It got really nice all of a sudden in Maryland. So I took a day trip to New Jersey. Saturday I drove to Wildwood, which I have never really spent much time in. It’s down the Jersey coast from Ocean City where I usually go.
Wildwood is an echo of what Atlantic City used to be before the casinos moved in. It has a big boardwalk and two really huge amusment piers. It’s more big city by the sea then anything else on the Jersey coast apart from Atlantic City.
I took my camera. Rather then make this post take forever to load, I’ll split it into several parts…
The unemployment numbers are dreadful. But for once, there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon: conservatives are going Galt.
"While they take to the streets politically, untold numbers of America’s wealth producers are going on strike financially. Dr. Helen Smith, a Tennessee forensic psychologist and political blogger, dubbed the phenomenon "Going Galt" last fall. It’s a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneurial class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue. (…)
The perpetual Borrow-Spend-Panic-Repeat machine in Washington depends on the capitulation of the wealth producers. There’s only one monkey wrench that can stop the redistributionist thieves’ engine. It’s engraved with the word: Enough."
"Just think what kind of nightmare scenario we might be inflicted with if the titans of finance who’ve made up such a large proportion of high earners in recent years were to pull back on their efforts! I shudder."
Unfortunately, we don’t know how many of America’s wealth producers are going to go on strike, since their number is "untold".
There’s a wee problem here that I’m sure has been spotted by the gasbags on the right. Vis:
But every one of them will free up work for someone else. And thanks to eight years of Bush’s economic policies, we are not short of unemployed people to take up the slack.
I am puzzled by one thing, however: the fact that none of the people who advocate "going Galt" seem to have actually done it.
I appreciate your puzzlement Hilzoy. Keep looking at the sentence you wrote about how every one of them that goes Galt frees up a job for someone else and you get the picture. They know damn well that quitting isn’t going to prove anything, other then how worthless they actually were in the grand economic scheme of things. Let’s face it, these are the folks who have been advocating, for decades now, the kinds of deregulation blue sky that got us into this mess in the first place. Wealth producers? More like wealth leaches.
I’m not clear whether the point of "going Galt" is to stop doing creative or productive work, as Rand’s novel would suggest, or trying to lower one’s income, as many of the people quoted in storiesabout "goingGalt" claim.
To stop doing productive work, you’d have had to have been doing productive work to begin with.
But as best I can tell, the people advocating this are doing neither. Consider:
Rep. John Campbell has neither resigned from Congress nor given back any part of his salary.
Michelle Malkin is still blogging, and still seems to be on the PJMedia payroll.
Dr. Helen, who is "still mulling over ways that she can "go Galt,"" has not taken any of the obvious steps: stopping blogging, giving up her career, severing her connection to PJTV, or even not taking BlogAds. Neither has her husband.
Cassy at Wizbang, who says it’s "time to go Galt", doesn’t seem to have stopped blogging either, and Wizbang is still running ads.
It’s almost enough to make me think they’re just posturing.
Like…when they’re going on about homosexuality and sexual morality? Personal accountability? Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the right wing billionaire dole most of these deep thinkers wouldn’t have an income, let alone a platform. They’re gasbags. And I’ll endure lectures on the evils of government spending and taxation from a lot of people, but not a congressman. Especially not a republican congressman.
Let’s take a closer look at this ersatz grass roots revolt against President Obama’s economic policies…shall we?
Populist revolt against the U.S. government is all the rage in the Republican Party, these days. As they tell the story, the public is so outraged by the recovery and reinvestment efforts of the Obama administration that Americans everywhere are turning out to overthrow the tyrannical king of the federal government by re-enacting the Boston Tea Party.
Funny thing, though: it turns out this whole "populist" movement was a planned PR stunt funded by big-money right-wing backers of the GOP who specialize in faking grassroots movements to drum up opposition to Barack Obama.
Everything about this so called "Tea Party" movement was pre-planned–from the supposedly "spontaneous rant" of CNBC stock market reporter, Rick Santelli, to the presumed ground-level organizing of protests all over the country. Fake, fake, fake–like a product launch staged covertly to look like a spontaneous trend.
