A New Big Lie

I have written about what I called The Big Lie several times (see here, here, and here). The Big Lie I wrote about in 2011 concerned the financial crisis and the attempt by conservatives to blame it on the government "forcing" financial institutions to lend to unworthy borrowers. It was a lie because no coercion was needed. GSEs, banks, and private mortgage brokers wrote a massive number of unsound sub-prime loans, Wall Street bundled them and sold them as mortgage bonds, and the ratings agencies gave them phony AAA ratings all because they they made a lot--a whole lot--of money doing it and nearly destroyed the financial system as a result. The crisis was caused by private greed and incompetence, not government policy.

Conservatives have to lie about this because it undercuts one of the essential raison d'etres of conservatism, which is the unsullied virtue of private institutions operating under capitalist principles free from government regulation. The financial crisis of 2008/2009 offers a direct contradiction of this conservative catechism.

In recent years a new big lie has emerged. It goes something like this: Obama and a Democratic Congress rammed through Obamacare in a purely partisan fashion that eschewed bipartisan cooperation. This has been one of the primary attacks against Obamacare from the hard Right, but interestingly it has also been a constant theme espoused by more moderate elements in attempting to explain why they opposed the recent attempt of the GOP to repeal and replace Obamacare with only GOP votes.

This view is based on the fact that Obamacare was passed in the Senate using reconciliation with only Democratic votes. However, the process that led to this was strikingly different from what we saw with recent GOP efforts to repeal and replace the ACA. As Glenn Kessler points out in a Washington Post fact checking column:

Republicans have skipped the lengthy, open process of hearings and markups of legislation that characterized the Democrats’ march to passage of the ACA. Instead, they moved directly to floor votes. Moreover, Democrats at first tried to enlist some Republican support, while Republicans have not reached out to Democrats.

The part of the ACA legislative history that Republicans unanimously ignore is that Max Baucus, then chairman of the Senate Finance committee, worked diligently to try and gain the support of Olympia Snowe for the bill (Snowe voted for the bill in committee and later against the bill on the floor during the final vote). There was a serious and sustained effort to pass at least a minimally bipartisan bill. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress did not want to pass a health care bill with only Democratic votes. The fact is that there was no GOP support for Obamacare not because Democrats wanted to ram through a partisan bill, but because Republicans had decided in advance to withhold cooperation on any major Obama initiative. This scorched earth policy of noncooperation was hatched even before Obama was inaugurated.

Comparing THIS process with the recent GOP votes on Obamacare repeal and replace is absurd. The Democrats tried to obtain GOP support and failed because the word had gone out that they were to obstruct major Obama initiatives, such as the stimulus and health care reform. Given this, the ONLY reason that Obamacare passed the Senate using reconciliation was that Scott Walker won Ted Kennedy's seat after he died of brain cancer and the Democrats lost their 60th vote. Reconciliation was a desperate last-minute fallback position after attempts at bipartisan cooperation failed. (It is worth noting that the major changes that Obamacare underwent during it path through Congress moved it closer to--not further from--the GOP position. In particular, the public option and an expansion of Medicare to those 55 and older were dropped.) Contrast this with the GOP efforts on repeal and replace. Reconciliation with a purely partisan bill was the ONLY option ever tried. It was the first choice (and so far only choice) of the Republican Congress. It wasn't forced on them. It was their preference.

Anatomy of a Bad Movie

Actually, the title of this blog post is somewhat misleading. Perhaps insufferable movie would be better. Or maybe, pretentious. Or perhaps self-indulgent. Or maybe incomprehensible.

I was one of the unfortunates this weekend who shelled out 9 bucks to see Mother!. It stars Jennifer Lawrence, whose last three non-franchise X-Men or Hunger Games films* have flopped I am counting Mother! in this list. I have never been so sure that a film would die at the box office.

There are a couple of things that are interesting about Mother! One of these is how out of touch movie critics can sometimes be. I refuse to believe that the 69% Rotten Tomatoes score or the 75% Metacritc rating is based on anything other than technical prowess or sheer audacity of the film-maker. Mother's! CinemaScore (a score that rates the responses of audiences) is a quite rare F. Movie goers are generally forgiving about the films they've seen. Not with Mother! I understand completely. Many critics have compared Mother! to Rosemary's Baby and another Roman Polanski film The Tenant. This libels these films. Rosemary's Baby is a classic 1968 thriller in which Mia Farrow's character Rosemary gradually comes to learn that her husband and neighbors are in league with Mephistopheles, who also turns out to be the real father of her unborn child--a fact that is not revealed until the shocking ending. The Tenant, which at least is a little reminiscent of Mother!, concerns a Parisian tenant of an undistinguished apartment building who starts witnessing increasingly bizarre events unfold in his building. In this film the ending reveals that the tenant was hallucinating all along, because he is crazy.

The thing is that both of these films tell comprehensible stories. The Tenant does not seem comprehensible for much of its running time, but all is explained in the end. Not so with Mother! SPOILER ALERT! Mother!'s ending does nothing to explain the events that occur during the film beyond revealing that, whatever they were, they were part of a cycle of events that have apparently repeated over and over. The cause of these events, their meaning, or even their physical possibility is never broached. The only real similarity to Rosemary's Baby is that the female lead gives birth near the end of the film, and the father is definitely holding something back from his wife. However, in the case of Mother! I challenge anyone to reveal just what that is. Perhaps a better comparison would be Groundhog Day, but not really. (I'll ignore the religious symbolism in Mother! because it is not particularly coherent or clearly suggestive of Satanism.)

The other aspect of this film that struck me is how dishonest its marketing has been to the public. The trailer suggests that it is perhaps a weird family-based comedy, something along the lines of the 1981 Belushi/Ackroyd film Neighbors. I haven't quite decided what Mother! is, but whatever it is, it is not a comedy, at least not intentionally.

* Mother!, Passengers, and Joy

The Sad Life of an Audiophile

Part One: A New Way

Arguably the most debilitating aspect of an audiophile's life lies in its fiscal drain on one's resources. Being an audiophile is expensive. Decent speakers with anything approaching a full range really cannot be had for much under $2,000. Add to that a good front end and the required electronics and you are at at least $5,000. Mind you, this is pretty much the minimum. Prices go up from there.

I have recently had something of a realization on the road to Damascus. Good audio, and I mean REALLY good audio, does not have to cost anywhere near this much. In fact, my current main system costs $647. I think it is the best sound I have ever heard. What can provide this miracle? Headphones. Modern headphones are insanely good for shockingly reasonable prices. I bought a set of Koss Pro 4As in 1973 for $79. In today's money that would be over $400. My reference phones are now the PSB M4 U1. These cans cost $229.

