A Rat's Eye View

Book Review: American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

2012-03-04T23:45:00.001-06:00

Almost every word in this book is an explanation of why our mercenary military is doing to be the death of democracy. If "American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History" had been written 236 years ago, Chris Kyle would have been British and he would have been saying exactly the same things about the American "insurgents" he had slaughtered. His lack of empathy for the country he invaded and the people who fought to regain control of their country is embarrassing. The fact that he considers himself a great patriot and brags about decorating his vehicles with a Texas flag is telling.

When you read a book like this, you hope that there will be some sign of personal growth in the journey the author makes. The biggest disappointment was that Kyle is exactly the same amoral, bloodthirsty corporate tool at the end that he was in the beginning. He is the kind of guy you won't be surprised to hear assassinated a president, blew up a government building, or fell in with white supremacists and died in a gun battle with the ATF in some cultist whacko's suicide war. He loves to kill people and can find justification in the smallest ways. The most informative quote I found in the book was, "After the first kill, the others were easy." Scary stuff. Characters from these two irrational wars will be biting back on this country for decades.

Kyle appears to believe he has done something patriotic in his part of the Iraq invasion. He seems to have nothing resembling an analytical capacity regarding the reasons for that invasion, the feelings or motivations of the invaded, or a rational ability to see the inconsistencies in his own statements. In one paragraph, he calls the Iraqis "cowards" and "evil" and the next he is disgusted by their "courage" or "stupidity" as they try to fight an overwhelming enemy with primitive weapons. He is unable to assume responsibility for his part in the slaughter. When he witnesses war protesters, he contests their patriotism or courage because they don't properly honor his half-witted understanding of a citizen's personal responsibility. If Kyle were typical of the kind of people who volunteer for our military, it would be pointless for war protesters to try to provide insight, moral encouragement, or context to the volunteers. Fortunately, he is just one kind of poverty draft victim and I have known soldiers who were moved and informed by war protests aimed at the warriors.

On the best pages, this book is barely a soldier's diary; a recounting of the tools, days, and shallow mind of a man who lives to kill other men, women, and children. You'd like to believe that this kind of man would grow to recognize how much of a tool he had been, but that is as likely as Chris Kyle is to discover make useful scientific breakthrough. The day he and his fellow soldiers storm through a Wall Street bank's doors and "liberate" that company's assets for America will be the first day Chris Kyle performs a real patriotic act. Until then, he will cover himself in the Texas flag and chant the slogans he has been trained to repeat and his "service" to the country will be one of many acts that destroys the United States of America.

Who's in Charge?

2012-02-06T22:23:00.000-06:00

A while back, I was talking to a friend about the general level of uselessness typified by CEOs that that scum-sucking, pond-muck sub-species of almost-humans. He argued that in the company he'd just left, the CEO was a "great guy," but all the middle managers were idiots and backstabbers. After arguing about business life in general, we left it at "we're going to have to agree to disagree."

A few moments after I hung up the phone, it struck me that it should have been obvious that the good guy CEO hired idiots and backstabbers to do the dirty work so he could pretend to be half-human. After all, what does upper management do except select and direct middle management? Middle management usually reflects the best intentions of the corner office crowd, not the worst. As the Temptations said,

Smiling faces, sometimes pretend to be your friend
Smiling faces show no traces of the evil that lurks within(can you dig it?)
Smiling faces, smiling faces sometimes, They don't tell the truth
Smiling faces, smiling faces tell lies and I got proof I can dig it.

Why Health Care Costs So Much

2012-01-30T10:22:00.002-06:00

Pretty funny topic, right? I just received the bill for my hip replacement (for about $50k, by the way). Since I have a "Health Care Account" to pay for some of the bill, I called the hospital's accounting office to ask them to flag my account so that I would know when the account had paid out and I would know what my share of that expense would be.

"We don't have anyway to flag an account for notification. We service at least 100 accounts in this office."

"I didn't mean you, personally. I assumed you had a computer system that you could access and that system might have a way to note when money had been credited to an account." (Yep, I was being sarcastic.)

"No, we don't have anything like that." (Yep, he was being too dumb to recognized sarcasm.)

Oh boy. It's hard to imagine that long bill was hand typed, but I guess it's possible. There were a lot of people typing shit into computers while I was in the hospital, but maybe all that stuff just ended up on a piece of paper for the accounting department to copy into their ledgers. Then, the accountants handed off their papers to the customer service characters and they will toss paper back and forth until someone realizes the bill is paid (or not).

Heard this Before?

2012-01-22T16:49:00.002-06:00

When Rick Perry endorsed Newt Gingrich, he had this overwhelming recommendation for Newt, "Newt is not perfect, but who among us is?” I wonder how many times that has been said before?For a character who fashioned himself as the representative for traditional family values, Perry has gone off the deep end with Newt. The only family value tradition Newt has is that he trades in his wife for a new model every 4-5 years. The boy is Penthouse Magazine's dream President.

Perry justified this ethical flip-flop by saying, "I believe in the power of redemption.” Really? Newt Gingrich is born again? Somebody really believes that? I can't decide if I want to sell Perry the Brooklyn Bridge or my own real estate for 500% of current value.

Short Memories, Tiny Minds

2012-01-22T09:28:00.001-06:00

The poofs at Faux News are upset that the Muppets are waging class war on the 1% and the poor oil billionaires. Obviously, they've missed the last couple hundred years of American life and literature. The basic theme of practically every story in our history is about the battle between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. If you can find a western, even a Ronald Reagan or John Wayne western, that isn't about some powerful rancher, mine owner, crooked sheriff or marshal, or some other rich gangster who has taken over the town, corrupted the characters who usually work as enforcers, cops, or gangbangers for the interests of the ruling powers, and bought the town with money and guns. It has to be the oldest story in the US.

Face it, girls. It isn't a story unless it's about the rich and powerful against the rest of us. Call it "class warfare" or call it reality. Either way, it's an American story. If we aren't fighting our side of the battle, it's just class slaughter.

Customer Service (with the agricultural definition)

2011-12-03T21:56:00.001-06:00

I just bought a laptop that came with Windows 7 Lite (or whatever POS name Microsquash put on the cheapest, most limited version of their lame new OS). I thought I'd use it for a while and see if I found a reason to put up with a new interface and learning curve. A week later, I'm stumped. I can't find a thing to like about the new system.

I admit, I lived with my old Dell laptop for more than 10 years and the only reason I'm replacing it is because the keys are coming off when I type. Nothing about the system is slow, cumbersome, or inconvenient. While I worked at finding a reason to like the new OS, I stumbled on this website, "I don't like Windows 7 and I want to go back to Windows XP. Is this possible and if so how can I do this?" on the Microsoft "Answers" webpage. An older user asked how to turn back the software clock on a new laptop similar to mine. What she got was attitude and arrogance from Microsoft's "help desk" (a business oxymoron if there ever was one). I am amazed (a little) that Microsoft's management has left the condescending replies on the site for old users to see, but it's a little enlightening.In my case, I bought a reconditioned Dell that originally had an XP/7 OS option, so I don't have to worry about having drivers for XP. Other users are less fortunate.

The question the Microsoft characters completely avoided answering was in providing some reason for "upgrading." Since most of the new OS features are only visible to IS dweebs, that makes for a lame sales pitch. Without a practical justification for changing, most computer users don't care one way or another how the work gets done, let alone what the OS number might be. And that's, apparently, all that changed for Win 7.

Mac users have put up with this crap forever. Apple could care less about legacy users. The company regularly blasts out "upgrades" that disable older computers and, sometimes, does serious damage to customers' data. I have often found myself in the position of needing a computer to fix one of my Apple computers, when an OS X update disabled my machine. Since I have a fully functioning audio/video Mac and haven't seen a reason on the planet to change what works, I expect my current Mac tower rig to outlive me. If it doesn't, it will most likely outlive my career and that is good enough.

Corporations have grown past the point of considering customers to be the people their products serve to imagining customers obligated to buy the crap they build. As a society, we're no longer "citizens" but "consumers." As individuals, our rights are subservient to corporate profits. As a nation, we're far past the point of no return on the path to when greed and power are the sole motivations of those who imagine themselves to be the "job providers" and when citizens are left with no democratic method to regain control of government and our lives. Microsoft and Apple are perfect examples of how indebted crass corporations imagine citizens to be and they are equally powerful examples of confused businesses that are likely to fall hard when they fall.

(Postscript: I did replace Win7 with WinXP and experienced a dramatic improvement in performance. Things my computer was unable to do with Win7 in charge, the computer did easily with WinXP. That settles it for me, I don't need Win7's features and can't tolerate the lack of performance.)

Occupy Wall Street, the right message

2011-11-26T09:12:00.000-06:00

http://occupywallst.org/

https://www.wepay.com/donate/ows

https://www.facebook.com/#!/OccupyWallSt

Contradicting Yourself

2011-11-05T11:07:00.003-05:00

NASA and other astronomers have identified a large (aircraft carrier large) asteroid that will be passing between the moon and the earth Tuesday, November 8. There appears to be no sign of panic from the global warming deniers or the usual panicked crowd of conservatives and religious nuts. This thing is going to be close, an estimated 202k miles from the earth and about 150k miles from the moon. Still, no panic.

Explain this to me. According to conservatives, these same scientists are incapable of accurately measuring the temperature of the earth or calculating the extremely predictable expected increase in temperature based on the last 100 years of measurements and experience, but we're all supposed to be warm and cuddly since these same people say the asteroid is going to miss us "this time?": How do they hold these two conflicting opinions in their tiny little minds?

Even more comforting, the scientists say we're safe, "this time." For at least the next 100 years, we don't have to worry about this thing hitting the earth, causing "a magnitude-7 earthquake and 70-foot-high tsunami waves." At my age, that is comforting; sort of. For my grandkids, that will certainly have impact (no pun intended) on their children's lives. Being the short-sighted animal we are, I'm sure planning for the actual impact will begin a week before the expected hit.

Apple's Inventions

2011-10-15T00:50:00.001-05:00

What wouldn't exist without Apple and Steve Jobs?

Personal Computers
1976 - Steve Wozniak was selling a 30-chip circuit board, the Apple I computer.
1977 - The Commodore PET was the first commercially available personal computer.
1978 - The Tandy TRS-80 computers and the Apple II began shipping.
1980 - The Commodore 64 sold 17 million units and was the best-selling single personal computer model in history.
By 1980 there were dozens of personal computer companies in the US, making a variety of computers using a collection of operating systems.

Graphical User Interface
1973 - Xerox developed the Alto personal computer with a bitmapped screen and a graphical user interface (GUI), but didn't use it in a commercial product until 1981 with the Star personal computer.
1982 - Tandy pasted the Deskmate GUI over MSDOS and made it available on their TRS1000 machines and for other PC's.
1984 - Digital Research Inc. offered the GEM GUI operating system for Intel machines and the OS came standard on the Atari ST personal computers.
1984 - Apple introduced the Mac computers.
1985 - Windows 1.0 was introduced, the GUI-based operating system for the IBM and clone computer market.
1985 - Commodore introduced the Amiga with its Workbench GUI that introduced widgets, graphics library, multi-tasking capability, keyboard, mouse, and and other input devices.
1985 - Sun Microsystems introduced PostScript-based NeWs OS. Sun's systems ran both NeWs and X-Windows concurrently.
1986 - X-Windows or the early version of UNIX was introduced by MIT engineers, this has become the standard layer for GUI systems, including Apple's OS X, since its introduction.
1986 - Apple released the Apple IIgs, an upgraded Apple II that ran Apple GS/OS with the introduction of the4 "folder" concept (instead of the more technically correct "directory" terminology) and a new video graphics chip.

Laptop Computers
1968 - Alan Kay began to work on his Dynabook concept at Xerox PARC facility and demonstrated the first concept portable personal computer in 1972.
1975 - IBM introduced the first commercially available laptop, the IBM 5100.
1981 - Epson introduced the HX-20 portable computer, with an LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a small printer. HP and Tandy also offered portable computers with similar features that year.
1982 - The GRID Compass, followed by the GRID Gavilan, portable laptops were used by NASA and the military. The GRID products were commercially available, but at an $8,000 price tag they were rare.
1991 - Apple introduced the Mac Portable to slight notice from consumers. By 1991, IBM, Compaq, HP, Epson, and several other companies were on their 3rd and 4th generation laptop product lines.

MP3 Players
1979 - Kane Kramer designed a digital audio players, the IXI, which managed about 3 minutes of playing time and never became a commercial product. but it did not enter commercial production. Apple hired Kramer as a consultant and used his work to claim "prior art" when Apple tried to take ownership of personal players.
1996 - Audio Highway announced the Listen Up player, but only a few were sold.
1998 - SaeHan Information Systems marketed the “MPMan” player sold as the "Eiger MPMan" in the US. The MPMan had 32M of flashRAM and could manage about 20 minutes of playing time.
1998 - Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio PMP300, another 32M player.
2000 - Creative released the 6GB micro-drive based Creative NOMAD Jukebox.
2001 - Apple introduced the first generation 5G iPOD.

Smartphones
1992 - The IBM Simon is demonstrated as a concept product at COMDEX.
1996 - Nokia introduces the Nokia 9000, which combined a cell phone with HP's personal digital assistant (PDA) features.
1997 - Ericsson coined the name "smartphone" when the company displayed the concept phone GS88
2000 The touchscreen Ericsson R380 Smartphone was the first device to use an open operating system, the Symbian OS.
2000 - Nokia 9210 communicator was the first color screen smartphone.
2001 - Palm introduced the Kyocera 6035, the first widely used smartphone in the US.
2007 - Apple release the company's first iPhone.

Graphical Pads
1968 - Kay's Dynabook was the first concept for a graphical pad.
1991 - GO Corporation, Pencept, and Linus introduced a variety of tablet computers to little consumer success.
1993 - Apple introduces the Newton to minimal customer notice.
2000 - Microsoft attempted to market a line of Windows-based Tablet PC touchscreen pads to little consumer interest. The Windows CE operating system was used by several Japanese and US mini-computer companies, including the NEC MobilePro product line that used touch screen operation, a drawing pad feature, and communications. Compaq, Acer, and other computer companies introduced and attempted to market a variety of touch-screen computer devices.
2010 - Apple introduces the iPad and the iOS interface.

Ponzi Schemes

2011-09-17T11:17:00.000-05:00

Texas lunatic, Ricky Perry, claims that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. That's cute, isn't it? An ex-cheerleader Texas governor who claims to be a "conservative" and who brags about running a state with a balanced budget (and who "balanced" that budget by paying of an $18 billion deficit with federal TARP funds) and who barely passed his college Economics class at Texas A&M (not a rocket science university) pretending to understand multi-syllable words and criticizing a 75-year-old federal institution that has provided stability and security for three generations of Americans.

Even funnier, the bozos on Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal are joining in with Perry in trying to tear down what's left of the US economy to enrich themselves as they scavenge what's left of the nation's bank accounts. Normal humans would be embarrassed to be so wrong, so often; which is why the Extreme Court has given more rights and privileges to corporations than to real people. As Andy Borowitz said, "“Rick Perry is qualified to be President in the same way that Olive Garden is qualified to be Italy.” That fact, unfortunately, doesn't stop Repuglicans from running raving lunatics, complete idiots, vicious criminals, and sociopathic corporate executives for office.

All this is distracting the voting, taxpaying public from the fact that the real Ponzi scheme is all of Wall Street. Any idiot who managed to remember the news of the last 20 years would know that the SEC has been cut down to a fraction of the police force required to keep Wall Street and international corporations from running wild in the streets, setting fire to every corner of the country. The number of companies that have crashed and burned after years of filing quarterly profit reports without a glitch in the pretty picture painted by their "accountants" until the trail of lies started crashing around the CFOs' heads ought to stretch the credibility of any numbers posted on the stock market.

Until Americans wise up and realize that "regulation" means the country is policing the biggest crooks in the nation, we're going to keep trashing our future to enrich the Wall Street sleazebags at the expense of everything worth protecting and preserving. "Amoral" is an insufficient word to describe their character, but it's the best English has to offer. Perry, on the other hand, isn't smart enough to warrant any adjective more complicated than "idiot."

Crazy People

2011-07-05T09:16:00.001-05:00

One of Michelle Bachmann's constituents, Nancy Bjorkman was quoted in an MPR article saying, "I think she's willing to take a stand and stick to her guns, even when the guns are against her. And I appreciate that." I think that says it all. Minnesota District 6 is clearly one of the places we put the tube when the world gets an enema.

For some reason, my wife and I watched the July 4th show in Bachmann's eastern territory last night. Three things were apparent:

There is a lot of money in that place
Musical taste is not a right wing quality
The people in Bachmann's world can't drive for shit.

Damn! There are a lot of dumb folks in Stillwater. Escaping that silly town after the fireworks show was like getting out of Stillwater Prison. It reminded me of driving through a small Midwestern town at noon, when all of the churches let out their inmates. Traffic resembles random motion.

Why Do They Hate Us?

2011-07-02T14:24:00.002-05:00

"Why do they hate us?" I heard this question a year ago from a young man who had just dropped out of a state university engineering program because it was "too hard" and was pursuing one of the most remedial and disgraceful programs offered by any educational facility: criminal justice (talk about an oxymoron!), police science or law enforcement. Pick a program name, they are all the same and they are all equally simple.

My response was lame, at best. "You're kidding?"

The kid was, of course, excelling at the idiot program because he is of normal intelligence and moderately conscious. If you are unable to pull an "A" in classes like:

CPS 103 Particular Forms of Crime - Analysis of conventional property crime, criminal markets, criminal organizations, white collar crimes, and corporate crimes. Consensual and non-consensual delinquency, and "victimless" crimes. Factors that can be used to differentiate several dimensions of forms of crimes. (4 credits)
CPS 105 Deviance and Social Control - Competing theories of deviance, deterrence and control, relations between deviant actors and reacting audiences, and how deviant individuals explain or justify their behavior.
CPS 170 Domestic Violence - Comparative approach to power and violence in family systems including detailed and in-depth analysis of the devaluation of family relations.
CPS 171 The Criminal Mind - Psychological aspects of criminal behavior, personality of criminals, the psychological processes affecting behavior, and the violence that is often associated with criminal behavior. Dealing with fear and anger, offering and counter-offering, and negotiating in high-risk situations.
CPS 172 Comparative Police Systems - Selected police systems in the United States compared with a variety of police systems in other countries.

Honestly, I can't go on. The titles of these classes sound like exactly the kind sociology program titles that would study the anti-social behavior of police officers around the world.

