The fish weren't biting anyway

Enough of a break for now. I feel that I'm missing out on opportunities to chime in on this Rick Perry "Ponzi scheme" "controversy," and that's intolerable, given the close, quasi-symbiotic relationship which has always (okay, almost never) existed between the Perry Campaign and Waldenswimmer (which is to say, they quoted me at length once; think about it: there will probably come a day when I can say that I was quoted by the campaign of the President of the United States of America. Awesome.)

Anyway, my main complaint about the abuse of such terms as "Ponzi scheme" to describe Social Security is that, as with so many other usages which evaporate into the MediaCloud (TM pending) and become completely amorphous, this perfectly good, sensible term becomes debased and useless because of the lack of precision so characteristic of this dumb-ass country. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It has many problems, chief among them the fatal demographics of this country and the fact that on a cash flow basis (the only basis that counts) Social Security is already in the red, 6 years earlier than forecast in the recent past. So we're hosed.

Still, it's not a Ponzi scheme. Charles Ponzi ran a Ponzi scheme, Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme. The cardinal characteristic of this species of confidence fraud is that the fraudster, such as Madoff, solicits investments which he represents will be placed in income producing assets. He promises a steady, lavish rate of return. The gullible marks turn over their money. The fraudster then takes this money, skims enough to buy and maintain his chateau in the Loire Valley and waterfront house in Palm Beach, sets himself up with lavish cash flow, and then begins doling out the "returns" (say 12% per year) to the suckers, who are unaware that their own money and that of later "investors" who bought from Madoff on the recommendation of themselves and other suckers is being used to fund these fictitious gains. Then a smart Greek like Harry Markopolis comes along, realizes in an instant that nobody can pay out returns like that, year after year, in a dogshit economy like the United States, and proceeds to bust the con.

That's a Ponzi scheme. It's really beautiful in its simplicity and sheer criminality; the crook gets rich using only what Willy Loman had, "a smile and a shoeshine."

But that's not Social Security. As I listen to more and more of Rick Perry, I am reaching the conclusion that even by Republican candidate standards, this is a pretty dim bulb. His explanation for his charge against Social Security is that younger workers won't receive their promised benefits. Yeah, true; it's likely that those now retired or nearing retirement aren't going to receive all of their benefits either, and for the same reason. The program just doesn't work anymore. Today's retirees (the Boomers, who are reaching Social Security age at the rate of 10,000 people per day) are counting on about 1.75 workers per retiree for their support. In a dead jobs market. With average wages, in real terms, declining. Indeed, the Census just released numbers showing that the average male worker in the United States, in inflation-adjusted dollars, earns less than such a worker in 1968 America. As I said to the research scientist at the Great Southwestern University, that sounds completely believable. 1968 was absolutely an affluent, wonderful time here in the U.S.A, provided you weren't involved in fighting one of the first of the completely useless wars America concocted. Or unless you were Martin Luther King, Jr. Or Bobby Kennedy. Okay, nothing is ever entirely perfect, even if you had a new black Mustang.

Social Security worked fine back then, too. It was easy; the tax was light, the earners were many, the country was rich. None of these things is true anymore. The latest monthly disaster report was just issued by the Department of the Treasury, which confirms the ongoing trend. Total FICA receipts (including disability) were about $43 billion; the outlays, including disability payments, were about $60 billion. The shortfall was made up by payments from the "Trust Fund," which doesn't exist; that is to say, the difference was made up the usual way, by public borrowing, or by having the Federal Reserve pay the interest which the Treasury owes the Federal Reserve on the Treasury bonds held by the Federal Reserve to the Treasury (I just like saying that).

Consider the viability of a system which requires 1.75 workers to support each retiree (many of such retirees are still of working age, actually - such as your faithful blogger here, who is still working - please, no applause necessary), a retiree cohort increasing by 10,000 golfers per day. And all of this is happening against the background of a crap job market, massive unemployment, declining real wages, and a political class who keep reducing the FICA tax (thus hamstringing the funding mechanism further) in an effort to curry favor with the electorate. Rather than ideological rhetoric about "Big Government," the C+ student from Texas A&M should focus rather on the inherent unworkability of this thing (I'm still trying to help, Rick - shucks, I just cain't quiiiiiiiiiitttt you!). But you can't call this "fraud," because the facts are open and obvious. Liberal economists may emphasize the "moral imperative" of recognizing the validity of the Trust Fund (which I have always characterized as a crime scene), others may talk about "tweaking" the system, but it doesn't make any difference in the long run. The money isn't there, it's not going to be there, and as younger voters come into their own, they're going to dump this thing. And who can really blame them?

