Cliff diving north of Acapulco

"The misconception of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1953 American Mercury article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.^[10][11] Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration.^[12] A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.^"

<sup>Increasingly, I think the Disney Corporation has a lot to answer for.   For one thing, the movie "Old Yeller" was just short of deliberate child abuse.  Disney spent 90 minutes making the doomed mutt lovable and then finished him off in the final scenes.  Now, with the kind of superficial research possible in the Internet age, I learn that the whole lemming mass suicide thing is a myth, what the Aussies call a "furphy."  A load.  I recall that there was a wooden turntable for humans in the Fun House in Playland-At-The-Beach, in the San Francisco of my distant youth, but it was for fun (as should be the case in a Fun House) and not for throwing us all to certain death.

Despite the apocryphal nature of the lemming story, not a day goes by where I don't see the U.S. Congress compared to these close relatives of voles and hamsters, with the point of comparison being the willingness, even the sense of destiny, of Congress as it rushes toward its own cliff, this one fiscal in nature.  Indeed, the whole metaphor of "cliff" is probably derived from the lemming myth, which means that our Congress also gets its images from the Disney Corporation.  What next, multiplying buckets of water?

Meanwhile, down in Mexico, the PRI has been returned triumphantly to power.  The PRI, the organ at the center of Mexico's "guided democracy" from 1929 to 2000, spent twelve years in the wilderness, but now the gentle gente of Mexico have come to their senses and stopped their useless experiment with multi-party democracy.   I can't help but think we were part of the inspiration.  America pretends to have two parties, but for all practical purposes we just have two wings of our own PRI.

When I saw that "1929" as the initiating date for the long hegemony of the PRI, I knew something, and something violent, must have happened to get the PRI started.  I don't know if you've ever read any detailed Mexican history, but you're missing a treat if you haven't.  American history is totally bland by comparison.  We had the Revolutionary War, then the Civil War, then our participation in World War II (World War I was a cameo).  Those events would cover about a decade of Mexican history. The instability of Mexican government up until, well, 1929 was such that there was practically never a time when the Mexicans weren't at war with each other.  In the 1920's it was the Cristero War (Cristero meaning, roughly, "Christer"), and it came about because Mexico elected an atheist president, Plutarco Calles, something the U.S. has never done (at least an avowed atheist, although let's be real here - do Clinton and Obama really seem pious to you?). Calles essentially wanted to abolish the Catholic Church, a large undertaking in Mexico, as you might imagine, with complete secularization of schools and government and restrictions on the right of priests to appear in public. It sparked a rebellion by the Cristero army, with assistance from the U.S., which wanted to make sure Mexico didn't get any bright ideas about nationalizing the oil fields (another dreary monotony in American history) while they were persecuting Catholics.

The rebellion succeeded, the government was forced to relent in its anti-church crusade, and Mexico settled into the traditional aftermath of one of its wars, a decade of revenge murders, torture and multi-purpose atrocities. Then the PRI took charge and reliable corruption once again asserted itself. Along the way, Cardenas did in fact nationalize the oil fields in Mexico, and hired none other than Leon Trotsky (in exile in Mexico at the time) as one of his polemicists.  His arguments against American pretensions to ownership of Mexican oil fields are classic anti-imperialist screeds.  

On my various visits to Mexico, I've always found the commoners there far more realistic about the corruption of their federal government than their American counterparts; the latter insist on believing in the mythology of "ideological differences" between the parties.  One can line up the main elements of the federal budget and see at a glance where the problems are:  a medical system that costs far too much and a runaway defense budget.  If each of these two components were cut in half, the budget crisis would be solved, and at no real cost to the quality of life in America.  We pay twice as much per capita for medical care in the United States compared to comparable First World countries, yet rank 37th in the world in the quality of care.  The U.S. defense budget is premised on re-fighting World War II, which is no longer possible in the nuclear age.  We need a home guard and a nuclear umbrella; nothing else is sensible.

Such sanity is unthinkable because our own PRI, with its Janus-faced components, will not allow sanity, because it disturbs the power base of our elected-for-life D.C. bureaucrats.  So these large, bipedal lemmings (not nearly as cute as their Rodentia inspiration) will hem, haw, extend, pretend and do nothing effective, pulling back from the cliff in the nick of time.  For now.

We're gonna need a bigger turntable.</sup> 

Speed Blogging: 1/2 hour on the economy

I haven't tried to write much about the American economy in recent months.  Perhaps it's because the economic news has a "Groundhog Day" quality to it.  We are told the recovery is well underway, as we fight back from the worst economic slump "since the Great Depression," only to be told a few days later that we're slumping back into a recession.  The stock market goes up a little, then falls back down, so that after accounting for inflation in the intervening years, the Dow Jones is actually considerably below its levels in the last years of the Clinton Administration.  Technological breakthroughs these days seem limited to electronic gadgets you can carry around in your hands so that you can "Like" your "Friends" and "Comment" on somebody's picture of their favorite cat.

The Federal Reserve pumps money into the system through its current iteration of Quantitative Easing whereby it is buying up mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in the secondary market, primarily from the Primary Dealer "community" (the "Friends" of the Federal Reserve which the Reservists "Like.")  This is called "money printing" by the goldbug, libertarian community, which in a sense it is, but it is the only kind of money printing the Federal Reserve allows itself.  Ben Bernanke does not want to produce "runaway" inflation such as would occur if the Fed purchased not MBS but actual mortgages from actual Americans.  This latter approach has been suggested by many as a real goose to the economy: the Federal Reserve could simply buy up all underwater mortgages in the United States by printing the money necessary to refinance them at a value equal to the house's fair market value, while leaving the owner-occupants in place.  Suddenly, a giant cohort of house-rich Real Americans would stand proud in their front yards.

Nope, can't do that.  Bernanke is certain (and I'm certain he's right) that an economy stage-managed to that degree by the Central Planners would turn the American economic tragedy into a farce of hyperinflation.  So The Bernank comes at the problem from oblique angles: holding down interest rates through Operation Twist (whereby the Federal Reserve buys up the long end of the Treasury curve), providing a secondary market for distressed MBS, and maintaining its Zero Interest Rates Forever program... forever, which starves the savers and retirees who might otherwise earn some money on their bank nest eggs, but this is an economy with many problems, and trying to fix some of those problems entails making others worse.

Thus, the salient point is at last reached: why do we have an economy where only tweaks and gimmicks are available for dealing with its many deficiencies in providing a general, prosperous standard of living for its citizens?  Why do we have the general feeling that no matter what scheme we try next, we're going to remain mired down in this sluggish, sputtering contraption known as the American economy, in a fugue state similar to the conditions which have prevailed since 2007, when the wheels began to come off?  When the Bubble popped?  Choose your mechanical metaphor.

Sorry, that's all the time we have for today.  Tune in next time when we ask some more rhetorical questions.

Sunday Morning Essay: American Mania & the Total American Asshole

I don't know if I've mentioned before that I've been reading a book entitled American Mania, by Peter Whybrow, a British psychiatrist and current head of the Semel Institute of Neuroscience at UCLA. This is another look at "American exceptionalism," only one that makes a little more sense to me than the usual malarkey based on sketchy ideas about Americans having "inherited" the adventurous blood of their European, Asian, African and Latin American ancestors, those who braved the unknown to establish a new country, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as the King of Siam said to Anna.

That always sounded like complete and utter nonsense.  Every human not living in Equatorial Africa is in some way the descendant of just such an "adventurer," and the inheritor of genes passed on by those who came up out of Africa beginning about 60,000 years ago.  Our narrative is simply a self-centered meme intended, as with so many things in the national lore, to make us feel superior. This yearning for superiority, of course, being the surest sign of insecurity.

Be that as it may:  the question, as I would frame it, is along these lines:  is there an explanation, scientific or at least rigorous in nature, that would shed light on America's tendency to mass produce Assholes?  For example, can an explanatory theory cover such excrescences as Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist, the entire personnel lists of the Wall Street investment banks, James Inhofe and so forth?  Why does America lead the way in creating humans who actively work, and in some cases devote their lives, to destroying the Earth as a viable habitat?

