Seeking that perfect niche practice

Let me assure you, practicing law can be hard work. If I were to delve into the legal complexities of a case I handled recently concerning title insurance law, you would see what I mean. Hours and hours in the county law library. There's a reason the law is called "a jealous mistress" (sexist, I know, but the point is still the same - it's time consuming).

It's why I envy Gloria Allred. She didn't become a lawyer until she was about 34, by my calculation, but she really made up for lost time. If there is a high profile celebrity case (and there always is), and if the high profile celebrity case involves a woman who is tangentially involved, usually in some way where she has been publicly "dissed" or treated shabbily as the "other woman," by some guy who is trying to finagle his way out of the usual situation that guys so often find themselves in (namely, pretending to a kind of saintly aura of monogamy bordering on monasticism, when in fact they're carrying on like randy old goats), there's Gloria, the Righteous Avenger, to speak for the woman who cannot articulate her own anger in exactly the right way (that is, for maximum PR impact), and who senses, however inchoately (usually because she is somewhat inchoate, not to say incoherent, herself), there is Gloria, to level the playing field and to open the doors to that most valued of all American sinecures, The World of Celebrity.

What a client list! Paula Jones, in the Clinton BJ case, Nicole Brown Simpson's family in the O.J. murder trial, Amber Frey, in the Scott Peterson case. And now --fff

Gloria Allred, the prominent lawyer who has represented a range of high-profile clients, calledTiger Woods' Friday apology a "staged public relations stunt."

Allred has worked for at least two alleged Tiger Woods mistresses, including Rachel Uchitel (PHOTOS) and porn star Joslyn James (PHOTOS). She said today that Woods needs "lying rehab" and "betrayal rehab" in addition to sex addiction therapy.

Is there anyone in the country who would be more attuned to exactly what a "staged public relations stunt" is? Actually, aren't "staged," "public relations" and "stunt" actually all the same thing? And here's the thing about "betrayal rehab:" where would such a program be conducted for the men of America? In the Astrodome? In the new Yankee Stadium? (As for "lying rehab:" oh yeah, we're going to clean that up.)

It seems to me that Gloria will just not let a man grovel in peace. But more to the point, is she certain that she does not have a conflict of interest in simultaneously representing two of Tiger's dissed women? Are their interests possibly adverse? Suppose Rachel says, "Tiger promised me that he would leave Elin for me." What, then, if Joslyn James, the porn star, then says, "No, Tiger promised me that he would leave Elin for me" ? What if Tiger goes to Lying Rehab and clears up any ambiguity. ("It was the porn star all along," Tiger tearfully admitted. "In front of God, my country and Nike's Executive VP for Advertising, Joslyn's the one. The rest were just to cover my tracks.")

Or suppose both Rachel and Joslyn turn to Gloria and ask, as Amber Frey or Nicole Brown Simpson's Family might have asked, why the hell do we actually need a lawyer to represent us as peripheral actors on the stage of a major national drama in the first place? Do we actually have a legal problem? For that matter, does Tiger? Wasn't he just screwing around with women of adult age in consensual trysts? Why does he need "rehab" for anything, and what the hell are lawyers doing mixed up in this non-event?

Still, the envy remains. See, Gloria represented Nicole Brown Simpson's Family in the OJ murder trial. Remember how they were put on trial for the murder...okay, wait, I'm confused. I guess they weren't actually parties to the case. And in the civil case against OJ in which they were parties, Daniel Petrocelli was the lead counsel, a very able attorney who won the case whereas the DA in Los Angeles had lost the criminal case. Imagine all the work involved in that. Betcha he had his hours in the library. I must have been thinking of Amber Frey. No, that's not it. She wasn't a party either, just a witness.

Those are the cases I want. No jeopardy for my clients, they're not even parties, yet I represent them for...something. I guide them through the...process. I could have thought of that if I had had Gloria's intuitive sense for just how profoundly dumb a circus American public life has become. If your name is in the news, in some way connected to some tawdry episode where real lawyering is needed (or even where it isn't, as in Tiger's "case"), the spotlight itself means you need a lawyer, because becoming famous as a person who has become famous, can, in the right, skillful, cynical hands, become your new career.

While my guitar gently weeps

I bought the guitar I play most of the time these days at a music shop on Scott Street in San Francisco. It must have been in the mid 1970's, because I have pictures of me playing that axe around that time or a little later. It was a Japanese knock-off of a Spanish classical style, like a Ramirez, made with a Brazilian rosewood back, a German spruce top and an ebony fretboard. It cost about $250, and it came with a hard shell case of brown leather and plush orange lining. The guitar has mellowed with age, the tone actually improving, but it was always pretty good. A few years ago I thought about replacing it. To get a guitar made of similar wood (they're not actually supposed to use Brazilian rosewood anymore because of the rain forest problem), you need to spend at least a couple of grand, so I tried a few out at a well-stocked specialty store south of Market Street in SF. These didn't actually sound as good as mine, and the action (basically, the ease of playability) was no better. I found I needed to go as high as three grand to actually do better. After a while, I just forgot about it and went back to playing the same old guitar.

I have sheet music from my first purchases in the late 1960's, when I first started playing a lot of classical guitar (and learned how to read for the instrument). A particular favorite is a slim, tawny, corny-looking volume filled with the great masterpieces of the repertoire: Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Albeniz' Leyenda, Granados' Playera, Bach's Bouree from the Lute Suite in E Minor. Almost every tune in the book is a hit; just a few clunkers in the bunch. It cost $1.95, according to the cover. Cheaper than a Starbucks Venti. I know that I'll die while still trying to master all the music in that book.

Over the years I picked up a music stand and even one of those classical player's foot stools, so you can rest the guitar's curve on your left knee, where it belongs for classical stuff. Or bossa nova, or even Duke's Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me. It was the Duke, in fact, who said the truth: there are only two kinds of music - good music and bad music. Anyway, that paraphernalia cost about $20, total. We're not at three hundred bucks yet, and we're spanning thirty years of playing.

You have to re-string a guitar regularly if you want it to sound good. You can buy a set of classical strings for six bucks, but I tend to go high end and buy Savarez Carte Rouge strings, which set me back about fifteen. That's every six months or so. You can change them more often, but I'm playing in my den, not Carnegie Hall.

I've made friends with that guitar, played weddings, parties and paid gigs, shown off, courted ladies, jammed with friends and family. Spent hours and hours, hundreds, probably thousands of hours, alone with it, just me and the guitar, working through the polyphony and counterpoint of ancient music, like the music in that buck ninety-five book.

