“Suck it up and cope”

David Sirota provides ten case studies of rich people who seem to be so completely oblivious to the raging and widening inequalities in the US and the resentment it breeds that the apocryphal story of a princess (wrongly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette) who upon hearing that the poor had no bread helpfully suggested “Let them eat cake” immediately comes to mind.

One of Sirota’s examples is billionaire Charles Munger who, in a 2010 speech to University of Michigan students, said that the unemployed, the homeless and the impoverished, whose lives are being torn apart by the recession, should stop whining and instead should “Suck it up and cope.” Yes, those very words. Sirota also said that Munger “first lauded bankers as people who “saved your civilization” and then urged all Americans to bow down and “thank god” that the bailouts preserved the financial industry’s profits.”
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Murdoch update

The people involved in the Murdoch phone hacking scandal keep falling faster and harder and, as is often the case in such situations, are turning on each other.

  • As I expected, the head of Scotland Yard Sir Paul Stephenson has resigned because of charges that he accepted gifts from Murdoch’s cronies and did not aggressively pursue the hacking case. In his resignation letter he aimed a parting shot at prime minister David Cameron’s close association with former News of the World editor Andy Coulson. Cameron has hit back.
  • The assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard David Yates, who had effectively shut down the original investigation into the hacking claims, has also resigned.
  • Stephenson and Yates and other senior Scotland Yard officers are to be the subjects of yet another inquiry.
  • One of the other senior police officers to be investigated is another former assistant commissioner Andy Hayman who led the original phone hacking investigation in 2006 and later became a columnist for Murdoch’s The Times, another example of the incestuous relationship between the police and News Corp.
  • Sean Hoare, a former News of the World employee who first blew the whistle about rampant phone hacking at that paper and alleged that Andy Coulson, former editor of News of the World and later a close aide and confidante to David Cameron, knew about it all along, has been found dead at his home.
  • News International’s former head Rebekah Brooks has been arrested and is out on bail but will apparently still appear with Rupert and James Murdoch before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday.
  • Prime minister David Cameron has cut short a trip to Africa to return home to help plan the judicial inquiry that he was forced to initiate into the phone hacking.
  • Cameron also said that parliament, which had been due to go on a six-week recess at the end of Tuesday, will likely now come back on Wednesday to debate the scandal.
  • Now in major damage control mode, News Corp has initiated its own internal inquiry into what happened at the News of the World. This is one inquiry we can probably safely ignore.
  • Murdoch is ‘lawyering up’ with some heavy hitters in the US, following reports that the FBI has opened an investigation. The hacking of actor Jude Law’s phone in the US could be a key issue but merely the one that gets the ball rolling. As Felix Salmon points out, there are plenty of other odious News Corp practices in the US that will emerge once the spotlight is turned on them.
  • What is going to really hurt Murdoch is that the stock price of News Corp is sliding globally. Ultimately this is what he really cares about since a low price makes him vulnerable to shareholder anger and the possible ouster of him and his family members.

Things are moving really fast.

Obama’s goals and strategy

One of the interesting features of the current discussions involving raising the debt ceiling is how Obama keeps offering cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits as part of the deal. This does not surprise me because I have repeatedly said that the best chance for the oligarchy to cut these programs that they do not care about is when a Democrat is in office because then the defenders of these programs drop their guard, thinking that the president will defend their interests, not realizing that his primary goal is to serve the oligarchy.

Obama’s supporters seem to think that this is just a clever strategy on Obama’s part, that by linking it to some tax raises for the very rich, it will cause the Republicans to reject the plan, thus making them appear unreasonable. I disagree. Offering something in negotiations that you actually oppose on the assumption that the other side will reject the entire deal is very dangerous because there is always the small chance that they might accept and also because in future negotiations you cannot refuse to consider those proposals if brought forward by the other side.

Matt Taibbi argues persuasively that Obama does not want a progressive deficit deal. He actually does want to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow also has Obama’s number.