Remember, I said $647? Well, I added to the PSB an external DAC, the $169 Audioengine D1, and I plug the PSB into an external headphone amp, the $249 Schiit Asgard 2. My front end for this setup is an ordinary laptop computer I already had and is used mostly for other things, so I didn't include this in the total price. I simply play high bitrate MP3s on my computer to which I connect the Audioengine via USB. A standard RCA cable runs from the Audioengine to the Schiit into which I plug the PSB headphones.

The sound quality is breathtaking. It sounds studio quality to me, and I couldn't be happier.

Part Two: What Matters and What Doesn't

In addition to cost, another pitfall of being an audiophile is that the audiophile press is rancid with corruption and superstition. The plain fact is that other than digital audio (CDs and streaming music), there has not been a substantial advancement in audio technology for 30-40 years (Many of the current cause célèbres--vinyl records and tube amps--are based on technology going back to the 1950s.). It is generally held that some of the best speakers ever arrived on the market in the 1970s and 1980s. Think of the $50,000 Infinity IRS V or the Quad electrostatic. The Apogee Scintilla ribbon speaker was released 32 years ago. Apogee shut its doors in 1999. The Yamaha V-FET range of amplifiers sold through the late 70s and early 80s and are still prized for their tube-like sound.

However, selling audio gear is a business so manufacturers have to keep coming up with new reasons for enthusiasts to buy their products and for the audiophile press to write about them. This has spawned an enormous about of nonsense. Let me share with you what I think matters and doesn't matter.

1. Bit rates: Does matter, a lot. A 128 KB MP3 does not sound very good, but a 256 KB and above MP3 sounds very good. It is not quite indistinguishable from the CD source (you'll need a lossless FLAC file for that), but it is very good.
3. High Resolution digital audio: Doesn't matter. CD technology is based on a 44 kHz sampling rate and 16 bits of dynamic range. Neil Young believes that CD sound loses something compared to old fashioned analog sound (true) and that the cause of this is insufficient resolution (not true). He and others champion a 192 kHz/24 bit format. I have listened to this and I can't tell any difference between this and CD's 44/16 format. In fact, in some cases it seems to sound worse
4. External DAC: Does matter, a little. Adding an external DAC to a computer can slightly improve the sound quality. I wouldn't call the difference dramatic, but it is audible and, I think, worth the money.
5. External Headphone Amp: Does matter, a little. Just like the DAC it can make a small but audible difference to the sound.
6. Headphones: Does matter, a lot. Which headphone you use will have a large impact on the sound quality. In fact, after the type of digital audio you choose, this will have the single biggest impact on sound quality.
7. USB cable: Does matter, a little. This one floors me and I have no explanation for it. When I replaced the short USB cable that came with my DAC with a cheap, off-the-shelf 10 foot USB cable, all of the weaknesses of CD sound--sterile, clinical, emotionally uninvolving reproduction--reappeared. Oddly, I have tried two high-end USB cables from AudioQuest and Kimber and niether sounds as good as the ordinary looking cable that came with the DAC.

Part Three: My Latest Journey

As I mentioned at the outset, I have recently discovered an absurdly cost effective way to get audiophile quality sound. I was so pleased with what I heard because not only did the music provide extremely high resolution, but it reminded me of the way music sounded back in the analog days. There was something about it that was just more enjoyable. It was emotionally involving, unfatiguing sound that regularly inspired toe-tapping immersion in a way that standard CD music has not done for me in years. I have no technical explanation for this. Perhaps, it is a reduction in jitter that asynchronous USB provides. Perhaps it is the direct digital playback a computer provides, compared to a laser reading digital data off of the rapidly spinning disc. I just don't know.

Based on this experience with my $647 package, I convinced myself that more was better. I went searching for an upgrade (the eternal audiophile quest). After a lot of research, I decided on the $400 PM-3 Oppo headphones and the $600 Schiit Bifrost Multibit DAC. The PM-3s arrived first, so I plugged them into the Asgard 2 in eager anticipation. I was shocked. They sounded worse--in fact, considerably worse--than the PSBs. I had been hoodwinked by the audiophile press yet again. They exhibited less detail, a flabbier bass, reduced clarity, and a seemingly rolled off top end. The difference wasn't subtle. For a good review that reaches the same conclusion from someone whose judgment I trust (mostly because he often just simply says "I can't hear any difference"), see this comparison. Needless to say, I was very disappointed.

The next day the Schiit Bifrost arrived. Again, I plugged it in with eager anticipation. This time, the result was different. I didn't hear much difference at all. At first, I thought that the Bifrost sounded the same as the D1, but after painstakingly going back-and-forth between the two with music with which I am very familiar I ultimately decided that I preferred the Audioengine D1. The problem with the Schiit DAC was that the sound lost a slight amount of you-are-there-in-the-same-room realism. The $169 Audioengine just sounded more vivid and lifelike. Don't get me wrong. Unlike the headphone comparison, this difference was fairly subtle, bit it was definitely there. There are some practical advantages to the Audioengine as well. In addition to being less than 1/3 the price, it is much smaller and truly portable since it draws its power from the USB connection. More importantly, it has its own volume control. The Schiit pretty much has to be used with an external headphone amp because it has no volume control.

My conclusions? First, you should definitely audition a headphone before buying one. It will have by far the biggest effect on the overall sound, and, just like speakers, the differences between headphones can be large. I would be surprised if there were another set of headphones in the sub-$1000 category that sound better than the PSBs, but obviously I haven't heard them all. The improvements made by an external DAC and headphone amp are real but not dramatic. Get a good set of cans and you are 80% of the way there. The PSBs sound better than they have a right to plugged directly into the computer's sound card. Fortunately, you can get really good DACs and amps for a surprisingly small cost. I am sure that there are other combinations that sound great, but I can personally vouch for the Audioengine D1/Asgard 2 combo.

Edit: I thought that perhaps I heard something this evening and so I began a lengthy test to determine if, indeed, there was an audible difference between CD sound and MP3@256k. After much back-and-forth with several recordings I have decided that there is. There is a lack of energy and presence in the high-end with MP3 that I do not hear with the CD original. The difference is subtle and requires a very good sound system to appreciate, but it is definitely there.

This means that I am going to have to go back and rip all of my music again and save it in FLAC format. In comparing FLAC to the original uncompressed WAV I could not hear any difference. This makes sense in so far as FLAC is a lossless format.

The problem with this is that the difference is small and without blind A/B testing I can never be sure that the placebo effect is not coloring my perceptions. So the bottom line is that FLAC is the recommended format. I say this because even if it is no better than high bitrate MP3 it certainly isn't worse and it is only hard disc space. Thus, it probably helps and certainly cannot hurt.

If you already have an audiophile quality main system (speakers, pre amp, and power amp) then you can use use laptop as the front end for this. You don't need headphones. Of course, this removes the affordability of the system, but it improves the sound compared to a CD player front end.

