Days of Living Aimlessly

Speed: not always a good thing

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:53:00 +0000

427 Shelby AC Cobra. 0-100-0 in 11.4 seconds. Shelby gave one to Bill Cosby who returned it because he couldn't control it. Next owner drove it off a cliff into the Pacific. Sometimes you're better off to keep the money in your pocket.

Economics Professor Gets Schooled

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 04:36:00 +0000

(By every shred of good advice about blogging, this entry is too long. I can't shorten it because I have a fetish about completing my thoughts. If you're short of time and patience, you can spare yourself some agony by skipping the boring preamble and going directly to the creative stuff, which has a big, bold, all-caps heading, THE PARABLES, for your convenience. On the other hand, should you choose to read the entire post, you will know a hell of a lot more about economic reality than you do now...probably.)

Boring, yet Sublimely Captivating, Preamble

You may have seen the anecdote going around the Internet about the college economics professor who failed his entire class in order to teach them a valuable lesson about the merits of capitalism vs. socialism. He did this after becoming upset that his students had bought into Barack Obama's socialistic economic policies, notwithstanding the fact that the proposed policies are neither socialistic nor exclusively Obama's.

The appeal of the piece hinges largely on the perception held by many that our current economic woes are the result of too much government pandering to the desires of too many citizens who expect to get too much for nothing. For those who believe this, the obvious solution is a song of one note: get a job.

Want to end long term unemployment? Cut benefits, so that all the layabouts have to get a job. Want to reform welfare? Cut benefits so that all the layabouts have to get a job. What to do with the welfare children of single parents who've had to return to work? Child labor laws are burdensome to American businesses and hamper their ability to compete with Asian sweatshops. Repeal the laws and cut benefits so all the juvenile layabouts have to get a job.

Want to put a stop to runaway Medicare spending? Make everyone buy their own insurance. Can't afford insurance? Get a job. Can't get insurance because of a preexisting condition? Well maybe you should have taken better care of yourself when you had the chance. Now it's too late. Best to just suck it up and make peace with your maker. No one likes a whiner, especially one who thinks they are entitled to a handout from the more productive and deserving members of society.

Want to return Social Security to sound financial footing? There's no point. Social Security is a ponzi scheme. People should be responsible for funding their own retirement. Repeal Social Security. Cancel benefits for those already retired. If they don't have enough to live on, they should get a job and support themselves until they are able to retire without having to slurp at the public trough.

The flaw in this logic is the underlying supposition that everyone who is unemployed or impoverished or infirm is a lazy, shiftless, irresponsible wastrel who expects the government to provide for their needs. The corollary belief is that those who are employed, wealthy, and/or privileged are so because they are industrious, motivated, and noble. As such they ought to be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors and not be expected to yield any of that fruit up to the lazy grasshoppers.

That this is a simplistic way of looking at reality ought to go without saying. It's not that there is no truth in it. It's rather that it ignores a whole host of other, less just causes of disparity in income distribution: things like racism, sexism, religious intolerance, fraud, cronyism, elitism, and deliberate manipulation of power and privilege to preserve and enhance power and privilege. These are things that you would think would have been eradicated from society by the great American Experiment, but they continue to exist because they serve so well still to delineate the haves from the have nots.

To illustrate this point I have rewritten the popular anecdote to better reflect the reality of our current economic landscape.

Photo from the original post. No credits given. This poor slob probably isn't even teaching economics. Personally I think he has a liberal haircut so it is ironic that his sincere looking visage is now a spokes-image for conservative thought.

THE PARABLES

(The aforementioned creative stuff - possibly even more sublime than the preamble. The original tale is in blue type. My revisions are in black.)

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. Several of the students had tried to point out that they didn't think Obama's policies could actually be characterized as Socialism, but the professor had insisted that any attempt to fetter the workings of a free market and redistribute wealth according to social principles, no matter how altruistic, was indeed Socialism.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan. All grades will be averaged, and everyone will receive the same grade whether that be an A, an F or something in between. In this way we will substitute grades for dollars—something more readily understood by students who have little experience with real money.”

Again some of the students tried to point out that, even substituting dollars back for grades, this did not sound very much like anything that President Obama had proposed. The professor told them to shut up—that he was the professor and they were mere ignorant students so he would decide what exactly it was that Obama was trying to do, even if Obama himself did not realize it. He had just as much right to do this as Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck because he was, by God, a professor of economics and he knew stuff.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little..

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who had done well on the test, whether or not they had applied themselves, were upset. Whether their success was the result of hard work or natural ability, they all felt that they should get the grade they made rather than have to yield up some of it to the lesser students.

The average students who had performed at the average level on the test were indifferent.

The students who had done poorly on the test, even though they had studied hard, were relieved to be getting the average mark. One of them, a music major who found the vague concepts of economics lacking the mathematical symmetry of her beloved music, was so relieved of the anxiety that the required economics course had been causing her, that she returned with renewed enthusiasm and energy to a sonata she had been composing.

Some of the students who had studied little were ecstatic, while some others, privileged students with highly developed senses of entitlement, thought they should be able to use their wealth and influence, or more particularly that of their parents, to obtain marks that were significantly better than those that would be awarded to the mere mortal students. These latter few conspired with their parents to approach the professor and offer him a sizable stipend to fund his research in exchange for an exemption from the grade averaging that would apply to the rest of the class.

At first the professor demurred. That arrangement would be unjust, he argued. Everyone had to play by the same set of rules. When the parents threatened to go to the board of regents, many of whom were close personal friends, and undermine the professor's tenure, he relented. Not only did he agree to exempt the privileged few students from the grade averaging scheme; he also agreed to exempt them from the usual collegiate proscriptions against submitting the work of others as one's own.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that.

The second test average was a D! Everyone was awarded a D according to the agreement, except of course for the students who had used their parents' influence to negotiate themselves an exemption. These happy few all got an A, even though they hadn't actually studied or applied themselves at all, but had rather broken into the professor's office and stolen the answer sheet the day before the test. The professor wasn't very happy about this development, but there was little he could do about it under the circumstances. What the students had done may have been immoral and reprehensible, but under the exemption to which he had agreed, it was all perfectly legal.

At this point all the students could see clearly which way the wind was blowing. Those for whom economics was not a required core course promptly dropped the class. Those who remained decided that they needed a plan to raise the average grade. Nobody wanted to fail, after all, and the only way they were going to succeed as individuals was to succeed as a group. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” one of them declared, and the rest agreed that nowhere was this truer than in their economics class.

After several meetings, they agreed among themselves that forming a study group would be the best way to achieve their goal. The students who grasped the concepts of economics easily would explain them to the less adept students and drill them until they grasped the concepts as well. Not only would this help the students who were bringing the class average down; it would also help the students who were doing the tutoring to perform even better than they had been on their own. Organizing their lessons so that they could explain them to the below average students would make the smart students even smarter. In this way both the poor students and the good students would improve their test performances and the class average would become in fact better than average.

The average score on the third test was a B+. The study group students were encouraged, and decided that they could do even better. The privileged students, on the other hand, the ones who had bought themselves the exemption, thought that their status as students of status should warrant them scores that were better than just a fraction of a letter grade above the new average. They hired a lobbyist to go back to the professor on their behalf and get them a better deal.

The lobbyist was very persuasive in his own right, but he also had a robust research organization that could provide him statistics to back up virtually anything he said and a formidable budget to make things easier for the professor to understand. The lobbyist told the professor that it was obvious to all concerned that the experiment he had initiated was going to result in what is know as grade inflation.

If every student in the professor's class got an A, as now seemed possible, then the grade of A would be devalued in the eyes of academia. This would be bad not only for the college, but also for all its students and alumni because the grades they received would forever be assessed at less than their earned value. This was especially true, the lobbyist argued, of the grades being garnered by his clients, the privileged few exempt students, who had after all already provided generously for the professor's research, which would surely, except for the ugly prospect of inflation, elevate the prestige of the college and therefore the real market value of the grades it issued.

What was required, the lobbyist went on, was to change the rules of the grade averaging scheme in order to forestall any inflationary impact and to thus protect the value of the grades that the exempt students were going to receive by virtue of their contributions to the betterment of the college. As a further inducement to making these rule changes, the lobbyist promised to double the professor's stipend and to provide him, in addition, with cogent and attractive arguments to justify changing the rules to the class and to anyone else who might question his motivation.

The lobbyist then laid out the following proposed revisions:

Henceforth, the average letter grade awarded to the non-exempt students would be reduced by one half letter grade for each A grade received by the exempt students.
The exempt students reserved the right to sell additional exemptions to other students on terms that would remain secret, and that these other students need not be actually enrolled in the professor's economics class.

The professor, quite naturally, took exception to this last provision. This rule, all by itself, he pointed out, could prove to be quite inflationary, especially when you considered that the exempt students were using unfair and dishonest tactics to get their A grades. If they were then in effect allowed to sell additional A grades to students not even enrolled in the class, all the grades surely would be de-valued.

The lobbyist pointed out that the market for exemptions would be self-regulating. The exempt students surely would not do anything to put their own achievements at risk. They would monitor their sales closely and change the terms and availability as they saw fit to prevent any erosion of their own value. Furthermore, the lobbyist said, even though his clients had no knowledge, either direct or indirect, of the dishonest practices to which the professor had alluded, they would themselves provide security for the examination answers in the professor's office to ensure that there were no shenanigans of the kind that might provide some students an unfair advantage. They would be happy to provide this security through their own efforts if only the professor would provide them a key to his office to facilitate the regulatory process. It was the least they could do, and it was surely in their own best interest to protect their investment in the system.

The study group students continued to work harder and harder after that to bring their average up. They succeeded in learning an awful lot about economics, but in the end they all failed the course. Every time the group made an improvement in their average grade, the exempt students would sell a few more exemptions. The new exempt students would get additional As for the exempt group, which would serve to further reduce the grades awarded to the study group students. The exempt students' security service was never able to determine who, if anybody, was stealing the professor's tests. After a while they declared that the security was unnecessary and disbanded the service.

The study group students never had a chance, no matter how hard they worked. Some of them were forced to leave school as a result of the grades they received. Some of them were never able to get into another school even though they were quite intelligent and capable.

Meanwhile the exempt students expanded their influence to other classes and other professors and, eventually, to other colleges as well. Today they are all regents at major universities. They still work diligently to preserve the system they created.

Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

Remember, there IS a test coming up: the 2012 elections. Good luck figuring it out. A lot of people claim to have the answers, but they are either mistaken or lying through their teeth. Look to history for the truth. (I was trying to force myself to stop here, but I've grown too pedantic in my old age to just let it rest. I apologize for that. Doesn't mean I'm actually sorry. I just think it's the polite thing to do. If you're tired of these little tirades of mine, feel free to skip the next three paragraphs.)

HERE IS WHAT I MEAN BY LOOKING TO HISTORY: in spite of what the GOP keeps telling us, we've already had over thirty years of continuously reducing the tax bite on the rich and continuously emasculating banking and other regulations that were put into place to protect average depositors and investors like you and me. If reducing taxes and regulations worked as advertised, we should have seen a concomitant increase in prosperity. We have not.