Playboy bloggers Mark Ames and Yasha Levine pulled together all the pieces of this puzzle in an incredible expose (Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine):
What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.
As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.
Go read the whole thing. It’s the right-wing billionaire club we’ve all come to know and love, screwing the political process so they can keep screwing the middle-class. If you thought the fight was over when Obama won, you are sadly mistaken.
If we could just get rid of these drooling morons we might have a rational discussion in this country about the economy and how to clean up the mess the billionaire teat sucking jackasses have brought down on all of us. Going Galt would be a blessing for this country…the best thing they’ve ever done for it. So, fat chance of that happening.
Gay marriage is banned in France. But about a decade ago, France’s Socialist government created a compromise — a civil solidarity pact, known by its French acronym PACS — as a form of quasi-marriage for homosexual couples.
This is France’s equivalent to the so-called "civil unions" that exist in some U.S. states. And naturally, France’s right wingers denounced it as a cheapening of marriage. But it was a cheapening they’d had a hand in creating, by their dogged resistance to letting same sex couples simply marry. PACS were seen to be a compromise, just as they are here in the United States, between the needs of gay couples and the hatred of homophobes.
Then, as Hinkle puts it, a funny thing happened. Large numbers of straight couples started opting for PACS, too…
MARRIAGE IN France has been on the skids for years. The French marriage rate has fallen more than 30 percent in the past generation. Marriage has been declining in other European countries as well, but in France the slope has been steeper. By 2005, 59 percent of all first-born children in France were born out of wedlock. More and more French couples live in "free unions," or what Americans might think of as nonbinding common-law marriages. They simply shack up, often for life.
Now France’s experience with PACS helps clarify a very muddled point in the debate over gay marriage here in America. Social conservatives commonly argue against gay marriage for a multiplicity of (often dubious) reasons, from the necessity to protect children to the importance of subsidizing procreation. But perhaps the most often cited reason is that gay unions threaten the "institution" of marriage.
How, precisely, they do so is not intuitively clear. No one seriously argues that a marriage between John and Steve somehow undermines the bonds of affection that keep Ted and Amy together. Nor is it clear how encouraging homosexuals, who sometimes are condemned for libertine promiscuity, to enter a contract requiring lifelong fidelity weakens the appeal of lifelong fidelity.
So opponents of gay marriage fall back on the idea that letting gay people marry somehow cheapens the currency — as though a marriage between Ted and Amy weighs less in the cosmic scales because John and Steve have entered into a similar contract. That is akin to the argument that letting gay people open bank accounts weakens the institution of banking.
FRANCE’S EXPERIENCE teaches a different lesson. It is not gay marriage, but the attempt to deny gays the chance to participate in marriage, that has cheapened the currency and further imperiled the institution. By creating a second-class — call it a "subprime" — form of marriage, France gave both gays and straights a watered-down option that let people enjoy all the privileges with none of the obligations…
…and then, he puts his finger on the heart of it:
And that points to the real issue at the heart of the argument about marriage as an institution. To say that letting gay people marry cheapens the currency of marriage holds true only if gay people have less intrinsic worth than straight people — just as the argument against interracial marriage, that it would lead to the "mongrelization of the human race," made sense only to those who saw blacks as less than human.
To let gay people enter into sacred matrimony, then, requires recognizing something sacred within them…
There’s the problem. How do you recognize it when from nearly every pulpit in America gay people are called abominations in the eyes of God? How do you recognize it when in one statehouse after another gay people are called a bigger threat to America then terrorists?
You can’t. You don’t. You are incapable. They are not human beings. They are some strange, alien, dangerous, evil other. There is nothing at all sacred in them. You are not putting a knife in their hearts, because they have no human heart. Only degenerate lust. You are defending the dignity and the honor of your love, against the animal passions of sub-humans that threaten to devour it.
There can be no dialogue as long as we are not human. There just can’t. Only war. We have seen time and time again how we appeal to our common humanity and we get slammed in return with one filthy lie after another, after another after another. We hold out our hand in fellowship and our enemies jump at us like a pack of pit bulls. As long as we are not human, they will continue to put their knifes into our hearts and put their wreaking balls to the lives we try to make for ourselves, and call it self defense. And we, because we are human, will continue to fight back. Because we must. Because the only alternative is to live with the knife and the wreaking ball. And it will never end. Until the day comes that they can finally look at us, and see human beings.
