Games Wall Street Plays

My favorite quotes of the month are all about how "the best and the brightest" are being put upon by terrible ideas like limits on CEO salary and talk about cranking up the upper bracket income tax rate.

The best and the brightest? Maybe, it's sad to say.

It's actually possible that this country has directed its best and brightest into do-nothing mobster occupations like tax accounting, finance, MBA-style management, marketing, law, and similar unproductive manipulative skills. Many so-called "top schools" have refocused their output into accounting, law, and MBA programs, moving out of the much more capital intensive science and engineering disciplines. Americans are rarely found in the engineering and science departments of our own universities. The money is found elsewhere and that's where the hot students have gone.

The money is the only motivation for the legal crowd. Where the money isn't is in government service. Under a constant barrage of Republican and faux-Republican (Clinton's "Eisenhower Republican" administration) executive branch bureaucrats for nearly 30 years, the federal government's talent level has fallen to 1929 levels. Reagan and the Bushies stuffed the legal system with hundreds, if not thousands, of untalented neocon fruitcakes and it will take decades, if we cared to do the work, to purge that collection of morons from the judicial system. Cinton packed the regulatory agencies with pro-corporate yes-men. Dedicated talent fled civil service after Reagan made it clear that talent was the last thing he wanted in government. For the last 8 years, Bush actually actively chased down talented civil servants and tossed them out.
If the United States wants to make a comeback, we are going to have to reverse all of this foolishness. The federal government is, once again, going to have to find a way to staff itself with scientific, industrial, economic, diplomatic, legislative, and white collar criminal investigative talent. Our universities and K-12 education system is going to have to relearn how to educated itself, then its students, in disciplines that are based in science and technology, not tax-evading money laundering games. We have to figure out how to, once again, attract the best and the brightest to government service.

Wall Street is the last place we want to waste that kind of talent. As anyone who follows history knows, Reagan's "miracle of the markets" is based on the squalor of criminal behavior. Markets, when allowed to run wild, are nothing more than a collection of gangsters in suits wallowing in greed, corruption, and collusion. Mathematic's game theory has long proven that the basic capitalist theory was a misreading of human nature. Libertarian theory is so far from reality that it appears to be as reality-based as Creationism. Humans are both greedy and lazy. The greediest and laziest are often best suited to take advantage of a system that is not based on laws that regulate those tendencies. Executives are not the cream of any crop and haven't been since the first generation of any industry. Once the founders are gone, the politicians move in and sharks begin to feed on the business culture, turning it from productive to vicious. Keeping the best and brightest from finding homes on Wall Street should be a prime directive of the education system, the legal system, and the rest of us.

For now, we are stuck with a generation or two of our best and brightest who are unsuited for any productive work. The American X, Y, and Z Generations have rarely been engineers, scientists, doctors, technicians, or even schooled in any reality-based discipline. Our society and our education system has wasted 20 years of bright young talent and there will be a terrible cost to the world because of that misuse.

A solid description of the flaw in our economic and education system is presented in "The Ascent of Money," a British documentary about how money has been disconnected from reality. The introduction to this documentary demonstrates the scale at which money has outstripped reality. The fact that derivitives have valued themselves more than 10x the total assets of the world is mind-boggling. Bankers have actually invented an alternative universe of money that argues against the existence of the real world. This is not only insane, but it is an example of how poorly our education system has prepared the average person to govern himself.

Obviously, the cure is in our tax system. It should be clear that a tax system is designed to encourage or discourage activity. We tax the stuff we don't want to happen and we don't tax the stuff we want to encourage. Currently, our tax system is designed by exactly the people our culture ought to be discouraging.

There is no upside to fantastic inherited wealth, which is the reason for inheritance taxes. G.W. Bush is the posterboy for why wealth and power should not be inherited. The people who campaign actively against "the death tax" are exactly the people who benifit from the lack of a rational tax system, which would actively prevent those people from inheriting the power to launch a meaningful campaign for anything.

There is no advantage provided to businesses or the culture for excessive executive salaries; it's not like these morons could go somewhere else and make money. We should stop providing corporate tax breaks for executive income expenses.

We need alternative energy research and development. We need a working education system. We need manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology. We don't need more lawyers, tax accountants, or MBAs. The fix is to tax to death the things we don't want and to reward the activities we desperately need.

Above all, the nation needs to develop and encourage leaders. However, leadership is top-down. When the top of our corporate structure is incompetent, uneducated, and corrupt, you can expect the economic levels below them to follow. For the last 30 years, from the President to CEOs, our "leadership" has been drawn from the worst of the worst. We have to fix that. We need to find a way to discourage our best and brightest from wasting their abilities on Wall Street.

Conservative Crazy Man

You should read this article to get the whole gist of the concept: "Steele: GOP needs 'hip-hop' makeover." The article is about the new Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael S. Steele, and his plans to modernize the Republican Party. Steele wants "to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party's principles to 'urban-suburban hip-hop settings.'"

Sounds like more of that mafia gibberish about con games and dope dealing being "jus' bidness." Actually, that's probably not far from the truth. Steele is "the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and former state Republican Party chairman." Maryland, the home of Chevy Chase Bank and a variety of other credit card mobsters, isn't exactly a place you would go to find state-of-the-art anything. However, if you wanted to stage a movie about the mob, with lots of realistic and readily available stand-ins, Maryland would be a great place to visit.

Steele offered a lot of gibberish about how he was going to add bling to the Republican Party's image, but my favorite quote was, “I don't do 'cutting-edge.' That's what Democrats are doing. We're going beyond cutting-edge.” Beyond cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, current technology and into science fiction technology? Really, Mr. Steele? Republicans are going to use technology that doesn't yet exist? You clowns can't even cope with the internet, unless it's packaged in retarded apps like Flicker. The part of the backyard smear, crowd-mentality chanting is going to invent something? I don't think so. The last original idea generated by a Republican appeared in Teddy Rosevelt's Presidency and nothing even interesting has come from that crowd since.

Paying for the Best

Summing up a Washington Post editorial, Harold Meyerson asked, "Is this any way to treat our best and our brightest? The guys who shuttered our industrial base, indebted us to Communist China, hooked us on plastic and subprime mortgages, bought our politicians, eluded our regulations, wiped out our retirement plans -- and then turned to us for help when their house of debt collapsed? Damn straight it is. Bring on the pillories." This comment was in regard to the banking CEOs' whining about being pay-limited to $500k if their failed companies took the bailout corporate welfare. Meyerson's entire analysis is worth reading and I've linked it to this paragraph. "The best and the brightest" is a label often applied to insanely corrupt and incompetent elites, from Greek times to today.

For greed and arrogance, it's hard to top the characters pretending to be wounded today, though. CEOs in every industry have been providing the nation with short-term thinking and bookie quality accounting systems since Reagan and the Republicans' "Contract on America." That collection of gangsters and conmen put a hit on the nation that it will take decades, again, to repair. Most likely, though, we'll do the usual American thing and give up on the repair job about 1/4 of the way through the work.

For some whacked reason, we appear to be unable to break our connection to royalty and religion. Americans, inheritors of Washington and Jefferson's "great experiment" in democracy, seem to crave queens, kings, princes, and princesses instead of equality, justice, fairness, and rational thought. We tossed off a reasonably competent Jimmy Carter for the royally incompetent Ronny Rayguns and his band of buffoons and criminals. A dozen years of stagnant economy and regressive taxation and corporate welfare, the country was broke and headed down the trash chute. So, the royalists relented and allowed a competent poor boy, Billy Clinton and his academics, to straighten out the financial and social mess crazy Ronny had left. Eight years of competence was clearly too much to stand, though. The country hunted down one of the least literate princes of the elite and assigned him and Ronny's leftover bozos the task of wrecking the nation's financial system and downgrading the talent in our federal government to something similar to the old Soviet Union’s.

The purpose in all of this idiocy is hard to determine. Maybe there isn’t one. It’s possible that, like all failed societies, we are committing suicide because we’ve had enough of success and democracy.

Listening to the wingers babble about “creeping socialism” and the terrible sacrifices being made by “talented executives” (probably the rarest species of human on the planet) has made me suspect that we might be the most gullible voting public in history.