We have seen instead a volatile cycle of bubbles and busts and booms and bailouts. Today the rich are richer than they have ever been. They pay less taxes than they have in a long time. Corporations have more cash than they ever have. There is 60 to 80 Trillion dollars of money flowing in and out of totally unregulated markets. Every major bank in the country has either pleaded out or been adjudicated guilty of felonious activity, but no one has gone to jail. In spite of this huge, stinking pile of counter-indicating evidence the Republican candidates, to a man, think we need to further reduce taxes on the wealthy and ease regulations in order to stimulate the economy????

I for one am sick and tired of stimulating the 1% while their deaf, dumb, and blind minions keep telling me to get a job.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment: (I've modified them to reflect the rather more complicated reality that I outlined above.)

You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. Neither can you build a nation's prosperity on the backs of the middle class while you systematically strip them of their ability to better their situation. What you can do is legislate a level playing field that provides opportunities for everyone while denying those with means the ability to use their wealth to rig the game in their favor.
What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. This is true enough, but it's important to remember that it cuts both ways. When the wealthy get breaks and opportunities and regulatory exemptions that enable them to increase their wealth and influence, they do so at the expense of those who have to work for their money.
The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. Also true enough. Also cuts both ways. TARP and the AIG bailout, just to name two examples, came out of the taxpayers' pockets. Chances are pretty good that you paid taxes at a higher rate on your income than Mitt Romney did. In other words, the Wall Street bonuses were taken from you and given to the guys who almost tanked the system.
You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it! This sounds logical, but it's just not true. When the Justice Department broke up AT&T, they divided a huge pocket of wealth. The resulting surge in competition resulted in a telecommunications boom of unprecedented scope. Not only was a lot of new wealth creation enabled, but, at the retail end, communications have become cheaper, better, and more sophisticated than ever before.
When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation. Or...when 1% of the population gets the idea that they can commit fraud with impunity and take monumental risks with borrowed money, reap the profits if they guess right, and get the other 99% to absorb the losses if they guess wrong, and the 99% finds that no matter how hard they work or how carefully they invest they are continually losing ground, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

By: Ed Will

and: Jonah Gibson

The Geezer Bandit: Back for More

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:33:00 +0000

Real Geezer or Real Silicone? The question on everyone's mind.

I've noticed a significant uptick in pageloads for the post I did on the Geezer Bandit several months ago. I'm suddenly getting a lot of hits from Europe, not unusual in itself but this is the first time I've had a lot of foreign activity on the Geezer interview. I figured something must have happened in the news to trigger these hits, and sure enough the Geezer has hit three more banks since my post. For some reason the story has gotten a lot of play in the European press.

The week before Christmas authorities released a security tape of a man they say is the Geezer Bandit leaving a Bank of America branch in San Luis Obispo, California. The dye pack that the teller slipped him along with the money explodes in the parking lot. You can see the Geezer trying to recover some of his stuff before he hightails it out of there. This happened on December 2. It was the Geezer's last bank job...so far anyway. Presumably he is recovering from the burns he got from the explosion and busy scrubbing the red dye off his skin, which could take weeks.

According to authorities the video further demonstrates that the Geezer Bandit may not be a geezer at all, but rather a much younger person, one capable of sprinting through a parking lot without a cane or a motorized scooter. They are now canvassing all the latex mask makers in the southern California area looking for their customers who may have purchased a mask called 'The Elder'.

All this is very discouraging to me because I have been following the Geezer's career with an eye to developing a 'Plan B' for my forced retirement. Let's face it, it's hard to make ends meet when the end of the income stream comes way before the end of the expenses. I figured this for the reason the Geezer embarked on a life of crime. Of course I was also thinking that the Geezer was, like me, an actual Geezer. Being a Geezer would explain a lot—everything in fact except the sprinting.

Robbing banks has a lot to recommend it for an elderly person with limited resources. It's easy to do. It doesn't require any special skills beyond a level head and a respectable 'skunk eye', both of which come quite naturally to a person of a certain age. Intimidating young people is fun. Knocking over banks seems an awful lot like justice. Getting caught is just like icing on the cake—free room and board, free medical care, a built-in excuse to get out of every disagreeable social and familial obligation for years to come, and, perhaps most important, even in prison no one wants to have sex with an old guy. This is all way better than my current retirement plan, and not least because no shifty Wall Street derivatives trader is likely to take it away from me.

Now I'm left wondering if all this is just a pipe dream. I mean, if the Geezer's a young guy with broken-field running ability and a latex mask, maybe this scheme is going to be harder than I originally thought. There are unforeseen (by me at any rate) barriers to entry. First off, the 'Elder' mask that the FBI thinks the bandit is using is listed on eBay at$1,799.99, buy it now. Second, a 9 millimeter Glock will set you back about $450, depending. I don't know how much ammo costs, but realistically you probably don't need any. Other supplies—day planner, paper sack, pad of paper and pencil for note writing—are going to set you back another $20-30. The fact is that I can't afford to get into a life of crime unless I get a job first. Well...that just sucks.

Then of course there's the sprinting. I can't do sprinting anymore. I can't even walk fast enough to please my dogs. You can ask them. They spend an incredible amount of time on our walks turning around to see what's holding me up. Sometimes they have such pained expressions on their faces that I am tempted to drop their leashes and hide in the bushes to spare them any further embarrassment. Sure, they're greyhounds, but really? I feed them. You'd think they'd cut me a little slack.

Exploding money...not unlike the disposition of my former retirement account...thank you very much.

Last is the problem of those pesky dye packs. Dye packs are terrifically effective for banks. They are said to be responsible for the recovery of some $20 million in stolen money and the apprehension of 2,500 bank robbers. Naturally, what's good for the banks is a problem for would be bank robbers. You could say it's an occupational hazard, but I think it's even worse than that. When a dye pack goes off in your paper bag full of loot you get fairly severely burned. Your clothes, your skin, and your money—the money that doesn't get burned up in the explosion—are stained bright red. Permanently. So your plans are foiled, you're marked for life, and you're injured. This just doesn't add up to a very good day at the office. I've had worse, but I'm not working any more. I like to think those days are behind me.

Personally I blame slip-shod customer service. I know the Geezer Bandit asked the teller, 'pretty please', to not slip a dye pack into his sack. He added what you'd think would be sufficient incentive by waving the Glock in her face. She gave it to him anyway. Modern tellers are just like every other person in the retail trades when it comes to executing the customer's wishes, especially if the customer is an elderly person. They can't pay attention long enough to get the simplest requests right. Most of us have just given up expecting what we asked for first time around. Who doesn't check inside the bag before they leave the drive-up window at McDonalds? No one is who. We all know better.

Not so easy for the Geezer Bandit though. The dye packs are disguised to look like regular money. In fact they are regular money—mostly. The receiver, trigger, dye and explosives are concealed in a stack of real currency. The banks don't mind blowing up a thousand dollars worth of twenties to stop a felon in his tracks. They've got plenty more where that came from. They get it out of their bailout funds, or take it from the rest of us in the form of new 'fees'. Sure.

Long story short, the Geezer couldn't just open his bag and look to see if the teller got his order right. He was in a hurry after all. He had places to be. He had to depend on the teller to be just a little bit brighter than your average counter help. He had to depend on the same level of customer service that he'd come to expect from Bank of America. Oh wait...Bank of America you say? Never mind.

The Ironic and the Furious: What I Want for Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 17:03:00 +0000

the President's offending 'holiday' greeting. mostly the GOP yawned.

Two days ago MoveOn.org put up a post about the Republican reaction to the 2011 White House Christmas card. The headline read, 'Republicans Are Furious About Obama's Christmas Card? Wait Till They See Reagan's'. Those who thought to comment were mostly incensed that conservative pundits, GOP luminaries, and Tea Party Hacks were so petty that they would actually be furious about something as innocuous as a greeting card. What seemed to escape many of those commenting is the irony of being themselves so petty that they would get incensed over something that didn't really happen.

According to the article the only Republican who expressed any reservations about the card was Sarah Palin. She made her comments on Fox Radio. What she said was that she found it 'odd' that the President's Christmas card would highlight the family dog rather than traditional Christmas values like 'family, faith, and freedom'. Palin was clearly not furious. She was not even very judgmental...at least not compared to her usual standards. MoveOn's headline, in other words, was inflammatory, divisive, and untrue—the very charges that so many leveled against the GOP leadership, who apparently remain blissfully unaware that they are embroiled in a flap.

Personally I don't think that Christmas is a very good time to be sowing the seeds of hate and recrimination. I know that both sides do it, but the fact is that there are a lot of Democrats who think that only Republicans are capable of this kind of duplicity. Clearly this is not the case, and clearly many liberal believers are ready to be seduced into making the same kinds of unthinking blanket indictments of which they accuse the conservatives. I'm not letting conservatives off the hook here. They are not only just as guilty of this kind of flimflammery, they practically invented it.

Wouldn't it be great if we could get back to actually discussing real issues with logic and civility? Wouldn't it be useful if politicians and hacks would lay out their positions so that we voters could make informed decisions from a substantive array of facts? Wouldn't it be interesting if the media would delve into the meat of differing political positions instead of focusing on who changed their mind about what or who had a bad hair day or who left Jesus off their Christmas card? Wouldn't it be a 'Wonderful Life', if politics could actually make a difference?

That's what I want from Santa—a great big bag of political relevance. We could all use a little. Even a little would be a sea change...but oh, so welcome.

Gangsta Whips

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:48:00 +0000

I have gangstas (well gangsta wannabes) for neighbors. They installed a new speaker system in one of their big wheel whips today. When they tested it, the dogs went wild, the windows rattled, the walls shook, and the drop lights commenced to swinging. I'm trying to recoup my losses by selling these guys pictures of their rides. Samples below:

I figure when you spring for rims like these you're prolly 'all in.' It lightens the load in your wallet, making your pants easier to hold up, which of course you have to do continuously since the belt line is properly worn below your crotch so that the too-long cuffs pool luxuriously around your Lugz making it all but impossible to run away from the police.

I call this one Luna-Cee because, well, wouldn't you?

None of these guys seem to have any money, but as soon as they get some they are going to spend it on something ridiculous. Maybe on pants that don't fit. Maybe on illicit pharmaceuticals. Maybe on 9 millimeter Glocks. And maybe they'll just take it down to the local 'gentlemen's club and stuff it into some lucky dancer's garter. But maybe, just maybe, they'll spend some of it on funky pictures of their cars. I can only hope.

Back to Work...well...sort of

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:28:00 +0000

I've been working on the above graphic for two weeks now, including the intervening holiday. It remains a failed piece by my estimation, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with a way to fix it. I feel as if I have an excuse, but I'm still waiting for a solution to suggest itself in due course. My excuse is that I've been working nights, and when I get home in the morning I'm too tired to marshal my creative juices. I want to make this graphic zing with the same presence as the Auburn Speedster I did a few weeks ago, but a few weeks ago I had a lot more energy for the process.

Now before you get excited about me going back to work, I have to point out that I have not landed a job. I am still un-gainfully unemployed and seemingly without prospects. What I am doing is working in my dreams. I have worked in my dreams before - in fact while I was still working in my waking life - and, while it's never been a pleasant experience, neither has it ever been as stressful and debilitating as this current little spate of projects. The problem with my current dream set is that I'm working for the worst boss I ever had (Richard Hardin) and I'm saddled with the sorriest excuse for a manager I ever met (Fische) to collaborate on a series of meaningless projects.