How to make that day come, I honestly don’t know. Large swaths of the U.S. still cannot look at a black man and see a human being either. Or a red one. Or a brown one. Or a yellow one. Too many U.S. males still seem to think that the female half of the human race is sub-human…good only for making babies and cooking dinner. How do you fight that? Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that a bigot’s mind is like an eye…the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. But for the sake of our common future, our survival as a species, those eyes have to open.
I have no idea how to make that happen. But I know this full well: until they do, this fight will never end. It will only grow more bitter, more damaging, more violent. The word people are choking on in the fight isn’t "marriage". It’s "homosexual". And we are not only being preventing from marrying because of it. We are targets…
"A 4-pound stone, one of several door stops hurled at patrons in a bar that includes gay people among its clientele, left one man with 12 staples in the back of his head and two brothers and an acquaintance accused of a hate crime. Marc Bosaw, 57, said Monday he has little recollection of the Sunday night attack, in which police said one suspect held open the door to Robert’s Lafitte bar while two others launched an assault shortly after 8 p.m. Bosaw sat at the corner of the bar at 2501 Ave. Q just a few feet from one of two entryway doors. ‘I thought I had just been slapped, and the second rock hit me here,’ Bosaw said of the mark on his hand. ‘Everything went white in my mind, and I thought that was it. I even said ‘goodbye.’’ The barrage also hit another patron, James Nickelson, 39, who police listed as a Houston resident, but bar patrons said Monday they believed he had recently moved to the island."
Other bar patrons reportedly struggled to keep Bosaw conscious before he was transported to a regional medical center.
The Houston Chronicle reports: "The three men fled, but were apprehended by police about 10 blocks from the bar, Alvarez said. They were then brought back to the bar, where witnessses identified them. One of the men arrested told police they targeted the establishment because it was a gay bar, Alvarez said. All three men were charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon along with hate crime charges. They are being held on a combined bond of $120,000."According to the Galveston News, "Bonds for Lawrence Henry Lewis III, 20, Lawrneil Henry Lewis, 18, and Alejandro Sam Gray, 17, all of Galveston, were set at $120,000 each on two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with the enhancement of a hate crime, said Lt. D.J. Alvarez, a Galveston police spokesman."
KOMO news reports: "The latest attack came a week ago near 13th Avenue and Columbia Street, about a block from the Seattle University campus. Forty-one-year-old Jerry Knight was on his way home when two men confronted him. And now he says the horror of that weekend might always haunt him. ‘I remember being hit hard, where I fell and my hands were bruised falling directly on the ground,’ he said Saturday in an interview. He acknowledges it could have been worse.’I am grateful,’ he says. ‘I am grateful I did not wake up in the hospital. I am grateful I am not in a coffin. I know that, and honor that.’ He says he was attacked by two men as he walked home alone in the early morning hours. The assault was first reported online by The Stranger newspaper."
In March 2007, Skipper’s body was found by the side of a rural road in central Florida with more than 20 stab wounds. His car and laptop had been stolen. The car was abandoned and recovered by authorites, who reported that the assailants had attempted to set it on fire but did not succeed. They had also cut out a seat belt because it was so bloody they couldn’t clean it. Bearden, then 21, and William David Brown Jr., then 20, were later arrested and indicted for the killing. A witness brought in by authorities at the time told police that Brown had killed Skipper because he was gay.
Bearden’s co-defendant, William Brown, is to be tried at a later date on charges of first-degree murder and robbery.
Blabbeando: "27 year old Isaac Ali Dani Peréz Triviño was born in Spain. 32 year old Julio Anderson Luciano was born in Brazil. They lived together in the Spanish province of Vigo and were planning to get married. Both were stabbed to death by Jacobo Piñeiro Rial in their apartment in the early morning of January 13th, 2006. The bodies showed a total of 57 stab wounds, according to forensics. After killing them, Piñeiro took a shower and cleaned himself up. He filled a suitcase with some of their belongings to make it look like a robbery and then spilled clothing all over the place. He poured alcohol over everything, including his victims’ bodies, turned on the gas spigot on the stove, and set everything on fire. The local fire department said that little evidence would have survived if it wasn’t for their prompt response to the 5-alarm fire"
The jury bought the killer’s ‘gay panic’ defense…
This fight isn’t about marriage. It was never about marriage. It has always been about our human status. The sacred is within us too. But you have to want to see it. That is the problem. That is the only problem.