Social Security is doomed, but not because it's a Ponzi. Because its day has come and gone. Because we'd rather spend a trillion on the military to fight wars to secure our oil supplies. Because we'd rather go on being energy pigs. Because we're a country in name only. Because, fundamentally, we don't give a shit. Because frankly, Scarlett, it's not 1968 anymore.

Forgot to Go Fishing

Time for the annual summer break, now that summer is almost over. Since I've never been entirely clear on why I do this, it's doubly nuts to write the blog when I can't think of anything I want to say. There isn't really much "news" these days anyway; all industrialized nations are financially strapped and drowning in unpayble debt; we're not doing much about climate change; we're still operating at the 1.5 Earths rate in terms of resource depletion; the United States is still fighting about six (6) wars, give or take an unmanned drone or two. Big Business still owns the federal government.

One thought that does occur to me: I read something about Noam Chomsky's idea of "spectator democracy," which he says has become the reality in modern America. The voters are moved around by the advertising business, which in turn is paid for by Big Business, and these ad campaigns determine who will serve in federal government and execute the business plan of the powerfully wealthy. Hard to argue with that. It helps explain Barack Obama's extreme passivity and seeming acquiescence in the status quo. He's just the front desk man -- it appears that his Wall Street bankrollers knew what they were getting, even if the rest of us, unfortunately, allowed ourselves one last illusion about "Light Workers" and conquering heroes.

I would add to this Chomsky concept the idea of "mediated reality," a term which first came to my attention thanks to the great Jerry Mander (and h/t here to the research scientist at the Great Southwestern University) in his visionary book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. It does seem that at the outset of every cultural watershed, there are those who see clearly, and first, what the real implications of a pervasive technology will be. Mander could see it where television was concerned. His point about the substitution of electronic images for the real world, and the consequent tendency of those living in industrial countries to become indifferent to the actual state of the natural world, has only gotten worse with the Internet and social media. Dmitry Orlov, I note, has taken up this theme - the younger generations growing up with Facebook and Twitter have happy glowing images and avatars to look at, to become absorbed in, so no need to notice the incredible ugliness of the artificial environment we have constructed around them.

Yet "mediated realities" have other effects. I think "spectator democracy" is one of them. We're so immersed in reading about the political scene, and "forwarding emails," and the rest of it (even blogging about it all), that we forget all of this solipsistic activity is largely impotent to change anything in the real, non-virtual world.

Perhaps a key distinction is the rise of the Tea Party, and it is here that the connection between the Tea People and Evangelical Christianity (and its darker spawn, such as Dominionism) is perhaps telling. Evangelical Christians get together, physically, on a regular basis, and they discuss their agendas, religious, political and otherwise. And the Tea Party people, building on this organizational advantage, do physically assemble for the petition of grievances - and it is this distinction from the passive liberals which accounts for their astonishing success. I cannot even tell what the Tea Party message is; their "platform" appears to be a hodgepodge of completely inconsistent planks. They seem to be both for and against Big Government, for and against Big Business, for and against almost anything you can name. I am sure the Tea Party people do use the Internet; the point is, they do not stop there. They assemble outside the White House. They show up, in droves, at political rallies and candidates' appearances. They're all over the place, and they force the Republicans to answer to them.

These methods were the ones used by liberals in the 1960's for the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Today liberals would hope to integrate Alabama lunch counters and Arkansas schools, and stop the war, by means of forwarding emails, I guess.

Anyway, see you in a month or so, probably. Or not. Depends on whether anything new ever happens.

Agnotology and future developments

Not to belabor these religious matters, but the inability of anyone from a skeptical viewpoint ever to close the difference between hermself and the community of believers is instructive in other areas as well. I was thinking, in particular, about the reflexive habit of Christians to refer to the Bible as proof of the Bible, and, in general, to the primacy of strong feeling over a more austere, scientific approach.