I sweat through every night with incomplete information, inadequate instructions, impossible deadlines, and fear of reprisal. In the end I know that we will fail to meet expectations, and I know that Fische will dip me in the grease for it. It is just like being back at work, only without a paycheck or health insurance to soothe the sting of the sundry abuses.

The only difference that I can see is that when I was working I dreaded waking up from fitful dreams to face an unpleasant reality, but now I welcome my new reality with open arms. Unpleasant as my new reality may be, it is not nearly so sinister as the memories that await in sleep. Personally I think there ought to be a way to hold asshats accountable for invading your dreams. I mean how fair is it that an unmitigated douche canoe like Fische should be able to crowd Kelly Ripa out of my dream life?

More graphical interludinous gratuitousness!

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:01:00 +0000

Graphical Interlude.

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:44:00 +0000

For your enjoyment - and mine - taking a little break from the politics to create something entirely different.

first this classic 50s model Cadillac convertible done up in vintage style.

Cadilac-ac-ac-ac

and this pristine Auburn Speedster, sharing design cues and heritage with Duesenberg and Cord. Auburn stopped production in 1937, but designs and parts inventory were bought by Auburn/Cord/Duesenberg enthusiast Glenn Pray in the early 60s. In 1966 Pray began design work and tooling to begin production of a second generation Boattail Speedster based on the 1935 model 851 in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

2nd Generation Auburn Boattail Speedster

More Conversations with Bean: Dogging Healthcare

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:44:00 +0000

We've had our greyhound, Bean, for a year now. Every day he grows in wisdom and grace. He is a good dog, eager to please and eager to learn. We have begun to engage one another in conversation with some frequency. He seems to enjoy our little talks, and I find, as his powers of observation grow, so do I. Here is another recent exchange.

BEAN: You remember when you took me to the Vet last week?

ME: Yes. Sorry. It was time for your annual shots.

BEAN: Oh, I don't mind going to the Vet. I mean once they took my nuts, I figured it couldn't get any worse.

ME: Not my fault, Buddy. They did that before I got you.

BEAN: Yeah, I know. Still it seems like a cruel fate. You don't have any idea what's about to happen. They give you a lovely nap, and when you wake up you're carrying an empty sack around. It's embarrassing. I'm mostly over it now, but every once in a while, when I think about it, it gets my back up. You might want to reconsider sleeping in the nude...you know, for your own safety. I'm just sayin'.

ME: Yeah. Okay. Thanks for the warning. We were talking about the Vet.

BEAN: Yeah. What I was wondering is, how come it's so much cheaper for me to go to the Vet than it is for you to go to the Doctor?

ME: I don't know, Bean. I haven't thought about it much.

BEAN: It's not like the Doctor is smarter than the Vet. In fact it's probably the opposite. The Doctor only needs to know how to fix people. The Vet has to know how to fix dogs, cats, hamsters, boa constrictors, guinea hens, cows, horses, giraffes, and hippopotami—just to name a few.

ME: You make a good point.

BEAN: So what's the difference then? Are people more valuable than dogs?

ME: I don't think anyone I know would make an argument like that.

BEAN: Me either. Clearly that would be ludicrous. So what is the difference then?

ME: Well I think it might be the insurance companies. Insurance companies are in charge of most of the healthcare system for people. They decide who gets covered and how much it costs to get covered on the one side, then, on the other side, they determine who gets paid, what services get paid for, and, to a large extent, how much gets paid. They have a significant say in every aspect of the money flow for healthcare in humans, but very little say about healthcare for animals.

BEAN: So you think insurance companies have bid up the cost of healthcare for humans?

ME: I don't know. It's very complicated. If you think about it though, the insurance companies are handling all the money and taking a piece of the action on everything, so the more healthcare costs, they more money they will make. They really don't have a vested interest in keeping medical costs down - only their own costs. They keep their own costs down by limiting coverage to people who are not likely to get sick and then denying the claims of the people they do cover.

BEAN: Sounds to me like you guys need to get the insurance companies out of healthcare.

ME: Maybe so, but that's way easier said than done.

BEAN: Why's that?

ME: Well for one thing, the insurance companies have a lot of money left over from collecting big premiums, limiting coverage, and denying claims. They use that money to make campaign contributions and to pay lobbyists in Washington to make sure that no one in Congress messes with the system. They pay good money, in other words, to keep things as they are.

BEAN: And people put up with this nonsense?

ME: So it would seem.

BEAN: I think someone needs to take this system out on the back porch and chew it up like a rawhide bone.

ME: As usual, you make a lot of sense, my friend.

BEAN: Yeah, and meanwhile you ought to consider just getting your work done at the Vet.

Dithering on Hard Choices

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:31:00 +0000

I've been putting off this post for a long time. I've never claimed to be other than a devout Roman Catholic and adamantly pro-life, but I haven't had a lot to say in this blog, or in any other forum for that matter, about abortion. It is a divisive, emotional, and controversial issue. It takes a certain amount of courage to speak out on it because doing so is sure to result in some heated disagreement if not outright vitriol.

I prefer to avoid confrontation as a rule, so when mommy bloggers that I follow post, for example, that they are sick to death of fat, middle-aged, white, Republican men trying to misappropriate moral choices that ought to be the sole purview of women, I hold my tongue. I do this because 1) I don't want to offend the sensibilities of otherwise smart and funny women on the basis of my disagreement with them on one issue, and 2) being a fat, middle-aged, white, Republican man I am already seen to lack any credible moral standing on, not just this, but many issues facing women.

Now that I'm changing my stripes, so to speak, by championing the Democrats' more 'touchy feely' approach to economic policy I find I have to confront the Democrats' decidedly non 'touchy feely' stand on abortion. I may not be a Republican any more, but neither am I a Democrat. Without the relative harmonic safety of one camp or the other, I find I need to 'nut up' and explain myself more fully. Likely this won't be any easier to read than it was to write.

Life in the Balance

I like to say that I used to be a Voldemort Republican. That's not strictly true. I've been a one-issue Republican voter for as long as I care to remember. That one issue is life. The other issues that constitute true ideological Republicanism are not so dear to me. I go back and forth on some of them. I'm just plain opposed to others. Lately I've abandoned supply side economic theory because I have come to believe that it has been a spectacular failure, even though it remains bedrock Republican economic policy. I used to buy it, but I don't any longer. This is why I call myself a former Voldemort Republican.

I've not changed my mind about abortion though. I still vote a pro-life ticket. It's not that I don't care about other issues. I do, but for me the issue of life takes precedence. For me it's been the most important issue when it comes to my vote. If you are wrong on the issue of life, nothing else really matters. It is the last purely moral issue on the table. Everything else is political or economic or both, but the issue of life is central to our humanity.

If you want to vote pro-life, you pretty much have to vote Republican. I don't really understand why this is. It doesn't make sense to me that the Republicans are pro on life and Democrats are pro on choice. I would think it would be the opposite, especially when you consider that, on the other major life issue, capital punishment, the Republicans want to kill you and the Democrats want to rehabilitate you and turn you loose. It's as if, at least as far as the political parties are concerned, it was all a matter of timing. The Republicans want to kill you after you're born, and the Democrats want to kill you before. I don't get it.

You would think that the GOP, the party of individual rights and curtailing government involvement in matters of morality, would be pro-choice. When I hear the pro-choice argument that government shouldn't be telling women what to do with their bodies, and that the decision to have or not have a child is a matter to be decided by the family and not the state, I think that sounds just Republican as hell. And yet the Republicans are happy to interpose government in your moral choices when there is a baby involved, but only, it would seem, before the baby is able to make demands of its own on various entitlement programs.

After you're born, it's an entirely different matter for Republicans. After you're born, Republicans are not so much pro-life as they are pro-keeping-what's-theirs. Once you're weaned from mother's milk and start suckling at the public teat, your life is suddenly not worth so much. You fail the Republican cost benefit analysis. This is why Republicans love capital punishment so much. It puts an end to your state paid support. They want to cut the cost and get you in the ground before you bankrupt the system.

They feel the same way about a lot of entitlements that are meant to keep body and soul together. They don't want to pay for your social welfare or your health care or your food stamps. They don't want to pay unemployment benefits. They just want you to either get a job and pay your own way or go away quietly and die. And no, they're not going to spend any money to create jobs either. That's your lookout. If you want to work, work. It's just that simple. There's not a lot of logic or consistency at work in Republican principles, and for the GOP, what claims to be pro-life, isn't. Not really. I don't know what it is, but it's certainly not consistently about life.

On the other hand, you would think that Democrats, who have traditionally been associated with grand social engineering to lift the oppressed masses out of poverty and affliction and servitude would be in favor of protecting the most disenfranchised of humanity—the unborn. Democrats have always been about legislating the right thing to do, and so they are historically and philosophically associated with The New Deal, The War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, Medicare, Civil Rights, Head Start, The National Endowment for the Arts, Consumer Protection, The Clean Air Act, and others. This being the case, one has to wonder why they keep pushing to expand a woman's right to impose her choice over the rights of her own unborn child to life, liberty and the other guarantees of our Constitution.

Democrats love killing babies—so much so that they don't want people thinking about it much before they get abortions. They are against counseling, they are against educating young women about alternatives, they are against involving families in the decision, and they are against waiting.

They are not against waiting when you've already waited too long though. If you've been dithering about getting an abortion into the third trimester, when fetuses are viable and abortions are not for the squeamish, then they think you should be able to have something called a 'partial birth abortion', a procedure so draconian it can scarcely be discussed in polite company.

In a partial birth abortion, labor is induced, and the baby is allowed to start its trip toward the light at the end of the tunnel. It's not allowed to complete its journey though. Once the tike crowns, it's little skull is pierced with a surgical spike, and its brains are vacuumed into a jar. Then the rest of its now lifeless body is allowed to pass into the world where Democrats will applaud its mother's pluck, and, if she's poor enough, pay for the procedure.

Democrats are actually okay with this. It's the mother's body, they say, and so it's the mother's decision. I would argue that, at the very least, it ceased to be about the mother's body when the baby crowned. In fact I would argue that it ceased to be about the mother's body long before that. I know that, officially at least, the jury's still out on this, but I believe it stops being about the mother's body at the moment of conception. I don't think I'm alone in this. Even Democrats agree...sort of.

Here's where the Democrats are as inconsistent and illogical as Republicans. It's about the woman's body when they're talking about abortion, but if an expectant mother smokes crack, or snorts cocaine, or drinks, or smokes, or abuses prescription medications, then it becomes all about the baby. Democrats don't want you doing anything that might injure your unborn child, unless of course you want to have it killed. Then suddenly it's all about women's rights, and the baby be damned. Oh...and they want the Republicans to agree to pay for it too.

It seems to me that the political parties have got it backwards. If they would just switch positions on abortion, I would have a much easier time embracing the social justice championed by the Democrats over the inequities fostered by the Republicans' dogged insistence on supply side and trickle down economic policies. As it is I have to continue to vote a pro-life Republican ticket because babies can't vote for themselves. I have to continue doing this even though I am certain, way down deep in my analytical accountant's soul, that the Republicans are wrong on just about every other important social and economic issue. I'd certainly feel a lot better about my choices if the choice was clear and consistent on choice.