I was thinking about all this while reading a book called Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton, an Australian political theorist, think tanker, humanist, Big Picture Guy. The book's about the essential disconnection between the GDP "growth" of a country and the happiness or sense of well-being of its citizens. Beyond a threshold level of wealth (which the United States crossed decades ago), enough to assure basic prosperity to the citizenry, there's no correlation at all between GDP "expansion" and human happiness. Happiness arises from things in life other than material accumulations after the basics are taken care of. Human relationships, a sense of purpose in life, interesting things to do. America is the richest country but it isn't the happiest, not by a long shot. We lost our way in the fetishistic pursuit of material prosperity, and finally crashed the economy in the desperate quest for acquisition, taking on debts (both government and private) we can't repay, that depended on an insane expectation of exponential growth to sustain. Truth is, as measured by statistically accurate surveys, we were happier in America in the 1950's than we are now, when things were simpler and more egalitarian. That will probably come as no surprise to members of my generation. We remember.

That guitar teaches me the essential truth of Hamilton's thesis. For years at a time, in the pursuit of more complicated endeavors, I have neglected that guitar. I have been out in the world getting the money together to acquire other things. The guitar has sat in the closet, in the case, unloved, unused, with tarnished strings and a dusty sound board. Then I remember I still have it, still know how to play, and I bring it out, re-string it, polish it, and it leaps back to life, better than ever. Then I get in the habit of playing again, learning new stuff or, more likely, re-learning what I already know.

I suppose that if you amortize the cost of the whole guitar experience over the thirty years I've owned that precious instrument, the original price, the books, the stand, the stool, all the strings - it doesn't come to a thousand dollars. Maybe thirty bucks a year for all that enjoyment. 75% of what it costs to fill up the car with gas so I can go out and drive in traffic jams. Without a doubt, playing that guitar has given me more pleasure than anything else I can think of, and certainly more than anything else I can do alone. And as I keep getting older - hell, maybe even more than that.

Is America Actually Still Capable of Great Things?

Odd that President Obama even felt the need to reassure us on that point Wednesday night, don't you think? What has been going on that would call our capability into question?

I was musing out loud to a friend recently about the rough congruence of a normal lifespan and big societal changes. Life is change, the Buddha tells us. Suppose, I said, you had been a man born in Dresden, Germany, in 1910. By the age of 4, the Great War would have commenced and lasted until you were age 8. A few years after the that, the Weimar Republic would have succumbed to one of the great episodes of hyperinflation in world history. That set the stage for the rise of Hitler and the Brownshirts in the 1920's, and by 1933 (age 23 for unser Mann) the Third Reich ran the state with murderous, totalitarian control. When this German reached the age of 29, World War II would have begun, and if he were able-bodied, chances are he would have been conscripted into the Wehrmacht. If he survived the war, he would have returned to a hometown utterly destroyed by Allied bombing. The Soviets who arrived in the eastern part of Germany as a liberation army decided not to leave, so now Der Mann finds himself a citizen of the GDR, a Soviet satellite, a Communist government replacing Fascism. At the age of 35 he is perhaps trained in whatever heavy industry the Soviet Central Committee decides is appropriate for East Germany. Dresden is rebuilt, much of it in the inimitable Soviet style. This state of affairs continues until 1989, when the Berlin Wall is torn down, and as our Mann expires in 1990, at the age of 80, talk is rife about reunification with the West, bringing the country of his birth full circle.

So maybe the idea that things must always stay the same through the laws of inertia is something of a myth. America, because of poor, short-sighted leadership and business practices, transmogrified itself from the manufacturing colossus of the 1950's, during my own youth, to its present hollowed-out "consumer" economy, dependent on foreign borrowing for its solvency and for overseas manufacturing for most of its everyday needs. Unlike Der Mann, Americans have never been exactly confronted with some immutable sign that Things Have Changed: when your city is destroyed and your German rulers are overthrown in favor of Soviet stooges answering to Moscow, it's hard to pretend it's the same-old same-old.

It seems likely that during my lifetime, we will witness the end of American financial hegemony in the sense that the dollar will no longer be the world's fiat currency. This fact alone will bring about huge changes, since it won't be possible to print valuable currency as a way out of debt or to control the cost of basic commodities by pricing everything in dollars. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the Eurozone, will all have a lot more to say about how such things are done. These changes are inevitable and are already underway. Our era of "legacy" domination is coming to a close.

So I don't know the answer to Barack's question. I think it's unfortunate, really, that he decided it was the best political course to do "a lot of big things at once." That strikes me as a survival of the old style of American Exceptionalism. It would have been much better to start with a job-creating, sustainable effort to rework the energy grid so we can move toward self-sufficiency. But maybe all these old pols who have been in Washington, D.C. forever, and refuse to see (or are incapable of seeing) how much things have changed need to find out the hard way, and have history happen to them (and to us) as der alte Herr Mann did in his.

Happy Days Are Here Again

It's good that the recession is over. I don't know how much more we could have taken. Things should shortly return to normal, the Dow should move back up to 14,000, unemployment will move below 5%, and housing prices will regain their 2006 levels. It was a close call but effective and timely government intervention saved the day.

With housing prices restored, equity borrowing and refinancing can resume and the consumer economy will become again the dynamo of world commerce. Chinese manufacturers will have a reliable market for their goods, the Big 3 automakers in the USA will rehire their laid off assembly line workers, oil prices will stabilize, and inflation will remain under control.

The war in Afghanistan, thanks to the Obama surge, will at last be won and added to the victory column next to Iraq.

State and local governments will balance their budgets, tax revenue will increase, Social Security will remain solvent and Medicare will continue to provide health care to the aged.

The very land will flow with milk and honey, a heavenly choir will sing at sunrise, and a lamp will appear at your feet to light your way at night.

It was a near thing. I hope we've learned our lesson.

The Inefficiency of American Happiness

I think I may have found my lfe's work, courtesy of a talented, insightful and mild-mannered professor of a geat metropolitan Southwest university, whose mother and father, by dint of incredible coincidence, were also my mother and father. Small world. So here it is, the Basic Answer to Everything. What I could never figure out was how the United States continued to lead the world in gross domestic product (GDP, "the world's largest economy") while seeming to be, how to put this, so fundamentally retarded on virtually every relevant parameter of a productive and worthwhile existence.

The key to it all is here, thanks to Professor Waldenswimmer (the family name or nom de blogue), a simple graphing of happiness on the y axis, as measured by a researcher named Veerhoven at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, as against the x axis measurement of energy use per capita, translated to metabolic equivalents. (To enlarge, hit ctrl + on your keyboard; if I place a large picture, it tends to go out of frame on Blogspot.)

