Flimsy Sanity

Strange

2011-12-01T07:52:00.001-08:00

The worst thing for the economy is to economize and the conservatives hate conservation. So it goes.

With things the way they are, you would think the Republicans and the Democrats would both want to lose the battle and win the war. Whoever presides over the further collapse will no longer be electable. I may get the proper ID if Ron Paul and Ralph Nader would join forces and run as an independent team. I like Ron Paul but believing people will do right with no ~~laws~~ regulation is nonsense...even little league has referees.

Diverting attention

2011-11-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

It was funny how Cain tried to divert attention from reports of his caddishness by breaking into gospel singing. Probably not smart to strike a religious tone and remind people that he was the evil brother. Nein Nein Nein

It is an adage that everyone who thinks they are the first to think something probably hasn't read enough. The fact that Bernie Madoff made off with rich people's money (only the special were chosen - beware when someone tells you that only smart people can belong) and Elena Bobbitt did bob it have always ammused me. I was just reading Scott Adams latest book and he mentioned the same thing with other examples.

Everything old is new again

2011-10-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

Richard Hofstadter's essay about the far right in the time of Goldwater could be a description of the current conservative movement. The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt 1954 in part:

Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

No doubt the circumstances determining the political style of any individual are complex. Although I am concerned here to discuss some of the neglected social-psychological elements in pseudo-conservatism, I do not wish to appear to deny the presence of important economic and political causes. I am aware, for instance, that wealthy reactionaries try to use pseudo-conservative organizers, spokesmen and groups to propagate their notions of public policy, and that some organizers of pseudo-conservative and “patriotic” groups often find in this work a means of making a living — thus turning a tendency toward paranoia into a vocational asset, probably one of the most perverse forms of occupational therapy known to man. A number of other circumstances — the drastic inflation and heavy taxes of our time, the dissolution of American urban life, considerations of partisan political expediency — also play a part. But none of these things seem to explain the broad appeal of pseudo-conservatism, its emotional intensity, its dense and massive irrationality, or some of the peculiar ideas it generates. Nor will they explain why those who profit by the organized movements find such a ready following among a large number of people, and why the rank-and-file janizaries of pseudo-conservatism are so eager to hurl accusations, write letters to congressmen and editors, and expend so much emotional energy and crusading idealism upon causes that plainly bring them no material reward.

Elmer Davis, seeking to account for such sentiment in his recent book, But We Were Born Free, ventures a psychological hypothesis. He concludes, if I understand him correctly, that the genuine difficulties of our situation in the face of the power of international communism have inspired a widespread feeling of fear and frustration, and that those who cannot face these problems in a more rational way “take it out on their less influential neighbors, in the mood of a man who, being afraid to stand up to his wife in a domestic argument, relieves his feelings by kicking the cat.”5 This suggestion has the merit of both simplicity and plausibility, and it may begin to account for a portion of the pseudo-conservative public. But while we may dismiss our curiosity about the man who kicks the cat by remarking that some idiosyncrasy in his personal development has brought him to this pass, we can hardly help but wonder whether there are not, in the backgrounds of the hundreds of thousands of persons who are moved by the pseudo-conservative impulse, some commonly shared circumstances that will help to account for their all kicking the cat in unison.

Why do the pseudo-conservatives express such a persistent fear and suspicion of their own government, whether its leadership rests in the hands of Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower? Why is the pseudo-conservative impelled to go beyond the more or less routine partisan argument that we have been the victims of considerable misgovernment during the past twenty years to the disquieting accusation that we have actually been the victims of persistent conspiracy and betrayal — “twenty years of treason”? Is it not true, moreover, that political types very similar to the pseudo-conservative have had a long history in the United States, and that this history goes back to a time when the Soviet power did not loom nearly so large on our mental horizons? Was the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, which was responsibly estimated to have had a membership of from 4,000,000 to 4,500,000 persons at its peak in the 1920′s, a phenomenon totally dissimilar to the pseudo-conservative revolt?

What I wish to suggest — and I do so in the spirit of one setting forth nothing more than a speculative hypothesis — is that pseudo-conservatism is in good part a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity. Normally there is a world of difference between one’s sense of national identity or cultural belonging and one’s social status. However, in American historical development, these two things, so easily distinguishable in analysis, have been jumbled together in reality, and it is precisely this that has given such a special poignancy and urgency to our status-strivings. In this country a person’s status — that is, his relative place in the prestige hierarchy of his community — and his rudimentary sense of belonging to the community — that is, what we call his “Americanism” — have been intimately joined. Because, as a people extremely democratic in our social institutions, we have had no clear, consistent and recognizable system of status, our person status problems have an unusual intensity. Because we no longer have the relative ethnic homogeneity we had up to about eighty years ago, our sense of belonging has long had about it a high degree of uncertainty. We boast of “the melting pot,” but we are not quite sure what it is that will remain when we have been melted down.

The American pattern of occupational mobility, while often much exaggerated, as in the Horatio Alger stories and a great deal of the rest of our mythology, may properly be credited with many of the virtues and beneficial effects that are usually attributed to it. But this occupational and social mobility, compounded by our extraordinary mobility from place to place, has also had its less frequently recognized drawbacks. Not the least of them is that this has become a country in which so many people do not know who they are or what they are or what they belong to or what belongs to them. It is a country of people whose status expectations are random and uncertain, and yet whose status aspirations have been whipped up to a high pitch by our democratic ethos and our rags-to-riches mythology.6

In a country where physical needs have been, by the scale of the world’s living standards, on the whole well met, the luxury of questing after status has assumed an unusually prominent place in our civic consciousness. Political life is not simply an arena in which the conflicting interests of various social groups in concrete material gains are fought out; it is also an arena into which status aspirations and frustrations are, as the psychologists would say, projected...Therefore, it is the tendency of status politics to be expressed more in vindictiveness, in sour memories, in the search for scapegoats, than in realistic proposals for positive action.

The primary value of patriotic societies and anti-subversive ideologies to their exponents can be found here. They provide additional and continued reassurance both to those who are of old American ancestry and have other status grievances and to those who are of recent American ancestry and therefore feel in need of reassurance about their nationality. Veterans’ organizations offer the same satisfaction — what better evidence can there be of the genuineness of nationality and of earned citizenship than military service under the flag of one’s country? Of course such organizations, once they exist, are liable to exploitation by vested interests that can use them as pressure groups on behalf of particular measures and interests. (Veterans’ groups, since they lobby for the concrete interests of veterans, have a double role in this respect.) But the cement that holds them together is the status motivation and the desire for an identity.

Sociological studies have shown that there is a close relation between social mobility and ethnic prejudice. Persons moving downward, and even upward under many circumstances, in the social scale tend to show greater prejudice against such ethnic minorities as the Jews and Negroes than commonly prevails in the social strata they have left or are entering.12 While the existing studies in this field have been focused upon prejudice rather than the kind of hyper-patriotism and hyper-conformism that I am most concerned with, I believe that the typical prejudiced person and the typical pseudo-conservative dissenter are usually the same person, that the mechanisms at work in both complexes are quite the same,13 and that it is merely the expediencies and the strategy of the situation today that cause groups that once stressed racial discrimination to find other scapegoats. Both the displaced old-American type and the new ethnic elements that are so desperately eager for reassurance of their fundamental Americanism can conveniently converge upon liberals, critics, and nonconformists of various sorts, as well as Communists and suspected Communists. To proclaim themselves vigilant in the pursuit of those who are even so much as accused of “disloyalty” to the United States is a way not only of reasserting but of advertising their own loyalty — and one of the chief characteristics of American super-patriotism is its constant inner urge toward self-advertisement. One notable quality in this new wave of conformism is that its advocates are much happier to have as their objects of hatred the Anglo-Saxon, Eastern, Ivy League intellectual gentlemen than they are with such bedraggled souls as, say, the Rosenbergs. The reason, I believe, is that in the minds of the status-driven it is no special virtue to be more American than the Rosenbergs, but it is really something to be more American than Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles — or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The status aspirations of some of the ethnic groups are actually higher than they were twenty years ago — which suggests one reason (there are others) why, in the ideology of the authoritarian right-wing, anti-Semitism and such blatant forms of prejudice have recently been soft-pedaled. Anti-Semitism, it has been said, is the poor man’s snobbery. We Americans are always trying to raise the standard of living, and the same principle now seems to apply to standards of hating. So during the past fifteen years or so, the authoritarians have moved on from anti-Negroism and anti-Semitism to anti-Achesonianism, anti-intellectualism, anti-nonconformism, and other variants of the same idea, much in the same way as the average American, if he can manage it, will move on from a Ford to a Buick.

Recommended Extra Features on DVDs

2011-08-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

Jesus Camp deleted scenes. Rachael (the little girl that mocked mainstream religion as boring) also appears here in an even more disturbing light, plus you can see Ted Haggard again if you want.

World's Fastest Indian. Early interview with the Australian man that set the fastest motorcycle record on the sand flats is extra feature. Movie is just reenactment.

Temple Grandlin Her commentary is even more interesting than the movie.

Wall Street Some interesting views by Oliver Stone about the economy - this refers to the original movie not the later return of Gecko.

Thin Blue Line Interview with a ~~disturbing~~ disturbed psychiatrist that blames rise of gruesome murders on woman's movement. Finally ordered (from Netflix) this old documentary on the justice system of Texas in a singular case. It is nearly always recommended as a documentary to see and I agree. Eventually succeeded in freeing an innocent man.

Inside Job Deleted scene of speaker talking about how Pawlenty said God was running the economy and how Alan Greenspan quoted the speech often.

What Are They Thinking?

2011-08-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

On first glance, the British riots don't make sense. The Norwegian camper murders is another example of irrational behavior at first glance, but both are pretty human actions.

Did the Columbine killers get up in the stands during football practice and blast away at the athletes that relentlessly bullied them? Hell no, they went to the library and killed the quiet kids who were able to read.

Did the Oklahoma federal building bombers attack the ATF or FBI because of anti-government rage about Waco? Hell no, they blew up some low level cubicle drudges.

Did the Americans of African descent attack the homes of the brutal police or burn the court of justice that could dismiss a crime caught on film as inadequate proof? Hell no, they attacked stores and beat up working stiffs.

Did the Islamic fundamentalist attack the military bases in Saudi Arabia for invasion of their holy land? Hell no, they attacked office buildings (well, the Pentagon makes a little sense) and we retaliated by attacking one war torn country and one country decimated by sanctions.

Did the Germans eliminate their military machine after World War I bankrupted them? Hell no, they built cohesion by torturing gypsies, political dissenters, and unpopular religions.

Did America attack Russia because Communism was so evil that loyalty to the state could warp family values so that children reported on their parents? Hell no, we attacked Korea and established the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities.

When Reagan was in trouble for selling drugs and guns to fund a private war, he ordered an attack on Grenada.

When Clinton was in trouble for his wayward asparagus, he ordered an attack on a medicine manufacturer.

When America's delusional economy met reality, did we impound the property of the tricksters that created the financial fraud instruments and make the populace who bounces from one bubble to the next pay their debts? Hell no, the unions and the national pension plan for working people must go and poor people cause all our problems. Middle America is so white that kids stare at brown complected people. They think all non whites spend their time shooting heroin and squirting out welfare babies. Greg Palast called America an "Armed Madhouse" but all the gun-toting fearful fanatics should worry about the people who have more. Bad things trickle down, good ones seem to percolate up and only rarely.

According to Christian lore, humans lost paradise by disobedience and can be saved by persecution and death of an innocent. Religion finally makes sense to me - it fits with blind obedience and bullying and is human from kids at school to Karl ~~Rasputin~~ Rove's strategies.

Temple Grandlin is right. Humans just don't make sense.

All the Predators

2011-07-25T08:25:00.000-07:00

All these Wall Street lawyers are running the system according to Buckminster Fuller. After World War II they took most of the money out of the United States, they drained the blood out of the United States and put it abroad, overseas capital…. Fuller calls it Lawyer Capitalism, the lawyers run the show. Tax laws are the key. In the postwar years, tax law allowed US capital to go abroad…. It all fled the country and stayed abroad and America changed tremendously…. We became a world power, yet a rapacious one, with capitalists really doing a major theft of our money…. Nixon took us off the Gold Standard in 1972 because America went bankrupt…. All these recessions in the 70’s, 80’s…. My father got wiped out on Wall Street

- Oliver Stone's commentary on Wall Street

Don't have a lot of time on the computer at the library, but I was looking for the article from Buckminster Fuller that was mentioned in the commentary to the original movie of Wall Street. I think Stone said the article/book was called Higgety Piggety.

