Financial whining

I'm so sick of listening to complaining about cutting government spending. Let's back up and look at it again, folks. How to fix the country's budget/spending problem:

1. Figure out how much money is actually coming in
2. Make a list of everything that you want the government to pay for.
3. Make a list - it'll be reeeaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllly long - of every last damn dime spent by Uncle Sam. Do NOT make this list first. Ignore, completely and totally ignore what we're spending today when you make the list of what you actually want to pay for.
4. Start spending and stop when your balance sheet hits $0.

The financial wizard/con-men are trying to screw you by including point #3 above. This is completely irrelevant to the solution. Ignore today's reality when trying to create tomorrow's. Really. Seriously.

"Cutting Spending" is the modern mantra. It's bullshit. You don't want to pay for the state's maternal and child welfare (a.k.a. WIC) ... just don't put it on the We Want To Pay For It list. Cut everything!
Start from Zero. Not from the current budget.
What do you want? Can you pay for it? Figure out what you can afford. Everything else will be eliminated anyway, so stop arguing about whether or not to cut it.

Back up.

1. Decide whether or not you want to live with Capitalism. If you don't, please go away. If you do, please wake up and smell the coffee. You don't live in a capitalistic economy, if you live in the USA. I hate to break it to you, but all of you already live in a socialist state which has NOTHING to do with whether GW or Obama is in office.

2. Eliminate every last goddamned penny of federal subsidies. Take the resultant $1.6 Trillion* and cut the federal deficit by half.

Subsidies are economic engineering. A True and Pure Capitalist would refuse to take them. A real capitalist would ... well, actually she would take them. And any other damn thing the federal government threw her way.
Then she would start to rely on them.
Then she would demand them as her due.
Then she would claim they were her right as a business owner.
Then ... one day she might look in the mirror and realize that she's been sucking off the teat of the American Taxpayer and has committed Capitalistic Heresy and Apostasy.

If you want subsidies, that's fine. Just don't ask for them and then delude yourself into thinking you're a Capitalist.


As I listen in painful agony every weekday morning to 91.1 FM, I hear people of all parties saying they want to cut spending. And I never ever ever ever hear them say exactly what they want to cut.

The following need to be removed from any conservative (that is, the American ones) whining about social problems. None of this would be a problem if you just sucked it up and did what you're supposed to be doing according to the Word of God and Conservative Society:

1. birth control: if you ain't married, you don't need it because you aren't having sex
   
2. abortion: since the only way you'd get pregnant is if you're married, you can't need an abortion
   
3. financial aid: if you can't afford to pay tuition, you need to get off your ass, get a job, and save up your money. You cannot sit back and expect me to pay for you to go to college.
4. unemployment benefits: you'd have a job, if you just got off your ass and made a real effort
5. unemployment benefits: if you'd saved your money like a responsible person, you wouldn't need to worry about a year of being without a job because your neighbors and fellow parishoners will be helping you like Good Folk Should
   
6. job safety: if you just do your job properly, there wouldn't be any accidents.
7. drug safety: if we just let Pharma alone, they'll be more than happy enough to let us know if there's a problem with their products
   
8. food safety: if it isn't safe, don't buy it and the market will realign itself to reflect the customer demand.

Holy cow - think of how much money we could save by eliminating all of the government agencies or laws which regulate the above items?
OSHA
MSHA
USDA/APHIS/PHS
EPA
CSB
FDA

This, plus cutting all subsidies should fix the Whole Financial Crisis and we could get back on with our lives.

hallucinations? ... no...

Here it is, what I was previously bitching/whining about:



And, admittedly, once you get to the still shot where it is abundantly clear there was a gross foul ... ummm... the other major holding foul was by uhhh... the US. Still totally horrid referring.

@ Capacity

Riverview Theater: 700 people

US Men's Soccer Team: 1 goal

Ghana Men's Soccer Team: 2 goals

sigh...

