Who Cares about Idiocracy?

For a large part of my life, I've carried around a few books and one notebook full of short stories clipped from a variety of magazines. One of those short stories is "Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth. The movie Idiocracy was ripped from the pages of "Marching Morons" and dumbed-down into something a pack of marching Hollywood morons could comprehend. Still, the basic premise--the dumb keep breeding like rabbits while the best minds of our species take a pass on reproduction--held together for the first 1/4 of Idiocracy. The conclusion of the movie was that the incredibly stupid would figure out how to feed themselves. The conclusion of "Marching Morons" was that the microscopic percentage of remaining intellects would find a way to jettison the stupid. Either scenario is depressing and unrealistic.

This morning, it struck me that the problem is a non-starter; unless you are under the delusion that humanity is somehow precious to the universe. Let's take it as a given that humanity will never brighten up enough to stop killing itself. Most likely we face a terrible future, regardless of what a few pitiful humans do to try and avert it. Humans will doing stupid destructive things, keep electing greedy idiots who will aggravate every problem, the incredibly corrupt will keep inventing crazy religions (ie. capitalism, communism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) that distract the foolish and waste valuable resources, and the dumbest will out reproduce the intelligent in exponentially greater numbers.

The sad part of this hurtle to oblivion is that some good people will most likely go down with the overwhelming majority of idiots. The upside, which came to me this morning, is that the number of intelligent humans on the planet will be declining exponentially over the next couple of generations and that minimizes the tragedy. In fact, after watching a few moments of Faux News, I'm sort of looking forward to an end to the species. Between the Teabagger Ladies and corporate scumbags, my tolerance for my own fauna has fallen to a new low.

Creating Power, Creating Community

My wife and I attended an event at a small St. Paul Library last night. This was an old Carnegie library building in one of the older parts of the city, so it's one of the many libraries on the Ramsey Country Library Board's chopping block. This old library reminded me of the primary purpose of public libraries; creating communities.

This local library has been, obviously, starved for resources, but it still keeps attracting neighbors and serving the local community. In fact, the only way to stop a library like this from being used is to close its doors.

This community-building value is a purpose that modern politicians have either forgotten or one that they oppose. It's hard to tell which. For example, our local library politicians are creating a monolith of a library that will be a monument to government excess and community consolidation. When it's finished, the new Roseville Library will suck resources from every other Ramsey County Library until the library board begins to close those small libraries to make room in the budget for the one-and-only-library the country will be able to afford to keep open. Ramsey County is following the incompetent example of Minneapolis, because that's what mismanagement does. One mistake deserves another.

All of this is a good thing for the overpaid, underworked, completely useless bureaucrats who mismanage the country's resources. A giant building means giant management salaries, which means larger salaries for the politicians who mismanage the bureaucrats, which means higher taxes, which means a more stressed, less connected community, which continues the cycle of abuse and incompetence.

As in the business world, the word "leadership" has lost all meaning in government. Conservative characters like Pawlenty gabber about "responsible government" while building monuments to bureaucratic incompetence as fast as they can borrow the money to do so. Their only concern is packing the pockets of their supporters and themselves, while doing as much damage to communities as possible. The weaker, the less informed, the less educated the voters are, the easier they are to mislead. Shredding the value of public libraries to local communities is just part of this tactic.

In a few years, when the United States becomes a minor world power, broke and stagnate and paralyzed by incompetence and politics, the rest of the world will study how we came to such a low state and wonder how anyone could have not anticipated this future. The route from superpower to disaster zone is one of history's most repeated stories. Here we go again.

Tea Party Mental Failure

The real problem with right wing movements like the Tea Baggers is pretty simple. Many of us sympathize with the complaints about our country's taxation, immigration, and healthcare policies. Many Americans think government has become too large, too incompetent, too invasive, and too unresponsive to be useful to working class citizens. Those are core issues for a majority of citizens.

The problem with the Tea Baggers is that they believe complicated issues can be comprehended, managed, and solved by simple-minded people. It's hard to imagine a problem simple enough for the capacities of characters like Palin, Bachmann, Limbaugh, Beck, and the Faux News doofuses. Stupid people can not solve complicated problems. That's it. There is no issue involving a country of 300 million people or a planet with 6 billion souls that a bonehead like Glenn Beck could resolve. Sarah Palin was incapable of managing a state that has a population that wouldn't fill a decent sized lower-48 city. Not only couldn't she manage that simple state, she didn't have the mental capacity, durability, or courage to stay on the job for one full term.

Like the history of banana republic revolutions, simple people desperately want simple problems. They will always be disappointed. Human history is crowded with the story of cultures looking to idiots and nutcases for solutions and the disappointment that always follows. From Julius Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler to Mao to Idi Amin to G.W. Bush, one moronic nutcase after another has drug his country down the toilet bowl of stupid fantasies.

After 8 years of brain-dead, corrupt Republican foolishness, the appeal of Obama was that the man isn't stupid. That's it. The country was desperate for a leader with an IQ greater than the number of fingers and toes he could count on. The entire Bush Administration couldn't put together as much mental capacity as the Obama family brings to the breakfast table, let alone enough synapse connections to solve simple three variable word problems. After experiencing the usual Republican "Rule by Fool" it was way past time to give up on the desperate hope that idiots might stumble upon a miracle cure for complex problems.

That is consistently the wingnut problem. Smart people don't hang out with stupid people and that leaves Republicans and the Tea Baggers with slim candidate pickings. The fact that conservatives are incapable of humor sadly describes the mental state of wingnuts in general. Not only is "conservative comedy" an oxymoron, but so is "brilliant conservative movie," "conservative think tank," and "Sarah Palin's great idea."

The allergy wingnuts have for "intellectual elites" and "college boys" is a fatal flaw. Economic elites are obvious enemies of the working class: multi-million dollar CEOs, trust fund brats, Wall Street bankers, and that ilk. Grouping economic elites with intellectual elites is so dumb that it ought to be an obvious mistake even to the uneducated. It, apparently, isn’t. “Elite” has a couple of meanings: “1) the socially superior part of society" and 2) "the best of a class.” If we chose “humanity” as the class we are speaking of, selecting “the best” of our species to make complicated decisions is only logical. The “socially superior” elites (of which Bush, Cheney, and most of that clan were perfect representatives) have almost nothing of value to contribute. They are the inbred hillbilly children of robber baron heritage and they represent the most conservative position in society: rich people who want to hang on to their wealth and power at any cost. One type of elite is expert at solving problems the other is only skilled at resisting change. Change is going to happen. Pretending the world is static is conservative and stupid.

Elites of intelligence come from a variety of backgrounds; there are PhD fools and high school dropout geniuses and everything in-between. The common ground smart people occupy is a low tolerance for fools, so it's often tough to entice them into politics. It's really hard to con them into having out with a group of non-stop idiots. As the nation's problems become more obvious and more difficult to solve, the Tea Baggers will, hopefully, become less relevant. However, in this idiocracy they may get a chance to make an even bigger mess of our complicated problems before the majority comes to its senses.

If the majority has any sense left.

The Tea Baggers are in a good position to restart our political system, but they are too well-populated with the same idiots who have created this mess. Somehow, the country needs to create a similar movement, but stock it with intelligent citizens who might offer up intelligent solutions and leadership.

Personally, I think the country needs to return to the system that picked George Washington as the first President. We need to draft the best people, even against their will if necessary. Politics is the kind of job that attracts the wrong people. Anyone who wants the job should be avoided at all costs. For the most part, the people who could best run the country would be happier doing practically anything else. For one, they’d have to hang out with politicians and their supporters and lobbyists. Anybody with a lick of sense would flee the country rather than put up with an hour suffering that crowd.

#198 Our Immigration Anti-Policy

The MSM talking head goofballs are shrieking about an Afghan terrorist cell discovered in Colorado. We're all supposed to be upset about the fact that a collection of Islamic refugees from a conservative loony bin have turned out to be crazy enough to be building bombs and planning mass murder in American cities. If that surprises you, you are exactly the 8-year-old intellectual capacity market the MSM caters to.