I mentioned in This Post some time ago, about how expensive wiper blades were for my Mercedes. A little update: It turned out I didn’t need to replace the blades I had on there just then after all. The streaking I saw was due to some dirt and once I cleaned it off the blades resumed their excellent job. So I saved the spare blades I’d just bought, keeping them in the trunk as backups. I only just now had to, finally, replace the factory blades. This is almost a year and a half after I took delivery on the car. I’m very impressed. Those factory blades got a lot of use.
If it seems like I’m completely geeking out here I beg to differ. Wiper blades are one of those little items nobody really thinks about that actually play a critical safety role. Most of the time these little plastic and rubber items sit tucked away behind the hood and you forget they’re there until it starts raining or some car in front of you kicks some water mixed with dirt or road salt onto your windshield. When you need them they’d better work.
One of my pet peeves ever since I got my first car is how little thought the car makers, until very recently it seems, were putting into something as critical as keeping the damn windshield clean while you’re driving. Wiper arms and blades back when I was a teenager in the 70s, and for most of the 80s and 90s too, were just these crappy little afterthoughts that did the job just well enough but never really all that good. And you were lucky if you got more then a few months out of a set of blades before they started streaking on you. Usually right at eye level.
When I bought my Mercedes I thought a couple odd little blade-like items that had been stuffed in the back pocket of the front passenger seat were a set of spare wiper blades, and I was impressed by the thoughtfulness. But it turns out, at least for ‘C’ class customers, Mercedes isn’t that generous. Those little things weren’t spare blades after all. I still have no idea what they are…I keep forgetting to ask the parts guys at my dealer about them. But when I found I didn’t need to replace the factory blades last March as I’d thought, I kept the pair I’d just bought in the trunk as backups. It’s a good idea to keep a spare set handy.
I only now had to, finally, replace the factory installed blades. The Mercedes blades come out of the box bent like a bow, and their tops are shaped like an airfoil to hold the blades firmly against the glass at highway speeds. Replacing the old ones is a snap. You just tilt up the arms and then tilt the blades 90 degrees from the shaft and they just slide right off. Slide the new ones on, tilt forward, place the arms back down…done. Less then three minutes and part of that was double-checking the instruction manual while I did it. As is typical on this car, everything fits together right. There is no fussing with any of it. The parts fit together like they’re supposed to.
I tried the new blades out with a few washer squirts. The sound these things make is like a whisper gliding over glass. I have never seen wipers work as smoothly or as thoroughly as these. It may seem like a small thing but all winter long last year and this traffic in front of me has kicked water and road salt onto my car and all I notice now is that my hood gets dirty and the car needs a wash. The blades are long and one arm is articulated and between them nearly all the windshield is kept perfectly clean. I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to have to squint through my windshield all winter long.
God forbid the economy ever gets so bad and I loose my job and I have to sell everything, including the car. But if that day ever comes, swear to god I’ll go buy a used Mercedes with whatever I can cobble together, no matter how many miles it has on it, and drive that. Probably not anything made when they were having quality control problems, say between the late 90s and early 2000s. But I am not driving anything that doesn’t have that three pointed star on it anymore. I’m just not. I sincerely regret now, not buying a used one back when I could afford a car again. I’d have had one to enjoy for so much more of my life then I did, because I stubbornly held out for new. It’s not the status value. It’s the engineering. It’s the satisfaction of driving something made by people who put some real thought into how a car should work and made it as well as they could. A friend said this car would change my idea of what normal is. Yes it has. Oh yes.
Banging My Head Against The Wand. Wall. Wand. Ouch. Dammit. (continued)
I’m listening to my German language audio files. I’m dutifully repeating the words and phrases as I am instructed. I am actually getting these first baby steps in the course right most of the time now…
Ask me if I understand English.