First, let’s examine the “talent” being sacrificed. If these executives were so talented, they wouldn’t need federal handouts to fix the problems their brilliant leadership created for their businesses. In my experience (in two Fortune 100 companies and a variety of smaller enterprises), what appears to float to the top of the bowl is rarely cream. As in academic institutions, corporate bureaucracies are mostly “led” by men and women who have avoided the blame for catastrophes and who have taken credit for successes that had nothing to do with their own activity. In other words, politicians of the worst sort.

Even the dullest Apple Kool-Aid-sipper has to be smart enough to know that Steve Jobs is as far from being a designer, engineer, and product guru as Bill Gates is from an motivational speaker. Even the dumbest car guy knows that William Clay Ford, Jr. couldn’t design, repair, market, or drive a Ford car if his life depended on it. The collection of fools and criminals that misled AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, PNC Financial, and US Bancorp couldn’t balance a check book with Quicken and a literate assistant. Many of these CEOs are not smart people, but they are clever people. AIG’s Ed Liddy, for example, couldn’t manage a hotdog stand, but he can probably sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

Obama is finding it difficult to staff his cabinet with intelligent, experienced, reasonably uncorrupted people. In our current social and economic environment, it’s hard to find anyone who has become prominent in any area who isn’t one of these sharks. We, as a nation, are so wrapped up in wanting “anointed leaders” to follow that the people who are doing leading are left behind doing the actual work while the mindless figureheads take the credit. It takes time and energy to accomplish anything. It doesn’t take much of either to take the credit. When taking the credit becomes more rewarding than doing the work, you end up with the kind of system that we are seeing crumble before our eyes.

More of the Same

The picture at right is of David Santistevan in his 5th year of incarceration in the grossly misnamed Idaho Correctional Facility. For a man looking at 40 more years in prison, he's in exceptionally good humor.

David, an old friend of mine, screwed up five years ago. We may never know how badly he screwed up, since he didn't receive anything even resembling a fair trial in the redneck, hillbilly, skin-head, KKK-worshiping state of Idaho, but he definitely screwed up. According to the joke Idaho passes off for a court system; David Santistevan committed attempted murder with a handgun. David claimed that he justifiably acted in self-defense. Where David screwed up was when he panicked and ran from the scene of the crime(s). He kept screwing up and hid the weapon after dismantling it. He's a poster child for my rule, "every panic reaction you will ever have will be wrong."

Where David screwed up was when he bought a gun for self-protection in an avowed gun-rights state with conflicting feelings about gun rights. Where David screwed up was when he decided to defend himself, western-style, instead of running away, rational-being-style, when he had the opportunity. Idaho's perverted sense of justice gets completely bent out of shape when a man of color (David is Hispanic) protects himself from white men.

If those white men happen to be "teens," even if they are six-foot, 220 pound teens, Idaho falls all over itself in vengeance. In David's case, even though the teens recovered from their injuries and were not charged with any crime, he received a 45-year attempted murder conviction from the all-white jury and court system. The court consistently refused to admit evidence that pointed to the victims' past activities which might have "prejudiced" the jury toward leniency. In the trial, a good bit of evidence was presented that demonstrated that David was so overwhelmed by fear that his response to being attacked was psychological unbalanced. The posing-for-election prosecutor called that “psychobabble” and it was obvious from the local barely-literate hick newspaper reporting that the prevailing attitude was “hang the Mexican bastard.”

I have a couple of problems with Idaho's gun laws. First, I don't believe that the 2nd Amendment was intended to arm the general public, so an individual's "right to bear arms" isn't something that I think deserves defense by the state; any state. Second, when a state goes as far overboard as has Idaho, Nevada, Texas, Minnesota, and other loony conceal-and-carry states to allow citizens to arm themselves for everyday war, adding special penalties for using guns in crimes is disingenuous. Either people have the right to use guns as conveniently and often as sharpened pencils, or they don’t. Get your psychobabble gun-bearing laws to line up; or quit babbling. Either it is dangerous for ordinary citizens to be armed like bandits in the grocery store or it isn't. If it isn't, tacking weird fixed sentencing guidlines to crimes committed with guns is irrationa. If it is, drop the hammer on gun-toting citizens everywhere.

The local press worked the pages hard to demonize David with all sorts of near-racist descriptions. David, however, is normally a harmless, decent, incredibly talented musician. This is a picture of David with my grandson a couple of years before he went to jail. He's teaching Wolf to sing the blues, something that David did well before going to prison and is probably incredibly talented at now. I'd sent a copy of this picture along with a letter of reference to the court to be read at his sentencing, but the court decided to ignore my experience with my friend. It didn't fit their preconceived notions of his viciousness and they probably worried that actual knowledge of David might moderate the jury's desire for revenge and punishment.

So, David is giving guitar lessons in prison, writing a guitar instruction book, and becoming a jailhouse lawyer. The state of Idaho is wasting taxpayer money keeping this guy behind bars, while Idaho politicians regularly commit crimes that make David's worst moment look benign. The US is the First World's champion prison state. In "the land of the free," one in 100 citizens is behind bars. Last year, we blew $55 billion dollars on state and federal prison costs. With the crashing economy in front of us, we can expect to add a few tens of billions to that in the next few years. 2.3 million citizens in prison puts us well ahead of China; and that totalitarian state has four times our population.

Like most criminal activities in the US, prisons are a "business." There is money to be made in canning every 100th citizen behind bars and it's a business with political clout. Every incompetent bozo lawyer can find a home in a prosecutor's office and a little time spent as a bureaucrat appears to be a pass into higher political office.

Adam Gelb, director of the Center's Public Safety Performance Project, said "There are large numbers of people behind bars who could be supervised in the community safely and effectively at a much lower cost -- while also paying taxes, paying restitution to their victims and paying child support."

Not much profit in that. The corporations who mismange most state's prison systems would fight that kind of logic with millions of political dollars and lobbying. Idaho, for example, is looking at $1 billion in prison construction and in 2008 the Idaho prison budget was $2.82 billion. If the state's economic forecast was half as optimistic as the prison population forecast, Idaho would be an island of prosperity amidst a nation in severe depression.

Idaho, however, is an economic catestrophe state with property values falling like bricks from the sky. Even Idaho's gungho media admits that as of December, "1 out of every 479 houses in Idaho has been foreclosed on." Idaho's Unemployment Insurance fund is expected to be completely broke by early 2010. Unemployment is heading toward a national high. Wood and paper product sales, Idaho's prime industy, have dropped more than 10%. Tech has all but abandoned Idaho, mostly due to the poor K-12 education system and lack of higher education technical capacity.

It seems to me that a more rational legal system would be something worth looking at, but that's going to be a fight because the vested interests have fear on their side. Fear, as we've seen for the past 8 years, outweighs rational thought by at least 10:1.

The Word is "Depression"

The media and other talking heads are doing everything they can to avoid the word "depression." They use phrases like "unemployment hasn't been this high since 1931," "the worst downturn since the Great Depression," and "economic growth has slowed to post-1929 levels," but they don't call it a depression.

A depression is supposedly "is a severe economic downturn that lasts several years." The quacks who like to refer to themselves as "economists" have latched on to a phoney statistic misnamed the GNP as the defining number for economic direction. In the last 25 years, the GNP has been an indicator of how well the top 1% is doing, but it doesn't say anything about the rest of us. As a backup, these mathematically-dishonest academics spew babble about the unemployment rate, which has been a fudged number since Jimmy Carter decided to define military personnel in the employed category. The real unemployment figure in the United States as of this month is about to creep past 20% (counting recently unemployed, "discouraged" workers, and "under-employed"). Add the military to that and you have unemployment near the 1930s numbers.

The "several years" portion of the depression definition is pretty bogus, too. The employment figures have been angling downward since a few months before the 2000 election. I think that's because many intelligent people began to suspect that Bush would win that Presidential election and the country would go to hell with another regressive Republican in the White House. Whatever the cause, real economic growth stalled and has been sinking ever since. Republicans are consistently bad for the economy while being good for corporate mobsters and other bottom feeders.

Like Reagan and his daddy, Bush II has left the country broke and broken. The more times we experiment with this foolishness, the more likely it becomes that we won't make a comeback. Americans are resilient, but they are not infinitely flexible. Like another elastic material, glass, if you bend the fabric of the culture and economy far enough, it will break. Of course, the elites who power the Republican Party would love to break the democracy because their short-sighted view of the world has them in the driver’s seat and the national car planted firmly in the middle of the road. They aren’t bright enough to realize that traffic is moving both directions and the occasional curve will toss their incapable asses into the same vacuum the rest of us will suffer. The word “stupid” was invented to describe neocon elites. Look it up, there is a picture of the two gay neocon princes, Donnie Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, beside the definition.