The rest of us should be asking, "Why are we still importing Afghan immigrants?"

We're at war with Afghanistan. We didn't import German immigrants during WWI or WWII. We didn't go out of our want to welcome Russian or East German immigrants during the Cold War. Why the hell is our dumbass government even considering immigration applications from Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Russians, Saudis, North Koreans, most of Africa, South America, or any of the places that routinely rant about "evil Americans?" It's not like we need their unemployed, unskilled, uneducated rejects. It's not like the "diversity" they bring to the United States provides the country with anything that will even support itself.

As crazy as it may seem, the United States, like practically every other country on the planet is overpopulated. While Americans have been making something of an effort to control family size, our idiot government has been making up for the "shortage" in idiots-being-born by ramping up immigration from the underclasses of the world. Bush/Cheney saw the Mexican boards swung wide open and more than 20 million illegals poured into and through our southern states during those brain-dead 8 years. If you had the feeling that the national IQ has been dropping in recent years, you might look to the Nation of Babble conditions our school systems are dealing with as the requirements for ESL classes overwhelms those facilities. You can't spend a lot of time on math and science when half of the classroom can't read or write the common language.

For an established nation, immigration should be a tool to temporarily obtain needed skills, technology, and innovation. We don't need more Section 8 "renters" or more Food Stamp consumers. There is a surplus of unprofitable shopkeepers in the inner city. Importing more minimum wage grunts than the economy can employ or moderate-skill workers intended to keep labor prices down is treasonous. We don't need to import intelligent, motivated students to compensate for the fact that our children are drawn to menial "creative" jobs because our corporations and factories are mismanaged by a pack of idiot MBAs who couldn't properly organize a dozen eggs. Like most every other country in the world, instead of exporting discontents or importing the same we need to fix our economy, education system, democracy, and political system before we arrogantly head off to build some other nation.

Yeah, I know, isolationist. I can live with that. I'd rather be isolationist than imperialist. It's hard to create vicious enemies when you are minding your own business.

Our current tax system was designed by idiots who shouldn't be allowed near sharp pencils. A rational system would be rewarding innovation, education, ecologically and economically friendly activities and making the opposite of those activities pay its own way. Our current system rewards speculators, the worst of all economic activities, and punishes innovation. Our system has been designed to protect the least useful of our giant and inefficient corporations--banking and finance--and to repress every industry that has a fighting chance at turning an honest profit.

Where our best companies get hit the hardest is in the talent they can find from our own citizens. Eight years of "No Child Left with a Mind" has decimated the talent pool and it will take at least that long to fix that mess. Fixing the education system could be financed by revising the tax system to encourage corporations to reward employees who upgrade their skills and by removing any corporate tax deductions for salaries and other perks over $100,000. Companies that attract people who are only motivated by money are only hiring mercenaries who will rape and pillage the business as quickly as they would leave for the next company that is foolish enough to hire them. The reward for that kind of stupidity ought to be a rational tax system that discourages idiot activities.

Instead of trying to fill the holes in the workforce with untrained, unskilled, and uneducated immigrants, our policy ought to be one that aims for quality not quantity, with a core desire to improve our own citizens' lives first.

Customer of Size

One of the beauties of being old and poor is political incorrectness. As I write this, Southwest Airlines is taking a load of crap for not being able to seat a moderately huge Hollywood character, Kevin Smith director of Clerks, Chasing Amy, and other X-Gen drivel. Southwest issued an "apology" after Smith whined about his poor treatment on Twitter. Finally, content that is appropriate for something as lame as Twitter and Tweeting, although most of the crap I've seen on Twitter ought to be more accurately termed Whimpering.

I have to admit I enjoy the politically correct phrase "customer of size." It's much nicer than lardass, hippobutt, ton of flab, walrus boy, tank, or any of the usual descriptions of those of us who can't turn down calories and never saw a meal we couldn't finish. But look at this guy. He's huge! He couldn't fit into a queen sized bed, let alone an airline seat.

The thing that bothers me the most about this episode is that someone as unimportant to the scheme of life generates any national attention at all. I mean, come on, Clerks? Isn't that like being the guy who stunk up the boy's shower with a really nasty fart? Sure, some people remember stupid stuff like that their whole lives, but people with lives and families and real jobs forget pointless junk like Clerks the moment the credits roll. I'm pretty sure I saw Chasing Amy, too. Probably on a thin Netflix night. It didn't make a mark, though. I have no idea what it was about, unless Amy was a runner and the movie was about all the girls behind her in some kind of race.

As for fat folks in airplanes, "discriminating" against people who actually cost more to haul into the air and across the planet is only logical. I have always thought that cars and people ought to be taxed for the resources they consume. Big, heavy cars and trucks ought to cost more to buy and license. Lardasses ought to pay more to ride in buses, trains, and airplanes.

Conversely, if you can fit into a normal airline seat without touching the person beside you, you should get a discount. If you can't, you should either pay the person next to you for the real estate you're stealing or the airline for extra territory. Why is that so hard to figure out?

People are fat because they eat too much and exercise too little. It's not an affliction, an unavoidable handicap, or a reason to be treated with special consideration. In the end, nature is going to be particularly ruthless with diabetes, heart failure, stroke, and a boatload of misery to go along with all those boatloads of gravy. This is another example of Americans taking the victim road too seriously. "Customer of size," my ass. The dude is a hippo. He might be able to cram his butt into a seat, but he'll be spilling into the seats on either side of him.

Intended Results?

Digital television has been a catastrophe. There are hundreds of websites, many sponsored by the FCC, that give lame, useless advice on how to better receive these weak, unpredictable new television signals, but nobody seems to be getting the television they once enjoyed through antenna signals. Was it intended to be a disaster or was this just another example of American mismanagement?


The question is probably unimportant at this late date, but I suspect there are going to be a number of unintended consequences. Television, in general, is sucking wind. The 18-25 year old male audience is disappearing. A bit of that market is buying into cable or satellite television, but most of the boys are playing video games, getting their tube fix over the Internet, and renting movies through Netflix or stealing them via a variety of file-sharing Internet routes. Even the Boomer viewers are considering alternative routes.

You can tell that television execs are as clueless about what to do about the mass exodus of viewers as music business execs have been about vanishing CD customers. The blooming of moronic but cheap "reality" drivel is exactly the kind of reaction you'd expect from MBAs to a phenomena that they can not possible comprehend. "When in doubt, do the dumbest thing you can't imagine. " That is the Harvard MBA mantra. When it comes to dumb, it's hard to beat "Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage," "Battle of the Bods," "Busted and Disgusted," and the rest of the crap that passes for entertainment on cable and over-the-air television. Trust me, it will only get dumber. By the time the MBAs are finished, the only people cable of being entertained by the crap that will be showing on television will be the same morons who voted for G.W. Bush twice. I realize that is a fair portion of the US population, but it's a very poor and unemployable portion. You can't attract high-end advertisers when all of your viewers are on welfare.

Back to the digital television clusterFox.

The unintended consequence of screwing up over-the-air television could be way worse than the television executives imagine. Netfllix is probably counting on it. To fill all that cable space, cable companies are jamming the airwaves with space filler which is driving even more viewers away from their tubes to video games, on-line movie channels, and any other source of entertainment that gives them control of the message. We're getting our news from a host of non-traditional sources, our entertainment from even more places, and this is just the beginning. Leading users of media are probably the place to look for where entertainment and news are going in the very near future.

All those digital glitches are driving change a little faster than a competent move to high definition television would have inspired.

Five Scumbags Do It Again

Five low-life, activist, corporate shills shrouded in black dresses have done their best to destroy the little that is left of democracy in the United States. These Republican-appointed scumbags have decided that corporations don't have enough say in who gets elected by owning the right wing media and most of Washington. Now, that collection of superstitious, ignorant, corrupt pinheads who control the majority of the Supreme Court have decided that corporations and unions can spend all they want buying votes and representatives.