The United States, as you can see, keeps the same company in terms of energy use (and satisfaction with life, for that matter) it keeps on such matters as capital punishment: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, other enlightened principalities and tyrannies. Denmark, as always, is #1. Those people are so happy all the time they must be doing something illegal, all the time. Iceland is an outlier, but that's understandable. The entire island is a geothermal power plant and energy use does not entail or imply, as it does in the United States, a culture of waste and inefficiency. Energy is cheap, clean and renewable and they can use it or lose it.

The happiness/energy chart clears up for me how the United States, which comprises only about 4% of the world's population, could nevertheless use about 25% of the world's daily supply of refined oil and account for 20% of all greenhouse gases. We use energy like it's going out of style, which it should be but isn't. And the return on all that energy use? About 18th in the world now in educational achievement, way down on the list in basic health parameters (infant mortality, obesity, incidence of diabetes [for people born after 2000, 30% will suffer adult onset diabetes]), yet we spend about about twice as much for health care as other industrialized (and happy) countries typically do per capita.

The graphic at the top depicts the basic components of GDP (colored arrows). Consumer and government spending, plus industrial investment in new capital and equipment, minus our trade deficit (we have a negative result when you subtract imports from exports). So, given our profligate waste of money on unnecessary energy expenses (unnecessary in the sense that such use is not positively correlated to increased satisfaction with life) and our insanely out of control government spending (which factors into GDP as well), it is small wonder that our GDP looks so large and seems so "powerful." In the case of government spending, we are now at the point that about half the money spent by the federal government (which will run a deficit this year of about $2 trillion) is borrowed, largely from abroad. Yet if we count government spending on a dollar-for-dollar basis as part of GDP, then of course it masks the fact that the USA does not actually have the money and makes our economy look far more prosperous than it really is.

Similar factors are at work with energy use. The actual importation of all that oil (about 14 million barrels per day, out of a total use of 20 million barrels) drags GDP down; it is a main factor in the trade deficit. But GDP is driven upwards again by Americans buying all that gasoline, which they use to operate the 250 million vehicles in the country, which on average get about 17 miles per gallon. And of course all those cars are bought with credit, increasingly in default. (The auto market died when the line of credit and refi markets died.) There are more vehicles in the USA than there are licensed drivers, and about half of the world's automobiles are located in the United States. It is small wonder that the epitome of American travel and commuting is one person in one large car on a crowded freeway.

So what do we wind up with? Bike trails, as in Holland? High speed rail, as throughout Europe and Japan? Salsa dancing, as in Colombia? No, with decrepit highways and bridges, a dilapidated rail network, a cratering airline industry, rusting autos, and a corrupt Congress bought off with the lucre of high finance.

So just one other point on the Happiness Scale: I don't trust the data point for the USA. I don't believe we really clock in at 7.0 on a 10-point scale. More likely we look at life at about the eye-level of those in Minsk. I think the relatively high number is the result of the self-reinforcing "externality" of American Exceptionalism, the narcissistic trance which makes it so difficult for Americans to see the way we are really living: a nation of very fat people, in very big cars, driving down crowded, potholed freeways, looking at the other cars.

Land of Happy Motoring

This is kind of interesting - it's a graph, or Greendex, of public use of transportation by country.  Generally (in reading the graph), the more bluish a country's bar graph is, the more frequent is the use of public transportation. Russia ranks #1; the United States ranks last.

Of course, such graphs must be described and analyzed in a value-neutral way.  This graph does not, in my view, impugn Americans in any unique way for being energy hogs.  As you go down the list (to the Germans and French, say, who also don't score that well), you might well conclude that to the extent that a prosperous nation has a good highway or autobahn system, and can afford good autos, the less likely are its citizens to use public transportation. I've seen this myself in Germany - they have such great trains (I think the best in the world) - why do they drive so much?  But they do.  They prefer the convenience, the flexibility, and besides, trains are kind of expensive over there.

The United States, of course, is the apotheosis of the car culture.  Public transportation, except in some congested urban areas where cars are practically impossible to use (Manhattan, for example), Americans look upon as faintly distasteful, the result, perhaps, of bad choices in life.  In movies and popular songs, a bus ride is usually associated with either a period of bad luck ("Midnight Cowboy" or "The Trip to Bountiful") or a sense of being lost (Paul Simon's "America").  Bus stations are usually located in a part of the city where a respectable person wouldn't go for any other reason.  And since that's true, why go there for the bus?

So my view is that the most interesting thing about America is that, for the human species as a whole, we're always a leading indicator.  We're the fattest people on Earth, among the most poorly educated (versus other industrialized nations), the most sedentary, and the biggest energy hogs on the planet. In all these senses, I think we're the most "advanced."  We merely manifest or demonstrate what human beings tend to do and be when given the economic chance to be lazy.   We still own the best real estate in the world, a plenteous, resource-rich, varied, variegated sea-to-shining-sea Eden that many people the world over understandably covet.  We've treated this birthright like a toilet, of course, but that's another matter.  The point is that Americans, over the last 60 years or so, have simply done what any subset of uniquely blessed Homo sapiens would have done with the same advantages: we abused them.

That degenerative process actually underlies the "economic crisis" currently weighing Amurrica down.  While we glorify the Horatio Alger story, and praise the virtues of diligence and thrift, in truth all of that is actually a bummer.  Americans, for a brief period at least (about 20 years) figured out how to cannibalize the capital stock built diligently  up over generations by pledging it as collateral for debt.  We gave various names to this drift: "the Information Economy," the "Service Economy," etc., but what these euphemisms stood in for was the detrmination to get away from the grueling routine of manufacturing and farming jobs (which actually built the country) in favor of a kind of National Trust Fund Existence.

It actually worked for awhile, especially in those halcyon early days of the Bush Administration, about 2001 to 2005, where all regulatory oversight was dispensed with entirely (a process given a big boost by the Clinton Administration).  Lending and borrowing became the main industry in the country.  Alas, the laws of financial thermodynamics reasserted themselves in 2007 and the unwinding process began.  We're in the early stages of that.

As our fortunes sink, it will be interesting to see if our own bar graph above gets bluer.  Not out of virtue, of course, but because it may be the only way to get around.  In the end, that's the only reliable motivator of thrift and conservation - it must be thrust upon us.  It may soon be true that the only autos available for sale in the United States are foreign brands (although they may still be manufactured in the USA), and as the dollar sinks because of unsustainable federal trade and budget deficits, these autos will be out of reach for more and more former "trust fund babies."  

Cathy, I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,

Michigan seems like a dream to me now...