Bill Clinton was Right: ObamaCare in its Current Form is a Crazy System

During the recent presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was quoted as saying that the current healthcare system in the country (ObamaCare) is a "crazy system." He took a lot of heat for this, but when you see his full quote, what he actually said makes a lot of sense.

 

I was reminded of this so-called gaffe today when a proposed GOP plan for replacing ObamaCare leaked. A key feature of this plan is that instead of means-tested subsidies, the plan uses refundable tax credits that rise with age, not income. Here's a graphic that lays out the benefits.


As you can see, if you are in a low income bracket, especially if you are older with low income, you do MUCH better on ObamaCare. However, at the same time if you are in a higher income bracket ($60,000 and above) ObamaCare is not such a great deal for you. You make just enough money to make you ineligible for subsidies.

This illustrates the problem with ObamaCare. It is basically a benefit program for those with lower income. People who are moderately comfortable--but far from rich--are screwed in this system, especially if you are older. For people like this (I am one of them), the proposed GOP plan is vastly preferable. In my own case, the cheapest plan on our local exchange would have cost me $650 a month and included a $4500 deductible. I viewed this as little more than catastrophic coverage. Under the GOP plan, assuming that nothing else would change, I would pay only $300 a month for the same plan.

This is a persistent problem with Democratic policy proposals. The party consistently criticizes vast levels of income inequality and special breaks for the rich. I strongly agree with this. However, when it comes time for actual policy proposals the party tends to pass legislation that targets benefits towards the poor at the expense of the middle class. If you are rich, then you can afford to pay more, but if you are only moderately successful, then you cannot. What is rich? This is not easy to define, but I would say that at a minimum you cannot be "rich" unless your annual income is in the top 1%, which nationally averages about $465,000 in income annually.

This is an urgent problem that the party must fix. Clinton's idea of a Medicare buy-in for the middle class sounds like a great idea. If Hillary had promoted this idea, then maybe. . . .

An Unhealthy Trend at the Oscars

No, I am not referring to the embarrassing flub last Sunday night when the Price Waterhouse accountants handed Warren Beatty the wrong envelope for Best Picture, and La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner.

There is a long-term trend in which the film that wins Best Picture has become less and less a film that many people have actually seen. Consider the numbers. In constant 2017 dollars in the 40 years between 1959 and 1999 the average domestic box office gross for the Best Picture winner was $342 million. Yet, in the 16 years between 2000 and 2016 the average was $139 million. More disturbingly, in the last 7 years from 2009-2016 the average was $67 million, less than 20% of the 1959-1999 average.

Some might herald this trend as evidence of the Academy placing a focus on pure artistic achievement above popular success. I disagree. I think that this trend is unhealthy for the film business in general and certainly toxic for the Academy Awards specifically. Fewer and fewer people watch the award ceremony on television. This year's show attracted only 34 million viewers in the U.S. As recently as 1998, the show drew 55 million viewers--a year when the country's population was 40 million smaller. To the extent that the audience begins to view the Academy Awards as a salon of artists recognizing rarefied and exotic tastes, the ceremony--and by extension the film business in general--will lose its status as an important component of American cultural life. For example, I found the winner of the 2014 Academy Awards, Birdman, nearly unwatchable. The box office receipts of that film suggests that a lot of others felt the same way. In 6 of the last 8 years, the Best Picture winner has earned less than $50 million.

Interestingly, this phenomenon is not entirely due to the Academy recognizing only art house critical favorites. Although Birdman (2014), The Artist (2011), and this year's winner Moonlight (2016) could all be fairly described in this way, the other two films in the sub-$50 million club, The Hurt Locker (2009) and Spotlight (2016) were certainly not art house films. The Hurt Locker is a more or less mainstream war film and Spotlight is a conventional procedural. I suspect that these films suffered from poor marketing campaigns, or, in the case of The Hurt Locker, an reluctance of audiences to go to a film about the Iraq War, which was still an open wound for many in the country.

I certainly don't want to see the Oscars turned into a mere popularity contest along the lines of The People's Choice Awards. But I would like to see Oscar voters at least taking into consideration the cultural impact a film has on the society, while keeping in mind that a film can't have a cultural impact if very few people in the culture are exposed to it.

Michael Wolff and Donald Trump

Michael Wolff, columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, recently sat down for an interview on CNN's media criticism show, Reliable Sources. It infuriated me.

Wolff begins by observing that the media "keeps losing to Trump." By what metric is this loss measured? Certainly not by popular opinion. Trump is the least popular new president since the advent of modern polling. The only metric I can think of to justify this statement is the extent to which Trump supporters have abandoned him in the face of media criticism. One of very few profoundly true statements that Trump has made in his brief political career is that "I could stand in the middle of 5th avenue and shoot someone and wouldn't lose any voters." Rhetorically exuberant perhaps, but it captures a real phenomenon. About 30% of the country's voters who constitute Trump's base are extremely loyal and seemingly unmovable in the face of negative information about their great leader. This has been true from the very beginning. It is difficult to see how the media is responsible for this. If anything, the media is responsible for Trump's incredibly high negatives. Even many who voted for him had a negative view of him.

Wolff said that when the media fact checks Trump, it helps him. Again, helps him with whom? Surely only with the aforementioned 'Go-ahead-and-shoot-someone-and-see-if-I-care' demographic. Again, this is hardly the media's fault. What is Wolff suggesting here? Is he suggesting that when Trump makes statements that are demonstrably false that the media should just ignore the statement and move on?

Wolff rejects David Remnick’s claim that the Trump administration poses an "emergency" for the media, other than the personal pique that members of the media find themselves in. Wolff displays what is surely willful ignorance regarding the nearly constant stream of falsehoods that come from Trump and those charged with representing him. One hardly needs to itemize these. It has been done by others many times. Trump's willingness to repeatedly make statements that are directly contradicted by easily checked evidence is unprecedented at the presidential level. Perhaps this is source of the feeling by some in the media that we are in a very different “emergency”environment that requires a different set of journalistic standards.

Wolff doesn’t know what "going easy on them [the Trump administration] means in this case". He merely plays the role of a fact finder, discovering "What do you think? What do you believe. Tell me."

The problem with this is two-fold. First, if all the media need do is serve as a vehicle of transmission for what politicians believe, then they are not acting as journalists. A journalist's job requires the ability to provide analysis of, context for, and fact checking of what those in power say. This has ALWAYS been the case. This job description has not been changed for Donald J. Trump. The only difference now is that the sheer volume of falsehoods emanating from Trump and his spokespersons requires the media to spend much more time than they are accustomed playing the role of truth referee. When Trump claims that he saw a video of thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey over 9/11, it is the media's job to say "No, you didn't, because no such video exists, because nothing like this occurred.” When Trump asserts that “You can’t believe what my people in Africa are finding” about Obama’s real birthplace, it is the media’s job to inform people that this is a racist lie. That’s not name-calling, it is a factual description.