Dr. Whybrow, gentle soul that he is, and perhaps constrained by his foreign-born status, is much gentler in his approach.  To summarize his thesis: as with other neuroscientists who have ventured into sociology, Dr. Whybrow notes the "layering" of the human brain; which is to say, the topmost layer, the cerebral cortex where all of the complicated ratiocination is carried on, is placed as a sort of sedimentary layer on more primitve structures, such as the "reptilian" brain.  (For those evolution-deniers, another almost unique species mass produced by America, I would ask: why would God build a human brain, 6,000 years ago, that contains elements obviously retained from earlier, lower life forms?  Why not just start from scratch, on this, His magnum opus?)  Moving on: Whybrow explains that this reptilian brain, operating unconsciously, controls the drives for basic security in terms of food, sex and material acquisition.  Because of the unique physical circumstances of the United States, a large and varied topography; favorable climate; plentiful water; great natural resource stores; isolation from older cultures which tend to destroy each other on a regular basis; and a progressive political system (until about 1980, when we chucked it all in), America leapt ahead into modernity and into production, exploiting this uniquely favorable real estate, on a scale never before seen in human history.

The reaction of the reptilian human brain to such abundance was natural and reflexive.  Since this brain component evolved during eras of scarcity, when the struggle for survival was a daily grind (till we reached the Upper Paleolithic, our Golden Age), abundance is treated as an opportunity to make hay while the sun shines.  We begin a frantic process ("mania") of material acquisition, power-seeking, sexual conquest, celebrity worship and envy, and other manifestations of a completely out-of-control venality and acquisitiveness.  Since American culture venerates those, most of all, who are rich and famous (the King Reptiles), we elevate to national stardom the Total American Asshole, that specimen (such as Donald Trump) who most clearly epitomizes this sick maladaptation to abundance.  Trump, indeed, with his grasping, palpable air of desperation and grandiosity, is perhaps the Poster Boy for American Mania.  An essentially dumb, incompetent Lizard who inherited a lot of real estate and managed to keep some of it through serial bankruptcy.

The other aspect of Whybrow's analysis is his explanation of America's attenuated social cohesion. To be brief (since I'm often criticized for going long, given America's pathetic attention span and ability to focus), Whybrow assigns the "folkways" of family continuity, caring (for each other and Nature), creativity and basic decency to cultures carried on and transmitted, human to human, by the cerebral cortex.  The attempt to maintain such aspects of a decent culture in America are under intense strain caused by the Mania about which he writes.  Everyone is so busy maintaining an excessively abundant lifestyle, overkilling the need for security by building 12,000 square foot houses with five-car garages and six bathrooms (for a working married couple with no children), paying credit card bills, overpaying college tuitions (driven higher by the Congressional-College Conspiracy on student loans), and in the process destroying the air, land, water and aesthetics of the Ecosphere, that there is simply no time or inclination to live in a meaningful way (in cerebral terms), and no leisure during which to teach one's offspring about what Thoreau called "the finer fruits in life," which cannot be plucked because of "fingers which tremble from excessive toil." 

Sunday Morning Essay: If At First You Don't Secede

Following Barack Obama's reelection, a wave of petitions under the "We The People" program have been submitted to the White House requesting permission for various states to leave the Union.  Petitions which reach the requisite number of 25,000 citizens are supposed to receive an official presidential response (not just on secession, but on any issue).  Some states, such as Texas, have far exceeded this number so we can anticipate that the President's staff will put together some form of excessively complicated answer which reminds us of the strength and durability of the American republic, affirms the right of free speech and the right to petition the government about grievances, and blah blah blah.  Ending with, I don't think so.

It's really a kind of fad at the moment, and it can be expected to meet the same fate as the Occupy Movement.  Americans have a very limited attention span for such matters, and the MSM is probably mostly right, at the moment, to consign such convulsions to a knee-jerk response from some conservative quarters to the prospect of four more years of submitting to the rule of a chief executive of African descent.

Bob Cesca of the Huffington Post wrote a long, querulous rejoinder to the secession petitions from Southern states in particular in which he trotted out the usual arguments against secession: such states, in fact, are more dependent on federal largesse than their blue brethren, since the transfer payment scheme (Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment) tends to favor such states with a higher rate of return (higher than 1:1, and in the case of such states as Louisiana, much higher) on their federal tax dollars.  But this is not always the case, as in Texas, for example, where Texas pays in more than it receives in federal benefits (this is also true in California and other large states).  States such as Texas and California, if allowed simply to retain the federal income and FICA taxes paid to the federal government, would probably be in a more favorable budgetary position than as members of the Union, and, of course, would have the freedom and flexibility to use their money as they saw fit.  California, for example, could spend its money as if it were living in the 21st century and Texas could continue to win the War of Revolution against Mexico.

I think, however, that there is more to the secession noise than impatience among the Southern states with a minority President.  American "approval" ratings of Congress have been ridiculously, hilariously low for a very long time, as one example - on the order of 11% of all voters.  It's not an exaggeration to point out that the vast majority of ordinary American citizens despise the central government, in the good old, SAT-test definition of this venerable verb.  Americans hold Congress and Washington, D.C. in contempt.  They regard the whole apparatus as one step up from useless.

I do think that a good definition of the federal government is "an insurance company with an army."  This is the root of Washington's problem.  As the "entitlements" and interest on the national debt have swollen to consume virtually the entirety of all federal income taxes paid (mainly income and FICA), the central government is little more than a paymaster.  You send your money in, they send it out.  The other function of the federal government is to engage in mysterious "warfare" against an extremely ill-defined "terrorist threat" that apparently has something to do with killing members of the Taliban and blowing up other Muslims with Drone strikes from time to time.  Increasingly, these activities make less and less sense to the American populace.  We launched a war against the Taliban because they were "harboring" Osama bin Laden.  We now know that for most of the time the war in Afghanistan has dragged on, bin Laden was in Pakistan, a putative ally.  Bin Laden is now dead, beyond anyone's ability to "harbor" him (Allah, I suppose), yet the war in Afghanistan for some reason continues, I guess because of the other reason blown up by the Bush Administration: the Taliban repress women, unlike the royalty, for example, in Saudi Arabia.

I think all of these factors have seeped into the American consciousness.  Congress and the Executive shuffle around, put off deadlines on budget matters, shout hysterically about "cliffs" of their own devising, borrow enormous sums of money to run their dubious enterprises, send American soldiers off to die for no reason whatsoever, and many Americans are simply looking for a way to make them all shut up and go away.  Thus, all these petitions for "secession."  Since there are no real solutions to any of the problems outlined, in a resource-constrained, economically-stagnant world, these ideas are going to stick around and mutate into something more tangible.  Such is my intuition, based on the idea that things that can't go on forever, don't.

Further notes on the slippery slope to tyranny

One aspect of Dave & Paula & Jack & Jill that has received little attention (yet is the actual story) is the extent to which the FBI ransacked the email accounts of four Americans without a shred of probable cause.  Glenn Greenwald wrote about it, of course, and Rachel Maddow (that perspicacious observer of subtle story lines) said something, too, for which she deserves much praise, for after all this is Obama the Great's Justice Department of which we speak..  But for the most part, the complete and utter disregard of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights continues unimpeded by so much as a whimper from the Mainstream Media or the political establishment. 

For example, our Constitutional scholar President might have risen to the defense of his CIA Director by murmuring the following:  General Petraeus's emails were hacked into by the FBI by the following chain of logic:  an FBI agent with the hots for Jill Kelley, the Tampa party girl and military groupie, responded to Jill's damsel-in-distress routine about emails received from Paula Broadwell, which apparently were to the effect of "back off, bitch," or something along those high school-rivalry lines.  This agent, along with others at the FBI, could not really find anything in these emails from Broadwell to Kelley which were actionable; there were no threats of bodily harm, no warning that Jill's house would be burned down, nothing.  Nevertheless, the FBI then began pawing through Paula Broadwell's emails and discovered that she was having an affair with Petraeus.  This led to reading all of the CIA Director's emails, and then the agents discovered among the emails of Jill Kelley (which they of course began reading, far beyond the scope of the Broadwell "threat" emails) the voluminous emails from General John Allen to Jill Kelley.