The logic of science-6: The burden of proof in law

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

For a long time, religion claimed to reveal eternal truths. No one except true believers seriously says that anymore because science has become the source of reliable knowledge while religion is increasingly seen as being based on evidence-free assertions. So some believers tend to try and devalue the insights science provides by elevating what we can call truth to only those statements that reach the level of mathematical proof, because such a high bar can rarely be attained and thus everything else becomes a matter of opinion. They can then claim that scientific statements and religious statements merely reflect the speaker’s opinion, nothing more.
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How do you evaluate ‘expert’ opinion?

None of us are in a position to figure out everything for ourselves. We are all dependent on experts in specific fields for knowledge. While an expert’s reputation and record of reliability and honesty can and should be factored in, we don’t want to unquestioningly accept the assertions of authorities since it is possible that they may be mistaken or not as expert or knowledgeable as they claim to be or may even be lying

So to what extent is it reasonable to depend on experts? Bertrand Russell in his 1941 book Let the People Think suggested that rather than depend on this or that expert, one should look at the views of the aggregate of experts and draw the following reasonable inferences:

  1. “that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;
  2. that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and
  3. that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.”

That seems like a good rule of thumb.

But of course, you will rarely get unanimity among experts. There will almost always be dissenters. But at least when it comes to scientific matters, there often tends to be an overwhelming consensus and what I do is see what the dominant views are. So for example, in the case of global warming, since an overwhelming majority of climate scientists say that it is occurring and is man-made, Russell would say (according to rule (1)) that it would be foolish to insist that they are wrong. Similarly, since an overwhelming majority of biologists accept the theory of evolution as the means by which speciation occurred, Russell would say that it would be silly to confidently deny it. At most one should voice tentative dissent.

When it comes to economic or political questions where there is often not only no unanimity but not even a dominant consensus, rule (2) comes into play and it is wise to not place one’s faith too strongly on one particular view.

The Murdoch dominos start falling

The loyalists surrounding Rupert Murdoch are getting picked off one by one. Rebekah Brooks, head of his British operations News International, has resigned. It was thought that she and Murdoch sacrificed 168-year old The News of the World, the paper at the center of the scandal, to save her own skin, shutting down the profitable paper and throwing all its employees out of work in the hope that it would quell the scandal. That did not work.

The biggest casualty so far is Les Hinton, Murdoch’s long time right hand man who has worked for him for 52 years and who has also resigned as Chief Executive Officer of News Corp’s Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal. Hinton and Brooks say they were ignorant of the illegal activities that were going on all around them but that is not credible and both of them are so close to the Murdoch father and son team that it is hard to believe that the latter two did not know too. Murdoch can probably buy the silence of these loyalists until such time as they are staring serious prison time in the face.

Hinton, seen as Murdoch’s consiglieri, seems the most vulnerable since he seems to have lied to a British parliamentary inquiry, claiming that a thorough internal investigation into the hacking scandal that he ran while head of News International showed that the phone hacking was done by a single reporter gone rogue, an assertion now seen as laughably false. The departure of Hinton and Brooks now puts son James Murdoch in the crosshairs. Brooks and the two Murdochs are due to testify on Tuesday where I expect them to make groveling apologies along with stout denials that they were aware of what was going on. This is of course highly implausible, given that they all seem to be control freaks working closely.

Jonathan Freedland describes in detail the power that Murdoch exercised over the British political structure. Its extent shocked even someone as cynical as me who has long been aware of the collusion of government, media, and business. It seemed like Murdoch has almost all of the big players (David Cameron, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown) in his pocket, obsequiously toadying to him even as his papers occasionally revealed unpleasant things about them.

What may be the final straw is that the corruption extended well into the police, which tends to bother people more than political corruption. As Freedland writes:

What has shocked more deeply is the extent to which the police force and News International had become intertwined: the wining and dining, the top brass of both organisations apparently separated by a revolving door: ex-cop Andy Hayman moving to NI, ex-editor Neil Wallis moving to Scotland Yard. No wonder the Met was so lethargic in investigating hacking: why look too deeply into the affairs of people who represent either a meal ticket or a future paycheck?