This goofy kid appeared to be completely clueless about why ordinary citizens hate the police. Even in St. Paul, where the local police and country sheriff's deputies went 1968 Chicago-style on local and visiting protesters during the 2008 RNC debacle, it appears that a police candidate can remain ignorant of the history of the occupation he desperately wants to join. He asked me, repeatedly, to cite reasons why so many citizens "hate cops." As you might expect, he had excuses for every abuse and every anti-social police act committed in modern history. As I should have expected from someone so disconnected from human history, he imagined none of this violence applied to his possible future.

It's hard to imagine this level of avoidance, but it's critical if what's left of our society expects to create "order" from the chaos of corporate socialism and pusedo-capitalism. The fact is, fear is not respect. Fear is a close emotional relation to hate and as far from respect as love is to hate. While there are cops who deserve respect for trying to do the right job in a system designed to repress human dignity and freedom, most are exactly the vicious characters pictured in these video links and the photos on this page. For example, any animal capable of intentionally smearing pepper spray in the eyes of environmental or political protesters is unfit for socialization. Any society decadent enough to instruct its stormtroopers to commit such a crime is undeserving of history's charity. Cops have been used to break up legal protests, as strikebreakers, as an armed force dispossessing citizens of their legal property, and as a protection force for corporate criminals and other organized crime figures since the middle of the 1800's.

The fact is, most of us don't hate cops. We do fear them, however. They represent us in our national decay and "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Cops serve the worst of our society and repress the best. Regardless of the deranged fairy tails Hollywood and television create of hard-working, dedicated, clever police protecting society from terrible criminals and solving complicated crimes, many cops are nothing more than lazy, cowardly, tenured, over-armed, arrogant, brownshirt terrorists who repress any attempt of the public to regain control of their nation. (Not just true in the US, but in many corporately controlled nations.) What kind of person wouldn't fear that kind of police force? When some citizens get past fear and hate, and act accordingly, we call that "revolution." Remember that when you finally get your corporate welfare job and are asked to remove your badge and any other form of identification before committing a psychopathic act of brutality. Being ignorant of your own motivations and the history of your chosen occupation is no defense. When you are the fist of repression and the weapon of fear, you will have to get used to being the object of fear and hate.

Why Say It Then?

2011-07-02T13:46:00.000-05:00

". . . it is important to recognize that profession of noble intent is predictable, and therefore carries no information, even in the technical sense of the term." [Noam Chomsky, Hedgemony or Survival]. Chomsky was making a technical and detailed explanation of the old saying, or "actions speak louder than words."

If claiming patriotism, nationalism, the moral high ground is exactly and predictably the "last refuge of a coward" or a criminal or a con artist, why does anyone listen? "Why" is the right question. The fact is the majority of the thundering herd (or the "beast" as Alexander Hamilton called us) are primed and ready to stampede off of the nearest cliff like lemmings chasing a change in weather and overpopulation. Why are humans so inclined? Why doesn't our education system provide some immunity to our idiot natural inclinations?

I'm sorry to say that it appears to be because we, as a species, are freaking morons. Someone with a far better grasp of the history of human societies said, in the middle of this past decade, that America is on the cusp of the point of no return. If we continue to waste our wealth and talent on the military, the military-industrial complex, phony finance schemes, our inclination to provide military assistance to any international corporation's demand for other nations' natural resources, and the rest of the perverse fascism that is in the long list of failed world powers playbooks, we're going to become the next fallen empire.

Obviously, the real downside to our failure is that we are likely to be inclined to take the rest of the world with us in our demise. It's a terrible truth, but the current random proliferation of nuclear weapons in the 3rd world may be a good thing, since nuclear retaliation is the only thing that appears to stand between an attempt by the corporations (represented by our government and its military) to take over the world's resources and to destroy all forms of democracy. If those psychopathic CEOs and CFOs weren't worried about a terrorist lugging a suitcase nuke into their palaces, they would order the forcible takeover of every asset on the planet.

Of course, that's a double-edged sword.

As we found in 2003, any hope that we can defeat the rest of the world's crazies by employing our own crazies in that battle is probably a defend-able definition of insanity. Arming all of the Bin Ladens, Kim Il Sungs, Moammar Gadhafis, and Dick Cheneys of the world is not a formula for world security. Sooner or later, one of these idiots is going to say "to hell with all of you" and start launching bombs for the fun of it. And they will do so claiming "defense of the motherland, fatherland, little brotherland" or whatever. As we're all going up in nuclear smoke, the last words we'll hear will be G.W. Bush babbling, "I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."1

1 G.W. Bush, being his usual irrational self.

Dumbing Down the Nation

2011-07-02T13:43:00.000-05:00

A recent poll found that 26% of the country doesn't know that the American Revolution was a revolt from British rule. Fox News has 3.3 viewers every day. Americans listen to the voices of fools and corporate shills and ignore pretty much any information that comes from sources with above sub-human intelligence. I actually had an acquaintance recommend that I listen to Limbaugh and Beck to "learn something."As George Carlin said, "."

NOTE: When I want to learn something I look for intelligent sources. I have absolutely no interest in what the fools of the world are thinking and saying; if you are willing to give them credit for the capacity to think.Listening to Glenn Beck in the hopes off "learning something" would be as stupid as asking G.W. Bush to explain quantum physics.

In 1950, the country listened to the inane babbling of Joe McCarthy and voted for Ike because the conservative majority was terrified of an intellectual President: Stevenson. Nearly half of the country voted for Nixon in 1968 out of the same fear of Kennedy's intellect. Nixon won two elections, even when there was every expectation (and hope) that his criminal regime would end in a huge collection of jail terms (for folks who ended up in the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II regimes) . A look at the interesting and informative list of those pardoned by past Presidents says a lot about the ethics of those people.

The conservative majority has little respect for law and even less respect for our Constitution or our history. Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and all of their cronies and fellow mobsters are all working for purposes that serve a collection of masters who are disinterested in the best interests of the United States and its citizens. The Republican congress is working for those same un-American, un-democratic, regressive wealthy interests. Unfortunately, those interests are not in sync with the interests of the nation as a whole.

Desecrating the nation's education system is a terrific way to convince the public that "four legs are better than two" or "two legs are better than four," depending on the propaganda of the moment. Even a conservative as wingnutty as Phyllis Schlafly is worried about the quality of the US education at the college level. Of course, she wants the world rewritten to reflect her nutty view, but that's nothing new for the far right. The problem with providing a scientific, mathematical education is that knowledge goes in all directions at once. That was the reason the religious right dumbed down public science education in the 1950's, to suppress all discussion of evolution. At best, I suspect today's idiot public education system motivations are to create more gullible consumers.

One of the nation's founding fathers, Roger Sherman, suspected we'd end up in this condition if the country opted for "one man, one vote" democracy. He said, "the people . . . should have as little to do as may be about the government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled." The gross ignorance of much of the media's audience proves Sherman's fear that the public would lack ("want") information. Their willingness to follow the advice of fools and criminals proves the are easily "misled." The dumber we get, the more likely this advice will be prophetic and accurate. Without an active, focused attempt to rein in the media's corporate propaganda, the idiots will rule and the criminals will profit from the fall of this nation.

A Nation of Assholes

2011-05-14T21:58:00.000-05:00

This weekend, I'm polishing off a book titled, The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton. The book reinforces a lot of the arguments I've made in the past on my old Rat's Eye View website from the days when that collection of essays was mostly about business practices and management/mismanagement.

However, toward the end Sutton has a chapter titled "The Virtues of Assholes" where he attempts to explain the success of so many certifiable assholes (one prime asshole he constantly returns to is Apple's Steve Jobs). After describing how some assholes manage to become rich and powerful, he lists three "blind spots" successful assholes often have. One of those blind spots is that "experienced victims use [defensive measures) to protect themselves from cruel and vindictive actions, measures that have the side effect of shielding assholes from realizing the damage they inflict . . . victims avoid their oppressor's wrath by reporting only good news and remaining silent about, and even hiding, bad news." Sound familiar?

In 1816, the north eastern United States went through a catastrophic "year without a summer." The prevailing theory describing the reasons for that "last great subsistence crisis in the Western world" is that a record low solar activity and the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora caused record world-wide crop failures at least 200,000 deaths in Europe and similar devastation in North America and China. 200 years later, science is in a position to be able to predict the results of this kind of event and, even, allow for planning that could moderate the effects.

The real question is, are scientists likely to provide that information? I'm betting the answer is no.

The hostility aimed at scientists who have made predictions about global ocean and climate changes most likely has an effect similar to the distortion of reality created by asshole bosses. First, scientists will be inclined to keep their cultural heads low to prevent the anti-scientific "community" (read "Republicans" and pseudo-conservatives) from going ballistic with their loony counter-arguments. Unfortunately, going loony isn't all that the Republican drone crowd does. They attack scientific institution funding, eliminate critical national and state research facilities, and go after state university research funding. Since they can't understand the data, they attack the messengers. Our primitive citizens aren't the first monkey-people to use these tactics, failed empires liter history with their foolish ancestors. However, it's possible that the costs of allowing these idiots to speak in public might be a lot higher than it was in pre-industrial times.

Imagine yourself as a climate scientist, an astrophysicist, or a biologist. Your research finds that something international corporations is doing is likely to cause a worldwide disaster. Or your data tells you that our society's inability to wean itself from its excesses will cause climate change, famine, and war. Or your observations spotted a fast moving asteroid heading in our direction. The problem is, you're doing science not something simple like banking or something idiotic like pretending to know the minds of the gods. Science allows for predictions with tolerances. In the case of the asteroid, maybe the odds are 2:1 that the asteroid will strike the planet somewhere and the odds are, if the strike occurs, the same 2:1 odds exist that the strike will cause a world-wide disaster. What do you do, if you're one of those scientists? Do you tell an ignorant, superstitious world about the problem and the cure or do you keep it to yourself knowing that your fellow humans are too stupid to do the right thing even with the right information?

Based on what we've seen over the last 25 years of the global warming crisis, I'd suspect that any scientist with a lick of sense would keep quiet and let nature (human and global) take its course. Especially in the superstitious US, we're too dumb to care about our children or their planet. We're too greedy to be concerned with the welfare of any generation beyond our own. We're willing to burn up the world's natural resources in a single generation, leaving future generations to suffer for our greed. Who would step into the political cesspool for a species as foolish as that? A nation of assholes, led by a pack of corrupt and vicious corporate assholes who are as psychopathic as the worst serial killers in history.

Factual Statements

2011-04-14T12:45:00.000-05:00

The dumbest state in the Union appointed one of its many idiot residents to jabber on the floor of the US Senate until his monkey-talk becomes common "knowledge." Yes, Arizona's junior three-term moron senator, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (whose parents were incapable of spelling either of his names correctly), stood slope-shouldered on the floor of the senate and claimed that abortion was "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." Of course, Kyl is as clueless about Planned Parenthood as he is about every other subject the Senate might address. CNN's Don Lemon described Kyl's response when he was asked why he made up these "Republican statistics" (politispeak for "lies"),"We did call his office trying to ask what he was talking about there. And I just want to give it you verbatim here. It [Kyl's response] says, 'his remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions.'"

As Stephen Cobert rightly exclaimed, "this is so liberating!" We can say anything we want, just like Faux News, and explain it all away by claiming what we said was not intended to be a factual statement. Or, in more plain words, we were lying.

So, with the playing field wide open here, I'd like to enter the following information into the public consciousness:

First, Jon Kyl is an alien. Not the kind of alien that Arizona wingnuts are terrified of, but the kind of alien that Arnie fought in Predator (the kind that killed Governor Ventura just after he said "I ain't got time to bleed."). The kind of alien that killed off a ship full of astronauts and practically molested Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and I'm not sure which of his relatives were which in Aliens vs. Predator. I suspect that last documentary was produced by Kyl's alien Republican bosses to confuse the issue. Kyl's species was even more accurately depicted in John Carpenter's 1988 masterpiece documentary, They Live, which exposed the infiltration of of aliens into the ranks of the Republican Party, trendy yuppie grocery stores, and corporate middle and upper management.

The 170-year-old Kyl announced in February that he would be giving up his seat in the senate because he had been recalled to duty in the Klingon Air Force. Insiders suspect this is an early sign that the Klingons will be attacking Earth in the next century. Kyl served four terms in the House before invading the Senate in 1995, under the leathery wings of John McCain. Terrifyingly, Time Magazine labeled Kyl one of the 100 "most influential" people in 2010, a clear sign of the alien apocalypse.

As is obvious by his picture (at left), Kyl was the inspiration for television's favorite zombie,Gomer Pyle. From his dopey, crooked face to his "gollee, Sargent" and the phrase he always uses when he remembers that Arizona voters were dumb enough to send someone of his ilk to Washington, "surprise, surprise," anyone could see that the braindead alien executives who cobble together network television comedies were inspired to create a carbon copy of Arizona's boy idiot senator.

Kyl's easy political successes in Arizona politics has led some to feel that the state may no longer boast of any triple-digit IQ residents. The more obvious conclusion might be that all of the carbon-based, humanoid residents have been terminated by Kyl's alien relatives.

Of course, it goes without saying that some of the above comments were not intended to be a factual statements but rather to illustrate that Senator Jon Kyl is the dumbest, most dishonest, enemy of rational thought produced by the state of Arizona; probably the world's hub of dumb ideas and irrational people.

The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl's Planned Parenthood Statistics
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Thieves with Fountain Pens

2011-03-27T10:15:00.000-05:00

"They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. They remind us that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. You and I must protect and preserve freedom here or it will not be passed on to our children and it would disappear everywhere in the world. Today the workers in Poland are showing a new generation how high is the price of freedom but also how much it is worth that price." Ronald Reagan

"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.

"And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home." Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody Guthrie

"The thieves who rob you with a fountain pen, they take it all." Elvy Day, 2011

We're right back in the corporate welfare mode. Wisconsin's corporate shill government is stripping away middle class protection, Minnesota's Republican majority is working toward the same ends, the country is being prepped for whichever hopeless idiot the Republicans will foist off as their 2012 presidential fodder, the US Congress is focusing on completely useless crap, and the specter of "socialism" is being hyped by the nation's right wing press as the worst thing that could happen to the country.

Meanwhile, the "too big to fail," under-talented, perfectly corrupt financial institutions are sailing along as if they hadn't bankrupted the nation and a good bit of the world with their shenanigans. While they are dipping into the nation's credit, free of interest (thanks to their boy Bernanke and Obama's collection of financial idiots - particularly Geithner and Larry Summers), the new Mob is charging consumers nearly 30% interest on credit cards, stifling anything that resembles liberal and rational reform and regulation of banking, speculation, insider trading, derivative roulette games, or any of the giant money-stealing scams that pass for "financial services" in this demented place and time.

It's long past obvious that the solution to the nation's pressing problems is to refocus criminal prosecution from the bottom of the social ladder to the very top. The Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, the basis for RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) states that "a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering." Among that collection of RICO crimes is embezzlement, fraud, gambling, money laundering, obstruction of justice, bankruptcy fraud, securities fraud, bribery, and theft. If you don't haven't noticed at least five of those crimes committed by every one of the major banks in this country in the last five years, you are both a Republican and a fool (redundant, I know). You could educate yourself here or here or here or here or here or here or here or any number of places that accurately recorded the catastrophe we call "finance" or "banking."

[Of course, one of the beauties of being "conservative" is not having to read, think, or investigate the truth; conservatives just chant "two legs better than four" until they are unable to babble. As Mr. Cobert wisely warned, "reality has a liberal bias." Better to keep what's left of one's head deeply buried in the shit.]

As long as the FBI remains incapable of investigating and prosecuting these worst-of-all-criminals, they are a useless and feeble arm of law enforcement and deserve to have their funding cut to levels insufficient to maintain a secretarial staff. In fact, I recommend that we follow the libertarians' idiotic advice and eliminate all regulation, including regulation of the airwaves and, when what's left of this once great and democratic nation is reduced to rubble and chaos, the rest of the world will have a fair warning of everything to avoid.

A Look at Reality

2011-03-04T23:23:00.000-06:00

One of the basic precepts of modern quality manufacturing is that you can't fix a problem that you don't acknowledge. In manufacturing, that means you count defects, analyze processes, and keep it all out in the open so that everyone stays focused on fixing problems. That, of course, is the exact opposite of the 1950-1980 American manufacturing process and that is why we got our asses handed to us by Japan in the 1970's and why we are still a second-rate manufacturing nation. We're a hell of a lot better than we were in 1970, but so is everyone else. Today, the United States is only #1 in markets where reliability is unimportant (military-industrial garbage) or where cost is a non-factor (US medicine and military-industrial garbage). It also helps that nobody else is seriously competing in those markets, because Japan and Europe could kick our asses in either area if they gave it a half-hearted shot.

My wife and I had a heated discussion about the future of humanity tonight that brought up my manufacturing experience. She is an eternal optimist. She desperately wants to believe that humanity will pull its head out of its ass and find solutions for social inequality, global warming, overpopulation, and vanishing natural resources. I do not. She believes that a few dedicated, intelligent, hard working idealists can fix these catastrophes-in-waiting even though the mass of humanity is perfectly clueless about the problems; let alone the likely end results of ignoring these problems. I do not.

She was on a pretty fine altruistic roll with her argument for a "few good humans" until I asked her how that worked out for her at Home Depot; her last inhuman employer. To be clear, she was exactly as successful as I was at influencing my equally psychopathic past employer, Guidant. We didn't make a scratch in those institutions' hard callous patina.

Nor will a few million dedicated environmentalists, social reformers, Planned Parenthood volunteers, or the world's scientists. As long as the head is dead, a few sentient organs will have no effect on the actions of the body. The human brain has been officially pronounced "dead" for centuries.

The problems are obvious. We are running out of fossil fuels. We have no viable alternatives. Our natural resources are vanishing as quickly as the energy to abuse those resources. Human population is far beyond the point of sustainability and when the energy issue comes to a head billions will starve. The world's air, water, and climate are being stressed beyond practical recovery. Social injustice has been ignored for so long that many of the world's democracies are that only in name, the United States especially.

With those big problems facing every semi-intelligent person, what are the big issues our own government wants to address? Reducing taxes on the filthy idle rich. Banning gay marriage. Removing all barriers from corporate pillaging of the nation's savings and resources. Providing a more regimented education to people who will never have a job or a purpose in their lifetimes. Eliminating labor unions. Freeing the corporate media from any social responsibility or even the pretense of honesty.