Bush in the Rear View Mirror

With any luck, George W. Bush will simply disappear into the gated suburbs of Dallas, ride his bike around his ranch, pretend to stock his library, play golf in his sweat-soaked shirts and stay out of the way.  His astonishing ego has compelled him lately to make the rounds, burnishing his "legacy," rewriting history, and distorting a clear recent public record, still fresh in everyone's mind, with ludicrous fantasies about his "competence."  I think he argued that FEMA's handling of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans was actually first-rate, just as one example.  The most stupendous screwup in U.S. military and foreign policy history, invading a country to disarm them of an arsenal which they absolutely and completely lacked -- Bush called this a "disappointment."  Bush is that most tiresome of human specimens, a dull and slow-witted man who for reasons known only to himself thinks he's the smartest guy in the room.

Everyone is ready to turn the page.  Various liberal commentators have urged that investigations and/or prosecutions of members of Bush's "team" move forward under the Obama Administration, given the manifold (and manifest) prima facie felonies under the FISA law and the War Crimes Statute. Regardless of Alan Dershowitz's opinion as a "criminal trial attorney" that Bush/Cheney could beat the rap on the basis of national security (just like Jack Bauer), I doubt that's the case.  (Having watched Alan get his clock cleaned by Johnny Cochran in a mock trial a few years ago, I think Alan must have meant to say a "criminal appeals attorney.")  Once the full extent of the gratuitous abuse of prisoners came to light, the rampant, sadistic torture for no reason other than the appearance of being tough guys, an inflamed jury would go to town on those two erstwhile cowboys.

Dershowitz misses the salient point -- Bush's secret weapon, what (real) lawyers call an "affirmative defense."  Bush's unwatchable, intolerable person. Prosecuting Bush would mean that W would not go quietly into that goodnight.   He'd be in our living rooms for years to come, doing his girlish mincing and head-ducking, slaughtering the English language in front of an array of microphones, strutting from the court house with a splayed-finger wave of his little right hand.  And we'd have to watch. After eight interminable, awful years, eight full years of my life as an American tarnished and devalued by the incompetent bumbling of this pretentious goof-off -- and we still wouldn't be done.  More Bush, all the time.  

I don't think I could take it.  So okay, O.  You're right again.  You're really a smart kid, I'm starting to see that.  I'm going to check my own ego at the door for awhile.  I was over-employing it, trying to figure out too much, because I knew I could trust absolutely nothing that Bush ever said.  If I wanted to have any grasp of objective reality in these United States Under Bush, I had to build that comprehension from the ground up, because Bush went to work every morning (well, maybe half the mornings, whatever was left after deducting his 77 vacations while in office) with the express determination to mislead, obfuscate and lie.

It's true that not dealing with Bush's crime spree will leave the country with a damaged collective psyche.  We're not going to think of ourselves in quite the same way ever again, not after eight years of this guy and his gang.  That's part of the price of Bush.  But for a little peace, a break from all that he stood for, maybe it's for the best.  Dealing with the problems he left us will remind us everyday of his true legacy.  That's inevitable.  But at least we won't have to look at him, or listen to him, or watch him fake his way through another Presidential day.  That's pretty good.  Ordinarily, I never wish any part of my life away.  Every day is precious.  But man -- is it Tuesday yet?

Free Bernie Madoff

I'm tired of all this piling on where Bernie Madoff is concerned.  I understand that there are those who are perhaps justifiably angry about his $50 billion Ponzi scheme, but a lot of the criticism has gone way over the top.  For example, he's been called a "sociopath," and among the reasons for this serious allegation is that he cheated his own sister out of $3 million, and she is now faced with the prospect of selling her Palm Beach house at a major loss.  I admit that this does not look good, on the surface.

Yet there is a pack mentality about the public outcry which I find personally unsettling.  Even the cable financial programs are joining in the lynch mob stuff, calling for Madoff's bail to be revoked, for the book to be thrown at him.

Is this really the time to be focused so intently on things which happened in the past?  Bernie Madoff did not kill anyone, at least not in a sense which any penal code actually defines as "murder."  Many, many rich people gave their money to Bernie in hopes of becoming even richer, in the expectation that because of their connections to this maven of Gilded Age Investment they could "outperform" the paltry returns of the ordinary market available to shlubs like, you know, you and me.  I'm not sure that's a compelling narrative; for my money, it lacks the essential elements of a long-running media scandal, unlike a disappearance of a Southern coed from a Caribbean Island.

But returning to the major point (and I'm heartened by the New York judge's ruling a moment ago that Bernie's bail will NOT be revoked and Bernie will be allowed to live in his $7 million penthouse while he awaits trial), anything that Madoff did, by definition (as suggested by my use of the past tense "did"), occurred before now, and our focus needs to be prospective, not retrospective.  

This sick, self-absorbed, self-indulgent obsession with things which have already happened ties up valuable intellectual and material resources which could otherwise be used in the serious battle to restore America's economic health, which, lying as it does in the future, has yet to occur.  Is anything likely to be recovered from Madoff?  No, of course not.  That $50 billion is gone, and we are simply throwing good money after bad in a futile attempt to "make an example" of Bernie Madoff, and the mood of the country, and more importantly, the mood of its political leaders, is impatient with such "nostalgic" indulgences as investigating crimes or "singling" people out for persecution.

So I think I would go beyond today's ruling allowing Bernie to remain free on bail.  I urge the dismissal of all charges against him.  In the largest sense, the problem is "self-contained;" only those who specifically represented that they could withstand a total loss of their capital were allowed this special opportunity to place their bets with Bernie in the first place.  The fact that, technically, there were no actual stocks, bonds or anything else in which they were investing does not materially change this crucial factor.  They said they could handle losing everything; they lost everything; and now they're all complaining.  

So the equities of the situation also favor an exoneration of Bernie.  It seems to me the investors are trying to change the rules of the game simply because they don't like the outcome, and the outcome, as I've pointed out, has already happened, which is a point on the space-time continuum where we simply can't afford to lavish our attention.  

Globalization and other Anti-Human Conspiracies

I came rather late to Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," but it would be hard for me to recommend it too highly.  A couple of well-read friends mentioned it at Thanksgiving.  The book goes very deep; I can see why some people have suggested that Mr. Pollan should be Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, instead of the usual agribusiness shill from Monsanto or ConAgra.Perhaps there's hope. Barack's impending selection of Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy was nothing short of inspired, IMHO.  It makes me wonder whether this can actually be the same country that gave us the Pre-Enlightenment Obscurantism of George W. Bush.  The answer being, of course:  No.  As the Buddhists tell us, one can never step into the same river twice.

Pollan's theses include the idea, anticipated in the writing of Frances Moore Lappe and Wendell Berry, that industrial food production is a very sick idea.  Factory beef, factory chicken, factory corn, monoculture farming, processed food, long supply lines for delivery, fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer, nitrogen runoff, manure lagoons, massive pollution, Omega-3/Omega-6 imbalance, incompatible diets for ruminants, animal cruelty, cancer, diabetes, obesity -- hey, we've perfected it all right here in America.  Michael Pollan's book is a great public service.