My thoughts led me to a slightly ghoulish train of thought which I'll reproduce here, the ghoulishness at least having the advantage of being memorable. It starts with this observation: if I trust the formulas in a physics textbook, for example, it is because I sense pretty strongly that the formulas have been experimentally validated in the real world. Most rational people would not argue that the formula for a falling body above Earth (d=1/2gt^2, where g is the terrestrial constant for gravity, d is distance, and t is time) is true because this formula is written down in a physics book; it's the other way around. It's in the book because it was experimentally validated first.

I performed one such validation a few years ago when I was writing a novel which had a scene set on the Golden Gate Bridge. Given my penchant for gathering essentially useless facts, I researched and found that the bridge at the center is about 225 feet above the water. This gave me, roughly, d. The question germane to my book was: if a person stepped off into space from the center of the bridge, how long till splashdown? I had a lousy high school physics teacher (discussed at length recently with faithful reader W, who suffered the same fate), a teacher who thought physics, in some sense, could be taught non-quantitatively, so I'm always at pains to fill in this gap with some real number crunching. Rearranging the formula above, I came to a result of around 3 seconds, with maximum speed at about 80 miles per hour.

Around this time, the haunting documentary "The Bridge" was released, and I watched it on dvd. This movie actually films a number of bridge suicides over the course of one year by means of a camera constantly trained on the span. Ergo, of course, I used the stopwatch function on my phone to time one particularly well-filmed jumper (who cooperated by falling backwards off the bridge rather than jumping, which confounds the calculation). It was shown, naturally, several times, both in slow-mo and in real time. My stopwatch reading was consistently 4 seconds for the real time sequences. Well, of course: air resistance, wind, et cetera. Close enough, however, for some sort of Newtonian validation.

Biblical proof is circular because it has no real-world cognates or referents. It's a completely sterile exercise in reading something and declaring it's true because you just read it. We're asked to believe what's in the Book because it's in the Book. I've often thought this circularity does not need to be so. An actual god could show up at Times Square at noon on Sunday and put on a magic show which would eliminate all doubt. Believers have various answers for this curious resistance of the deity to clearing up the mystery, none of them particularly convincing to me. Most of the excuses, in fact, sound a little smug, as if believers actually prefer the mystery as a way of enhancing the In-Crowd nature of being among the saved.

Anyway, this word "agnotology" has arisen recently as a word applicable to what is becoming known, in America, as the "Alternative Reality Right (ARR)." Essentially, agnotology is the study of culturally-induced ignorance. To run for President as a Republican these days, it is almost mandatory (why do I say "almost?") that a person voice certain culturally-required professions of profound ignorance, such as Rick Perry's idea that evolution "is a theory with some holes in it." Why stop there? Maybe that gravitational theory up above has some holes in it too. (I've never understood how Strict Creationists deal with the ability of bacteria to develop immunity to antibiotics. Is it the Creationist position that bacteria just "figure it out?") And although 97% of the scientists seriously involved in climate research confirm that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is occurring, and that, if anything, the official pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are perhaps dangerously optimistic in their time lines, the ARR will point out a few dissenters (usually referred to as "thousands of scientists") and claim that these lone voices (some with demonstrable links to oil and coal companies) are right, although, to tell the truth, the ARR cannot explain even the fundamentals of AGW and are basing their preference for the (extreme) minority position for the same reason as their preference for Creationism, I guess, which is also an extreme minority position among biologically-educated scientists, including all of those in the National Academy of Sciences. In point of fact, it's a mystery to me why three disparate fields of human inquiry (the origin of the Universe, evolutionary adaptation and AGW) should all inspire the same response from the same theocratic impulse. Is it just a maniacal desire to be wrong all the time, no matter what the human cost?