The second problem with Wolff’s impoverished description of what the media ought to be doing regarding Trump is that it simply isn’t necessary. Trump and the seemingly ubiquitous Kellyanne Conway are not shy about telling the public what Trump believes and what he wants to do. In fact, the only mystery about Trump’s plans (which can often appear to change from day-to-day depending on whom he’s talking to) is how will he square the populism on which he ran with the Wall Street friendly, tax cuts for wealthy agenda that his administration at least initially seems to want to pursue. However, Wolff would presumably resist reporting even on this point as to do so would involve a implied criticism of his subject, which he seems to have ruled out in advance.

Wolff’s final comments border on the incoherent. When asked if he thought the Trump administration was unusual, his reply is that “all new presidencies are unusual”, which, as far as I can tell is an incredibly convoluted way of saying that the Trump administration is NOT unusual because it is like all the others.

My Day Trip into Right-Wing Media

I read a lot of news online. Sometimes the stories come from aggregation pages, such as the Yahoo or Google News pages. One day in September I saw a World News Daily headline on Yahoo news that I foolishly clicked on. The headline said something along the lines that only 5% of the money donated to the Clinton Foundation actually went for charitable causes.

I knew that this was false. It was a right-wing zombie myth that had been debunked numerous times but simply refused to die. After reading the predictably unhinged and fact-challenged article, I decided to post in the comment section. Since this was  a conservative site, I got a lot of negative response, but I persevered and responded. One of my critics ended his response (twice) with the cryptic remark "How is David?" I am deep enough into the weeds of the culture wars to know what he meant. He was referring to David Brock, the founder of Media Matters, a web site dedicated to the defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the unmasking of what it sees as a right-wing conspiracy to destroy their political standing.

The first time this poster offered this statement, I ignored it. The second time he did it, I decided to end my post in a way that I thought would annoy him. I wrote "David says Hello."

All along I assumed that this was just some random right-winger who was trying to get under my skin. It turns out that it was more than that. After my "David Says Hello" post, I discovered that I had been banned from the site which would no longer accept any of my posts. Whomever this guy was, he was clearly tasked with challenging those comments that offered a reasonably articulate defense of anything resembling liberalism and getting them booted off the comments section lest it be polluted with non-conforming ideas. He apparently took my "David says Hello" comment literally, seeming to believe that I was some semi-official representative of Media Matters. Or, maybe he just didn't like what I had to say. In any case, I was out of there solely for offering a political opinion they didn't like.

The paranoia, pettiness, and propagandistic aspects of this were stunning, and yet I fear that it represents a large slice of the conservative media world. The idea that someone from a not-very-well-known political web site would spend time banning people from posting in the Comments section because they failed to repeat the party line is deeply weird. Comments sections are generally moderated, but usually to prevent people from being abusive, using profanity, or soliciting business. Not in Rightwingistan. The rules there are different.

A Cure for Cancer?

60 Minutes aired a double-episode tonight on what appears to be a breakthrough in cancer treatment that involves using the polio virus to trigger the body's natural immune response into attacking cancer. The results of the Phase I trial have been stunning.

The episode was full of caveats, but it is hard to watch this without thinking that a corner has been turned in the fight against cancer. For me, the most exciting part of the therapy is that it appears to be indiscriminate in the the type of cancer it attacks. We have often been told that cancer is not one disease, but a range of different diseases. This makes developing effective therapies extremely difficult. However, ALL cancers apparently have at least one characteristic in common: they all have the ability to trick the immune system into reacting to the tumor as though it were normal tissue. The polio therapy removes that protective sheath and exposes the cancer to the relentless attacks by the body's own immune system. In fact, the only major problem researchers have thus far run into is that, while attempting to determine the proper dose, they discovered that doses too large resulted in an immune response so powerful that it did more harm than good.

I wonder if 60 Minutes is aware of the response this report is likely to stimulate. My guess is that CBS News and Duke University (who is running the study) are going to deluged with requests from desperate patients demanding this new therapy.

The Music of the Aquarian Age

This afternoon I went to a local bar with my father as I generally do on Saturday afternoons. As we were sipping our beer I couldn't help but notice the music being piped in. Among the titles I heard were,

Come Together: The Beatles (1969)
Who'll Stop the Rain?: Credence Clearwater Revival (1970)
Jumpin' Jack Flash: The Rolling Stones (1968)
Brown Eyed Girl: Van Morrison (1967)
Stairway to Heaven: Led Zepplin (1971)

This music is 45 years old--45 years!--and we are still listening to it. And it is not just us--and by "us" I mean we Baby Boomers, children of the Age of Aquarius. Young people are listening to it as well. I find this subject endlessly fascinating. I have written about it here before. I can personally guarantee that when I was a tween-ager I was not listening to music from the 1920s and 1930s. Oh, there was a brief period during which Scott Joplin' various rags, popularized by the film The Sting, were in the vogue, but that was an aberration. What is it about the music of my generation that has held the fascination of subsequent generations like no other in the 20th century?

I was so filled with curiosity about this mystery that I asked the 27-year-old bartender about it. First, he said that this was the music he listened to when he was growing up because his parents were listening to it. I pointed out that when I was growing up the last thing I wanted to do was listen to the music my parents were listening to. Then the bartender said that young people were attracted to this music, commenting that a lot of kids liked The Beatles. (He amusingly referred to this music as "classical." In my day "classical" meant Mozart and Beethoven. Apparently, now it means memorable popular music from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s.) I pointed out that this begged the question as to why contemporary kids are attracted to The Beatles in way I never was in my childhood to Glenn Miller or Peggy Lee. Finally, he simply insisted that this music--the music of MY generation, and not his--was simply good, and further that, with a sadly small number of exceptions, the music one hears on the radio today more or less sucks.

I expect to live another 20 years or so, and on my death bed I will be pleased to learn that  Applebees is playing The Moody Blues and Janis Joplin.I used to think that the Chuck Berry song Roll Over Beethoven was just a whimsical play on words born from childlike belief in the importance of one's own generation. Now I am not so sure.. . . Roll Over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news, indeed!

The Case against Elizabeth Warren

Let me start by pointing out that I think Elizabeth Warren is great. I agree with virtually everything I have heard her say. I also appreciate her forthrightness and clarity, features that elected politicians often don't have. In this way, she is more like Bill Clinton than Hillary Clinton.