1 Justice Anthony Kennedy - Republican President Ronald Reagan
2 Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. - Republican President George W. Bush
3. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. - Republican President George W. Bush
4. Justice Antonin Scalia - Republican President Ronald Reagan
5. Justice Clarence Thomas - Republican President George H. W. Bush

The five Republican z0mbies wrote, ""The First Amendment protects more than just the individual on a soapbox and the lonely pamphleteer." If it protected individuals and pamphleteers at all that would be a triumph. "The government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether." By "altogether," these illiterate, corporate communist morons mean "in any meaningful way."

The four outnumbered dissenters, represented by Justice John Paul Stevens, called this idi0t decision a "radical change" in the law and noted that "the court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation." As if Republicans and integrity can ever be included in the same sentence without a disclaimer or negative.

I looks like we're in for a long, painful, lawless period until a couple of those scumbags retires, is exposed to sunlight, or strokes out. Since the good die young and evil seems to be eternal, it's safe to assume Thomas, Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy will live forever.

Only A Game

It's that time of the year, again. The time when the Minnesota Vikings are making a pass at the NFL playoffs and when their management and local politicians and our completely useless media are campaigning for $750 million of taxpayers' cash.

At the beginning of the season, I was slightly sucked in because I sort of like Brett Farve. I like him because he's an old guy still competing in an young guy's game. I like him because he says what's on his mind in a sports world full of clichés and boilerplate sports jabber. Farve is more interesting than the whole pack of sports writing talking heads and our local columnists. However, leveraging my fondness for this old guy's tenacity into making me pay for a stadium for a near-worthless corporate entity that is part of a monopoly pack of gangsters is an unlikely sell.

Sports fans are idiots. Because we can be fooled into identifying with guys who have no more in common with us than our relationship to superheroes, we can be fooled into thinking we have something to do with these mutants' successes. Our shouting at the television screen or screaming in the stadium has nothing to do with their abilities. If these guys were playing on an abandoned field in outback Alaska, they'd still be competitive, beyond normal abilities, and they'd be finding a way to make more money in obscurity than the rest of us make anywhere we apply our meager skills.

Nothing any athlete can do can overcome the desperate need every city has for a superior education system, modern transportation, efficient and affordable energy, and a profitable business sector. Pro sports does practically nothing for the business sector. Pro sports take funding directly from education, transportation, and research. Pro sports decimate everything important in a city and leaves the city with massive debt, undevelopable property, and a lower urban and state IQ.

The best thing a struggling economy can do is to abandon any public support to unnecessary distractions. Pro sports are several steps below unnecessary. Sorry, Brett. I’d love to see you go out on top, but I’d rather you did it in Green Bay or any other city than Minneapolis. We can’t afford your success.

Seriously? Someone is surprised at this?

"It's like having 26 kids that I have to watch after . . . Who's smoking hashish around here?" This YouTube video is an interesting insight into how the war in Afghanistan is going for the men and women on the ground. While Congress and the President pontificate about "winning," the people responsible for "building the Afghanistan army" are wrestling with a corrupt local government and derelict material with which to build a puppet army that will hold up long enough for Obama to escape with some pretense of "winning" Bush's war against the Taliban.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2F80llZ5F4

Empire-building is frustrating work. When the people who want to liberate their country are all on the other side, what you get work with is pretty poor material. We have been here in the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, and we're there in Afghanistan. The "advisers" in Vietnam made the same kind of comments about "training" the ARVN.

"They've recruited the wrong kind of men. They're all stupid and ignorant. These young men are a bunch of delinquents." Big surprise. What sort of men did the British manage to recruit to fight against American revolutionaries? Benedict Arnold, for one. Even the British didn't think much of the Tories they had to repatriate after losing that war. In the US, our record of honoring the Vietnamese who served our side has been less than stellar.

You don't win civil wars, especially by foreign intervention. Hell, we can't honestly claim to have won our own Civil War, since a substantial portion of the southeast consistent elects representatives (and Presidents) who fight against the ideals of this nation and who support only 1 of 27 2nd amendment) of the Bill of Rights. Further, their only reason for supporting the 2nd amendment is that they still have dreams of resurrecting their lost secession by taking arms against the United States government. If we can't create democracy, promote civil rights, protect working people from abuse by international corporations, or protect civilians from invasion and terrorism by foreign terrorists, how do we plan to create that kind of democracy in the places where racial hatred, religious superstition, and inequality is ingrained in the culture?

How Do You Win?

My neighbor has a sign in his yard, "Support our troops. Let them win." I see that sign every day and everyday I wonder what it means.

How do you know when you've won a war against insurgents? Who would offer the surrender of thousands of independent groups, hundreds of thousands of pissed off, homeless, jobless, religious fanatics? Who would rightfully be able to hand over the domain to their own country to an invading force? What would a win in the ridiculous and pompous “War on Terror” look like?

In Vietnam, I often heard old farts and returning vets claim that the way to win that war was to bomb the Vietnamese into oblivion, to "nuke 'em" until there was nothing left alive in that country. Since we, supposedly joined that war to protect the Vietnamese from other Vietnamese, that "win" never made much sense to me. You win when everyone is dead? You win when no one opposes your invasion of their country? Really? People really believe that you can win this kind of military action?

Since this war supposedly began when New York was attacked by a group of Saudi Arabian Islamic fundamentalists who hijacked a quartet of airliners and used them as bombs, I'm particularly curious as to how war can be fought against people who will kill themselves for the honor of killing us. In particular, I’m curious as to how we defeat Saudi militants by attacking every country except Saudi Arabia?

Every time one of our $10.5 million Predator drone's missiles strikes a village in Afghanistan, we kill a few people and turn a few more people into someone who has nothing to lose. With every military or Blackwater attack on civilians in Iraq, hundreds of Iraqi youth lost family and security and set themselves to wreak revenge on the country who hired those mercenaries. Seven years later, we have created armies of young people who have nothing but hatred for the United States. Generations later, this hatred will continue to fester. People with nothing to lose are tough to defeat, as the British discovered in its wars against “insurgents” from United States, India, Africa, and the Middle East. Rome took a shot at overcoming insurgents and, for a long while seemed to have the formula, until insurgents on both sides of the gates took down the empire. The old Soviet Union, at one time, believed itself to be the only successful modern empire, silencing dissent and propping up incompetent local governments, until it ran out of money and energy. Afghanistan had a lot to do with the end of the Soviet Union.

The United States has been creating enemies and battling insurgents since the turn of the last century, in the Philippines, in Panama, in Korea, in Vietnam, and, now, all over the Muslim world. For that matter, we’ll send troops any place that has a natural resource that our corporate masters want to incorporate. That policy has made enemies for the country all over the world. The reckless and ignorant Bush administration accelerated and expanded our enemy-making to new heights, so we have decades of surprise suicide attacks stored for our future.

Maybe worse, we are creating another generation of injured American men and women who will perpetrate the illusion that their wars could have been won if they’d have been allowed to carry out total war. Like the psychological damage done to the victims of our imperialist wars, the damage done to our own citizens tends to make it easier for us to keep trying to win these unwinnable wars. They want revenge, we want vindication.

It may be true that no enemy will ever be as clear and present as were the enemies of “the great wars.” Germany and the Axis powers made a pretty obvious target, even if they were supplied by Standard Oil and financed by Preston Bush’s Union Banking Corp. Withstanding the US and world banking interests that profited and encouraged WWI and WWII, our enemies mostly wore enemy uniforms, used weapons of their own manufacturer, and were based in their countries of origin. Today’s wars are fought by enemies wearing Levi’s and Nike’s, with weapons supplied by US weapon makers, and with techniques often learned in our own training camps.

As with McVeigh and Terry Nichols, some of our own soldiers bring those wars back to us, creating a completely different sort of terrorist with whom to wage this war. If the corporations and our government fights that war, we will all be insurgents. How will we define "winning" then?