Verstehen Sie Englisch?
Ask me if I understand German.
Verstehen Sie Deutsch?
Tell me you understand no German.
Ich verstehe kein Deutsch.
While I am dutifully repeating all this on command, it occurs to me that telling someone you know no German in German is a tad contradictory. It further occurs to me that asking a person who knows no German to say how they would inform someone they know no German, in German, is ridiculous.
I’d wandered over to This Post, Are You a Christian Hipster? And scanning his blog page, and down the right hand column where he lists the artists and thinkers who have shaped him, I came across…
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost
layers of frailty men want to be good
and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their
vices are attempted short cuts to love.
When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents
and influence and genius, if he dies unloved
his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Yeah. This.
What Steinbeck wrote about Sinclair Lewis in Travels With Charlie has haunted me ever since I read it back when I was a kid. It was like a premonition. I’ve been afraid of it ever since. But no use being afraid of your fate…
[Update…]He’s a Proposition 8 supporter. I guess it’s still hip to be a bigot. Hating your gay neighbor must be that 11th commandment I keep hearing about…
Atlas Shrugged…Then Charged It To Someone Else…(continued)
Commentary from John Stamos on This Post regarding the new hippies. Why yes John, I have read Doctor Seuss. Let it be said that Seuss could get his point across in a few pages of a children’s book. Rand on the other hand… Well to paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment on the music of Richard Wagner, Ayn Rand’s novels are better then they read.
Approximately 2% of the American households make more than $250,000 a year and (you may find this hard to believe) a very high percentage of these high-earning go-getting producers spend their days commenting over at Michelle Malkin’s place… when they’re not busy flying their Lear jets up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun.
Scenes from the Go Go Gaults:
I’ve resigned from my job, and I’m selling my rental properties. After this, I’m moving to a rural little town and simplifying everything. I’ll be reading so many more books soon, if that sort of thing is still allowed.
What motivation do we have to make more money? Only to have it confiscated by the Feds. Bad enough CA just increased a variety of taxes, including the income tax. That’s why I’m looking to move to NV. I was just there on Saturday. Won’t be too long now.
I decided I will endeavor to take more business trips and continuing education classes at exotic places and try to reduce taxable income.
Yep, it’s happening. Several friends are shutting down to sustaining levels. Partly due to housing and the rest due to the tax hikes.
I shut down my online businesses in early November, I don’t remember why. I’m now a net user of Obama Cheese. I may even apply for food stamps.
Small businesses will lay off employees, and I hope the first to go are the ones that voted for bho. They wanted ‘hope and change’, well you got it. These bho voters have NO idea how much more taxes they are going to be paying. I just hope those bho voters have their IRA, 401k and stocks cratered as much as those who DID not vote for bho. Such(sic) it up kids!
I’m starting my victory garden this spring. My sister is expanding hers and in exchange for my helping with that I will be able to claim some of the produce. I’ve been couponing for over a year now and have a nice stockpile of food for when things get really, really bad. I can’t believe that my country is on this path. From Ronald Reagan to this Marxist in the span of one generation. Unbelievable.
I have a friend who is planning to not work overtime this year to stay well below the dangerous benchmark that is 250k. His point was that he might as well take some time off and enjoy and relax rather than work and give every dollar above 250 away. I don’t blame his reasoning and the loss is, he spends his money.
You have to wonder if this guy ever paid taxes because here be basically admits he doesn’t understand how the income tax works:
ABC News reports on "upper-income taxpayers" who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.
According to ABC, one attorney "plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law." According to the attorney: "We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00." ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.
This is stunningly wrong.
The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate. If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.
But that isn’t actually how income tax works.
In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.
The people ABC quoted don’t seem to understand that. Worse, ABC doesn’t seem to understand it, either.
Anyway…back to Atlas Slouched, and TBogg’s personal favorite:
We also have “gone Galt”. Hubby decided to retire and start Medicare instead of our original plan of waiting two years.