Since the United States is the world's primary energy hog (on a per capita basis - well, hell, you name the basis), there are real world consequences of such idiocy. Reading this book by Richard Heinberg (and the Peak Oil theorists in general, including Our Man Dmitry), I'm beginning to see that peak oil, and the concomitant requirement that life again be re-localized on a massive scale, may operate as a kind of deus ex machina (and that's the one sense in which "god" might have some currency). To wit, American progressives (the educated members living in Consensus Reality) are never, ever going to convince the ARR of...well, anything. That's what agnotology is concluding. The ARR is so stuck in a kind of mindless denial and delusion, so haunted by ghosts, souls, goblins, gods, demons and the rest of their dramatis personae of insanity, that there is absolutely no hope whatsoever that this thing can be turned around through rational procedures. Thus, to counter the impediment which the United States is, an outside force, called Mother Nature, must intervene and compel all the changes that America, acting monolithically, is incapable of making on a volitional basis.

There might be time for that to happen before the window of opportunity slams shut and runaway greenhouse becomes inevitable, and Mankind's arrogant experiment with accelerating the entropic conversion of potential energy to waste heat beyond natural rhythms will come to a screaming stop. It's almost enough to make me believe in Divine Providence.

Richard Heinberg's The End of Growth

I've been reading Richard Heinberg's latest book, The End of Growth, which follows up where his book Peak Everything left off. Increasingly, it seems to me that we've turned a corner in our economic reality. Whereas before the arguments were monopolized, on the one hand, by the liberal Keynesians, who contended the path to growth, and thus full employment, was a robust participation by the federal government through spending to take up the slack in private demand; and on the other, by the Austrians and other "conservatives" who are convinced that government is the problem, and that big public debts are the precursors to runaway inflation, the "Deep Economics" of people like Heinberg (building on seminal work by Herman Daly and his Steady State Economics of the 1970's, along with all the brilliant books by Barry Commoner, which analyzed the thermodynamics of our energy predicament), Heinberg et al. proceed as if there is a physical environment involved in economic reality. Pretty wild, huh? I think so too.

I think that small lacuna, the absence of context, is what drives me a little nuts about liberal economists such as Paul Krugman. His personal style, grandiose as it is, grates somewhat, but it's his (apparently) unexamined belief that "growth in GDP," regardless of its composition, that makes me question whether there is really much of a difference between a "liberal" economist such as Krugman or Brad DeLong (on the faculty at John Yoo University) and a conservative. They all want the same thing, I guess: the return of the American consumer economy with unemployment at a nice, healthy 5%, growth at 4% of GDP, just like the good old days. They are only arguing about how to get there - should the federal government increase its existing deficit of around $1.5 trillion (and 43% of its total budget) to something along the lines of $2.5 trillion? Krugman & Co. say yes, because they're convinced the medium-term growth in the economy will allow the economy to fill in the difference with tax revenues in the longer term. The conservatives say this is folly, not because they don't believe in growth, but because the federal government will "crowd out" private investment or "over regulate."

Although I write about it from time to time, I don't really care whether the United States increases its budget deficits. The interest rates it pays on Treasury debt are, for the time being, dirt cheap, and the effect on servicing costs of the national debt (that $8 trillion or so that is truly "public," that is, not one of the intragovernmental trust funds or bonds owned by the Treasury's alter ego, the Federal Reserve) are not a big deal - now. But I actually don't care because it's pretty obvious we're never going to get near paying off the national debt anyway because that would require true growth in the economy, and that is not going to happen. So pile it on: a deadbeat with room on his credit limit may as well take things up to the max before he goes belly up.

What Heinberg & his ilk point out (Dmitry Orlov is very good on these same points) is that actual growth in an economy (as opposed to monetary and fiscal games, which the United States substitutes for productive activity) requires energy. We don't often think about the congruence of energy and economic growth because we've been distracted by people getting rich writing credit default swaps, which seem to require only household alternating current plugged into a computer. But at the macroeconomic level, an increase in wealth (meaning, an increase in the overall well-being of the general populace in terms of maintaining their vital heat through eating and shelter) requires a real interaction between the human race and the planet we live on. Fundamentally, this is because we are ourselves carbon-based life forms dependent on physical processes for survival; while it's confusing at times because of all the virtual avatars we now substitute for our actual selves, facebook and Twitter, by themselves, are not something you can eat. The way we effect the interaction between Homo sapiens and Earth is through the use of energy.