Late last week Warren made an epic speech on the Senate floor pleading with her colleagues to vote against the budget bill that was needed to keep the government operating. Her opposition was based on the fact that it contained a provision slipped in at the last moment that would partially repeal one aspect of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that passed in response to the financial meltdown of 2008. If you missed the speech, you should take a moment to watch it. It is awe-inspiring.

 

To be sure, the provision in question is a noxious piece of legislation. It was literally written by Citibank lobbyists and would have repealed the part of Dodd-Franks that forbade financial institutions from investing in risky derivatives using depositor's FDIC-insured money. The intent of the provision was to make it less likely that financial institutions could ask the government (and taxpayers) to bail them out if their own high-risk investment strategies went sour. They could make these investments if they wanted to, but just not with FDIC-insured money. It seems like a sound principle and a commonsensical one as well.

Although I agree with her assessment of the provision in question, I nonetheless disagree with her plea to reject budget deal. Why? There are several reasons.

1. Not everyone who is on what I think of as our side of the argument agrees with Warren. For example, no less than Paul Volcker has said that the provision's main problem is symbolic. It will have little real effect on the banks. His reasoning is that he believes that another part of Dodd-Frank, the part that is commonly referred to as the "Volcker rule" would prevent the kind of systematic risk that Warren warns of. Also, Paul Krugman reminds us that the most damaging behavior that led up to the 2008 crisis did not come from FDIC insured banks, but from bank-like entities, such as Countrywide, AIG, and Lehman Brothers.
2. If the provision, obnoxious as it is, does not in fact pose the threat to the economy that Warren seems to believe it does, then simply on a cost/benefit analysis shutting down the government to fix this is simply not worth it. 
3. If the budget deal is not agreed-to now, it will be brought up again in the next Congress when the GOP will have even more votes. What comes from that is likely to be much worse from a Democratic point of view. 

Thus, my beef with Warren is not really on policy grounds so much as it is on the politics. It is just possible that, having won control of the Senate, the GOP now feels some incentive to actually start caring about governing the country rather than simply trying to blow it up through obstruction as a political maneuver to gain power. In this new frame of mind, perhaps we can get back to normal political deal-making in which each party gets part of what they want, rather than on insisting upon everything or nothing, which is one of the most damaging characteristics of the Tea-Party Republicans.

Gone Girl: I Don't Get It

Spoiler Alert: Don't read this unless you have already read the book Gone Girl or seen the movie adaptation, or plan never to expose yourself to either.

I have been hearing about this book for a couple of years. Friends and members of my family read it and mostly loved it. The advance reviews of the David Fincher film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike were almost universally positive. The only thing I knew about the story was that it concerned a man suspected of killing his wife and that the story contained a great plot twist.

Now having seen the film, I have to say that I just don't get it. Let's start with the big twist. I am not particularly good at seeing elaborately disguised plot twists in advance. I don't know, maybe I am just gullible. The big reveals in Sleuth, The Crying Game, and The Sixth Sense, to name but three examples, left hairs standing up on the back of my neck I was so surprised and exhilarated.

By way of comparison I saw the plot twist in Gone Girl coming a mile away. I wasn't the least bit surprised when the big reveal occurred. Why? I can think of several reasons. First, Amy was portrayed as friendless, loathed by Nick's down-to-earth sister Margo, and as very intelligent, but somewhat manipulative and who loved to play elaborate games.

Second, Ben Affleck's Nick just didn't seem particularly menacing. I had no trouble believing that he would screw an undergrad. The fact that the undergrad was the gorgeously sexy Emily Ratajkowski--the topless, prancing star of last summer's Blurred Lines video--made it even more believable. Affleck was easy to see as a cad, but not as a murderer.

Finally, and most importantly, the big plot twist was, frankly, not very clever. The person who fakes their own death to serve some ulterior purpose is a shopworn literary device almost to the point of cliché. It has been used over and over going back at least as far as Agatha Christie's 1939 novel And Then There Were None. More recent uses of this trope in film can be found in You Only Live Twice (1967), The Sting (1974), Body Heat (1981), The Usual Suspects (1995), and Double Jeopardy (1999). There is even an original Star Trek episode (Court Martial, 1967) in which Captain Kirk is framed for a murder by man who fakes his own death as a way of getting revenge, much like in Gone Girl.

My point is that--unlike The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense, who's surprises were both shocking and shockingly original--Gone Girl relies on a plot twist that is almost absurdly familiar.

OK, once you get past the plot twist, what's left? The best part of Gone Girl is the winking satire on the modern media's exploitation and sensationalistic approach to crime stories. One of the characters is a very thinly disguised version of Nancy Grace who bloviates on national television about case she knows very little about. This is good stuff, but it occupies only a relatively small space within the larger story. The bulk of the narrative stays with the consequences of the act of a manipulative, psychopathic femme fatale.

Been there, done that.

The History of Southern California Rock--The Byrds to the the Eagles

I ran across a quite excellent 2007 BBC documentary on YouTube entitled Hotel California: LA from The Byrds to The Eagles.

Its basic premise is that the popular music scene in LA that began with The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield and culminated with the Eagles is a story of idealism corrupted by corporate commercialism. It is also a story--though less emphasized in this piece than it should be--about how the early promise of great groups such as CSNY was squandered when cocaine and speed replaced marijuana as the drug of choice.

The 90-minute documentary is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the emergence of CSNY out of the ashes of The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and The Hollies as the first S. California super group. The second part--and the most interesting to me--is about the rise of the singer/song writer and merging of country, rock, and folk music with acts such as Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, Carol King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Linda Ronstadt. Ronstadt, a personal favorite of mine, is an exception in this group as she was never a song writer. Her talent, as the documentary points out, was surrounding herself with great song writers and performing the best version of other people's songs.

The third part focuses on the Eagles as the most commercially successful group to arise from the crucible of the Troubador and the Laurel Canyon enclave of pop music talent.

If you are interested in the subject matter I strongly recommend this documentary.

An Update on the 858,000 Conservative Viral Infection

The RAND study discussed in the previous post has now been made public.

It reports, contrary to the countless conservative web sites that claimed only 858,000 out of 7.1 million of ObamaCare exchange enrollees were previously uninsured, the actual figure is, (predictably) much, much higher. RAND estimates that as of mid-March, when there were 3.9 million exchange enrollees, 1.4 million of them were previously uninsured. When you extrapolate these numbers through of the end of March--a period in which the number of exchange enrollees exploded to 7.1 million--you get 2.5 million exchange enrollees who were previously uninsured. The represents a 36% slice of the exchange pool who are newly insured, which is 3 times the rate claimed by bogus conservative reporting of the RAND study prior to publication.

Furthermore, when you include the other areas of ObamaCare, primarily the expansion of Medicaid, the total number of newly insured from Sept. 2013-mid-March, 2014 is 9.3 million, a drop in the percent of uninsured in the country from 20.5% to 15.8%.