Well that’s showing those looters a thing or two. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has a note from a reader that explains it all for the dense of skull…
Downsized out of my career in my mid-50’s, after 20+ years of faithful service to a 150-year-old company that declared bankruptcy some months after my termination. I got a decent severance – in the latest wave of layoffs, there were people with more years of service who got zilch. I have found some freelance daily-hire work here and there – last year my after-tax/after-insurance net was about 25% of what I had been making. Still looking, still hoping.
The 401(k) that I’d faithfully funded since the mid-80s lost a third of its value in just a few weeks. I had bad vibes about the bankster/gangsters over a year ago (CDO’s and swaps? I’d read about them on internet message boards back in 2006, but gave more credence to my adviser since he’s an expert and the internet is notoriously unreliable. Fat lot of good that did.) I know he wasn’t trying to steer me in a wrong direction – he feels as badly as I do. Thank God BushCo never got their filthy mitts on Social Security.
I’ve always conducted my financial affairs in a conservative fashion, so I have a (dwindling) cushion to rely on and some equity in a home with a (for now) manageable mortgage. I pay for my own health insurance (a lousy policy with high premiums and deductibles – please, dear God – help me stay healthy.) The premiums are about four times more than I spend for food, all of which is prepared at home by me. I haven’t been more than 15 miles from home in more than a year. When cabin fever sets in, I go for a walk.
I’m not complaining, really I’m not. I am able to stay warm and dry and fed, and current on my bills. I am fortunate – I know I am blessed. I don’t take it for granted and don’t consider myself more worthy than others who find themselves in far more dire straits. I could very well be in their shoes before this is all over.
This is exactly what woke me up from my libertarian delusion back during the big Reagan recession: seeing so many decent, hard working people who did everything the way they were supposed to get clobbered because the gods of finance and industry turned out to be fallible human beings too, and not Greek gods holding the world on their shoulders. I was working as an architectural model maker back then, and watched appalled as developers and their financiers ran themselves off a cliff, knowing full well they were heading for the edge, knowing full well they were going to fall off eventually, knowing full well it would be a financial disaster, but utterly unable to stop themselves from chasing those last few dollars off that cliff. When it was over, nearly all my clients, the businesses I sold my services to as a model maker, had gone belly up and I was mowing lawns to make ends meet. But at least I didn’t have any mouths to feed.
When the brakes came off the savings and loans, the crooks moved right in and without oversight, there was nothing to stop them. And even had they all been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, the damage was done. There’s the problem. I saw families who had once owned nice homes, whose parents worked hard, made good money, saved responsibly and lived within their means, living in tents in campgrounds because everything they had vanished in the savings and loan scandals. What good would prosecuting the savings and loan crooks have done for them? Their money is gone.
That was the end of my libertarian years. I saw that greed is not good after all. I saw that wealth is not an indicator of either moral, or common sense. I saw that to err is human, but to really screw things up you need a lot of money. I saw that selfishness is not a virtue. Pride is a virtue. Ambition is a virtue. Selfishness is a cancer on your soul. It turns your neighbors in this life, and all their hopes, all their dreams, everything they ever made for themselves, their families, their kids, into play money.
You’re not it. No…not you…You! I was walking through the house working off a few chores just a moment ago, and glanced in a mirror, and for the first time in months I kinda liked what I saw in there again. Thank you Joe, for making that such a hard thing to do. A friend isn’t someone who craps all over your self-esteem.
When Juan Zamora stopped to refuel his car at a Conoco service station in Richland, the gas pump’s calculator registered a total fee of $26.
But in a freak computer hiccup, the PayPal debit card he used recorded the transaction as $81,400,836,908. Yes, you read that correctly, that’s more than 81 billion dollars.
Initially, Mr. Zamora thought it must’ve been a joke. But after contacting PayPal customer service he was surprised to see that the company treated it as anything but a laughing matter.
“Somebody from a foreign country who spoke in broken English argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes,” Zamora said. ” ‘Did you get the gas?’ he asked. Like I had to prove that I didn’t pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!”
This is more understandable then it looks. If PayPal is outsourcing its customer service to Zimbabwe then the rep would have had no trouble believing you’d bought eighty-one billion dollars worth of gas.
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.