We are now entering an era of permanent shortage in the cheap liquid fuels on which modern civilization has been built, and everything is going to change as a result. In the United States, for example, liquid fuels (primarily gasoline) are used for 90% of the passenger miles traveled by Americans. Petroleum inputs are used in virtually everything, but most critically in order to carry on agribusiness. Our consumer society depends on long-range transportation of goods through the global economy to their Big Box destinations. At a point past Peak Oil (which has already happened), then the whole system begins to wobble, as the price of oil goes up, the fear of shortages begins to drive future prices, as the uncertainty of long-haul restocking begins to weigh on the decisions whether to expand existing business, et cetera. As Dmitry Orlov has demonstrated through a careful thought experiment, the ride down from Peak Oil is not a smooth descent, but a chaotic, bumpy ride, as various negative feedbacks begin to interact. More or less the way the world increasingly seems to be these days, in other words. We're just not always aware of the Man Behind the Curtain, imagining it's all because of one political "policy" decision or another. Things will become increasingly clear over the next decade, that's for sure.

As I say: an interesting read.

Will the State of the Union be delivered in tongues?

I note with a growing sense of detached bemusement that Gov. Rick Perry of the Lone Star State is strenuously creating as much daylight as possible between any perception of himself as a "rational former Democrat" (which he once was, when he served as Al Gore's campaign organizer in Texas) and his new incarnation, that of a dumbed-down, anti-intellectual, global-warming-denying, Creationist know-nothing. "God is how we got here," he assured a crowd of the Republican Ultra-Orthodox recently.

It's amazing that this stuff works in America, in 2011, at least 250 years after the Enlightenment, 150 years after The Origin of Species, over a hundred years after the Special Theory of Relativity, despite the amazing discoveries of modern cosmology. "Evolution has some holes in it," Governor Rick lamented. It may have been covered in one of the 9 classes he got a D in at Texas A&M, but nevertheless, Perry has a powerful sense that we're not monkeys, even if our physiology is about 99% identical. Makes you wonder if the Creator just ran out of ideas, and started tweaking existing models a tiny bit rather than building from scratch.

In response to the nice comment on the last blog - I write about Christianity and religion because I know more about it. I was raised in a Fundamentalist Christian church, heavily indoctrinated for 18 years or so till I escaped to Heathenland (Berkeley). Thus, I am intimately familiar with the double binds and circular logic used to demonstrate that there is no escape from God's Truth: the very act of resisting one's "salvation" was prophesied and predicted by Scripture. Further, the Bible is inerrant (proved by Scripture itself, which says it is), and thus if the Bible declares that the act of resisting salvation is further proof of the truth of the Bible, because the Bible predicted that man would resist the truth and be unable to see it, then the Bible has confirmed itself through the very act of any man's renunciation.

I always suspect that when word play is used to prove Actual Things, then we are dealing with something fundamentally Not Real. Bertrand Russell was particularly adept at puncturing such sophistry, as when he dealt with the notion of First Cause. An argument for Creation is that nothing can exist without a cause; the Universe exists, thus it has a cause. That cause, rationally, is God, an intelligent force who put things together just as Rick Perry says He did. Russell, however, refusing to play along with this easy syllogism, then asked the question: then who created God? The answer given by the faithful is that God "just always was." To which Bertrand responded that the same exact answer could then be given for the Universe, or the materials out of which the Universe was made: the Universe just always was, and did not need a cause.

Neither of these "theories" is necessarily true, of course. I don't think Bertrand Russell was attempting to elaborate a theory of cosmology; he was simply demonstrating that if all you want to do is play word games, you can't really "prove" anything. You can only demonstrate that such a mode of argument, free of any empirical proof or investigation, can prove nothing. You cannot "trap" an agile mind into belief in God. Maybe it's possible that the materials present at the Big Bang did not exist a nanosecond before and "quantum fluxed" into existence out of nothing. Who's to say what went on in such Singularities billions of years ago and under such exotic, incomprehensible conditions? I think the only honest answer to Leibnitz's question, why is there something instead of nothing?, is this: Ya got me.