This weekend's "This American Life" was about the patenting of software and the scam it has turned out to be. It is so discouraging that no one wants to make things or produce anything, just cannibalize the ones who try to.

Monkey Day

2011-03-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

Today is the day in 1925 that Tennessee declared that the Biblical version of creation had to be taught in school. I just finished reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. This is from page 195:

Six rhesus monkeys were trained to pull on a variety of chains to get food. If they pulled on one chain, they got a large amount of their favorite food. If they pulled on a different chain, they got a small amount of a less enticing food. As you can possibly guess, the monkeys quickly learned to pull on the chain that gave them more of what they wanted.

After a few weeks of this happy setup, one of the six monkeys got hungry and decided to pull on the chain. This is when something terrible happened: a separate monkey in a different cage was shocked with a painful jolt of elecrtricity. All six monkeys saw it happen. They heard the awful shriek. They watched the monkey grimace and cower in fear. The change in their behavior was immediate. Four of the moneys decided to stop pulling on the maximizing chain. They were willing to settle for less food as long as the monkey wasn't hurt. The fifth monkey stopped pulling on either chain for five days and the sixth monkey stopped pulling for twelve days. They starved themselves so that a monkey they didn't know wasn't forced to suffer.

Compare this behavior with the Milgram experiment and then tell my why the religiosly correct (RC's) refuse to recognize their better cousins.

A Couple Observations

2011-03-07T08:37:00.000-08:00

The cliched depiction of a crazy person is a guy carrying a sign saying "The End is Near". What does that say about the 2012 crowd?

I am still looking for a pit bull owner who is carrying a poop bag. Now that would be a miracle.

All insurance is socialistic.

A Couple Quotes

2011-02-24T09:58:00.000-08:00

True friends stab you in the front. - Oscar Wilde

No American gets rich on his or her own. Every one of us rich people stands on the shoulders of people who stood on the shoulders of people who stood on the shoulders of people who stood on the necks of Native Americans. - Al Franken

Not a Dime's Worth of Difference between Dems and Repub's - just as Ralph Nader said.

2011-01-19T08:56:00.000-08:00

Amy Klobchur says police should have access to IRS filings to look for missing children. Is there no law we cannot abuse to save the children?

The cop in Arizona who said the shootings were due to an atmosphere of hate and fear is getting so much hate mail that his computer crashed (comedy writes itself). Speaking of paranoia, if you took guns away from the paranoid, the NRA would disappear. Right wing homegrown terrorism is more common than Arab terrorism. What in the hell is wrong with people? Have they foxed their brains out?

If You're so smart, Why Ain't You Rich?

2011-01-03T07:47:00.000-08:00

From a Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith:

Contributing to and supporting this euphoria are two factors little noted in our time or in past times. First is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten...when the same or closely similar circumstances occur again, sometimes in only a few years, they are hailed by a new, often youthful and always supremely self-c`onfident generation as a brilliantly innovative discovery...The second factor contributing to speculative euphoria and programmed collapse is the specious association of money and intelligence...In all free enterprise (once called capitalist) attitudes there is a strong tendency to believe that the more money, either as income or assets, of which an individual is possessed or with which he is associated, the deeper and more compelling his economic and social perception, the more astute and penetrating his mental processes...In practice, the individual or individuals at the top of these institutions are often there because, as happens regularly in great organizations, theirs was mentally the most predictable and, in consequence, bureaucratically the least inimical of the contending talent. He she, or they are then endowed with the authority that encourages acquiescence from their subordinated and applause from their acolytes and that excludes adverse opinion or criticism. They are admirably protected in what may be a serious commitment to error.

Rita Mae Brown says

2010-12-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

Wikileaks defense:

It is imperative that people write and speak the truth. There can be no community if a person is not as good as her/his word. Camus said, "It is immoral not to tell." If this (truth-telling) is prevented (as in Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Botha's South Africa) the civilization begins to die from the inside out.

She also does not say that people are sheep:

People like iron filings, will line up toward the center of force. For instance, if your setting is a small southern town and the sheriff is the real power in the town, then the majority of residents will support the sheriff. Many of them may not be conscious of this. To their way of thinking, the power is given, therefore not examined. It's the way things are. On a national scale, you could say that the power rests with multinational corporations.

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-24T07:43:00.001-08:00

Paula Poundstone says she is bulimic but forgets to throw up. Me too. Have a good one

When the house needs cleaning, get a woman!

2010-11-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

When women are the advisors, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do; then they act on it, and if it succeeds, they give the weaker half the credit of it; if it fails, they generously give her the whole. - Alcott, Little Women

The time to put some women in control is NOW when things are going to hell. I nominate Renee Dufault for FDA, Brooksley Born for Treasury Secretary, Geneviette Walker Lightfoot for SEC and Eileen Welsome for head of the IRS. It makes more sense to put the people who exposed problems in control instead of the "go along to get along" crowd. Come on, Obama, the time for party politics is gone.

David Ignatius Says

2010-11-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

The world is run by organized criminals. We still like to pretend that the world is run by governments which have neat little boundaries, and their own currencies and stamps and intelligence services and police forces. Those were the rules of the game during the cold war, but they've changed. Power has slipped from the governments into the hands of private organizations. In New York, private currency traders have more power of the dollar than the Federal Reserve. In Russia, the mafiya has more power than the army. In Mexico, the drug lords have more power than the President. In Japan, the politicians are just a front, the real power is held by the corporations and the yakuza. Real power around the world does not reside with governments any longer but with private industries. Real power is secret power.

When the last depression hit, the male role model was strong, quiet, honest, and decent (the radio show Jack Armstrong, All American Boy according to a cute bio I read called "The Lutefisk Ghetto"). In the last decade, the most popular movie is the Godfather and fraud is considered clever.

When the Mexican peso was crashing, people bought what they knew they would need like food or shingles for their house. I will post a picture of my new water heater when it shows up.

FreeMarket Follies Deux

2010-11-08T08:33:00.002-08:00

The Arizona immigrant law was written by the private prison industry. The oil companies wrote the energy policy. The drug companies wrote the Medicare prescription plan. Corrupt money changers who got large by swallowing other sharks wrote the bailout. What is the point of paying to keep legislators in a corral for lobbyists to pet, flatter and ride? A lot of tax money could be saved by eliminating all of the congressmen and everyone assisting them in the ABC (Always be Campaigning) amusement park.

John Leonard said:

Ours is a tantrum culture that measures everyone by his or her ability to produce wealth and morally condemns anyone who fails to prosper.

Is is any surprise that what Kant called "the will to be ethical" has been replaced by preachers sermonizing about the "prosperity gospel" whereby wealth is reward from the Kingdom of God? Or that Lloyd Blankfein says he is "doing God's work?"

Quite comic that the worst of the right-wing bullies chose the effeminate name of T party. Does it stand for tantrum? For the crazies who slipped down the foxhole? Or is it like Ayn Rand's devotees who called themselves the collective and are experts at misdirection, like Blackwater who is now Z? Please do not bring back the people who caused the world to give the peace prize to someone for what he was not.

Free Market Follies

2010-11-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

The torch and pitchfork teaparty crowds are not the only thinkers who can come up with simple solutions to complex problems. Given that the USA approves of the bounty and/or contractor methods of employment and given that the goal is to privatize government functions, eliminate taxes, fix health care, balance the budget and end unemployment simultaneously through free market principles, I propose the following small changes to America that transfers costs to the benefactors.

Adopt the Diamond Standard The gold standard was always a problem of distribution, aquisition, and storage. Frankly, everyone's faith in money's value is diminished no matter how many anti-counterfeiting dodads thay add to fancy it up and pretend that it is more than flexible-valued paper. Furthermore, a major problem with a gold standard is that one has to either round up the hoarding John Birchers or blow up a whole mountain to get a bucket of it. Diamonds are much more plentiful, are carbon based like other products we would die/kill for and people are already deluded by the DeBeers that they have value. Also, many diamonds are in Africa and those people could finally quit being third worlders and/or would be easier to kill than Arabs.
Social values expand. Finally divorcees could quit bitching about the years they wasted as diamonds become the next bubble and values skyrocket. Women will all insist that men "put a ring on it" and prostitution returns to its rightful place as a profitable business for the non-squeamish who are the true professionals at faking it.
Create jobs -Genuine Zirconium (my aunt brags that she has a genuine Zirconium) and rhinestone manufacturing to supply hustler's and p[oseur's demand become growth industries as do consulting diamond identification experts.

Tomorrow: Politicians become freelancers.

Virus problem

2008-12-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

My computer has a virus, so I may be gone for awhile. I trust the country can run itself without my advice.

Divorce lullaby -Folk Spinal Tap

2008-12-07T09:05:00.000-08:00

Jokes.com

Stephen Lynch - Why Mommy Left

Exactly Right on the Bailouts!

2008-12-05T08:45:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Bean on a Plate Edition

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Boy George

2008-12-05T06:19:00.000-08:00

Boy George guilty of false imprisonment - Yahoo! News Sometimes I get religious and think maybe God did create man just so he could laugh his ass off.

Dinosaurs roamed with man debated by idiots

2008-12-05T06:14:00.000-08:00

OpEdNews Questions Your Pastor Will Hate
Point:

I remember asking about how humans and dinosaurs could coexist. After all, they had to be a part of the creation story, even though not mentioned specifically. Or why would dinosaurs be taken on the ark, only to go extinct such a short time after? And how do you cage a T-Rex or fit a Brontosaurus on such a boat, much less a pair of all sorts?

I got a lot of looks but very few answers. As the years went by, I concluded that none of it was either possible or even addressed in the Bible. I realized humans and dinosaurs had nothing in common (unless you live in the SE USA) and the pastor was either ignorant, deliberately deceptive or hung up somewhere in between himself, not knowing what to say to a kid. I honestly think I would have appreciated knowing what I suspect he knew, that being the story of Noah was fiction and I didn't have to worry about dinosaurs or polar bears for that matter on the ark. It never happened.

Counterpoint:

I hate to bust one of your bubbles, There is only one location on the entire earth where dino remains have not been discovered, and it is the middle east, So dinos not being mentioned in the bible are likely a result of them not being able to survive there, not enough plant life to support the plant eaters and therefore resulting in the others not being there to eat them.

Some Great Quotes

2008-11-28T06:18:00.000-08:00

Using blogger for a file cabinet of things one wants to keep is great because of the ability to run a search and retrieve it. A few quotes I've run across and want to keep are these:

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one...People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." - A. J. Liebling

"To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats - we know it not". - Eric Hoffer

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle" - George Orwell

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."- Hunter Thompson

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread". -Anatole France

"Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? -stupid." -Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 1965

"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."-William Blum

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime" - Balzac

Amazon's Evil Cousin

2008-11-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

Check It Out

"How Modern Liberals Think"

2008-11-26T07:37:00.000-08:00

I was rewatching the TED Jonathan Haidt talk on the difference between liberals and conservatives. He said the conservatives want to preserve and the liberals want to destroy, which I thought was an incredible conclusion for an academic, but I agreed with him that both sides think they are right and neither side listens to the other. A comment on the TED talk linked this video, so I watched about half of it but the hate spewed here was overpowering. We have some common ground of course - both sides agree that the other side will destroy America. Actually, the way things are going we will implode from the greed of our haves and havemores and our "kiss up, kick down" society will probably fight each other for what is left and the meanest most organized dogs will win. Osama must be laughing in his cave.

This right wing darling says liberals hate America and he draws the analogy of a man standing by and watching his wife (who he claims to hate) get beat up. If the analogy would have been more accurate, he would have said that after the wife gets beat up, the perp (cop talk) shoots himself but still the husband goes out and throws a grenade at the town where the man formerly lived.

Cost of Counterterrorism

2008-11-26T04:47:00.000-08:00

Laura Donahue wrote the book, The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power, Politics, and Liberty.