At least I still own a German flag.
Glockenspiel, St. Paul, 9:00 a.m. CDT
Mr.Gopher has the kids today; I promised to watch Jr.Gopher #2 once his attention capacity is reached tomorrow morning.

@ Capacity:
Attention Span of Jr.Gopher #2 ... probably 10 minutes. We'll see...
.

Congressional Intrigue, 19th Cent. Style

Have we sent persons here to intrigue with members ...?

No, sir, we have had no one here.

Have we stirred up the people into town meetings to aid us by memorials?

No such thing, sir.

Have we called meetings and induced honest mechanics to come here to influence Congress by idle fears, impressed upon them by those who are interested, to tell a tale that shall answer our purposes?

No, sir, we have pursued no such course.

Respectable merchants, I observe, form a part of the bank deputies--for what?

To represent the late fall of the price of flour as a consequence of the danger of the bank charter not being renewed, and thereby to alarm the minds of members.

I am sorry that men of such respectable character did permit themselves to come here on such an errand.

February 11, 1811
Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856
Benton, Thomas Hart
arguing about eliminating the U.S. Bank



Of course, the next week's letter from Pres. Monroe explaining why the United States was justified in the use of military force to occupy the territory of a foreign power in order to protect our "interests" provoked a sense of de ja vu. The land in question is currently the State of Florida.
.

Next Year

Tune in next year for the Women's World Cup.

Help! I've turned into a soccer mom!!!

written last week

There's a protest @ the Y on Lake Street tomorrow morning (10 a.m., if you're interested - the one near the Light Rail station). Some bunch of Nazis are planning to protest the Y's scheduled anti-racist seminar. (only 4 turned up) I asked Mr. Gopher if he wanted to go. The only reason I asked at all is because Jr.Gopher#1's soccer game is at 9:30. Political protest of right-wing assholes or our child's sports fun? Mr. Gopher replied with no hesitation that he didn't want to go, as he considered them a relatively harmless bunch of clowns.

I was quite shocked that he considered them harmless. Personally, while I don't see them as being an immediate danger to society, they present a real hazard. I didn't get a chance to ask if this was due to the fact we're in the States and not Germany. We see racism through different filters. The expression of racism has a very different history in our respective countries. The efforts chosen to eliminate it have also been very different.

His opinions on the NDP (the new incarnation of the Nazi party**) have been quite unambiguous about their potential danger to Germany being quite real. Maybe American Nazis aren't so much of a threat because the percentage of non-whites in America is so much higher than in Germany? Or just the specific and significant place in their history is absent here.

It seemed to me (filtered through a cultural chasm as well as trying to read a newspaper in a foreign language) that people in Germany seemed to be shocked that the NDP managed to get a few people elected recently. Whereas, I personally would not be surprised at all if quite a lot of people here got elected on a euphemistically defined platform of racist nationalism. (They're pretty much all called Republicans - not that Democrats aren't racist, but they tend not to be as nationalistic.) Why would I not be surprised? Because I can look at the government & see it has already happened. What else would one consider the last 8 years' policies, if not nationalism? Well, I guess arrogantly self-centered and self-righteous would be equally valid labels. I would sincerely like to believe that a group publicly espousing white supremacy wouldn't be able to be elected.

People like this are out making noise for self-serving attention-seeking purposes to just piss off sane people. Would it manage to undermine them if they got no attention? No media coverage; no counter-demonstration; no acknowledgment by passersby? I can see how it would fuel their ego if only a handful of people showed up, letting them try to paint their ideology as unassailable. If dozens show up (as I expect tomorrow) (it turned out to be about 200), it lets these social retards pretend to be some oppressed minority struggling against The Mud People or Race Traitors. But with no audience ...? How can they create some mutual self-identity without a social mirror?

I once heard a suggestion for deporting them all to Germany, if they're so much in love with the Third Reich's policies. Of course the same person was intending these people to run into a government who would - unlike ours - smash them like sociopathic cockroaches they are. Let them go see what oppression of their political opinions really is. I personally wouldn't wish it upon the German people.