But here in the Enchanted United States, in this demon-haunted land, we're carrying on as if the Enlightenment never happened. I took the time to further my education on "charismatic Christianity," which apparently received new impetus around 1962 and has since become quite the In Thing, Christ-wise. It's from the Greek "charismata," meaning gifts, and refers to the Pentecostal practices of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), prophesy, healing by laying on of hands, and working miracles. Those seem to be the Big Four, and you have to admit that's quite a skill set. Whether it indicates a visitation from the Holy Spirit or not, it could definitely land you a nice gig in Vegas. I suppose the old line Fundamentalists were simply wondering why the Pentecostals should have all the fun and muscled in on spouting gibberish and various other signs and wonders.

Thus, if a "second baptism," this one of the spirit and administered directly by the Holy Ghost rather than a preacher in a trout fishing get-up, should visit the head of a believer, maybe Rick Perry himself, then the sky's the limit, and Presidential addresses might be given in a language sounding vaguely like a cross between the Aramaic of "The Passion of the Christ" and Mandarin Chinese. I certainly hope so. The straight-ahead versions have been intolerable for years.

That's only if the "modern Charismatics" are right. Another set of Christian believers, called the "Cessationists," believe the gifts were only bestowed during Apostolic times. That strikes me as a cop-out; if that's true, what was Jimmy Swaggart mumbling about on cable TV? The Cessationists would have you believe he was faking. A bum rap. My money's on the Neo-Pentecostals and their ilk, but the "controversy" is indicative of the one truly fun thing about these various camps and their "belief systems." Once you decide to part company with rationality and empiricism, jettisoning the whole scientific enterprise which has brought mankind to such truly astounding discoveries and insights about the nature of the universe, and to simply dabble in mythology and what amounts to modern sorcery, then you can make this stuff up by the metric ton. While informing those not quite so taken with all this lunacy that they simply lack the "gift" of understanding what is so obviously true.

Hope it is true, in a way. At the rate we're going, we could use some homemade miracles.

Rick Perry, Straight Talker

Okay, it's about trying to create another word bite the Rick Perry Campaign website might find while trolling and raise the Swimmer's visibility a notch. You must understand that what appears, at first glance, like unprincipled bipartisanship really serves a deeper purpose, that of constructive anarchy. I think the USA has crossed a kind of national Event Horizon and is not going to "reform" itself into anything useful for the well-being of mankind; therefore, the ethical approach must be to support developments in America which tend to bring about radical transformation through unconventional methods (not "revolution by force," mind you - no sedition here, or "treason" of the kind that nogoodnik Bernanke might resort to). I cannot think of a more effective way to bring about radical transformation than the election of Rick Perry, noted outspoken Secessionist, as President of the United States.

Thus, to return to the "Bernanke as traitor" meme, first trotted out by Good Ol' Boy Rick a few days ago while charming the corn farmers of Iowa: Rick said, in his usual direct, semi-rational way, that if "that guy" prints any more money before the election that Rick didn't know what they would do in Iowa, but down in Texas they would treat him "pretty ugly," because printing money like that is tantamount to "treason." Now, Rick didn't say "tantamount," because a C+ student from Texas A&M doesn't use ten-dollar words like that. It isn't manly, or necessarily within his syntactical reach. Anyway, on the East and West Coasts, the liberal Nerd-O-Meters started flashing red and the usual academic economists weighed in, leaping to the defense of their fellow academic economist nerd Bernanke. Paul Krugman, always the first in line in any politically correct parade, sniffed that "aside from the ignorance of monetary policy," blah blah blah.

Okay, Perry People, let me set up the lift. I'll even mark it off with quotations to make it easier:

"But Perry was right - Bernanke is printing money through quantitative easing. Krugman, disingenuous as always, is engaging in academic sophistry. In his customary way of pulling the wool over the eyes of his gullible and adoring readership, Krugman is drawing a distinction between the Fed's 'crediting the reserve accounts' of Primary Dealers who sell Treasury bonds back to the Fed in POMO operations, thus increasing the Fed's balance sheet and the monetary base of the dollar, and simply printing money. But the act of adding to the 'reserve accounts' in exchange for Treasury bonds which the Primary Dealers paid actual money for is the creation of wealth out of thin air, as Krugman well knows, and is tantamount [note to Perry Campaign: use Google dictionary function] to 'printing money.' You can't fool a straight-talking, eminently sensible, down-to-earth Texan with such sleight of hand, Perfessor Krugman."

