Laura Ingraham on her radio show (from The Rachel Maddow Show):


I couldn't have said it any better: Republicans have real problems. They are wimps who surround themselves with like-minded people so they are never challenged.

I see this clearly today and I've been watching it happen over the last three decades. Republicans have systematically ghettoized themselves. It is sad to see conservatives I talk to who only get their news from conservative outlets like Fox News and right-wing radio: they are shocked that liberals even exist because their only experience of them is as straw-men seen through these media filters. What's more, they are completely impotent against real arguments. Of course, this doesn't cause them to abandon their beliefs; they simply don't accept what are established facts.

It is really very tiring when you get to that point in all these arguments when you are asked to produce the proof, as though you should carry it in your pocket. They, of course, have accepted everything they've been told without a smidgen of proof. But if it goes against their prejudices, "There must be proof!" Occasionally, I do get through to these people. In time, I will provide them with newspaper articles and sometimes they actually read them. And then it is always the same, "You mean they've been lying to me?!"

Yes, deary: they've been lying to you.

And that's how the Grand Old Party became the Simplistic New Party. And they have real problems, such as the fact that people like Ingraham think the party still has any relationship to Ronald Reagan—or even Bob Dole. Not that I'm saying that would be good, but it would be better.

Like most people, I discovered DeVotchKa (apparently Russian for "girl") in the delightful film Little Miss Sunshine. And I've heard a bit of their music since then and generally liked it all. Just today, I came upon a song from their most recent album 100 Lovers called The Man from San Sebastian. It is a wonderfully energetic song, produced in an almost wacky manner. The stark opening accordion somehow reminds me of the zither used throughout The Third Man.


I wish I could say that I knew what the song was about. There seem to be many clues in the video, but they mean little to me. At one point, a headline appears on the screen, "45.3 Kilos de Uranio Altamente Enriquecido": 45.3 kg of Highly Enriched Uranium. That's pretty specific, but still, the people in the photos? I'm not a modern man! I don't know what's going on now or recently. What's more: I'm sure I'm not the only one who does not remember the man from San Sebastian.

My hunch is that the song itself is post-modern in the sense that it isn't about anything. It is a song that pretends to be about revolution but is more about love but is really about nothing but word play. Here are the main lyrics:


According to the director of the video, Vincent Comparetto, the political photos are from people in the Basque Separatist Movement in Spain. He apparently did an interview with NPR, but you are best to check out the DeVotchKa—Making of Video video at Prometheus Productions (sorry, no direct link).

Dean Baker wrote an excellent article about copyright that goes along with much of what I (as the creator of many copyrighted works) believe. I certainly don't want to go back to the days of Cervantes when publishers alone were allowed copyright of authors' works. But the truth is that today, with all the changes that have been made to the copyright laws, we are ending up with much the same thing. Baker takes on the common canard that welfare is social engineering while copyright enforcement is just protecting the free market:


Artistic freedom Voucher

In the article, Baker links to a paper he wrote about The Artistic Freedom Voucher. The basic idea is brilliant. Our current system (copyright law) supports creative activity by pushing money from the bottom to the top. The AFV would support creative activity in a much more direct way by allowing everyone to give $100 to their chosen artist. This would be done as a tax credit—in my mind at least, kind of like that question on Form 1040, "Would you like to give $3 toward elections?" or whatever it actually says. The program would be entirely voluntary. Taxpayers would not have to give and artists would not have to participate. If artists did participate, they would have to give up any copyright protection for some period of time (Baker suggests 5 years).

If everyone participated, this would support a half-million artists at an income of $40,000 per year. As Baker says, this is one possible alternative to copyright law. And one that would appeal to most artists who are not, like the Mothers of Invention, just in it for the money. The more important point is that there are lots of ways to support the arts. We don't have to stick with copyright law and there is nothing "natural" about copyright law.

Protect Corporations (and Paul McCartney[1])

This is a very exciting idea to me, because I have long been a critic of copyright law. In the US, copyright is now a minimum of 95 years. This means the wonderful and rare "Lu-Brent's" Exclusive Card Mysteries that I own is still under copyright even though it was published in 1933. Give me a break! It amazes me to think that the copyright on The Beatles' Yesterday will outlive me! This is madness. And the government has only made it worse, extending copyright retroactively. This is not done for the benefit of artists and their heirs; it is done for the benefit of corporations. And it no only hurts art consumers, it hurts art creators.