And here's a final irony—as if choosing weren't difficult enough already. The current state of the economy is putting more and more pressure on women to have abortions. Sure, we're supposed to be in a recovery, but nobody is putting Americans back to work. There are 14 million jobless Americans on the unemployment rolls. There are probably another 11 to 12 million people who are off the official rolls or seriously underemployed. The Republicans don't want the Democrats to solve this problem. They want everyone to wait until 2013, when they hope we will have a Republican administration that can save us all from the Democrats' profligate spending.

Meanwhile, for the millions of jobless and uninsured, having a baby is a bankruptcy event. From a purely fiscal perspective - the favorite perspective of your quintessential pro-life Republican - abortion begins to look like a sensible choice. This may be an unintended result, but that doesn't make it any less real. Any policy that prolongs joblessness fosters abortion. Any policy that increases poverty increases the abortion rate. Any policy that denies basic subsistence and health service options to those who need them most denies life to the unborn. An increase in abortions may be against Republican principles, but it is at least consistent with Republican economic policy. The last thirty years of economic history proves this.

Republicans will argue that the key to economic recovery rests in unfettering the private sector from the burdens of regulation and taxation. Our problem, they say, is big government and runaway spending eating away at the incentives of business to succeed. If we would just reduce taxes on the wealthy and on corporations and loosen the regulatory noose we would see marked and immediate gains in productivity, employment, and prosperity, and these gains would benefit everybody. You've no doubt heard this mantra before. It is currently being touted by virtually every Republican candidate for the presidency. They only vary among themselves in how much they want to give to the wealthy in order to fuel this dramatic turn of fortune. I have to wonder how they can possible hold on to this supply side pipe dream that has been a virtual non-starter since the Reagan years.

If any of this stuff was going to work, it would have worked by now. It hasn't. We haven't had thirty years of unparalleled prosperity. We have had thirty years of consistently lowering taxes on the richest Americans. We have had thirty years of significant erosion of regulations that were originally put in place to protect us from boom, bust, and bailout cycles. We have had, in other words, pretty much full realization of the Republican supply side initiative without any realization of its promises.

Instead of prosperity we got ever more volatile bubbles, followed by ever steeper declines and ever more expensive public fixes. Instead of investment in innovation and jobs growth we got richer rich and poorer poor. The rich didn't invest in America as promised. They invested instead in a status quo designed to keep them at the top of the food chain. They did not risk their capital seeking gain. They used their gains to eliminate their risk. Whenever they made mistakes, which was often, they relied on poor and middle-class taxpayers to backstop their plays. In the words of Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, we got the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses.

Today the rich are richer than they've ever been. Corporations are booking record profits and are sitting on unprecedented amounts of cash. Even so they are not investing in new technologies and they are not hiring Americans. They are not doing any of the things that supply side theory tells us they are supposed to be doing with their money. And yet, almost unbelievably, the Republican solution is to lower taxes even more on the wealthy and on corporations, and to further emasculate the regulations that are meant to protect the vanishing wealth of the rest of us.

This doesn't make any sense to me at all. It defies logic, and yet you cannot turn on a television or radio or open a newspaper or log onto the Internet without hearing this trickle down claptrap trotted out as gospel. Even people who stand to lose the most believe it. People who will have their retirement funds looted by Wall Street pirates, people who will have their taxes increased to pay for yet another round of million dollar bonuses for a bunch of executives who missed the forest for the trees, people whose dreams are being snuffed out by the very people they look to for salvation, still believe with passion that supply side theory is the answer to all our prayers. Prosperity may not trickle down but irony certainly does, and that may be the great tragedy of American politics.

So this is my dilemma. I vote against abortion by voting for Republicans, but the result of Republicans winning elections is an economy that continues to spiral out of control, and the result of that is more abortions, not less. Of course the Republicans can always legislate against abortion, but then there would just be a lot more babies that those same Republicans are going to legislate against feeding, housing, medicating, and employing. It's a quandary.

The Republicans have done a pretty good job of killing the American dream. Even though they are philosophically pro-life, they are now almost as good as the Democrats at killing babies. The Democrats and Republicans need to switch sides on abortion. That way at least my vote can be consistent with my own beliefs. It may not accomplish anything in the grand scheme of things, but at least it will make sense to me.

Dissecting the 'We Are Wall Street' Letter: the most fun you can have in reading glasses

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:43:00 +0000

New York Stock Exchange - iconic Wall Street ready to fight back.

Some of you will have seen this letter. It's been circulating around Facebook for a few days now, proudly touted by those who still buy into the whacky premise of supply side economics as a beautiful rejoinder to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Let's analyze it piece by piece, and see just how beautiful it is. (Original text in blue. My comments in black.)

We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. This much at least is not problematic. Given the timbre of the rest of the letter, the writer is certainly arrogant enough to represent the excesses of Wall Street that we've all grown to despise.
I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its [sic] not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas. Also quite true. No one complains when they are winning. The problem here is, of course, that it was just like gambling, except it wasn't supposed to be. No one in their right mind takes their pension fund to Las Vegas. They put it in nice safe diversified mutual funds and money market funds. All the unmitigated risk came from Wall Street. Wall Street took our money to Las Vegas and lost it. Not their money, our money. We didn't give them permission to do it. They didn't ask. But even though they lost our money, they still expected to get their commissions and their fat bonuses. And it gets worse because they didn't just lose our money, they set us up to lose our money and then bet against us. They sold securitized mortgage paper that they knew was crap to our pension funds, lied about how crappy it was, and then invested themselves in short positions on the same crap so that the more money we lost, the more money they made. The biggest and most respected Wall Street firms were found guilty of this kind of fraud. They paid substantial fines and penalties for it—not so substantial that it has slowed them down any, but hundreds of millions of dollars. No one went to jail though. A lot of us Joe Mainstreets think someone should have gone to jail. God knows we would have had we sunk to this level of criminality.
Well now the market crapped out, and even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are. Scapegoat, my ass. If the shoe fits, bud.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that. Most of us in the 99% work long hours too—at least those of us who still have jobs. Good luck taking jobs away from the 14 million of us who don't have one to take, or the 11 million additional displaced workers who have been forced into early retirement, have fallen off the unemployment rolls, or are underemployed. We don't retire at 50 with a pension either. In fact many of us will be lucky to be able to retire at all after what you bozos have done to our savings. You don't eat what you kill. You kill for sport. You work until 10 at night because your whole life is about racking up points. You don't have friends except at work. Your family plays second fiddle to your job. You come after my plate and you're not going to find the filet steaks and coquilles St. Jacques that you are used to. You are going to find rice and beans. If you try to take it away from me, you are going to end up eating broth and jello at the hospital.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3^rd graders and doing landscaping? Well, yes I do think you are incapable of teaching 3^rd graders and landscaping. I've done both and I've also been a CPA and worked as an accounting executive. I'd rather do accounting. It's easier. It's not as easy as trading hypothetical pieces of fake paper, but it's not nearly so hard as managing a classroom full of eight-year-olds or trying to get rid of a spider mite infestation on a variegated dracaena marginata without killing the plant...or yourself.

Trading floor of the NYSE where Wall Street is busy saving America from its elementary school teachers.
We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much. Wait...what? Cushy? 4 months off? Double time and a half? $5,000 for running a baseball practice? What planet do you live on?
So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours. Wait...what...again? $85k? Same question with respect to your planet of residence. I drive a 2003 PT Cruiser, which I wash in the driveway with a garden hose. I tip 20-25% when I eat out because that's as much as I can afford. I didn't stop tipping or cut my tipping down when I lost my job because, unlike you, I am not a prick. And here's another thing. Since you make your money off of mine, when my money dries up, so does yours. It doesn't actually work the other way, much as you might wish us to believe that it does.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom. We lived off the money we worked for. You rejoiced in the money you scammed us out of. What's more the Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee are not going to knock you off the top of the pyramid. You guys paid to put them in office. They are probably going to leave things as they are unless the Occupy Wall Street movement gains so much momentum that they have to sit up and take notice. Where do you think the $2 trillion in bailout and economic stimulus money went? It went to Wall Street. It paid your fat bonus. Conservative pundits are clamoring about Obama's spending spree, but most of the money went right to the top of the pyramid where it stayed. It didn't go to hiring teachers back or putting America back to work. It went into the coffers of asshats and pirates who used some of it to lobby against financial reform and the kind of common sense regulations that would prevent another bubble, bust, and bailout cycle. Obama is your friend. He may not be as good a friend as, say, Rick Perry, but he's done everything you required to maintain the status quo.
We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply...will he? And will they? Honestly, I don't even know what this means. I think possibly your last hit of cocaine kicked in somewhere in the middle of the paragraph above this one. In fact this whole missive is so disjointed and misinformed that I have decided, arrogant or not, you are not Wall Street at all. You don't know enough about how finance and economics actually work to have ever done time selling securities, vetting market analysis, or timing trends. You are an ignoramus, and you are not taking anything away from me. Besides, someone way smarter than you has already got most of it.

A Steaming Pile by Any Other Name: Horse and Sparrow Economics

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:20:00 +0000

For several weeks now, I have been tweeting and facebooking the hell out of something called 'horse and sparrow economic theory' because it is at once so evocative and so descriptive of the bill of goods that has been supply side policy since the Reagan administration. 'Supply side economics' was a term adopted to replace what was, at the time, the more pejorative term, 'trickle down economics'. In either case, the theory was that if you cut taxes for the wealthy they would have more money to save, and part of that savings would be invested in new technology and new productive capacity, which would create new jobs and lift the economy as a whole. In other words a little governmental largess at the top would eventually trickle down to benefit everyone.

For a while it seemed to work that way. Reagan had inherited an economy that wasn't just stagnant, it was also inflationary. They called it 'stagflation', and while there were lots of theories as to what caused it at the time, it was doggedly resistant to any measures adopted to get out of it. Reagan's solution was across-the-board income tax cuts coupled with a massive increase in defense spending. The math didn't work of course, and Reagan's budget director, David Stockton, got into trouble for saying as much in an interview with Vanity Fair.

Reaganomics, as it came to be called in the press, relied on something called the Laffer Curve to sell the plan. What the Laffer Curve purported to show was that if you lowered tax rates, total tax revenue would actually go up because the taxes saved by individuals and businesses would lead to higher income through investments and thus higher absolute taxes although at a lower rate. This turned out not to be true, and Reagan had a revenue problem. His spending was going through the roof, and his tax receipts were taking a nose dive.

Alan Greenspan, tapped by Reagan to chair a bipartisan commission to fix Social Security, instead fixed Reagan's revenue problem with subterfuge. Purporting to put Social Security back on sound financial footing, he raised Social Security taxes. The additional tax revenues filled federal coffers by effectively reversing Reagan's income tax cuts for middle and lower income wage earners. This was a huge regressive shift in the total tax burden—lightening the load for the rich and increasing the burden for the poor.

