always occurs right around Labor Day and it's always the same: warm, muggy and cloudy, but without the release of a cooling rain. Just this nasty grey funk that occurs off-and-on, but mostly on, in the early weeks of September. So I decided to call it "the greyness."

More troubles for artists thanks to the US Copyright Office

The US copyright system appear to have been designed entirely for a class of people who are knowledgable about legal issues and/or can afford regular access to legal counsel. 

In addition to the troubles the US Copyright Office caused me by allowing Edward Einhorn to submit a copyright on his bogus "blocking and choreography" script - which was a derivative work although Einhorn seems to have filed the original copyright as a primary work, and removing my name entirely from registration;  those rules have also lead to trouble for the author of the Motown hit "Money."

Unbeknown to Mr. Strong, who also helped write many other Motown hits, his name was removed from the copyright registration for “Money” three years after the song was written, restored in 1987 when the copyright was renewed, then removed again the next year — his name literally crossed out.
Documents at the copyright office show that all of these moves came at the direction of Motown executives, who dispute Mr. Strong’s claim of authorship. Berry Gordy Jr., Motown’s founder, declined requests for an interview, but his lawyers contend that the original registration resulted from a clerical error, and that Mr. Strong passed up numerous opportunities to assert his claim. 

Mr. Strong said he learned of the alterations only late in 2010 and has been struggling ever since to have his authorship officially reinstated. At stake: his ability to share in the lucrative royalties from the song’s use. But his efforts have been blocked by a provision of copyright law that says he relinquished his rights by failing to act in a timely fashion to contest Motown’s action. 

Mr. Strong’s predicament illustrates a little-known oddity in the American copyright system, one that record and music publishing companies have not hesitated to exploit. The United States Copyright Office, a division of the Library of Congress, does not notify authors of changes in registrations, and until recently the only way to check on any alterations was to go to Washington and visit the archives personally.

And the wealthy never fail to take advantage of their privileges.