Economics of Innocent Fraud by J.K. Galbraith

2008-11-25T12:31:00.000-08:00

The problem is that work is a radically different experience for different people. For many - and this is the common circumstance - it is compelled by the most basic command of life: It is what human beings must do, even suffer, to have a livelihood and its diverse components. It provides life's enjoyments and against its grave discomforts or something worse. Though often repetitive, exhausting, without any mental challenge, it is endured to have the necessities and some of the pleasures of living. Also a certain community repute. Enjoyment of life comes when working hours or the workweek is over. Then and then only is there escape from fatigue, boredom, the discipline of the machine, that of the workplace generally or of the managerial authority. It is frequently said that work is enjoyed; that common assertion is mostly applied to the feelings of others. The good worker is much celebrated; the celebration comes extensively from those who have escaped similar exertion, who are safely above the physical effort.

Here is the paradox. The word 'work' embraces equally those for whom it is exhausting, boring, disagreeable, and those for whom it is a clear pleasure with no sense of the obligatory. There may be a satisfactory feeling of personal importance or the acknowledged superiority of having others under one's command. 'Work' describes both what is compelled and what is the source of the prestige and pay that others seek ardently and enjoy. Already fraud is evident in having the same word for both circumstances.

But that is not all. Those who most enjoy work - and this should be emphasised - are all but universally the best paid. This is accepted. Low wage scales are for those in repetitive, tedious, painful toil. Those who least need compensation for their effort, could best survive without it, are paid the most. The wages, or more precisely their salaries, bonuses and stock options, are the most munificent at the top, where work is a pleasure. This evokes no seriously adverse response. Nor until recently did the inflated compensation and extensive perquisites of functional or nonfunctional executives lead to critical comment. That the most generous pay should be for those most enjoying their work has been fully accepted.

A synopsis from an Amazon review:

The "innocent" frauds that Galbraith calls to our attention are actually not all that innocent. What he means by "innocent" is that for the perpetrators, there is "no sense of guilt or responsibility" as though the fraudulent were children. Indeed from the perspective of Professor Galbraith's extensive experience and learning, many of the people who run our economies and our political systems are children. At any rate, there is a somewhat lofty and even grandfatherly tone to this treatise.

The first "fraud" is the use of the euphemistic "market economy" instead of the slightly stained "capitalism" to describe the present economic system. (By the way, Galbraith does not number his frauds. I do it for the sake of keeping them straight in my mind.)

The second is the fact that in the modern corporation, ownership--that is, the stockholders--have little to no authority while the professional managers call all the shots including setting their own compensation (fraud #7). Galbraith attributes this to the fact that corporations have become so vast and complex that the relatively unsophisticated ownership cannot really understand how to run the enterprise and so must yield to management.

Fraud number three is one that interests me a lot. Galbraith writes, "Reference to the market system as a benign alternative to capitalism is a bland, meaningless disguise of the deeper corporate reality--of producer power extending to influence over, even control of, consumer demand." (p. 7) This really is one of the most pressing problems of our time because the corporate power, through its ability to influence and control its legions of employees and the media, also has "influence over, even control of" who runs for office and who is elected in national and state governments. Indeed, in fraud #8 Galbraith notes that "A large, vital and expanding part of what is called the public sector is for all practical effect in the private sector." (p. 34) He specifically identifies the "defense" industry as being largely controlled by defense contractors in the private sector. Elsewhere in the essay, Galbraith refers to "the control of consumer choice and sovereignty" indicating that he understands that the control extends to the electorate. (p. 13)

Fraud number four is the way we hypocritically value "work." For some it is toil and for others it is a pleasure and indeed largely the reason for living, and yet how differently we are compensated, with those who need it least often getting the most in financial reward.

Fraud five refers to the corporate bureaucracy. While corporate people sneer at government agencies as being bureaucratic, large corporations have become just as bloated or even more so. (Chapter V: "The Corporation as Bureaucracy.")

Fraud #6 is the phony celebration of small businesses and family farms in the political rhetoric. Galbraith comments, "For the small retailer, Wal-Mart awaits. For the family farm, there are the massive grain and fruit enterprise and the modern large-scale meat producer." (p. 25)

Fraud #9 (I've mentioned numbers 7 and 8 above) is the fraud of economic predictions. Galbraith observes: "The financial world sustains a large, active, well-rewarded community based on compelled but seemingly sophisticated ignorance" (i.e., stockbrokers, stock analysts and other financial prognosticators). He adds, "...those...who tell of the future financial performance of an industry or firm, given the unpredictable but controlling influence of the larger economy, do not know and normally do not know that they do not know." (p. 40)

Finally there is the quaint fraud of the actions of the Federal Reserve Board, which Galbraith claims have no real effect on the economy.

Again, the blog being used as file cabinet. Sounds like a great book by one of my favorite people and a definite interlibrary loan candidate. A much better book than this snoozer or Joe the Plumber's new book unless he writes a sequel about how the government shouldn't pry into private business per his current lawsuit (dare we hope for a precedent?).

Scientology Celebrity Center Death

2008-11-24T04:25:00.000-08:00

Man attacks Scientology Celebrity Center with swords and is killed. Article says the swordsman had a former relation with Scientology, whatever that means. According to this site Scientology often uses sword symbolism, particularly in association with recruitment and in their elite inner organization called the Sea Organization.

Who Will Eat?

2008-11-24T03:30:00.000-08:00

Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply

Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

And in a Multinational Monitor article on the ten worst corporations, author Robert Weissman names Cargill as one of the worst, though I don't understand why he didn't include ADM:

The world's food system is broken. Or, more accurately, the giant food companies and their allies in the U.S. and other rich country governments, and at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, broke it.

Thirty years ago, most developing countries produced enough food to feed themselves [CHECK]. Now, 70 percent are net food importers.

Thirty years ago, most developing countries had in place mechanisms aimed at maintaining a relatively constant price for food commodities. Tariffs on imports protected local farmers from fluctuations in global food prices. Government-run grain purchasing boards paid above-market prices for farm goods when prices were low, and required farmers to sell below-market when prices were high. The idea was to give farmers some certainty over price, and to keep food affordable for consumers. Governments also provided a wide set of support services for farmers, giving them advice on new crop and growing technologies and, in some countries, helping set up cooperative structures.

This was not a perfect system by any means, but it looks pretty good in retrospect.

Over the last three decades, the system was completely abandoned, in country after country. It was replaced by a multinational-dominated, globally integrated food system, in which the World Bank and other institutions coerced countries into opening their markets to cheap food imports from rich countries and re-orienting their agricultural systems to grow food for rich consumers abroad. Proponents said the new system was a "free market" approach, but in reality it traded one set of government interventions for another - a new set of rules that gave enhanced power to a handful of global grain trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, as well as to seed and fertilizer corporations.

"For this food regime to work," Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, told the U.S. House Financial Services Committee at a May hearing, "existing marketing boards and support structures needed to be dismantled. In a range of countries, this meant that the state bodies that had been supported and built by the World Bank were dismantled by the World Bank. The rationale behind the dismantling of these institutions was to clear the path for private sector involvement in these sectors, on the understanding that the private sector would be more efficient and less wasteful than the public sector."

"The result of these interventions and conditions," explained Patel, "was to accelerate the decline of developing country agriculture. One of the most striking consequences of liberalization has been the phenomenon of ‘import surges.' These happen when tariffs on cheaper, and often subsidized, agricultural products are lowered, and a host country is then flooded with those goods. There is often a corresponding decline in domestic production. In Senegal, for example, tariff reduction led to an import surge in tomato paste, with a 15-fold increase in imports, and a halving of domestic production. Similar stories might be told of Chile, which saw a three-fold surge in imports of vegetable oil, and a halving of domestic production. In Ghana in 1998, local rice production accounted for over 80 percent of domestic consumption. By 2003, that figure was less than 20 percent."

The decline of developing country agriculture means that developing countries are dependent on the vagaries of the global market. When prices spike - as they did in late 2007 and through the beginning of 2008 - countries and poor consumers are at the mercy of the global market and the giant trading companies that dominate it. In the first quarter of 2008, the price of rice in Asia doubled, and commodity prices overall rose 40 percent. People in rich countries felt this pinch, but the problem was much more severe in the developing world. Not only do consumers in poor countries have less money, they spend a much higher proportion of their household budget on food - often half or more - and they buy much less processed food, so commodity increases affect them much more directly. In poor countries, higher prices don't just pinch, they mean people go hungry. Food riots broke out around the world in early 2008.

But not everyone was feeling pain. For Cargill, spiking prices was an opportunity to get rich. In the second quarter of 2008, the company reported profits of more than $1 billion, with profits from continuing operations soaring 18 percent from the previous year. Cargill's 2007 profits totaled more than $2.3 billion, up more than a third from 2006.

In a competitive market, would a grain-trading middleman make super-profits? Or would rising prices crimp the middleman's profit margin?

Well, the global grain trade is not competitive.

In an August speech, Cargill CEO Greg Page posed the question, "So, isn't Cargill exploiting the food situation to make money?" Here is how he responded:

"I would give you four pieces of information about why our earnings have gone up dramatically.

1. The demand for food has gone up. The demand for our facilities has gone up, and we are running virtually all of our facilities worldwide at total capacity. As we utilize our capacity more effectively, clearly we do better.
2. Fertilizer prices rose, and we are owners of a large fertilizer company. That has been the single largest factor in Cargill's earnings.
3. The volatility in the grain industry - much of it created by governments - was an opportunity for a trading company like Cargill to make money.
4. Finally, in this era of high prices, Cargill over the last two years has invested $15.5 billion additional dollars into the world food system. Some was to carry all these high-priced inventories. We also wanted to be sure that we were there for farmers who needed the working capital to operate in this much more expensive environment. Clearly, our owners expected some return on that $15.5 billion. Cargill had an opportunity to make more money in this environment, and I think that is something that we need to be very forthright about."

OK, Mr. Page, that's all very interesting. The question was, "So, isn't Cargill exploiting the food situation to make money?" It sounds like your answer is, "yes."

The Government You Deserve?

2008-11-24T03:09:00.000-08:00

CIA and Drugs

Interesting

2008-11-22T04:11:00.000-08:00

Nader Put Back on the Shelf

2008-11-20T08:28:00.000-08:00

I am afraid everything he ever said will still be true 4 years from now. Going back to my old name until the next round of lies and promises.

Lame Duck Follies

2008-11-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

Administration Protects Bush Appointees by Converting Positions to Career Civil Service Jobs - washingtonpost.com

The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions, called "burrowing" by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs.

Back from the grave to see everything is still the same

2008-11-18T04:40:00.000-08:00

Bail Out GM?

2008-11-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

GM Must Re-Make the Mass Transit System it Murdered

By Harvey Wasserman

In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses.

Just one American family in 10 then owned an automobile. Instead, we loved our 44,000 miles of passenger rail routes managed by 1,200 companies employing 300,000 Americans who ran 15 billion annual trips generating an income of $1 billion. According to Snell, “virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system.”

But GM lost $65 million in 1921. So Sloan enlisted Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, glass and rubber companies and an army of financiers and politicians to kill mass transit.

FDR forced Detroit to manufacture the tanks, planes and guns that won World War 2 (try buying a 1944 Chevrolet!). Now let a reinvented GM make the “weapons” to win the climate war and energy independence.

It demands re-tooling and re-training. But GM’s special role in history must now evolve into using its infrastructure to restore the mass transit system—and ecological balance—it has helped destroy.

The Israeli Mob Recycles

2008-11-17T08:30:00.000-08:00

Bottle recycling adds up to a $5 million-a-year industry, according to estimates by police and environmental groups. Police say criminals sell restaurants protection in exchange for empties, which leave no paper trail and offer crime families a relatively legitimate source of income.

Israeli mob boss killed in car bombing

Roy Zimmerman

2008-11-17T06:16:00.001-08:00

News Roundup

2008-11-17T03:05:00.000-08:00

Obama election spurs race crimes around country

"The principle is very simple," said BJ Gallagher, a sociologist and co-author of the diversity book "A Peacock in the Land of Penguins." "If I can't hurt the person I'm angry at, then I'll vent my anger on a substitute, i.e., someone of the same race."

Hollywood out of step with American morals: poll

Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said that religious values in America are "under attack," and 59% agreed that "the people who run the TV networks and the major movie studios do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans."

Money is the motive. Hollywood makes movies that they hope will make money and many genres are guaranteed like slashers while documentaries seldom pay. Religions that inflame fear and loathing and claim persecution make more money than those teaching peace and love. Same motives, different venues.