Reagan was happy to borrow the Social Security receipts to fund the arms race. He got the Soviets to spend themselves into the poor house, but the apparently serendipitous collapse of the Soviet Union may have created as many problems as it solved. Reagan once famously called the accounting sleight of hand 'revenue enhancement'. For the middle class taxpayers upon whom the burden fell, Reagan's use of the term 'enhanced' is the moral equivalent of using 'enhanced interrogation techniques' to describe torture.

Eventually stagflation went away. Supply side advocates today like to point to Reagan's success to sell 'enhanced' trickle down policies today. I would argue that since Reagan actually raised taxes, increased spending, and more than doubled the deficit, supply side philosophy had little to do with the improved economy. A much better case could be made for increased spending as the best way to kick-start a stalled economy.

This is just too Keynesian to be embraced by conservatives though. They are all still firm believers in the supply side formula, even though it has never really worked...not even for Ronald Reagan who is its patron saint. After thirty years, the legacy of supply side policy-making is clearly bubbles, busts, and bailouts. It is time to go back to calling supply side theory by the name it started with—' Horse and Sparrow'. It goes like this: if you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

When the sparrows get tired of the steady diet of the horse's leavings, we will finally see what 'Angry Birds' really look like.

Flatline the Flat Tax

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Rick Perry is coming to town with a tired old idea - the flat tax - only it's voluntary. That's right, in an effort to simplify 3 million lines of tax code, Perry has proposed adding another layer of tax rate that you can elect to pay if your taxes computed under the old system add up to more than 20%. How is this simplification? This is an unvarnished tax reduction for the highest bracket taxpayers.

It's just another way to lessen taxes for those who can most afford to pay, and stick it, yet again, to the middle class.

Just say 'no' to more of the same old trickle down doodoo with a bumper sticker from Aimless Arts.

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Trickle Down Theory: DooDoo Economics

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 20:27:00 +0000

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Dumping on the Occupation

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:04:00 +0000

The legion of detractors of the Occupy Wall Street protests are beginning to sound as tedious as some of the activists. Their favorite rejoinder seems to be 'get a job' followed close on by 'take a bath'. Of course neither one is particularly useful when you're speaking of a group of people who are essentially camping in an era of 9.5% unemployment. Those protesting the protests are as clueless as to what the Occupy movement is about as the individual tin-foil hat candidates they love to single out as somehow representative, which of course they are not.

Some of this is the fault of the movement itself, which has deliberately sought to be so leaderless and egalitarian that it has given a voice, however briefly, to all manner of crackpots and scatterbrains, and even listened politely while they rant about whatever is on their minds. The rest is due to the self-appointed and largely self-serving guardians of the status quo who pick out easy targets for the kind of sound bite criticism that sells blog space and air time. These pundits miss the issues at the heart of Occupy Wall Street, and so miss the opportunity to engage in the kind of dialogue that would actually address our myriad of problems.

Raise your hand if you think Occupy Wall Street is a bunch of effete college students who think they should get something for nothing simply because they are too lazy to work for it. Shout out if you believe they are all left-leaning progressives who want to crush business with an endless stream of burdensome taxes and regulations. Stamp your feet if you are convinced that Occupy Wall Street was started by a bunch of elitist college professors to sweep away capitalism and the American way of life and replace it with a New World Order. What a bunch of folderol—honestly!

The irony here is that the protestors camped out in Zuccotti park are angry for the same reasons that the Tea Party is angry. Their future looks hopelessly grim. The self-worth and economic value that were supposed to accrue to them for getting an education and going to work have evaporated. The rewards of innovation and creativity and perseverance and frugality and hard work are no longer assured. The natural order of things has been overturned and replaced by something insidious and grossly unfair. The system now rewards the pirates and charlatans.

The difference between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party lies, not in why they are mad, but rather in who they are mad at. Occupy Wall Street is mad at the bank executives and speculators who stole our future—the guys who, as Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, has pointed out, created a system to 'socialize losses and privatize gains'. They took huge risks, pocketed the money they made, and got the taxpayers to backstop their play when things went south. You can follow the money and see what they got away with. Their perfidy is well documented and infamous.

The Tea Party, on the other hand, is mad at Barak Obama and the runaway spending of the Democrats. They are mad at everyone who got sucked into an adjustable rate mortgage. They are mad at people with serious illnesses who can't buy medical insurance. Why don't they just die already and quit burdening an already overtaxed system? They are mad at welfare cheats, medicare cheats, layabouts who draw unemployment instead of getting jobs, and anything with the word entitlement in it.

They are mad at these things because Glen Beck told them to be, or Rush Limbaugh, or any one of a number of pandering nabobs who make their money telling people what they want to hear. It hardly matters that the math doesn't work. You can take all the villains of the fundamentalist right and add up the money lost to their villainy and you won't come up to the amount of the problem. That's because the problem is on the other side of the equation—the revenue side—the side where the real cheats live.

Occupy Wall Street Occupies National Stage

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:21:00 +0000

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I've been watching the Occupy Wall Street protest in a kind of bemused and detached way since it started. They have yet to look serious or come up with a thoughtful, viable agenda. Their one saving grace up till now has been, in the words of Paul Krugman of the New York Times, that 'they are angry at the right people'.

So I like them—this great unwashed rabble of campers and activists—even though they seem to ricochet from issue to issue like amped up pinballs without understanding anything fully, or even adequately. Why do I like them? Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. They may not understand what they are doing, but they are down there in the financial district making trouble and impeding traffic and generally pissing off the Wall Street establishment. That's almost enough for me.

Things are beginning to change though. Occupy Wall Street is gathering momentum as a movement, and in no small measure due to the over-reaction of the police sent to maintain order and the screeching condemnations coming from conservative pundits and financial commentators on the usual cable outlets.

The protestors are still largely an unfocused mob with no clear agenda, but their persistence, their omnipresence on social media, and the ridiculous posturing of their detractors have given them an air of legitimacy. Lately, even Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and President Obama have separately expressed philosophical empathy with the protest, if not in principle, at least with their level of frustration. '...Who can blame them?' Bernanke quipped. Well, seemingly a lot of people can blame them, but most of that blame is apparently going to come from the political right.

Indeed. Bernanke's rhetorical question is doubly curious in that one of the more consistent calls of the protest is for the complete and immediate dismantling of the Federal Reserve Bank. Bernanke will be out of a job if the protestors have their way and, given the timbre of some of the attendant tweets and rally signs coming out of the protests, he just might be tarred, feathered, and carried out of town on a rail in the bargain. Obama's remarks are more obviously self-serving, and that, to my thinking, is as problematic as the condemnations from the right because the protest is and ought to stay apolitical.

The initial Occupy Wall Street narrative went something like this: Wall Street greed and corruption have robbed us of our future. They have tanked the economy, cost millions of jobs, stripped us of the value that used to give us comfort in our homes and our retirement accounts. They have undermined our worth as individuals and as a nation. They have made us less secure, less safe, more vulnerable. When they had brought the whole financial system to the edge of collapse, they reached into our pockets yet again and got us to rescue them from their own folly. Now, while the rest of us are still trying to crawl out of the smoking ruins they left us, they are back to their old tricks, unchastened, unrepentant, and unrelenting in the pursuit of the rest of our happiness. This is a huge injustice that needs to be fixed, and we are going to camp here and raise a ruckus until somebody does something about it.

This is not a political narrative, although many seem tempted to make it one. The Wall Street pirates donate almost equally to both major political parties. There is a reason for this, and the first Occupiers of Wall Street seemed to understand as much.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle share the blame for the paucity of regulation and fiscal licentiousness that got us into this mess. While Democrats are held by Republicans to be the party of profligate spending, the deficit rose most dramatically under Republican administrations. And while Republicans are widely thought to be the party that champions the worst excesses of corporate America, some of the most egregiously enabling deregulation took place under Democrats. Our problems are not rooted in political ideology. They are rooted in a system whose controls were deliberately broken in exchange for political contributions and support made to both parties by what Matt Tabbai of Rolling Stone calls a new Grifter Class.

These thieves are the real enemy, and they have co-opted our democratic processes and our institutions for their own gain. What they do is not just greedy, not just larcenous. It is, in my opinion, treasonous. They have done more damage to this nation than any terrorist organization. They have undermined our strength, weakened our influence, stripped us of our freedom, and all without recourse to any ideological framework. They are not political. They are criminal. They use politics, to be sure, but only as a means to an end. The larger political issues of left versus right, progressive versus conservative, the tensioned balance between individual rights and majority rule mean nothing to them. Their only concern is have or have not.

The Occupy Wall Street protestors think this is wrong. They may be a raucous mob at this point. They may even, as conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has suggested, smell bad. There's no doubt they have expressed some crazy notions, some of them self-contradictory, but this is always a danger when you have deliberately tried to remain leaderless and organically democratic. One could level many of the same criticisms against that other infamous grass-roots protest movement—the Tea Party. Personally I think there is something to like about both groups. They each have legitimate grievances.

The danger is that all this unfocused frustration is easily co-opted by politics. Certainly the Tea Party has come to be identified with a kind of fundamental rebublican libertarianism. Now MoveOn.org is busy trying to marshal the energy of the Occupy Wall Street groups. This is a shame, really. There is much to like about the fact that the initial anger of the movement has been directed at real pirates and charlatans. The environment that made the piracy legal was created in Washington by Democrats and Republicans alike. The solutions to the problems are actually quite simple and even fairly well known, but they will have to be addressed with the same kind of bi-partisan co-operation that created them in the first place. Playing us versus them with these movements will just muddy the waters and delay any chance of real reform.

Class Action

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:28:00 +0000

When you've got the blues, you need to blow the horn.

My friend, David Kaa, who blogs at ManWife Chronicles about the trials and tribulations of long-term unemployment received a cease and desist order from an attorney representing his former employer. You can read the details here.

It seems that David's employer was upset that he was making disparaging comments about them in his blog and on a video commentary that he put up on YouTube. The lawyer said he had to quit. Not only did the lawyer insist that he quit, but also that he remove the offending posts and dismantle his website. To give legal weight to this demand the lawyer cited a non-compete agreement that David had been required to sign when he was first employed. Also cited was the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

This last seemed a bit over-reaching to me. At issue was the fact that David's video included shots of the employer's office building with its logo displayed prominently on the side. Wait...what?! Displaying a picture taken on a public thoroughfare of a sign on a building is copyright infringement?

David called bullshit on this one, but it turns out that the lawyer is right. You can't do that, at least not for commercial purposes or private financial gain. Neither can Google it would seem, but nobody is making an issue of it with them. David's former company's logo is displayed for all to see on the street view of Google maps. Google presumably has more lawyers than God.

David did take the video down though. Who wants to waste the precious hours of blissful unemployment (no longer working for assholes) fighting with a lawyer? As my hometown pharmacist and soda fountain operator used to say, 'You can wrestle with a turd all day long, but no matter how bad you whup it you're still bound to get a little on you.'

Copyright issues aside, I think the proscription against making disparaging comments is an actionable offense on the part of David's employer, and many others as well. My former employer did it too—not in a non-compete agreement but in the termination letter I was forced to sign in order to get any severance pay. I'm not only prohibited from making disparaging comments in any public forum, I'm also prohibited from acknowledging that any severance agreement even exists. Good luck enforcing that one.