We are in a depression. We have been in one for several years. We will be in one for several more. It might get much worse before it gets better. It might not get better, ever. Cultures die. Nations fail. The United States of America could fail and die. Twenty years from now, this continent could be littered with a Baltic-style collection of disorganized states. It could happen. Many want it to happen.

I have my own definition of an economic depression and, for that matter, a recession. When hard-working, marginally skilled citizens can not find a job that pays a living wage, the country is in a recession. When skilled professionals can’t find work, the country is in a depression. We’ve been in a recession since 2000 and we’re entering a depression right now.

Partisan?

A while back, a reader described my outlook as "partisan." He seemed pretty convinced that is a terrible perspective on politics. Partisan is a word that I only find used in fairly low-brow environments, so I wasn't familiar enough with the definition to be able to defend myself. So, I ignored the comment. But, like popcorn and other objectionable things that stick in your teeth, that word stuck in my mind. So, I looked it up.

Webster's defines the word as follows:
1: a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person ; especially : one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance2 a: a member of a body of detached light troops making forays and harassing an enemy b: a member of a guerrilla band operating within enemy lines.

Huh?

Me?

I couldn't be less of an "adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person." I know that my constant ranting and general repulsion of everything Republican might seem like an endorsement of their opponents. That is a logical fallacy. I have never been a fan of the theory "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

First, it's true that the most positive emotion I can give to any Republican is pity. I pity working class people who think that the Republican Party gives a flying damn about any aspect of their life. That's the best I can offer. Many of the folks I know who fancy Republican candidates are solely interested in preserving their anticipated (or already received) inheritance. To those folks, the best I can offer is my disgust. You simpering, worthless, underserving . . . you get the picture? I'd be hard pressed to think of a reason not to jetison the inherited wealthy into the oceans. Thow them all into a giant clown cannon and shoot them into the seas.

Now for the rank and file of the Republican Party. They are all, everyone of them, crooks. I wouldn't trust a Republican candidate with a butter knife. For 28 years, they have raped and pillaged the nation of everything worth admiring. Their whole reason for being is to steal as many of the nation's assets as possible. They are, simply, traitors.

Now, for the opposition; mostly Democrats. They are a pitiful excuse for democrats. They are better than Republicans, but not as good as the Green, Independence Party, Labor Party, American Reform Party, and, occasionally, Libertarian politicians. Whenever the Democrats give me a marginal option, I opt to vote for any of the alternative parties. If that's your definition of "partisan," you need to adopt English as a Second Language. In fact, I'd guess you are a moron.

Crazy Laws and Crazier Lawmakers

A friend sent me an email, which will follow my own rant. His note includes a movie recommendation and his correspondence with his US Representative. One statement from the bureaucrat particularly offended me. "As a former prosecutor, I have seen firsthand the detrimental effects of marijuana use and how it often escalates to the use of more serious drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Studies show that the harmful effects of long-term marijuana use are many and varied. Effects include lung and asthma problems, loss of ability to set long-term goals, and a propensity to graduate to other, more powerful drugs." That is among the dumbest things I have ever seen in writing. Where are his citations for any of those claims? His personal experience is more of a self-justification than evidence of anything useful.

You make people buy grass from dealers who would rather sell you more expensive addictive drugs and, then, claim marijuana use causes the escalation to "serious drugs?" The doofus is just trying to justify the lives he has ruined as a prosecutor. We all know the legal system is terrified of the serious drug users, distributors, and producers. What they tell themselves is that all illegal drug use is equally hazardous and harmful to society. What they know is that argument is bullshit and criminally negligent.

Any comparison of alcohol and marijuana demonstrates an obvious injustice. However, for me the religious tone of the Drug War illustrates an obvious arrogance in the anti-marijuana argument; the same people who believe an all-knowing god created the world and everything in it also believe that god screwed up when he created marijuana and other naturally occurring substances. They, on the other hand, believe that man-made narcotics are perfectly moral as long as a rich corporation gets to distribute them.

T.W. Day
Chief Rat and Rat Bottle Washer
http://ratseye.blogspot.com/

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If you ever get a chance to watch or rent this documentary please do. From the NetFlix description:
___________________
"A/K/A Tommy Chong"
In 2003, the U.S. government allocated an astounding $12 million to apprehend the elusive Tommy Chong -- better known as half of the classic comedy team Cheech and Chong -- for selling bonglike glass pipes over the Internet. In this fascinating documentary featuring interviews with Richard "Cheech" Marin, Jay Leno and Bill Maher, filmmaker Josh Gilbert chronicles the sting that came to be known as "Operation Pipe Dream."
__________________

Makes me so very angry, but it also reinforces my opinion of our government's "War on Drugs". I'm always writing my state and federal Senators and Representatives. Ron Kind (D. WI) is my representative and I write to him at least a couple of times a month. Last month I wrote him a long tome on his Web site "contact" form concerning medical Marijuana. I told him of all the pain I have and how about the only thing I've ever tried that seemed to give me relief was that herbal medication, but because it is illegal I cannot use it. The guy is really quite liberal on most things, but this is what I received in response:
___________________
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From: Congressman Ron Kind [mailto:wi03ima@mail.house.gov]
Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2008 3:37 PM
To: sheldon@. . .
Subject: Re: Your recent email.

Dear Sheldon:

Thank you for contacting me about the legalization of marijuana. I appreciate hearing from you.

While I appreciate the points you make regarding legalization, I do not believe that marijuana should be legalized. As a former prosecutor, I have seen firsthand the detrimental effects of marijuana use and how it often escalates to the use of more serious drugs such as heroin and cocaine.
Studies show that the harmful effects of long-term marijuana use are many and varied. Effects include lung and asthma problems, loss of ability to set long-term goals, and a propensity to graduate to other, more powerful drugs.

The use of marijuana for medical purposes is a contentious issue filled with conflicting scientific evidence, and I remain willing to listen to both sides of the debate. I understand that marijuana was once popularly recommended for various illnesses, although in recent years its medical use has declined. This decline is due to the increased availability of alternative medicines and the federal government's increasing role in curbing international drug importation and fighting domestic substance abuse.

I have heard from several medical professionals and citizens that, in a controlled environment, the benefits of the drug outweigh the possible risks to the patient. They present evidence that marijuana's chemical properties increase the quality of comfort and care afforded to patients suffering from illnesses such as cancer and AIDS.

Data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, however, raises legitimate concerns as well. While illegal substance use has declined since the 1970s, marijuana has remained the most common drug among illicit users.
If marijuana is to become a legal form of medication, further research and consideration must be given to both sides of the issue and a consensus must be reached between the health care and law enforcement professions. Please be assured that should legislation regarding this issue be introduced, I will keep your views in mind.

Again, thank you for contacting me. Should you have further questions or comments, I hope you will not hesitate to be in touch with my office. Also, I encourage you to visit my website, www.house.gov/kind, where you kind find updated information, send me e-mail, and signup for my e-newsletter.

Sincerely,
Ron Kind
Member of Congress
___________________________

I lost some respect for him when I got this reply. He seems to be telling me that he is open-minded, but in the same breath is appears that he already has made up his mind.

What a shame that our government would withhold an effective treatment from we who suffer with massive pain, and continue a "war on drugs" that in reality is a "war on people", especially the poor and elderly.

The "A/K/A Tommy Chong" documentary will be shown on Showtime several more times this month. Here is the schedule although I have Dish Network so your channels may be different:

SHO2e 320 12/17/2008 3:30 PM
SHO2e 320 12/18/2008 4:00 AM
SHOW 318 12/21/2008 1:35 PM
SHOWW 319 12/21/2008 4:35 PM
SHO2e 320 12/22/2008 4:00 PM
SHO2e 320 12/26/2008 11:30 AM

Very sad,
Sheldon

I Might be Wrong

After a lifetime of doubting the existence of a Higher Power, the rumour that crazed Faux News facist Ann Coulter's mouth is wired shut due to a broken jaw has introduced some doubt into my universal view. However, I think a return to the Fairness Doctrine (eliminated by Reagan in 1987) would be a much more effective remedy for returning the country to sanity. It wouldn't make me into a believer, but it would at least make me believe that "change" is really coming.