Meh

2008-11-17T02:23:00.000-08:00

'Meh': Apathetic expression enters dictionary

"Meh" was selected by Collins after it asked people to submit words they use in conversation that are not in the dictionary. Other suggestions included jargonaut, a fan of jargon; frenemy, an enemy disguised as a friend; and huggles, a hybrid of hugs and snuggles.

Jargonaut gets my vote, who hasn't been a victim of these bullshitters. Frenemy is a great, useful word; although I wish there was one for disloyal family but maybe that is too rare to need a special word; "huggles" is stupid like "humungous" and I hope it disappears. "Meh" is annoying, but "whatever" is more irksome, so I will stick with it.

If You Have the Stomach for It

2008-11-16T11:02:00.000-08:00

Torturing Democracy.

"Don't worry I can get you a job as a dog groomer"

2008-11-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

Is this Insane?

2008-11-12T05:47:00.000-08:00

How are bail-out operations currently financed in North America and Europe? The State gives good money to the banks and insurance companies on the verge of bankruptcy, either as recapitalisation or through the purchase of their toxic assets. What do the bailed-out institutions do with this money? They mainly buy safe assets to replace the toxic ones in the balance sheets. And what are the safest assets on the current market? Public debt securities issued by the governments of industrialised countries (treasury bonds issued in the US, in Germany, in France, in Belgium, you name it).

This is called looping the loop. The States give out money to private financial institutions (Fortis, Dexia, ING, French, British, US banks,...). To support this move they issue treasury bonds to which these same banks and insurance companies subscribe, while remaining private (since the States did not demand that the capital they injected give them any right to make decisions or even to be included in the voting process) and deriving new profits from lending out the money they have just received from the States to these same States while of course demanding maximum return.

Financing the Bailout:
A Holy Union for a Deuce of a Swindle By Eric Toussaint

Veterans Day

2008-11-11T07:21:00.000-08:00

Cartoon by Jim Day.

An excellent essay on Veterans Day.

Country First?

2008-11-11T04:22:00.000-08:00

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

A Quiet Windfall For U.S. Banks

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

The change to Section 382 of the tax code -- a provision that limited a kind of tax shelter arising in corporate mergers -- came after a two-decade effort by conservative economists and Republican administration officials to eliminate or overhaul the law, which is so little-known that even influential tax experts sometimes draw a blank at its mention. Until the financial meltdown, its opponents thought it would be nearly impossible to revamp the section because this would look like a corporate giveaway, according to lobbyists.

Section 382 of the tax code was created by Congress in 1986 to end what it considered an abuse of the tax system: companies sheltering their profits from taxation by acquiring shell companies whose only real value was the losses on their books. The firms would then use the acquired company's losses to offset their gains and avoid paying taxes.

"It's just like after September 11. Back then no one wanted to be seen as not patriotic, and now no one wants to be seen as not doing all they can to save the financial system," said Lee A. Sheppard, a tax attorney who is a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Analysts. "We're left now with congressional Democrats that have spines like overcooked spaghetti. So who is going to stop the Treasury secretary from doing whatever he wants?"

Bush's friends are pushing other gifts for each other before Bush slinks off to Texas or Paraguay or wherever he has his loot:
According to Christopher Brauchli:

* political appointees at the Department of Labor were drafting a rule that would make it more difficult to “regulate workers’ on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins.”
* Food and Drug Administration issued a draft assessment that concluded that the 100 studies performed by government scientists and university laboratories found health concerns associated with bisphenol A (BPA) were in error. BPA is the chemical found in can linings and baby bottles.
*the Interior Department released a new environmental impact statement changing a 1983 regulation that protects water quality from the waste generated by mountain top mining.
*the EPA is considering rules loosening pollution controls on power plants. The new rules will enable older power plants to continue functioning without upgrading their equipment since their pollution emission will be based on hourly rates of emissions instead of annual emissions.

And from the New York Times November 3 editorial, So Little Time, So Much Damage:
*Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.
*Mr. Bush’s secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, has recently carved out significant exceptions to regulations requiring expert scientific review of any federal project that might harm endangered or threatened species (one consequence will be to relieve the agency of the need to assess the impact of global warming on at-risk species).
*Interior also is awaiting E.P.A.’s concurrence on a proposal that would make it easier for mining companies to dump toxic mine wastes in valleys and streams.And while no rules changes are at issue, the interior department also has been rushing to open up millions of acres of pristine federal land to oil and gas exploration. We fear that, in coming weeks, Mr. Kempthorne will open up even more acreage to the commercial development of oil shale, a hugely expensive and environmentally risky process that even the oil companies seem in no hurry to begin. He should not.
*Soon after the election, Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, is expected to issue new regulations aimed at further limiting women’s access to abortion, contraceptives and information about their reproductive health care options...Existing law allows doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in an abortion. These changes would extend the so-called right to refuse to a wide range of health care workers and activities including abortion referrals, unbiased counseling and provision of birth control pills or emergency contraception, even for rape victims.

What's Old is New Again

2008-11-10T05:53:00.000-08:00

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; now we know that it is bad economics;" - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

My Opinion on the Puppy

2008-11-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

Actually, I don't care, but I worry that it is the only promise that Obama made that will be kept. His votes as Senator promised more of the same but the world was just so elated to get rid of the Republicans, they projected wonderful things onto Obama. Everything good has always percolated up, not been handed down, but we'll see. I'm not holding my breath. Americans will probably never make up their own minds and reject the media propaganda. I cannot believe that the third parties did so poorly when the choice between "business as usual" and "real change" were never so clear.

At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, "If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else would come along and lead you out."

Talk To Action | Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith

2008-11-03T15:06:00.000-08:00

Talk To Action | Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith

As the top leader of the New Apostolic Reformation, which extensive evidence suggests is Sarah Palin's chosen religious and political movement, C. Peter Wagner proclaimed, on June 21, 2006, that "God has declared through His prophets that the wealth of the wicked will be released to the Kingdom of God," and Wagner declared, threateningly, "the enemies' camp will be plundered."

Sarah Palin endorser Bishop Thomas Muthee, in a speech he gave before blessing and anointing Sarah Palin as a political leader, on October 16, 2005 at the Wasilla Assembly of God, laid out the same New Apostolic Reformation agenda, on how "God's kingdom" needed to "infiltrate" seven sectors of society. Muthee listed most of them: business and finance, schools and education, media and entertainment, politics and government.

Muthee also stated "The Bible says the wealth of the wicked is stored up for the righteous. Sarah Palin was in the audience. Minutes later, she was anointed, and blessed, with the laying on of hands.

Thomas Muthee is a top leader in C. Peter Wagner's movement, an internationally known celebrity in the New Apostolic Reformation and a personal friend of Wagner.

The New Apostolic Reformation is not a small movement: an apostle of C. Peter Wagner, one of the 500 apostles in Wagner's International Coalition of Apostles, owns what will be one of the tallest buildings in the world, the Jakarta Tower. One of the NAR's branches is successfully supplanting the Catholic Church in Brazil. The movement holds international conferences on advancing Christian hegemony in the business sector.

At the end of this post I've added the nine minute video in which Thomas Muthee urges "infiltration" of key sectors of society and then blesses and anoints Sarah Palin as a political leader.

Point - Counterpoint on Voting

2008-10-31T04:19:00.000-07:00

And James Clay Fuller lists just a few voter fraud red flags. One has to wonder if Bush brought soldiers back because he is anticipating riots from another stolen election.

Hate and Fear

2008-10-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

James Clay Fuller

2008-10-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

James Clay Fuller wrote a great blog entry on voter mentality. Here are a few samples:

Get out there and listen to those people, the American electorate. You'll find they believe that “all men are equal,” and don't grasp the fact that the equality the founders of this country aimed for was equality of opportunity. If you're a dummy, you are NOT equal to a knowledgeable, intellectually active person when it comes to discerning how best to govern this over-sized country.

It was not the illiterate stable hands nor even the barkeeps, good men though they may have been, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and led the Revolution against England.

That is an admission none of us are supposed to make, lest we be struck down as “elitists.” Strive to elect politicians who are smarter than the average loaf of bread and know more than the average 12-year-old and we become “Eastern elitists,” which is something as repulsive as dog droppings on the soles of one's shoes.

To some unknown degree, a majority of the American public walks blindly through life because we no longer have a functioning mass news system. We have a mass propaganda system, easily manipulated by the political right and inclined anyway to believe whatever the power elite tells them.

Need an example?

People who regularly read good Internet news sources such as TruthOut, know that the Republicans already have in place a massive system of vote suppression and election fraud which will function powerfully on Nov. 4. But ask your neighbors what they know of that.

You'll find that most of them “know” ACORN is a corrupt organization that has been busy registering fraudulent voters. They don't know that's been disproven time after time. They know nothing of the huge Republican vote suppression efforts in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado and other states, and they certainly don't know about the blatant fixing of voting machines to produce Republican election victories in some of those states.

CNN tried Thursday, Oct. 23, to report on vote suppression, but it so carefully, and falsely, “balanced” the reports that they gave the impression that the suppression techniques were necessary to stem massive voter fraud – which, in fact, is nonexistent except in swing states where the Republican Party has set up its scams.

The two Americas cannot cooperate in any meaningful way. The far right does not compromise, and it has filled its army of the ignorant with hate; it is like a horde of Genghis Khan's Mongols, intent on destroying all who impede conquest.

Wordsmart, a company that sells vocabulary-improvement home courses, says that from 1950 to the present, the useful vocabulary of the average American teenager dropped from 25,000 to 10,000 words. That's roughly a 60 percent decrease in the number words kids readily recognize and can use. It seems obvious: If you lack the words to describe, analyze, think with, you can't think critically to any real depth. At this rate, Americans will be reduced to “Me Tarzan, you Jane” by 2050.

Eric Fromm’s observation: “That millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make those people sane.”

I just don't understand

2008-10-27T08:03:00.000-07:00

If the banks are insolvent, wouldn't it make sense to raise the interest rate so that people put their money into savings? Are USA'ers addicted to always operating on credit?

Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus

2008-10-27T07:50:00.000-07:00

Joe Bageant: Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus

By an anonymous political consultant

Over the last many weeks we have all been subjected to endless news stories about Senator Obama's campaign "Move to the Center". Leaving aside the political illiteracy which underlines this phrase, the use of it reveals important clues about the rhetoric of electoral campaigns, whom they target and what they are trying to communicate.

Put simply, what "Moving to the Center," means is: moving towards power and money.

"Moving to the Center" is not a move to where the center of public opinion is, but it is a move to the center of where elite consensus is. Once the boundaries of that elite consensus are understood, then we can comprehend the limits of our public choices and more importantly what will be allowed within the confines of our electoral system.

It is important to understand that elite consensus itself is not static and can shift in moderate degrees, but it has definitive boundaries of which you can not cross and still be a viable player within the electoral system. These boundaries exist to the left and right within that consensus, but the institutional bias of the system is much harsher towards any moves to the left. This is because in its essence elite opinion is anti-populist and primarily concerned with protecting the fundamentals of the established economic order.

Every national campaign is in fact a dual conversation, one targeting voters while the other is directed towards the political, media, and economic elites. The purpose of the message targeting the first group is to win votes. The messages to the latter group is designed to form elite consensus, first for it not to correlate against you and secondly to have it help you win and eventually govern.

Surviving the contradictions of these dual dialogues is the primary element that makes a successful national campaign.

Let's examine the primary public policy issues and areas of discussion, and examine what the boundaries of elite opinion are on how they contradict or mirror public opinion.

Economics Trade and Globalization

The elite consensus on these issues is solidly to the right of public opinion. This is especially the case on the issues of trade and globalization. Support for supposed free markets, free trade and globalization are almost universal and unquestioned within elite circles.

This is the establishment issue, all else can be argued and debated but to question the system of privatized profit and socialized cost is the fastest road to political oblivion for any candidate for national office.

Within the confines of elite consensus no cost is ever too exorbitant in "reassuring" Wall Street and "calming the financial markets". No better example of this than the prompt and generous response of the Federal Reserve and the Congress to the recent financial crisis in the housing markets. With hardly any opposition the United States Government nationalized the losses which resulted from the bursting of the housing bubble. There where no calls of prosecution, lectures on personal responsibility, fears of creeping socialism or demands for conditional structural adjustments from bankers and investment houses. The scandal in fact is not the crime in this case, which is to be expected, but in the silence of the public and the political class to this public thievery.