Michael had fun at the soccer match. See photos here.

** thinking of providing a succinct explanation of this, I went to Der Spiegel's English pages; as expected, there's a page explaining the different major parties' platforms. There is no entry for the NDP - only the big 5 (CDU, FDP, CSU, & Greens). I guess they've taken the "ignore them" position due to their real minority.

Liberty or scrap metal?

The Author's blog about her novel asks in passing: Would Americans ever want security and economic stability more than democracy and freedom?

hell, yes! Look at what we did to ourselves in 2000. And far more in 2004. The US government ran for 5 or 6 years on nothing but screaming fear of our security. (Admittedly, even today few seem to give a goddamn about our economic stability, which is likely far more critical to her novel's view of the future ... this being defined as the willingness to educate themselves about what the gov't is doing with their money, and scream about it).

Even today, the right-wing of the Republican party is harping on keeping out the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.* Tear down the big copper bitch, if we can't bother to respect her. At the rate copper is going, it might even make a microscopic dent in the national debt. Or sell it, like bits of the Berlin Wall, and make a more significant dent in the debt. I doubt any of the unmentionables on Wall Street would give a damn.
(the Wikipedia entry on it is pretty interesting, especially the Aftermath of 9/11 section)

Far, far too many Americans ponied up to the Fear-Я-Us campaigns. It was like watching the Deep South in '64 facing the potential of actually having the government enforce equal rights for all those 'pesky niggers'. Protect our sacred rights to racial purity! Let them into our schools and they'll be impregnating our daughters and stealing our jobs! They'll destroy Our America! Or was that Mexicans? Or Arabs? Or the Irish?

Who's kidding who?

We happily embrace limitations of our freedoms without blinking! The government is still legally allowed to tap our phones, grossly impede commerce/travel with TSA, obscenely violate our legal rights of a speedy trial, or even reasonable suspicion. God forbid any of these ignorant voting idiots actually know what the phrase habeas corpus means.** Did anyone bother to read the PATRIOT Act? Even legislators afterwards admitted they didn't! Has anyone got the brass balls necessary to revoke it? No. Why? Because politicians are too afraid of scaring off the votes of the Fearful, who happily accept those limitations. Hence does fear make cowards of us all.

Even with a change of governmental figurehead, the government doesn't bother to revoke the acts made in initial panic. They pander to the fearful, rather than do anything to educate them into some sort of recognition of reality.





** The Habeas Corpus Acts "declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty." ~ A.V. Dicey, specifically it is a summons with the force of a court order addressed to the custodian (such as a prison official) demanding that a prisoner be brought before the court, together with proof of authority, allowing the court to then determine whether that custodian has lawful authority to hold that person

*The inscription on the base of the statue originally named Liberty Enlightening the World reads:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land; [i.e., the Collosus of Rhodes]
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles.

From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips.

"Give me your tired,

your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

admittedly, I'm sure the 'wretched refuse of your teeming shore wasn't intended to mean Manhattan's garbage scows

Globaloney

From January's Atlantic Monthly, with thanks to my friend The Author:

"Change” has been President-elect Barack Obama’s mantra, and for many of his supporters, the most important change his administration promises is a more restrained, less arrogant foreign policy, a global posture that avoids the costs and dangers inherent in playing the world’s policeman.

They’re dismayed by the presumptuous and anachronistic attitudes behind the declaration that the president of the United States is the “leader of the free world.”

They’re exasperated with the messianic invocation of “America’s larger purpose in the world,” with the smug notion that this country is “called to provide visionary leadership” in “battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.”

They discern the dangers of declaring with righteous omniscience that America “has a direct national security interest” in seeing its economic and political beliefs take hold in foreign lands.

They’re annoyed with the historical myopia that results in an unironic reference to American military “operations to win hearts and minds.”

In the claim that “the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people,” they hear echoes of the universalist logic that led to the disaster in Vietnam and see a sweeping foreign policy that the rest of the world finds at best meddlesome and at worst menacingly imperialist.