For those of you who are too young to have experienced the golden years of American media (all 20 years of them), the Fairness Doctrine reminded the electronic media that access to the airwaves is a privledge that must be earned, not a right or a property to abuse without restriction. Right wing talk radio spawned from the black hole that the repeal of this obviously rational requirement created. Before 1987, television and radio news stations worked hard to avoid irrational or partisan opinions because they would have to provide free time for opposing views. A big portion of Reagan's "teflon shield" came from his handing over the reins to public opinion to the corporate media. They gave him 8 criticism-free years. He gave them freedom to flaunt their corporate interests at the expense of democracy and real information.

For now, we'll just have to hope that all of Faux New's cast of wacky drug addicts and mental midgets stumble down stairs cases, slam face first into doorways, forget to wear their seatbelts and get close and personal with a windshield, or simply meet with dental catestrophes.

Why the Bubbles?

In the last couple of decades, we've had a collection of economic bubbles bursting. Post-Vietnam, the overspent economy crashed, bringing down our technological capacity, education system, and middle class economy. Reagan poured zillions into his California military-industrial buddies (the reason they'd put him in office), dropped taxes on the highest income bracket, added non-income-based taxes on the middle class, and released the electronic media from their social responsibility so they could reap the "magic of the market" and kept the majority of the nation in recession for another dozen years. Clinton rolled back some of the mil-industrial corporate welfare, slightly adjusted the income tax percentages, almost balanced the budget, and occasionally listend to smarter people in government and his cabinet. We managed to sustain a reasonably robust and less unfair economy and began to bring a little life back into the education system and economy for about half of his 8 years. Bush turned that all around. He went whole brainless hog on deregulating the Wall Street crooks, designed an economy to best benefit corner office psychopaths and trust fund babies (big surprise, since Bush is probably the poster child for both species), and cranked up the welfare system for the most inefficient, corrupt part of the national economy; the military industrial complex.

The nation suffered 8 years of depressed middle class incomes, two major economic crashes, a radical dumbing down of the education system, more corporate and government scandals than the conservative media could cover-up, and is, now, stone broke and functionally inept.

Obviously, "bubbles" follow stupidity. The radcon habit of electing the braindead is hard on the economy. It's great for the elites, since nobody is watching the national cookie jar, but it's tough on the nation, overall.

The old radcon tactic of constantly repeating Nixon's Big Lie is even wearing out. My favorite Big Lie is the "myth of Middle Class decline." The chart at right may be hard to read, but it's a plot of incomes, broken into economic classes; from the 95th percentile (95th highest incomes) at the top to the 10th percentile at the bottom. This is census data and is unweighted for cost of living or any other funky copout to try to hide the facts. At the bottom of our income class system, it's pretty obvious that the poor have seen no improvement in life from the booms or busts. Since inflation hasn't slowed at all over the years, they obviously are more poor than they were 40 years ago. If you believe that a "middle income" family made about $85,000 in 2003 (the green line), it appears that their income has at least steadily increased. Since these are before tax numbers, they are fudged a good bit to disguise the cost of the double-income households' attempt to stay with inflation. Even the Census Department is in on the game to convince us that we're treading water, not sinking.

The latest economic bust is evidence that we're sinking and are shod in lead boots.

For most of my adult life, I've wondered how ordinary, "middle income" families can afford modern Texas whorehouse-style surburban homes. When we lived in California, in the 80s, my kids were disappointed that I stuck us in a $1600/month, 900 square-foot apartment, instead of putting all of my savings into a $300k, $3500/month house in the eastern LA burbs. I couldn't make the math work, on my $85k salary, so I stuck with what I could manage. What I suspected and now know, was that everyone who played that game ran a Ponzi scheme on themselves; paying the big bills with credit card loans and a series of "2nd mortages." Except for my tolerable mortage, I've always paid as I go and gone without when I couldn't. No new cars, no new clothes (yep, I buy my clothes 2nd hand), no new furniture, no new anything except food and toilet paper (that's even recycled paper). The economy wouldn't survive long on me, but it isn't doing well on the rest of you, either.

Here's what I think is the real problem with our economic system; it's designed to benefit the fewest, richest citizens and damn the rest of us. That's it.

Take, for example, interest rates. Common sense would tell you, I think, that bank interest rates should at least be slightly higher than inflation. A rational society would want to encourage conservative savings for all citizens. You can't make people be rational, but government can encourage that kind of activity. The following two graphs seem to indicate that had been the Fed's policy for quite a while:

If you get nothing more out of these two graphs, it should be that there used to be an attempt made to make normal, conservative savings a reasonable investment. It has never been a way to get rich, but for most of modern history savings have kept up with inflation. Since Reagan, that link was disconnected. Reagan wanted to encourage wild spending, irrational borrowing, and the kind of short-term thinking that led us to where we are today. Republicans like to brand Democrats as "tax and spenders." I'd think that "borrow and spenders" would be worse, but the radcon media seems to ignore that notion.

We're reaping the result of "borrow and spend" without a lick of sense. One key, I think, to settling this economy down is to provide a means for ordinary citizens to safely keep up with inflation. Currently, the unregulated credit card mobsters are allowed to charge leg-breaker rates (20-32%!) while those same banks pay pitance interest rates to savers. This kind of system is doomed to failure, but the no-government radcons are too dumb to see it. Or too vicious to care.

Blaming the Reaction

Recently, a redneck aquaintance sent me a spam email that argued the nation should "pull out of Chicago" because, like most American cities, the city has a variety of crisises. Of course, any city in the United States would exhibit a colleciton of economic and social failures these days. After 8 years of waste and corruption in Washington and all over the country, everywhere Republicans have reared their evil heads, the whole country is failing.

The title of this retarded neocon rant is "Should the US pull out of Chicago?" Look it up, you'll be amazed at how foolish working class Republicans can be. Here is my response:

"More politics from the innumerate conservative crowd?

"Of the Illinois Legislature, 26 of 59 of the members are "there aren't any" Republican. They even have a website (http://www.senategop.state.il.us/.) which must be non-existent since they don't exist. Illinois isn't even in the top five of the highest state taxes: "Tennessee (9.4%), Louisiana (8.7%), Washington (8.5%), New York (8.25%), Arkansas (8.15%), Alabama (8.05%), Oklahoma (8.05%), and California (8.0%)." However, Chicago is the most expensive place in the country to buy cigarettes, but the the "top nine states with the highest state tax on cigarettes are: New Jersey ($2.58), Rhode Island ($2.46), Washington ($2.025), tied for fourth place are Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, and Michigan ($2.00)." Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont tax Social Security income as harshly as does the federal government. A bunch of Republicans run most of those states. "The top five states (in order) based on median real estate taxes paid are: New Jersey ($5,772), New Hampshire ($4,136), Connecticut ($4,049), New York ($3,031), and Massachusetts ($3,195)." Of course, those states also have the most expensive incomes and the most expensive real estate.

"Overall, the most taxed states are New Jersey at 11.8%, New York at 11.7%, and Connecticut at 11.1%. New Jersey is cursed with ex-Goldman Sachs CEO and Republican Christopher Christie, New York's David Patterson is a Democrat, and Connecticut is governed by Republican Jodi Rell.

"The worst colleges in the nation are all from neocon states or worse: http://www.radaronline.com/features/2006/09/the_nine_worst_colleges_in_america.php/. The worst schools in the nation are unquestionably from the south, with Mississippi heading the list. (http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results.html?articleid=14359).

"Chicago doesn't make it into the top 25 of the country's most dangerous cities, either: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0921299.html. Again, it's mostly red states that are home to the dangerous places.

"The natural neocon political tactic is Nixon's Big Lie. You can safely assume that pretty much anytime a Republican is talking he or she is lying. We expect if from them. The real reason that people get so upset when a Democrat gets caught screwing around, robbing from the public till, or lying is that we don't expect that behavior from Democrats. We elect them to fix things. We elect Republicans because we have too much spare cash or too much economic stability and want them to "fix" it for us."

The Price of Getting it Right

One of my favorite authors, Thomas Frank (http://tcfrank.com/), has gotten it right so often over the years that he's practically invisible. In his books (The Wreaking Crew, What's the Matter with Kansas, and One Market Under God), he has predicted the collapse of our unbalanced fantasy economy, the failure of democracy, and the corruption of our social system by corporate greed. His reward has been complete invisibility in the eyes of corporate media. Economic and business gurus like Thomas Friedman and Tom Peters (what's with all the Toms in economics?) have been consistently wrong in their predictions, analysis, and comprehension of economics and society and they are, still, considered "experts" in fields where they have demonstrated absolutely no ability to predict consequences or reactions.