I was musing this morning, while drinking a cappucino with a little too much foam (and musing out loud, because that's what happens when I'm fully caffeinated), that the USA has managed, through its mass industrialization of everything, to place itself in the degenerate condition of a kind of capitalist USSR in the depths of its senescence.  We have a sort of command economy now: highly centralized, grotesquely energy-inefficient, wasteful in the extreme, and with the great mass of our population on a downward spiral toward poverty.  We are in the process also of finishing up an eight-year experiment in Leadership by Mental Defective.  That will be one for the history books for sure.  How did the United States finally arrive at a place where half the population actually voted for a brain-damaged, emotionally unstable intellectual mediocrity as the President of the United States?  Do you ever think about it in just those terms? Because that's exactly what happened.

I have theories, because I have theories about everything.  (Beats working, as someone once said.)  The "Globalists" really love this "interconnectedness" of everything, the human mosaic pulled together by modern technologies like television and the Internet.  Thomas Friedman, for example, practically achieves orgasm when writing about Internet "platforms" that allow everyone to "plug and play" in a "flat world."  A question that never seems to get asked is fairly basic: simply because these technologies exist, and were invented by humans, does that necessarily mean that they represent the optimal means of human interaction and lifestyle?

Marshall McLuhan's use of the term "global village" is often misinterpreted, I think.  The automatic assumption is that McLuhan meant this in a positive sense.  It seems more likely to me that he meant it simply in an inevitable sense.  The interaction between electronic media and the human brain, given the way the human brain works, leads inevitably to the illusion of interconnectedness because that's simply the way the human brain operates.  The perception of the senses is accepted as Reality.  Millions of years of evolution adapted us to this literalness: if we perceive something with our senses, then we conclude it's real.  Any other way of looking at the world is just too dangerous.  There isn't time to second-guess the primary authority of our senses.

The world of advertising, including the selling of political candidates, relies heavily on this essential fact of the human-techonology interface.  People will vote in droves for a brain-damaged nincompoop if you can dress him up and give him some folksy aphorisms, resulting in an image reminiscent of some real person we encountered in non-electronic life.  George W. Bush was an amalgamation of electronic pixels and rehearsed affect.  Nothing more.  And he got elected.

As with politicians, so with our food.  All this crap we eat seems vaguely like food so we eat it. We're told it's food, it's advertised on television as food, so we believe it's food.  Is it optimal nutrionally, in terms of taste and enjoyment, all this bar-coded junk we ingest?  No, of course not.  But industrial food production is what we do now, and the cheerleaders for globalization, Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, the World Trade Organization, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agribusiness, are excited that the human race has lost touch with its localized sense of direct judgment and discernment in favor of this new "platform" of Mass Everything.

The pendulum is beginning to swing the other way now.  The big energy companies are frightened to death, as they should be, of the idea that indiviudal citizens will be able to access their own energy directly from the sun for home heating, cooling and electricity.  As Americans die off from obesity, cancer and diabetes, industrial food will give way once again to localized agriculture.  The experiment with the Total Economy, as Wendell Berry called it, will come to an end.  The Global Village will give way to the older paradigm of maximal diversity.

Famous Mea Culpas of Western History

(Washington-) Facing a firing line of questions from Washington lawmakers, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman once considered the infallible maestro of the financial system, admitted on Thursday that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves without government oversight.  A fervent proponent of deregulation during his 18-year tenure at the Fed’s helm, Mr. Greenspan has faced mounting criticism this year for having refused to consider cracking down on credit derivatives, an unchecked market whose excesses partly led to the current financial crisis. (New York Times, Oct. 23).

 (Sodom-Gomorrah News Dispatch, 4000 B.C.) – Lot’s wife admitted today in an interview that she made a “huge mistake” in turning for one last look at the Twin Cities.  “It’s not like I wasn’t warned,” she said, speaking with difficulty given her current condition (a crystalline column of sodium chloride).  “God said not to look, but I did.  It’s all there in Genesis 19. It's tough to go from being a pillar of the community to a pillar of salt because of one screw-up.”

(Rome Clarion, 64 A.D.) – Nero, reached today at his villa on the Palatine, candidly admitted that he should have picked a better time to practice the violin than during the Great Fire.  “What was I thinking?” said the Emperor.  “Romans have a right to expect more from their leader than a guy who works on some fiddle tune while the Imperial City goes up in smoke.”

 (Le Monde, Paris – Oct. 16, 1793) – Marie Antoinette, interviewed while riding a wagon on the way to the guillotine, told reporters that “public relations are a lot more important than people sometimes think.  The ‘cake’ thing was a serious gaffe, I can sure see that now.”

 (Big Horn Bugle, June 26, 1876) – General George Custer, head of the U.S. Cavalry’s 7^th army, admitted today that he probably “grossly underestimated” opposing forces in the battle against a Cheyenne – Northern Lakota alliance near the Little Big Horn River in southeastern Montana.  “Wow,” said the blond Indian fighter.  “Sitting Bull’s got, what?  Two thousand braves?  I’ve got maybe 300 guys.  You can’t like my chances. I blew this one, big time.”

(Berlin Zeitgeist, April, 1945) – Adolf Hitler, reached by telephone in the besieged capital city of Germany, spoke above the roar of incoming Soviet artillery, plainly discernible even in his deep bunker.  “I screwed up,” Der Fuhrer said.  “I really shouldn’t have started this whole Third Reich thing, or the Second World War, or the genocide. I made some big mistakes, there's no getting around it.”

John McCain's Pastor Problem, Revisited: Was Hitler an Agent of God?

In Sunday school, Revelations was always my favorite book of the Bible. The church I attended was pretty square, and too much time was given over to dreary stuff about sin and redemption, all the things you weren't supposed to do (anything fun), and of course that macabre crucifixion story, forever and ever, amen. But Revelations -- as close as a Fundamentalist church ever got to the psychedelic, this side of glossolalia anyway. I liked the theories I heard later (not in Sunday school) that John of Patmos was tripping when he wrote it, maybe stoned on righteous (or Righteous) hash, or smoking some of the opium crop growing there around the Seven Churches in Asia Minor.

The Book of Revelations is full of beasts, dragons, pale horses, war, lakes of fire, bottomless pits, Satan, thousand-year reigns, Gog and Magog, and Chapter 20 is the main action sequence. It reads like a screen treatment for a Biblical "Star Wars." 1:"And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. 2: And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years." While the bust of the Devil is going down, the righteous are raised up and live and reign with Jesus for a thousand years. The rest of humankind, quick and dead, sleep through it, little suspecting what's going to happen at the end of that first Millenium. Hint: you don't wanna know.