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[1] According to The Telegraph, McCartney is worth upwards of one billion dollars (a half billion pounds). Could this be why he really hasn't done anything particularly good since my childhood? Let's see, Shakespeare sucked after he was wealthy. Cervantes only got better throughout his life of poverty. I have three data points and the results are in: money destroys artists!

Update: It isn't that I expected McCartney to do Yesterday and Penny Lane for the rest of his career. Quite the contrary. There are flashes of brilliance throughout his later career that make my observation all the more poignant. I still think that Here Today is the only listenable John Lennon tribute song, even if it does only barely transcends some of McCartney's worst lyrical impulses.

Hello boys and girls! After a day of trying, I've finally managed to get Frankly Curious transferred over to its new host. You see, the bad people over at Lunar Pages have clearly outgrown their infrastructure, and rather than investing in more are depending upon the fact that it is a total pain in the ass to move a website to a new server. Proof of this is that after all the work I've done, at this moment, individual articles are displaying with the Curiously Clever logo. But regardless of the trouble, I could not continue on with Lunar Pages. It seemed that every day the site was down for at least a couple of minutes and the night before last, it was down for almost a half hour. This resulted in my starting three problem tickets with tech support, billing, and sales. Not one of these have been answered.

So I'm taking a chance with Host Gator. They cost a tad more after the first year, but they have a 99.9% guarantee, which, if my calculations are right, means that if they are down for more than 45 minutes during a month, I get the month free. At that rate, I never would have paid Lunar Pages.

According to the MPAA, "A motion picture’s single use of one of the harsher sexually-derived words, though only as an expletive, initially requires at least a PG-13 rating." This is just a really fucked-up way of saying that in a PG-13 film, you can say "fuck" once, but only if you use it the way it is almost always used: the way it wasn't first used. They say it must be used as an expletive. That would mean it can only be used as when a bullet rushes past the hero and he says, "Fuck!" But this isn't the case, based upon actual films. For example, in the PG-13 rated Bourne Identity, Bourne says, "Fuck it!" In that sentence, fuck is clearly a verb, even if the clause serves as an expletive. It is not shocking that the MPAA is ignorant of basic grammar; they are ignorant about just about everything.

The only way that you cannot use the word "fuck" in an PG-13 film is as what Ruth Wajnryb, author of the excellent Expletive Deleted: a good look at bad language, calls its referential sense. That is, you cannot say, "I want to fuck you." Why? Who knows! It makes no sense. Wajnryb, in particular, would likely be very unhappy about this. In her book, she spends a lot of time lamenting the fact that fuck has all but lost its referential base. It's used in many and various ways, but increasingly not for the act itself. And the truth is, we don't really have any good replacement for it. "Make love"? A lot of times, people are just fucking. "Having sex"? That's awkward. And why not just "fuck"? Everything else is either too clinical (coitus) or too silly (hide the salami).

But the MPAA continues to hold onto its power: restricting children from seeing homosexual kissing, doing drugs, and saying bad words. But most of all, children cannot see realistic depictions of violence. What's left? Idealistic depictions of violence where children can learn that guns are safe and they just cause people to fall down. Thanks a lot you fatuous, ignorant, conservative bastards.

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I highly recommend Kirby Dick's great documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated. Check it out!

I gave up on PolitiFact a couple of years ago—long before the recent ridiculousness about the claim that House Republicans voted to end Medicare was named their Lie of the Year. The truth is that if you go to PolitiFact (I don't recommend it, so I won't provide a link), you will see that in general, the Republicans do worse than the Democrats. But even still, this greatly understates how much more lying goes on amongst conservatives than liberals. The biggest problem has to do with what PolitiFact chooses to fact check. For example, George Will's constant stream of lies and misinformation about climate change never seem to interest PolitiFact.