Corporate Welfare

Robert Reich supposedly invented the term "corporate welfare," back when he was Secretary of Labor in the first Clinton Administration. He started a firestorm of CEO whimpering and whining that somehow convinced Clinton to get his nuts clipped and back off of any sort of meaningful reform for the next 8 years. Bush, of course, was the world's greatest supporter of corporate welfare, having been the recipient of millions in handouts as an "oil man" and a part-owner of the Texas Rangers MLB team.

It remains to be seen where Obama stands on corporate handouts, but early signs are not good. His administration has treated the bankers and investment speculators as if they were valuable contributors to society. He's protected GM and Chrysler from the results of decades of lousy management and a half-century of embarrassing engineering. Of course, the bankers threatened the country's economic stability and Republicans and the right wing media wouldn't have tolerated treating them any differently. The car manufacturers hold the keys to hundreds of thousands of jobs and the country has no other middle class worker industry with which to replace it. It's possible that there were no good choices either with the banks or Detroit.

Locally, we're arguing about the most despicable of all forms of corporate welfare; publicly financed sports stadiums. In 1990, the state gave the NBA joke team, the Timberpuppies, the new $120 million Target Center. In 2000, St. Paul and the state handed the NHL and the Wild a welfare check for $120 million with the Xcel Center. Minneapolis smoke-filled-room-crooks robbed the city's taxpayers for the Twins' new $400 million stadium last year and the bill for that boondoggle will haunt taxpayers for thirty years.

Because too many middle class kids could almost afford the state's University of Minnesota system, our worthless state government (under Pawlenty) stuck taxpayers and students with a $300 million football stadium, higher tuition costs, higher state taxes, and an opportunity to become a 1st tier football school and a 3rd grade educational organization. The nation's football colleges are notorious for being party schools with a plethora of "communications majors" and MBAs and the associated worthless contribution those degree holders make to society.

Now, the Vikings have their paws out and their deadbeat "fans" want the rest of us to cough up a half billion during a time when the state is running a $1.2 billion deficit and has cut back education, state and city services, and taxpayers are suffering the worst employment crisis since the 1930's. While the state's head crooks are pretending that they care about the plight of the working class in these hard times, there is no question where this is going. The NBA holds LA out as the threat against any city or state that pretends to a conservative fiscal policy. Minnesota is just another place in the land of sports wimps. It's gonna happen, it's just a matter of when.

The fact is, pro and college sports do not contribute anything meaningful to a city's economy. Usually, they do the reverse. A few politically connected development crooks scrape off some taxpayer money, some politicians get closed door handouts in exchange for votes, the team gets a free ride, and the nation's IQ continues to drop through the floor. The rest of the city and state cough up welfare for both the team and the fans who refuse to pay ticket prices that will support the extravagant lifestyle the pros expect. In the meantime, our education system continues to decline from lack of attention and funding. Our economy stagnates while the rich Romans watch the gladiators as the city burns. Bridges collapse, working people lose their jobs and homes, businesses move from the area as the quality of life degenerates, and, eventually, we'll be a cold Omaha; except that Omaha has a much more robust economy without the deadbeat overhead of a half-dozen pro sports teams.

Cures and Capitalism

There are two absolute reasons for fixing this country's incompetent, inefficient, and unfair medical system: cures and capitalism.

The first is the most important. Modern medicine, as practiced in this country, is about treatment not cure. The entire economic focus of our system is all about keeping patients in the system as long as possible, or until their money and insurance runs out. The last thing a hospital wants is to eject a patient from the facility with cash still untapped. As the current system becomes more stressed and over-committed to this amoral philosophy it is becoming more mercenary and greedy. The end result is that more prospective patients are wary of allowing themselves to be hospitalized for any condition, allowing treatable disease to become untreatable and creating less faith in the medical system.

Doctors, of course, have much of this to blame on themselves. Instead of showing themselves capable of healing themselves, they have demonstrated almost no capacity for self-regulation. Back at that 1950's turning point in US medical history when physicians chose to exchange being trusted, honored citizens for being rich citizens, practitioners of US-style medicine put themselves on the path to becoming poorly regarded and distrusted by much of society. Suppliers of medical devices and drugs have blazed that trail so well that it is paved and polished. Nobody but a complete fool would trust anything said by a drug company CEO about any subject more complicated than bribing a Republican Senator. Their smarmy ads are loaded with misinformation, make-believe illnesses, and the only honest information is contained in the long, scary list of side effects.

The medical system is close to a critical point in history. Genetic engineering is almost capable of absolutely curing many disabling and fatal diseases. Medical device and drug companies have vested interests in subverting these cures while society has exactly the opposite desire. For years, drug dealers have been in opposition to the best interests of society, where we are now presents a dramatic ramp-up in that conflict. At best, drug companies will pervert absolute cures into temporary respite, requiring regular treatment instead of a one-time application. More likely, the drug dealers will just repress genetic research to avoid having to deal with the possibility of cures. So, when science is nearly able to do away with disease, the medical system will prevent that from happening.

The second reason for fixing this mess is economic. The US economic system is as uninventive, unimaginative, and uninspired as it has been since the Great Depression. Our products are inferior and rarely designed or manufactured in the US. Our colleges are overstocked with business, social science, liberal arts, and basket-weaving students and professors and our engineering and science departments are staffed and attended by foreign students. The future is being manned by young people who "just want a good job," not by inventors or creative entrepreneurs. Universities are cranking out people who can manipulate investors, the tax system, and superstitions, but the people who might invent the next energy source, modernize our transportation system, or solve the major problems of the future aren't there.

Worse, much of the nation's great innovators have come from the working class and those people are desperately hanging on to crappy Home Depot jobs just for the insurance benefits. That goes not only for the inventors and grass-roots entrepreneurs but for the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, auto repair technicians, and the rest of the support talent that every technical society depends upon. Nobody can afford to start a business today, unless they are deluded enough to imagine themselves and their families immune to accident or disease. 60% of US bankruptcies are due to medical expenses and many of those families were insured under our current corrupt and incompetent system before discovering how useless that overpriced insurance can be.

The best way to get America back to work is to get the medical catastrophe off of the backs of American workers. When creative, innovative people believe they can take a chance on an idea without risking the lives and security of their families, the economy will find the road to recovery. As long as Washington is more interested in protecting the interests of drug dealers and insurance hucksters, we're all screwed.

Our Crazy Teabag Lady Is at It Again

Nutty Michele is scaring kids all over the country, again. With that withering death's head grin, the look that makes serial killers nervous all over the world, Bachman planted her crazy face on Faux News and in a leadership position at the head of a protest march of angry call-center employees and mid-level insurance executives and a few oddly anti-public-option Medicare recipients.

Exhibiting her usual ability to see the world in a distorted perspective, she touted her crowd of 10,000 to be at least 40,000. I wonder if her quadruple vision is politically motivated, since she regularly managed to under-count Bush-era anti war protestors and still can’t manage the numbers for pro-public-option voters?

From the words of our local Loony Lady, in front of the US House of Representatives, “The American people overwhelmingly reject the government takeover of our health care. Last Friday a couple from Hawaii decided the time was so short they needed to get on a plane, come to Washington, to beg their representative to vote no — from Hawaii. What sacrifices freedom-loving Americans are making to get their government’s attention. And how big our government has gotten.

“They brought me this beautiful, precious lei and I’m reminded that the one who created this lei also created our freedom. Are we so insensible to the high cost our forbearers paid to purchase our freedom? Tonight, would we foolishly bargain those freedoms away? The American people, our forbearers, generations yet unborn are crying out to us tonight, for us to preserve their freedoms. Vote no on the government takeover of health care?”

Aaaahhh, what? Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson made leis? Or did her mythical Hawaiians happen to be employed by one of those real Hawaiian patriots, HMAA (Hawaii Management Alliance Association), HMSA (Hawaii Medical Service Association), Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Summerlin Life & Health Insurance Company, United Healthcare Insurance Company, or UHA (University Health Alliance)? Pretty likely since Crazy Lady is the 21st biggest recipient (of 435 House members) of swag from the insurance industry. The health care providers aren’t nearly as impressed with her, since she is 230th on their list of graft-takers.