Maybe that can help Perry, and help my underlying cause, the election of a secessionist to the White House (I'm not sure that one has ever happened before). Perry also made some news with his idea of using "Predator drones" along the Tex-Mex boundary (and Southern border generally). He went on to add that he was talking about aiding law enforcement (and the military, which he also wants to use) in "surveillance." He wasn't talking about using Predator drones to blow up illegal immigrants or Mexican drug cartels. (Was he?) Well, I'm not sure. The main use of Predator drones currently is to blow up Aghani wedding parties, as far as I can tell, which must be the festive occasions where the Taliban, or al-Qaeda (what's the difference, they're all Muslims), plan their attacks.

In both of the above examples, the Wily Rick is really operating at two levels. 'Twas said the Bard of Avon simultaneously wrote at four levels, but Shakespeare did not have the benefit of an education at Texas A&M, where simplification was the order of the day. With the Bernanke "threat," Perry is creating distance between himself and Obama/Wall Street/Federal Reserve. The latter troika, of course, is dedicated to preserving the financial oligarchy of the banks and Big Money, and the Tea Party dimly appreciates this conspiracy at their expense. Quantitative easing is a way to pump the stock market while holding down interest rates to, well, zero, thus making sure that old people with savings accounts can't make a dime on their nest eggs (hey, Gramps, just go head-to-head with the High Frequency Trading computers located two nanoseconds from the stock exchange servers -- no guts, no glory!) So Rick is heading that one off at the pass, by telegraphing that Bernanke may face a posse in Fort Worth if he tries that trick again.

With the Predator drone remark, Rick is again having it both ways. If you want to think this former Air Force Captain is advocating blowing up coyotes and their illegals as they approach the border, or blasting away at the gun-drug trade down in "Murder City" (Laredo), then have at it. Ol' Rick ain't gonna stop you. Plus, it gives Rick a chance to draw a nice distinction between himself and the oh-so-careful O Man, who, as noted, has opened his first attacks on the Defense of Marriage Act in areas around Kandahar.

Rick is full of Texas bluster, that's for sure. He scares the crap out of liberals for that very reason. I remain fairly sanguine about the whole thing, however; it's all working out according to plan. Michele (Deer in the Headlights) Bachmann is not going to last very long, even with the adoration of Chris Matthews and other dirty old men. It will come down to Mitt versus Rick Perry at the end of this interminable process of maneuvering, since the media have decided that Ron Paul (who finished in a virtual dead heat with Bachmann in Iowa) has ideas that threaten the cozy power sharing of the military-political-media complex. Paul represents the "reform" path, which doesn't work anymore. Not enough drama. But a Cowboy versus a guy wearing Magic Underwear - that might play on cable. And thus, the die is cast, and the cast is picked.

Bachmann Palin Overdrive

I don't really understand what the "Ames Straw Poll" is, exactly, although I assume that it's about momentum in a presidential primary, a way for a candidate to distinguish her/himself ("hermself"? did I just coin a usage, another neologism?). Yes, it's a way to distinguish hermself from the pack, and this apparently is what Michele Bachmann did yesterday in Iowa, by winning the Ames Straw Poll with a plurality vote of 29%.

Michele is, of course, the recognized leader of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, and as such she is a force to be reckoned with even if, as appears to be the case, at the personal level she doesn't really seem like a force to be reckoned with, if you know what I mean. I toss in the early caveat that I don't mean that as some sort of sexist snark - I get that she's a "tax attorney," and all the rest. Caveats aside, however, if the United States of America elects Michele Bachmann President of the United States, then I must go on record as saying that from that point forward I would not be able to take the USA seriously as a country again. There comes a time, and all that.

Thus, Bachmann's victory in whatever just happened in Ames, Iowa acquires a different kind of significance, a watershed event, another crossing of the Rubicon. The straw poll, one way or other (and the canny Michele, of course, knows this), conferred upon Bachmann the laurel wreath of legitimacy, of Seriousness, and this is the clear and present danger which the country now faces. Particularly with a badly weakened President, whose flagship legislation, his health care bill, just took another torpedo amidships from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal in Atlanta and will soon be struck down by the Supreme Court. With the O Man reeling, with his Irrelevance Factor hitting the ionosphere, the race is wide open. All the Republicans really have to do is play it safe and nominate someone who sort of looks the part, like Mitt Romney, maybe Rick Perry, although Rick Perry most looks the part of a singing cowboy in a John Ford western.