This is one of the clearest examples of how the conservative media can disseminate false information through a viral connection of media outlets.

Viral Information and ObamaCare

Do me a favor. Do a Google search on "RAND Corporation 858000".

You will get countless hits from conservative web sites all claiming that an "under wraps" or "hush-hush" RAND Corporation study has concluded that only 858,000 enrollees in ObamaCare were previously uninsured. These articles all use almost exactly the same language, because they are just viral repetitions of the same source.The thing is, though, none of these sites link to an actual RAND study. Presumably because it is, well, still "under wraps."

If this is true, then only about 12% of those getting insurance through the state and federal exchanges were previously uninsured.

I have a prediction to make.
1) The RAND Study will never see the light of day, either because it never existed or because it was never an official RAND study deemed worthy of public release.
or,
2) The RAND study will appear, but it will not show what this conservative viral phenomenon claims that it shows.

The claims about the mysterious RAND study seem to originate from a Daily Mail Online article that also does not provide a link to or provide any sourcing for this claim. As of now the mainstream media has ignored this story because, until an actual study is published, it is little more than rumor.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

EDIT: It appears that (2) is more likely. Apparently the study is real enough. This LA Times article claims to have seen the unpublished data and even names the study's author as Katherine Carman. The money quote from the article is this:

A February survey by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found 27% of new enrollees were previously uninsured, but newer survey data from the nonprofit Rand Corp. and reports from marketplace officials in several states suggest that share increased in March.

If the RAND study suggests that the number of previously uninsured was greater than 27% of new enrollees, then it certainly cannot claim that the number is 12% or 858,000. It is possible that the 858,000 number ignores the increase in the Medicaid participants, which was always envisioned as perhaps the most significant method for lowering the number of those left without health insurance. Until the study is finally published it is impossible to know.

EDIT 4-2-2014: The Washington Post also spoke directly to the RAND Study's author, Ms. Carmen, and they report "What percentage of the 7 million are “newly insured?” No one really knows at this point, though a reasonable, conservative estimate would be about one-third. That’s a little over 2 million people."

It is becoming increasingly evident that, as I suspected, the 858,000 (or 12% of 7.1 million) figure was bogus. Both the LA Times and the Washington Post have spoken directly with the study's author and both report that the number is higher 27% of new enrollees. The Post pegs it at about 33%, or 2.3 million.

The Passing of a Comedy Legend that many People Didn't Know

When Saturday Night Live premiered in the Fall of 1975 I immediately knew that it was something special. Having grown up enjoying the comedy of Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, and others it was clear that SNL was something entirely different, a comedy from and about my generation. It was a seminal cultural event. I would routinely stay in on Saturday nights just to watch SNL with my friends. Nearly 40 years later, SNL is now an institution, but at the time it was part of a revolution.

This article is about someone who was never on SNL and never wrote for the show, but was as much a part of the entertainment revolution that SNL represented as Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, or John Belushi. He arguably had a bigger influence on this new wave of comedy than any of these famous performers and yet most people wouldn't recognize his name.

A Chicago native, Harold Ramis began his career as an feature entertainment writer for the Chicago Daily News. Later, he worked briefly a joke writer for Playboy magazine. His first real job in comedy was as a performer and eventually head writer for SCTV, the Chicago-based sketch show that both inspired SNL and provided many of its original cast members, including John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Bill Murray.

Ramis's introduction to Hollywood came in 1978 as a screenwriter for Animal House, which starred SCTV cast mate and SNL member John Belushi. It was a huge hit and Ramis became a bankable figure for behind-the-scenes work in contemporary comedy. Ramis's connection to SNL continued with his next four films in which he served as either writer or director: Meatballs (Bill Murray), Caddyshack (Chevy Chase and Bill Murray), Stripes (Bill Murray), and National Lampoon's Vacation (Chevy Chase). The John Hughes-penned Vacation was a huge success and inspired many sequels starring Chase, though Ramis was only involved with the original.

His biggest hits came in the mid 1980s and early nineties with Ghostbusters I and II and Groundhog Day, which among his many films is the most likely to be remembered as a classic.. All of these efforts involved collaborations with either Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, or Dan Aykroyd. Other than a few small roles, he appeared in front of the camera only with Murray in Stripes and with Murray and Aykroyd in the Ghostbusters films. His primary contribution was behind the camera as a creative force.

Ramis's singular major success without SNL ties was in 1999 with Analyze This, which he directed. Analyze This and a less successful sequel starred Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. Ironically, Analyze This, a story about a mob figure (De Niro) who seeks treatment from a psychiatrist (Crystal) came out the same year as The Sopranos, which had essentially the same theme.

If I had to pick one Harold Ramis film that is not well-remembered, but offers consistent laughs it would be Multiplicity, a film he directed in 1996 starring Michael Keaton and Andie McDowell (Murray's love interest in Groundhog Day). Keaton plays multiple roles as a character who clones himself as a way of giving himself--the original--more time to pursue personal interests. It is a lot of fun and Keaton and McDowell both give great performances.

Harold Ramis died yesterday at the too-young age of 69 after a four-year battle with autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, an autoimmune disease related to lupus in which the body attacks the blood vessels, which can result in multiple organ failure.

Recently, there was some talk of a Ghostbusters III film, which Bill Murray tended to dismiss in public interviews. It certainly won't happen now.

Harold Ramis Selected Fimography

Screenwriter
SCTV (1976-1979)
Animal House (1978)
Meatballs (1979)
Stripes (1981)
Ghostbusters (1984)
Ghostbusters II (1989)

Director
National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
Multiplicity (1996)

Writer/Director
Caddyshack (1980)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Analyze This (1999)

Single Payer. . .Nah.

Ezra Klein has an exceptionally smart column today about the mistaken belief by many liberals that the problem with the U.S. health care system in general and ObamaCare in particular is that it relies on private insurance companies.

The gist is that the huge inefficiencies in our health care delivery system are caused by the providers themselves, not insurance companies. Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and, yes, physician salaries are where all our health care money is being squandered.

This is mandatory reading.

The New Right is the Old Left

When I was in graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s I developed an interest in what has become popularly known as the "political correctness" movement. I was particularly interested in that aspect of the movement that affected higher education. I read and sympathized with several books on this topic, books with titles such as "Tenured Radicals" and "The Closing of the American Mind," among others. John Searle, a great American philosopher, wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books entitled  "The Storm over the University", which I still consider to be the definitive treatment of the subject.

Because political correctness was mainly a phenomenon of the Left, at the time I was viewed by many of my colleagues as a conservative. And, insofar as my criticisms of campus PC  would have in many ways resonated with your average College Republican, it is not difficult to understand why people thought that. However, I (like Searle) was not and am not a conservative. I have always voted Democratic, I was a critic of the Vietnam War, and I loathed the Nixon administration. My objection to campus PC was that I thought that it undermined intellectual standards of excellence, especially in the humanities.