One of Nutty Lady’s biggest promotions is the plot to stuff Intelligent Design (sorry, Brad) into the science programs of public schools. If she really wants to do that cause some good, she should put some serious distance between Intelligent Design discussions and herself. She is one-woman evidence that that Designer wasn’t particularly intelligent. Any reasonably competent engineer would have tossed her into the factory seconds pile and stuck an alternative label on her so nobody would confuse her with the quality brand.

(Note to myself: I'm waffling between Faux News and a new one I discovered while Googling the Minnesota Nutty Lady, "ClusterFox.")

Academic Idiocy

Ok, I know this is a redundant rant title. At least 90% of all college degrees are idiotic. Just look at the degree listings from any any religious, liberal arts, or business school. You’d think Comedy Central invented some of these "programs." Jon Steward did find a lot of humor in both the UC ad and the job description.

Academia likes to pretend that getting a degree isn't about employment, especially when many college graduates career-peak at Starbucks. However, University of California Santa Cruz just hit the Braindead Lottery on several counts with their ad for a Greatful Dead archivist. I realize that these are desperate times for people with degrees in alphabetizing useless stuff, but a new standard in petty uselessness has been set with the goals for this position:

"The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning."

Now, I could be wrong about this (but I'm not), I bet you could get at least two over-degree-credentialed central California stoners for the advertised salary of $50-60,000. You could probably clean out the management staff of several Starbucks for that price. Regardless of the silly-assed goals for collecting the "works" of a pack of stoned, atonal bozos who managed to attract an even bigger collection of idle stoners who were desperate to spend mommy's money for 25 years, the credential requirement for the dude or dudette who will be packing up bongs, spent and bend needles, miles of badly recorded analog recordings, and thousands of dope-messaging t-shirts and storing them in the academically approved cardboard boxes where no one will ever want to see them again are amazing. You need a master’s degree to be able to use the alphabet? Man, talking about dumbing down the education system!

If there was ever justification for suing your alma mater for providing a trivial education at non-trivial prices, this sort of nonsense would be high on the list. By the way, good luck to Trina Cherisse Thompson in your suit against the Monroe College Office of Career Advancement. It's about time someone sued a college for academic nonsense. Like those fools who paid $750k for a prefab 3-bedroom in Riverside, the long welfare cue of folks silly enough to pay $70,000 for a bachelors (or more) in Information Technology or any number of business-related or the opposite purpose (Hi, all you liberal arts kids!) degrees is long overdue in our courts. If you can sue McDonalds for selling you hot coffee without requiring a sippy cup for the retarded (who are in the driver's seat in the drive-thru), you ought to be able to sue for any dumb thing a human will spend money for. I want my money back for my pet rock. I’ve had it for 20 years and it still can’t do a single pet trick, except “sit!”

The long list of pointless academic exercises that are passed off as being worthy of 2-to-8 years of adult study is amazing, you have to admit. However, getting back to UCSC's most idiotic waste of California's vanishing and over-stressed taxpayer dollars, even the most dedicated lover of academic trivia has to admit that this job is a stretch. Visit a trip to any library and do your best to find anyone there doing a job more complicated than every job at Wal-Mart. Now that I think of it, why isn’t Wal-Mart experience on that list of required experience for the UCSC job?

Taking Sides

Every once in a while, a wingnut confronts me for my opinions of poor government management. "It seems incongruent that you are critical of the policies of a style of governance that you apparently are strongly in favor of," goes the argument. This "analysis came from a comment I made about the Faux News' bias and stupidity that led into an article about how foolish it is for a city to paper its streets with parking meters and, then, whine about the lack of business downtown. I don't see the inconsistency. Money is the source of both corruptions and idiocies. Corporations are the source of the money. I'm bitching about the same problem showing its face in more than one place.

You can't get a political office in the US unless you have corporate money behind you. The overwhelming majority news comes from conservative corporate sources and most Americans get their information from these low-brow, biased, corrupt sources. Corporations are, by design, psychopathic and short-sighted. They don't care if they kill themselves as long as the parasites within are rich when the host dies. Who is surprised when an executive turns out to be a Madoff, Petters, Lay, Skilling, Fastow, Ebbers, Sullivan, or any of the other mobsters who wore suits and took up valuable space in corporate offices? Anyone who's worked in a Fortune 500 corporation knows that scum floats to the top of most corporate structures. It's not a surprise that some of these douchebags get caught, it's the result of contaminated government that most of the nation's CE?'s aren't in jail. Corporate crooks aren't the exception, they are the rule.

As for the flaws of government, Soviet Russia and both China's demonstrated how corrupt government can get. Like corporations, their fatal flaw was arrogance. Like corporations, that fatal flaw didn't show itself quickly enough to cause the biggest criminals much pain. Societies move glacially. You can get away with a lot in one human lifetime, if you create a big enough crime. Steal a loaf of bread three times and you're in jail for life. Steal an entire nation's wealth and you get a federal bailout and pat-on-the-hand regulations and a boatload of sympathy from Faux News and parades by the Teabaggers. Seriously, go figure.

If you're a mindless freemarketer I suppose you can imagine and anticipate a world government by corporations. Piles of refuse hidden away from the rich and heaped over the working class and poor. (They deserve it, right? They are poor.) Rivers streaming with floating garbage and saturated with chemicals, but there will still be bottled water and special reservoirs to supply the rich. Mountains cut flat for their minerals. Oil fields left as poisoned fields of contaminates for future generations (if there are any) to deal with. An enforced separation of infinitely rich owners and desperately poor slaves with no civil rights or hope for the second class citizens. A justice system (like our current Supreme Court) that enforces the worst traits of humans and human organizations and represses community and individual rights for the advantage of the rich and powerful. No invention, no creativity (the idle rich don’t have the inclination, ability, energy, or time for innovation), no future, and no hope for anyone who doesn’t already possess power and wealth. Sounds like the worst of communism, to me. Which is why I can’t tell the difference between a corporatocracy and any other totalitarian state.

The only state or world I have any hope for is a democratic one. Any system, including corporations, that are not democratic are useless and corrupt. That’s where I stand. That’s where I’ll live.

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” Horace Walpole

The idea that a corporation could, in any way, be less corrupt, more competent, more responsive, more valueable to society than a democratic government is insane and completely out of touch with reality.

Make It Less Boring

Way back when my kids were young, our family would spend the occasional evening playing Monopoly; the board game, not the computer version. Some evenings, we'd play for a couple of hours. As the girls got older, the games got shorter. The reason they got shorter was that it became obvious how boring the game really was and we wanted to get it over with sooner. The way to make Monopoly go fast is to treat it like real business. You take shortcuts. When one of your competitors gets into trouble, you buy their property cheap. You plot strategies to do the most damage possible to your competitors, in this case my kids and wife. If you are lucky, ruthless, and reasonably clever, you can "win" pretty quickly. The point of winning being, the game ends and the boredom ends with it. Don't get me wrong, I loved spending time with my family, it was the Monopoly I hated.

It struck me that this might be the core problem with modern business (and government). In my experience, the closer you get to the top of American corporations, the more uninteresting the people become. I've been stuck in meetings with C's, vp's, directors, and the like and there wasn't a one of them that you'd want to invite to a party. Unless you expected your daughter to grow up to be a useless, dependent bimbo, you wouldn't want any of them dating your daughter. The only kind of sport you could imagine them playing would be the kind of activity that crippled old men suffer: golf, bowling, bridge, riding Harleys, and tossing dice in an alley.

So, with that as a background fact, maybe the solution to resolving the lack of ability, integrity, and intelligence in the nation's board rooms is to get rid of the boredom. The key to livening up business (and government) is to eject the boring people. The problem is, most Americans are timid, conservative people who freak-out when their dull little worlds are challenged. So, this is purely a theoretical exercise because we are clearly a dying culture with no more hope of rejuvenating ourselves than a body with a severed head.