However, the Republican Party is certifiably insane (as opposed to their brother duopolists the Democrats, who are mostly certifiably corrupt), and rational expectations of the party elders no longer determine the outcome. Thus, Michele's victory in Ames comes really as no great shock. Michele, with that rare distinction of a law degree (J.D.) from Oral Roberts University, the largest Charismatic Christian college in the world, although I don't know what "Charismatic Christianity" is, exactly, and I'm too lazy (and too disillusioned) to google it. I assume it's like ordinary Christianity only weirder, and that the kind of "charisma" involved implies some other, off-the-wall meaning of the Greek word, and not the kind, say, that John F. Kennedy had. No, that's definitely what it doesn't mean. A law degree from Oral Roberts is fairly rare because the school only existed between 1979 and 1986 before it packed up its library and reopened as Regent University, another Christer college. But ORU is only one of several Bachmann alma maters, and don't forget her undergrad days at Winona State, where it all began.

However, Michele really owes her opportunity to the trailblazing work of Sarah Palin, who proved that any kind of actual credentials are increasingly beside the point. I don't know what the "point" is anymore, to tell the truth. There is some sort of "brand" or telegenically-driven "buzz" which is now decisive in these matters. It's nothing altogether new, of course, this melding of mass advertising concepts with the political process. The process of selling products and candidates is now virtually identical, and the fact that Bachmann has only been in Congress since 2007, and regards global warming as a "hoax" because carbon dioxide occurs naturally in the atmosphere and could therefore never be a poison or harmful substance, and has a husband who runs a clinic to pray the gay away - none of these factors, which should be absolutely crippling in a rational country, will ever be held against Michele, that feisty, gutsy gal that Chris Matthews just thinks is kinda cute.

It so happens that I've been reading Sam Harris's latest book, The Moral Landscape, which posits the idea, which always seemed true to me, that morals and ethics arise naturally in human society, the products of subjects which neuroscience can now study rigorously, and do not depend on religion or formal, codified codes of other "spiritual" paths. The book seemed kind of dry, at first, till I got to the chapter on "religion," which Sam, in his usual deadeye way, devoted mostly to a detailed demolition of Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH and founder of the BioLogos whatever (some "bridge" between science and religion which Collins insists must exist, somehow), and the loony ideas Collins expressed in his 2006 book The Language of God, where part of Collins's conversion moment (his rededication to the Christianity of his Virginia youth) apparently came about because of the beauty of three frozen waterfall streams he encountered on a hike through the Cascade Mountains. (Three. Get it?) Harris called The Language of God an "intellectual suicide note." Anyway, the appointment of Collins was a previously unknown (to me) example of yet another compromise sell-out of intellectual honesty by the Incumbent-in-Chief.

Be that as it may: The Moral Landscape brought home to me again that my view of America is badly distorted by the Parallax of Nostalgia, as I've called it before. Alone among advanced industrial countries, America is a profoundly theocratic nation, hyper-religious, anti-secular, anti-intellectual, obscurantist, with falling standards of education and quality of life (religiosity is always negatively correlated with quality of life, perhaps not surprisingly, since deteriorating living standards are one of the factors which drive the commoners to an embrace of divine assistance). In such an irrational environment, anything, really, is possible, because it is not constrained by rational thought processes. Religious dogma in, clear thinking out (RDI-CTO). Any criticism of Michele Bachmann, in such a context, can be stood on its head - her naivete and inexperience can be rebranded as "perkiness" or "authenticity," her intellectual mediocrity can be recast as "the common touch." God's Messenger in sling-back heels and a short skirt. Golly, she's got a lot of zing!

Anything can happen. Washington, D.C. might close, the nation's capital moved to some place in the heartland, in Iowa or Missouri, and the White House turned into a museum, to be replaced, on some blue highway off the Interstate, by the White Trailer, in the Congressional Mobile Home Park, sharing a ten-acre parking lot with the local Charismatic Mega-church.

(Note to self: keep studying French re: relocation to Arles.)