The common justification for turning classrooms into little more than opportunities for political indoctrination went something like this: there are no objective standards of excellence in the Arts and Humanities, thus educators should be free to adopt whatever standards in the classroom they believe would achieve a socially desirable goal. 

Another justification one heard had to do with the unavoidable political dimension of higher education. Searle writes:

I should say again exactly what the argument is and why it is bad. Its premise is that universities are already instruments of social transformation because the university has all sorts of political effects, some of them conservative, some even reactionary. The conclusion that is drawn from this premise is that it is therefore acceptable and desirable that we should try to make the university into an instrument of social transformation for desirable rather than undesirable ends; and as leftists we should make sure that it promotes left-wing purposes.

The premise is correct but the conclusion does not follow. The university, like all human institutions and activities has all sorts of political effects and consequences. It shares with music, sex, art, religion, physics, gastronomy, and everything else a political dimension in the sense that it can have political consequences. In each field people with different views will gain or lose followers, influence, and power and have effects on the behavior of others. But it does not follow from this, indeed it is a fallacy to conclude, that the only or primary criteria for assessment of its activities are political or that its objective should be political. Universities at their best often achieve social transformations because knowledge can transform people and institutions. But the aim should always be knowledge, not transformation.

In the 20 years since I first engaged this subject I have not changed my mind. I know from personal experience that higher education--again, especially in the humanities--is often plagued by professors with strong political beliefs who use the classroom as a platform for the expression of those beliefs. As it so happens, these beliefs are usually, though not always, of the Left. Among the 20 or so students in my graduate school class there was an actual member of communist party. At my first teaching job one of my best friends on the faculty firmly believed that the purpose of the Berlin Wall had been to keep Western invaders out of the communist utopia of East Germany. Since I left the Academy I have had no further occasion to run into folks like this.

I only mention this history as a preface to what appears to me to be a breathtaking turnaround on the part of conservatives. Many of the same people who used to bemoan the way that university professors used the classroom as an outlet for political indoctrination now routinely engage in and applaud exactly the same approach--for the Right, of course--in the media. Amazingly, they use many of the same justifications as did their leftist academic forbearers. You routinely hear conservatives point out the need for blatantly partisan and ideological outlets, such as Fox News, AM talk radio, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, a need based on the perception that the news is not objective in any case, so why not use it for a politically desirable purpose?

The latest egregious example of this lies in the Right's reaction to a widely-discussed year-long investigation by The New York Times of the attack against the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. The Times found that, contrary to repeated insistence by those on the Right, that Al Qaeda was not involved in the attack and that an inflammatory American-made video, "Innocence of Muslims", denigrating Islam was one of the main motivations for the attack.

The Times story backs up these conclusions with fairly compelling evidence. For example, the best evidence for an Al Qaeda link was an intercepted phone call from one of the attackers to a a friend with known ties to Al Qaeda. When told of the attack, the friend responded with surprise, as if this were the first he had heard of it. Second, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb sent a letter that was later obtained western media listing notable acts of terrorism perpetrated by the group in the region, but it made no mention of Benghazi at all. As for the influence of the video, The Times claimed to have a Libyan reporter on the ground the night of the attack who spoke directly to many of the principals and they specifically mentioned the video as one of the main issues motivating the assault. They believed that they were standing up for Islam.

The Right reacted to this unwelcome news just about as you would expect. Conservative members of Congress and conservative pundits denounced the Times story as false. This is really simple. If  someone says or writes something that you believe is false, and the claims made were accompanied by specific evidence, you should include along with your denunciation a rebuttal of that evidence. However, the conservative reaction to the New York Times story completely ignored the evidence presented.

Charles Krauthammer declared confidently that the story was "obviously" a political move initiated by The Times as a way to protect Hillary Clinton. Krauthammer's only evidence for this claim was his analysis of New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal's commentary on the conservative content-free denunciation of the article. Rosenthal wrote

The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. They also want to throw mud at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who they fear will run for president in 2016.

This analysis not only seems correct to me, it seems nearly self-evident. How commenting on a political reaction by conservatives to the story is conclusive proof of a political motivation for the story in the first place is spectacularly unclear. Conservatives are just like the radical professors I read about 20 years ago. Because they see politics in everything, they ascribe political motivations to virtually all public activities. Once you start to see politics everywhere in art, journalism, education, and entertainment then your analytical toolbox is limited to merely ascribing political motives and predicting political consequences. That's it. Nothing else matters.

By way of conclusion, Searle reminds us in that seminal article that

Categories like “left” and “right” have a useful place in politics and journalism and even a marginal place in scholarship. But where serious intellectual work is concerned they tend to be the enemies of thought. If one begins an argument with the idea that one is “speaking as a leftist” (or “rightist” or “liberal” etc.) one is unlikely to produce anything that rises above the mediocre intellectual level of the categories themselves.

I suppose that this is what bothers me the most about this phenomenon. It debases and trivializes our public discourse. Really smart people find themselves with little to say beyond expounding silly conspiracy theories and soap box proselytizing.

60 Minutes has a Problem

I love 60 Minutes. The show is a national treasure. It also happens to be extremely popular. It is routinely among the ten most-watched shows on television. That is an astounding fact considering that 60 Minutes is basically an investigative news show. Admittedly, it often includes light, entertainment stories as well, but its bread and butter is hard news.

Last week's story on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has caused quite an uproar. The focus of the controversy is that the show's primary source seems to have told a very different story to the FBI. 60 Minutes is now reviewing its reporting.

What I find frustrating about this is that the veracity of the witness, Greg Hicks, is not to my mind especially important. His story added some detail and color to the events, but did not change the basic narrative of what occurred. The really big problem with the report lies elsewhere, and it has gotten very little attention. The report ended with a lament, pained speculation about why military assets were not deployed to protect the U.S. forces on the ground.

LOGAN (VOICEOVER): [T]he lingering question is why no larger military response ever crossed the border into Libya -- something Greg Hicks realized wasn't going to happen just an hour into the attack.

LOGAN: You have this conversation with the defense attaché. You ask him what military assets are on their way. And he says--

HICKS: Effectively, they're not. And I -- for a moment, I just felt lost. I just couldn't believe the answer. And then I made the call to the annex chief, and I told him, "Listen, you've got to tell those guys there may not be any help coming."

LOGAN: That's a tough thing to understand. Why?

HICKS: It just is. We--for us, for the people that go out-- onto the edge, to represent our country, we believe that if we get in trouble, they're coming to get us. That our back is covered. To hear that it's not, it's a terrible, terrible experience.