If you’re surprised about this then you haven’t traveled much in the bible belt. I see more highway billboards advertising strip shows and adult entertainment dives when I take a road trip through the Fundamentalist States of America then anywhere else, except maybe Nevada. But at least there they aren’t hypocritical about it. Oh…and guess who is the biggest consumer of online porn in the nation.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.
Utah. Where marriage is so sacred they pour millions into California last year to prevent loving same sex couples from being allowed to marry. Nice. The magic underwear isn’t working so well I take it. Or perhaps too well. Perhaps it was all part of a plan on the part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to drain money out of the faithful’s porn budgets.
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
I keep thumping my pulpit on this but it keeps being relevant. They need their scapegoats. Gay people are their handy punching bags for all their own private secret shame, their own pathetic failures of moral character. They hate us, because we learned to live with our sexual nature and they, locking it in the closet, never learned how to control themselves.
Denial isn’t a plan for life. The human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. Least of all religions founded by con artists. No river rises higher then its source.
Consider this a follow-up post to my They’d Be Crazy To Start A Second American Civil War post below. From Pam’s House Blend…a first hand account of how they love the sinner but hate the sin in the Aloha State…
…You know, it gets really tiresome to be called diseased and a pedophile and a rapist and an abomination and a threat to America three dozen times in one day. It infuriates me to hear that yes, heterosexuals have special rights (at least they admitted it finally!) and that is how it should be because The Big Book of Bronze Age Fairy Tales says so. To hear little old ladies screaming that they would rather see their grandchildren commit suicide than "be part of that disgusting, filthy, evil lifestyle", isn’t even remotely amusing anymore.
Even better is to, due to the concussion headache beginning to blind me, forget to take off my little green and gold "equality" sticker on the way out of the building, and be followed to the bus stop by a bunch of red shirts with signs. Three 6’5", 200 pound Islander guys with signs saying "Gay marriage is wrong" and "John 3:16" followed the lone little white girl with her laptop case across the street, yelling at me, "Repent!", calling me a bitch and a whore, telling me, "You just need a real man to fuck you straight." Nothing I haven’t heard before.
Then one of them said, "We know who you are now, and what you drive. We saw you last Thursday. You better watch yourself, fucking haole bitch." Not one of the 20 people standing around the bus stop said anything to them.
I got on the first bus that came along, got off three stops down the street, and caught my right bus a few minutes later. I rode home all alone, with my headphones on, praying no one bothered me.
I don’t actually believe there is going to be anything like a second American civil war coming out of cowardly louts like these. But the republican noise machine is deliberately egging them on and it’s an open question as to whether or not they understand the forces they’re witlessly playing with. What I expect is to see more Timothy McVeighs and Eric Rudolphs…more godly men like this one…
Progressives around the country can breathe a little easier today: James Adkisson has been sentenced to life behind bars for the deaths of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, the Unitarian Universalist martyrs who died during his assault on their church in Knoxville, TN last July.
Many of us intuited at the time that Adkisson’s rampage was exactly the kind of rancid fruit that would inevitably take root in an American countryside thickly composted with two decades of hate radio bullshit, freshly turned and watered with growing middle-class frustration over the failing economy. That suspicion that was verified in the days that followed, when police searched Adkisson’s apartment and found it filled with books and newsletters penned by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other right-wing hate talkers.
But Monday, Adkisson told us himself — in his own words — just how central right-wing eliminationism was in driving him to his shooting spree. Shortly after he was sentenced Monday, he released a four-page handwritten "manifesto" — which he’d intended to be his suicide note — to the Knoxville News (the full .pdf can be downloaded here). In it, he unleashes the full measure of his hatred for liberals — and encourages other would-be right-wing warriors to take up arms and follow him into battle.
Some choice excerpts:
"Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them….
"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."
"I thought I’d do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me….Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.
No doubt this manifesto is being blogged, mailed, twittered, and otherwise littered across the far-right infosphere today, and Adkisson will likely emerge from this as a new hero of the extreme right wing. (He’s obviously articulate and literate, which means we may expect more of these bilious rants coming out of his cell in the years ahead.) It also seems likely that, probably sooner rather than later, other victims of our curdled economy will accept his charge, pick up their guns, and attempt to follow him into battle.