Here's my point. The ability to make disparaging comments is a necessary adjunct to the continuing mental health and well-being of an unemployed individual. This fact is, I think, well established in modern society on another front. For instance people who have just gotten out of bad relationships are allowed, expected, even encouraged, to say all manner of perjorative things about their former significant others. It's part of the healing process. It's an expression of the anger that is one of the five necessary steps in the grieving process.

Nothing more closely parallels a divorce or break-up than losing one's job. The longer you've had the job, the more effort you've invested in the relationship, the harder it is to adjust to being terminated and escorted out of the building like a trespassing derelict. This is a hurtful experience. Anyone who's been through it knows that you need all the healing tools available to weather the turmoil and get your life back on track. One of those tools is the ability to work through the natural feelings of anger and betrayal.

Taking this a little bit further, the continuing mental health and well-being of the unemployed is a necessary adjunct to their ability to get another job.

This is and has been an extremely difficult job market. Three years after the CDO- and derivative-fueled real estate bubble burst and brought our economy to the brink of collapse, unemployment is still running above 9%. There are an estimated 25 million unemployed, underemployed, and displaced workers who need jobs. Conservatively there are 6 people actively looking for work for every one available job.

A job seeker in this market needs to be on top of his or her game. There's no room for self doubt or depression. The slightest sign of weakness is going to get you culled from the herd of available applicants for any job. A job seeker needs to be positive, confident, assertive, self-possessed and optimistic. None of these is very likely while you still have unresolved issues regarding your former employer. In other words you've got to work through your anger to be sane, and you've got to be sane to have a chance of getting a job, especially in an employer's market.

Seen in this context, any effort on an employer's part to circumvent the natural process of healing can be viewed as unfair and injurious. Proscriptions against disparaging remarks, public or private, are deliberate attempts by employers to protect themselves from the consequences of their decisions at the expense of the very people they harm the most. It is adding insult to injury. It is kicking a man when he is already down. It is therefore objectionable. It needs to stop.

I propose a class action lawsuit on behalf of every unemployed person who has been forced to agree to place their mental health and future financial security in this kind of jeopardy in order to make it easier for their employer to fire them. It's only fair.

MORE CONVERSATIONS WITH BEAN: Inbreeding the Banks

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:33:00 +0000

We've had our greyhound, Bean, for a year now. He's adapting well to life off the track, and he seems happy to have traded his racing days for a life of reflection. Every day he grows in wisdom and grace. He is a good dog, eager to please and quick to learn. We have begun to engage one another in conversation with some frequency. Here is one such exchange.

BEAN: Did you see that thing that's going around the Internet about all the bank mergers?

ME: Yes I did, Bean. Very interesting, don't you think?

BEAN: Interesting?! Frightening is what it is.

ME: How so?

BEAN: I've been watching this for a long time, ever since the news started talking about banks being too big to fail.

ME: And?

BEAN: Seems like merging is the wrong way to go about fixing the problem.

ME: You make a good point. If they're already too big, mergers just make them bigger.

BEAN: Yeah, but that's not the half of it. Think what's involved in the merger. You got a bad bank, full up with toxic assets, about to go under, and you merge it with another bank where all the same problems haven't come to light yet. You haven't solved anything. I mean, you palm Merril and Countrywide off on Bank of America, Wachovia off on Wells Fargo, Bear Sterns and Washington Mutual off on JP Morgan, you just made yourself a ticking time bomb. There are only four commercial banks left at the top. You're running out of places to bury the crap, if you know what I mean.

ME: You seem to have a pretty good handle on this for a dog.

BEAN: Well it's not exactly rocket science.

ME: A lot of people find this all very complicated.

BEAN: That's because they don't know how to think like dogs. Look at it like this. Suppose you had a really bad pit bull. He's aggressive, unmanageable, and anti-social. He's already done serious injury to a lot of innocent bystanders. What do you do with a dog like that? Do you neuter him? Rehabilitate him? Put him down? ...Or do you breed him to a bigger, stronger dog?

Conversations with Bean: Sorting the Bitches

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:44:00 +0000

BEAN: Have you ever tried to sort out the neighbor's bitches?

ME: We call them women.

BEAN: I know you do, usually, but I think your neighbor's women are probably bitches.

ME: What makes you say that?

BEAN: Well, for one thing, he calls them bitches when he is talking to the friends that he calls dogs. You know the ones I mean. They drive cars with big shiny rims that I like to pee on when no one is looking. None of these dog friends ever talk about women...only bitches. They stand around smoking the cigarettes, looking at their cars, and talking about bitches. Then they throw their cigarettes on the ground, and drive away in a pack. I like these guys. I think they all would like to be dogs. I think that shows good taste even though they all have to use their forepaws to hold up their pants.

ME: You may have a point.

BEAN: Anyway, have you been able to sort them out, the bitches I mean. Because I don't understand them. They confuse me.

ME: Well women can be like that sometimes. Aren't you glad you live over here where it's easier to figure out.

BEAN: I do like it over here. Everybody over here knows their place. It's me, then you, then Sandy, then Mommy. Mommy's not so good when you're not here. Sometimes she forgets her place, but since you're here almost all the time, it hasn't been much of a problem.

ME: One of the benefits of me not having a job I suppose.

BEAN: What is job?

ME: A job is where you go someplace else and do stuff that somebody else tells you to do.

BEAN: Why would you do that?

ME: Well every couple of weeks they give you treats for doing it.

BEAN: Is it the good treats? The chewy ones that taste like the stuff the cats leave in the sand box?

ME: No, not really. I guess you would say that the job treats are not that good.

BEAN: I don't think I would like this job then. We should talk more about this later. Right now I want to finish sorting out the bitches.

ME: Okay. Tell me what it is that confuses you, and I will try to help you sort it out.

BEAN: Well the neighbor has the two bitches, just like you, only they both walk around on their hind legs like Mommy instead of on all four legs like Sandy, so it's harder to figure out who is alpha. It would be good to see them together. If I could see how they interact when they are together, I would know how they rank in the pack. They are never together though. Sometimes the skinny one with the face like a doberman with worms is there, and sometimes the bouncy one with the pictures on her legs is there, but they are never there at the same time. I can't figure out how they arrange to never be there at the same time. It is a mystery.

ME: Well, Bean, I have to say that I have noticed the same thing.

BEAN: It is almost like magic. The skinny one will be there for three or four weeks, and then one day she will get in the round car and drive away, and then five minutes later the bouncy bitch will come up the driveway in her square car and she will stay for a week. Then, as soon as the bouncy one leaves the other bitch comes back. They don't miss each other by much, but they always miss. I think that maybe these bitches cannot get along with each other like Mommy and Sandy, so the neighbor has to keep them apart. I don't know how he does it though.

ME: I'm not sure how he does it either, my friend, but I think maybe it has something to do with his cell phone.

BEAN: What is cell phone?

ME: A cell phone is that little box that he holds up to his ear when he is standing in his driveway and it seems as though he is talking to himself. He is actually talking into the cell phone, and someone someplace else can hear what he is saying and can talk back to him.

BEAN: I have seen him do that often. It is a relief to know that he is not talking to himself. I was beginning to worry about him. I thought that maybe not knowing when his bitches were coming and going was making him a little mad.

ME: I can see where you might think that.

BEAN: That still doesn't sort out his bitches though. Why do you think they behave in this strange manner?

ME: Well here is what I think, but I am only guessing. I would ask him, but in addition to the cell phone and the car with the big rims he also has some guns, so I don't want to sniff around in his business until he lets me know that it is okay, if you know what I mean. I think the bitch that looks like a doberman with worms is the wife bitch, and the one that bounces is the girlfriend bitch, and that the neighbor uses his cell phone to manage his bitch's comings and goings because if they are in the same place together they will tear each other to bits.

BEAN: Why doesn't he just tell them to behave?

ME: Well the thing about wives and girlfriends is that they do not really behave like proper bitches, at least not when they are aware of one another. Wife and girlfriend bitches are more like cats. They are very difficult to manage.

BEAN: If not impossible. Thank you. That really clears things up.

ME: You are welcome.

BEAN: Do you think that I could have one of these cell phones? I would like to be able to manage Mommy better when you are gone. It seems like a cell phone could be very useful in this regard since the neighbor is able to use his to make what seems like magic.

ME: Well first I think you need to understand that having a cell phone is a lot like chasing your tail. It seems like a good idea until you catch it. When you have a cell phone you can tell people what to do, sure, but you also have to listen to them when they talk to you.

BEAN: Do you mean that Mommy would be talking into the cell phone from someplace else, and I would have to listen to her?

ME: Exactly.

BEAN: Well...never mind then.

Letters to Nineveh

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:02:00 +0000

Today's post is over at Letters to Nineveh. I put it there because it seems to fit the more or less prophetical nature of that blog. On the other hand, I also meant Letters to Nineveh to be the repository of my more hilarious and irreverent musings, and today's entry is neither. Still I think it's worth a read and a comment or two. Enjoy.
http://savingninevah.blogspot.com/2011/09/religion-and-irreligion.html

Wisdom's Going to Be the Death of Me

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:53:00 +0000

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest." Confucius

I would add a fourth—nearly getting killed, which is scariest—although you could argue that this is just a part of bitter experience.

I emerged from all my nearly-getting-killed experiences relatively unscathed. What I learned is that the difference between living and dying is sometimes measured in inches or seconds or amperes, and while a near miss may be good as a mile, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try at least to draw a lesson from it.

Periodically I review the ways I have been nearly killed in order to refresh my sense of good fortune at having survived this long on the planet. So far, I have:

tangled and lost with an electric arc welder
dived headfirst into a shallow pool, cracking my head on the bottom in the process
rolled over in a loaded feed truck
passed on a ride in an airplane that crashed
pulled out onto a highway in front of a speeding car
skidded across an icy interstate between two tractor-trailer rigs going the opposite direction
spun out in heavy traffic on a wet interstate highway
been held up at gunpoint
toppled over a low iron railing from a concrete stairway onto an asphalt drive

I could probably add being diagnosed with cancer, which certainly gives pause for reflection, but it doesn't quite fit with the potential for instantaneous finality that characterizes the rest of the list. With cancer you get to think about your imminent demise before it overtakes you.

So what lessons have I learned from all these there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-went-I events? Not much it would seem. I'm more cautious than I used to be, but who isn't?

I used to want to sail around the world single-handed. I idolized guys like Joshua Slocum and Francis Chichester. Now I'm afraid to go out of sight of land.

I used to want to ride a motorcycle across the U.S. Now I'm afraid to get on one for fear I won't be able to keep it upright at a standstill.

I used to want to race sports cars. Now I drive slower than anyone I know. Friends and family make fun of how slowly I drive. People stuck behind me in traffic who don't know who I am want to kill me. That's the only thing that keeps me moving along at all. I'm almost as afraid of being shot by a road enraged motorist as I am of being sucked under a truckload of cattle bound for the slaughterhouse.

Another thing I used to think is that I was somehow being saved from all these near deaths for a higher purpose. That there was something important I was supposed to do, and I wasn't going to shuffle off the mortal coil until I had done it. I'm still trying to figure out what it might be. I've cataloged my singular talents, hoping the things that I am good at would give me a clue as to my purpose on earth.