When I watched the show Sunday I was appalled. The issue of the lack of military response to the events in Benghazi has been repeatedly and exhaustively addressed by top military officials. It simply is not possible that 60 Minutes was unaware of this. This means that the show intentionally left out crucial information from their report in order to--one can only assume--make the events seem more controversial than they were. This is pretty much the functional definition of sensationalst journalism, something I thought that 60 Minutes was above.

The liberal media website Media Matters has covered this fairly well, but the mainstream press has largely ignored this part of the story.

My guess is that 60 Minutes will end up retracting or substantially altering its story because of the apparent unreliability of its main witness. It may even issue an apology. My fear is that it will not acknowledge its failure to fully report on the issue of the military response, which is the bigger problem with the story.

This reminds me of the mini-scandal discussed here over Bob Woodward's book on John Belushi, in which a highly-respected journalist shaves the facts just enough to add to the story's dramatic impact. It isn't lying exactly, but rather putting selective emphasis--spin if you like--on a story to make it seem more dramatic or controversial than it actually is. Hollywood does this all of the time when making docudramas. Argo is an excellent example of this. The extremely tense and dramatic airport escape is basically a complete fabrication. In contrast, Zero Dark Thirty sticks much closer to the historical facts while telling its story. Its only really flaw is that it portrays as routine harsh interrogation practices that were controversial inside the government even at the time they were being used.

I expected more from 60 Minutes.

My ObamaCare Experience

I have been trying for the last 3 weeks to enroll in health insurance via the healthcare.gov web site with no luck. Tonight I succeeded!

What I found is that the web site worked fine using Internet Explorer, but did not work for me using Firefox. Once I switched to IE, the process was smooth and painless. I signed up for a Coventry plan and paid the first month's premium in about 15 minutes.

My only disappointment is that the coverage is a little more expensive than I had hoped. When I left my job in Maryland I maintained my health insurance through COBRA for 18 months. The cost was $500 a month. I was hoping to get private health insurance for no more than this. However, the cost of a Gold plan, which pays 80% of costs with a $2100 maximum annual out-of-pocket expense is $515.36 a month. I could have gotten a Silver plan that covered 70% of costs with a $3200 maximum out-of-pocket expense for about $450 a month, but for now I am going to go with the Gold plan.

Since I am self-employed, health insurance costs are tax deductible, so my actual expense will be closer to $350 a month.

I am out of step and now I know why

I have been puzzled of late over why I have been so out of step with current technology. I have always considered myself something of a techie, so why am I so hopelessly behind the times?

By "current technology" I mean Twitter and Facebook on the software side and tablets and smart phones on the hardware side. I read an article in Slate about Microsoft's latest tablet entry that helps to explain this. The money quote:

There’s just one problem with Microsoft pitching its new tablets at people who prefer to use their tablets for work rather than play: Those people barely exist. . . a Gartner survey found that tablet owners use their devices overwhelmingly for entertainment, followed by social media, e-mail, and other types of communication. Just 15 percent of tablet screen time is devoted to work. That makes sense when you consider that nearly everyone who owns a tablet also owns a different device that is far-better suited to doing work, whether desktop, laptop, or both. The tablet is where they go to get away from that work.

I don't use Twitter and Facebook, because other than their amazing ability to rapidly metastasize information, they are generally used to express day-to-day events and other mundane activities. I am just not interested in sharing this stuff with, well, anyone. I guess that I don't think that my life is that interesting. The overwhelming majority of us have lives that are not that interesting. I don't use tablets or smart phones because they are generally used for watching videos, listening to music, reading and posting to Twitter, texting, reading and posting to Facebook, and e-mail. I use my laptop for e-mail and videos. I don't much listen to music anymore, and oh, as I already pointed out I don't have much use for Facebook or Twitter.

I use my laptop for web browsing, e-mail, videos, and work. When I am working I am often in Microsoft Excel. You need a big screen and a decent keyboard to do work in Excel. Anyone who tries to do serious spreadsheet work on a smart phone or a tablet is very weird or a masochist or both

Of course, the great advantage of tablets and smart phones is their portability. If I regularly flew on airplanes this might appeal to me. As it is, I bring my laptop with me on all trips and set it up at the hotel in which I am staying, (they all have high-speed Internet). I watch with amazement when people--mostly young people--emerge from the movie theater and immediately open their phones to check messages as they are walking out to the car. Jeez, what is the rush? You can't wait to get home to check your e-mail? I check my e-mail 10 to 20 times a day. Do I really need to check it 100 times a day? There is a fine but clearly distinguishable line between diligence and obsession.

At least I think I get Facebook. If it were better designed and if I were more social, then I would probably use it regularly. Twitter, on the other hand, is completely inexplicable to me. Jonathan Chait, someone whose work and opinion I greatly admire, tried to explain the value of Twitter. He writes:

I started with a distrust/misunderstanding of Twitter, but quickly found it to be a super-efficient system for filtering out the crap I don’t want to wade through on the Internet and delivering the stuff I want to read, written or recommended by my favorite writers, to me. I also like to use it to trade quips. I’ve quickly grown addicted to it. I’ve seen enough writers go through the process — hate Twitter, get reluctantly dragooned on to it, discover you can’t live without it — that I attribute basically all hatred of Twitter to a lack of familiarity.

Of course it is possible that I simply lack the familiarity that Chait has about this medium for posting a maximum of 140-character comments, but I don't really think so. BTW that last sentence contained 141 characters, which gives you an indication of how truly in-depth twitter posts can be. I think that the problem just might be that Chait doesn't understand how to use his web browser.

If there are people whose writing you really like reading (Chait mentions Ezra Klein), then the web browser has a way of tracking just them and ignoring the rest of the Internet. It is called bookmarks (or Favorites in the IE world). I have bookmarks that take me to Chait's blog, Paul Krugman's blog, and, yes, Ezra Klein's blog, among others. These blogs are not limited in length, and thus these writers have an opportunity to develop their thoughts in depth. Furthermore, if any of the posts on my regularly visited pages recommend the work of others that I have not bookmarked, these recommendations are usually accompanied by a hypertext link to the relevant article. So, other than the additional activity of "trading quips", which frankly sounds suspiciously to me like famous people patting each other on the back for being famous, I don't really understand what else Twitter brings to the table.

Interestingly, both Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman have commented on this. Both use Twitter merely as a means to push links to their respective blogs to followers. It is the blogs that are worth reading, and not the Tweets. However, those followers could just have easily bookmarked Klein's and Krugman's blog, as I have done. They don't need to get a Tweet with a link. This is deeply weird.

The bottom line is that although I don't think that my life is that interesting, I am just egotistical enough to believe that I do have interesting things to say from time to time, which explains why I have a blog and don't bother with 140-character quips and observations.