When the thousand years are up, Satan's let loose again. You might ask why. It's like asking why the girl in the deserted house always walks down the dark hall when she hears a strange noise. I guess God just has a good feel for narrative flow. Sure, he could wrap things up right there, but that would leave the Faithful feeling cheated out of a big finish. Glenn Close needs to come up out of the bath tub one more time. So the Devil (staying in character and having learned nothing from a thousand years chained up in a bottomless pit) immediately hoofs it (heh heh) and starts deceiving the nations in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, and to gather them to the battle of Armageddon, which may refer to Har Megiddo in present-day Israel. Once Old Scratch has them in position, surrounding the camp of the Saints, fire comes down out of heaven and devours the Devil's Irregulars. Satan is then cast into the lake of fire and brimstone (which makes the Bottomless Pit seem like the Ritz Carlton), alongside the beast and false prophet, and is tormented day and night forever. The Final Judgment follows soon thereafter.

That's only the Cliff Notes version of the End Times, of course. I'm leaving out some other great stuff, like Chapter 13's description of the beast with seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. (As a kid, I wondered: did each head have ten horns, meaning seventy horns and seven hundred crowns? If some of the heads didn't have horns, that would be one spooky beast. Well, either way, actually.) Also, I would be remiss not to mention the seven angels with seven vials with the seven plagues, because that is some wild, wild stuff. Quick recap on the Plagues: #1: sores on those engaged in Beast-worship. #2: turning the sea into the blood of a dead man. #3: turning rivers into blood (kinda derivative, Angel No. 3). #4: vial poured on sun, angel acquires scorch-power vs. men. #5: vial pouring on seat of the Beast, which turns out the lights and causes the Beast to gnaw his tongue for pain. It is when Angel Numero Seis opens the Sixth Vial (have they made a movie called "The Sixth Vial" and if not, why not?) and pours it out on the Euphrates that things go freaky-deaky. The river dries up and three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon (guess who? He-e-e-e-e-e-re's Johnnnny!) and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. "Rev. 16:14: For they are the spirits of the devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty." So Angel No. 6 has the vial that's really vile, because it brings on the final battle. Angel No. 7, batting clean up, pours his vial on the air and a voice comes out of Heaven saying, "Th-th-th-at's all folks!" Actually the voice says "It is done," and I'm accurate here because I'm not going to run the same risk as someone else I could name, as you'll soon see.

I'll have some of whatever John of Patmos is having. And speaking of amphibious creatures, John Hagee, John McCain's Go-To Pastor, looks a lot like a mutant bull frog with a learning disability. The latest bad news on Hagee is that he gave a speech, or sermon, or was simply ranting and raving about Hitler's role as an agent of God who acted as a "hunter" driving the Jews back to Israel so the Final Act could get underway. You know, let the End Times roll.

Now I recounted a lot of Revelations to (a) have fun and (b) make a point. Isn't it strange, after reading through that delirious account of angels with killer vials, frogs as Army recruiters, Devils-in-Chains, and goats (or whatever) with seven heads and ten horns, that the part everyone would find weird is calling Hitler an agent of God? That's so... tame. You're going to compare that little squirt from Austria with a seven-headed animal with seventy horns and seven hundred crowns? The Third Reich with Gog and Magog? You're messing with me, right? Hitler was just a man, a shitty little man to be sure, but just a man. The Devil-Dragon, the Beast with the Number 666, the False Prophet, all with their frog-filled mouths, these are spirit world creatures of immense power, of unimaginable evil. And they're completely mythological, the fabulisms of a guy who sounds like he was trying to shake off the DT's after a four month bender on ouzo.

So if I've got this right, millions and millions of Americans have absolutely no trouble if John Hagee believes literally in the End Times story I just summed up. That's why the Evangelicals are such fervent supporters of Israel, because the Jews need to be there when Vial No. 6 kicks things into high gear. So no problem with all of that; and if John McCain seeks support from a man who really, really believes that's how it will all play out, it's a sign not of clinical schizophrenia but of sound religious faith. It's a plus for McCain's campaign. The only thing pulling Hagee down is he got a little creative with this Hitler stuff. If he had kept to the story and said that God got the Devil-Dragon to do it, everything would have been all right.

Well, I've got a word or two for John Hagee, because I paid attention in Sunday school. Seems to me his exegesis runs afoul of the very last chapter of the Bible, Revelations 22: 18: ..."If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book." Vials Nos. 1 through 7, inclusive, John-Boy. I'll see ya; wouldn't want to be ya.

Teachings from Chairman Kahn

I mentioned a while back that I was reading On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn, polymath, RAND Corporation fellow and model for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove." Herman Kahn didn't look much like Peter Sellers's caricature, actually; indeed, not at all. He died fairly young, probably for reasons associated with a lifelong problem of obesity, which again is nothing like his movie version.

The brilliance, however, and the blood-chilling willingness to look at any existential situation which humans can create, no matter how horrible, with a steady, penetrating eye are the same. That implacable fixity of purpose allowed him to "think the unthinkable," and it's evident throughout his long book that he delighted in exploring ideas all the way to their inevitable, awful conclusions, wherever they led. I suppose that's what prompted his occasional vilification, along with his Cold Warrior conservatism.

Society needs thinkers like Herman Kahn as a kind of reality check, so we don't get carried away with idealistic notions about ourselves. That self-glorification, I believe, has been a major impediment to American innovation in the face of global challenges. Kahn was a physicist first and foremost and looked at any problem from a rigorous and detached perspective. Writing about the revulsion that most Americans felt in pondering the value of life after a thermonuclear war, Herman pointed out a simple and homely analogy, our tolerance for traffic fatalities, as an example that we are perhaps far more callous about the suffering of others than we like to think. After even a catclysmic war, the survivors would go on, seeking meaning and even happiness to the extent possible. It's simply part of our genetic disposition, however much we like to believe in heroic traits of empathy that would make us "envy the dead."

In modern times, under the heavy influence of conventional political correctness (where idealization of homo sapiens is de rigeur), we're inclined to characterize such sang-froid as "sociopathy," a term often hurled in the general direction of the Presidential incumbent. This criticism (in his case) has to do, largely, with deaths in Iraq, American and indigenous. The sad truth is that if the president is "sociopathic" about such deaths, so are most Americans. I think the true grieving for the fallen American soldiers in Iraq is largely confined to the families and comrades-in-arms of the dead and wounded. Most Americans don't think about the Iraqis at all. Most Americans have compartmentalized the Iraq war as useless and futile and so don't see the outcome as affecting their daily lives in any meaningful sense, except as a waste of money. So we go about our business, as news of the war retreats from the front pages and becomes a kind of dull buzz in the background.