Why does the media demonstrate this incredible disconnect from reality?

Mostly, the media has fooled the majority (the "can be fooled all of the time" crowd) into believing major news is about information, not propaganda. The myth of a "liberal media" is a fantasy invented by crazy rightwingers and corporate interests. It is certainly true that the majority of intelligent people are also liberal. It follows that the majority of people who can write coherent sentences will also be liberal. What doesn't make sense is the assumption that corporations run by the same kind of people who run General Motors, Apple, Halliburton & Drexler, Microsoft, and Sony would allow their news outlets to present viewpoints that are substantially in conflict with corporate interests. That doesn't happen. Dream on paranoid neocons.

What does happen is that some residue of actual thought creeps into the overall media and, since it is so at odds with the majority message, it sticks harder and longer than the propaganda. When the propaganda turns out to be grossly wrong, as has the "free market magic" drivel, the remaining message is what is left; the truth. Over time, the sum of remaining messages creates our impression of the media and, if the truth is all that remains, the overall perception of the media is "liberal."

For example, the war promoters during the Vietnam era were all promoting the corporate pro-war message. They were all fools or corporate shills. Their message has vanished into the ether. What's left is what writers like Mal Browne, Peter Arnett, Neil Sheehan, Horst Faas, Charlie Mohr and David Halberstam and that genre of analysts said about that conflict. Those authors' work sticks in history because they were right. They were right because, as Halberstam said,"My loyalty was not to the president, not to the secretary of state or to the generals who sat on their asses in Saigon. My loyalty was to the First Amendment and to my readers." When your loyalty is to the truth, you are not only right more than not you are also most likely "liberal." One of the foundations of a conservative philosophy is dogma, the act of clinging to illusion over reality. It's tough to be right when you aren't living in the real world.

The tendency of the majority to cling to fantasy doesn't offer much hope for the future. If we desperately hope that the greedy and insane are "right" and punish those who are right with banishment or derision, what hope do we have of ever creating a just and rational society? I don't mean just here in the United States of America. I mean in the world.

When it was obvious that worshiping wealth and greed was creating a monstrous split between the haves and the rest of us, most Americans worshiped greed and wealth. McSame campaigned hard on the terrible thought that Obama might actually tax the wealthy according to their ability to pay taxes and the benefits they receive from their position in society. Anyone with the slightest sense of history would know that every past war resulted in taxation on the wealthy. Income taxes were invented, in fact, to pay for wars and they were, originally, only levied on the wealthiest citizens.

Obviously, the average trust-funder hates the idea of making any useful contribution to society, but why that influences the rest of us is beyond me. The fact that this message had any stickage at all is due to the overwhelming conservative nature of the major media.

A Really Dumb Waste of Tax Dollars

You should check out this article: "Taxpayers may pay legal bills for mortgage execs." It is hard to imagine a more convoluted, incompetent, amoral, and foolish system than our current corporate legal definition. The purpose of corporations was, originally, to allow money to be pooled to accomplish substantial tasks that were too large for normal business arrangements; sole proprietorships and partnerships. Due to a screw-up made by one of our many incompetent versions of the grossly misnamed Supreme Court in 1886, an ex-railroad executive turned sinister "court reporter" (J.C. Bancroft Davis) invented corporate rights based on the 14th Amendment. The lazy justices did not rectify this intentional perversion of their ruling and we've been stuck with a despicable and unaccountable intuition ever since.

As the US economy continues to self-destruct, we should take advantage of this moment in history to redefine the purpose and structure of corporations. Corporate executives should bear more responsibility for the actions and failures of the businesses they administer, not less. Since their business structure is supposed to, first, provide useful benifit to the society, that should be their first obligation. Second in line would be the profit of their investors. Last is the wealth of the executives.

Too soon?

In 2004, I suggested that Democrats sit out the elections. All of them. Since Republicans, the part of the rich and stupid, were determined to trash the country and the rich and stupid were determined to let them, I thought the best move the Democrats could make would be to let them do their worst.

To be clear, I'm talking about two groups: 1) the rich and 2) the stupid. The rich have every reason in the short-term world to be Republican. Their worst fear is that they will have to pay for their power and protection and luxury. The "Reagan Revolution" was about exactly that; providing a seperation and insulation layer between the people who derive the most from our economic and political system and the responsibility to pay for that benifit. Characters like Donny Trump and Paris Hilton and G.W. Bush expect to be treated like royalty, but they do not want to pay for that treatment. They are the ultimate believers in the free lunch. The stupid are the breed that Nixon labeled "the silent majority." They are rarely silent, but they are often the voting majority. They are unskilled, uneducated, superstitious, and on average at the old end of the nation's demographic. The are rural, small town, out-of-touch, and terrified of their own shadows and every other shadow in the night. Sarah Palin called them "true Americans," but they are much closer to true Tories. No only would they have not fought against the British in the American Revolution, but they would probably have sided with the British. Conservatives. Cowards. Fools.


The voting majority is made up of the stupid, in most elections. They have nothing else to do but to vote themselves rich and safe. They aren't bright enough to idenfity either wealth or safety. The middle states are great examples of this stupidity. Right down the "heart" of the nation, from Texas to North Dakota, all red states. All packed full of down-bred rejects of the rest of the country. Every family's smart kid has abandoned those places as soon as he or she was able. (Example: President-elect Obama's mother was born in Kansas, but her parents excaped to California and she spent most of her life in Hawaii; about as far as you can get from Kansas.) All the dumb kids stayed and reproduced themselves, way too often. Each of these states are stuffed with citizens older than the national average. These states have K-12 education systems that are stuck in 1955, minus the 1955 science classes. Not a one of them has an important technical university or a significant industry. They farm, with lots of welfare support. They work at Walmart, selling products made in China. They sell Grandma's stuff in their antique stores. They consistently vote against their own best interests, but they count on federal welfare to make up for their lack of initiative, talent, and hard work.

It took a decade of similar foolishness before the real majority of Americans wised up and elected FDR. Before that Republicans and equally corrupt Democrats drove the country into the ground, requiring Teddy Roosevelt to completely revamp the economic system, going after monopolies and robber barons with his big stick.

The general public has become as gullible and uneducated as the worst fears of the nation's founders anticipated. Voters are afraid of intelligent politicians, so they vote for "clever" ones. Clever like foxes, not humans. Self-interested, greedy, corrupt characters like Dick Cheany thrive in this kind of environment. Vicious scumbags like Karl Rove become rich and powerful on skills that are not only destructive to the nation, but that are incredibly remedial and transparent.

It was obvious that this kind of government would destroy the education system, crash the economy, wipe out the middle class, promote superstition, fear science, and do decades of damage to the nation that would take more decades to fix. But the majority, the not-so-silent and very foolish majority wanted this future. Intelligent people have been imigrating from the US to Canada, New Zealand, Europe, and the rest of the civilized world for a decade. I know a lot of people who have considered giving up on the "land of the free" and heading for safer grounds. Nobody wants to be the last imigrant on the boat when the facists close the boarders.

My theory was that Democrats and intelligent people should let the fools crash the country and return to pick up the pieces. It turned out that Bush and Co. were able to do that job a lot faster than I'd imagined possible. Maybe Obama has timed it perfectly.

Coleman's Past

Pitiful little Normal Coleman thinks the Democrats aren't "playing fair." He may find himself in need of a pardon from his hero, G.W. Bush, because of the illegal money he's taken from at least one supporter/owner. In a last ditch maneuver to turn this disaster into political hay, he dipped into comedien Al Franken's past to call up the routines Franken performed or wrote for SNL as "evidence" that Franken's past makes him unfit for political office. As if Republicans go into politics with ideals and morals?

Normal's past is pretty shaky, if he wants to go that way. When Paul Wellstone died and Coleman inherited his current office, he said "I will be a 99% improvement over Paul Wellstone." A real class act that Coleman character. Wellstone was the only Senator to see through Bush's Iraq War scam and Coleman has yet to perform a single sentient act as Senator.

Going further back in the boy's history, we find he was a mindless upper-crust hippy wannabe during his days as a Hofstra University radical. One of Coleman's famous quotes is "These conservative kids don't fuck or get high like we do... Everyone watch out, the 1950s' bobby-sox generation is about to take over." Top that Franken!

"Bobby-sox generation?" What kind of hippy dork was he?