It is precisely because of the iron grip of this consensus, that even if we have a new Democratic President and an enhanced Democratic majorities in the Congress, there will be no legislation signed into law to make it easier to organize workers, provide universal health care or deal with our ever widening class and income divide in the United States.

Social Issues

Elite consensus on the issues of race, sex and role of faith in public life are to the left of public opinion, the only area in which this is the case. Elite opinion is overwhelmingly secular, pro-choice, supportive of gay rights and hostile to overt displays of racism.

Tolerance and liberalism on this front is a very useful tool, since it buys political space to be more conservative on the more important money issues. It also enjoys the advantage of making the right enemies, after all who wants to be on Pat Robertson's side during weekend dinner parties at the Hamptons.

When social conservatives complain about the "Liberal Media" they are not wrong, but only in regard to their issues. The contempt of the American elite for the religious right is quite real. What social conservatives misunderstand is that the hostility against them is not because the threat their ideas represent but only a display of the traditional contempt that the merciless strong have for people they consider to be the feeble minded weak.

The significance of the religious right in our politics is only in the wonderful diversions their issues create. Issues that feed a war between urban educated middle classes against the more numerous, the ever more frustrated lower income fundamentalists on issues that are unsolvable in nature.

Foreign Policy

Elite consensus on this issue is center to right, discussions are allowed on the mechanics of running the empire and the management of the military industrial complex, but never regarding the reality of its existence, its necessity or usefulness to most Americans.

Within this narrow context there are always code words and phrases used to differentiate one candidate from another. Words and phrases like "all options are on the table", "realism", "toughness" and "experience" are simply a sliding scale on the willingness to kill in order to defend the interests of our ownership and governing class. This is an especially critical issue for Senator Obama, considering that most victims of our killing are non-whites. His vulnerability to the charges of dual loyalty on this issue, almost certainly means no end to wars, expansions of foreign military bases and occupations of third world countries under his watch.

The made up charges of having a radical minister, or being a Muslim, a Palestinian sympathizer or being married to a black nationalist was meant to limit his room to maneuver on these issues even if there was never any indication he was ever serious about moving in a bold progressive direction.

With his "weakness" defined as his associations with progressive movements, ideas or individuals, he can do nothing but run to the other direction for the next four years if he ascends to the office of President. This is the genius of McCarthyism at work, fifty years after its namesake split hell wide open.

The Politics of Personal Responsibility

Personal responsibility is a legitimate issue when discussed in the context of family and personal lives. When dragged into the political arena it is an issue that is entirely an elite construct. The actual positions of the elite are not particularly relevant. What is important is that the issues get discussed, not what results from that discussion. The relevance of this issue is not in what it illuminates but in what it hides.

The recent enthusiastic embrace of Senator Obama of the call for "responsibility" from inner city black fathers is a prime example of this issue. What he is really saying is, "I will never blame the owners of the country for the social problems caused by their economic policies." Senator Obama knows better than anyone that you can eliminate most of the problems of inner city fathers in a generation with a decent educational system and living wage jobs.

But all systems of power need a convincing and unlikable enemy, which can bury the contradictions of the system. In our case incoherent, undereducated black urban males fit the bill perfectly. They are being attacked not because they are a threat to the power structure, but precisely because they are not.

What voters are expected to believe is that after a 30-year class war against the bottom 90% of income earners, the source of their troubles are black rappers and inner city fathers and not criminality on Wall Street or a corrupt political system. The road to the White House over the past 30 years has been paved by pretending to believe the absurdity that the individuals who pull the levers of power over people's lives are named Willie Horton, Sister Souljah and Ludicrous, and not Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and Hank Paulson.

If as a society we are prepared to believe this, then we have lost the stuff that makes free men.

Sick and tired of re-fighting Vietnam War

2008-10-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

Joe Bageant: Sick and tired of re-fighting Vietnam War

Dear Joe,
Here's one of the reasons I'm voting for (in fact, already voted for) Obama: he is untainted by the Vietnam War.

McCain is a very dangerous man because he is so hungry to win a war, that is, to win Vietnam. I even heard him say in one of the so-called debates, "I know how to win a war." Oh, yeah? Not much evidence of that particular competence, but lots of evidence of a deep desire -- let's say, acute obsession.

I am sick and tired of re-fighting Vietnam and re-fighting the '60s. In 2004, Kerry made a tactical mistake by trying to cast himself as a Vietnam war hero, but not as the hero he was for his opposition to it. Then he got slimed by the old soldiers who were still pissed at him for that opposition. Today, McCain and Palin are trying to get mileage out of the Bill Ayers/SDS story -- but guess what? Nobody under 50 gives a damn! And they are right. It's time GET OVER IT.

I'm 61, so the 1960s is "my time." I'm not a bit sorry I opposed the war, broke a few social rules, and opted for a simpler life. Back in 1992, I had high hopes for Bill Clinton because he was of "my generation." I actually thought he would represent a turn-around toward some of the counter-culture values -- peaceful, creative, anti-materialistic, pro-human. Can you believe a grown woman could be so naive?

Well, I'm not so naive now as to believe that Obama is anything but a competent politician (thankfully, an intelligent one). But at least he isn't weighed down by the stinking leftovers of the military and social battles of 40 years ago. I am very much hoping that people younger than I am will determine this election -- and that's as it should be.

With modest hopes, but not succumbing to the "disease of optimism,"

Patty

How to do that irritating voice

2008-10-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

A better video of the voice patterns described here.

WMC Commentary She’s Phyllis Schlafly, Only Younger by Gloria Steinem -- September 4, 2008

Steve Conn: The Real Story of Troopergate

2008-10-16T04:26:00.000-07:00

Steve Conn: The Real Story of Troopergate

When Power Corrupts

2008-10-16T03:27:00.000-07:00

When Power Corrupts: 'Those People' Look a Lot Like Us

In the hindsight of headlines and media coverage, it's easy to see the executive being led away in handcuffs as a corrupt individual. But that same person probably perceives himself as ethical within the context of their organization. "These people sincerely believe that this is the way things are done at their company," Ashforth says.

Indeed, by convincing themselves that their behavior really is not unethical, employees can engage in corrupt business practices without feeling any pangs of conscience. Corrupt individuals depend on rationalizations to justify their behavior, including:

*
Denying responsibility: actors convince themselves they had no choice but to participate in unethical behavior.
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Denying injury:if no one is hurt, the behavior isn't really unethical.
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Denying victims: blaming violated parties for what happened on the grounds that they "deserved it."
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Social weighting: this rationalization includes condemning anyone who questions their actions as a way of mitigating the charges. Individuals may also focus on other companies that are "worse than we are" as a way to deflect responsibility.
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Appeal to higher loyalties: unethical behavior is justified if it was "for a good cause" like loyalty or higher ideals.
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Metaphor of the ledger: using seniority or other variables to justify unethical behavior on the grounds that they have earned the right.

As a group, department or organization systemically adopts rationalizations, employees reinforce each other's behavior and corruption is accepted as valid business practice. But this is not to say that individuals are not aware that their behavior violates societal norms –- that's why people don't talk about their actions outside of work. Instead, they compartmentalize their lives so that work becomes a separate world with different rules and norms -- a world that neighbors and friends wouldn't understand.

Socialization is another critical factor in understanding how corruption becomes institutionalized. To survive, newcomers must be initiated into the organization's corrupt systems. "You cannot coerce corruption in an organization because people will rebel," Ashforth says. Instead, organizations subtly socialize newcomers by rewarding attitude change toward unethical behaviors, gradually introducing corrupt activity, and creating situations where individuals feel they must compromise their values to solve problems. The key is to convince the newcomer that she or he has a choice all along when in fact, they really don't.

Often an organization is just too mired in corruption to be helped from within. In those cases, a strong external force -- often a lawsuit or criminal charges -- is needed to bring about change. Organizations can recover and even thrive after a bout of corruption, but it requires that current leadership -- scarred by too many years of rationalizations and excuses -- be replaced with new management that has a clear mandate to clean up the organization and the authority and support needed to get the job done.

I was doing a little math this morning. I read that subprime mortgages made up about 20% of the mortgages. According to 2000 statistics, there were about 106 million households and I rounded that up to 110 million. Dividing 20 percent of those into 700000000000 means those poor people were buying houses valued at over 300 thousand. Talk about your welfare queens and/or those mortgages were sold many times and it will take trillions to balance the books.

Or as one commenter said:

The normalization of white collar crime without punishment is now complete. I have not read of a single instance of any leaders responsible for the largest collapse of financial institutions in recent history being prosecuted for illegal activity. Most are receiving huge payments as they leave their wrecked organizations. The legitimization of cunningly crafted misrepresentation has permeated every sector of government and industry, leaving us a profoundly sick and dysfunctional economy. We will now reap the consequences.

There is no quick structural fix for societal decadence. It will take decades to recover."

Not a bang or a whimper but just a fart.

2008-10-13T11:37:00.001-07:00

Methane study reveals serious new climate threat as methane release in Russia occurs from polar ice melt. According to this article the dinosaurs suffocated from something similar. Time to quit worrying about right wing power crazed wackos rounding up liberals to put them in concentration camps and go for a walk. Something kind of comforting that everyone is in the same boat.

The Credit Crunch set to music

2008-10-13T04:58:00.000-07:00

The Coming Month

2008-10-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

Swiftboaters Start Your Engines is an interesting article about other attack dogs besides Rove.

I just think our country is racist and even the worst white man can beat the best black guy. This makes me so sad. I'm not saying Obama is the best black guy (picking someone like Biden, the credit card business whore) but he is leagues ahead of an idiot whose rise is due entirely to the misfortune of being a publicity-hound POW (most were ignored) because he was the son of privilege.

Few cartoons

2008-10-13T02:44:00.000-07:00

Jerry Holbert, cartoonist

Joe Heller, cartoonist

Gary Varvel, cartoonist

This Just In: Greed Is Not Good

2008-10-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

This Just In: Greed Is Not Good | CommonDreams.org Good use of the word entrepreneuriating in this excellent rant, very possibly the best I ever read..

Sons of Privilege

2008-10-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

I find it so disingenuous that McCain goes on and on about how inadequate (dog whistle for unionized) teachers should be fired. Now I don't know how much a plane costs, but McCain crashed three (five but we cannot count the one that blew up on board ship or the one shot down in Vietnam) but continued a career as a pilot rather than being demoted. I just cannot understand how any veteran who had to earn their rank could support either McCain or Bush who were unqualified for their positions from the very onset.

BTW I agree that poor teachers should be fired. Also poor doctors (a small percentage is responsible for most malpractice suits). Also poor lawyers such as those who are often used as public defenders. I believe in firing politicians (throw the bums out and get new bums) and impeachment.

Economic Problems and Global Warming

2008-10-12T05:43:00.000-07:00

Yahoo news article on global warming says economic disaster might delay the human solutions to global warming. IDJETS. Reduction in consumption and it's relation to earth health might be the one good thing to come of this.

Disney will never get another dime from me

2008-10-12T04:47:00.000-07:00

Scientific Misconduct has an interesting post about Disney. Seems laws only protect the people with power. No wonder so many people are anti-authoritarian.

After the painful experience of losing Oswald the Rabbit, the Disneys "held on to everything they did with a ferociously strong grip".

The discussion about Mickey resulted in a 2003 paper in a University of Virginia legal journal that argued "there are no grounds in copyright law for protecting" the Mickey of those early films. A Disney lawyer "threatened the author with legal action for "slander of title" under California law".

Earlier, Gregory S. Brown, a Disney researcher challenged the arguments of Disney lawyers who wrote that "Mickey Mouse had been created by Walt Disney Co. in 1928". The former archivist knew that the company didn't exist then. Without ruling on the merits of Brown's arguments, the judge tossed it aside as untimely. "He was clobbered with a $500,000 judgment". "His appeal was dismissed when he missed a filing deadline. Disney then seized $20,000 from his accounts" and he was left bankrupt.

They "threatened to sue three Florida day-care centers for painting Disney figures on their walls." They sued a a home-based business for $1 million "after a couple put on children's parties with ersatz Eeyore and Tigger costumes."

In fact "many of Disney's most famous figures were the creations of others, including Cinderella, Pinocchio, Pooh and Snow White, though it has vigorously protected its depictions of them." (A legal dispute with Disney bankrupted the publisher holding the Bambi copyright).