One could even trot out Herman's car wreck analogy on the subject of sociopathic indifference. As relevant today as ever. When he was writing, in 1960, the U.S. had a population of about 180 million with about 40,000 traffic-related fatalities per year. Today the numbers are about 42,000 fatalities and a population of about 300 million. The improved statistics no doubt reflect major advances in safety design, such as air bags and inertial seat belts. The term "traffic fatality" includes pedestrian deaths caused by cars and motorcycle deaths, along with a few other categories which are motor vehicle related. Kahn pointed out that if you lowered the speed limit to 20 miles per hour, you could probably eliminate most deaths. In our era, it seems reasonable to say that most deaths could be eliminated by a reduction in speed to 35 mph, given the improvements in car safety. There would still be deaths caused by bad weather, driving over cliffs or into water, etc., but it isn't difficult to imagine a drastic reduction in mortality, maybe by 90% or more.

And as I write this, the price for oil is topping $130 per barrel. Since the power necessary to overcome air resistance increases by the cube of increasing speed, lower speeds mean improved gas mileage. Indeed, at 35 mph (enforced by governors placed on car engines), it isn't difficult to imagine all our personal transportation needs being met by electric cars, eliminating gasoline altogether. So: virtually no deaths and no oil importation. It seems likely as well that since it might take 12 or 14 hours to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles at such a tortoise-like pace, the demand for high speed rail would increase dramatically. Finally, imagine that all cars were equipped with breathalyzer interlock systems that did not permit operation of the slow moving electric car by a driver with a BAL in excess of .02 (the standard in such countries as Sweden, where the designated driver is a social institution). The roads would be about as safe as we could make them.

So why don't we do all of that? Because it's inconvenient and because we've set the economy up to run at a faster pace. We tolerate all that blood and gore on the highways, all those tragic deaths, all that wasted gasoline, the growing problem with the balance of trade, our funding of autocratic regimes in the deserts of the Middle East, because it's just easier to own a car of any size we want and drive it as fast as we can to get where we're going, and because we perceive that more money can be made living that way. All the deaths caused by driving too fast for safety are a tolerable and necessary side effect of those simple values, or so the evidence of our behavior indicates. So even though the total deaths per year exceed the total soldier fatalities in Iraq by a factor of 10, we don't care, even though we could obviously do something about it immediately.

As I say, that guy Kahn was a smart dude. Makes you think, doesn't he?

And the same society that thinks that way is supposed to worry about soldiers they never met? Just remember, young men & women, as you enlist in the Army: saving your own ass is Job One.

El derecho de vuelta

I suppose it's because of a spasm of nostalgia that has seized me in the wake of the creation of an alumni website for my high school, but I've been giving more thought to this curious phenomenon of "shifting frames" which confounds our ability to comprehend contemporary reality in, well..., real terms. I think I will call this effect "age parallax" because it's kind of cool to create a term and it sounds erudite as all hell, don't you think? Parallax: "Simply put, it is the apparent shift of an object against the background that is caused by a change in the observer's position. The term is derived from the Greek παραλλαγή (parallagé), meaning alteration".

So, sifting around in old pictures of elementary school classes, in a Northern California suburb where I lived in the 1950s, I found one of a fourth grade class circa 1958. There was nothing special about the subdivision where I grew up, nothing special about the school, nor the weather, nor anything at all, really. It was one of those places thrown up during the post-War building boom on land "reclaimed" from San Francisco Bay (filled in, in other words), and the houses were stuffed up with families as fast as the homes could be tacked together. There was no history or lore associated with this subdivision, laid out on a wavy grid of dog-legged streets, nothing like the colorful associations of old neighborhoods on the East Coast. They were utilitarian and abstract, as opposed to organic. It's special in our memories only because it's where we came of age.

So in that picture there are 30 students, boys and girls. Every single student is white, the teacher is white and matronly, and everyone looks clean and presentable, in that Eisenhower Era way. Looking for a picture of the school on the Internet, to post on the alumni site, I found instead a description of all schools in the city, including demographic composition. For my old elementary school, I found the following. The school is now 12% white, 5% black, 5% Asian/Chinese, a smattering of South Seas (Tongan, Samoan, mainly)...and 65% Hispanic. This shouldn't be that surprising, really. California is about 40% Hispanic/Latino, and those are just the official numbers. My old neighborhood represents a good entrance-level domicile for immigrants, as perhaps the Lower East Side of Manhattan did in another era. It's down at heels now, the curbs crowded with cars, comprised of houses that probably had a useful life of 50 years when they were built and have now been around more than 60. Much of California was built that way, including vast tracts of older Southern California neighborhoods, constructed only to endure the mild California winters, light wood frame construction, asphalt shingle roofs -- it all starts going to hell after a few decades, but it starts becoming "affordable," in the California sense, as a kind of makeshift low income housing.

It behooves us Anglos to remember that America, as a First World nation, is unique in sharing such a long, essentially unguarded border with a Third World country. Look around the globe; you won't find many comparable situations. And unlike the tribal grounds of the Native Americans, whom we mostly exterminated with disease and war, the land we stole from its Mexican owners (who in turn had displaced the California Indians) remains adjacent to a large population of the relatives of the Californios, the people we stole it from. Such luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams and Henry David Thoreau (remember his night in jail?) protested the war with Mexico as an unjustified war of aggression, carried out under the fig leaf of Manifest Destiny, whatever the hell that means. It began with the Texas rebellion, supported by Southerners who wanted another slave state to add to their side. There's the glory of the Alamo for you. It then opportunistically spread, about a decade later, to California and the rest of the Southwest, and the United States, at long last, stretched from sea to shining sea.

It would appear that our Mexican neighbors have been exercising a kind of ad hoc derecho de vuelta - a "right of return." No one knows how many Hispanics are actually in California illegally. In a way it doesn't matter, because they're not going anywhere. They're an integral part of life in the Golden State, even if I sometimes miss the full impact of that phenomenon because of age parallax.

Congress and the Brinks Job on Social Security

I confess that, as weird and wonky as it might seem, I have always been fascinated by the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and all of the moral and actuarial drama which surrounds it. There is something deliciously insightful about this tale -- the ideas of institutional irresponsibility, of blame aimed at a moving target, of the essential and ineradicable short-sightedness of human behavior. If you pay enough attention to it, you can learn everything you need to know about the political process.