Today, PolitiFact checked a number of things in the President's State of the Union speech. In particular, they found his claim that businesses had created three million jobs in the last 22 months "half true." Why? What was wrong with that claim? Nothing. So why did they say it was half true? Because PolitiFact that divined that Obama implied that government policy had something to do with it. Hence: half true. Apparently, the people at PolitiFact have never seen Dragnet; Just the facts, Ma'am.

This morning, Paul Krugman wrote about when facts aren't facts about the half true designation. He was one of many. So PolitiFact, showed, in addition to being useless, they have no backbone; they changed the "half true" into "mostly true." This did not help matters, because what the President said was in fact true. Krugman wrote again on finding the truth. He wrote


Rachel Maddow provides an excellent summary. And she ends it properly: "You're fired!" Better late than never, everyone. Welcome to my world!

Scott Turow is about the only modern "Best Selling" novelist who I will read. I give him credit for teaching me how to write a mystery/suspense novel, and to some extent how to write a novel at all. So while in the Hong Kong Airport, I found myself without anything to read. So I picked up a copy of Turow's newest novel, Innocent, the sequel to his first novel, Presumed Innocent. I'll write about the novel later, because I have much to say. For now, I want to focus on one sentence that Turow wrote in the following short paragraph:


This is the character Nat, son of the main character Rusty. He is talking about his father's computer skills. He was asked, "Are you computer literate?" And this is the question he appears to be answering, but it isn't.

There are two ways the last sentence can be written:

1. I know a lot more than him.


2. I know a lot more than he.

The first sentence means, "I know a lot more about computers than I know about my father." The second sentence means, "I know a lot more about computers than my father knows about computers."

Clearly, when speaking, only a pedant like me would say, "I know a lot more than he." So maybe Turow wrote the sentence that way because that's the way people talk.

But I'm not sure. All of Turow's books are fundamentally about how unknowable everyone is. And this theme is very much on display in Innocent. Nat does not really know his father. So the question is whether Turow is such a good writer that he knew he was doing that when he wrote that line.

"I know a lot more about computers than I know about my father."

I present the following video (a catch from Ezra Klein's Wonkbook) as an illustration of what it is like to be a freelance writer: lots of work for little pay. This young man made a $100 bet with his father than he could do a backflip every day in 2011. Watch it. It is really interesting. Shockingly, it only has a couple hundred views.


This is a lot of work for very little money. But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

I would be worried what people would have to say about this article, but no one reads my political writing. So I will go ahead and pretend to be brave.

I don't understand all the uproar about Iran's supposed nuclear weapons program. First, of course, there is the issue that the evidence is pretty poor that they even have one. Second, and more important, is the issue that the uproar just seems racist. Why are European countries allowed nukes, but not Iran? Why are Asian countries allowed nukes, but not Iran? Why is Israel allowed nukes, but not Iran?

I know the standard answer: the Iranians are crazy and they'll actually use it. But this exact argument was used against the Soviets. Remember what a big deal détente was? The idea that the Nixon administration would treat the communist countries as if they were rational like we were? Shocking! And that's how I feel about Iran. Would they actually use a nuclear weapon? I just don't see it. Would they give it to a terrorist group? Give me a break! A millionaire won't even give a bum a dollar; you think Iran would go to all that trouble just to create a bomb to give it away to some terrorist group that just as well might use it against Iran itself? Preposterous.

The bad side of allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon is that it would likely set off an arms race in the Middle East. But could it really be worse than anything that brought the US to have almost 10,000 warheads and Russia, a similar amount?

We need to stop pretending that countries we don't like are irrational. They never were and they aren't now. So can we all just lower the rhetoric before we start another war? Is it so much to ask that we all stay calm and peaceful?

Paul Krugman provided the following graph of total public and private debt, which I altered with red with the presidents at the different times. The only Republican who doesn't look too bad is George H. W. Bush, who was an old-fashioned conservative. What it shows, as I've discussed before, is that modern Republicans are not economically conservative. In general, I don't care about the budget deficit. But Republicans supposedly do. I've come to the conclusion that Republicans are not hypocritical; they are good old-fashioned 1984 styled authoritarians who care about one thing and one thing only: power for its own sake. And as a country, we really need to wake up to this.