The one thing that I do better than anyone else I know, better than you, and better than anyone you know, is to fart. I've always been pretty good at it, but since I lost 14 inches of south-bound pipe to colorectal surgery my skills are world class. I'm not talking just volume and duration either. I have tonality and pitch control that would make an opera tenor proud. If I went onto America's Got Talent, I would blow the competition away. (pun intended because, you know, who could resist?) As a bonus, my farts do not stink, although my wife maintains that the only reason I think this is that I have burned out my olfactory nerves with Afrin and Mucinex.

Even I know, however, that this is not the kind of talent for which one can reasonably expect to be preserved because it is so unlikely to ever be the fundamental impetus of some august achievement. If anything, trying to capitalize on a penchant for flatulence should be cause for being struck down early. Alas the fates and the rules of natural selection do not work that way. A spectacular paucity of anything meaningful to contribute to society is not, apparently, reason enough to be excised from the fabric of modern culture. Else why would Pauly Shore and Perez Hilton still be with us.

A part of me harbors the idea that, so long as I fail to realize my appointed purpose, I will be safe from the grim reaper. I know this is probably ridiculous, but the notion panders to the same part of me that thinks it wants to live forever.

“How do you want to die,” someone asks.

“Last,” I say.

“Last among whom?”

“Just last...or not at all.”

Many are happy to point out the error.

“No one lives forever.”

“So far,” I reply.

Lately though this too is a thing I used to think that no longer holds the same fascination for me. I am so riddled with pains and diminished capacities in my sixties that I can scarcely imagine going happily into my nineties. I figure by the time I get to eighty, the only thing holding me upright is going to be the gas.

Building the Ziggurat of Babel

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:45:00 +0000

Tower Concept - Noida, India

At first blush building the tower of Babel must have seemed like a noble undertaking. According to the account in Genesis, the people of Babel, 'of one language and few words', decided to build a tower and city, 'whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth'.

It's interesting to me that, at least as portrayed in the language of King James, these people knew what was about to happen, but did not realize that what they were about to do would be the cause of it. Instead they thought the tower and the city would cement them in both history and geography. Not the first time that men have misread the portents of their ambitions, nor the last.

In other accounts—and there are more than a few—the purpose of the tower was so that the builders might be able to commune directly with God. Apparently they had a clearer idea than we do today of where exactly God lived and how to reach him. What they didn't understand was how little, even then, God wanted to have to do with an over-reaching humankind.

By nearly all accounts, the Tower was huge. Not the replica built by Nebuchednazer in Babylon in the 6^th century B.C. That little exercise in borrowing thunder from the past measured only 300 feet in height. The real deal, the first Tower of Babel, the one frequently attributed to Nimrod, was 5,433 cubits plus 2 palms tall 13 stades wide and 30 stades long according to the Book of Jubilees.

Translating these measurements into units we are more familiar with today: 9,508.25 feet in height, 7,800 feet in width, and 18,000 feet in length. By comparison, the current tallest structure in the world, the puny Burj Khalifa in Dubai, stands only 2,716.5 feet high, less than a third of Babel's awesome height and the merest sliver of its width and breadth.

A more modest estimate for the Tower in the Third Apocalypse of Baruch puts it at 463 cubits or 810 feet. This would have made it the tallest structure in the world up until the Eiffel tower was completed in 1889. Interestingly, the estimate in the Book of Jubilees is not the most ambitious, for 14^th century traveler John Mandeville reported that local residents claimed the Tower had been 8 miles in height. This would make it some 13,000 feet taller than Mount Everest. The Sherpa has not been born that could carry a white mountaineer and all his gear this high. Presumably, when your aim is to talk directly to God, oxygen is not that big an issue.

In the end all the effort came to naught. Again according to the account in Genesis: 'And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.'

Now I don't presume to know why God objected to the tower. It may be that it was so large that He thought it would throw the earth out of orbit and undo a lot of His handiwork. He already had a lot invested in the dodo bird, the passenger pigeon, the North African elephant, and the Bali tiger, not the least of which was getting them paired up and safely stowed on Noah's Arc. Surely he didn't want them to become extinct because of some misguided land development scheme authored by the movers and shakers of the day.

It may be that he didn't want a bunch of social climbers showing up unannounced and uninvited for dinner. Or it may be, as the narrative seems to suggest, that He didn't want them to succeed to the point where they thought they could undertake other even more ambitious projects. Whatever the reason for His objection, the solution was simple enough—confound their speech so they couldn't understand one another. The people were scattered. The project was abandoned. The problem persists to this day.

Another word for a stepped tower is ziggurat. Ziggurats were common in ancient Mesopotamia. The Ziggurat of Babel is a good name for the infamous tower, especially for those of us whose speech has been confounded by a watchful God. If you drop 'ziggurat' into casual conversations, no one will know what the hell you are talking about. Just, it would seem, as God intended.

I think the InterWeb is a good modern digital analog of the Ziggurat of Babel. For one thing, it is huge. I don't think anyone knows exactly how big it is. It grows every day. If you took all the hardware that it takes to run the InterWeb—servers, cables, disk drives, storage devices, PCs, tablets and mobile devices from all over the world—and piled them up all in one place, that stack would probably reach near to heaven. I don't think that if we climbed up that stack though, we would be able to talk to God.

I do think that some people believed, as the InterWeb developed and grew, that it would make us like God in many ways. The instant and universal availability of knowledge and ideas would foster sharing and collaborations such that 'now nothing will be restrained from [us], which [we] have imagined to do'.

There is certainly a lot of promise in the InterWeb, and, at first blush, it would seem a noble enterprise. What no one seems to have reckoned with, however, is the instant and universal availability of bad information—the modern digital analog of confounded speech. Hardly anyone knows what the hell they are talking about anymore, and every day it gets harder and harder to winnow the chaff.

This is why it is possible for some yahoo to assert with certainty that 4 million innocent Iraqis died at the hands of U.S. Troops as a direct result of the evil machinations of President George W. Bush. The same yahoo believes that the Pope, Jesus, and the Tea Party were somehow complicit in this, and there is nothing about the InterWeb to prevent him tweeting this drivel out into the ether where it can be read by more yahoos who will believe it for no better reason than that they want to. Snopes, no matter how well intended, cannot keep up with the sheer volume of dreck.

Morons are writing our history. They are baking it into mud bricks and cementing it together with pitch slime. We will be well and truly confounded and likely scattered amongst the stars, the Earth no longer being sufficient to contain our ambitions.

Blowing Up Your School for Extra Credit

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:51:00 +0000

Tough homework assignment.

Everyone who's going to school gets first day of school jitters. Students, teachers, administrators, custodial staff, cafeteria help, resource officers. This day and age probably especially resource officers because, let's face it, kids are getting more and more dangerous every year.

In my neighborhood we're just getting over the tragedy of a seventeen year old kid caving in his parents' skulls with a claw hammer and then throwing a big party for all his slacker friends. Nobody knows why he would do such a thing, but he did. It looks like he's thinking about claiming to have been possessed by the Devil. At least he'd been hinting around to some of his friends for several weeks that he thought he might be possessed. Apparently Satan wanted him to get a leg up on his defense by laying the groundwork early.

Now a couple of weeks ago in Tampa another kid got arrested for planning to set off a series of bombs at Freedom High School. He got expelled last year after he was arrested and convicted on a burglary charge. The ink is barely dry on his driver's license, and already he's been caught with a stolen handgun, drug paraphernalia, marijuana, and more. Seems like he wanted to go out in a Columbine style blaze of glory. I don't know how simple-minded kids like this come up with this shit, but they do. It's scary.

About the only comfort we can take in all this is that, no matter how grandiose their evil schemes turn out to be, their execution leaves a lot to be desired. Thankfully seventeen-year-old boys are just as stupid today as they've always been, even though they can learn to do virtually anything on the Internet.

The kid in Tampa couldn't help but tell his friends about his big plans. This proved to be his undoing. Whatever he read to make him think blowing up his school was a good idea failed to mention that he ought to keep his plans a secret. Seems like he probably told someone who didn't want any of his friends to get killed making the mad bomber famous. They called the cops.

So the cops rushed over to the kid's apartment to find him stoned out of his gourd and playing video games with another stoner. His room was full of bomb-making materials. He had fuel, accellerant, fuses, timers, shrapnel, the works. He also had marijuana plants under cultivation, and a manifesto of sorts detailing his minute-by-minute plans for visiting carnage on his former school on opening day.

His stoner buddy said he was just venting, that he never would have actually done it. I don't know about you, but I think, when somebody starts laying in supplies, things have progressed beyond mere venting.

Now there's plenty for me to not understand about this whole situation, but right at the heart of it is this: I can't for the life of me figure out what the dumb sumbitch was pissed off about. He posted on his FaceBook page that all he wanted to do was get stoned every day. I figure everybody's entitled to pursue happiness in their own way. If something was getting in the way of this kid's happiness, I could understand him being a little peevish, but there were no apparent impediments to this kid realizing his dream.

He was already getting stoned every day. He didn't have to go back to school because he was expelled. He was living his dream, such as it was. He was a fully-realized, totally uncommitted pot-head without a shred of responsibility. Where was the pressure? What was the problem?

Then suddenly he comes up with this plan. He decides on his own that he's going to go back to school for one day. He put the pressure on himself, not exactly stereotypical behavior for a pot-head. He didn't want to screw it up so he wrote a minute-by-minute plan in voluminous detail. If you told him he had to write a 300 word composition for English class, he'd have been rendered inert by the Herculean task being thrust upon him. He wouldn't have been able to function as a normal zit-faced, hormone-infused teenager with all that homework in the pipeline.

But a 14-page plan of action with clearly delineated goals and interim gateways—totally different matter. One wonders how he was able to maintain his focus through the haze of cannabis smoke, but he did. Somebody ought to grade the paper, see how much he'd learned before he got expelled. Standards aren't real high in the Florida school system. Our new governor, Rick Scott, is trying to erode them further still in an effort to put the state on a more businesslike footing. He's cutting down on the number of resource officers in the schools too. I guess he feel like if we lose a bunch of students to random and spectacular acts of violence, we won't have to pay to educate them anymore. Even better if we can scare a bunch of parents into putting their kids in private schools. Less burden for the state and more money to go around for the corporate sponsors of business-friendly legislation. You know—win, win. Governor Scott ought to think about giving this kid a medal for creative budget cutting.

GETTING AFTER JESUS FOR BAD POLITICS

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:39:00 +0000

Statue of Saddam Hussein - one of 4 million innocents allegedly killed by the Bush administration.

On August 22 some twit named @dandunx1 tweeted this to me: @aimlessjonah Where were you while Bush killing [sic] 4 million innocent people in Iraq?Where were the Vatican&Jesus?Tea Party?

Nothing would please me more than to engage @dandunx1 in some intelligent dialog online, but his Twitter account has been suspended. No reason was given, but I suspect unrestrained personal attacks and anger management issues are at the heart of it.

I'd be especially interested to learn where @dandunx1 gets his information. What he thinks he knows is so deliciously wrong on so many levels it is comical...if dangerously so. I find it interesting that someone who takes matters like this so seriously that he feels compelled to comment online to someone he does not know, would not bother to vet the salient points of his argument.

