This was actually ridiculously funny. Their mastery of the essence of the direction of each director was … fantastic. I especially loved the Martin Scorsese variant of Christmas…

Last week Wendy Davis wore these shoes for 13 hours to filibuster an end-run around women’s reproductive rights. Who would have known. I wonder if the minimalist dudes will chime in about how the extra padding of the shoes was the reason she needed a back-brace.

Minor rant. Texas cares so much about Women’s health that they have the highest percentage of people who have no medical insurance – about 1/3. And when the federal government tried to expand that percentage their governor refused to take part. Again, what was Lincoln thinking?

They care so much about Women’s health that they are forcing a special session of the legislature that violates all of their procedural processes just to get this law passed.

My next marathon is going to be done in these shoes.

In the 1930’s, the Nazi racial policies forced many Jews to leave Germany and head to the UK and the United States. Chief among those fugitives was a physicist named Albert Einstein.

Those refugees gave the USA a critical talent advantage at a critical juncture in world history.

Instead of the bomb being built-in Germany, it was built in the USA, and Adolf’s reign of horror ended after 12 not 1000 years.

The history of the world has been thus far, when you cause people to flee due to intolerance they go elsewhere and make the elsewhere better.

With the recent DOMA ruling, we are about to witness a similar migration of talent, and companies that hire talent away from places of intolerance.

It was delightful to read this article today. I especially loved this quote:

Bank of America is far from alone in grappling with the problem that some of its employees apparently have a powerful incentive to exit Texas that they didn’t have at the start of the week.

Texas has made hay about how corporate friendly they are, and they might be… But in a world where global talent competition is fierce, I want to be in a place where a gay man wants to live not in a place where a gay is denied the right to marry and all the rights that flow from that.

Companies will quickly realize that intolerant states are a bad place to be and will move fast.

Mark this day in history, it’s the day the intolerant south opted out of the 21st century.

And to all you folks who are looking for a place where you can get married and start a company, come to California…

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I’ve been reading a new book called Fear Itself that describes the unholy alliance between the South Progressives and Racists and the Northern Progressives that created the New Deal.

What the author can not explain but describes is how Southern Progressives and Racists who wanted to see a more robust active social order for the white man wanted to keep everyone else in their place.

Without those Southern Progressives the New Deal doesn’t happen.

At the same time their racism defined the limits of the New Deal.

An example of this is the voting process. The Federal Government wanted to create a Federal ballot for the military for state elections. The Southern states, leery of any federal involvement in their peculiar institutions (how about historians start calling them evil?) … did everything in their power to prevent the emergence of a Federal vote. Net effect during the Second World War, the men fighting the war couldn’t vote.

Which brings me to the SCOTUS decision. The only reason we don’t have a federal ballot is so that states can gerrymander outcomes to their majority preferences. And the only reason we have that is because we have states that want to preserve power for one majority at the expense of another majority. And the only reason that ever existed existed is so that the White South could guarantee that no slave would ever get a vote.

In a less elegant way, states want to preserve the right to exclude certain groups from participating in the democracy and so want control over the ballot.

What the Supreme Court did was to ask Congress to come up with new rules. The Supreme Court made the right technical decision. The problem is that the right technical decision coupled with political reality translates into less Federal oversight.

And that causes me alarm.

And all of this would be – well academic in interest – if it wasn’t for the Republican party’s desperate attempts to prevent the wrong groups from voting during the last election.

And so when I see these decisions it reminds me that the project of democracy in America is still a rough work in progress. And if we want a better America, we all have a lot of work to do.

The good news is that time is on our side if we don’t lose faith.

One of the worst pieces of shit science that was published in the last 20 years was the purported connection between autism and vaccines.

It was bad science, that lead to smart people making bad decisions that put their children’s lives at risk. Worse, it resulted in an amazing amount of money being spent to invalidate what could only be described as nonsense. And then it turns out that it was nonsense.

I, honest to God, thought it was the worst case of bad science in the service of horrible policy.

I lacked imagination.

One of the most disastrous public policy decisiosn of the past 5 years has been the decision to focus on austerity while in a depression.

Two forces were driving this.

The first force is a morality play. Some people believe that the government should not be spending other (mostly rich) people’s money. The core belief is that rich people are better at figuring out how to spend money than the government. It’s a legitimate point of view. One I used to agree with.

The second force is really bad science. There was a paper that seemed to prove the dangerous connection between debt and impoverishment. And another paper that argued that austerity could lead to growth, which in my head sounds like bloodletting to heal someone. Folks who believed in the morality play used science to argue for austerity. In spite of the fact that the experiment in austerity has failed, they continued to pursue the strategy convinced that eventually the science would prove them right.

And now guess what, the science is bad. We will have a generation of people whose lives will be destroyed based on bad science (the paper and the summary).

So which is worse? Dead children or hundreds of millions of destroyed lives? I wonder what ring of hell Dante would put both sets of buffoons in …