#192 Comparing the Candidates

Watching the recent speeches, I realized something amazing about the Republican candidate: John McSame is Eric Cartman, sort of grown up. Listen to his ranting, his strange nasal grunt used to punctuate his "important" moments. If we could just get him to sing "In the Ghetto," I think it would be obvious that John McCain and South Park's Eric Cartman are the same guy.

I wish I had written the following thoughtful analysis, but I didn't. However, it is so perfect that I wanted to do my bit to distribute it further. The comparisons between the two sets of Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates are clear and obvious. One set is completely unsuited and unprepared for any office more critical than small town American (preferably small town Alaska or Arizona where nothing of importance ever happens and nothing of value is created). The other set is prepared, educated, intelligent, and capable. If you are still inclined to vote for the unprepared pair, racism is clearly your motivation. In fact, you are simply casting your vote for two pink boobs. Here are some of McSame's greatest hits: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/20/3645/88162/152/538868.

In the 2008 Presidential Election, what if the candidates resumes were reversed?

• What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?


• What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?


• What if Barack Obama finished 894 out of 899 graduates from the Navy Academy in 1958?


• What if Barack Obama had been a prisoner in Vietnam for five years and suffered from Delayed Stress Syndrome?


• What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?


• What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?


• What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?


• What if Barack Obama had failed at an attempted suicide?


• What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?


• What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?


• What if Obama had punched a woman in the face in the halls of Congress?


• What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)


• What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?


• What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?


• What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing five planes? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-klein/mccains-secret-questionab_b_107409.html


• What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem? Or if he used high levels of profanity in his private and public conversations.


• What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?


• What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

Educational Background:

Barack Obama:

• Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International relations.
• Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude, Editor and President of Harvard Law Review
• Taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years.

Michelle Obama:

• Princton University - BA in Sociology, Cum Laude
• Harvard Law School, Juris Doctor (J.D.)

Joseph Biden:

• University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
• Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

John McCain:

• United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

Cindy McCain:

• BA in Education - University of Southern California
• MA in Special Education - University of Southern California

Sarah Palin:

• Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
• North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
• University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
• Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
• University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

Todd Palin:

• High School Graduate

Some try to sweep the issue under the rug but this is about racism. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

Education isn't everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land, the second highest office and the spouses who wield influence over them, as well as our standing in the world. You make the call.

Sheldon Aubut http://www.sheldonaubut.com/

October 2008

Crazy Economic "Experts"

Sometimes, John McCain appears to be so out-of-touch with reality that you'd think he might be slipping into senility. I tried (honest) to watch the debate last night, but McCain's constant smirk (reminiscent of another Republican moron) drove me back to working on my attic. His commentary on "taxes" is so supid and childish that It was impossible for me to listen to it without wanting to toss something heavy at the television. McSame is the candidate of the rich and powerful. I'm not rich or powerful, therefore he has nothing to say that could possibly have anything to do with my life.

John Nichols, in an article for The Nation (http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/10/16-0) said exactly what I was thinking, "But while McCain clung to the failed fantasies of the past, Obama offered America a community rarely served up on the presidential debate stages of recent campaigns: realism. " I read the kind of crap McSame is jabbering in every Republican propaganda piece I get in the mail these days. Some bonehead named "Kudlow" from CNBC is quoted in an RNC piece as saying Obama "has a very poor grasp of basic economic principles. First off, you don't raise taxes during a recession. That's a no-brainer." Great, morons are defining "no-brainers?"

A tax history source stated that "The Revenue Act of 1932 was the first tax law passed during the Great Depression (Revenue Acts, June 6, 1932, ch. 209, 47 Stat. 169). It increased the individual maximum rate from 25 to 63 percent, and reduced personal exemptions from $1,500 to $1,000 for single persons, and from $3,500 to $2,500 for married couples. The NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL RECOVERY ACT OF 1933 (NIRA), part of President FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT's NEW DEAL, imposed a five percent excise tax on dividend receipts, imposed a capital stock tax and an excess profits tax, and suspended all deductions for losses (June 16, 1933, ch. 90, 48 Stat. 195). The repeal in 1933 of the EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT, which had prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol, brought in an estimated $90 million in new liquor taxes in 1934. The SOCIAL SECURITY ACT OF 1935 provided for a wage tax, half to be paid by the employee and half by the employer, to establish a federal retirement fund (Old Age Pension Act, Aug. 14, 1935, ch. 531, 49 Stat. 620).

"The Wealth Tax Act, also known as the Revenue Act of 1935, increased the maximum tax rate to 79 percent, the Revenue Acts of 1940 and 1941 increased it to 81 percent, the Revenue Act of 1942 raised it to 88 percent, and the Individual Income Tax Act of 1944 raised the individual maximum rate to 94 percent."

The previous administrations, Hoover and Bush, certainly set the standard for no-brainers and putting an economic burden on the top income bracket is the smartest way to balance the budget, again. Republicans are the party of "spend and spend and borrow and spend" and Democrats have been, for the last 50 years, the part of social economic responsibility. That is a no-brainer.

There is no "miracle of the market." There is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, or magic bullet. Apparently, there are no economic conservative Republicans.

#191 Religulous

I saw Bill Maher's Religulous last night with a friend in a tiny, out-of-the-way theater in St. Paul. Two theaters are showing this film, although the show was better attended than all of the offerings in my local mega-theater for a very late night showing in an area with limited parking. It's not for lack of audience that this film is languishing in obscure "art theaters." It's most likely fear.

Many of the film's reviewers tentatively talk about their reaction to Religulous by reminding us all that "religion is a sensitive subject." In this case, "sensitive" means "dangerous." Overwhelmingly, religious people share traits with other crazy people, especially the trait of unpredictable (and predictable) violence. When a few of the major theaters attempted to cash in on Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, protestors swarmed those theaters attempting to scare off viewers with their abortion clinic tactics. Mostly, they found themselves outwitted, overwhelmed by numbers, and ignored, but the message was received by the theater chains. None of the major corporate commies have anything resembling the courage to show a film as controversial as Religulous, but showing a snuff flick like The Passion of Christ is right up their alley, sewer, or ditch.

Religulous is well made, entertaining (as this subject can be), intelligent, and disturbing. As any rational person knows, the connection between many nations possessing the means to destroy the world (in fire) and the desire to create a self-fulfilling prophesy by so many fools is scary stuff. Listening to these fools try to justify their "Bronze Age" beliefs is depressing and scary. The first twenty minutes are funny, but after a while the relentless stupidity of the "faithful" is nothing more than ghoulish and gloomy. Maher isn't trying to entertain us. He's trying to frighten the few remaining intelligent, unsuperstitious souls left on the planet into action. Mostly, he succeeded in convincing me that humans are the bottom of the evolutionary heap and the best thing that could happen is for humanity to breed itself into a plague that reduces our numbers as quickly as possible, to save the rest of the world from "God's dumbest creation."

I've read some reviewers complain that Maher "made to look foolish" the faithful he interviewed. Maher simply asked them questions and reported their foolish answers. Religious nuts, apparently, don't like mirrors.

One of the typically irrational reviewers of Religulous, Tim McNabb in a website misnamed The American Thinker, claimed "Maher claims that agnostics represent 16% of the population, but so far they have not built 16% of the nation's charities (unless you count voting for Democrats)." That's typical of religious arguments. As Maher discovers when he interviews Francis Collins, a "scientist" who made strange claims for "faith" and backed his arguments with an obvious lack of knowledge of the Bible he worships. If he's the head of the US government's Genome Project, that segment of the scientific world is in trouble, if not dead and buried. Fortunately, the US is no longer leading this field of research, so progress has not been stopped by Collins. As Maher reminds us, the majority of scientists in the world are agnostic or atheist. They attempt to remedy the world's problems with science and technologies that actually "fix" those problems rather than cater to the pitiful consequences of overpopulation, starvation, superstition, and ignorance.

Another religious apologist asked, "Was Maher afraid he might muddy his clownish jape if he actually brought into the mix a learned theologian." Actually, that tactic has been tried (The God Who Wasn't There and The Lost Gospel of Judas) and religious nuts liked it even less. "Learned theologians" tend to be as agnostic as they become historians or scientists. The more you know about the history of, for instance, Christianity, the more you doubt. Obviously, Maher consulted with many learned theologians, because his timeline of Christianity was accurate and his knowledge of the history of the Bible and the things actually in the Bible exceeded that of the Christians he interviewed. In fact, most of the professed "Christians" know less about their religion than the average uninterested agnostic.