Capitalism is anti Ten Commandments

2008-10-12T03:33:00.000-07:00

Stores and restaurants open on the Lord's Day that should be kept holy? How about not coveting the neighbors goods - what does that do to advertisers? Not killing to the military?

Pit bull with lipstick

2008-10-12T02:47:00.000-07:00

My mom's coffee group gets together on Thursdays and I have been sending her jokes for the ladies. It isn't very much work to assemble 20 or so since I kept emails of jokes that I thought were funny when I first got a computer. In 2000 I got a bunch of lawyer jokes and one was, "What is the difference between a female attorney and a pit bull?" You guessed it. Plagiarism must be the preferred VP candidates hobby. Of course, if there were fines for stealing jokes, we would all be in debt.

Views of some Alaskans

2008-10-11T06:14:00.001-07:00

As for you my fine friend, you're a victim of disorganized thinking...You're confusing courage with wisdom. —The Wizard to the Cowardly Lion

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama

2008-10-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama - The Daily Beast by William Buckley's son, the libertarian writer of the great book/movie Thank Your for Smoking

The Derivatives Game

2008-10-11T02:45:00.000-07:00

By RALPH NADER

The derivatives markets of today have become a high stakes casino of unimaginable magnitude. Wall Street's bets have gone bad, and now the whole financial system is in peril. In a best-case scenario, it appears, the taxpayers will be required to rescue the system from itself. This is why Warren Buffett labeled derivatives "weapons of financial mass destruction."

Amazingly, there seems to be some lingering sense that current-day derivatives properly perform an insurance function.

Case in point: Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chairman. Greenspan says the world is facing “the type of wrenching financial crisis that comes along only once in a century,” but, reports the New York Times, "his faith in derivatives remains unshaken." Greenspan believes that the problem is not with derivatives, but that the people using them got greedy, according to the Times.

This is quite a view. Is it a surprise to Alan Greenspan that the people on Wall Street -- said to be ruled only by the opposing instincts of greed and fear -- "got greedy?"

This might be taken as just a bizarre comment, except that, of course, Alan Greenspan had some considerable influence in driving us to the current financial meltdown through his opposition to regulation of derivatives.

A series of deregulatory moves, blessed by Alan Greenspan, helped immunize Wall Street derivatives traders from proper oversight.

In 1995, Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) of 1995, which imposed onerous restrictions on plaintiffs suing wrongdoers in the stock market. The law was enacted in the wake of Orange County, California's government bankruptcy caused by abuses in derivatives trading. An amendment offered by Rep. Ed Markey would have exempted derivatives trading abuse lawsuits from the PSLRA restrictions. In defeating the amendment, then-Representative and now-SEC Chairman Chris Cox quoted Alan Greenspan, saying “it would be a grave error to demonize derivatives;” and, “It would be a serious mistake to respond to these developments [in Orange County, California] by singling out derivative instruments for special regulatory treatment.”

The New York Times reports how the Commodity Futures Trading Commission aimed for some modest regulatory authority over derivatives in the late 1990s. Strident opposition from Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan spelled doom for that effort.

Senator Phil Gramm helped drive the process along with the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated the derivatives market.

Defenders of deregulation argued that sophisticated players were involved in the derivatives markets, and they could handle themselves.

It's now apparent that not only could these sophisticated players not handle themselves, but that their reckless gambling has placed the entire world's financial system at risk.

It seems to be then a remarkably modest proposal for derivatives to be brought under regulatory control.

Warren Buffett cut to the heart of the problem in 2003: "Another problem about derivatives is that they can exacerbate trouble that a corporation has run into for completely unrelated reasons," he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders. "This pile-on effect occurs because many derivatives contracts require that a company suffering a credit downgrade immediately supply collateral to counterparties. Imagine, then, that a company is downgraded because of general adversity and that its derivatives instantly kick in with their requirement, imposing an unexpected and enormous demand for cash collateral on the company. The need to meet this demand can then throw the company into a liquidity crisis that may, in some cases, trigger still more downgrades. It all becomes a spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown."

That is to say, our current problems were foreseeable, and foreseen. There is no excuse for those who suggest that present circumstances --what many are calling a once-in-a-hundred-years event -- were unimaginable during earlier debates about regulation.

Some ideologues continue to defend derivatives from very strict government control. As Congress moves to adopt new financial regulations next year, hopefully the proponents of casino capitalism will be given no more credence than those insisting that the sun revolves around the earth.

Open the Debates

2008-10-10T07:40:00.001-07:00

Open the debates by Amy Goodman.

At the core of the problem with U.S. presidential debates is that they are run by a private corporation, the Commission on Presidential Debates, founded in 1987 by the Republican and Democratic parties. The CPD took over the debate process from the League of Women Voters. Just once since then has a third-party candidate made it into the debate—Ross Perot in 1992. After he did well, he was excluded in 1996. The CPD requires contenders to poll at 15 percent before they qualify for any debate.

Nader calls the 15 percent threshold “a Catch-22 level of support that is almost impossible for any third-party candidate to reach without first getting in the debates.”

Angry people

2008-10-10T01:31:00.000-07:00

This is what Fox, O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Palin, and Limbaugh have wrought.

One comment on Metafilter:

I found all those people shouting get a job to be hilarious. If you are liberal and out in the middle of the day, you are a stinking hippy. If you are conservative and out in the middle of the day you are running errands for Jesus.

The single issue anti-abortion people think that abortion will end if it is against the law. All I have to say about that is "look how well that worked for drugs". Abortions were available before they were made legal, they were just more dangerous. Same thing with drugs - available and rip offs everywhere and the users are the only ones who have to pay for breaking the law (sometimes with their lives spent in prison) - more of the "punish the monkey, let the organ grinder go."

A Little Humor

2008-10-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

Raymond James | Glossary of Investment Terms

2008-10-08T04:53:00.000-07:00

Raymond James | Glossary of Investment Terms: "Blue Sky Laws – A popular name for laws various states have enacted to protect the public against securities frauds. The term is believed to have originated when a judge ruled that a particular stock had about the same value as a patch of blue sky."

Replacing the values of right and wrong are the concepts of legal and illegal as if that’s the beginning and end of what dictates behavior. -Charles Osgood

James Clay Fuller poses this possibility

2008-10-08T03:04:00.000-07:00

So how did this American dive turn so quickly into a crisis involving the biggest banks around the world? France, Germany, all of Europe, in fact, have had to bail out some of their biggest banks over the past couple of weeks, apparently because all of them owned some of those mostly worthless mortgage-backed securities and/or depended on big American banks for loans. Now its spreading into Asia.

Huh?

It doesn't track, unless, for example, there is some sort of gigantic Ponzi scheme underlying the crisis. Did some of the undeniably crooked subprime mortgage lenders sell the same bundles of mortgages, the same securities, to more than one buyer? Are the perpetrators more criminal and are the banks even more careless and more stupid than we think?

On the other hand, it might be the End Times (In Abrahamic religions, End times are often depicted as a time of tribulation that precedes the appearance or return of the Messiah, a person who will usher in the Kingdom of God and bring an end to suffering and evil). Crackpots like Bush and Palin believe in and are praying for and indeed, helping to orchestrate the prayers of the nutters. No one is hoping for the rapture more than I am as then we will be rid of those loons. Here is a little of what McCain buddy Hagee has to say:

American RadioWorks - What Killed Sergeant Gray

2008-10-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

American RadioWorks - What Killed Sergeant Gray

I just listened to this and it was very interesting. Supporting soldiers and hating the war is like smiling at your bank cashier and hating the investment banker. PTSD through the eyes of the soldier.

More Realists, Less Pollyannas

2008-10-07T04:45:00.001-07:00

How Positive Thinking Wrecked the Economy

Naomi Wolfe on American coup

2008-10-07T03:30:00.001-07:00

She doesn't even mention America's Stasi, the informant brigade called Infragard (grown rich by the drug industry - ok that is my foil hat theory based on observation of launderering businesses and the righteous people who own them and too many pipes with timed fans on too many right-wing people's houses - probably not raising tomatoes in hydroponic gardens and not even bothering to hide them from the law). See you at the camps.

An excerpt from
They Thought They Were Free; The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer describes how the Germans were influenced. A quick read for those few people that believe anything useful can be learned by history. The right wing propaganda machine has inflamed the hate for liberals to equal any feelings the good Germans had for jews. Liberals believe in the innate goodness of man. I am so relieved that I am not a liberal.

Too late for Reason now

2008-10-06T13:45:00.000-07:00

Interesting

2008-10-06T04:56:00.000-07:00

Wall Street demonstration I think they are chanting: "You broke it, you bought it, the bailout is bullshit"

This American Life episode from this weekend explained what is going on and why it is so much more than bad mortgages. The program airs on Saturday afternoon and then again on Sunday night. The Saturday one was blacked out after the first few minutes - one hour of dead air which was really strange. I'm expecting an innocuous sounding 'bank holiday' quite soon.

And this tragedy is damn sad.

Karl Rove the master debater

2008-10-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

Compliments of Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly . com

Why Obama Cannot Win

2008-10-05T10:14:00.001-07:00

I don't know what it is, but every time I see a white guy walking towards me, I tense up. My heart starts racing, and I immediately begin to look for an escape route and a means to defend myself. I kick myself for even being in this part of town after dark. Didn't I notice the suspicious gangs of white people lurking on every street corner, drinking Starbucks and wearing their gang colours of Gap turquoise or J Crew mauve? What an idiot! Now the white person is coming closer, closer - and then - whew! He walks by without harming me, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

White people scare the crap out of me. This may be hard for you to understand - considering that I am white - but then again, my colour gives me a certain insight. For instance, I find myself pretty scary a lot of the time, so I know what I'm talking about. You can take my word for it: if you find yourself suddenly surrounded by white people, you better watch out. Anything can happen. As white people, we've been lulled into thinking it's safe to be around other white people. We've been taught since birth that it's the people of that other colour we need to fear. They're the ones who'll slit your throat!

Yet as I look back on my life, a strange but unmistakable pattern seems to emerge. Every person who has ever harmed me in my lifetime - the boss who fired me, the teacher who flunked me, the principal who punished me, the kid who hit me in the eye with a rock, the executive who didn't renew TV Nation, the guy who was stalking me for three years, the accountant who double-paid my taxes, the drunk who smashed into me, the burglar who stole my stereo, the contractor who overcharged me, the girlfriend who left me, the next girlfriend who left even sooner, the person in the office who stole cheques from my chequebook and wrote them out to himself for a total of $16,000 - every one of these individuals has been a white person. Coincidence? I think not.

I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord, never had a meeting at a Hollywood studio with a black executive in charge, never had a black person deny my child the college of her choice, never been puked on by a black teenager at a Mötley Crüe concert, never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, and I've never heard a black person say, "We're going to eliminate 10,000 jobs here - have a nice day!"

I don't think that I'm the only white guy who can make these claims. Every mean word, every cruel act, every bit of pain and suffering in my life has had a Caucasian face attached to it. So, um, why is it exactly that I should be afraid of black people.

I look around at the world I live in - and, I hate to tell tales out of school, but it's not the African-Americans who have made this planet such a pitiful, scary place. Recently, a headline on the front of the Science section of the New York Times asked Who Built The H-Bomb? The article went on to discuss a dispute between the men who claim credit for making the first bomb. Frankly, I could have cared less - because I already know the only pertinent answer: "It was a white guy!" No black guy ever built or used a bomb designed to wipe out hordes of innocent people, whether in Oklahoma City, Columbine or Hiroshima. No, friends, it's always the white guy. Let's go to the tote board:

Who gave us the black plague? A white guy.

· Who invented PBC, PVC, PBB, and a host of chemicals that are killing us? White guys.

· Who has started every war America has been in? White men.

· Who invented the punchcard ballot? A white man.

· Whose idea was it to pollute the world with the internal combustion engine? Whitey, that's who.

· The Holocaust? That guy really gave white people a bad name.

· The genocide of Native Americans? White man.

· Slavery? Whitey!

· US companies laid off more than 700,000 people in 2001. Who ordered the lay-offs? White CEOs.