The only activity that is even remotely improper, as far as the four targets of the FBI were concerned, was General Allen's affair (if there was one) with Kelley, which would violate the rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  But UCMJ rules are not within the purview of the FBI.  Petraeus's affair is not criminal in any way, since he was a civilian (CIA Director) at the time his liaison with Broadwell occurred.  More importantly, as of the time the FBI began its wholesale invasion of the privacy of these four Americans, there was no indication that any crime had been committed, since the point of entry for the Bureau was the Broadwell to Kelley email traffic.  Unless the FBI found an initial basis for believing (reasonably) that a crime had been committed, anything else it discovered would be inadmissible as "fruit of the poisonous tree," as we used to quaintly call the doctrine before the repeal of the Fourth Amendment.

The FBI paid a kind of faint tribute to the rules of search-and-seizure by arguing, ex post facto, that the Bureau was "concerned about breaches of security," thus betraying the FBI's cognizance that it had no business rifling through the private lives of four Americans without a predicate crime on which to base its investigation.  This "national security" stuff (involving the Petraeus-Broadwell affair) came to light only after the initial violation of the Fourth Amendment.

As I say, if we had other than an Empty Suit President (with the election behind us and a greater danger averted, we can go back to the plain truth), the real issue here would be part of the public discourse.  But Obama, while still a Senator, completely reversed himself on the issue of telecom immunity for cooperating with violations of the FISA law and warrantless searches, despite his campaign promise that he would "never" vote for immunity.  He didn't until it became politically expedient to do so.

President O doesn't want to dredge all that up into the public consciousness again, so he will, as usual, do nothing.  Which, as we have been warned by wise men, is all that is necessary for evil to thrive.

A Personal Note of Thanks to David & Paula & Jack & Jill

(with a cameo role by the shirtless FBI agent who became infatuated with Jill.)  Without this meaningless "scandal," we would have been inundated over the next six weeks with nonstop news about the "fiscal cliff."  Yech.  This is a lot more fun.  I don't know if we can squeeze a Christine Keeler/Mandy Rice-Davies sized story out of this tale of Generals Behaving Badly, but the Lamestream Media can at least try.

My favorite angle?  Diane Feinstein's outrage that the FBI was having all the fun with this, poring over thousands of pages of steamy emails (military version), without "consulting" Congress.  Oh brother.  Let me get this straight: an entire war (Libya) can happen without consulting Congress (as in, seeking authorization under the War Powers Act of 1973) and that's not a problem.  But if things get worked up into such a lather that an FBI agent is iPhoto-ing himself with no shirt in an effort to turn Jill Kelley on, and Congress is not in the loop, it's time for a Special Prosecutor?

I'm trying to come up with a story line that better illustrates the utter and complete frivolousness of Congress, the endless War on Terror, our misbegotten wars and the commanders who lead them, the entire circle jerk of what Washington's bureaucracy has become - and drawing blanks. 

Twenty to thirty thousand pages of emails between Kelley and John Allen?  What, exactly, is General Allen being paid to do?

How Could General Petraeus Do Such a Thing??!!

(For the benefit of curious and deductive sleuths, I have provided the above visual clue as to why a 60 year old man exhibited "terrible judgment," in his words, in making such a colossal mistake.)

Oddly enough, this is not the question the valiant Washington press corps is asking.  Rather, in General Petraeus's case, the only real issue seems to be whether President Obama should or should not have accepted his resignation. I'm not sure this question even makes sense.  Refuse his resignation?  It's a measure of how undone Washington is over this disgraced hero.

As Glenn Greenwald has (hilariously) pointed out, in all other sex scandals involving Washington bigwigs, the smarm is thick enough to shmear your poppy seed bagel with (my words, not his).   While straining to keep a straight face, and delighting in every lurid, salacious detail dredged up on the embarrassed public official, the media always play sex scandals to the hilt.  Nothing is condemned as harshly as marital infidelity, as Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer and many others have found out.  Every Washington reporter, every Congressperson, every D.C. bureaucrat instantly becomes functionally Amish.

But this is the military we're dealing with, and, to boot, a four-star mega-hero who has salvaged (so the legend goes) two completely unnecessary wars and prevented them from becoming unsuccessful unnecessary wars (not that it would matter, heroism-wise), and kept us safe from terror which would not exist were we not waging war in the Muslim world all the time.  And in my book (and it better be in your book, too), all that we can be, as far as General David Petraeus is concerned, is eternally grateful, and wipe that smirk off your face, soldier.

We'll get puff pieces, however, on new "insights" into infidelity.  (Adam was probably faithful to Eve so long as no other options existed, but it was all downhill from there.)  Still it must be "analyzed," psychologists, sociologists, urologists, must be consulted to find out why people have sex when they can.   Here's the actual title of a piece on the Huffington Post by Lisa Belkin, who's something called the Life/Work/Family Senior Columnist:

Why do powerful men cheat?

I simplified this as follows:

Why do powerful men cheat?

I realized I could ask another question:

Why do powerful women cheat?

And as before:

Why do powerful women cheat?

Reducing to simplest terms, and using a collective noun:

Why do (wo)men cheat? 

Or:  Why do people cheat?

My answer was as follows:

Because they’re people.

Something told me that this would not be the answer from the  expert on the the Huffington Post.  And sure enough it was far more nuanced and complicated than that.  Belkin said:  "What is unclear is why."

That's why I'll never be the Life/Work/Family Senior Columnist on The Huffington Post.

The Distant Sound of Heads Exploding

Rick Blaine → Ah, that's the new German 77, and judging by the sound, only about thirty-five miles away.  "Casablanca."

What an ear Monsieur Reeeeeeeeck! had for German armament.  I suppose it's because, during the Spanish Civil War, he fought on the Loyalist side, although Franco would have paid him much better.

Ilsa had just said something about her heart beating, an obvious opening for Rick, but he got all masculine and technical in response.  Maybe because his brain was constantly addled by excessive carbon monoxide from all those French cigarettes he was hoovering.

No matter what else happens in American history from this point forward, I shall be forever grateful that I was there when Karl Rove made a complete, utter and irretrievable doofus out of himself, refusing (in the characteristic Republican fashion) to stare reality in the face.  Although the candidate he had been bankrolling through "American Crossroads" (a giant slush fund made possible by sympathetic cheerleaders for unrestrained corporatism on the Supreme Court in their Citizens United decision) was 100 electoral votes behind, although it was obvious that Ohio's vote count was simply going to get worse for Romney, although all "paths to 270" were clearly foreclosed for the Republican, Rove, remembering his fondest days as a bag man for W, could not concede.  I remember the best description I have ever read of Karl Rove's appearance, one penned by Al Franken back in his writing days:  Karl Rove looks like a "giant baby."  Now he was acting like one.

At some point in this chronicle, I related that I looked up the demographic mix at the elementary school I attended in the period 1954 to 1960, in suburban Northern California.  From old class pictures I still had, I could see that back in the Eisenhower era, the school was about 95% white.  Current stats maintained by the state of California paint a different picture.  Albion H. Horrall Elementary is now 64% Hispanic and about 11% white, with the balance a mixture of African-American, Asian and South Pacific Islanders.  

Times change, and with it the suzerainty of the white, aging Baby Boomer.  When I watched Obama give his late-night acceptance speech, transported as I was by his soaring, eloquent bullshit, I realized, maybe for the first time, that only Obama would have been an appropriate choice for the United States at this point in history.  Romney would simply have retarded the move toward the nation's destiny for another four years.

It's been pointed out that only the United States, among First World countries (basically, Japan, Australia, Canada the U.S. and most of Europe) shares a long, mostly unguarded border between itself and the Third World (Mexico, which is used as a transition path also for Hispanics farther south).  This is the primary driver behind America's move toward a new "multi-culturalism," and the old, white commentators on Fox News and elsewhere, tricked by the "parallax of nostalgia," have a hard time coming to grips with it.  The billions unleashed by Citizens United simply aren't enough to stem the tide anymore, and voter suppression, at a certain point (which was passed in Ohio and Florida) actually becomes counter-productive: it simply encourages people (particularly minorities) to vote just to show the Man they won't be denied.