The bribing of police to get information seems to be well established but now The Guardian newspaper (and its reporter Nick Davies), which has been terrier-like in its dogged coverage of the story and breaking scoop after scoop, has revealed that the Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson tried to get the paper to back off on the Murdoch story by saying that it had information that its coverage was “exaggerated and incorrect”, while at the same time not informing them that they had hired a senior The News of the World executive Neil Wallis as an advisor. Wallis has also now been arrested. My hope is that the Stephenson also gets fired (and investigated and even arrested) and a new untainted person brought in who will try and repair the image of the police by doing a full investigation.

Now that Murdoch seems weakened, those who formerly were cowed by him are now speaking out more openly, especially in parliament, and The Independent gives a preview of what to expect at the inquiry on Tuesday.

Murdoch has gone into full damage control mode, apologizing to everyone he can get to, including the family of Milly Dowler, and inserting a big apology advertisement in all the British newspapers today, blaming it all on a single newspaper when the corruption seems to have spread to others within the Murdoch empire with actor Jude Law suing The Sun for hacking his phone. But people who condone the tapping of the phone mails of dead schoolchildren are not the kind of people who feel shame and remorse, and this merely seems like the latest attempt to stem the furor.

The pernicious influence of Murdoch on the media and political landscape is captured by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. (Thanks to reader Norm.)

It should be noted that the Fry and Laurie comedy show ran around 1990. Things have got much worse since then.

The few, the proud, The Undefeated. Actually, just the few. In fact, just one

Whose bright idea was it to release the new Sarah Palin fan-biopic on the same day as the final Harry Potter film? Is it any surprise that there was only one person in the theater who was there just to interview audience members? Two other people came in not knowing anything about the film but guessing from the title that it was an action flick. They left after 20 minutes.

That gave me an idea. Maybe Palin and her husband should have ditched their idiotic bus tour and instead made a real action movie, a remake of Easy Rider, with them playing the roles of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in the original, roaming the country on their Harley Davidsons looking for the real America and living off the land by killing and eating moose. And Michele Bachmann could take the Jack Nicholson role, a kindred soul they meet and pick up while riding through Minnesota.

And instead of getting shot, in the remake they could be the ones packing heavy heat and killing off America’s enemies (gays, non-Christians, city dwellers, people who live along the two coasts, minorities, immigrants, non-Tea Partiers, etc.) with powerful automatic weapons.

I bet that would beat Harry Potter at the box office.

The ridiculous debt ceiling negotiations

Stephen Colbert provides the best summary I have seen to date of the absurd discussions involving raising the debt ceiling.

It was always obvious that the debt ceiling would be raised because the oligarchy demanded it and the Republican party leadership, like that of the Democrats, are their faithful servants. The Republican leadership had assured the financial and business world that the ceiling would be raised and everyone, including Obama, knew this. So the Republican idea of holding the ceiling ‘hostage’ to demand other concessions was laughable on its face. How can you use hostages as a negotiating tool if both sides agree that the hostage would be released unharmed? All Obama had to do was insist that the ceiling be raised with no conditions and it would have happened.

The only reason for this spectacle was for both party leaderships to create a made-for-media drama that would allow them to arrive at ‘compromise’ policies that would further benefit the oligarchy while hurting everyone else, all the while claiming that they were forced to take this drastic action to ‘save the hostage’.

It is still possible that there will be such a deal but where things seem to have gone awry is that the Republican party base does not understand how this game is played and took at face value all their leadership’s rhetoric about how raising the debt ceiling was a horrendous evil that should never be agreed to unless a steep price were paid. Now that time is running out, they have to find a way to wriggle out of the situation.

Colbert further discusses the issue with Naftali Bendavid, the congressional correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

The logic of science-5: The problem of incompleteness

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

As I discussed in the previous post in this series, our inability to show that an axiomatic system is consistent (i.e., free of contradictions as would be evidenced by the ability to prove two theorems each of which contradicted the other) is not the only problem. Godel also showed that such systems are also necessarily incomplete. In other words, for all systems of interest, there will always be some truths of that system that cannot be proven as theorems using only the axioms and rules of that system. So the tantalizing goal that one day we might be able to develop a system in which every true statement can be proven to be true also turns out to be a mirage. Neither completeness nor consistency is attainable.
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