Imagine, if you can, business, political, and cultural systems designed to remove the boredom from work, politics, and life. For starters, the corporate system has proven, repeatedly, to provide no useful value to society. It attracts mobsters to the top management levels, it produces useless trinkets that quickly turn into giant trash piles, it endangers the environment and the future of the nation. The existence of corporations, as they currently exist, restricts freedom and democracy. Worst of all, corporations are the ultimate conservative organization, far more so than even government, so they are coward-breeding facilities. If you want to bust boredom, you have to get past cowardice.

Minnesota tried a government experiment at busting boredom in 1999. We didn’t like it. Jesse Ventura shook up the state bureaucracy, rattled the cages of the vested powers, challenged our braindead media, and got more done in 4 years than the previous half-dozen Republicrat governors had managed. Like any good leader and intelligent citizen, he got out after 4 years and went back to living his life. The state followed Ventura with Pawlenty, a likeable, attractive, incompetent, hopelessly useless, and boring hack politician. He’s one of the douchebags the Republicans are hoping to pawn off on the nation in the next Presidential election. If you thought national politics are idiotic today, wait till you elect Polluty to national office. The nation’s IQ will drop as quickly as it did in 2000.

There are small pockets of communities and small businesses that work to remove boredom and boring people from everyday processes. If anything from this country survives into the next century, it will be their legacy. Everything else is doomed to fail and deserves that fate.

Fairness and Democracy

Once upon a time in the United States of America, news reporters worried about lying in print or on the media. The reason they worried about lying was because they might get caught and exposed on their own territory. How they would be exposed was through a convention the country had devised called "the Fairness Doctrine." The Museum of Broadcast Communications describes the Fairness Doctrine as "an attempt to ensure that all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair. The FCC took the view, in 1949, that station licensees were "public trustees," and as such had an obligation to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of contrasting points of view on controversial issues of public importance. The Commission later held that stations were also obligated to actively seek out issues of importance to their community and air programming that addressed those issues."

Reagan took offense to everything that resembled competent government or democratic regulation and the Fairness Doctrine was one of the first pieces of government that the senile bastard and his band of gangsters started disassembling when they slithered into office in 1980. That and deregulating the FCC's ownership rules are the basis for the coating that provided Reagan's "Teflon Presidency." Reagan bribed the media with overwhelming control of the nation's information sources and they rewarded him with near-universal approval for every idiotic thing he did. Reagan is responsible for the harebrained drivel spewing from Faux News and wingnut radio. The new generation of media "personalities" consider themselves neocons, but they are nothing more than ignorant liars with a corporate agenda. There is nothing "new" about being conservative and corporate spokespersons have been around since the beginning of that incompetent institution.

Democracy can not exist without information. Even more important, the information has to resemble the truth. The only way to obtain the truth is to the only way to do that is to make all of the information available to as many people as possible. If there is a single public information source that is allowed to lie about every important issue without responsibility or ethics (yeah, I'm talking about you Faux News), the system has a cancer that will destroy the nation.

The older I get, the less I care about economic systems. I do not believe that the USSR died because it was a communist country. I do not believe the USA was so successful for our first 200 years because were were a capitalist country. I believe the strength of a nation is directly tied to its dedication to democracy, as Webster's describes it " a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections." I'm pretty happy with Webster's secondary definitions, too: "the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority" and "the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges." Anything that weakens democratic rule, the strength and the ability of the "common people" to act competently as the "source of political authority" is the enemy of democracy and my enemy.

The FCC Administrator, Mark Fowler, Reagan's usual sort of appointee, ruled that the Fairness Doctrine created a "chilling effect" on reporters' willingness and ability to report on controversial issues. Rephrased in honest English, that meant they were unwilling to invent "facts" and lie about controversial issues because they would be called on their lies and look as stupid as they often were; and are. In a rare act of courage and corporate independence, Congress passed a bill enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, but Reagan managed to remember to veto it before his nappy time. It came up again during Bush I and Pappy vetoed it, too.

Since then, the quality of discourse has continued to fall in the United States and the media has allowed itself to become polarized; with the overwhelming majority of news sources falling on the corporate right opposed by a few scattered and underpowered sources in the democratic center and a microscopic squeak from the the radical opposition from the left. Without a Fairness Doctrine, Faux News is allowed to say any crazy thing that comes into their tiny little heads and the closest thing to a correction we can expect comes from Comedy Central, since the MSM is solidly corporate. While I'm all for the idea that we should all switch to Jon Stewart and Steve Cobert for our daily news fix, I'd rather that the whole media provided useful information.

Congress needs to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and make it current with today's media. Any media that receives any government funding, including any publicly financed advertising or support resources, should have to live up to the standard provided by the original Fairness Doctrine: "allowing editorializing only if other points of view were aired, balancing that of the [network, newspaper, magazine, or website]." In fact, I'd go even further and force media to present alternative views of every aspect of the news. If a thing is worth knowing about, it's worth knowing everything about that thing.

In that spirit, comments on this blog are and have always been unmonitored (except for R-rated language and spam) and you can post whatever crazy opinion you have without even having the courage to identify yourself.

Polishing Reagan's Turd

A while back, a friend told me about a collection of PBS videos he'd been watching with his family: The Presidents. I haven't seen the series, yet, but according to my friend the series is particularly friendly to the man who called the Nicaraguan Contras "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." Reagan's memory, unlike his actual memory, has received a thorough polishing in the last decade. The man who began his administration by swapping weapons to Iran for hostages, who'd practically bankrupted the country with his Star Wars folly, and an administration that rivaled U.S. Grant's in corruption is, now, seen by a myopic many as some kind of "great leader."

One of the nasty features of being old is having to hear people who weren't alive when history happened (or where alive, but were too damn dumb to know what was going on) tell me what happened "way back when." For instance, the fruitballs at Motley Fool have been trying to sell me on their brilliant investment advice by screeching, "When Ronald Reagan signed his $750 billion stimulus plan in 1981, it snapped the U.S. out of a deep recession, ignited a high-tech revolution, and signaled the start of the greatest bull market in history... " And so on.

There was no "snapping" of the economy in 1981 or in any year surrounding 1981. The US Misery Index does a fine, month-by-month, non-partisan job of graphing the combined effect of the economy on US citizens and that index steadily grew in the early years of Reagan's administration and didn't begin to fall until the last year of Reagan's 2nd term. It didn't drop substantially until Clinton's 2nd term. The US's flawed and disingenuous "unemployment" statistics peaked at 9.7% in 1982 and fell back to the 6-7% territory (as it had been during Carter's term and the previous 2 Republican administrations) in 1987. It dropped all the way to 4% in Clinton's last year of office. The graph to the right (thanks to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank) demonstrates the "snapping" that went on during the Reagan years. Thanks, Ronny. You really improved our lives.

Most likely, the speculators and con artists on Wall Street made a killing during the Reagan years. After all, he handed over the keys to every S&L in the country to mobsters (like one of the Bush brothers) and they made off with billions of taxpayer dollars (~$150B). Reagan raised the public debt more than 4 1/4 times--from $700B to $3T--and joked about it. So much for the "conservative economic policy" king. The GNP, always a contested statistic, rose fairly steadily during Reagan's terms. Since the average quality of life of the working class dropped steadily during the Reagan/Bush I years, I don't know what that meant. The fact is, most of us were better off before Reagan, unless "we" were building bombs.

Joe Conason wrote in Salon.com, "However historians will assess Reagan's responsibility, the record is what it is. Gathering dust in the news archives are thousands of clippings about the gross influence peddling, bribery, fraud, illegal lobbying and sundry abuses that engulfed the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, to name a few of the most notorious cases." Dozens of Reagan appointees were prosecuted and jailed for corruption. Cheney learned his infamous "I don't recall" defense during the Iran-Contra hearings. If the President can get away with claiming senility as a defense, why can't everyone else? Now, our ex-Vice President uses that infirmity every time he's put in a position of recalling any past decision. Of course, when Cheney does remember something he's notoriously wrong, so it's probably true that Little Dick is senile and always has been.