America remains, of course, with all of its same problems, its perilous finances, its declining status among nations, its delusional fixation on safety from "terror," its extreme polarization.  In a way I think Obama has not so much been elected President as Chief Engineer of a Runaway Train.  Having said that, however, I must acknowledge he looks a lot more like Modern Life than the other guy.

Sure, I'll Vote for Obama on Tuesday

Come on, I was just kidding.  Jill Stein?  Ha!  I've got to be kidding myself.

Look, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.  We all know that.  I have been brought around.  Not, mind you, by Obama himself.  He's the same as he ever was, a rather opportunistic shredder of the Bill of Rights who can claim, along with George W. Bush, that he was there when the Constitutional lights went out.  The NDAA-driven indefinite detention, deprivation of counsel, even murder of American citizens by Presidential fiat?  Drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan with a 2% accuracy and effectiveness in killing the terrorists we're mass producing by....drone strikes?

Voting your conscience in modern America is terribly self-indulgent, however.  It's kind of intellectually fussy.  In a country which has fundamentally lost its mind (as this one certainly has), one must vote for the candidates of the psychopathic party which is closer to the psychopathology you favor.  I know, in my heart of hearts, that the good and noble Barack Obama only engages in systematic unconstitutional and even illegal acts (of war, of violations of civil rights) simply because he needs to convince a sufficient number of uninformed and deranged fellow Americans that he has what it takes to be the leader of an insane country.  I think he's done that.

Right Wing lunacy, on the other hand, guided mostly by an obese and moronic monstrosity whose cerebrum was turned to lemon-flavored Jell-O long ago by chronic, massive Oxycontin abuse, is way too dangerous.  Voting for Romney increases the chances that a Republican mob will seize total power and institute a kind of American Fourth Reich.

The Republicans have become completely, freaking nuts, their ideology shaped by vast conspiracy-theory nonsense, theocratic yearning, anti-scientific obscurantism, and racial and misogynistic hatreds.  Nothing whatsoever should be done to help them.  In such circumstances, consistency doesn't matter.  Only survival does.

Four more years!  Of something or other.

General Theory of Irrelevance, Part 1

As a philosophical, and probably temperamental, style, I have always found great comfort in theories of hopelessness.  Luckily for me, such theories abound and exist at every philosophical and existential level.

Take, for example, the theory at the outermost concentric ring of reality, the life cycle of the sun (or Sun, since it's so special to us).  The Sun is in its main sequence, as it's called, where it's busy converting its hydrogen supply to fused helium.  This generates heat which radiates to Earth, and this is the fundamental energy powering life on our planet.  The Sun, like everything else in the known universe, is subject to basic conservation and thermodynamic laws, and it can't go on forever like this because, large as it is, it's a finite mass.  Toward the end of the Sun's life, it will begin to expand as it exhausts its fuel; it doesn't have the mass to go supernova (the major leagues), but it's got enough heft to achieve red giant status, sort of the Triple A baseball of stellar transition-states.  I've always found this a fairly convincing argument (among many) against Creationism: I mean really, God put us in a galaxy where our own Sun isn't even one of the Big Boys?  That doesn't make any sense. Anyway, the Sun is about halfway through its main sequence, with about 5 billion years to go on its journey to White Dwarfism (sorry, that's just the way it goes), but before you relax and start thinking you have, well, all the time in the world, pay attention: 

Earth's ultimate fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth's current orbit, 1 AU (1.5×10¹¹ m), 250 times the present radius of the Sun.^[108] However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions.^[108] Even if Earth should escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere will escape into space. Even during its current life in the main sequence, the Sun is gradually becoming more luminous (about 10% every 1 billion years), and its surface temperature is slowly rising. The Sun used to be fainter in the past, which is possibly the reason life on Earth has only existed for about 1 billion years on land. The increase in solar temperatures is such that in about another billion years the surface of the Earth will likely become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life.^[108][109]

 This may provide some comfort if you haven't saved enough for retirement.  You were thinking we all had five billion years to go, but we're not going to be around to see the Sun reduced to its pitiful White Dwarf destiny.  You might call this the ultimate Inconvenient Truth. 

It's nothing to worry about, however, as I shall attempt to describe subsequently.

Alice Checks Out the 'Hood

In her twelfth year in Wonderland, Alice couldn't help noticing that things looked a little ragged around the edges.  In the place of forest paths edged by wildflowers, there were potholed streets lined with old cars, and the residents of Wonderland spent their time standing around trash fires burning in rusted barrels, warming their hands against the cold of early autumn.  Those who weren't so engaged stood in long lines waiting to get into Government Groceries.

"Goodness, what a sight," murmured Alice lifting one patent leather shoe to step delicately over a passed-out drunk on the sidewalk.  Up ahead, Alice thought she saw the Mad Hatter, standing with the Dormouse around another trash fire.  He was heating his teapot on a wire screen resting on the barrel.

"Mr. Hatter, how do you do?" said Alice as she approached.

"What up," grunted the Mad Hatter.  "Slumming or something?"

"I'm lost, as ever," said Alice with a little more heartiness than she really felt.  "Silly me."

"Yeah, silly you," said the Hatter.  "Want some tea?  How bout a biscotti?"

Alice looked at the teapot, smudged black with flame, and the metal canteen cups, which weren't in much better condition.

"Oh no, thanks," said Alice.  "I've eaten."  Which was literally true, although she couldn't remember which year that had been.

"Suit yourself."

Alice noticed that the Dormouse, who was wearing a pair of oversized Ray-Bans that kept slipping down his snout, was inhaling deeply from a short stubby cigar.  He coughed between tokes.

"Is the Dormouse alright?" asked Alice.

"He's good," said the Hatter.

"That's nice," said Alice, for lack of any other remark to make.

"Smoke 'em if you got 'em," said the Dormouse to no one in particular.

"So what's new with you and Wonderland?" said the Hatter, in his usual caustic tone.

"I was just thinking that things don't seem very much the same since I followed the rabbit down the hole back in...oh, so many years ago."

"Times are tough, kiddo," said the Mad Hatter.

"Boo-yah!" the Dormouse suddenly shrieked.

Alice tried to ignore this last interjection.  "I can see that," she said thoughtfully. "What seems to be the problem?"

"What seems to be the problem," sneered the Hatter, "is that we ran outta dough, you know?  Cash, dinero, the old scratch.  Bust-o, kid, tits up and no pulse.  Along those lines."

Alice couldn't help thinking that one thing that definitely hadn't changed was the Mad Hatter's penchant for unpleasant self-expression, which was as vibrant as ever.

"But why is that?" asked Alice, genuinely curious. "Did the Red Queen cease her benevolence."

"She's flown the coop," said the Hatter,  "down in the Caymans, luxuriating on a pile of her money."

"How very selfish," said Alice.

"Careful, Lamebrain," said the Mad Hatter.  "Or they'll off with your head."

"I thought you just said the Red Queen had fled Wonderland," replied Alice, perplexed.

"True that is," said the Hatter, "but the two guys running for Red King can label you anti-Wonderland and it's sayonara, Toots." 

"I'm afraid I don't understand," said Alice.

"If you're afraid, you're getting warmer," said the Hatter.

"I still haven't the first notion what you're talking about," said Alice.

"Knock me over with a feather," said the Mad Hatter.  "Look, Babycakes, if you're anti-Wonderland, you can wind up on the losing end of a Drone missile on the Red King's say-so."

"Which Red King?"

"Take your pick," snickered the Hatter.  "It's the law.  Of course, your odds are worse if your name's Arab."

"That's what the law says?" asked Alice timidly.  This surely didn't sound much like the Wonderland she used to know.

"Not in so many words.  That would be unconstitutional.  Equal protection, you know."

"That sounds ever so much better," said Alice, relieved.

"We're now entitled to equal lack of protection under the law, see," said the Mad Hatter, cackling... madly.  "Hey, want to buy a hat?  How bout five hundred of 'em?  Things have been a little slow."

"I don't really think so, thanks," murmured Alice.

"Suit yourself, Bimbo.  Have a nice day."