Not a one of those "big issues" will amount to a second thought when one of the true big issues comes to a head. Of course, by then it won't matter one way or the other. Every single big issue will solve itself the way every major human issues is resolved; in catastrophe. When we hit the rapid downside of the Hubbert Peak, the population issue will take care of itself. Before the Industrial Revolution and the energy-driven society, world human population stuck to 100-200 million for tens of thousands of years. After we harnessed cheap energy, population exploded. As we burn through the last of the oil reserves, we're going to see the other side of that population curve as reality informs our not-so-bright species about sustainability.

I was suffering a National Geographic show on human evolution a while back. One of the "experts" repeatedly chanted the foolish pipedream that "humans are the most adaptable animal on the planet." I'm unconvinced, considering that we are somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 years old, as a species, and that there are crocodiles that have survived virtually unchanged for 200 million years, sharks that can track their linage back 400 million years, and cockroaches whose relatives were pretty much the same 300 million years ago. Roaches can live on postage stamp glue. Crocodiles can and do eat anything and tolerate fresh or salt water and do pretty well on land. Sharks are . . sharks. I wouldn't bet on human adaptability against either of those opponents.

Our claim to fame is our amazing ability to comprehend our own demise. However, most of us (84%) have invented a Big Rock Candy Mountain imaginary afterlife because we can't comprehend a universe without us.

Our confidence in finding the next great solution is well documented in science fiction, but reality tells a different story. Every big break science has provided has produced a secondary effect that is likely to be a much bigger catastrophe in the future. "Solutions" actually solve problems. Stop-gaps are notoriously dangerous tactics when applied to life-threatening problems.

Until I see some significant portion of society begin to work on solving the big problems with the kind of long range focus and objectives that these problems require, I will stick with my belief that humanity is just a blip in the evolutionary process and no more significant than any one of the tens of thousands of now-extinct species from the earth's bloody past. We are one failed growing season, one moderate-sized asteroid, one environmental disaster, one giant volcano, one world war away from a massive culling of the species. So don't bring your superstitious happy talk my way. My patience for fools is damn close to exhausted.

What's It All About, Newt?

2011-02-19T10:35:00.005-06:00

Listening to the new Republican majority in the house list their top priorities this morning, I realized that it is entirely possible for this crowd of morons to pull off an unintended conspiracy. Their agenda is to strip the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, to eliminate any federal funding of Planned Parenthood, to bankrupt the Social Security system, and to undermine health care legislation. Their campaign monkey-talk about "jobs" and "it's the economy, stupid" was a smokescreen for the brainless morons who vote Republican but live Democrat. Now that they are in the driver's seat, their "plan" is to eliminate every federal government activity that provides value to working people. That was the idea behind Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" and Ronny Wrinkle's "government is the problem" and Bush/Cheney's outright pillaging of the nation's banking account.

None of that is new news. The only question one might ask is "Why?" I think the species-suicidal green house gas agenda is the key to the answer.

Republicans have always--with the momentary exception of Teddy Roosevelt and, sort of, Abraham Lincoln--been the tools of international money. Every action an American conservative takes is intended to either preserve the assets of the idle rich or put more money in their pockets. Global warming, especially ocean warming, presents an emergency to these powerful, useless, corrupt, and lazy people.

If the working class woke up to the threat to our species and to the world, huge resources would be spent on saving future generations. The only people who have huge resources are that 1-10% who own the majority of assets in the industrialized world and who control the world's income. Those people have two characteristics: they are incredibly greedy and incredibly foolish. Those qualities have worked for them for centuries and they expect them to keep working indefinitely.

Apparently, their theory is that the world is going to suffer a catastrophe regardless of what we do now. After all, scientists have been saying the world is heading toward a point of no return since the mid-1960s. Fifty years late, we must have past that point, right? So, if we can't save the world we might as well finish raping and pillaging every culture and resource on the planet right up to the end of life as we know it. Because many of those filthy rich families have pulled this off for the last several hundred years, they expect it will keep working for them, at least, for the rest of their lives. And they are probably right.

Worst case, my generation will suffer the result of the last 100 years of unrestricted industrial pollution and profiteering near the end of our lives. Which leaves out children to live lives of suffering and misery, one environmental catastrophe after the last, depleting resources, collapsing societies, and many of the horrors that science fiction has depicted in thousands of apocalyptic end-of-times scenarios. While most of us worry for our children, the rich have no such limitations. The ruling class has been willing to eat its young for convenience, entertainment, and profit since Roman times, at least. Every one of these crusty old families is willing to sacrifice humanity to preserve another week or two of their own opulence.

Since the 2010 elections, they have accelerated their misbehavior; tossing off even a pretense of doing what they do "for the good of the nation." Today, it's all about grabbing as many resources as they can hoard with the hope that they can hole up in their gated castles while the rest of us suffer the consequences.

The media is doing a damn good job of distracting the marching morons from issues that matter, too. Jabbering about Charlie Sheen's latest stupidity, Justin Beiber's ass, and all of the rest of the mindless crap that passes for "news" is just a way to eliminate any focus on anything that actually matters.

The real question is, "Will it work when the sky really begins to fall?" Ask the Roman ruling elites or the German Nazi elites or the British ruling class or King Louis the 16th's buddies. Obviously, it worked for a few of them, but a bunch of those useless inbred horse-faced, big-toothed, cousin-marrying hillbillies went down in a wave of pissed off peasants. I hope I live long enough to see our Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Girards, Biddles, Morris, Fords, Hiltons, Mellons, Kochs, Vanderbilts, Bushs, Murdocks, Trumps, Waltons, and the rest of that pack reap the humiliation and lynching they so well deserve.

Sad Times for the GOP

2011-02-11T09:48:00.000-06:00

The Gay Old Party is having a tough time with getting its act together. The crazies in the House of Representatives pledged to focus on the economy ("It's still the economy, stupid.") and immediately turned their toilet-tube focus on abortion, union busting, and jabbering about socialism (a form of government that their hero, Reagan, badmouthed and loved at the same time). The crazies at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) wrangled publicly about who was going to sponsor the event; crazy religious freaks or self-destructive pseudo-conservative gays.

The CPAC event is wrapping up showcasing the micro-intellects the Republicans have to offer for the 2012 presidential campaign: the corporate criminals' best friend and the poster boy for everything-not-family-values, Newt Gingrich; Abramoff's buddy and medical tort reform hypocrite, Rick Santorum; the trust-fund baby with the dead squirrel comb-over; and the Minnesota state bird masquerading as a US Representative. Palin was probably there, too, but I can only digest so much crazy before I lose all faith in my country.

Eventually, you'd think these loony memes would self-destruct and the species would begin to rebuild. Wouldn't you?

I am often accused of being a pessimist. As soon as my constant downgrading of expectations begins to prove wrong, I promise to accept that label. As long as expecting the worst from my fellow human is a reliable predictor of future behavior, I'm sticking with what works.It's a sound investment strategy, too.

NPR drew some sort of idiotic conclusion from interviewing some "young Republicans" at CPAC. That bunch (NPR and the spoiled brats at CPAC) confirmed my expectations from that crowd. Supposedly, these were "college students," but when asked about their field of study the response was repeatedly "business," "communications," "theology," and other fluffy subjects barely suitable for an adult's afternoon recreational reading. Not a science, engineering, or pre-med student among them. This isn't higher education, its a continuation of the K-12 babysitting service. I know that reflects the "education" distribution in the general college public, but that is nothing to brag about. The dumbing down of the American public began with the watering down of "higher education."

The only upside to all this nuttiness is the entertainment value. Suddenly, Republicrats are as disorganized as Demolicans. The only thing that has allowed me to pretend that Demolicans slightly represent my positions is the lack of lock-step marching from members of that party. While both parties are corrupt, inept, and corporate sponsored, the Demolicans occasionally show signs of independence. Republicrats are wholly-owned subsidiaries of international corporations and, therefore, useless as the tits on my chest. Is it possible that actual citizens of the United States have crept into the GOP?

What Our Government Is Doing in a Time of Crisis

2011-01-26T22:14:00.003-06:00

I'm lying. No one in our government has near enough talent to intentionally put together a funny YouTube video. They are accidentally hilarious, though.

Distracting the Retards

2011-01-23T12:59:00.001-06:00

After listening to the new collection of Republican nutballs jabbering away like a flock of demented crows, it struck me how easily the mass of Americans can be distracted from important issues. After campaigning on giving healthcare back to the insurance companies and the drug dealers and babbling about how the stimulus didn't magically fix 8 years of Bush/Cheney madness, their first big issue is . . . abortion.

Supposedly, we were warned. Maybe, but not with much intensity. Of course, anyone with a functioning memory should expect Republicans to begin the distractions as soon as they warm up their office seats. Since their mission is to lie, cheat, and steal, it's obvious that they will be pointing in the opposite direction of where the action really is. So, it's "look over here at this abortion stuff, dummy," while they are pillaging the nation's bank account and dumping the silverware into their gym bags.

Cause, let's face it, nobody in the Tea Party cares a wit about poor people having abortions; especially poor non-white people. The Teabag Ladies don't give a damn about anything poor people do, but they are big on making people do whatever dumb shit they want them to do this week.You can't top the corporate hacks behind the Tea Party Patriots when it comes to gathering up authoritarian nutsacks and getting them into robot marching formation.

As far as getting abortion under their thumb, even a dimwit like Michele Bachman has to be smart enough to know that cat is out of the bag forever. She doesn't have to say she knows that, though. She just has to pretend to give a shit and the illiterate dimbulbs who stumble along behind her and the Bimbo Führer will keep chanting "four legs are better than two." Yeah, you can make the legal, safe medical practice of abortions illegal, just like you can make natural vegetation illegal. However, telling nature not to grow poppies, marijuana, the coca plant, the peyote cactus, rye fungus (LSD), nutmeg, psilocybin mushrooms, betel nuts, morning glory flowers, salvia, and the rest of nature's recreational bounty is an exercise in arrogance. That arrogance is made even funnier by the fact that most of the plant-banners pretend to be awed by God's brilliant plan. I firmly believe that 99.99% of modern "Christians" are every bit as atheist as me. If they weren't, they'd be very afraid of an afterlife where they have to explain why they thought God is a moron.

The abortion cat is out of the bag, up a tree, and telling all of the other cats about the holes in the bag. A quick Google search on "home abortion" (in quotes to limit the false positives) will return 25,400 hits as of today. Tomorrow, I wouldn't be surprised if another thousand resources appear. Everything from large doses of ascorbic acid to carrot seed soup to mutton marrow is supposed to cause a miscarriage. Even Wikipedia lists 14 references and more than a dozen "solutions." Toss out the doctors and the result is most likely going to be more abortions with more casualties among the mothers-not-to-be.

Legally, the Republican antiabortion stance is one of the most disingenuous arguments in human history. Not only do they not give a flying damn about 90+% of the abortions in the country, but they are tiptoeing around who is going to be criminalized if they get their way. They don't have the balls to tell girls and women that they are going to imprison, execute, or condemn them as witches for having abortions. If they did, today, they would vanish from the face of the national discussion. No, these clever fruitcakes are pretending to be caring, loving human beings while planning the kind of fanatical religious persecution history has seen so many times. Why they feel compelled to piss on our democracy when there are so many theocracies already making life miserable for those citizen-victims is beyond me. As I always ask these characters when they raise their venomous heads, why don't you move to Iran or Pakistan? Those places are exactly the science-hating, superstitious, anti-democratic, totalitarian and miserable places you claim to love so much.

Crazy Is As Crazy Does

2011-01-23T08:59:00.001-06:00

The Department of Homeland Security linked Jared Lee Loughner to a collection of right wing hate groups that the DHS called "anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government], anti-Semitic.” Sounds like Fox, doesn't it?

The wingnut bin has been trying, predictably and desperately, to separate itself from responsibility. That's the beauty of being conservative; you can be wrong on every issue and still claim you're Right. When you're Right you're always right.

Of course the other side of that position is it's hard to tell crazy from stupid. Rush and the Bimbo Führer are both crazy and stupid, but they aren't foolish. In our idiocracy you can be a moron and still be powerful, corrupt, and completely unhindered by any form of civility or common sense or any interest in the common good. They are anti-democratic, pro-corporate, and sponsored by elite money that has no loyality to any country, let alone the United States.

Limbaugh, Palin, O'Reilly, Beck, and the Faux News cast of fools and lunatics are running from their own words in terror of taking any responsibility for their constant hate agitation and fear mongering. In a just world, Faux News would be held accountable for all sorts of national disasters, not just the most recent tragedy. As the sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik said, “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government—the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country, is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

If we were a country ruled by laws, these people would be immediately held responsible for the damage they do. We are not. Obama and the Justice Department are pretending that a "lone gunman" (when have we heard that one before?) is responsible for this assassination attempt and the associated murders. Screaming "fire!" in a dark auditorium is no longer a criminal offense, even when lives are lost. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' father replied, when asked if his daughter had enemies, "The whole tea party." "Enemies," not opponents. Palin and her gang of ignorant "patriots" considered Giffords an enemy because she disagreed with their nutty, perverted mutation of what a society should be.

When taking a political position is sufficient to become a hated enemy, you know crazy has taken over and rational discussion is beyond hope. When a national figure can generate a hit list, publish it nationally, and talk about "reloading" in reference to defeating an opponent, rational dialog is not on the table.When our government stands by and allows this kind of rhetoric to contaminate the tiny minds of fools like Jared Loughner and pretends that those who incited murder are above the law, we are that much closer to becoming the kind of country the Bimbo Führer dreams of.

Look at this map littered with gun-sight bulls-eyes. Tell me you think those are anything but a call to shoot the opponents Palin has listed here. Give it your best shot, but you are only deluding yourself. Of course, if you think Palin is anything but a dangerous fool, you're pretty good at delusion.

Test Yourself

2011-01-01T20:40:00.001-06:00

Here's a test worth taking. Political Compass. I found it oddly comforting to be left of Ralph Nader and more libertarian. I can't be embarrassed by the company I keep in this quadrant, either. After you take the test, I recommend you look at the analysis of other places and people. The chart that allows you to look at the politics of a variety of US states is particularly interesting.

The question of right and left has always seemed incomplete to me. The aspect of government that I oppose is authoritarian. The aspect of government that most wingnuts represent would have its sticky little hands and corrupt amorality placed right in the middle of all of our lives. The wingnuts would force their fake religion on everyone. Their phony brand of "liberty" would focus on corporate "freedom" to pollute our water, air, and food and to control any political discussion with floods of money. Whenever a corporation decided to send the nation into war, the wingnuts would do anything in their power to suppress dissent and discussion. Individual freedom would always be sacrificed for the corporate good. I don't care if the authority is the state or federal government or Walmart. Authority and money are moral standards for the pseudo-right and I have no interest in the world they would build.

Obviously, the authoritarian left has lots in common with their buddies on the right side of the vertical axis. I have never been able to tell the difference between Mao and Hitler or Nixon and Stalin or G.W. Bush and Lenin or Sarah Palin and Ayatollah Khomeini. They are all the same character.

Palin thinks Wikileaks editor, Julian Assange, should be on a terrorist hit list. Disagree with the bimbo Führer and you're on an assassination list. Considering her idiotic interpretation of Christianity, Palin's resemblance to Ayatollah Khomeini and his hit on Rushdie is identical. I have no use for either of those authoritarian fools or the morons who chant "four legs are better than two" whenever their timid leaders raise the call.

Bob Is Dead

2010-12-16T08:37:00.000-06:00

Bob Feller died yesterday. One of the highlights of my years in Denver was getting to see Feller pitch at McNichols Stadium in an "Old Timers" game. Feller was in his 70's and most of the guys in that game were either unrecognizable as athletes or in their late 30's to 50's and barely out of the game and looking to prove they were still players. Feller was a Cleveland star before I was born and he was one of the most amazing players of an amazing generation of players. When white-haired Bob Feller came up to pitch I didn't expect much, but his first pitch blew by the batter and the next three batters didn't touch him. He walked off to a standing ovation and gave the stands a tiny tip-of-the-cap.

I don't know why, but it always moves me unexpectedly when someone who was a hero to me as a kid turns out to have been a truly special person. Rapid Robert interrupted the prime of his career to join the Navy and fight in WWII. When he came back, he restarted his career and in his spare time he barnstormed the country with players from the Negro League in his off-months. His star-power was responsible for introducing thousands of white fans to men like Satchel Page, Josh Gibson, Ernie Banks, Hank Aaron, and the players who revolutionized the game in the late 1950's, after Feller retired and moved on to his business career. He just did the things he wanted to do and, often, what he wanted to do was the right thing.

He said what he thought and he thought more than the average person. His lack of political correctness got him labeled as racist or worse by a media that hasn't been worth noticing for at least three decades. I feel lucky to have seen Robert Feller pitch, even it if was 40 years after his prime. In his prime, he was said to have thrown a 106mph fastball. In his old age, he whipped up on men half his age and made it look easy.

Tipping, When Your Career Path Depends on Begging

2010-12-10T09:07:00.001-06:00

I was in Durango, CO when I began to write this. My grandson and I were taking a Rocky Mountain motorcycle tour and we ended up here after a few days of camping. Right after parking the bike at the motel, we went for a walk downtown and stopped at an ice cream shop. An ice cream cone and a smoothie cost me about $10 and the server was obviously putout that I didn't leave a tip.

I suspect my father went his whole high school teaching life without spending much more than $10 on tips. His advice on tipping was that extraordinary service might warrant a tip, but just doing your job is what you get paid for. Today, people doing practically any sort of job that requires some sort of interaction with a customer expect a tip for the slightest nod to common courtesy.

I suppose I should be interested in the fact that most of these folks have done a pitiful job of planning their careers. I should probably care that their lack of technical knowledge or employable skills has relegated them to a life filled with the repetitive phrase, "Would you like fries with that?" or "Can I get you another beer?" I should find sympathy for the awful situation these people find themselves in after a life of screwing off in class, taking the easy path through the public education system, and grabbing an easy job at Old Navy or Payless Shoes instead of pursuing a career in manufacturing or doing something meaningful and useful. Sorry. I can't generate any sympathy for any of those decisions or the results.

A kid recently told me he had "the best job in the world." He was a guide in the Grand Canyon. So, having recently experienced the tactics guides use to weasel tips out of customers, I said, "Cool, you're a beggar." He was offended. Go figure.

When you spend at least half of the time you're with a customer telling them about how hard you've worked for all of your "outdoors degrees" and how much student loan debt you're in because of those degrees, you're begging. When you mention, every five minutes or so, that your guide has worked hard to show you a good time and that the guide deserves something extra for that effort (even if you paid $500 for a couple of days on a rubber boat), you're begging. When you make a special trip, with your hand out, around the group of tourists to be sure they have an opportunity to tip you, you're begging. There is no such thing as a "professional beggar." You're either a panhandler or you aren't one.