I'll grant that there is and has been a lot of reasonable opposition to the war in Iraq. I for one supported the effort to throw down Saddam Hussein, and I continue to do so in spite of the much demonstrated lack of weapons of mass destruction and any real links between Hussein's regime and Al Queda. There are many however who think that I am wrong in this, and they have very good reasons for thinking so, not the least of which would be the much demonstrated lack of weapons of mass destruction and any real links between Hussein's regime and Al Queda.

No one with the good sense to articulate reasonable opposition however, thinks that 4 million innocent Iraqis were killed in the conflict. 4 million would represent something over 10 percent of Iraq's total population of 38 million. There is no way possible that this number of people went killed or missing without some global alarm being raised. To believe one tenth of this number would be stupid. To believe 4 million is ludicrous.

@dandunx1 seems to want to implicate the Vatican, Jesus and the Tea Party in this travesty. It's bad enough that he holds George Bush personally responsible for every alleged death. After all it took a lot of complicity to get us where we are today, and George Bush never exhibited the kind of monolithic charismatic leadership to have accomplished this kind of carnage all by himself. Blaming the Vatican, however, shows a singular disregard for historical fact.

The fact is that the Vatican, under both Pope John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, expressed repeated opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the pursuit of war there. This fact is well known and well documented. I don't know how @dandunx1 has the brass to make such an accusation without at least trying to Google it to see if he had a leg to stand on. He did not. He does not, and now he's all apoplectic about something that isn't even true.

I think it's reasonable to assume that, if the Vatican was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, so was Jesus. I know there are a lot of people who don't think that the Vatican and Jesus are in sync on every issue, but anyone who has read scripture with a critical eye to what was on Jesus' mind, has to allow that He was all about peace. Still, just what @dandunx1 expected Jesus to do about it in this particular instance is kind of a mystery. Jesus has been largely absent on the global political scene for some 2,000 years while those who profess to believe in Him and those who insist that He is a phantom of superstition work in concert to hold the world on the brink of ruin. Whatever @dandunx1 thinks happened in Iraq, Jesus didn't have anything to do with it.

Neither did the Tea Party. The Tea Party is not in sync with Jesus or the Vatican on every issue. The Tea Party is kind of an enigma, comprised as it is of angry crackpots of every stripe. There is much that is good about the Tea Party, as well as much that is completely off the wall. I don't actually know where the Tea Party stands on Iraq. I do know, however, as there was no Tea Party when the war in Iraq started, it would have been exceedingly difficult for them to come up with a cohesive platform. Hell...they can't do that now, when they actually exist.

Steven Hawking Shouldn't Quit His Day Job

noreply@blogger.com (Jonah Gibson) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:58:00 +0000

I watched the inaugural episode of Discovery Channel's new series, Curiosity, the other week. (Sunday August 7, 2011) In it Dr. Steven Hawking, noted theoretical physicist, postulated that the immutable laws of nature 'prove' that there is no God. I do not doubt that Hawking is a brilliant man who has contributed vast new insights in the fields of physics and cosmology, but, after watching this show, I have to conclude that he has left a lot of air in these particular postulations, and most of that air is hot.

I can't help but think that the show itself was designed to advance the notion that gods in general, and the modern concept of one, true creator God in particular, are mere fanciful concepts of ignorant people rooted in superstition and prejudice. Fully half the show was given over to demonstrating that the ancient Norse gods were invented to explain natural phenomena like solar eclipses, and that the Christian Church of Rome spent centuries frustrating the advancement of science by branding luminaries like Galileo as heretical.

While these are indisputable historical facts, presenting them in this way in this particular show did nothing to advance Hawking's cosmology, but rather served to to cast that cosmology in a light of courageous departure from conventional thinking that was likely to embroil him in controversy. And so it has, not because Hawking has advanced cosmological thinking to new frontiers, but because he has made some leaps of faith in science that would make a televangelist blush.

Hawking seems to relish the role he has scripted for himself. He claims, for instance, that when he attended a Vatican conference on cosmology in 1985 Pope John Paul II admonished the attendees not to 'ask questions about the origins of the universe because that is the work of God'. Hawking has made this claim several times before, but it turns out not to be true. The complete text of the Pope's remarks at that conference and the preceding one in 1981 contain no explicit proscription against investigating the origins of the universe. In fact he seems to welcome such inquiries on the premise that such knowledge advances our understanding of our place in the universe.

To be fair, the Pope does warn against undertaking such queries using the physical sciences alone. He asserts that such investigations without benefit of the metaphysical disciplines would be perforce limited in their usefulness. He does not forbid questions of origin, however, and he certainly does not threaten the kind of 'trouble' that Hawking intimates he will get into for undertaking to answer these questions anyway. Hawking's posturing as a scientist victimized by religious prejudice is little more than self-serving bunkum. It is Hawking's slipshod logical progression that is his undoing, not any fundamental Christian bigotry.

Notwithstanding, I am sure there is plenty of religious bigotry to go around. A lot of it has already surfaced on the Internet in response to Hawking's claims on the show. A lot of it is just as riddled with ignorance and superstition as Hawking says, although, again to be fair, so are the in-your-face celebrations of fundamental atheists worshipping at the altar of Hawking's so-called proofs. As Albert Einstein once quipped, 'The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer'.

Hawking's points are summarized below. Except where noted, these are direct quotes from the show, taken in the order in which they were presented. Brackets indicate paraphrasing by me.

The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws, laws that can be understood by the human mind.
The discovery of these laws is humankind's greatest achievement...for it is these laws of nature, as we now call them, that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all.
Physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal.
If you accept...that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask what role is there for God.
To make a universe you need only three ingredients: matter, energy, and space.
Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place.
[Because, as Einstein discovered, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, mass and energy are essentially the same thing, so you really only need energy and space to make a universe.]
Space and energy were spontaneously created in an event we now call the Big Bang.
The laws of physics demand the existence of something called negative energy.
When the Big Bang produced a vast amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. [The positive and negative energy in the universe always add up to zero.]
If the universe adds up to nothing, then you don't need a god to create it.
[At the sub-atomic level] you enter a world where conjuring something out of nothing is possible. That's because at this scale particles such as protons behave according to the laws of nature we call quantum mechanics, and they really can appear at random, stick around, and then vanish again to reappear somewhere else. Since we know the universe itself was once very small—smaller than a proton in fact—this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the laws of nature.
The laws of nature themselves tell us that, not only could the universe have popped into existence like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that nothing caused the Big Bang.
At the instant of the Big Bang time itself began...because inside [a] black hole...time doesn't exist. And that's exactly what happened at the start of the universe. The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is...the final key to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the universe created itself.
As we travel back in time toward the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it finally gets to a point where the whole universe is in a space so small that it is in effect a single, infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And, just as with modern day black holes floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that, here too, time itself must come to a stop.
You can't get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no 'before the Big Bang'. We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. [So] there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed.
Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything.

What Hawking has attempted is to explain how the universe could have come about without a creator. This much he seems to have done, at least to his own satisfaction and that of the giddy atheists who were waiting for a brilliant cosmologist to tell them they don't have to worry about judgment in a nonexistent afterlife. That is, he has succeeded if you accept that a theoretical prototypical black hole with no existing matter or energy from which to draw would behave in the same way as a proton, which can pop into existence willy-nilly in the midst of a whole universe of preexisting stuff. Personally, I think this is a leap of faith.

Beyond that is Hawking's short-shrift treatment of the laws of nature upon which he rests his case. Where did they come from? He doesn't say. I suppose you could argue that when the universe exploded onto the scene it came complete with the laws that would govern its dynamics and processes. All the matter and all the energy contained therein would just behave according to their natures, and these natures would, in essence, constitute the rules of behavior. I find this a little problematic, but then I am not a theoretical physicist. I am an unemployed accountant. What the hell do I know?

So here is my question for Dr. Hawking. If the Big Bang initially produced a single, infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense proton, which is essentially the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, complete with its own rules for being and acting, what did that hydrogen nucleus fuse with to create helium? How did helium then know how to behave? Where did gold come from? And rabbit fur, and patent leather, and Donald Trump's hair?

Ostensibly all of these things proceeded organically one from the other over billions of millennia until we end up with this immense complexity of matter and energy all behaving according to immutable laws of nature for which we have no source. How is this a more simple explanation than a creator god?

And that's another thing: the creator god, or God. Hawking asserts there couldn't have been one because there was no time for one to have acted. This is the limitation of physical sciences about which John Paul II tried to warn us. If physical science can't observe time before the Big Bang, then it must not have existed. But what if it existed someplace else? Like, for instance, a place where the prototypical proton existed before it appeared here?

Physical science also apparently requires its creator god, if in fact it can conceive of such a thing at all, to have mass and to occupy space and time. Hawking says there was no time for God to have acted. The metaphysical notion of God does not have these limitations. In fact, most of us who believe in God believe that he emphatically does not exist in time or space, nor does he have any mass. We have convenient metaphorical expressions to explain God's presence and attributes, but on the conceptual plane we think of God as timeless intellect, pure spirit, an overarching ideal containing the essential nature, the rules if you will, of everything we are able to observe and experience.

This is ancient stuff. God's own name for himself in the ancient Hebraic texts is 'I am'. He is not before or after creation. He just is. Always. This is not an observable kind of thing. This is therefore not something that can be proven or dis-proven with science. You can call bullshit if you want, and many have, but that doesn't make it so.

Hawking makes a lot out of our 'need', or more specifically the lack thereof, for a creator. His idea of God is of a construct invented to explain the otherwise unexplainable. Accordingly, as we are able to explain more and more of our physical universe, we need God less and less. Science has its own artificial constructs though. Black holes and the Big Bang are two such. They are theoretical events that were invented to explain the otherwise unexplainable.

The Big Bang especially is a theory whose purpose is to explain the existence of the universe without God, and Hawking has made good on its promise. Of course this is rather easier when the theoretical construct was constructed without any reference to God. When it comes to accepting theory as scientific fact though, in the absence of any as yet complete proof, a certain amount of faith is required.

God on the other hand, construct or reality, has always required faith. The faithful already know this—the ones who actually think about it at any rate. There will always be some theological wankers about who will quote the Bible as an authority in an argument with an atheist as if Scripture carries any weight with a non-believer. Most of us realize that this is not just an exercise in futility. It is stupid.

For the intelligent believer though, faith must necessarily contain an element of doubt else it isn't faith at all but certain knowledge. Certain knowledge does not move mountains. Certain knowledge is not spiritual, religious, holy, nor full of grace. Certain knowledge, or at least the requirement for it, is the necessary fundamental limitation of the physical sciences. Science requires proof to keep it honest. When science makes an assertion that is not backed up by proof, it is required to keep looking.

Doubt, on the other hand, is the liberating principle of faith and the ultimate foundation of metaphysics. A metaphysical philosopher must ask a question of the discipline that no self-respecting physicist ever would or could ask about physics, and that is, 'Is metaphysics even possible?' Asking this question makes metaphysics at once more honest and analytical than physics will ever be. Why? For the simple reason that it forces the philosopher to consider, with humility, that he might be wrong. I don't think this notion has entered Stephen Hawking's mind. As a man of faith I have to grant that he may be right, but I don't believe it for a minute.