Alice hurried away down the sidewalk, down a side street, and eventually came upon the forest, where she at last relaxed a little.  Strolling along in the deepening woods, she looked for sign posts.  She wondered if she could find a trail to the Cayman Islands.

Pensées dans l'isoloir

Everything just sounds more deeply philosophical in French.  It translates as "thoughts in the voting booth," and concerns that quiet moment, when one is all by oneself facing the ballot, and your brave and independent pronouncements about voting for a third party candidate are at last put to the real test.

So much to think about.  So many pensées.  Have I made myself a victim of my own "false equivalence," that easy cop-out favored by the Mainstream Media (those sycophants you often call the Lamestream Media in your snarky moments)?  Is it just too easy to say that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are indistinguishable politically, that voting for the lesser of two evils is nevertheless voting for evil, that third parties with actual real, helpful ideas can never break through to relevance and power if election after pitiful election we keep saying to ourselves, not this time, there is simply too much at stake?

Certainly these are conundra worthy of Voltaire and Descartes.  


One begins with the electoral facts.  California's 55 electoral votes are cast on a winner-take-all basis. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that anyone other than Barack Obama is going to win the Golden State.  Plus, I know that my vote is worth 25% of the vote of a pickup-driving cowboy from Laramie, Wyoming.  Wyoming has the constitutional minimum of 3 electoral votes (matching its two senators and one congressman) with a population of 563,000.  California's 55 electoral votes are based on a population of 37 million, roughly 74 times larger than Wyoming.  Yet the electoral votes are only 18 times as many.  Since we do not have direct election of Presidents by popular vote in this country, my vote is not what it appears to be in the first place.  It's a diluted ballot that I cast; thus, as far as symbolic votes for third party candidates are concerned, California is a nice safe haven to exercise one's conscience (and if it's not safe, whoever in the United States indulges himself in an act of conscience?  Certainly almost no one in the White House or Congress.)


There is a good reason that the Obama and Romney campaigns do not waste their money running expensive TV ads in California.  I hear about these "hard hitting" ads in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, but I never have my focus on "Big Bang Theory" disturbed by actual viewing.


Thus, a voter in California who worries a lot about how he votes, as a matter of reality, is engaging in a form of electoral grandiosity.  The die is cast; the fix is in.  Maybe the national polls talk about "razor thin" margins for Obama, a lead within the "margin of error," it's currently "neck and neck" at 47% all (that was actually the last number I heard - rather ironic, because I imagine, Venn Diagram-speaking, that there is a huge overlap between that 47% and the 47% that Romney despises).


I can assure you, however, that the campaign honchos do not look at those national polls.  They're irrelevant.  Ohio and Florida, Ohio & Florida, Ohio/Florida: color in the rest of the states red or blue, and just hold the elections in Ohio and Florida.  I'd hate to be a voter in Ohio: I'd be so tense every four years.  Here I take my place among the voters of a state with one of the worst-performing educational systems in the country (its glory days as No. 1 long past), casting my vote upon a sea of votes from millions and millions of uninformed, functionally illiterate, easily-manipulated (remember Proposition 8, anyone?) fellow citizens.  Please: give myself a break.


On the merits: I would rather see Obama win, and I'm fairly sure he will.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, however, believe any longer in the American Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  That is not false equivalence; it's just the way it is.  For a person like me, a "process liberal" as opposed to a "substantive liberal," my enthusiasm for the voting franchise took a major hit during the Misrule of George W. Bush, and virtually all of Bush's most repugnant, anti-Constitutional positions have been continued, and even expanded by Barack Obama.  (I don't know if you've noticed, but Barack is just not real original.)  Both parties appear content with the awful ruling in the Citizens United case.  Mr. Obama peeped about it in one State of the Union address, and that was it.  The big telecom companies were just granted final immunity by the Supreme Court from their complicity in all of the warrantless wiretapping of the Bush (and Obama, of course) years.


On and on.  Both candidates are warmongers, both will overspend on the defense budget forever, both will kowtow and cater to the interests of Wall Street over Main Street (it's where the campaign cash is).


But, but...yes, I know what you're going to say.  What about abortion and gay marriage?  What about those Supreme Court appointments?  This is the ratio decidendi (basis of decision) of all elections, isn't it?  This is actually what the Presidential election is about: not tax policy (the President doesn't decide tax policy, the Congress does); not the "war on terror" (there's no difference); not the "budget" or deficit (the Obama Administration doesn't even propose budgets anymore); not environmental issues (both candidates are against the Earth); not nothin'.  Abortion, and in recent years, gay marriage.


Look, I wrote a screed on the effect of overturning Roe vs. Wade a long time ago.  Such a ruling does not mean that abortion is everywhere illegal in the United States.  It just means that you can't get an abortion in a Red State. So weigh that in the balance.  You have to travel from Texas to California.  My mother did that (not to get an abortion - to get the hell out of Texas).  Texas is a good place to get out of, for whatever reason.  


Should the rise of actual alternatives to the Two Party Duopoly system, with its thorough corruption and ossified inability to adapt to a changing world, be forever held hostage so that women in an unfortunate situation do not have to travel from Texas to California?  Nothing is perfect in this world, after all.  Perhaps we could organize the modern equivalent of the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad for women who need to travel to escape the ideological slavery of their judgmental, religious fellow citizens.  That, in fact, would be an excellent plank in a Third Party Platform. You have to take a few chances to get anywhere.

The Crisis of Global Warming Passes

It will hit 88 degrees here today in Northern California and 90 tomorrow, according to my usually reliable iPhone temperature app.  That's pretty warm for mid- to late October around here. Not that I'm one of those scientifically illiterate guys who think "weather" is the same as "climate" or anything like that.  I understand the difference.  Still, it's somewhat worrying, you know?  A little weird.

However, I think it must be my imagination because I watched the debate between the two presidential candidates who are allowed on mainstream television last night and the words "global warming," "climate change," or even "weather" were never mentioned.  Not a single, solitary time.

Since the Arctic ice depletion this year is the greatest in recorded history, and there are many other signs of warming, ocean acidification, collapse of marine life, and migration of infectious diseases and tropical insects into formerly temperate climates, one would think that in the course of such a debate climate change would at least merit a passing comment.  You might think about it this way: let us say that you're uncertain about the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  Shouldn't the issue at least be aired out?  It does have to do with the viability of Earth as our natural habitat, and that seems important.  Granted, you've been influenced by the dissenters, who at this most point are mostly Freeman Dyson, a very elderly mathematician who dabbles in atmospheric science mainly to irritate people (especially his wife); and Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric scientist at MIT.  Unfortunately for Denier Orthodoxy, the shock troops of AGW skeptics were dealt a heavy blow recently when Richard Muller, a prominent UC Berkeley scientist, changed his mind.  As reported by the Chronicle:

 "The hot issue of global warming got hotter Monday when a UC Berkeley physicist, once a loud skeptic of human-caused climate change, agreed not only that the Earth is heating up, but also that people are the cause of it all."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/UC-climate-change-skeptic-changes-views-3748148.php#ixzz29ZK4ipMI

For the Denial movement, scientists can be very unreliable supporters since they have this distressing habit of changing their minds in the face of new evidence.  I suppose this is why there is such a perfect congruence between the base of Denialism and Evangelical religion, where Denialism is an article of faith (so to speak).  If you can believe that present life forms were simply placed here on Earth about 6,000 years ago by some Guy you read about in a book, then Denialism is the classic piece o' cake. Evidence?  What's that got to do with anything?

Still, one may deride the scientific bona fides of such skepticism, but one thing you gotta admit:  the AGW deniers are in charge in this country.  They don't need Muller, they don't even need Lindzen (who actually wobbles a lot - his argument seems to be that AGW is real, but it's not so bad).  They don't need anyone, since they disproved Evolution by devising their own "probability" science.

It works, too.  The heavily upholstered Candi Crowley, last night's moderator, certainly never brought the subject of climate change up.  Not a single questioner (the good citizens of Nassau County, N.Y.) were allowed to broach the subject (the moderator and CNN know, you see, what questions will come to the floor); and I imagine that the campaigns knew in advance that neither side would be "embarrassed" by a direct question on AGW because that would force them to commit themselves, one way or another.  So Romney can pretend to disbelieve in AGW, to please his salivating, know-nothing base; and Obama can be assumed to believe in such malarkey, to placate his "liberal" supporters.