There are all sorts of jobs that are more critical, more entertaining, more helpful and more important than the occupations that incorporate begging. Firemen don't expect a tip after saving a home from a kitchen fire, so why tip a valet for parking a car? Teachers don't expect tips for educating children for a life free from begging and panhandling, so why tip a waitress who didn't bother to listen in school and who chose the high tech life of moving plates from a counter to tables? Not that long ago, craftsmen refused tips as a matter of pride. If we have degenerated so far that begging for handouts has become accepted practice for any act of employment we might as well walk around with "will work for food" signs on our backs.

No tipping for common courtesy and expected service isn't disrespect or cheapness, it's reasonable. You chose your career, you do your job, you know what the salary was when you accepted the job, why imagine the public is obligated to make up for your lack of foresight? If the foodies wonder why most people would rather grab a fastfood burger and go home, look at the unrealistic expectation of "food serving" beggars for your first clue.

The Cost of Inclusion

2010-12-10T08:36:00.005-06:00

At the school where I teach, we "enjoy" all of the fruits of our inclusive society. We do our best to cater to non-English speaking students, even though we have practically no foreign language skills among our faculty. We try to find a way to include students with all sorts of mental and physical handicaps. At the core, we are a vocational school (as terrible a thing as that seems to be these days) and while our educational focus is directed toward giving students the background for obtaining jobs, our administration (and federal and state law) appears to be disconnected from the fact that some disabilities preclude the possibility of success in some fields of employment.

There is a delusion in the United States that we "can be anything" we want to be if we just want it bad enough. Working hard to achieve success is generally considered to be unnecessary. Having skills and natural abilities is equally superfluous. All that matters is that we want something and are given a chance to achieve it. This is an extension of the American weirdness that puts individual rights over the obvious needs of society. Not only do you have the right to prepare yourself for an occupation and employers who wouldn't employ you under any circumstances, but you have a right to require the public to provide you with a school loan that you will never be able to repay.

Here's a hot tip: if you are 62 years old, fat, short, slow, and as agile as a wounded hippo, you can not play professional basketball. In fact, if you are any one of the above things you can not play professional basketball. If you can't sing, you won't star on "American Idol." (Of course, if you are the spoiled offspring of a wingnut media star, you might be a finalist on “Dancing with the Stars” because only nimrod wingnuts watch something as dumb as DwtS and they will, obviously, vote for anything if it is stupid enough.) If you are unable to master the basic concepts of algebra, you will be an unemployable engineer, scientist, or math teacher. If you are lazy, you will fail at everything you attempt. (Unless you are a rich kid, then money trumps everything in politics and business.) If you are stupid, you will be doomed to a career behind a fast food counter, hauling garbage, driving a truck or a road construction implement, or (if you are a child of our ruling class) managing one of the nation's financial institutions. No amount of legalistic coddling will convince anyone to hire you for a job for which you have no ability (unless you have Daddy's money). You may have a degree in Creative Writing, but if you can't write you won't sell books (unless . . . you know). You could, however, be an intern editor at most of the nation's publishing houses for as long as your school loans will support you or Daddy's money holds out.

Reality doesn't have much of a grip on political correctness and federal legislation, though. As in everything about our system, it will apparently require a massive, painful, disastrous depression or a population-depleting plague for us to come to our senses. We will keep pretending that little Buford can become anything he wants to become, simply because several of the dumbest people ever born have become President of the United States. It would be worth noticing that any damn collection of cells can make it to the top if those cells come from the ruling class; Bush II being the best ever example of that. However, people who rise through the classes are a whole different breed from the harelipped spawn of our social elites. Like them or not, Ike, Carter, Clinton, and Obama are considerably brighter than the average schmo on the street. We've had a few mental midgets from the working class, Nixon and Reagan come to mind almost instantly, but the majority of ground-up Presidents have been pretty exceptional people. The representatives of the ruling class haven't been so impressive. Other than the two Roosevelt's and Kennedy, you have to go back to the early 1800's to find an example of a brilliant rich kid rising to power. And Kennedy doesn't look so good under close examination.

Since too much of our "higher education system" has become a babysitting service for rich kids, I suppose it makes sense that we've dumbed down the standards of education to accommodate that bunch. I think it's cruel to set these kids' sights higher than Congress, Wall Street, or the other repositories of fools and bums. It would be unfair and unkind to tell a doofus like G.W. Bush that he could "do anything." His whole life was about proving that he couldn't do anything and that's exactly what he proved while he hung out in the White House. So, in the interests of kindness I recommend that federal college loans be given to kids who have some hope of actually being educated. The rest of us should remain content in the knowledge that most of "higher education" is boring, pointless, and barely manages to be poor preparation for a management position at Starbucks.

The Incredible Old Party

2010-12-10T08:25:00.001-06:00

After a conversation with a co-worker last week, I've decided that Republicans have done something truly amazing; Republicans have joined the interests of the rich and powerful and the poor and uneducated. So, I recommend the acronym for the party be changed from "GOP" to "IOP" or the Incredible Old Party. This is a really incredibly achievement and the party and its politicians should be celebrated for their accomplishment.

Democrats and minority party hopefuls might as well hang it up because once the rich and powerful are joined with the gross mass of humanity in a common cause, whatever that cause may be (and I have no idea what the occasionally-working-class expects from their distant and 3rd class association with powerful elites), there is no stopping them from achieving their goals.

I had sort of suspected that Democrats had become obsolete after the mid-term elections. When the loony right joined hands with the country's idle rich and stuffed ballot boxes with votes for candidates whose only campaign promise was "no taxes for rich people," I thought the country had taken a last turn toward the right and the sort of upper crust inbred degeneration that has marked the fall of every great empire since Greece. The most recent concession of what was left of the Democratic party convinced me that the war is over and the rich have won. When Obama decided to cave to Republican demands that the Bush Tax Cuts be not only extended but enhanced so that the idle rich and the braindead elites of the country be allowed to soak taxpayers (a category of citizens the rich avoid and an activity of which they do not participate) for even more luxury and indolence, I realized Democrats and progressives are dead and just don't know it. It's not just that Obama gave in to every Republican demand on the tax code, it's that he did it after "fighting" for a more rational tax system during an NFL commercial break. I guess the "change" Obama has brought to Washington could also be called "wimpiness."

So, I hand it to Republicans everywhere. You guys are the Incredible Old Party; the party of the incredibly rich and the incredibly stupid.

My Father's House

2010-12-05T11:38:00.001-06:00

Xmas is approaching. It's a season I've disliked all of my adult life. Of course, I love the break from work, in the few years that break occurred, but for most of my life Xmas meant suffering awful commercial music and phony sentiment and propaganda from the most unsentimental and least spiritual institutions in the history of humanity; American corporations. Outside of the togetherness and joy my family receives from Xmas, I'd rather skip the whole thing and hide out in a Montana hermit's cave for the whole second half of December. I am an atheist and if it weren't for Tom Jefferson's precious "separation of church and state" and that beautifully worded opening statement in the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"), I suspect most of my love for the United State's Constitution would have been sorely tempered. Xmas is when most of the country ignores the First Amendment and we all pretend to be religious and loving. All of us except for those Americans who go on bombing and killing throughout the world in the interests of our favorite international corporations. It's a time full of contradictions, oxymorons, cynicism, and greed. It can't end quickly enough for me.

Part of the Xmas ritual for the last 35 years of my life has been an semi-annual trip to western Kansas to visit my parents. "Semi-annual" because of weather, distance, and the constant tension between my father's fundamentalist family and my secular nuclear family. Two years ago, my step-mother died. Last spring, my father died. Kansas is forever in my rear-view mirror. I still have a brother who lives in Kansas, but we've agreed to meet anywhere but Kansas from here out. Today's rant is the view from that driver's seat:

This is the Google View of my father's house, in Dodge City, KS. The home where he lived for the last 15 years of his life. Dodge City, KS is where he spent almost all of his adult life. Feel free to examine everything about that place. It's currently occupied by a free-loading minister who has convinced my step-sister he is improving the place by squatting there indefinitely. The housing market in Dodge has dried up so completely that this modern, well-cared-for home will probably sell for less than 50% of what it might have brought four years ago. Dodge is a wonderful example of the damage pseudo-conservative values have brought to the Midwest.

View Larger Map
My father was a high school math teacher for more than 40 years. Making a rough guess, based on his class sizes and typical course load, he taught 10,750 kids Trigonometry, Algebra I & II, Business Math, and, finally, Consumer Math (idiot math). Those years he was confined to teaching idiot math were supposed to be a punishment, incentive for him to quit, but when he lost his sight he was cared for and appreciated so much by "his kids" that he looked back on those classes as some of his best in a long career.

His last few years as an educator were doubly cursed by near-blindness brought on by chemotherapy, which he suffered in an attempt to suppress thyroid cancer, and a hostile school administration, which was endured because the new administration was hostile to older teachers. The cancer wasn't as malignant as the mismanagement, in the long run. My father loved teaching. He retired, reluctantly, at 73, and that pretty much marked the end of his life; although he survived almost 20 more years.

I think he would have enjoyed part-time assistant teaching, in a more enlightened community, or tutoring, but his last years teaching in the Dodge City School system were so miserable that he left the profession completely. He looked back often. In all of the conversations I had with him about his last 5 years, he had nothing but good things to say about the kids he taught (and those who taught him) and nothing but bad things to say about the spoiled brats in administratiion who mangled his city's public school system and squeezed all of the inspiration out of his career. I have no names to name, but I hope they know who they are. After spending more than half of his life in the same school, he left with about as much honor as if he'd been caught dipping into the school's petty cash.

My father's career was almost entirely in a small, rural area. He was a devastatingly conservative man in a completely conservative area. They were made for each other. Since nearly half of the city passed through his classes, you might say they were made of each other. Because of his perception of the Pendergast Democratic machine in Kansas City (mostly from the right wing editorials of Emporia's William Allen White) and his life-long dislike of Harry Truman, my father was a consistent Republican, regardless of how rarely Republicans lived up to his moral and philosophical values. It was a constant source of disagreement between us until the year he died. When I read Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, I saw my father in every page. When I hear any version of Pat Metheny and David Bowie's This Is Not America, my father's logic and his patriotism and his unwavering loyalty and the constant Republican betrayal of all of those things are my mental videography to that soundtrack.

At different periods in his teaching career, he was a basketball coach, a football coach, and a tennis coach. He coached a state championship runner-up basketball team in 1955 and '56. Several of his tennis students had successful college careers and a couple became college tennis coaches. At times, my father was a famous man in Dodge City. At times, he was almost an outcast; as when he publicly and loudly opposed the installation of the teacher's union in Dodge's public schools. For most of his life, like most 1950's K-12 teachers, he held several part-time and summer jobs to make ends meet; manufacturing company and department store accountant, farm laborer, filling station attendant, newspaper delivery, and various Amway-style (including Amway) pyramid marketing scams. In fact, when I looked at Wikipedia's list of "multi-level marketing companies," I saw more familiar names, from boxes and literature in my parents garage and basement, than unfamiliar. When my father was 60, he was working a 7-day work week, putting in an 18-hour workday five-days-a-week, with a 5-hour weekend break. When he retired, his teacher's pension, Social Security, Medicare, and some veteran's benefits provide him with the only security he'd enjoyed in his life. He had, practically speaking, next-to-no money in the bank, although his home was paid for and he had no debt. The fact that two decades disconnected from an active life was all that it took for my father to fall from a valued member of this small society to someone who's death was barely noticed is evidence that if you want to be remembered, die young.

He was a WWII Navy veteran, although he believed that FDR had unnecessarily involved (possibly through conspiracy) the United States in an Old World war. He had been an LST officer in three European Theater invasions (North Africa, Italy, and Normandy) and, later, became a gunnery officer on assorted aircraft carriers in the Pacific. Colonel S. L. A. Marshall's "military efficiency" book, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War, that described how our military could "improve" training so that new recruits are willing to kill on first contact at a much higher rate. Marshall complained that only 15% of WWII soldiers were willing to shoot to kill on first contact. Tyler Boudreau describes the resulting campaign of "improvement" in his column, To Kill or Not to Kill. My father was one of the 85%. In fact, he hoped to stay in that group throughout the war. When he accepted his Navy officer bars, he promised that he would never return fire if he was in a "kill or be killed" situation. Fortunately, he didn't have to. He sort of managed living by that promise by not having to directly fire a gun, although he targeted his aircraft carrier and LST gunnery crews. He told me about this promise in the 1990's, two-and-a-half decades after our Vietnam War battles that had seemed to place us in opposite camps regarding war and organized murder.

After the war, he returned to college, finished his teaching degree, got a job as a business teacher and football coach, started a family, and tried to put everything about war behind him. Eight years later, the love of his life, my mother, was diagnosed with liver cancer and one year later she died at age 34. I don't think he ever recovered, although he remarried four years later and added three more children to his responsibilities.

Our relationship was always a war zone, mostly over religion but also politics. We, honestly, loved to argue. We wanted to understand and "convert" each other, especially during a particularly verbal and intellectual period during his late sixties and through his seventies. I learned more about this complex, reserved, intelligent man in that decade than I imagined there was to know.

My father's (and my mother's) collection of 78 rpm Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Spike Jones, Duke Ellington, and big band and dixieland records introduced me to music and jazz. His 1950's appreciation for the Everly Brothers (in the midst of his general dislike for R&R and country music) taught me that music is mostly about pleasure and humor rather than some serious concern. That attitude has helped preserve my love of music through some pretty difficult times. It also allowed me to make a generally cantankerous character, Stephen Temmer, into a friend instead of someone who was convinced I was a musical idiot.

His mathematical approach to analysis, eventually, found its way into my career when that mutated into electrical engineering. His willingness to debate philosophical and political issues (a trait that came late in life to him) without fouling personal relationships became one of my life's ideals. His idealism, honor courage, work habits, loyalty, pursuit of knowledge and career goals all set standards for my life that are beyond my capabilities.

He was a small town farm-boy who lost countless friends who poured out of his LST into WWII enemy fire, left the career he loved, unrecognized and unappreciated, buried two wives, and suffered the loss of his incredible vitality and lived another 30 years practically as an invalid. Partially out of self-protection and more out of practicality, he absorbed those injuries and kept going. My father was my connection to Kansas and now that he is no longer there and there are so many things wrong with that place I happily relinquish and sever that connection. On this first anniversary without an obligation to ask me to consider that 1,000 mile trip to a place that is as foreign to me as any European country, I acknowledge that my ability to let that place fade into my life's rear-view mirror is a gift from my father.

A Burden on Peasants

2010-11-29T09:33:00.000-06:00

Something I read in Jared Diamond's Collapse has stuck with me all week. "Construction of royal monuments glorifying kings was especially massive between A.D. 650 and 750. After A.D. 700, nobles other than kings also got into the act and began erecting their own palaces . . . All of those nobles and their courts would have increased the burden that the king and his own court imposed on the peasants." Diamond was talking about one of the factors that contributed to the decline and dissolution of the Mayan Empire, but he probably wouldn't object to that statement being applied to the cause of death for practically every failed empire in human history.

Near the end of the Mayan society, the elite class really found their stride. They began increasing the distance between themselves and the working class and expanding their power, wealth, and attaching even more religious significance to their self-defined superiority. When we visit the ruins of a failed empire, we marvel at the incredible structures they left, as if there is something complicated about enslaving skilled people to make monuments for the inbred spawn of our masters. Those castles of kings, palaces of priests, and fortresses of robber barons are evidence that humans are destined to funnel power and wealth into the hands of the greedy and incompetent who will reward that society with collapse, famine, and the opportunity to become another tourist curiosity for the next generation.

Humans appear to be a significantly defective species. We are desperate for "leaders"; people who tell us we are inferior, who sell us fear and foolish superstition, and who give us "something to look up to." We will toss out liberty, justice, security, and our future to make a small portion of our society supremely comfortable and powerful. We do it willingly, or not, but we have done it over and over from the beginning of human history and we'll keep doing it until our species has found a way to wipe itself (and most of life) from the planet.

The fact is the existence of an elite ruling class is a burden on all of the working classes that can not be sustained. Wealth is either fairly and justly distributed or it exhausts and corrodes the culture until it self-destructs under moderate pressure from environmental, economic, and/or outside competition or invasion. The position the Republican Party has taken regarding the protection of wealth and power for the minority ruling class is consistent with conservative politics throughout the history of humanity. It is also a consistent cause of cultural death.

Republican Freedom Fighters

2010-11-28T16:35:00.001-06:00

I'm watching Casino Jack and the United States of Money as I write this. The Young Republicans, (K Street hucksters Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Hal Kreitman, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, Grover Nordquist, Michael Scanlon, and the rest of the Republican aristocracy) loved to see themselves as "Freedom Fighters." It was a sign of how useless and illiterate our media has become that the self-dubbed term didn't come to mean exactly what it says. These boys and their inheritors, the Teabaggers, are absolutely freedom fighters. Every place democracy, justice, or freedom (for anyone who didn't inherit a fortune) begins to fight out from under the corporate elite, these vicious animals beat it down and turn back the best motives and ideals of our species.

Republicans and all conservatives are notoriously incapable of art or creativity. Abramoff's Red Scorpion series (I & II) is about as inventive as conservatives get and II wasn't even worth converting to DVD. Abramoff's stint as a writer/producer was bad enough to land him in prison, if his all-around corruption didn't do the job. Funny that this boy founded the "Committee for Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment." While the violence, language, and disregard for facts and common sense depicted in Red Scorpion are consistent with Republican "values," only the perp's mothers would find something to enjoy in this drivel.

This pack of rats couldn't fight freedom any more effectively. They worked to set international corporations and the idle rich loose on middle class America. They created our Extreme Court and it will carry their corrupt and anti-democratic policies on for decades. Their "Contract on America" was a mob hit called on everything that the best of this country once represented. And now they are back.

Talk about Cynical

2010-11-21T16:25:00.000-06:00

Conservatives argue that liberals think the average American is dumb. It's true, of course. But we're not alone. The elite core of "conservatives" (a vanishing breed, if there ever was one) are just as cynical toward their fellow citizens. It's pretty obvious that the least intelligent of our species is the most afraid of change; a core definition of "conservative." The rich and powerful are also inclined to protect their status quo, so they will also be conservative.