You name the problem, the disease, the human suffering, or the abject misery visited upon millions, and I'll bet you 10 bucks I can put a white face on it faster than you can name the members of 'NSync. And yet, when I turn on the news each night, what do I see again and again? Black men alleged to be killing, raping, mugging, stabbing, gangbanging, looting, rioting, selling drugs, pimping, ho-ing, having too many babies, fatherless, motherless, Godless, penniless. "The suspect is described as a black male... the suspect is described as a black male... THE SUSPECT IS DESCRIBED AS A BLACK MALE..." No matter what city I'm in, the news is always the same, the suspect always the same unidentified black male. I'm in Atlanta tonight, and I swear the police sketch of the black male suspect on TV looks just like the black male suspect I saw on the news last night in Denver and the night before in LA. In every sketch he's frowning, he's menacing - and he's wearing the same knit cap! Is it possible that it's the same black guy committing every crime in America?

I believe we've become so used to this image of the black man as predator that we are forever ruined by this brainwashing. In my first film, Roger & Me, a white woman on social security clubs a rabbit to death so that she can sell him as "meat" instead of as a pet. I wish I had a nickel for every time in the past 10 years that someone has come up to me and told me how "horrified" they were when they saw that "poor little cute bunny" bonked on the head. The scene, they say, made them physically sick. The Motion Picture Association of America gave Roger & Me an R [18] rating in response to that rabbit killing. Teachers write to me and say they have to edit that part out of the film, if they want to show it to their students.

But less than two minutes after the bunny lady does her deed, I included footage of a scene in which police in Flint, Michigan, shot a black man who was wearing a Superman cape and holding a plastic toy gun. Not once - not ever - has anyone said to me, "I can't believe you showed a black man being shot in your movie! How horrible! How disgusting! I couldn't sleep for weeks." After all, he was just a black man, not a cute, cuddly bunny. The ratings board saw absolutely nothing wrong with that scene. Why? Because it's normal, natural. We've become so accustomed to seeing black men killed - in the movies and on the evening news - that we now accept it as standard operating procedure. No big deal! That's what blacks do - kill and die. Ho-hum. Pass the butter.

It's odd that, despite the fact that most crimes are committed by whites, black faces are usually attached to what we think of as "crime". Ask any white person who they fear might break into their home or harm them on the street and, if they're honest, they'll admit that the person they have in mind doesn't look much like them. The imaginary criminal in their heads looks like Mookie or Hakim or Kareem, not little freckle-faced Jimmy.

No matter how many times their fellow whites make it clear that the white man is the one to fear, it simply fails to register. Every time you turn on the TV to news of another school shooting, it's always a white kid who's conducting the massacre. Every time they catch a serial killer, it's a crazy white guy. Every time a terrorist blows up a federal building, or a madman gets 400 people to drink Kool-Aid, or a Beach Boys songwriter casts a spell causing half a dozen nymphets to murder "all the piggies" in the Hollywood Hills, you know it's a member of the white race up to his old tricks.

So why don't we run like hell when we see whitey coming toward us? Why don't we ever greet the Caucasian job applicant with, "Gee, uh, I'm sorry, there aren't any positions available right now"? Why aren't we worried sick about our daughters marrying white guys? And why isn't Congress trying to ban the scary and offensive lyrics of Johnny Cash ("I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die"), the Dixie Chicks ("Earl had to die"), or Bruce Springsteen ("I killed everything in my path/I can't say that I'm sorry for the things that we done").

Why the focus on rap lyrics? Why doesn't the media print lyrics such as the following, and tell the truth? "I sold bottles of sorrow, then chose poems and novels" (Wu-Tang Clan); "People use yo' brain to gain" (Ice Cube); "A poor single mother on welfare... tell me how ya did it" (Tupac Shakur); "I'm trying to change my life, see I don't wanna die a sinner" (Master P).

African-Americans have been on the lowest rung of the economic ladder since the day they were dragged here in chains. Every other immigrant group has been able to advance from the bottom to the higher levels of our society. Even Native Americans, who are among the poorest of the poor, have fewer children living in poverty than African-Americans.

You probably thought things had got better for blacks in this country. After all, considering the advances we've made eliminating racism in our society, one would think our black citizens might have seen their standard of living rise. A survey published in the Washington Post in July 2001 showed that 40%-60% of white people thought the average black person had it as good or better than the average white person.

Think again. According to a study conducted by the economists Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway and David C Clingaman, the average income for a black American is 61% less per year than the average white income. That is the same percentage difference as it was in 1880. Not a damned thing has changed in more than 120 years.

Want more proof? Consider the following: · Black heart attack patients are far less likely than whites to undergo cardiac catheterisation, regardless of the race of their doctors. · Whites are five times more likely than blacks to receive emergency clot -busting treatment after suffering a stroke. · Black women are four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth. · Black levels of unemployment have been roughly twice those of whites since 1954.

So how have we white people been able to get away with this? Caucasian ingenuity! You see, we used to be real dumb. Like idiots, we wore our racism on our sleeve. We did really obvious things, like putting up signs on rest-room doors that said WHITES ONLY. We made black people sit at the back of the bus. We prevented them from attending our schools or living in our neighbourhoods. They got the crappiest jobs (those advertised for NEGROES ONLY), and we made it clear that, if you weren't white, you were going to be paid a lower wage.

Well, this overt, over-the-top segregation got us into a heap of trouble. A bunch of uppity lawyers went to court. They pointed out that the 14th Amendment doesn't allow for anyone to be treated differently because of their race.

Eventually, after a long procession of court losses, demonstrations and riots, we got the message: if you're going to be a successful racist, better find a way to do it with a smile on your face. We even got magnanimous enough to say, "Sure, you can live here in our neighbourhood; your kids can go to our kids' school. Why the hell not? We were just leaving, anyway." We smiled, gave black America a pat on the back - and then ran like the devil to the suburbs.

At work, we whites still get the plum jobs, double the pay, and a seat in the front of the bus to happiness and success. We've rigged the system from birth, guaranteeing that black people will go to the worst schools, thus preventing them from admission to the best colleges, and paving their way to a fulfilling life making our caffe lattes, servicing our BMWs, and picking up our trash. Oh, sure, a few slip by - but they pay an extra tariff for the privilege: the black doctor driving his BMW gets pulled over continually by the cops; the black Broadway actress can't get a cab after the standing ovation; the black broker is the first to be laid off because of "seniority".

We whites really deserve some kind of genius award for this. We talk the talk of inclusion, we celebrate the birthday of Dr King, we frown upon racist jokes. We never fail to drop a mention of "my friend - he's black..." We make sure we put our lone black employee up at the front reception desk so we can say, "See - we don't discriminate. We hire black people."

Yes, we are a very crafty, cagey race - and damn if we haven't got away with it! I wonder how long we will have to live with the legacy of slavery. That's right. I brought it up. SLAVERY. You can almost hear the groans of white America whenever you bring up the fact that we still suffer from the impact of the slave system. Well, I'm sorry, but the roots of most of our social ills can be traced straight back to this sick chapter of our history. African-Americans never got a chance to have the same fair start that the r est of us got. Their families were wilfully destroyed, their language and culture and religion stripped from them. Their poverty was institutionalised so that our cotton could get picked, our wars could be fought, our convenience stores could remain open all night. The America we've come to know would never have come to pass if not for the millions of slaves who built it and created its booming economy - and for the millions of their descendants who do the same dirty work for whites today.

It's not as if we're talking ancient Rome here. My grandfather was born just three years after the Civil War. That's right, my grandfather. My great-uncle was born before the Civil War. And I'm only in my 40s. Sure, people in my family seem to marry late, but the truth remains: I'm just two generations from slave times. That, my friends, is not a "long time ago". In the vast breadth of human history, it was only yesterday. Until we realise that, and accept that we do have a responsibility to correct an immoral act that still has repercussions today, we will never remove the single greatest stain on the soul of our country.

© Michael Moore, 2002.

Originally published on March 29 2002 in The Guardian, UK.

Interesting Trivia

2008-10-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore be incapable of fighting in the future. This famous weapon was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as "plucking the yew" (or "pluck yew").

Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, "See, we can still pluck yew! PLUCK YEW!" Since 'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodental fricative 'F', and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute are mistakenly thought to have something to do with an intimate encounter. It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as "giving the bird". And yew thought yew knew everything!

UPDATE: False according to Snopes - thanks BeyondKen. My apologies for not checking, I can't tell you how many times I have referred e-mailers to Snopes when they sent some trash and I am embarrassed about being such a dupe. I liked this one and heck, it used the impressive word "labiodental". Even more humiliating, it is from 1999 - nearly ten years old. So much for being up to date.

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives | Video on TED.com

2008-10-05T05:59:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives | Video on TED.com

An Excellent Rant

2008-10-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

I have seen this too at supposed charities

Looking on the bright side of a depression

2008-10-03T06:02:00.000-07:00

Many of our most important social gains were actually achieved in periods of crisis.

Public education and shortening the 16-hour workday were first won during the tumultuous robber-baron years of the late 19th and early 20th century. Social security, unemployment insurance and other “New Deal” reforms were legislated right in the middle of the Great Depression. And finally, the historic GI bill was passed while the government was arguing, unsuccessfully, for “patriotic” extension of the WWII wage freeze.

From a business point of view, any profits diverted to social spending or to increased wages and benefits is a waste. As a result, all these reforms required enormously-powerful popular movements or serious threats of social upheaval such as the incredible 1946 rolling-strike wave in which 10 million participated.

Fortunately, from the very beginning there were many within the ranks of American labor who openly challenged capitalism’s primacy of private profit over public welfare.

In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were actually some 323 newspapers and periodicals that took up the cause of democratic socialism and kept a steady check on the now thoroughly, historically-discredited JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller industrialists.

The Appeal to Reason, one of the most widely read socialist papers, reached a weekly circulation of 600,000 copies in 1912.

On Election Day in that same year, labor’s universally-recognized national icon, Eugene V. Debs, won 897,000 votes for President as candidate of the Socialist Party (SP)--and this was before women had the right to vote. The SP had almost 118,000 dues-paying members.

- http://www.counterpunch.org/finamore09292008.html

On the other hand, we could go the way of others in our hemisphere. We are just a fat banana republic (Banana Republic is a pejorative term for a small country that is politically unstable, dependent on limited agriculture (e.g., bananas), and ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy and corrupt clique...a banana republic also typically has large wealth inequities, poor infrastructure, poor schools, a "backward" economy, low capital spending, a reliance on foreign capital and money printing, budget deficits, and a weakening currency.-Wikipedia). Good thing we have Blackwater to keep order but "Yes we Have No Bananas".

Debate

2008-10-03T05:35:00.000-07:00

High school debating should be a required school activity. It teaches how to think on your feet and how to construct a persuasive argument. Sure, preparation is part of it, but the fun of watching a high school debate is seeing how they can think fast. Believe me, it is more interesting than sports.

The VP thing yesterday was not a debate. That thing (whatever it was) was a waste of time. People are complaining the Ifill is writing a book about Obama and three other young black politicians so she should not have been the moderator. That thing didn't need a moderator because the only function she performed was to interrupt the stump speeches of either side. BORING.

I agree with Grandpa

2008-10-02T11:03:00.001-07:00

In case you were living in a cave and never saw the movie

2008-10-02T08:19:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Sucker

2008-10-02T04:44:00.000-07:00

“Yes, as through this world I've wandered I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen” - Woody Guthrie

Like clockwork, economic collapse occurs about the time that the people who lived through the last one die off. Day traders have replaced the Savings and Loan junk bond sellers that was just a preview of today's attraction but as Joseph Kennedy said in the late 20's, he knew it was time to get out when his shoeshine boy was giving him stock tips. As in all the other delusions, the true value of things gets inflated - perception becomes reality until the point where the illusion cannot be propped up. People are so stupid, there was even a tulip bulb bubble.

The book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is required reading in business classes but business students usually take the message that money can be made if one gets in early and gets out in time, rather than that humans are greedy nuts and have always been so and it is not nice to take advantage of their gullibility.

"Money for no work" is the cause of nearly all the crime in the world (call it greed if you prefer) and it is the hook used for bait in every con job. (The first known usage of the term "confidence man" or con was in 1849; it was used by the press during the trial of William Thompson. Thompson chatted with strangers until he asked if they had the confidence to lend him their watches, whereupon he would walk off with the watch. - Wikipedia). This whole mess was fraud and people want the bailout to save their 401K's and Money Markets. FAT CHANCE SUCKERS. Time to start saving and making do (like your grandma) and live in the world of reality until we can start the cycle again and time to quit listening to how we just need to remain confident in the free market.