It's just better, in this country, not to talk about it.  Maybe if we ignore it, it will simply go away.  Let's develop all these fossil fuel sources, coal, oil, natural gas, as fast as we can so we become "energy independent," and release all of that pent-up carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a fevered rush.  That was the message.  Better yet, if Obama is in charge of the release, the greenhouse gases, as I wrote on another occasion, will be "Liberal CO2," which I've shown is much safer than Conservative CO2.

Among the civilized and educated nations of the world, the United States of American does indeed dwell within a cocoon of profound ignorance.  It is eerie to behold it on such brazen display as last night.  One candidate, Romney, proposes a mathematically impossible plan of getting rid of whole categories of taxation without, somehow, increasing America's $1 trillion per year deficits.  He pays no political price for such nonsense, of course, because the mathematically impossible is just as easy to believe, in this country, as Creationism or the existence of a stable climate.

FAQ on the Fiscal Cliff

(Written without prior research in order to test my credentials as a low-information voter.)

1.  What the hell is the fiscal cliff?

I'm actually not clear on this.  If memory serves, it's some terrible thing that will happen right after December 31, 2012 (a little over two months from now) if Congress, which acts always as a slow, dumb and blind beast, does not get its act together and do something about it.

2.  Yes, but what is it?

Again, going from memory, when Congress was last faced with the notional illusion of a "debt ceiling," like the little kids they are they decided not to deal with it right there and then but told themselves that if they didn't really, for real, deal with it by December 31, 2012, that (in order not to have to think about it again and make difficult decisions) that all sorts of "Draconian" things would automatically happen (as if, in other words, they had not set these very things in motion by deferring a decision).  Among these terrible things are the expiration of the so-called "Bush tax cuts" (the reduction of the top marginal rate on income); the 2% FICA reduction; various other tax "relief" measures piled on in the endless pandering to the electorate which has been much in vogue since the economy collapsed; and (the Big Enchilada) 25% reductions in all "discretionary" spending categories, which would include, amazingly, defense spending, but exempt such old standbys as Social Security, Medicare and interest payments on the national debt.

3.  Isn't this kind of a mindless, stupid way to do things?

Well, yes of course.  The important thing to remember is that Congress wasn't the least bit sincere in this pantomime of fiscal probity.  The poison pill lodged in the middle of all this stuff is the reduction in defense spending.  That just isn't going to happen.  Since the United States, at the moment, is fighting about 14 wars worldwide, Republicans and Democrats alike can point to the need (as always) to "support the troops in harm's way/in the field/fighting to keep us free" and (reluctantly) extend the deadline on the fiscal cliff (that's a mixed metaphor - maybe "cantilever out" on the fiscal cliff) so that Wile E. Coyote has a little more running room before the moment of truth.

4.  How long will Congress keep extending the deadline on the fiscal cliff?

Essentially, till the freaking cows come home.  One thing to remember about the Republicans and Democrats infesting the building under the Capitol Dome: it isn't actually their money, all this tax revenue and cash they raise by borrowing all the time.  They don't really care.  They could solve these problems if they wanted to, but they don't want to.  They use all this money to solicit bribes (campaign donations) from crony corporations who feed off the federal budget. Other than the Entitlement programs, which have dedicated taxes of their own and thus are not the least bit interesting to Congress, other than as irritating drains on what little money America has left.  But you can't literally give the American people nothing and remain in office, so they live with it.

5.  Why is imagery from The Roadrunner cartoons used so much in discussing this issue?

The short answer is that public discourse in this country suffers from a paucity of imagination and cultural references. There are essentially only two metaphors used to discuss every dismal facet of the modern American economy: the Titanic (and generally rearranging the deck chairs thereof); and Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff and hovering briefly in midair.  At some point, you'd think the pundits would realize these tropes are completely played.  Then again, one would think that this "debt ceiling" nonsense would fade away as well, but there's not much chance of that either.

Saturday Morning Essay: The Snarky Smirk versus the Wrinkled Forehead

Brought to you by Trader Joe's Bay Blend (Ultra Dark Roast)...

I confess at the outset that I've always thought Joe Biden was the example par excellence of everything that is wrong with modern American politics.  He is, without doubt, the apotheosis of the style-over-substance practitioner of the black arts of the Beltway.  (Okay, Black Arts of the Beltway: that one's going in the pantheon.) 

Joe doesn't stand for anything, least of all the middle class.  When he ran for President in 1988, he didn't even run as Joe Biden; he ran as Neil Kinnock, a British politician who had challenged Margaret Thatcher.  Biden liked Kinnock's stump speech so much (redolent of rags to riches touches) that Joe began borrowing whole segments of it for his own campaign stops.  That wasn't quite enough, however (Joe, as you saw Thursday night, never knows when to stop), so Biden then began borrowing actual details of Kinnock's life, and soon we were hearing about the coal miners in Biden's ancestry.  Which seemed plausible, since Biden was from Pennsylvania, but unfortunately was contrary to reality.  Other tales of flagrant plagiarism from Biden's law school days then came out and Biden abandoned his run for the presidency (a picture of Joe in 1988, under siege, is above).  For 1988, at least, but he's made periodic stabs at it since then.

Biden was the perfect choice as Obama's running mate, as the Big Dog Triangulator, Bill Clinton pointed out early.  Obama had "knocked it out of the park" by choosing Joe.  And what wasn't to like?  Running against George W. Bush's record, with wars "put on credit cards" (Biden trotted that very hoary cliche out on Thursday night), there was the straight-talkin' Joe to watch Barack's back.  Because Joe Biden had always been a fervent opponent of the wasteful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, hadn't he?  He must have been, because the "liberal caucus" in the Senate in 2002 would certainly include this fearless champion of the people, a man who, even when the war drums were beating loudest, would keep his head and see through the propaganda.  Certainly Biden would demonstrate the kind of moral courage that I thought, even at the time, was reminiscent of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.

So here's the list:

Sens. Akaka (D-HI), Bingaman (D-NM), Boxer (D-CA), Byrd (D-WV), Conrad (D-ND), Corzine (D-NJ), Dayton (D-MN), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Graham (D-FL), Inouye (D-HI), Kennedy (D-MA), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Mikulski (D-MD), Murray (D-WA), Reed (D-RI), Sarbanes (D-MD), Stabenow (D-MI), Wellstone (D-MN), and Wyden (D-OR).

Hmmm.  Something's wrong here.   Certainly Joe Biden wouldn't leave Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy, Carl Levin and other vocal war opponents just hanging out there, would he?

Well, of course he would.  He voted for the other war on the charge card, too, Afghanistan.  Joe's "tough on terror."  Maybe Biden himself never served in the military, but he can claim (as he does, endlessly) that at least his son has put his life on the line fighting in these pointless wars his father voted for.  So that's something, at least.  What, I'm not so sure.

Joe was asked for another performance Thursday night, one where he just couldn't stop laughing at everything Paul Ryan said.  It got very, very silly, since Biden's risibility was so obviously counterfeit.  Biden was either not listening or he was high on nitrous oxide.

I suspect it worked.  That's not surprising, since Biden, who derived most of his campaign funding from banks and credit card companies (the Delaware senator led the charge in "reforming" the Bankruptcy Code to make it more difficult for the "middle class" to escape those onerous 29% interest charges through bankruptcy, another 2005 event that's gone down the memory hole), continues to survive politically through pure imagery.

As for Paul Ryan: who really cares?  I will say this.  At least he stated a few unpleasant facts, which we don't often hear in the anodyne evocations of America's glory which characterize all political appearances during the campaign.  Ryan said that Medicare and Social Security are insolvent, and they are.  He said that 10,000 Americans are reaching retirement age every day, and that's true, and the social safety net is being ripped asunder as a result.  Ryan said that 23 million Americans are unemployed and underemployed, that 15% of the total population lives in poverty, that the economy is actually decelerating, and that there are not enough millionaires in the United States, even if taxed at the 100% rate, to balance the federal budget.  These are the facts.