In fact, their definition of "conservative" and the working class definitions have about as much in common as their lifestyles. The rich only pretend to be religious because religion keeps the masses busy. Any country willing to carpet bomb a city (Baghdad, for example) is clearly unhampered by any sort of pro life concerns. While the children of the working poor do the bombing, the children of the rich profit from building the bombs. Why worry about an occasional abortion when you're willing to firebomb children of all ages? Don't ask me, I'm a liberal.

The ruling conservative elite class not only fails to share the religious values of the dumber aggregate of that political spectrum, they don't share social values. The children of the rich are as likely to work for a living as they are to grow wings and flap their way to the mountain tops. The rich and their offspring have promoted the academic tendency to dumb-down "higher education" to allow these inbred hillbillies a route to some kind of credential (see G.W. Bush's academic career for evidence). Without moronic programs like Business Administration, modern humanities (popular culture, ethnic and sexual self-examinations, all of the inbred academic-administrative crap), and communications (the degree athletic departments would be lost without), the idle rich would have to leave their brats in daycare until the nasty spawn graduated to wheelchairs. Probably the best part of Oliver Stone's W, was the depiction of G.W.'s disdain for work and people who do work. Little George did his class proud.

Probably the most cynical tactic the ruling conservative elite have taken is in the hand-wringing over the national debt. These folks invented the debt. They force the country into profit-making wars. They scam every public works project, every tax loophole, and corrupt the nation's political system for their own gain. They demand reimbursement when their speculations go bad.When the nation is about the be overwhelmed by their incompetence and arrogance, they pretend to want to fix it by taking away the minuscule value government provides to working people. They tear apart Social Security, Medicare, and every government program that doesn't exclusively benefit them.

The current "bipartisan" National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69 by 2075. This commission managed to pretend to be putting the burden of the national debt on all classes without putting a lick of burden on the richest 10% in the country who currently control more than 80% of the nation's assets and income and pay a measly 43% of the income taxes. Anyone who believes that middle class jobs exist for working class people at the current retirement age, 65-66, is doped-up and living on a trust fund. For most of us, finding work after 55 is difficult to impossible. But that is unimportant compared to protecting the inheritance of the idle rich.

The conservative elite are as ruthless toward their fellow citizens as they are toward the 3rd world countries they claim are our enemies. The fact that at least 50% of us believe them is why liberal and conservative elites know we are stupid. The difference is that conservative elites treat the working working class like shit while they pretend to be on the same side. Liberals can not suppress their disgust in the face of overwhelming foolishness.

The Pointless Lives of the Idle Rich

2010-11-21T15:05:00.000-06:00

Forbes recently published an idiotic story titled, "Quirky Billionaire Passions." The Forbes article tells us about:

David Rockefeller's bug collection
Clemie Spangler's clock collection
Gordon Getty's musical hobby
Bruce Halle's tire poster and "art" collection
Alan Casden's Jewish coin collection
Gary Magness's car collection
James Irsay's guitar collection

Of the lot, it's marginally realistic to argue that Halle and Casden had something to do with their incredible wealth and power. Casden's wealth comes from southern California real estate speculation, so he's always been dependent on connections and politics. Halle is the Discount Tire guy and we fought a war to protect his industry's access to natural resources. The rest are spoiled rich kids who have spent their idle lives burning up cash on pointless pursuits and doing as much damage as possible to the culture and the country. They are poster children for why the estate (inheritance) tax should not only be revived but should be returned to its original purpose. One of that tax's greatest proponents, Teddy Roosevelt, said, "Inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals of the generation which established our Government.''

Obviously, from the evidence provided by this Forbe's article, not only is "idleness the root of mischief," but it inspires some pretty stupid personal habits, too. Reinstating the 50% top income tax bracket and at least the 15% estate tax bracket for estates over $1-2 million would go a long way toward re-balancing the nation's debt and restoring economic fairness in the country.

Call it "class warfare." I'm good with that. There is a reason these rich assholes barricade themselves in their "members only" compounds. They've been at war with working people for centuries. They fire their weapons in every election, in every tax bill, every time they close a factory, pollute a community and abandon it, and every time they take our tax money and ship it to some 3rd world country where they build factories, mines, steal natural resources, and begin the cycle again. Anyone too dumb to figure that out is too dumb to have a job.

Back to the Future

2010-10-29T17:36:00.000-05:00

Teabaggers stomp a Move-On protester for trying to hand Rand Paul a sign. I've been hearing that the Teabaggers are trying to restore American to the values of the past. I assume that means the "past" when rednecks and rich assholes lynched minorities, their police and corporate thugs beat the crap out of union strikers, when our military ran roughshod over the democracies of the 3rd world, when racial and religious discrimination (especially against non-believers) was the standard for most of the nation, when our nation went to war every time some international corporation was inconvenienced by some small country trying to protect its natural resources or population from being robbed or raped, and when white men ruled the earth and women and children and every non-white race was an object to be used and abused? Looks like we have a good start on that world with the characters involved in Teabagging.

Being the shills of some of the worst characters in history is a great way to establish the agenda for this "party." Even the Salt Lake Tribune has figured out where this "movement" comes from (not unlike a bowel movement). While the chief Teabag Lady, Glenn Beck, misdirects his minions away from reality, the Koch Brothers are after nothing short of an overthrow of the United States federal government. These boys are familiar with violent revolution, too. They owe the core of their their fortune to Stalin and the Russian revolution.

So, if this is the revolution you want, plan on it being as un-American and anti-democratic as everything associated with this crowd of clowns. These people could care less about working class Americans and have no more in common with people who have real jobs than Glenn Beck has with people who study history.

Kill Welfare? Not the Parts that Feed Me

2010-10-06T09:22:00.000-05:00

Everybody is crying over the deficit. The solution, according to practically every expert, is to cut the welfare strings that hold up dependent citizens. A recent Week Magazine article cited statistics claiming 45% of Americans don't pay taxes and nearly 50% of us are on "government benefits--Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, unemployment insurance, food stamps." The Teabaggers use this sort data to justify their existence and most of the Moon-Murdock conglomerate harps on "American dependence" as a sign of the Apocalypse.

As usual, the media is barking up the wrong tree. For starters, more than 1/3 of "employed" Americans work for local, state, and federal governments. Another big chunk of our citizens depend on government retirement benefits. A huge portion of what's left of industry in this country produces products intended for government consumption. The military, alone, chews up billions in American manufacturing productivity. Add the military crap we produce to sell to foreign governments (mostly those hostile to this country) and you have a lot of corporate welfare that always seems to be slipping under the media radar. [Since the media is a top corporate welfare recipient, that should be no surprise.] Top that with tax incentives, government grants and loans, and taxpayer financed corporate infrastructure and you have a very socialist nation that does a lot of whining about socialism. In fact, we may be the most successful socialist country in the history of the world.

Success, however, is something you have to work at and if you don't know what it is you're working for that becomes less productive. The Teabag Ladies' constant whine about their brand of social conservative fantasies is a distraction. Many, if not most, of the Teabaggers are on some form of government support; notably unemployment insurance and Social Security. Fighting against the system that feeds and houses you and your family is an odd sort of logic.

What would happen if we gave up our pretense of "traditional American values" and admitted, as a culture, that we are socialist, have been socialist since the late 1800s, and are likely to become even more socialist in the future? The most socialist beneficiaries in the country would go ballistic, for starters. Bankers and investment firms would fight this acknowledgment because it would threaten their pretense of capitalism. Banks simply borrow money from the public and loan it to the public at elevated interest rates. If we admit that banks provide no useful or necessary service that a national bank couldn't do better, thousands of inflated corporate executive salaries would disappear in a puff of logic. Financial speculation offers nothing but a lottery system slanted to benefit insiders, but if we decided to drop government support of that farce we call the stock market, more puffed-up salaries would be jeopardized and acres of propaganda would be generated to try and convince a gullible public that "you need us to keep your something for nothing fantasies alive." A significant portion of manufacturing in the United States is intended to provide products requiring government support or outright purchase. Most of our military-industrial exports depend on associated government military grants and loans to the "purchasing" country. The auto industry requires government to build roads for their vehicles to travel. The entire medical products system (drugs and devices) depends on Medicare and Medicaid for paying customers.

The historic problem with actual socialism is that someone needs to do real work: grow food, build housing, fix broken stuff, and all of the actual production required to feed the inept and unnecessary bureaucratic masses. An obvious requirement of a successful socialist state is population control, but the usual way they mismanage that task is through wars and terrorism and purges and genocide. Maybe an honest socialist state would admit that the patriotic bullshit they usually spout is a cowardly way to get around population control. Maybe pigs will fly out of my ass and trees will grow golden apples.

Interpreting News

2010-09-11T09:57:00.010-05:00

The more media we have, the more sources that appear on the web, the more cable "news" channels we have, the more dense the new digital on-air world becomes, the harder it is to figure out what's going on. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. Ever since crazy Ronny Wrinkles abolished the "Fairness Doctrine," the media has steadily gone downhill. Of course, that was the intent behind eliminating the one thing that held the American media accountable so Reagan could have claimed "mission accomplished" if he had been able to put together two such obscure words into a single sentence.

With the advent of all of these news "sources," American citizens are all the way back to those days when being more than 10 miles from the event is the equivalent to being across the ocean from useful information about the event. If you didn't see it, you can't know what happened. Even pictures lie, words are valueless. This is a serious problem for democracy. "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." - Thomas Jefferson

Clearly, today we are not to be trusted with our "own government." Our government, our world, belongs to corporations and their representatives in governments all over the world and they don't trust us, themselves, each other, or humanity at large. All my life, I've realized that two things float to the top of the toilet bowl: cream and turds. In the corporate world, cream isn't often produced. Which means that the people who are running the world are the lazy, inbred, retarded children of the people who have been running the world for decades. George W. Bush, for example. (No, by the way, I don't miss him.)

Until a solution like the one the Fairness Doctrine represented is found, the integrity of our democracy, the quality of discourse, the value of our actions, the usefulness of "information" will be minimal. If that seems unimportant to you, you are not alone. Reagan's FCC henchman, Mark Fowler, argued that abolition of the Fairness Doctrine was a First Amendment "matter of principle." The principle was the "right" of corporations and the elite to have their position strongly made over all objections. You have to give Republicans credit for consistency.

Obviously, the authors of the First Amendment would have gone to war to defeat that sort of argument, but Republicans have freely interpreted the Constitution for their own purposes since Teddy Roosevelt fooled the party into being responsible to all citizens for 8 short, incredibly productive and progressive years. Of course, TR had to invent his own party (Bull Moose) to try and hold together the people who were honestly "conservative" and ethical after Taft returned Republicanism to it's rightful, corrupt, inbred roots. The Taft administration was intellectually lazy, administratively incompetent and corrupt, and personally gluttonous (sound familiar?) and set the nation and the world up for the first World War and 1929. The Republican Party has been repeating that formula ever since. The intention and end result is redistributing wealth from the many to the few: socialism and wealth for the elites, capitalism and disaster for the rest of us.

But this kind of discussion is blasted out of the MSM with the irrational "class warfare" argument and as far as Faux News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Murdock and Sun Myung Moon's media conglomerates, and the rest of corporate wingnut America's "news sources" are concerned that is the end of the discussion. Of course, the American Revolution was the ultimate class warfare and our Constitution was supposed to be the platform from which that battle could continue throughout the life of the Union of States. The classes will battle, regardless of the illusions and fantasies of propaganda, and the only real issue is "are both sides equally armed?" Today, the rich and powerful have all the weapons.

Reagan and his cynical and corrupt henchmen and heirs fired a fatal shot to the heart of democracy in 1985 and there has been no sign of democratic life from the corporate media since. Despite the fairyland wingnut whining about "left wing media," the media is overwhelmingly far right. Apparently, any sign of responsibility, integrity, fairness, or curiosity displayed by reporters is taken as evidence of political apocalypse by the wingnuttery. While it is true that the majority of intellectuals are liberal, it is equally true that most corporations are owned and mismanaged by the inbred children of inbred children of robber barons and ancient royalty. Those true "elites" hold the purse strings and money is what makes our world spiral down the toilet.

Without the protection and balance provided by the Fairness Doctrine, fairness is the furthest thing from the mind of corporate America. Without honest, balanced news, corporations like Murdock's and Moon's are free to distort and pervert "information" until it is as credible and useful as the babbling of priests or miracle cure peddlers. Once that task is complete, democracy has a half-life measured in minutes. The cynically misnamed "Patriot Act" was an example of that sudden death as were G.W.'s grotesque overuse of the State Secrets Privilege and Cheney's secret "National Energy Policy Task Force" meetings. From where I stand, it looks like the ride is all downhill from here.

Why We Believe Them

2010-08-14T07:01:00.007-05:00

In an interview during a break in his Nuremberg trial, Hermann Goering explained, "Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.

"Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship."

Goering's interviewer, German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist Gustave Gilbert, naively argued, "There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

Goering answered, "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Repeatedly, we are suckers for these lame arguments. At the beginning of the Iraq invasion, I argued that this was Tonkin Gulf and Vietnam all over again. I was told there was no similarity between the two wars and Vietnam was much more complicated than Iraq would be because of the terrain. Unless you are willing to kill everyone in the country you invade, terrain makes no difference. Of course, some of the crazy convinced poor slobs on farms can't see any reason not to kill everyone in the country, in an effort to "save" those people from whatever awful situation we've been convinced they are in.

Nothing changes, unless humans become dumber every generation. Eugene Debs said, "“The people can have anything they want, the only problem is they do not want anything.” The trinkets that most Americans consider the important "production" of our so-called capitalist society amount to nothing in more brief intervals as we wind down our civilization. Today's $700 Apple iPad will become tomorrow's near-useless $25 eBay auction item by the end of the year. The most important entertainment tidbit will be forgotten and no more than a SNL laughable moment three months later. The useless drug promoted by Big Pharma on prime time television will turn out to have known side-effects far worse than the imaginary mental or physical disease the drug was advertised to cure. Today's Gulf oil spill will seem as minor as the Exxon Valdez tomorrow.

Mr. Debs also said, “I am not a labor leader. I don't want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out.”

Every tiny step forward humanity has taken has been followed by a race backwards. John Kennedy was followed by Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. Carter, as lame but well-intended as he was, was followed by Reagan and Bush; two people who never had a good intention in their lives. Clinton, a man who was equal parts progressive and regressive, was followed by Bush-Cheney; two men who make the word "regressive" sound impotent. Obama is probably more in the Carter mold than Clinton, so we can count on the follow-up to Obama to be something along the line of another Bush; probably Jeb. Humans can always be counted on to do the dumbest thing possible.

Mark Twain probably wrapped it all when he said, "Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion-- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.

"The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste" [The Lowest Animal essay, 1897]

Obviously, religion is a human invention designed to keep "some poor slob on a farm" distracted while he is being sent to some idiot war and being sold a pile of useless toys. The real question is, "What could possibly convince humans that a god would be interested in an animal as idiotic as that?" The reason we believe them is because we are dumb enough to fall for the same stupid trick ad infinitum.

Impossible Missions

2010-08-13T08:41:00.017-05:00

The United States has long been addicted to the idea of impossible missions; crusades and causes and impossible ideals. The Revolutionary War was our first national impossible mission. The Revolutionaries hoped to build a nation where "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," but where some men could own other men and where a very few men could live outside of the boundaries of decency and community. Maybe the idealists who wrote those words in the Declaration of Independence had nothing but the best of intentions, but there were men among those who saw opportunity in the misfortune of the many. The more I learn about the origins of this nation, the more I come to believe that something other than democracy was a principal creation with the United States of America. So many things stayed the same, or became worse, after our revolution but one thing that came to be and only grew stronger during the next 235 years; marketing mythology.

Since then, the American public has been sold a succession of wars and invasions that have been, primarily, intended to make that original group of marketeers, and the few who joined them in the last century, rich and powerful. In our nation's short history, we have been at war with some other nation, or nations, for a minimum of 76 of our 235 years; at least 32% of our life. Many of those "wars' have been simple invasions for profit: from the Barbary Invasion of 1801 to the Mexican-American War of 1846 to today's incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the invasions haven't even been declared and are not part of that 76 year total. Since 1950, we've been at war for 65% of those years. Again, that does not include CIA and undeclared military activities.

In his famous War Is A Racket speech and the book that grew from public appearances, General Smedley Butler, a former USMC Commandant who was twice awarded the Medal of Honor said, "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes . . .

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

The nation has been conned into at least a dozen wars since Butler's time, not including the CIA's violent and illegal interventions in practically every nation in the world. Now, we're wrapped up in a War on Terror, which from the start sounded oxymoronic to me. War, by nature, is terrorism. You can not drop bombs on civilian populations and be anything but a terrorist.

That wasn't the first instance of wars conducted on imaginary "enemies." We've had a War on Poverty, which lasted until Republicans distracted the American public with a variety of delusions from the early 70's until today. At least that "war" had some good intent. What followed was purely profit-motivated.

That might have introduced the outrageous idea that you can declare war on a noun; let alone a pronoun. Seriously? We're going to launch an invasion against everyone who causes terror in the mind of Americans? I'm pretty sure that isn't possible. Even more unlikely is the possibility that our government--which was well-stocked with rich men who counted on the sources of terrorism (Saudi Arabia, in particular) for much of their wealth--would wage war on the actual source of our particular terror of the moment; the people who attacked New York City on September 11, 2001. Obviously, they picked a place semi-close to the actual source of terrorism and fired away with the nation's treasure and youth. Today, they are much richer and we are nearly a nation in poverty. Fortunately for the rich, "money knows no borders" and after they've bankrupted and demoralized this country, they'll move to some other country and ruin it. It's what they do.

77 years ago, the nation ended its first experiment in prohibition; our War on Alcohol or The Noble Experiment. 1917's 18th Amendment and its enforcement legislation, the Volstead Act, created one of the most violent, destructive periods in the nation's history. This government effort to legislate and enforce morality resulted in 16 years of all out war (at a cost of $500 million/year) against the working class by several branches of government. It also created the US version of the Mob and strengthened their grip on several government agencies, including the FBI and state law enforcement. In the end, prohibition was ended with a gentleman's agreement between government and the Mafia called "Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938" and "Marihuana Tax Act of 1937." These gifts from our government to the Mob provided extensive territory of illegal markets and activity so that the underworld economy could continue and prosper.