PS: A cop who offers a pothead a joint gets in trouble for "entrapment". You can not believe how aggressive the loan companies were to get poor risks signed up. The guy who was going to buy my house had gone through a bankruptcy already and just worked part time as a jail guard at a city jail and they wanted to give him $70,000. They didn't care if he could pay, they just wanted a name on a piece of paper that they could resell to sucker investors looking for the next new thing. I think the meanest thing you can say to a victim is "you brought it on yourself" so if it helps, instead I will say, "I think it is unfair." I think it is most unfair to the people who kept their money in savings accounts and will have it devalued because everyone else wanted money for nothing.

YouTube - The Truth about the Wall Street Bailout:

2008-10-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

YouTube - The OBAMA GIRL and RALPH NADER Show!

2008-10-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

Mike Whitney: Black Monday?

2008-10-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

Mike Whitney: Black Monday?: "Indeed, the $700 billion is just part of a massive 'pump and dump' scheme engineered with the tacit approval of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Once the banksters have offloaded their fraudulent securities and crappy paper on Uncle Sam, they will do whatever they need to do pad the bottom line and drive their stocks up. That means they will shovel capital into hard assets, foreign currencies, gold, interest rate swaps, carry trade swindles, and Swiss bank accounts. The notion that they will recapitalize so they can provide loans to US consumers and businesses in a slumping economy is a pipedream.

The US is headed into its worst recession in 60 years. The housing market is crashing, securitzation is kaput, and the broader economy is drifting towards the reef. The banks are not going to waste their time trying to revive a moribund US market where consumers and businesses are already tapped out. No way; it's on to greener pastures. They'll move their capital wherever they think they can maximize their profits. In fact, a sizable portion of the $700 billion will likely be invested in commodities, which means that we'll see another round of hyperbolic speculation in food and energy futures pushing food and fuel prices into the stratosphere. Ironically, the taxpayers’ largesse will be used against them, making a bad situation even worse."

Bill Maher on Daily Show

2008-10-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

Maher and Jon Stewart talked about how religion gives comfort to people. Isaac Asimov said:

It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people... If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with.

Jon said that he understood how someone in prison might need faith but there are alternatives: "Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them" was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's mantra that helped him survive the Gulag.

According to the review in Village Voice the movie bombs. I think Julia Sweeney probably made the point better because she is less caustic. I don't know why I am posting on religion anyway when everyone should choose their own and then shut up about it instead of trying to convert people. My apologies.

Bailout Legislation

2008-09-30T07:09:00.001-07:00

I don't understand why they are spending all this time and effort trying to write a bankruptcy bill for investment bankers. Can't they just use the one that they wrote for individuals - the one that made it so hard to get out from under crushing medical bills? Corporations wanted personhood, didn't they?

Wall Street Suicides

2008-09-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

On the day after Black Thursday, the New York Times reported that many "wild and false" rumors were spreading throughout the country, including claims that 11 speculators had committed suicide and that a crowd had gathered around a Wall Street building because they thought a workman was a speculator preparing to jump. That same day, Will Rogers quipped that "you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of"; and soon Eddie Cantor was joking that hotel clerks were asking guests if they wanted rooms "for sleeping or jumping." By mid-November, New York's chief medical examiner tried to put the kibosh on the rumor by publicly announcing that there had been fewer suicides between Oct. 15 and Nov. 13 than there had been in the same period the year before. (Winston Churchill—himself a major stock-market investor—may have added to the rumor mill: He was in New York during the crash and, in a December 1929 Daily Telegraph article, recalled how, under his own hotel window, "a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storey and was dashed to pieces.")

The two Wall Street leaps that did take place, however, were dramatic enough to sustain the myth. On Nov. 5, Hulda Borowski, a clerk who'd been working at a Wall Street stock brokerage house for 28 years, leapt off a 40-story building. On Nov. 16, three days after the market had taken another dive, G.E. Cutler, the head of a produce firm, climbed onto the ledge of his lawyer's office. The New York Times reported that an attorney struggled to pull the frantic Cutler inside, to no avail:

The week following the 1987 stock-market crash, at least two suicides in the United States were linked to the crisis, but none involved a window plunge. (One of the incidents was a murder-suicide in which a distraught investor in Miami killed a Merrill Lynch executive and then himself.) There were also rumors that the Pacific Stock Exchange had asked Golden Gate Bridge officials to be on alert for jumpers, but the stock exchange denied the claim.

- Slate

Thanks to Vineyard Views for the great picture, though the sign should replace the s with a $.

In My Neighborhood

2008-09-29T05:35:00.000-07:00

My neighbor's mother's funeral is today and I know the respectful thing is to show my support for them but I just cannot go inside a church or a starbucks because the phoniness is just too much for me to handle.

Christianity in a nutshell (if you have never heard of it) is that Christ died for your sins. I think that whole idea leads to irresponsibility. Another neighbor's son is in prison for arson and his mother (like any good mother) says he is innocent but he confessed to keep his girlfriend out of jail. Now if that is true, the girlfriend is a real jerk for letting someone take the rap for her and I wouldn't want to associate with her or her kind.

Also, I don't see how there can be justice such as a hell for our enemy's deeds, but forgiveness and heaven for our own. The whole reward and punishment might work for dogs, but in humans it produces the brats that are screaming in the aisles of the grocery store until they finally get something if they will just be good. I like the "Santa Clause is Coming to Town" system that requires you to "Be Good for Goodness Sake".

Of course the whole religion thing employs a lot of people so I suppose that is a good thing as it keeps them out of the other power trip - politics.

Not Crazy but Consumer

2008-09-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went to a rummage sale at a mental health clubhouse. I had a bunch of crap I could have contributed to their sale and asked the woman taking the money if they wanted it for their cause. I was thinking they were planning an outing or something fun. The woman said that the sale was just an activity for their "consumers" and the money was going to an organized charity. I suppose she thought the label "consumer" was the least offensive one possible and at first, it bugged me as just more jargon that evolved from the equally irritating "client" but the more I thought about it, the more it may indeed be the perfect label for crazy people.

The term schizophrenic is often misused as somebody who does opposing things simultaneously so perhaps in that common kind of usage, "consumer" is the best descriptive noun. I sell stuff on ebay and there are two ways to pick things to sell. Currently popular ("all the rage" and how irrational is rage) and rare. Talk about your opposing goals.

I was visiting my neighbor and was trying to explain how insane shopping is. For a short while, I took consignments and sold three charger plates for a woman. They were the same shapes, the same colors, the same manufacturer (sorry, I cannot remember it anymore) and were just crude drawings of animals and things on the plates (the sale term is "primitive"). Two sold for under $10 but the one with the horse sold for over $200 because not as many were manufactured - they weren't even handpainted but machine made. How insane is it to want a variety of a common thing just because it is more rare since it serves the same purpose. The only reason is to inspire envy in other people. Same with books. I call rare books, "knick knack" books because they are not to be read, only for display. Same with mansions because you can only be in one room at a time and why wouldn't rich people live in a little house with a vault for diamonds and gold (or pickles if they become rare) instead of wasting all that glass and wood and chandelier electricity unless the goal is to inspire envy? I don't think I made my point because my neighbor wished I could remember the manufacturer.

I collect toasters that were probably popular in their day and thus have no resale value on EBay. Some have really interesting, esthetically pleasing designs. Because they were popular in their day, they are plentiful and CHEAP, usually in the free box and I am amazed that most work, just in case a big toast starved crowd shows up. My collection is not as good as my friend's collection of BIC lighters from many countries. You cannot believe all the places those things are made and the country of origin is usually printed on them. She picks them up by the side of the road. Her collection is interesting and better than mine in that it hardly takes any room. I am envious ;).

PS: The BIC collection would be easier to steal but both would be easy to replace.

Know Your Schemes

2008-09-28T04:34:00.000-07:00

*A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves promising or paying abnormally high returns ("profits") to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from net revenues generated by any real business.

The catch is that at some point one of three things will happen:
1. the promoters will vanish, taking all the investment money (less payouts) with them;
2. the scheme will collapse of its own weight, as investment slows and the promoters start having problems paying out the promised returns (and when they start having problems, the word spreads and more people start asking for their money, similar to a bank run);
3. the scheme is exposed, because when legal authorities begin examining accounting records of the so-called enterprise they find that many of the "assets" that should exist do not.

* A pyramid scheme is a form of fraud similar in some ways to a Ponzi scheme, relying as it does on a disbelief in financial reality, including the hope of an extremely high rate of return. However, several characteristics distinguish pyramid schemes from Ponzi schemes:
o In a Ponzi scheme, the schemer acts as a “hub” for the victims, interacting with all of them directly. In a pyramid scheme, those who recruit additional participants benefit directly (in fact, failure to recruit typically means no investment return).
o A Ponzi scheme claims to rely on some esoteric investment approach, insider connections, etc., and often attracts well-to-do investors; pyramid schemes explicitly claim that new money will be the source of payout for the initial investments.
o A pyramid scheme is bound to collapse a lot faster, simply because of the demand for exponential increases in participants to sustain it. By contrast, Ponzi schemes can survive simply by getting most participants to "reinvest" their money, with a relatively small number of new participants.

* A bubble. A bubble relies on suspension of belief and an expectation of large profits, but it is not the same as a Ponzi scheme. A bubble involves ever-rising (and unsustainable) prices in an open market (be that shares of a stock, housing prices, the price of tulip bulbs, or anything else). As long as buyers are willing to pay ever-increasing prices, sellers can get out with a profit. And there doesn't need to be a schemer behind a bubble. (In fact, a bubble can arise without any fraud at all - for example, housing prices in a local market that rise sharply but eventually drop sharply because of overbuilding.) Bubbles are often said to be based on "greater fool" theory.

* Robbing Peter to pay Paul. When debts are due and the money to pay them is lacking, whether because of bad luck or deliberate theft, debtors often make their payments by borrowing or stealing from other monies they have. It does not follow that this is a Ponzi scheme, because from the basic facts set out there is no indication that the lenders were promised unrealistically high rates of return via claims of unusual financial investments. Nor (from these basic facts) is there any indication that the borrower (banker) is progressively increasing the amount of borrowing ("investing") to cover payments to initial investors (as, again, Ponzi was not the first to do).

-Wikipedia

The confidence men (con artists for short) say "you can't cheat an honest man" because they nearly always use greed as their bait. As long as everyone stays confident that a system works, it can go on. That is why it is so essential that investor confidence needs to be restored before people find out that it is all unsustainable air and we are a country that produces little but wants to live well through gambling and exploitation. The game is over and like all schemes, the winners got in early and are by now off sipping margaritas on their yachts. Like Joseph Kennedy supposedly said just before the 29 crash, he knew it was time to get out of the market when the shoeshine boy was giving him stock tips. If I could require the reading of just one book for every human, it would be Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (written in 1852). It is a catalog of mass human greed and folly through the ages.

If only that 700 billion was used to rebuild our infrastructure by hand so many people had real work and we were back in the world of reality (like the WPA program). If they put that money into the base, it might percolate up, but they will give it to the top, still believing that it will trickle down. Nothing new here, it is the same song that has been going on for centuries, the perpetrators just tweak the verse a little so people think it a new tune. They will never learn from this because it is the human nature to never be satisfied, i.e. other animals will never build a home larger than they need.

I also believe this

2008-09-26T03:31:00.000-07:00

i begin to wonder if the republicans even WANT to win this election. i mean, they got their money, right? they got control of the oil. they've pretty much guaranteed that universal health care and social security reform (remember that?) are pretty much non-starters at this point. all the corporations are as big and vertically integrated and unregulated as possible. education is in the toilet. habeus corpus has been repealed. all the jobs are overseas. bible-thumping, homophobic christian fundamentalism is rampant. 1984 has come true (thanks AT&T!). they've established a homeland gestapo. they've killed an absolute shitload of brown people, both here and abroad. and they've pretty much guaranteed that the dems are gonna smell like shit for the next 4 years as all this sinks in. i just can't see anything more they could want.

and you guys are surprised that instead of choosing a VP candidate they opted instead to just pick up a bobble-head doll from the gas station around the corner. really?
posted by sexyrobot at 12:26 AM on September 26

Metafilter

Let Ralph Debate

2008-09-25T07:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks Michael.