Joe Biden prides himself on a "lifetime of service" to the American people, and yet what this really means is that he's a career politician who has presided over the fiasco that the American economy and budget have become.  Biden, with his craven votes for war and Big Defense, has seen to it that the Social Security "trust fund" was squandered on pointless military adventures, so that now, in a debate, he attacks his opponent for wanting to "privatize" Social Security (as Bill Clinton proposed during his second term).  There's really nothing left to "privatize."  The money's all gone and the system is collapsing under its own weight.

Still, as Joe bragged on Thursday night, he always says exactly what's on his mind.  Or Neil Kinnock's, but the effect is much the same.

Sunday Morning Essay: The Show About Nothing

Brought to you by Costa Rican Organic coffee.... 

Some ideas for questions for the next "debate:"

Q:  Professor Michael Mann, a leading climatologist at Penn State, has stated that Arctic ice melt and the melting of land-based ice shelves in Greenland and Antarctica are "decades ahead of schedule" according to climate models.  Groups at MIT and Stanford have concluded that the forecasts of the IPCC are, if anything, much too optimistic.  Do you consider the future habitability of Planet Earth by human beings an important issue?  Should we do something?

Q:  Almost everyone in America is clinically obese and dying of Type II diabetes.  Should we take a look at the federal government's massive subsidies to the inedible corn industry?

Q:  Since the world is running out of affordable petroleum, should we think about building a railroad so people can get from one place to another?

Q:  Should food be labeled so that Americans know whether they're eating a biological substance produced through millions of years of evolution, or is something concocted last week by a genetic engineer at Monsanto?

Q:  Gentlemen, should the President of the United States be given the power to assassinate American citizens without judicial process of any kind?

Q:  Mr. President, Governor Romney, should the President be allowed to invade and bomb any foreign country he chooses without seeking Congressional authorization under Article I of the Constitution and even without complying with the War Powers Act of 1973?

Q:  Should the President be allowed to suspend the right of habeas corpus for an American citizen on American soil simply by labeling someone a terrorist or by accusing him of material support of some terrorist organization?

Q:  Should an American official ever be prosecuted for a capital war crime, such as causing death by torture, in compliance with the War Crimes Act and with the Convention Against Torture to which the United States is a signatory? Should the answer be any different if the American official in question admits on national television that he ordered torture?

Q:  Should anyone on Wall Street be prosecuted, ever, for committing mega-fraud in the mortgage securitization business? Or were President Obama and Attorney General Place Holder correct that, "unfortunately," nothing anyone ever did was illegal?

Q:  Should the rule of law be reinstituted as a governing principle in the American Republic?

Such questions seem unlikely.  Rather, the passions of the mob will be stirred up instead by the riveting arguments over such issues as whether Mitt Romney does or does not propose $5 trillion in tax cuts at the top marginal rate over the next ten years, and whether Obamacare does or does not involve "raiding" Medicare reimbursements.  That's pretty much the whole story.  

Oh, and jobs.  Both candidates favor jobs.  I guess the next go round will be all about foreign policy.  Whereas in Round One there might have been a dime's worth of difference between the two candidates, this time the gap will narrow to the dimensions of the aperture in the electron slit experiments of quantum mechanics.

I tend to agree with those wags who opine that the problem with the debate format isn't that third party views are completely excluded.  It's that there is no second party represented.

Damn That Lincoln-Douglas Thing Anyway

A few inchoate reactions to the debate:

My own "format" for watching/listening to the debate was a little haphazard because of evening chores, but it went like this: I watched it live on TV for about a half hour, then drove somewhere and listened on the radio for about half an hour, then came home and watched the end of the debate live and then the general pandemonium among the MSNBC panel of Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, et alia as they tried to come to terms with what a terrible debater their champion, Barack Obama, actually is. Then I watched the 20 minutes or so I had missed while performing my St. Francis of Assisi duties in San Rafael.

Impressions gained by my multi-media encounter:  Barack Obama does better if you're only listening to him and not watching.  Mitt Romney does pretty well either way.  If you're watching and listening to Barack Obama, you get the full effect of his overall weakness.  The fidgeting, the downcast eyes, the lame hand gestures, and (his true Achilles Heel) that dreadful insertion of the long, drawn-out "Aaannnnnddddddd" between phrases as he tries to think of what to say next.

Paul Krugman, on his mysteriously-named "Conscience of A Liberal" blog, had this to say:

The hard-hitting and effective campaign against Romney led many people to believe that this wasn’t going to happen again. But in the first debate, there was Capillary Man once again.
I really don’t know what this is about.

Actually, Krugman knows exactly what this is about and doesn't want to say it because his conscientious liberalism won't allow him to.  Barack Obama doesn't have what it takes to argue his positions successfully.  He doesn't know how to marshal facts on the fly, synthesize them into a forceful, cogent argument, and go for the jugular of his opponent's many weaknesses (as opposed to the capillaries, as Krugman notes).  How the the rich scion of a prominent family, who dismantled American businesses for a living, who serially evades taxes, who won't disclose how little he pays to the government each year although he's seeking to become chief fiduciary of the country, who stashes money in the Cayman Islands, and who stated on videotape that he has nothing but contempt for about half the American public too broke to pay federal income taxes - how a guy with all these liabilities (we're talking about Romney here) could escape utterly unscathed after an hour and a half of discussing almost nothing except taxes and entitlements - I really don't know what that is about.

Except to avoid Krugman's disingenuous posing: the same fecklessness in Obama was evident in the Obama - McCain debates, but John McCain was such an inconceivably lousy candidate, crotchety, incoherent, often nonsensical, that it didn't matter.  Now it matters, and the Democrats have a huge problem on their hands.

It's only too bad that Obama wasn't debating Jim Lehrer.  Actually, what I'd really like to see is a Jim Lehrer versus Bob Schieffer debate, one-on-one.  The winner would be the first guy to remember why he was there.

The Hep Cat & The Bag Man

It occurs to me that in Portuguese, the native language of Brazil (I note for those of you unfortunate enough to have been educated in America's schools after about 1980 or so), that "BumBum" might well be pronounced "BoomBoom."  I don't know that for a fact; I just think it's a nice touch.  A less scrupulous man than myself might use such an intro to post another rearview photo, but I will refrain.

No, instead I turn to tonight's Presidential Debate.  I feel it is my responsibility, being a blogger who focuses on political, economic and, above all, philosophical questions.  The Debates are the major league baseball playoffs of American politics, although, it's true, the field has already been narrowed to the final two teams.  We will not see, for example, Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party or Gary Johnson of the Libertarians in tonight's contest.  The inclusion of such parties would knock the dyad all out of kilter, and introduce a lot of issues and viewpoints that would confound the media format.

No, we can't have Jim Lehrer talking to Dr. Stein about genetically modified foods or the relocalization of agriculture, or global warming, or any of these other irrelevant distractions. There are only a couple of issues that really matter to the American people: (1) When do I get my check?; and (2) Are we safe yet?

It will be very difficult for the corporate Bag Man, Mitt Romney, to outflank Barack Obama, the Hep Cat, to the O-Man's right.  How can you do that at this point?  Would Romney have killed bin Laden twice?  And you can't blame Obama for leaving Iraq, as Romney has nevertheless tried to do.  George W. Bush got snookered by the Ungrateful Nouri on that one.  Al-Maliki refused to give Bush the Status of Forces Agreement that would have allowed American servicemen to remain safely in Iraq, that is, to stay there without being subjected to the whimsical judgments of the mullahs in Islamic courts. So it's not Obama's fault that Obama had to bring to a close a war which Obama called a dumb war but then wanted to keep going because, as in the case of surging the troops in Afghanistan, it looked all Presidential and war-like, and thus bankable at election time.

Besides, it keeps us safe.  No, I'm not sure which parts of the preceding paragraph have to do with national security, but that's been true for eleven years now.  Thus turning us to domestic politics, that is, the Entitlements, Social Security and Medicare, since the federal government is an insurance company with an army and we've already covered the army part.  The Hep Cat won't touch the Entitlements now, of course, because it's election time and they're sacred.  Red or Blue, skinny or (far more likely) obese, Deep Southern or Yankee Northeast, everyone wants their check, and they need to be reassured that the federal budget (60% taxes, 40% borrowed) will be used to support the old folks (those so likely to vote, in Florida and Ohio, for example), and what isn't used for that can be sent to the weapons manufacturers and the Predator drone pilots.  Whatever the President wants, just give me my cut. Romney is in enough trouble with the "47%" so he's in zugzwang on that one, too (a chess term - see the games of Garry Kasparov).