We've waged an incredibly unsuccessful and expensive War on Drugs ($20 billion for this year, so far) since Nixon first coined the phrase in 1971. The Alzheimer's Candidate, Ronnie Rayguns, made this war on a noun his personal platform, created the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1988, and appointed our first Drug Czar that year. He and his nutty wife consulted tea leaves and Gypsy fortune tellers for advice on waging this war (and other policy decisions) and the result is trillions of dollars wasted and millions of lives ruined or destroyed. Supposedly, the Obama Administration will stop using the War on Drugs mantra because they believe it is "counterproductive." You have to love their love of understatement. This has been the longest, most expensive, least successful war in the nation's history. The history of this make-believe war has been vicious, dishonest, and destructive. There is no end in sight.

In October of 2001, Congress passed the War on American Civil Rights and Liberties Act, also known as the Patriot Act. This amazing 56,800 word incursion into the Bill of Rights and the Constitution couldn't have been nicknamed more poorly. Like most of our wars, this war eliminates basic rights that were once thought to be central to our democracy.

A Small Sample of our Long Wartime History (major events only):

Began	Ended	Years at War	Formal Name	Who and Where
1775	1783	8	American Revolution	English Colonists vs. Great Britain
1798	1800	2	Franco-American Naval War	United States vs. France
1801	1805; 1815	5	Barbary Wars	United States vs. Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli
1812	1815	3	War of 1812	United States vs. Great Britain
1813	1814	1	Creek War	United States vs. Creek Indians
1836		1	War of Texas Independence	Texas vs. Mexico
1846	1848	2	Mexican-American War	United States vs. Mexico
1861	1865	4	U.S. Civil War	Union vs. Confederacy
1898		1	Spanish-American War	United States vs. Spain
1914	1918	4	World War I	Triple Alliance: Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary vs. Triple Entente: Britain, France, and Russia. The United States joined on the side of the Triple Entente in 1917.
1939	1945	6	World War II	Axis Powers: Germany, Italy, Japan vs. Major Allied Powers: United States, Great Britain, France, and Russia
1950	1953	3	Korean War	United States (as part of the United Nations) and South Korea vs. North Korea and Communist China
1960	1975	15	Vietnam War	United States and South Vietnam vs. North Vietnam
1961		1	Bay of Pigs Invasion	United States vs. Cuba
1983		1	Grenada	United States Intervention
1989		1	US Invasion of Panama	United States vs. Panama
1990	1991	1	Persian Gulf War	United States vs. Iraq
1995	1996	1	Intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina	United States as part of NATO acted peacekeepers in former Yugoslavia
2001	2010	9	Invasion of Afghanistan	United States vs. the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to fight terrorism.
2003	2010	7	Invasion of Iraq	United States vs. Iraq
235		76
		32%

It's worth noting that practically none of the "wars" that General Butler mentioned in War Is A Racket are on this list. Most of our war-like activities in South and Central America and Africa are unlisted, also. Obviously, the many wars against native Americans are also unlisted. If those were included, it's possible the United States might be the most warlike nation in the history of the world. We might be more warlike than the Romans or the British. It is easy to imagine that our country has been at war with someone for more than half and, possibly, nearly every year of its existence. If we really wanted to wage a battle against terrorism, we'd probably be tearing ourselves to pieces. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

After describing these depressing statistics to my wife, she asked, "Well what do you want to do about it?"

Obviously, there is nothing I can do about it but my answer is, "Restrict the President to the very limited military powers the Constitution gives to that office and grow a pair of testicles on Congress." Before that will happen, the country will have to purge itself of the interests the Republican Party represents and create some political alternatives for the tiny number of people who actually are "conservative" and "liberal." What I expect will happen is that we'll keep following this nutty militaristic path until the rest of the world rises up and beats us down, the same way every other violent empire has died in human history.

Miss Me Yet?

2010-07-06T10:29:00.002-05:00

The disreputable descendants of apes in Wyoming, MN have posted this brilliant political statement near I35 just outside of town. This moronic question has raised its idiot head on bumper stickers and rear windows all over the country, since.

Yeah, we all miss this kind of international embarrassment over the crassness and arrogance of our Commander in Thief. We miss having to hang our heads in shame as the premier representative of our country puts both feet in his mouth and talks out of his ass. We miss being represented by someone so stupid that he inspires automatic references to Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman. We miss being lied to, stolen from, and laughed at by "conservatives" who would be welcomed as leaders in the old Soviet Union. We miss levels of incompetence at the highest levels of government that would embarrass any 3rd world nation. We miss the instant and total access to the White House that the worst, most corrupt corporations of the world once had. We miss the certainty we once had that, as our economy collapsed from corruption and incompetence, that nothing could ever get better as long as that gang of idiots held office.

Yep, we miss all of those wonderful things that Republicans bring to the table. Mostly, we miss our reputation as being the world's idiot, violent children. I feel confident that conservatives will restore that reputation as soon as they install Palin or some other conservative bimbo in the White House. We Americans are proud of our inability to learn anything from history.

Subway Sticks a Footlong up Its Ass

2010-06-02T13:36:00.010-05:00

An open letter to the geniuses at Subway Restaurants:

Sometimes I wonder if competitors plant lawyers and marketing idiots in the employment of their competition. For example, whatever idiot decided it was in McDonald's best interest to sue a pair of British protesters, Helen Steel and David Morris, for libel in 1989 almost had to be working for Burger King. After seeing a documentary made about that legal action, McLibel, I took my already skimpy fast food business to anyone but McDonald's ever since. In the long run, McDonald's didn't win any money from the suit, engendered a shit-load of bad will from anyone interested in corporate fairness, safe and healthy food, or good government. The idiot judge who settled the case in McDonald's favor ended up costing the British government a load of money ( £57,000) in the European Court of Human Rights where the case was overturned and England found itself owing that court money for violating Article 6 (right to a fair trial).

In all, the moron who advised McDonald's to sue these people produced a lot of customers for everybody but McDonald's. I'm not kidding. I haven't eaten a crumb produced by that miserable company since sometime in 1990 and I never will. In my opinion, the best thing that could happen to McDonald's is bankruptcy. I do my best to direct people to McLibel and every bad word I can think of to say about McDonald's gets said as often as possible.

One of the companies that benefited from my deflected business was Subway. That all ended in late May, 2010. Subway sent a letter to Coney Island Drive Inn stating, ""You must immediately remove all references to FOOTLONG (tm) in association with sandwiches."In the crazy mind of Subway's doofus legal and marketing departments, they imagine they invented the word "footlong" in regards to sandwiches. Good for them. Going crazy is a symptom of getting too big for yourself and this is obviously nuts. I would imagine that many businesses, like Coney Island Drive Inn have been making sandwiches called "footlongs" for longer than the morons at Subway have been alive.

So, this is my notice that I'm done with Subway; one of my wife's favorite food franchises. We're done. No matter how hungry we get, how poor the rest of the choices might be, we don't do business with corporate bullies. So, fuck you McDonald's and Subway. We're gone.

Whose Country Is This?

2010-05-30T13:59:00.009-05:00

Just so you are clear on where you are living, I strongly recommend you watch this recording of storm troupers invading a residence, killing a family dog for recreational purposes, and arresting two adults on trumped-up charges (possession of a minuscule amount of marijuana and a CYA charge of "child endangerment"). Obviously, what endangered the child was idiots in uniforms carrying weapons.

A short article discussing the case is included here http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/05/video-of-swat-raid-on-missouri and http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/feb/23/family-questions-swat-drug-search-that-led-to/.

A few weeks ago, I worked with a kid on a video shoot who was once on track to become an engineer before he decided he wanted to take the easy way into life by becoming a cop. Like many nerds, this kid barely qualifies as "socialized." He's got a superiority complex, is often a bully (mentally, since he doesn't have the skills or the weapons to physically push anyone around), and is superstitious and a wingnut. Other than having had experience as a high school bully or an actual criminal (as best I know), he's perfectly qualified to join the US version of Nazi Germany's SS.

At one point during the show we were taping, he made the comment, "I don't know why people hate cops. We're professionals like doctors or lawyers." He claim to professionalism was based on the fact that to get their lifetime guaranteed employment jobs, cops have to "earn a college degree." Of course, unlike doctors and lawyers, a grossly misnamed "Criminal Justice" bachelor's degree is a minimal education with grade school difficultly courses offered by every fly-by-night correspondence program on the planet. You can get your Criminal Justice piece of toilet paper from the same fine people who bring us degrees in Court Reporting, Culinary Arts, Health Insurance Customer Service, Paralegal, and Video Game design training. Some of these degree mills have the gall to call their programs "Public Safety Administration." Watching the video above sure makes this member of the public feel safer.

For laughs, here are some of the course names from a typical criminal justice program:

Ethical Issues in Criminal Justice,
Police Report Writing,
Precision Driving,
Firearms,
Current Issues in Criminal Justice,
Criminal Justice Internship,
Physical Fitness Conditioning,
Physical-Defensive Tactics,
Conflict Management in Criminal Justice,
State Criminal Law,
State Criminal Procedures,
Criminal Investigation,
Patrol Problems,
Traffic Management,
Law Enforcement Assessment,
Advanced First Aid,
and Crime-Violence in Literature.

I'm not making this up. These are acual class names for a state college's Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice program. Of course, basketweaving and pushups are liberal arts requirements for this pablum degree. If you are currently employed as a cop or meter maid or security guard or crossing guard, you can receive 50+ credits for "time served." For all this empty-headed crap, a "student" receives a "bachelor of science" degree. I will never again criticize Communications degrees. Compared for Criminal Justice, a Communications degree is actually academic. The closest thing to a science requirement in this entire program is "Advanced First Aid," a course often taken by people wanting to do activities like scuba diving or motorcycle safety instruction. The rest of the degree requirements make a mockery of the word "science." I would expect a normal person to be less intelligent after completing this pointless program. If this crap doesn't numb your mind, you don't have a mind to work with.

The kid who inspired this rant dropped out of his EE program because it was too hard. He figured if all he was going to do with his life was issue traffic tickets and break down residential doors, shoot household pets, and terrorize unarmed citizens, why learn anything useful? The next time you watch one of those idiotic television programs that has a highly-skilled geek whipping through loads of information, chasing down criminals using beyond state-of-the-art tools, remember this kid. He will probably end up being some police department's "genius," but he wasn't near bright enough to complete a real engineering program or diligent enough to work his way through a real college degree program. The fact is, all our police can do is break into ordinary citizens' homes and terrorize the family next door. They don't have the skills necessary to protect society from real menaces. They have a degree in Criminal Justice.

As for why people hate and fear cops, I'd bet the 8-year old who saw his parents treated like dangerous criminals and his family pets shot down because men in armour felt like killing something could answer that question. I'd imagine that Jonathan Whitworth could give you a pretty good explaination of why he is afraid of his local nutcases with guns. Anyone with a lick of sense ought to be afraid for their lives after watching this video, especially with the knowledge that teams like this exist in every mid-sized city and they are itching to pretend to be tough.

Ideally, they can exercise their bullying instincts in safe environments like the bust shown in this video. If they were busting bikers cooking meth, they'd have to worry about getting shot at. Busting a recreational marijuana user and his family is about as dangerous as beating up kids at the local Dairy Queen. Let's face it, if these bozos weren't employed by the local cops, they'd be doing exactly that, beating up kids and hanging out in bars. It's not like they have real skills, a useful education, or any social value.

Imaginary Alternatives: Reagan's $50

2010-05-13T09:27:00.015-05:00

In one of his most quoted statements, Reagan said, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. " And then, in true Republican fashion, he went on to deregulate a hoard of industries that had a long, well-documented history of desperately needing regulating and he created one of the longest periods of unemployment and wild government spending in US history. In the end, he left a shattered economy and massive debt as his legacy. The Republican history revisionists want to recreate his legacy as one of moderation and economic opportunity. There was opportunity alright, but it was for mobsters who took over S&Ls, the military-industrial complex who had a field decade with taxpayer "investment," and Wall Street's gamblers.

What was lost was the opportunity to fix America's real problems: taking on alternative energy solutions, converting to international metric standards, downsizing the post-Cold War military, modernizing our education system, facing the end-of-the-Industrial-Period and American Century facts and realigning the country for those reduced resources, and the rest of the unaddressed list of real problems. Instead, Reagan put on his happy face and set the country back two decades or more. He deregulated the media, giving us Faux News and the rest of the right wing corporate spokesperson networks. He busted unions, shipping the working class out of the middle class and into debtor slavery. He set Wall Street free of its post-Depression shackles setting the economy up a half-dozen boom-and-bust cycles since he took office and turning our economy from one that produces goods and services to one that produces con games on an international scale.

In a complete flight of imagination, Republicans are promoting a change to the $50 bill. They want to replace U.S. Grant with Reagan's mug. There is some historical connection between the two: 1) they both headed supremely corrupt administrations providing federal and state prosecutors with working material for a decade after they left office, 2) they were both hands-off Presidents (Grant was drunk for his two terms, Reagan was senile and asleep through most of his administration), 3) they both presided over substantial periods of economic recession, and, least likely, 4) they both supported Civil Rights. Grant was a strong advocate for the 15th Amendment (before the Supreme Court turned it to crap) and Reagan once said, "I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary." Who would have thought that the man who took best advantage of the southern flight from the Democratic Party because of the Civil Rights Act actually believed in its principles? Of course, Ulysses Grant actually provided a service to his country, leading the nation's military against the hillbillies of the Old South and saving democracy, the Union, and ending slavery in North America (until the 20th Century revived slavery in a variety of forms, something R Reagan had a hand in).

Since Reagan never actually accomplished anything useful in the defense of the nation or in any other useful area, I think dumping Grant for Reagan would be a foolish mistake. However, Reagan and G.W. Bush did an awful lot toward burying the country in debt and I would strongly recommend that their likenesses be put on an instrument of debt; the $100 savings bond, for example. I am in no way a graphic artist, but the included example is along the lines of what I would recommend. A legend such as, "I need your money to burn" or "Buy U.S. Bonds so Democrats can pay off our bad debts" or something equally quaint could go a long way toward truth in advertising our national savings bonds.

It looks like the $50 Reagan bill is doomed to failure. Something like 80% of Americans favor Gran over Reagan. Apprarently, the repackaging of Sleepy Ronny hasn't gone as well as the promoters hoped. Republicans always want to take the easy way out of work, representing the idle rich as they do. It's going to take a lot more Faux News propaganda before Boomers forget their losses from Reaganonmics. Of course, the quote Reagan should have been remembered for is, "It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?" He never did.

How to Fix Kansas

2010-04-15T07:25:00.008-05:00

The subtitle for this rant ought to be "And Why Kansas will Never be Fixed."

Kansas, like most of the Midwest, is and has been in economic depression since Jerry Ford and the end of the Vietnam War. Outside of federal welfare, the state's economic base has been steadily shrinking since the end of the industrial period in the 70's. The population is aging, the replacements are unskilled, uneducated immigrant minimum wage labor (when they aren't illegal). The school system, which was never particularly good, is now reduced to the blind leading the blind. The quality of life is so pitiful that the state resorts to generating its own standards for QoL measurements to avoid the obvious conclusion that only someone who is desperate and out of options would life in the state.

So, what are the state and local community solutions for this catastrophic situation? The usual culprits: hillbilly recreation and gambling. In my hometown, Dodge City, the city has proudly built a "$33.7 million multi-purpose events center" that is supposed to attract pro hockey, rodeo, and music acts to the city. Supposedly, Dodge has a population of 33,000, but most of that population is barely surviving, with next-to-no income available for high-priced recreation. A substantial portion of the population is retired or approaching retirement.

Dodge City has a long history of being conned into idiot development by city mismanagers and crooked city council members, only to find that the mismanagers skip town leaving the city with the smell of rendering and packing plants and feedlots surrounding the city and a continuing decline in average incomes and quality of life. This new "events center" has the stench of déjà vu.

Another proposed "solution" to the city's economic woes is gambling. Supposedly, the reason Dodge's tourist business is in decline is because the city hasn't properly hyped it's quarter decade of historic importance into a commodity. The fact that the freeway bypasses the city b y almost 200 miles and the railroad is all but dead and the city has no meaningful air transportation is, apparently, unimportant. Some folks imagine that the incredibly opportunity for poor people to gamble will be a big draw to the city. "Just hold your nose and ignore the nasty taste of our air and water and yank on that one-armed bandit." Catchy, don't you think?

The obvious real solution is so far out of the grasp of this kind of community that it might as well be described as "impossible." The solution for Dodge is the solution for the rest of the country, too. The taxpaying, self-supporting states and cities of the nation all have one trait in common: they are tolerant and liberal. Innovation and creativity and tolerance are all part of the same package. The code name for this is the "‘technology, talent and tolerance formula" and it's not only well-documented, but it's obvious. The places where tolerance is at what Midwesterners would call "extreme" are the places where talent and technology thrive. Call me crazy, but it just seems obvious that a culture of tolerance would attract talented people and talented people tend to drive technology.

A place like Dodge City, Kansas would be near the far end of intolerant locations. Being gay, non-white, hip, non-conformist, or unusual in any way is a guaranteed path to discrimination and, possibly, violence in Dodge. This is the kind of community that actively hunts down "the green monkey" and exterminates him with prejudice. Dodge is exactly the kind of "real American" city that Sarah Palin extols and it is also a dead zone, creatively. The school system produces mediocrity; when it produces anything at all, since the drop-out rate is above average. (Kansas' overall dropout rate is 25%, but the Hispanic dropout rate is 45% and that is the fastest growing population in the state and overwhelmingly the fastest growing population in Dodge.)

To become an economic center, the city and state would have to reverse decades of Republican-directed discrimination and intolerance. I can not see any way that would happen. Without that reversal, however, the place is doomed to become a 3rd world, dysfunctional poverty zone and a drag on the economies of the productive parts of the country.

More of What's The Matter with Kansas

2010-04-12T21:27:00.019-05:00

Kansas is one of the nation's welfare states, in 2005 Kansas was #22 on the list of states that receive more in federal dollars than it pays. You'd think that would make the state somewhat "liberal," but you'd be wrong. The overwhelming majority of welfare states are "red" states; which is pretty consistent with the 1950's definition of "red." The socialists are complaining about creeping socialism.

With that in mind, Kansas is still as confusing as ever. On a recent trip to Kansas, I was bombarded with anti-abortion, pro-capital punishment, pro-war, pro-gun, anti-government propaganda. As always, the contradictions are endless. Thomas Frank's book on the subject pointed out how well corporations and their spokesgroup, the Republican Party, have used distractions and ignorance to confuse the hell out of this non-working class who depend on government handouts but who imagine themselves as being independent and hard-working.