I have a feeling I know who is going to play the role that Jews played once upon a time when Germany was having its own little bout with economic chaos, and vitriolic class hatreds…
…After first establishing that God created Eve to be Adam’s “helper,” [Colorado State Senator] Renfroe explained why he opposed extending health care benefits to gay and lesbian partners of state employees:
Homosexuality is seen as a violation of this natural, created order and it is an offense to God, the Creator, who created men and women, male and female, for procreation.
Then came some passages from the Bible:
Leviticus 18:22 says, “You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination.”
and
Leviticus 20:13 says, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”
You just need a real man to fuck you straight. We know who you are now, and what you drive.
So…in case you’re wondering why your 401k is in the gutter…here’s part of the problem.
This article in Wired explains it in more detail. The above is a formula the gods of Wall Street were using to assess risk. Investors like risk. What they don’t like is uncertainty. If they know how to price risk, then they’ll lend. The greater the risk, the higher the interest rate. If they loose the bet every now and then that’s okay, as long as the rest of the bets pay off and they make money. But when they don’t know how to price risk, they won’t lend.
What makes the current financial mess look disturbingly like the Great Depression is that there is actually a lot of money available to lend, but nobody is lending any. Because nobody feels confidant enough that they understand the risks anymore. They don’t want to loose any more money then they already have. So they’re sitting on what they’ve got. This is why the Federal Government has to step in and inject money into the economy to keep it going. The banks and investors who usually do that…aren’t.
The biggest problem for investors is assessing risk in complex systems, such as the mortgage markets…
What is the chance that any given home will decline in value? You can look at the past history of housing prices to give you an idea, but surely the nation’s macroeconomic situation also plays an important role. And what is the chance that if a home in one state falls in value, a similar home in another state will fall in value as well?
H.L. Mencken once said, "For every problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong." Consider the Wired article on the Wall Street collapse an example. The above formula, crafted by mathematician David X. Li, seemed to simply and elegantly solve the problem of assessing risk. But it didn’t. It solved correlation. The best quote in the Wired article I’ve linked to this one, from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a hedge fund manager and the author of The Black Swan…
"Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism."
Beware your assumptions. Solving for correlation did not solve for risk. Correlation is pretty poor at solving for anything actually, not just in finances. We know poor people are thieves because we have seen many thieves who are poor. We know Jews are greedy because we have seen many greedy Jews. We know single parent families produce problem children because we have seen so many problem children who come from single parent families. We know homosexuality is caused by being molested as a child, because we have seen so many homosexuals who were molested as children…
You have to be careful where you draw conclusions from. Correlation is not evidence. It is only suggestive. And especially beware of the conclusions you expected. David X. Li’s formula didn’t cause the crash. This did:
The damage was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. In 1998, before Li had even invented his copula function, Paul Wilmott wrote that "the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable." Wilmott, a quantitative-finance consultant and lecturer, argued that no theory should be built on such unpredictable parameters. And he wasn’t alone. During the boom years, everybody could reel off reasons why the Gaussian copula function wasn’t perfect. Li’s approach made no allowance for unpredictability: It assumed that correlation was a constant rather than something mercurial. Investment banks would regularly phone Stanford’s Duffie and ask him to come in and talk to them about exactly what Li’s copula was. Every time, he would warn them that it was not suitable for use in risk management or valuation.
In hindsight, ignoring those warnings looks foolhardy. But at the time, it was easy. Banks dismissed them, partly because the managers empowered to apply the brakes didn’t understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop.
Besides, they were making too much money to stop. Besides. Besides. Right there’s the problem. They kept launching the Space Shuttle Challenger with O-ring joints that didn’t work the way the models said they should and they didn’t understand them but they kept on working, so they kept on launching. Until one of those joints killed good people who were trying to extend the human reach into space. This is such typical human behavior and it’s burned us all throughout our history and you’d think by now we’d know better, and rigorously teach our young how to avoid this trap. But we keep on doing it. There’s a saying I particularly despise: If it works, don’t fix it. There’s another way of saying that: Let’s wait for it to break.
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