What I remember about the Reagan years was economic terror. I was well-employed during most of those years, but I knew lots of hard-working, talented people who weren't. I knew several talented engineers who couldn't find work anywhere outside of the military-industrial complex. I knew doctors who were forced to quit their private practices and join HMOs because insurance companies squeezed them out of business. I knew lots of people, including myself, who held a couple of jobs and needed them to pay their bills. I knew people who lost a job and were out of their homes and on the street in a few weeks. Like most working class people, I lived in fear that I'd lose my job, be unable to find a replacement, and be unable to protect my family from poverty. Like my depression-era parents, I've lived in fear of being broke and on the streets for much of my life and it affected how I spent my money, where I saved it, and how much or little confidence I've had in personal security. Those twenty Republican years are the cause of that insecurity, 1972-1992, and the Bush II years amplified that insecurity. Carter didn't count for anything. Johnson-Nixon-Ford and Vietnam had bankrupted the country and Carter was in office with nothing to work with and no clue where to begin. Reagan promised a magic cure, but he was just more of the same.

The one thing I do know about Reagan is that I wouldn't invest a nickel with anyone who claimed there was a Reagan economic miracle. That is the kind of fool who is doomed to repeat the past indefinitely.

Anyone who is good for the speculators is bad for the rest of us. Anyone who is good for the military and its contractors is bad for the country. Anyone who conducts private wars, financed with drug money and siphoned tax money is bad for the world. Anyone who believes that making the world tax-free for the idle rich will "trickle down" prosperity on the working class is a fool and/or a crook. Reagan was all of these things and a lot more. I don't remember anything good about the man and his evil has lived on in the wingnuts and is doing damage to our democracy and economy every day.

Falling Down

This isn't the first time I've marveled at the arrogance of fools. It won't be the last.

In the public debate, a substantial number of "contributors" appear to be beyond proud of the fact that they are dumb as toast. People brag about having minimal education, the reading habits of a six-year-old, no technical abilities, and a fondness for a past that never was. It's as if being incapable of making a useful contribution to society has become a bragging point.

Another "value" the wingnuts appear to treasure is an independence of reality and truth. Limbaugh's claim that "thought police" got between him and his craving for an NFL franchise is pretty hilarious. Even the notoriously right wing, corporate NFL is put off by Limbaugh's racist craziness. The boy who said, "The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies." And, "They're 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?" And, "Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it." And who told an African-American caller to his show to "take that bone out of your nose and call me back." The man who called the President an "‘halfrican American" and the "affirmative action candidate" and who plays a song on his Faux News show that refers to the President as "Barack the Magic Negro" has a lot of nerve, or stupidity, in assuming that no one will remember or call him on his past statements.

Even dumber are his fans who think they can avoid being labeled "racist" for being his fans. You sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas, KKK'ers.

I think that's a problem with much of modern leadership. As we down-breed the nation into a pack of howling fools, the fools have sufficient numbers to affect/infect public policy. If the fools can find enough media spokespeople to present their case loudly and often, they infect even more fools and the pack begins to have enough mass that their fear factor pushes away anyone who isn't willing to dive into a fight for the truth. Most of the corporate media is right wing and those who aren't are infested with corporate ignorance and cowardice. Unless Obama brings back the Fairness Doctrine for all public media, the country is screwed. As long as the fools can lie about every subject without being called, on their own ground, for those lies, we might as well call this country "toast" and look toward a 3rd world future. Rush and his butt-buddies Rove, O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and the rest of the low-brow Faux News crowd are lowering the intellectual bar so far that it appears that Hannity's next "liberal" debate opponent will be a chimpanzee. I wonder what kind of handicap Hannity will require for the chimp?

The weird thing about America's dependence on dunces is that it is so counter-intuitive. You'd think pretty much anyone would look for advice from the most intelligent source they can find. You'd think that, but in America that has almost always been wrong. Adlai Stevenson was beaten twice by a notoriously inactive, ineffective, and intellectually limited Ike Eisenhower. Much of Eisenhower's appeal was that he was not an "egghead." Republicans actually bragged that their candidate wasn't as limited by intelligence and insight as the Democratic candidate. Our last three national elections were practically comedies of dichotomy. The Republican candidates, Bush, Cheney, McCain, and Palin, were so anti-intellectual that they were practically cartoon characters. Not a one of those buffoons were able to raise the level of public debate above grade school levels. That didn't do much damage to their electability. In fact, it might have been an advantage.

After 10 months of struggling out of the economic depression Bush/Cheney created, the brainless crowd are already arguing that Obama's intellect is a handicap. They are egged on in this display of ignorance by their retard Republican media cheerleaders from Faux News, but that is no excuse for listening to those idiots. In fact, there is no excuse for listening to anything Limbaugh and that band of fools says about anything. I think it's fair to consider knowing what Rush has to say about any subject as a failed IQ test.

What News?

The decline of the national news media has echoed (or led) the decline in the national intelligence. Someone once said that modern television news is a collection of "thank god that s**t didn't happen to me" events. Those were the good old days. As the national ship sinks, the news programs are busy distracting the public with brilliant exposes on what's happening in their network's reality shows, which talking head is going to be interviewed on which nighttime variety show, and the all important love lives of movie stars. The movie, "Stupidity," described the target audience of television news as a group with a third grade education. I have to ask why anyone would need three years of grade school plus kindergarten to comprehend the drivel presented on prime time network news?

In the last week, the distance between what the marching morons are being fed and what is happening grew so massively that I doubt the sanity and mental capacity of anyone able to watch more than 60 seconds of network news. Wall Street's mouthpieces aren't much better. The Wall Street Journal, the right wing rag most respected by derivititive traders and other hucksters, barely bothered to mention the fact that several of the recent short-term federal Treasury bond auctions had to be supported by the Fed. To put it simply, the US government is selling US government bonds to the US government. This means that the Chinese, the Japanese, the Arab oil governments, and the rest of the world's suckers have finally learned their lesson. They aren't interested in buying our paper, because our paper is nothing more than paper. The gross national product of the United States is devolving into worthless collections of imaginary money and the world knows it.

But we don't. NBC's news program, the only major news program running in the morning after this series of economic catastrophes, spent 10 minutes interviewing some douchebag who tried to sell his parents on Craig's list. The economy is swirling around the toilet bowl and what the nation hears about is this kind of crap?

This is an interesting look at what's left of our economy: "US is on the slippery slope to economic collapse."

I have to wonder if this is trickle down from the political idea that what people need is good news? Reagan won his elections ignoring reality and jabbering about imaginary good news and looking goofy and delusional (or, if you loved Reagan, you probably think he looked happy). CEO's around the country tell their middle managers "tell me what is right, I don't need to hear about what's wrong with this company." As if problems fix themselves and by gazing fondly upon the few things that are still working we can wish problems into self-correction mode. That's how you create a quality control system that resembles the United States Congress: clueless, incompetent, disabled, dysfunctional, and irrelevant.

If you say stupid things often, loudly, and with authority, it eventually becomes "common sense." Common sense is "common" in the sense the word means "falling below ordinary standards ." One piece of good advice I've followed in my past has been "figure out where the crowd is going and go the other way." That applies to common sense.

Capitalism and Invention

I'm facinated by a lot of the uninformed argument about health care, relative to technology. Without Medicare and Medicade, the profitibility of the major medical device companies would be so slim that they wouldn't exist in any recognizable form, but those corporations are fighting "the public option" as hard as the more obviously self-interested insurance companies.

People claim that our capitalist system "produces" innovation and it does seem that many of the more socialist countries are less inclined to develop new drugs and devices. On the other hand, we're consistently generations behind in surgical procedures and preventive therapies and our physicians often go to Europe, Japan, India, and Singapore to learn the newest surgical tactics.

Being the traditional "ugly American," I have absolutely no personal experience anywhere but here and Canada. So I'm only getting what little I know from the media and second-hand reports and experiences. Still, it seems to me that trying to work both sides of the capitalist-socialist boarder has created an expensive, sluggish, marketing-based system that works pretty poorly for the majority of citizens. The link between capitalism and technical advances doesn't seem particularly tight.