These lofty but potentially dangerous sentiments are entirely consistent with George W. Bush’s assertion in his second Inaugural Address that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands”—an assertion his critics at home and abroad rightly judged as … lofty and potentially dangerous. But the pronouncements quoted above—all of them—are in fact from Barack Obama’s two major foreign-policy statements, both made in 2007.

Surprise?

What, this is supposed to surprise me?

It also said that the UK and the US have "actively undermined" international law by their actions. It concluded that many measures introduced to fight terrorism were illegal and counter-productive.

The only news here is that someone bothered to sit down and write a report which will sit on someone's shelf, letting them thing happy thoughts that they somehow have improved the situation by vicarious approval.

This I Believe ...

National Public Radio gives access to recorded archives from the original 1950s broadcasts of This I Believe ...

Some of the more intriguing records are from the not-so-famous. If you're interested, however, the NPR archive has 2-4 min. essays from Pres. Harry Truman, Martha Graham, Margaret Meade, Sen. Margaret Chase-Smith, Justice William Douglas, and Jackie Robinson.

I particularly enjoyed one on a Doubting, Questioning Mind.

The page will lead you to the modern essays produced for NPR (rather than the originals for Edward R. Murrow/).
From someone I can honestly say I admire a great deal: Health is Human Right, by Paul Farmer.



Out of the mouths of babes: Thirty Things I Believe In.

Death, sooner or later -- Taxes now

good god, this is great... you have got to see this

Death & Taxes: a visual guide to where your tax dollars go

A poster of the 2009 federal budget, in gross detail. (really detailed, really gross) You'll need to zoom in a bit, before the click-and-drag function works. This has a list of all the major projects of all the executive departments. Wow.

A statistics paper I was required to read was titled: How to Present Data Badly, Wainer, American Statistician, 1984(?). It's not the calculations of statistics, just how to display data - badly. If you could find a copy and want to see how the media and government are dis-informing you, I recommend it. One of Wainer's recommendations for how to display your data poorly is a metric of 'data density'. Measuring how many data points are presented per square inch. A couple of points of real data swimming in a huge graph with other pretty non-data is a great distraction. This budget picture has a huge data density.


p.s. if you want to read the Wainer article, I'll send you a copy. It's fascinating

Already messed up ...

... and we haven't really started yet.

What's already wrong?

long lines & stupid bureaucratic activity don't surprise me, or even get much beyond raised eyebrows. Malfeasance, however:

# Common Cause of Colorado and two other groups sued Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman after he purged 20,000 voters from the state's registration list within 90 days of the general election. After the two parties reached an agreement last Wednesday, Coffman purged 146 more names from the list—a violation of federal law.

# The Americans for Limited Government Foundation, a group committed to "rolling back government" at the national, state, and local levels, sent a threatening letter to approximately 11,000 donors to left-wing causes. (Thanks to James Horwitz for the tip.) The letter reads, in part: "Your name has been put in our database. We are monitoring reports of a wide variety of leftist organizations. … Should any of these organizations be found to be engaged in illegal or questionable activity, it is our intent to publicize your involvement."

The view from the other side

"It's the rhetoric of Sept. 11. … But this crisis actually has much larger dimensions than the attack against the twin towers and collapse seven years ago. Why? Because, this time, the attack on all-American doctrines is not the work of some foreign enemy. It comes from within, from the depths of the system. Largely unobstructed by its own state controls, American capitalism has created its own suicide bomber whose explosives -- derivatives -- have had an even greater effect than the flying bombs of the jihadists. The whole world -- and not just New York -- has a new ground zero now -- Wall Street." -- quoted from the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung (a center-right paper)


As I sit, taking a lunch break at our local left-wing, progressive, so-totally-not-republican cafe, the constant theme of conversation seems to be "are you going to watch the debates tonight?" Now, if only they'll listen to the debates for reasons other than self-justification.