My wife's relatives are a case in point. In a household of three adults, one is a "social worker" at a local prison, one is a clerk in the education system specializing in providing services to students reliant on the National School Lunch Program, and a retired public school teacher living on a pension and Social Security. The social worker made a special point of calling the President "Ohbooboo," and pretended that he was making a political statement, not a racist slur. The school clerk "hates" the President and his "liberal agenda." Only the retired school teacher refrained from any hate speech during our visit. In a state that takes in $1.22 in 2005 dollars for every $1 of taxes paid into the federal coffers, this family was not even a little unusual. Just guessing, I'd expect their productivity ratio was more like a 100:1 substidy-to-taxpayer statistic.

How does that work? How do people imagine themselves to be anything but dependent when they are totally living on the dole? Easy. Anyone who can believe in a all seeing, all knowing god who is more concerned with greedy, lazy, illiterate Midwesterners than starving Africian children is capable of self-deluding themselves into all sorts of crazy notions. Delusion is state-of-the-art in Kansas.

Consider the income the state hauls in in farm substidies, the millions of dollars in religious tax exemptions, and the fact that the only population increase the state experiences comes from illegal aliens, and you have a place that couldn't support itself under any conditions; a welfare state. I wonder if these are the folks South Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer was talking about when he said “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Judging by the size of the average Kansan, I'd say we've been feeding them way too much.

Dumbing Down the State

2010-04-05T19:03:00.005-05:00

April 7, the state of Minnesota will host a Republican Marching Morons event with former quitter-Governor Sarah Palin, Representative Michele Bachmann, Governor Tim Pawlenty, and Sean Hannity. Wow! I suspect the state will be at least 50 IQ points dumber just with that kind of moron weight in town. The Republican propaganda machine calls Palin and Bachmann "two of the most dynamic and impressive conservative leaders in the nation." As usual, when Republicans speak, I convulsively lung for a dictionary to see just how far they are from properly using the English language this week. Putting Bachmann and Palin in a sentance with the words "dynamic" and "impressive" and "leaders" is about as oxymoronic as morons can get.

If there were a god, he would whip up a tornado and whisk away the dregs of the planet while they are packed together in their hive of craziness. Not likely, but a wonderful fantasy. Put these two grinning idiots on a stage and watch them stumble over words, thoughts, and cracks in the Republican platform.

Usually, the state capitol building is the center of idiocy in this state (and most states), but this weekend the mental bar is going to be lowered somewhere below ground level at the Minneapolis Convention Center. It could be years before our education system recovers from the massive quotent of stupid dragging down test scores and driving habits in downtown Minneapolis.

An Open Letter to Al Franken

2010-03-30T21:15:00.005-05:00

Dear Senator Franken,

I received your appeal for assistance regarding the changes you are recommending in student loan funding. I suspect you and I come from similar education backgrounds, so please accept this advice with the knowledge that I, too, am a liberal arts college graduate.

The country does not need any more historians, lawyers, musicians, cooks and chefs, truck drivers, writers, self-study experts, actors, dancers, psychologists or sociologists, MBAs and accountants. The nation is overstuffed with the skills provided by all of those "disciplines." The country needs to be able to sustain itself and its economy. Hobbies glorified by academia as "fields of study" aren't going to provide the talents or industry to support 300 million people. Doing actual work, providing practical value, is the only thing that can save us.

If the public is going to be asked to foot the bill to educate the generation of children who were handicapped by "No Child Left Untested," I think we should get our money's worth. Instead of shoveling money into the wasteland of worthless activity's, I'd like to see some focus to student loans. Engineering, science, and medicine are all worthwhile and practical fields of study and all of those will produce the skills necessary for the next century. Consider putting the nation's money where it's values are; where a return on the investment is likely instead of impossible. At this point, the disipline provided by a serious education is critical to the nation's success. It's time for the federal government to make value judgements and serious decisions with taxpayer's money. Stop funding hobbies and start reforming higher education in this country.

Who are they, really?

2010-03-27T07:14:00.006-05:00

The more I listen to the rantings of the crazies who represent the Teabaggers, the more I worry about where this country is going. Where ever they raise their vicious heads, the wingnuts always have the world's corporations backing them. No matter how often they try to portray themselves as being the "little guy," the right is doing the bidding of the real "Powers that Be." You can't find a single Teabagger position that doesn't parrot exactly what large corporations are saying. Not a one.

Now, Palin is asking her angry band of nutcases to put their gun sights on elected officials and "target" them for elimination. "Don't Retreat, instead - RELOAD!" If you ever questioned who our government works for, that is answered when this vicious hate monger can get away with telling packs of crazies to kill elected officials without penalty. These people killed Kennedy and they will do their best to kill Obama and anyone who stands between them and their New World Order, to quote one of the Teabaggers' sponsors; George Bush.

When a war protestor can be removed from the cameras' eye for wearing a tee-shirt during Little George's rein of terror but a Teabagger can proudly strap on a pistol and shoulder-up an assault rifle and join a march of similar nutcases in front of a building where Obama is speaking, you know who the Secret Service is protecting and who it is pretending to protect. As the song said, "This is not America." This is not a democracy. This is a scary place full of crazy people.

Palin's Bush-whipped ex-running mate, McCain, said, "that rhetoric and kind of language is just part of the political lexicon." The more McCain tries to appeal to the crazies, the more he exposes himself to be about as "independent" as a cartoon commercial character. Palin and McCain are poster-children for a career in becoming a corporate shill. Their yak about "death panels" and bureaucratic medical decision terror is a distraction from the fact that our current health-care system is all about bottom-line optimization for the wrong people.

We have death panels; they are called "insurance companies." We have health-care decisions made by ignorant bureaucrats; they are called "medical directors" and they act exclusively in the interests of the corporations they serve. The Teabaggers are a racist, anti-democratic, pack of clowns who would overthrow 225 years of democracy to serve their corporate masters and we should all be afraid of them and put them on notice that we're not going to stand for their idiocy in our towns and cities. They should be labeled as what they are; corporate brown shirts. They should be ridiculed and monitored like the pack if wild dogs they represent. They are not Palin's "real America," they represent the worst of that which America has tolerated in the last two centuries: lynch mobs, corporate goons, corrupt government officials, fascists, and fools. They dishonor our democracy and the ideals for which our Constitution stands.

A Battle of Words, Not Ideas

2010-03-21T13:26:00.002-05:00

Conservatives, properly named for their timidity and loyalty to the existing powers and authority, decided about 30 years ago to go on the attack to redefine their opponents. Somehow, that idiotic tactic worked, so they are sticking with it. With boatloads of crazy talk and completely idiotic "reasoning," they successfully redefined (for idiots and illiterates) the definition of "liberal."

"Conservative: of or relating to a philosophy of conservatism b capitalized : of or constituting a political party professing the principles of conservatism: as (1) : of or constituting a party of the United Kingdom advocating support of established institutions (2) : progressive conservative 3 a : tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : traditional b : marked by moderation or caution c : marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners"

As defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary

Any idiot with a 3rd grade education knows that "liberal" is a complimentary term and "conservative" is another word for "coward" or "rich asshole." Not anymore. There is an entire television network, Faux News, dedicated to convincing the rest of us that being a lilly-livered, gutless wimp is a "good thing." Of course, they've done a pretty good job of it. Amazing. A political party and a network solely dedicated to protecting the interests of international corporations, trust fund babies, and corporate criminals defining their enemies and convincing people who are regularly violated by exactly these conservative interests to worry about the "rights" of their natural and constant enemies. Somewhere, "stupid" ought to be in the definition of conservative, too.

"Liberal: 1 a : of, relating to, or based on the liberal arts education> b archaic : of or befitting a man of free birth2 a : marked by generosity : openhanded b : given or provided in a generous and openhanded way c : ample, full3 obsolete : lacking moral restraint : licentious4 : not literal or strict : loose 5 : broad-minded; especially : not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms6 a : of, favoring, or based upon the principles of liberalism b capitalized : of or constituting a political party advocating or associated with the principles of political liberalism; especially : of or constituting a political party in the United Kingdom associated with ideals of individual especially economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political, and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives"

As defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary

Not being satisfied with defaming "liberal," the propaganda machine is now going after the word "progressive." Again, any idiot would know the antonym of "progressive" is "regressive," which is exactly what a modern conservative typlifies as is demonstrated by the Teabaggers and every elected Republican in the nation. So, how do you get the uneducated, unwashed, unintelligent public to buy into this foolishness? Check out this synopsis from the Media Matters Institute.

Who Cares about Idiocracy?

2010-03-12T11:52:00.010-06:00

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

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

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

Creating Power, Creating Community

2010-03-09T09:56:00.004-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tea Party Mental Failure

2010-02-20T11:41:00.006-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the majority has any sense left.

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

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

#198 Our Immigration Anti-Policy

2010-02-20T08:33:00.002-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer of Size

2010-02-15T12:12:00.005-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intended Results?

2010-01-23T23:30:00.005-06:00

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

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

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

Back to the digital television clusterFox.

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

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

Five Scumbags Do It Again

2010-01-21T20:33:00.007-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

Only A Game

2009-12-28T22:04:00.004-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously? Someone is surprised at this?

2009-12-13T11:14:00.005-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

How Do You Win?

2009-12-11T07:32:00.008-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate Welfare

2009-12-06T19:09:00.003-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cures and Capitalism

2009-11-30T08:16:00.002-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Crazy Teabag Lady Is at It Again

2009-11-14T11:30:00.006-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic Idiocy

2009-11-14T10:11:00.005-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking Sides

2009-11-13T08:50:00.005-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make It Less Boring

2009-11-07T07:06:00.006-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fairness and Democracy

2009-11-04T07:12:00.007-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polishing Reagan's Turd

2009-11-03T06:02:00.012-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Falling Down

2009-11-01T14:49:00.008-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What News?

2009-09-10T09:45:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalism and Invention

2009-09-09T08:52:00.005-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Teaching Sucks

2009-09-08T05:01:00.006-05:00

In a recent conversation, my daughter made a comment about how unfair it was that teachers make $40,000 a year and "only have to work 9 months" for it. For the last decade, I've taught at a private college. For about 3 years of that decade, I had the time of my life teaching. For those 3 years, I would have agreed with her, except that I was making about $7,500 a year at the time. I was, also, working 12 months a year at two other businesses that paid the bills.

I wasn't teaching for money. I sure wasn't doing it because it was easier than my previous job. I was teaching because it was fun.

It was fun because I'd stumbled into a school situation where my boss was a terrific person with honorable motivations and his boss was, possibly, an even better person with amazing management skills. It was fun because I was learning as much as I was teaching, if not more. That's not a typical teaching position in the modern United States. It didn't last long where I worked, either.

Most schools are mismanaged as badly as the worst corporations. Most teachers find themselves in systems that provide no outlets for their own education. Most teachers are as unsupported in their classrooms as a National Guard foot soldier in Afghanistan. The web is jammed with articles describing the conditions teachers work under: Top 5 Reasons Many Teachers Quit, Why are So Many Teachers Quitting after 5-7 Years?, Valid Reasons Teachers Quit, Why Teachers Quit and Why They Don’t, Why New Teachers Quit, and hundreds of other articles on this subject.

18,000 California teachers quit every year. 6%, nationally, leave the profession every year. 20% quit after 3 years. Nationally, 50% of urban teachers quit in the first 5 years of their career. Most teachers are short-timers. Our national divorce statistics look better than the teaching profession. If the pay is so good, the hours are so short, and teaching is one of the last jobs in the country to be "protected" by a union, why is the job so unwanted after a few years of experience?

The reason is that teachers are constantly exposed to the nation's dirty laundry. From both ends of the work, teachers experience disrespect, incompetence, and disregard for their work. Students are ill-equipped to be educated. Administrators are mostly failed teachers. Society can't decide if it wants a professional education system or an amateur religious indoctrination. Government involvement swings from indifference to demanding hours of dysfunctional testing and mountains of pointless paperwork. From top-to-bottom, side-to-side, and front-to-back, teachers are surrounded by factors that would demotivate a saint.

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

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

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

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

Police State: Yes or No?

2009-08-23T08:09:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite commentators of American life, Ted Rall, recently wrote a column titled, "EVERYONE HATES THE COPS." Ted's point was "I can't point to a single positive experience I've ever had with a cop." He concedes that "No one should be less scared of cops than me. I'm white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite . . ." And goes on to say that, nevertheless, he's afraid of cops in practically every country in the world, especially Uzbekistan and the United States.

This subject came up for me when I recently watched Phillip Hoffman's "The Party's Over," his documentary about the 2000 election campaigns, conventions, and the final result of that moment when the charade of democracy in the United States formally ended. Recently, wingnuts have been comparing their violence-edged demonstrations at town hall meetings over health care to protests about the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The kids and adults who protested those wars were met by cops, rubber bullets, teargas, and arrest. The wingnuts and their insurance company instigators are welcomed by the cops and their gun-toting behavior has been ignored by the press and the cops. There is no aspect of personal courage being displayed by the wingnuts, since they are in no danger from anyone but themselves.

On the other hand, watching the gross overreaction of the L.A. cops at the 2000 Democratic Convention and the outright lunacy of the Philadelphia police and national guard at the Republican Convention, anyone familiar with the degeneration of the United States since WWII has to wonder where and why we went so wrong. Peaceful protest from anything resembling the left in the US is always met with overwhelming violence, police lawlessness, and depraved and pitiful reporting from the major news outlets. When the wingnuts carry automatic weapons into the street to intimidate participants at the town hall meetings, it barely makes the editorial section and never makes it to television news.

Which brings me back to my point, "Everyone Hates the Cops." Of course, that's not true. Wingnuts love the cops, since they act as official bodyguards for the right. Corporations own the cops, so they gotta love 'em. The rest of us are afraid of the armed force whose unpredictable behavior was best described as "cops on the take can't take orders" by reporters covering the unleashed violence Chicago police let loose on Vietnam protesters in 1968.

That is a big problem, too. Every Latin American country has discovered that building a police force, including a military, based on serving the interests of the corrupt rich and powerful creates a system inclined to self-destruct. You put guns in the hands of characters who will follow any order, regardless of legality or morality, and you are sowing the seeds of your own destruction. We've probably past the point of no return, in the US, on this regard. Between the un-Constitutional "Commander in Chief" designation of the President and the century of corporate invasions disguised as acts of "national security" defense, the war decision-making process has been handed from civilian to corporate-military and, since they have the guns, that is probably irreversible.

I've always thought that critical jobs like policing, governing, and maintenance should be nationally drafted positions. I totally agree with Rall that, " the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one." That goes for politician, bureaucrats, and highway maintenance among most of the nationally vital tasks. But it's too late for that sort of logic. What we're left with is the choice to keep out heads down and try to avoid the scrutiny of our corrupt police or join the wingnuts and take to the lawless streets.

Irrelevant Republicans

2009-08-20T09:04:00.006-05:00

Sen. Jon Kyl, accurately called "the No. 2 Republican in the Senate" said, in a conference call with fellow wingnuts, "One of the concerns I have about the approach of the Democrats ... is an assumption that there has to be a national mandate on all insurers to do various things." That about sums up the Republican position on health care reform. Whatever is done, the last thing they want to do is insist that private insurers "do various things"; or anything except ration health care to their customers and make a shitpot full of money that they will distribute to their own executives and the politicians who are so securely stuffed into their pockets.

At last count, those corporate crooks were spending $40M/day buying politicians and spreading propaganda. Obviously, this golden goose is producing a good bit of spare change. Otherwise, these characters wouldn't have this kind of money to dump into convincing us that the godawful system we have couldn't be improved.

Turdballs like Senator Kyl (hence the "No. 2" designation) are against anything that resembles value-provided by the federal government to working class citizens. Fortunately for them, a substantial portion of working class citizens don't want anything of value for their tax money, either. As long as we're just dumping trillions of dollars into fake wars that profit oil companies and the military-industrial complex, they're happy as clams in a bucket. If someone is crazy enough to suggest that tax money might be used to benefit taxpayers, suddenly we're freaked out about "socialism." A few crazy fuckers are even making the jump from socialism to fascism, which demonstrates why "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

Ah, the power of words with nonsensical definitions. Rush and Hannity calling someone else a fascist. Who'd have thought that would ever amount to anything more than a comedy routine?

Siding with Republican corporate spokespeople, these morons don't want to prevent insurance companies from discriminating against customers with pre-existing conditions (which is usually defined as anything expensive that might happen to an insured victim), equal and fair rate limits for all applicants, allowing the government to negotiate reasonable drug prices, or even the crazy idea that (like income taxes, Medicare, SS, and Unemployment insurance) if everyone kicks into the pot the individual cost becomes reasonable.

Pretty much, Kyl is saying that the corporate dope dealers, grossly misnamed "insurance companies," and the quacks running the nation's health care system shouldn't be inconvenienced by any sort of regulation. Of course, Kyl has a healthcare program that is provided by taxpayers, so why should he care? After "serving" (himself?) for five years, he's vested for life in that "socialized" system.

The only platform the Republicans currently possess is the desire to "make the President fail." As in the past, conservatives are willing to take the whole country down in their battle to stuff their own pockets with dope dealer money and ship jobs to foreign countries. They could care less about the brown-shirted morons who chant sheep-talk at town meetings and march around the meeting places with their AK-14's shouldered high and their automatic pistols holstered where everyone entering the meetings can see them. If anyone had any doubt as to the danger the right poses to democracy, these meetings ought to squash those thoughts.

But they won't, because America has become the Home of the Dumb and Dumber. The greatest fear the average citizen has is that someone much smarter might try to do something good for the country. They elect idiots like GeeWizz because he made them feel better about themselves. The worst possible political situation is a non-white President with an IQ in triple digits while the majority of the white population has bred itself down to the point that watching reality TV has become an intellectual pursuit.

In this environment, characters like Senator Kyl are doing exactly the right thing in doing nothing. It's the kind of action that Americans understand. Anything more complicated is "elitist intellectualism." The last thing we want is smart people thinking about solving problems.

Ted Rall recently wrote, Violence Works, Incrementalism Doesn't, where he described Americans as "one of the most gleefully anti-intellectual nations on earth." That about sums up the pathetic state of the union. That doesn't mean that we have to go backwards in time, though. Americans have been stupid often in our history. Sometimes leaders have to lead, even when the followers are wandering around like brainless chickens.

At least some Democrats are beginning to figure out how irrelevant Republicans are, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) said "I think that at some point everyone's going to see that the Republicans simply are not going to agree to any kind of healthcare reform that the insurance industry isn't supporting and that, reluctantly, we're going to have to do it without them." When it comes to doing anything other than As if that is different from the last 100 years of Republican inactivity.