A friend and I, about 6 years ago, came up with an invention for which he inisisted on applying for a patent. I was more convinced that we should build a product, first, and worry about the legal crap later. He went ahead, with his money, and dumped a load of cash into a New York patent law firm. The patent is still in the system, but another company is making exactly our product and selling it. They aren't making much money from it, as I suspected would be the case for our production. The whole process really made me thing about how I feel about invention, innovation, and business, though.

I've had about two dozen experiences with the patent process, in and because of my career. I invented a mobile electronic scale in the 1970's. I applied for a patent with that product, about six months after a company a friend owned went into production with the product. I did not follow up on the patent and the concept, as far as I know, is public domain now. It's also obsolete and went that way about 2 years after it went into use. I made some money. My friend got his company off of the ground with the product. I learned a lot about how corporations breech individuals' patent rights. I ended up in another industry and decided to keep my weight measurement ideas to myself. I wrote many of two companies' patent applications for a decade. I worked with patent lawyers and still communicate with one them, as a friend. The more I know, the less I want to participate in that system.

An engineer who worked for me in the 1980s had a common experience in lighting design in his own business. A Chinese company started copying his product designs and he ended up getting a consultant's fee for helping them steal his design. The feel-good stories and movies about inventors ending up rich after fighting off the corporations are mostly myth or massive good luck. My friend still creates some pretty amazing lighting controllers, but he submerges them in artwork and his customers could care less how he does what he does, so he's not as likely to get ripped off. The more he learned, the less he wanted to contribute to the corporate intellectual property theft system.

Just looking at my own experience, I don't think everyone invents and creates to get rich. I do think people might stop being publically inventive to avoid being robbed by corporations. I know people who create some incredible things for their homes and hobbies who will die with those secrets rather than lose them to some corporate scumbags. The Open Source computer world is a terrific example of that "look what I did" attitude and its disconnect from the profit motive. Moore's Law appears to be in stall-mode for the last near-decade. I wonder if the legal system has an effect on that?

Energy is an area where practically anyone in any area of technology and science could find the critical breakthrough that would save us all. Energy is probably the most tied-up-in-corporate-shell-games areas of invention law. Oil companies control Washington DC. They have the lawmakers, the lawyers, and paid technology thieves lurking around every corner looking to snag every invention that relates to their profits. Anyone foolish enough to announce "I've found the solution" to any energy problem is going to be sucked into a blackhole of corporate lawyers. Anyone smart enough to find the solution is probably going to be too smart to talk about it.

The founders of this country knew that the future belongs to invention and innovation. They created a patent office in 1790, George Washington signed the amendment. The office called itself "Commissioners for the Promotion of Useful Arts" or the "Board of Arts." Today, we talk about "intellectual property" and the associated rights, but that concept ought to be renamed "property of the powerful." Instead of protecting the rights of inventors, current law protects the corporate owners of concepts that were invented decades earlier. While stifling invention, our "property of the powerful" laws make sure publishing companies retain profits from art that was created decades ago, while ensuring that current artists are screwed multiple ways before their first fan experiences the art. The "property of the powerul" laws give priority to those with the most lawyers over those with the clearest claim to invention. The overall effect is to encourage inventors to stay out of the system, to keep their ideas to themselves.

Product design, today, closely reflects this constraining of mass participation in invention. Medical devices, for example, move in baby steps. New ideas find their way into products so rarely that you'd think human creativity had dried up. A friend described aeronautical engineering as "sued out," meaning that every new idea got so entangled into patent lawsuits that the industy has agreed not to do anything new. For an industry that is so dependent on the price of oil, you'd think that agreement would be the kiss of death. It probably will be. Auto manufacturers seem to have made a similar agreement. The movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" depicts an auto industry that is so connected to oil interests that the industry sabatoged its own best ideas to keep the oil companies happy. Today, every car company is offering exactly the same solutions to alternative energy and high efficiency vehicles. That ought to be proof that invention is not a significant part of those company's culture.

How do we fix this? We probably won't. If "necessity is the mother of invention," we're most likely going to be forced to wait for necessity. As it has taken a world-wide depression to force finance to mildly reform its corrupt practices, it will probably take a world-wide energy crisis to force industry to consider reforming creative property rights. Until then, we can enjoy the incremental, baby-stepping stutter-step of progress that we've learned to expect from our existing system.

Why Teaching Sucks

In a recent conversation, my daughter made a comment about how unfair it was that teachers make $40,000 a year and "only have to work 9 months" for it. For the last decade, I've taught at a private college. For about 3 years of that decade, I had the time of my life teaching. For those 3 years, I would have agreed with her, except that I was making about $7,500 a year at the time. I was, also, working 12 months a year at two other businesses that paid the bills. I wasn't teaching for money. I sure wasn't doing it because it was easier than my previous job. I was teaching because it was fun. It was fun because I'd stumbled into a school situation where my boss was a terrific person with honorable motivations and his boss was, possibly, an even better person with amazing management skills. It was fun because I was learning as much as I was teaching, if not more. 

That's not a typical teaching position in the modern United States. It didn't last long where I worked, either. Most schools are mismanaged as badly as the worst corporations. Most teachers find themselves in systems that provide no outlets for their own education. Most teachers are as unsupported in their classrooms as a National Guard foot soldier in Afghanistan. The web is jammed with articles describing the conditions teachers work under: Top 5 Reasons Many Teachers Quit, Why are So Many Teachers Quitting after 5-7 Years?, Valid Reasons Teachers Quit, Why Teachers Quit and Why They Don’t, Why New Teachers Quit, and hundreds of other articles on this subject. 18,000 California teachers quit every year. 6%, nationally, leave the profession every year. 20% quit after 3 years. Nationally, 50% of urban teachers quit in the first 5 years of their career. Most teachers are short-timers. Our national divorce statistics look better than the teaching profession. 

If the pay is so good, the hours are so short, and teaching is one of the last jobs in the country to be "protected" by a union, why is the job so unwanted after a few years of experience? The reason is that teachers are constantly exposed to the nation's dirty laundry. From both ends of the work, teachers experience disrespect, incompetence, and disregard for their work. Students are ill-equipped to be educated. Administrators are mostly failed teachers. Society can't decide if it wants a professional education system or an amateur religious indoctrination. Government involvement swings from indifference to demanding hours of dysfunctional testing and mountains of pointless paperwork. From top-to-bottom, side-to-side, and front-to-back, teachers are surrounded by factors that would demotivate a saint.

What we're often left with is the institutional dumbing-down of the career that has paralyzed small towns and the Midwest. All of the smart kids leave for the city or better jobs as soon as they can escape and all the dumb kids stay home, reproduce, and down-breed even dumber kids. The smart kids who become teachers quickly see how screwed up the profession is and get out. The dumb kids who can't find better jobs stay in teaching, infect new teachers with their incompetence, and wait to be promoted into administration jobs where they can do even more damage.

Top all this foolishness off with the national drive for "efficiency" and you have larger classes, fewer resources in the classroom, more demands on a teacher's after-class time, fewer teachers with special skills (particularly math and science), no time for class planning, mountains of No Child Left Behind paperwork, and more needy children desperately looking for a parent substitute. Getting a day off is easier for soldiers. Having a weekend free of class planning, paper grading, or required-attendance school activities is rare. Getting support from administration is as unlikely as getting an honest answer from Little Dick Cheney. Summers are spent on a 2nd job or advanced degree pursuits or class preparation.

"Efficiency," in the US, means lower taxes for the rich. This efficiency is producing a workforce that is so incompetent that practically every 3rd world nation has better educated labor. Eventually, the rich are going to find themselves surrounded by incompetence and they won't be so rich anymore. The middle class drives everything in this country, in every country, and wreaking the education system that feeds the middle class is cultural suicide.

Any reasonably intelligent person would do anything to escape from this rat's nest of a job. And they do. That leaves the unreasonably unintelligent holding down the fort. Great jobs don't see mass evacuation from the profession. Teaching is not a great job. Try it sometime. Let's see how long you last.