Social Security began under FDR. It is, to its core, a socialist program. The idea, spawned during the Great Depression, was that Social Security would provide an old-age benefit to ensure the dignified retirement of America's citizens - not really a luxurious stipend, of course, but a means to avoid living under a bridge and eating food from discarded cat food tins. That it has survived all these years owes to the genius of its money-in, money-out format. Current workers pay in, retired workers are paid out. While we have a Social Security number, this "account" is solely for computing our eventual benefit; the SS Administration does not actually maintain bank accounts for individual citizens.

Conservatives have always hated Social Security, of course, because of its aura of European Socialist decadence. The government should not help people. The government should run the prison system and wage war. Nevertheless, the plutocrats tolerated Social Security because (a) they had to, because of its popularity, and (b) because its funding was a stand-alone system powered by the FICA tax. This tax, a regressive, off-the-top levy which hits the lower classes much harder than the rich, allowed the government simply to act as a paymaster. Money in, money out, and all of the precious revenues not attributable to FICA could be spent for the wet-dream fantasies of the military-industrial complex.

Actually, it was better than that. The Baby Boom generation, which accounts for so much in the history of the United States over the last 60 years, foresaw a problem with their own retirement beginning...around...now. This foresight motivated Congress in the early 1980's to "fix" Social Security by increasing the FICA tax to create a surplus for the years between 1983 and 2008 so that the system would remain solvent. The Baby Boom Bolus, pushed by pythonesque peristalsis down the alimentary canal of snake-time (don't try this language at home), would one day reach the asshole of retirement. Plans must be laid or that turd would stink to high heaven.

It was curious, in a way, that the increase would occur during the first Reagan term, when the federal government was developing its hate-itself self-image and doing everything it could to reduce taxes. What made it palatable was that the surplus (which was supposed to be saved) could be swiped by Congress and invested in the military-industrial complex. More money for lobbyists! We like this FICA increase! The stolen money was replaced by an IOU, a special intra-governmental Treasury note with an interest rate and everything.

As an analogy, suppose you were funding your own retirement by putting money in a bank. Each year you put away $1,000. However, you like shiny cars and flat-screen TVs so you "borrow" the money each year, spend it and replace it with a promissory note to yourself plus 5% interest. At the end of forty years, you have $40,000 in notes, plus all that accrued and compounded interest, and you take your notes down to the bank so you can retire. The bank says that's fine, but the payor of the notes will have to pay up before the withdrawal can be honored. The payor of the notes is you. In order to honor your promise to yourself, you get a job. After a few months at your new job, you realize something was wrong with your retirement plan.

This is, without any serious difference, the current situation with Congress. Congress currently has about $80 billion in yearly surplus it can steal from Social Security, an amount which will decline precipitously between now and 2017, when the fund will "go negative." At that point, Congress will look exactly like the shlub with his clutch of promissory notes. We call that pile of worthless stationery the "Social Security Trust Fund." As David Walker of the GAO says, it is "without accounting significance."

Conservatives (such as W) attempted to "reform" Social Security a few years ago by "privatizing" the system. They needed to do so to avoid a fate worse than death; if Social Security isn't abolished, the "general fund" is going to have to "pay back" the money it stole. To do that, those precious non-FICA revenue sources will have to be tapped and misdirected from God's intended beneficiaries, the fat cats of the Military-Industrial Complex. America will become simply another Socialist Republic.

Whom does one blame for this fiasco? A sleepwalking American electorate? All those Congresspeople who have come and gone in the last generation? At what object does one focus his impotent rage? That's what makes the situation so subtle and insidious. So ripe for self-laceration. Lying deep within the mystery of the Social Security crisis are the very clues to the untenability of mass, impersonal democracy. The human frailities of cupidity and irresponsibility play out in a system of such complexity and unaccountability that while the whole system crashes, we cannot find a single person on whom to vent our wrath.

As Hobbes Almost Said, Life is Short, Nasty & Obese

It's difficult to improve on reality sometimes. Almost always, really. I mean, how do you top the finding below?

Conclusions

"Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures." PLOS Journal (open access)

America is a very fat nation. This is perceptually reinforced whenever we find ourselves in the waiting area of a foreign airport on the trip home. Americans don't look like other nationalities. It's like spending a month in the Serengeti photographing gazelles and then suddenly encountering a herd of elephants (no offense to pachyderms - their size is adaptive and useful). Americans are stupid, too - try to imagine another cogent explanation for the presidency of George W. Bush. However, you can't cover everything at once.

31% of Americans are obese (Body Mass Index >30) and 64% of Americans are overweight (BMI >25). Somehow these numbers don't do justice to what we're talking about, but they'll have to do. Still: 60 million really, really fat people.

They're the subject of discrimination, too, as reflected in the snarky tone of this blog piece. That is why I commend the study undertaken by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Centre for Prevention and Health Services Research, Bilthoven, The Netherlands, quoted above (not an American study--the Dutch must be unusually fastidious, because most of them seem to measure in at about 6' 6" and weigh 160 lbs). You can read about Americans, however, at www.obesity.org. The point of the study is simple: while they're alive, fat people are a health problem. But then they die, sooner than their svelte countrymen, and relieve the medical "system" in America of their blubberized problems right at that stage in life when medical expenses become routine and (especially in America) astronomical. The healthy people are the ones who really cause the system to groan under their weight - they just go on living, seeing doctors, replacing joints, taking drugs, checking into the hospital.

In the study, the Dutch divided the groups into three cohorts of health-freak sub-25 BMIs, slobs (BMI >30) and smokers who were otherwise "healthy" (that's what it says). Smokers are the true heroes of medical cost-containment, of course. Like the tubs, they front-load their medical problems into the first sixty years of life, and they do hog the budget disproportionately while they're around. But the health freaks just hang on. And on.

I take back what I said about Americans being stupid. Intuitively, they have seen the light and have been practicing what the Dutch can only talk about. It is credibly predicted (who would argue?) that by the year 2025, 50% of all Americans will be obese. Next time you're near a school yard, take a look and see if that seems unreasonable. That's an improvement of 20% in cost containment volunteers in only 18 years. Let's round off and say that obesity increases at the rate of 1% per year. You see where we're going with this. We'll hit that magic mark of Universal Fat Ass no later than 2078.

Frankly, I think we'll do much better than that. It's my enduring belief in Yankee ingenuity. Once a critical mass of massiveness is reached, I think the process accelerates (indeed, it's accelerating now). Fat begets fat. Meals will keep getting larger, SuperSize giving way to GargantuanSize, then to RidiculousSize. No one will notice that anyone else is fat, and with a worthless dollar, no one will travel and encounter what homo sapiens is supposed to look like.

That's why I don't believe in doomsday scenarios, like the "unaffordability" of healthcare BS you hear so much about. Nursing homes, assisted living, all of that stuff -- none will be necessary in the long run. Americans, waddling toward an early sunset, will always find a way.