Looking at the End

2009-08-04T08:16:00.006-05:00

In Our Endangered Values, Jimmy Carter recently described what the Red Cross found in US torture camps in Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The story is so vile, so unbelievable that it equals the horrors of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and all of the depraved, arrogant, sick dynasties of history. Truthout summarized only a bit of our actions against civilians, women, and children and you can read it for yourself here: http://www.truthout.org/080309X?n. There is no point in my trying to add anything to this.

While the crazy right is pretending that nothing can be done to rectify the crimes of Bush/Cheney ("the past is past" argument), they may be right. As the conservatives' best attempt to comprehend what was done, Sen. Lindsey Graham said, "The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."

"Some very serious charges?" What is more serious than "rape and murder?" If that doesn't move them to shame and action, they are immobile. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Not only did good men do nothing, but some knowingly did evil things.

This is so sick, so beyond humanity and reason, that it makes me believe we are done as a civilization. We're just waiting for the collapse. No society can survive this level of depravity. Once this kind of sickness sets in the culture is doomed to fail. And deserves to fail. I can't think of an example in history of a nation dipping so low and recovering. If you can, I'd appreciate the encouragement.

All through Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II's reign, I felt the decay of the general public accelerate. I feel the United States is just too damaged to continue now. It's just a matter of time and momentum before the collapse. We have proudly elected, twice, a President and Vice President who had no respect for the Constitution, the nation's laws, or our once proud history. We have raised children who became "soldiers" who committed these terrible acts. We have hired mercenaries and bureaucrats who administered crimes against humanity that can never be forgiven. The fantasies of the crazy religious right be damned, some crimes are unforgivable. Their own argument for capital punishment recognizes that fact. Once a human, and a culture, has stepped beyond a line of civilization there can be no redemption.

At the absolute minimum, Bush, Cheney, and their cast of international criminals should be subjected to a Nuremberg Trial before the world. But I'm not sure that if that trial resulted in that venal group hanging from scaffolds it would make a lick of difference in our nation's future. The fact that so many of us have degenerated into "conservatives" may be insurmountable. The ideals that created holy documents like our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the many great moments in the United State's of America's history may have been overcome by eight years of non-stop, unlimited evil.

Being Conservative

2009-07-30T08:27:00.012-05:00

Yesterday's conversation with my neighbor really stuck with me. In fact, I think I dreamed of what my responses should have been all night. The comment that in regard to a national health care system, "We need to go slow. To make sure we get the best outcome for everyone," stuck with me the strongest.

I'm reading a David Halberstam book, Teammates, about Ted Williams and his friends in the last days of Williams' life. In that book, Halberstam spends a little time explaining one of baseball's most controversial moments; the last game of the 1946 World Series. In the 9th inning, the game was tied and Boston's excellent centerfielder, Dominic DiMaggio, was injured and out of the lineup. A journeyman, Leon Culbertson, was in his place. Enos Slaughter, one of the game's most dangerous baserunners was on first and Harry Walker, a scatter hitter, was at bat. "Country" Slaughter had decided that he was going to go all the way on anything Walker hit out of the infield, particularly if that hit went into centerfield. Walker put the ball right where Slaughter wanted it.

Here's what Bobby Doer said about the play," It was brutal--as bad a field as I've ever played on. So bumpy and rough. Dom (DiMaggio) was accustomed to it by then, and not afraid of it. But Leon was very tentative with it. Dominic played balls aggressively; Leon played this one conservatively."

That's my definition of "conservative," too. My experience with taking the conservative route always ends in losing, too. Shakespeare's Falstaff used a less common term when he said, "The better part of valor is discretion." Playing the ball "conservatively," avoiding battle with "discretion," running away in outright cowardice, it's all the same.

The United States Congress has been talking about a single-payer national healthcare reform since Harry Truman's administration. Nixon side-tracked that movement by handing the keys to the nation's medical system to the worst of all possible "solutions"; HMO's. At that point in history, even conservatives realized that our national system was "in crisis." The conservative "fix" during the 1990's was to defeat, again, the Clinton's national healthcare system and to allow dope companies to market directly to consumers, which ballooned drug use and cost. So, "taking it slow and carefully" means wasting trillions of dollars and sixty years to get to . . . what? An opportunity to "break Obama," according to hillbilly senator, Jim DeMint? Another opportunity to pork-barrell more profits for insurance companies, dope dealers, and the rest of the crowd who prey on America's sinking national health crisis?

We are a conservative nation.

All this reminds me of the conversion to the metric system that every industrial expert describes as one of the most critical competitiveness disadvantages our country faces. We are, for practical purposes, the last nation in the industrialized world to give a damn about the length of the king's foot and a base-12 measurement system and the rest of the archaic "standards" that make up the English/SAE measurement system. Thomas Jefferson was the first American President to recommend that we convert to a decimal/metric system and in 1792, the United States was the first nation to adopt a decimal currency system. The metric system was made "legal for trade" in 1866. In 1971, the infamous Report to the Congress: A Metric America, A Decision Whose Time Has Come was delivered to Congress and that study recommended the country fully convert to the metric system in 10 years. A decade later, the Great Communicator Ronny Reagan, disbanded the U.S. Metric Board and declared the movement "dead." In 1988, Congress converted the federal government to the metric system and industry has been "electively" moving to the metric system since the 1970s. However, complete conversion to the metric system is nowhere in sight.

Apparently, our overwhelmingly conservative elected representatives will not be satisfied until the United States has the worst national health system in the world. In 2000, we were somewhere between 37th and 39th, falling below the high standards of the United Arab Emirates, Chile, Columbia, and Oman. In 2000, we were still healthier than Cuba, Slovenia, and Croatia, but just barely.

I am still working on generating a similar comparison for the 2006 data. They seem to have been effectively attacked on the 2000 position, from U.S. conservatives, that they are avoiding such a clear ranking of nations. Battling data is an easy win for conservative "think tanks" (the ultimate oxymoron), since US citizens are doing as well with math and science as is our healthcare system (28th of 40 industrialized nations in mathematics scores). If history is a guide, moving to a rational national healthcare system is at least 200 years in the future. If we can't manage something as rational and simple as changing to the international measurement system, something as emotionally charged, financially motivated, and easily misled as a healthcare system is impossible.

If I'm right, it's just more evidence that the United States is a radically conservative nation. If you don't understand my meaning, let me be clear: the country is cowardly, mentally disabled, and lacking in necessary survival skills.

Who Do You Trust?

2009-07-29T09:52:00.007-05:00

"You can't trust politicians, they're all liars and crooks," my neighbor said, as a final nail in the coffin he'd built for national health insurance and taxes on the wealthy.

He's normally a fairly reasonable guy, but we had a few hot flashes during the last election cycle when he decorated his lawn with McCain/Palin and Norm Coleman posters. My Obama and Franken posters, apparently, caused a little conflict in his home life and he pulled the Coleman posters down almost immediately and the McCain posters slowly vanished over the next week or two. I think his wife is less strident about her Republican commitment.

Listening to him chant "we need to do this slowly and carefully" so that the politicians he distrusts so much can "get the best result for everybody," I realized that there are people, with normal-sized brains, who still listen to Faux News and yak-radio. Somehow, I'd hoped that all that crap had vanished into blurbs specially produced for Jon Stewart's monologue. Who knew that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and whatshisname O'Reilly still had an audience? I'm not kidding, I had foolishly assumed that the only listeners left to the crazy right were safely occupied by the unemployment line. Unfortunately, not so.

Here's a question for you, if one believes that all politicians are "liars and crooks," what makes so many of the middle class gravitate to the collection of "liars and crooks" with the worst record for insight, foresight, corruption, or any other important characteristic of leadership or accurate information? If you look at the record the Faux News and yak-radio crowd has generated in the last two decades, it's hard to find a single important issue where they have been right.

They totally missed their Crazyland guesses on how the Afghanistan/Iraq invasions would work out; in the sort and long term. They lied (or were "wrong") about the Bush Administration's abuse of the Constitution and the laws of the country. Remember Willy O'Reilly's "You can't produce one person who's been tortured by the United States" statement? How about Tony Snow's 2003 Faux News moronic claim, "Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints." Yep, we all know that war's been over for six years, right? Google "iraq invasion 2003 quotes" or just check out this page (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2842) to see how far off the conservative news goofballs were on that issue.

Their proclamations on the state of the economy have been consistently out of focus with reality. I clearly remember the wingnuts' babble about our strong economy based on "the growth in homeownership and consumer spending linked to accumulated home equity." Yeah, everybody knows that an economy based on unrealistic inflated property prices and massive borrowing on imaginary "equity" is the core of a sound economic system. The logical extension of that thinking would be to borrow money against purchased groceries under the assumption that the crap digested groceries "produces" would be worth more than the food input.

The Republican/Faux News' blind loyalty to the idle rich and corporate socialism seems to be more deluded by the moment. Soon, we're going to hear Billy O'Reilly rant how Paris Hilton is going to take her fortune and inventive spirit to the Caymans and that great loss will be the downfall of the United States. Explain to me where the idle rich are going to go where they will be safe, marginally taxed, entertained, and properly honored. Not to mention the fact that most of their assets are tied up in US real estate, corporate investments, and state and federal bonds. How, exactly, do they move all of that to tiny islands in the Caribbean? I suppose they could move to the places where they've shipped middle class jobs: China, South Korea, and India. Sure they can. They'll be safe and loved in Communist China where the slightest dissent will get the most powerful people in the country a trip to a tiny cell and the opportunity to make toys for rich children in the US. I can see Paris and our overpaid, under-talented corporate execs going for that, can't you? No? Me either. The only place in the world where rich people are protected from the working class, have unlimited access to entertainment and power, and can freely wallow in their excesses is the United States. A change in the tax code is not going to change that.

So, what makes working class people gravitate to the sources that are consistently wrong? I can't figure it out any more than I can figure out why urban residents listen to country music or why rich white kids listen to rap. I'm not kidding, this is an aspect of human nature that totally baffles me. I imagine there are components of racism, suceptability to fear-mongering, the herd mentality, and psychological manipulation that contribute to this, but I'm still surprised that it works after decades of failure, corruption, incompetence, and outright foolishness.

Quittin' While the Quittin' Is Good

2009-07-26T12:40:00.008-05:00

Sarah Palin quit her Alaska governor's job today. Apparently, half of the country still loves her for her inabilities, flightiness, cowardice, ignorance, and general incompetence. You have to wonder about a country that idolizes someone who has failed every step of the way through her life, but that's the same country that elected "W" who had a similar life record.

The AP report on today's resignation included the information that Palin was leaving under the cloud of "ethics probes, mounting legal bills and dwindling popularity." However, that writer reminded us that "Palin may host a radio or TV show, or launch a lucrative speaking career." Yeah, that's what we need in the midst of a depression; another simple-minded, superstitious, wingnut "author" and talking head.

In quitting 17 months before the end of her first term, Palin finished off most her Alaska support (although there are still 40 percent of that goofy crowd who still "approve" of her performance). It's always worth remembering that Americans are the most short-term memory population in human history and Palin could yet return to her past summer's 60% favorable rating.

One of the idol-worshiping Alaska crowd, Wilson Villanueva, was quoted as having said, "She's not a quitter; she's a fighter. She wants to fight for the Alaskan people and for the greater good nationally."

Hilarious.

Palin burned up her parents' and taxpayers' money taking six years and five colleges to earn a BA in Communications, a degree slightly more demanding than Phys Ed. She didn't like journalism, barely able to cope with the low-level sports crap she wrote about, so she turned herself into a "hockey mom."

She didn't care much for the full-time mom thing, so while cranking out five brats, she ran for the highly demanding job of city council member and, later, Mayor of Wasilla, AK. She ended both jobs prematurely, quitting as it were. Wasilla has a population of 9,000 people and puts so little faith in the job of mayor that the town has a city manager to handle all of the actual tasks of running the city. The mayor has the following job description:

Preside at council meetings. The mayor may take part in the discussion of matters before the council, but may not vote, except that the mayor may vote in the case of a tie;
Act as ceremonial head of the city;

That's it. All those claims of management experience were about self-management, since the mayor of Wasilla has no authority, no practical function, and nobody wanted a particular mayor, Palin, to have the keys to her own office. I'd say "community organizers" all over the nation have more practical experience than Wasilla's mayor. She couldn't manager to keep her fingers out of the cash drawer in that job, either. She quit that job after unsuccessfully campaigning Lt. Governor from the Mayor's Office and getting caught using city funds for her state campaign. During her VP campaign, she was asked if she had done the same thing that she'd accused Randy Ruedrich of having done. She said, "Yeah, what I did was wrong.'"

From there, Palin moved on to the Alaska governor's office. 18 months from the end of her first term, she quits because, in her own words, because she is "doing what’s best for Alaska." Her biggest whine was that the Alaskan people questioned her ethics, decisions, and sources of income. While she once campaigned telling the people of Alaska to "hold me accountable," when they did that she stonewalled investigations (When she was the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Chairwoman, she quit because, "I'm forced to withhold information from Alaskans, and that goes against what I believe in as a public servant."), whined often and publicly that she was being picked on (after accusing Hillary Clinton of "whining" about her press coverage.), and now she's running away. Running a state overfloowing with cash from its natural resources and managing a population a fraction of the size of a decent Midwestern city proved too much for Sarah's talents. The poor babe couldn't keep her hands out of the state's till and her cronism got the best of a state known for legendary cronism. Wow, that's sad even by the low standards of Republican candidates!

As one conservative squawking head put it, "Sarah Palin is no quitter. That's why she's quitting."

Advertising age has speculated on her future exit from the media in this article: Inside the Collapse. I vote with them. No matter what Palin does, she'll screw it up, cover herself in "family values," and run away dragging the approval of the low brow wingnuts with her. Everything you need to know about Sarah Palin's fans is properly described in the movie, Stupidity.

Flying Lame

2009-07-21T08:04:00.006-05:00

Up to 2002, I spent a lot of my life in commercial airlines, flying for business and, rarely, flying for pleasure. Over the last 40 years, I've watched air travel evolve from a somewhat inconvenient experience into what is now a downright miserable exercise in customer-hostile service. I admit that I have flown business class or first class fewer than a dozen times out of the hundreds of flights I've suffered. It's possible that the folks who cough up $1,000 to fly from Minneapolis to Chicago are treated better than the rest of us. It's even likely. It's also possible that the reason coach-class travelers are treated like passengers in steerage on the Titanic is because the airlines don't make any money from us and would just as soon we didn't fly at all. If that is the case, I should be making them happy. I'd much rather drive 2,000 miles round-trip, take the train or even the bus, than put up with the vagaries of air travel and the discomfort of airports. Hell, I'd rather pay a taxi driver to pick up friends and relatives at the airport than go myself. Airports are so badly designed, overpriced, and security is so erratic and hostile that walking into a dark alley with a pocket full of cash feels safer than the airport experience.

The demise of the passenger train system in the US and the decay of airlines is returning the country to a time when moving away from home meant never seeing your home and family again. When a family member moves outside of practical driving distance, many families lose physical contact and resort to the age-old written communication tactic; although that is now instant via email, Twitter, and cell phone texting. Of course, cross-country telephone communication has been with us since the turn of the last century. Nothing beats eye-to-eye, though and that is something that the death of air travel will cost all of us.

In a recent airport experience, I was amazed at how incompetently airlines are handling the downturn in their business. American Airlines, for example, has lost the ability to accurately predict when a plane might land at a given airport. In the case of the flight I was trying to track, their telephone system decided to skip the Minneapolis/St. Paul portion of a flight and jump directly to predicting when that plane might land in Ontario, Canada. The flight had been moved from a 10:45AM Sunday arrival to an eventual 1:45AM Monday landing over more than a dozen steps and an equal number of plane transfers, so it's sort of understandable that the airline might lose track of what plane is going where. It might be understandable, but the passenger we picked up had suffered 16 hours of airport misery and had walked a considerable percentage of the total travel distance running from plane-to-plane without ever leaving the Dallas airport. Not once had an American Airlines employee offered sympathy, useful guidance, or tried to assist this 88-year-old traveler. In fact, without the generous aid of two fellow travelers, he might not have made the trip at all. The airline's employees were as useless as a Republican Peace Corps volunteer.

While we waited to learn where and when we should meet our traveler-in-misery, I watched a dozen passengers stacked up at the misnamed "help desk" baggage claim. I watched them for an hour and a half. The line didn't move. No one received any sort of assistance. The two giggling AA uniformed women behind the counter appeared to be engaged in conversation and were actively ignoring the customers in line. One-by-one, the passengers simply gave up and wandered off without their luggage.

In the meantime, the airline's computer system jumped from predicting (incorrectly) the arrival time of the remaining evening's flights to the mid-morning flights, leaving us to wonder if our flight would be arriving at all. That's when a call to the American Airline's computer system informed me that our anticipated flight would be arriving in Ontario in three hours.

I've been to our airport about a half-dozen times this year. The place is a ghost town. Two years ago, there were still a substantial number of pleasure travelers flying out of Minneapolis. Eight years ago, the place was booming. The differences are purely numeric and economic, though. Good times or bad, the airlines optimize the misery of their customers. You'd think when passengers are squeezing their dollars for maximum benefit, a luxury like air travel would try to provide added value, better service, and actively court customers. Airlines don't bother worrying about the middleman. Their existence relies on corporate welfare federal dollars. When the economy tanks, people stop flying, and executive bonuses are in jeopardy, the airlines go crying to Washington, begging for welfare and management assistance. Like finance and the military-industrial complex, airlines can't exist without taxpayer aid. Their management systems are incompetent. Their business model is non-functional. Their product may be obsolete.

Exceptions, like Southwest, seem to do well regardless of economic conditions and some of us limit the places we travel to the places those companies service. Obviously, the country needs to let the incompetent companies fail, including the manufacturers of the airplanes and the rest of the support industry for this out-of-date transportation system. It is impossible to justify the massive energy waste air travel represents and, clearly, airlines can not support themselves with the product they sell. Flight was an interesting engineering challenge and a lot has been learned from the experiment, but when commercial airlines become a luxury that only the rich can afford and they can only afford it with assistance from every other taxpayer, it's time to give it up. If the competently managed companies, like Southwest, can find a niche that doesn't require regular injections of corporate welfare, that would be wonderful. The overwhelming majority of airline management couldn't turn a profit under any conditions. They should be allowed to fail--and their management should exit without publicly financed golden parachutes--and the country needs to move on to transportation systems that work under 21st Century energy constraints.