Religious excuse-makers argue that "99% of the world's population can't be wrong." That's the dumbest of all arguments for any subject. Humans are insane and ignorant by nature. We're nothing more sophisticated than an ignorant animal with technology. Not only can 99% of us be wrong, but as Maher says, we have a long, violent, depressing history of getting practically "everything exactly wrong." From math to nature to the universe, humans have long believed in concepts that were so far from logical or right that it's hard to take humans serious, even if you are one. Mark Twain speculated that we "fell from the higher animals." If we don't start correcting some of the more dangerous misunderstandings our species believes, we may take out the higher animals with us in our suicidal drive to Armageddon.

Maher has either created this link or linked himself to it, http://disbeliefnet.com/. Whatever, it's an interesting source of information/entertainment on what the majority of the world's nutjobs are up to.

October 2008

#189 The Problem with Predictions

In the 1950s, a statistician named William Edwards Deming who had been successful in improving American production methods during WWII, tried to convince American manufacturing executives that consumers could recognize quality and would naturally gravitate to the best quality products in a global market. American executives blew Deming off as a quack and continued to direct their companies toward shoddier products and higher costs. Deming took his math and his methods to Japan with McArthur, where he became a national hero and where his analysis tools allowed Japan to leapfrog past US manufacturing capabilities. While most Americans reflexively prefer Japanese manufactured products over American-made versions, most Americans have not come to grips with the fact that Deming predicted this preference and the economic impact it would have on American manufacturing more than 50 years ago.

Minneapolis FBI agents repeatedly tried to warn Washington that Arab operatives were up to something major. In 1997, right wing author Tom Clancy wrote a book about a future when "the President, Congress, and Supreme Court are obliterated when a Japanese terrorist lands a 747 on the Capitol." The Clinton Administration kept its eye on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda's activities because they were certain that those characters were planning significant terrorist activity in the US. When the planes struck on 9/11, the fools in the Bush Administration all brayed "nobody imagined something like this" could occur. Nobody without an imagination imagined it, I guess.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote a book called "The Population Bomb." Ehrlich famously predicted "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." He was wrong, although a few "hundreds of millions of people" have starved to death since the 1970s. Ehrlich also predicted a dramatic increase in fatal plagues, although HIV/AIDS had yet to be discovered when he wrote his book. In 2006, 2.9 million people died of AIDS. The disadvantage those starved and sick millions had was that they were not in the US or Europe. Most of them were in Africa, South America, and Asia, where Faux News is rarely interested unless the military industrial complex tells them to be interested. The rightwingnuts have often cited Ehrlich as a "liberal" doomsayer whose "failed" dire predictions prove that the world's resources and human ingenuity are limitless. I guess this is an example of the political theory that states if A≠B then B≥∞?

In 1980, Ehrlich and Julian Simon made a bet that the price of metals would rise (Simon bet against that proposition) during the 80s due to shortages and cost of production. Ehrlich lost the bet and paid up. If the terms of the bet had made it to the late 1990's, Ehrlich would be the winner. If it were renegotiated today, Ehrlich would be winning consistently, possibly, for the rest of human existence. The prediction was accurate, the timing was not.

In 2006, 852 million people went "hungry," according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 2006, more than 9 1/2 million children died before they reached their fifth birthday. Everyday, about 16,000 children die from starvation. Since they aren't starving in the US, we figure they don't matter.

Ehrlich's I = P × A × T (Environmental Impact, Population, Affluence, Technology) formula is proving to be true in an unexpected place, though; global warming. Maybe it will turn out that human population's cultural impact will go unnoticed as it is overwhelmed by massive global impact. The IPAT formula is simplistic and probably needs some exponential components to be accurate, but it's a start.

Dr. M. King Hubbert predicted, in 1956, that the United States would reach peak oil production in the late 1960s and that the world would reach peak oil production in the first decade of this century. He was right on the money with his first prediction and close enough for practical purposes in his second. Many people have dismissed the importance of Hubbert's predictions because while oil has become exponentially expensive in the last few years, it is still more-or-less affordable. However, world starvation is rising along with energy prices and it may be the real "end of oil" realization will come from the food shortages that result from high energy costs.

A little research would find hundreds of accurate, dire warnings that have been issued by clever people investigating everything from energy to finance to education. Usually, those predictions come true but they rarely come true as accurately as Hubbert's calculations. Hubbert had the advantage of working in a field with no practical alternatives. Oil is the "bear in the closet." McSame can whimper that nuclear energy is the only workable alternative to our oil addiction, but the byproducts of fission nuclear energy are still an unsolved problem. We have no current alternative to fission nuclear power, so ramping up nuclear energy production guarantees a collection of future environmental catastrophes. Since we are still ignoring the result of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, it will be easy to ignore the warnings of nuclear catastrophe until disaster strikes and our "leaders" can whine that "nobody told us."

The problem with predictions is that human adaptability and gullibility make it difficult to figure out how a catastrophe will play out. In 1968, Ehrlich probably didn't imagine either our willingness to sacrifice future generations by decimating agricultural land for current production or the inventiveness of petroleum engineers and their ability to apply toxic chemicals as "fertilizers." I suspect he is a little baffled at the world media's willingness and ability to ignore the starvation in developing nations, too.

The hysteresis in human activities is unpredictable. Who would have thought that our phony banking system could have propped up its fake walls this long. Most economic observers figured the housing house of cards would come crashing down in the 1990's. Our corporations have been paying millions for non-performing executives for thirty years. What keeps this incompetent system of incompetents in place? Our economy has been slipping toward socialism and an abundance of unearned entitlements since the Johnson Administration. We are quickly approaching the point where more people work for local, state, and federal governments than work for product-producing, productivity-enhancing businesses. Including the military-industrial complex, federal and state contractors, retired government workers, and current government employees, a significant portion of the country's "gross national product" is a closed loop money stream. None of this makes any sense, but hysteresis keeps it all spinning long beyond when it should tip over and collapse on its own.

I've worked in a couple of companies like that. Initially, the products were good, the service was excellent, and management was, at least, not in the way. For several years, the company's success was understandable but not overwhelming. After a few years, the reputation exceeds the performance but humans are slow to change and we aren't nearly as bright as we like to think. After a certain amount of economic momentum, it takes extremely talented management to break the connection between customers and products. The products have to go from good to awful before some customers will start looking for an alternative. Sometimes, management has to engage in blatant abusive behavior before customer realize they've been buying crap.

So it goes with stupid behaviors on a macro scale. There appears to be no significant political or media figure willing to admit (in public) that our addiction to oil is so selfish that we are willing to search out and burn up every drop without a second's consideration of the next generation's needs. We are so concerned with our current markets that we'll pack the world to standing-room-only before we limit our population growth, even with the obvious knowledge of what that will do to future generations. Making accurate predictions requires some really clever estimates of the effects of cultural hysteresis and that will require a lot better understanding of human behavior and, more importantly, misbehavior.

September 2008

www.ratseyeview.com

Debate One and McCain's Inexperience

Probably more than any other defect in McCain's personality and knowledgebase, I think his almost perfect lack of experience as an American makes him worthless as a Presidential candidate.

According to his own published biography, McCain was born at the "Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone . . . Both McCain´s father and paternal grandfather, John Sidney McCain, Sr., were four-star admirals and his father rose to command all the U.S. naval forces in the Pacific. . .

"McCain spent his childhood and adolescent years moving between naval bases in America and abroad . . .

"McCain graduated (fifth from the bottom of his class) from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1958. . .

"His introduction to politics came in 1976, when he was assigned as the Navy´s liaison to the U.S. Senate. In 1981, after marrying his second wife, Cindy Hensley, McCain retired from the Navy, and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. While working in public relations for his father-in-law´s beer distribution business, he began establishing connections in politics. . .

"McCain was first elected to political office on November 2, 1982, easily winning a seat in the House of Representatives after his well-known war record helped overcome doubts about his “carpetbagger” status. "

So, from birth to senility, John McCain has either been provided for by the US taxpayer as a military dependent or a member of the military or was cared for by his rich father-in-law. He has never had to wrestle with health care, social security, paying taxes, finding the money to put his kids through school, managing an unsubstidized career, unemployment, or any other problem that "real people" deal with. He is, in fact, totally inexperienced and unfamiliar with the life led by the majority of the American public. He might know a little about life at the top of the economic heap, but he is of no use to those of us who work for a living.