It's simple really, this debate.  A simple agenda for a simple country.  A broke-ass country with its head up its broke-ass.  It should be riveting.

The Desk Set

A few years ago, in these very pages and while still possessed of a capacity for patriotic outrage over the systematic debasement of the core Constitutional principles on which the country (according to my study of history and law) was founded, I quoted Hannah Arendt's brilliant coinage "Desk Murderer" to describe certain highly-placed government officials who carelessly, wantonly destroyed human lives in distant countries and could not even be bothered to respond to methodical counts of the death toll. Professor Arendt used the term to describe monsters like Adolf Eichmann, who sat calmly and methodically at their desks and worked out the logistics of the Holocaust - train schedules, food supply, payroll, as if he were simply engaged in running a railroad whose end product happened to be death.  There were many Germans working in this "business" in the Third Reich, and for many of them the limited range of their function shielded them, to a large extent, from a daily appreciation of the true horror of what they were engaged in.

So the term occurred to me when considering the death toll in Iraq, now generally accepted to have been a "mistaken" war, or a "dumb war," in Barack Obama's phrase (when he was campaigning in 2008 and before he tried negotiating an extention of the American occupation beyond 2011). To wit, the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study which had concluded, using standard epidemiological approaches to such questions,  that something on the order of one million "excess deaths" (over and above what would have happened under Saddam Hussein had there been no invasion) had occurred in Iraq following the American occupation.  When "confronted" with this finding (at some Rose Garden White House/media love fest), George W. Bush simply dismissed it as "flawed methodology."

And that was that.  When the Obama Administration not only adopted all of the Bush era "modifications" of civil liberties (end of habeas corpus for American citizens; free-for-all domestic spying; use of the "state secrets" defense in court to end any and all attempts to win compensation for illegal detentions and torture; maintaining Guantanamo as a due process-free concentration camp; and, the Crown Jewel, assassination of American citizens by Presidential diktat), I knew we had undergone a paradigm shift that we're not likely to recover from while the nation remains in its current form.  Which is to say - never.

But the young, the idealistic young...along come research groups from the Stanford and New York University Law Schools, in a combined report called "Living Under Drones," and the problem of becoming a militaristic empire resurfaces all over again.  As noted by The Australian (you didn't think this report would get much play in the States, did you?):

A NEW study by researchers at Stanford and the University of New York has found that American drone strikes in Pakistan are killing far more civilians than advertised, taking out few high-value targets, and have become the primary recruiting tool for the terrorist groups the policy is aimed at combating.The report, "Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan", is based on "more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses and experts, and review of thousands of pages of documentation and media reporting" conducted over nine months.
The research found that in the past eight years drone strikes have "killed 2562 to 3325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children". Meanwhile, only 2 per cent of those killed were "high-level" targets. This means the strikes have killed three times as many children as terrorist leaders.
The report also shows that the impact of the drone war isn't limited to those directly affected by strikes because the constant presence of drones overhead "terrorises men, women, and children".

 

The writer goes on to state that it's "stunning" that this issue is not a bigger feature of the current presidential campaign.  Well, I don't know, mate - is it really as stunning as all that?  How exactly are President Barack Obama and the Carpetbagger supposed to talk about this one?  Granted, perennial troublemaker Glenn Greenwald, who writes for an English newspaper (The Guardian), is a graduate of NYU Law, and resides in Brazil (where the 2011 winner of the Miss BumBum contest is pictured above-I hope this answers your question, Willy, about my marketing ploys) has been all over this story.  

So what are these legal upstarts suggesting?  That President Barack Obama is another Desk Murderer?  Just because the drone campaign has, you might say, a 98% failure rate?

Well....not in context, when you think about it.  It is true that, in the first place, we're not even at war in Pakistan.  We're just killing people there, mostly by remote-controlled drones (which are operated, quite literally, by guys at desks in Langley, Virginia [CIA drones] and by the military at bases in Texas and Nevada).  Well, what are you gonna do?  Washington, D.C. has it in its collective head that the American people will only support a warmonger, and to be a warmonger you have to remain continuously at war.  President Obama has internalized that, and the Carpetbagger, given half a chance, would double down on our military adventures and start bombing whatever Muslim country might be left that we're not currently bombing.  

What is kind of funny is to watch the polemical gyrations of the Liberal Desk Murderers, such as Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Paul Krugman and lots and lots of Hollywood's glitterati. For in an ethical universe, to support a Desk Murderer, one who these idealistic students claim is "terrorizing" the indigenous population of Pakistan through systematic commission of war crimes, such as bombing rescue operations and targeting funerals of Pakistanis already killed by missiles, is, through moral accountability, to be a Desk Murderer yourself.  We're not too far gone to see that still, are we? Well, for the Liberal Desk Murderers, there is no doubt that Barack Obama is most definitely their guy - he's the cool brand, and what Obama actually does in office is not nearly as important as how he does it. Plus, maybe both Barack Obama and the Carpetbagger are Desk Murderers, but Obama is the Desk Murderer with the more equitable tax plan and the greater commitment to Medicare and Social Security.  Sorry about all the dead kids, but first things first.  It's important to keep our focus where it belongs, on our short list of self-involved topics.

Yes, I know what you're thinking - when the Liberals champion their own Desk Murderer, we have crawled into a hermetically-sealed madhouse and locked the door behind us. You won't get much of an argument from me.  

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Now that the election is out of the way

No Republican candidate has won the presidential election without carrying the electoral votes of Ohio for the last eleven elections.  Ohio is the swingiest of the swing states.  Mitt Romney is getting positively creamed in Ohio - as many as 10 points back in the popular vote, which is an enormous deficit in this day and age.  In all the other swing states, where the election is decided (you can color in huge blocks of the country in red and blue even before anyone is nominated for President), Romney is not doing much better.  Romney could save us all a lot of trouble by giving his concession speech now.

He's a dull and irritating candidate, prone to smug and derisive remarks about anyone not born into privilege the way he was.  The people who will vote for him are those who see the "R" next to his name and check the box.  That's it.  He generates no excitement whatsoever.  He looks like a guy who should be wearing a fishing vest in an L.L. Bean catalogue. 

In Brazil they're holding the annual Miss BumBum contest.  This is a beauty pageant which focuses on the best butt in Brazil, a nation known for fabulous backsides on prominent display at all their beaches and carnavals.  One gifted gal from each of the 17 federalist states of Brazil is nominated for the final runoff (back off?) in Sao Paulo.

In the United States this week, the nation will rivet its attention on a contrived "debate" between Barack Obama and....the aforementioned Mitt Romney.  This will be the dullest debate in the history of the known world.  President Obama can be articulate when he is reading a speech or reciting one from memory.  As an extemporaneous speaker arguing on the spot, Obama makes used dishwater look positively incandescent.  He is halting, banal, predictable, play-it-safe, and yet still manages to say absurd things that make no sense.  Romney, apparently, has put together a bunch of "zingers." Oh God, please spare us.  I am sure these will be delivered in a natural, flowing way, and won't look at all contrived.

I think two old-line WASPS (McCain, Romney) getting steamrolled in a row by a gifted minority politician marks a decisive turning point in the history of the country.  James Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation says that Romney is the Millard Fillmore of the Republican Party, playing the same role as the hapless Millard (Romney is Willard, don't forget) played to the Whig Party; namely, ushering them into extinction.  The remnants of the Republican Party will then scatter into ultra-Right Tea Party and White Supremacist factions, with Wal-Martians moving into the power vacuum.  That sounds about right.  It was primarily white trash that formed the operative legions of the Third Reich.

Maybe Barack, with no future election to hold him back, can start to boogie - have some fun, go a little crazy.  Get street, you know?  Sure hope so.  If we can't have a Miss BumBum, we should at least be allowed that.