John McCain thinks that pouring money into the corrupt and inefficient health insurance system will "fix" the sorry state of health care that most Americans suffer from. He knows, personally, most of the executives who have corrupted the health care system, so he has deluded himself into thinking he knows something about Americans and their problems. John, most of us don't earn 8 figure incomes. Trust me on this. Almost none of us get golden parachutes and pensions when we retire. Instead, we get to fight with Social Security for our tiny check and we decide between eating dog food and Top Ramen or getting a few of our prescriptions filled for the month. You should meet some real Americans, someday. If you can remember the experience, I'm sure you'll be moved by it.

John still believes in Reagan's delusional "magic of the market." The market magic is what caused the current economic crisis, but John's friends on Wall Street are still waving their wands around his pointy head and they are doing just fine with the buyout millions they gave themselves as they walked out the door of the failed corporations they mismanaged. The Wild West was a perfect example of market magic. It was every man for himself until a few men gained enough power to lord over their area like kings; vicious kings. The market is filled with corrupt people with sociopathic personalities and vicious tendancies. Corporations are not democratic and they are not interested in existing in a democratic society. In fact, they are in many ways very similar to the military, including the traits that allow crap to float to the top.

One look at John's picture and you can see that he's a little confused. Sometimes, he proudly imitates G.W. Bush's smug little smirk, but usually McCain is confused. He simply knows absolutely nothing about the lives of the people he wants to "lead." He knows perfectly the well the people he represents, though. Like every Republican candidate since Ike, John McCain represents the ruling elite. He is one of them, so who else would he represent? He's the representative of the 1% who own 99% of the nation's assets. He's the candidate of the military-industrial-complex. He is the man who will perserve and protect the status quo until he's left playing the violin as Washington burns. He'll give us more corporate power, more military spending, more national debt, less protection from government and corporate abuses and he'll be proud to do it.

This is one of the few times when being offered "the lessor of two evils" is so clear. John McCain is perfectly inexperienced at any aspect of life for the majority of citizens in this country. He couldn't manage a household budget, find a job, drive a nail or a car, raise a family, put up with an incompetent boss, or stay married to anyone who didn't inherit billions to save his own life. Like the moron before him, John McCain is completely unsuited for the Presidency so he is the perfect Republican Candidate.

#187 Watch Out for the Elites

Elites, what are they? It seems easy to figure out, but the Midwest has a terrible time defining the word in a rational manner. Barack Obama seems to have hit a nerve with his comments about small town bitterness, "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

I've been hearing people say exactly the same thing for most of my life. Most of the people who say those things are educated, have a sense of humor, have skills and careers, and take religion on an individual basis, rather than swallowing crap whole from fundamentalist evangelists. I'm beginning to think the definition of elite people who "are educated, have a sense of humor, have skills and careers, and take religion on an individual basis, rather than swallowing crap whole from fundamentalist evangelists."

The actual definition, per Webster's is: "1 asingular or plural in construction : the choice part : cream bsingular or plural in construction : the best of a class csingular or plural in construction : the socially superior part of society d: a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence e: a member of such an elite —usually used in plural 2: a typewriter type providing 12 characters to the linear inch"

So, the rednecks and right-wingnuts are throwing the word around as an insult, when what it means is "the best of a class?" Damn, that's terrible. We've been "led" by the worst of a class for the last 8 years and, off and on, for the last 45 years: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and, now, Little George were all class idiots and academic failures. The radical right would like to attach the tag of a "socially superior part of society" on anyone they think might cost them money and power. As long as Americans want to elect morons, this tactic will work. The question is, why do we want to elect people we know are near the bottom of the class?

I first wondered about this when Richard Nixon was elected in 1968. Contrary to the weird interpretation the media promoted during the debates, Nixon lost the debates because he turned every question into an opportunity to pontificate rather than answer the questions. Kennedy's answers were direct, clear, and to the point. If you listen to the debates, I think you will still come away believing Kennedy won. Obviously, interpreting Nixon's body language on the tube adds to that impression. At his heart, Nixon was a corrupt fool put in place by the California political power structure and there was no more to him than what there appeared to be at that moment. U.S. voters were so intent on electing an idiot at that time, they elected Nixon and Agnew to a second term when it was clear that they would be criminally impeached almost immediately after the election.

Ford was very much a national laughing stock outside of his group of cronies and proved to be no more than that when he pardoned Nixon and 408 other criminals. His justification for the Nixon pardon was so lame that few accept it for anything more than spin. Ford was the nation's first football scholarship President, which saved him from having to learn anything from college classes.

Reagan, another football-playing, classroom-avoiding politician, set new low standards for Presidential expectations, and lowered the bar for White House intellectual achievement so that an ant could step over the pole without stretching. Reagan is the cynic who said, "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem." And followed that by increasing the size and government exponentially. When Reagan took office, the national debt was $1 trillion. When he left, it was $2.6 trillion (more than 200%). " . . . .For every dollar a Democratic President has raised the national debt in the past 30 years, Republican presidents have raised the debt by $2.52."Conservative" Reagan reversed every Carter imitative to make the nation energy independent, in his first term of office.

The two Bushes kept blowing cash like a hooker with a stolen credit card, only mildly interrupted by 8 years of Clinton's actual conservative economic policies. Bush has taken what could have been a balanced budget in 2001 and turned it into massive debt, which will plague the nation for generations. The damage this character has done to the nation's technological base, the education system, and national security is immeasurable.

Still, many voters are desperately looking for a fool of equal character to replace Little George. The fact that Sarah Palin hasn't been laughed off of the national stage is solid evidence that voters are ready and willing to dip further into the muck of our gene pool for their next "leader." No, we aren't likely to vote for elites until the economic and social system is damaged beyond repair. Like lemmings heading for a watery death, we're hell bent to elect a moron and a senile has-been to lead the nation into bankruptcy. If that sounds elitist, you don't know me very well.

September 2008

Life in Loony Tunes

I just got back from a trip to Nova Scotia. Friends and aquaintances had been advising me to eat all the sea food I could choke down while I was visiiting the east coast, so I planned to do just that. However, I discovered that, mostly, I was about a decade too late. The spectre of off-shore drilling has a lot of east coast fishermen convinced that we're seeing the beginning of the end of life in the Atlantic Ocean. Human over-population and over-exploitation of the ocean has done a pretty good job of wiping out life on the right coast. Oil dereks and their associated pollution and physical damage will finish the job. While I was in Canada, I heard a radio science program describing that the typical ocean bed derek destroys practically all life within a 5-10 mile radius of the oil well and does significant damage well beyond that range. If you like sea food and oxygen, you're not gonna like the result of the kind of massive off shore drilling the Republicrats are about to sign off on. And all because we want to drain every drop of that resource in a single generation, leaving ever suceeding generation to despise the greedy bastards of the 20th and 21st Century.

On a lighter note, television and radio broadcast the Alaskan ceremony celebrating the shipping out of the Alaska National Guard to Iraq. The nation's next Vice-Dingbat, book-banning religious nut Caribou Barbie, is shipping her son, Track, off with the rest of the sacrificial lambs to . . . believe it or not . . . the tune of John Philip Sousa's "Liberty Bell." When life really wants to imitate comedy, it goes all out. For those of you from my generation, Liberty Bell was the Monty Python Flying Circus theme song. I almost choked to death listening to the serious boob tube and right wing radio announcers jabbering their take on this strange moment while acoumpanied by the Python's theme music. Freaky stuff.

The more I know about Palin, the stranger this story gets. You'd think that the righ wingnuts would be a little nervous about her husband, an employee of British Petroleum; the company that mismanages the Alaska pipeline and is obviously not an American company. I guess any corporation is good enough for them. The so-called right-to-lifers seem to be unswayed by her attempt to knock off her unborn Down's Syndrome child, Trig. In her last days of pregnancy, she flew to Texas to lecture to and take payola from oil executives. When her water broke, she finished her lecture and decided to gamble on the plane flight back to Alaska finishing the job. Didn't work. Trig was born and she, somehow, turned that into a bonus. Republicans are weird. Her anti-sex education stance has resulted in her 18-year old daughter's unwed, unplanned pregnancy and will, apparently, also result in a shotgun wedding. Crazier and crazier. Palin ought to be called Daisy Mae, she's not sophisticated enough to be Barbie.