tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42143980552414769942024-02-20T10:14:40.875-08:00WetwareHacksSignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-91630865602272221392014-08-04T17:42:00.003-07:002014-08-12T09:50:53.508-07:00Netanyahu's Bible Story: Genocide by the Book<div class="yiv6218318001" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1407196531975_8093" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span class="yiv6218318001" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1407196531975_8092" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was at the corner market last Sunday, picking up some food and sundries for the week, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began speaking on the television above the checkout line. I didn’t see who it was right away, but I was immediately struck by the tone of his delivery. He sounded genuinely concerned but reassuring; disappointed but optimistic; reluctant but resigned. He could have been talking about having to take away his child’s cell phone privileges after a lousy grade on a trigonometry test. What he was actually talking about was a ruthless and bloody military assault on a confined, impoverished and largely helpless people.</span></span><br />
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<span class="yiv6218318001" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1407196531975_8090" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Curiously, the group on the receiving end of this profligate carnage was made up of the natives who used to call that region home before a few charitable foreign powers decided to drop a whole new country down on top of them as if the place were uninhabited. To be fair, a native might be forgiven for thinking this peremptory exercise in nation-dumping somewhat rude; but keep in mind, <i>some</i> of the new residents’ ancestors had actually lived in this region only a couple of millennia ago, so this was really more like returning home from a protracted vacation only to find that the parties taking care of the place in your absence were less than enthusiastic about leaving now that you’re back. WTF, right? <span class="yiv6218318001"> </span>But not long before you returned, many in your number had just survived being evicted from where <i class="yiv6218318001">they</i> were living at the time—and then imprisoned, enslaved, tortured and very nearly annihilated—so it wasn’t like you didn’t know the feeling. Maybe if you just gave them a few additional lessons in what you'd recently gone through, they’d be more understanding (nice to see you got right on that). But either way, once you explain to the previous residents that you’re a people chosen by your god, aren’t they kind of obliged to grab their hats and start making for the door?</span></span><br />
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<span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Let's be clear: an awful lot of Israelis and even more Jews around the world have disagreed with the way Israel has treated its native Palestinians in the strongest possible terms, among them many of the planet’s most influential thinkers. Unfortunately, even the most distinguished of these voices are pretty thoroughly swallowed up in a cacophony of righteous nationalism and zeal before they can get a fair hearing. Leading the primal chorus is the great Benjamin Netanyahu, man of his people and scourge of the heathen. He is a canny political operator and a shrewd media manipulator with a crack team of messaging specialists. He can conjure the narrative of a beleaguered father figure for his international audience from one side of his mouth, while whistling up the dogs of genocidal war among his compatriots listening at home from the other.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">A number of times over the past five years the name “Amalek” has come up in both the official and unofficial communication of Netanyahu and his inner circle when speaking of countries deemed enemies of Israel. If you aren't Jewish or haven’t read the Old Testament, the name 'Amalek' might not resonate at all in your symbolic infrastructure. But once you know the back story, you realize that it's actually pretty absurd to invoke Amalek when speaking of, say, Iran or Palestine in the nation of Israel. The Amalekites were early Israel's arch-enemies. Israel's interaction with this group constitutes some of the most ignoble chapters in their bloody history / mythology in the region<sup class="yiv6218318001">1</sup>. It also provides a splendid example of the Hebrew sky god YHVH's<sup class="yiv6218318001">2</sup> renowned predilection for scorched-earth genocide. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" />Curiously, on the Genesis account, the eponymous Amalek wasn't an Arab or Persian ancestor; he was actually Hebrew. [OT geek alert] In fact, he was Esau's grandson, through his first-born son Eliphaz - Jacob's own great nephew! This is, of course, the same Jacob who was dubbed 'Israel' (yea, the eponymous) after a rather, eh, puzzling all-night wrestling match with a frisky angel back at the end of Genesis 32. So Isaac and Rebekah are the common ancestors. This is a family feud.<br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" /> In Exodus 17, the Amalekites attack the Israeli tribes from behind at a spot called Rephidim in the Sinai desert. Sources don’t offer a reason for the attack, but if you saw a massive group of armed strangers marching across your patch of wilderness, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine the worst and act accordingly. In any event, in our story Moses tells Joshua to choose a few good men and go crack open a can of Twelve-Tribal whoop-ass on these rapscallions. It was Israel's first major battle. According to the story, Moses goes to the top of a nearby hill to watch the fun, holding aloft his rod toward his sky god. In a remarkable twist, so long as he holds his rod erect, the home team scores; but whenever he begins to droop, the Amalekites prevail. So he has two young men bring him a rock to sit on, then instructs them to stand on either side of him to keep the thing up until Joshua's team brings the day to a satisfying climax. Hey, what are friends for?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">The Lord then tells Moses he's going to "blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven" (oh, thanks a lot, Bibi—you weren't supposed to remember...). Two verses later, however, we are informed that "the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation," so one is inclined to suppose that the threat of obliteration from memory just two verses earlier was more of a divine crotch grab than an actual statement of heavenly intent. And, of course, Bibi's off the hook in the eyes of the Lord for summoning a bothersome memory of an unkept promise. This should occasion no small relief—you know how He gets. If not, read on.<br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" />The unpleasantness resumes a few hundred years later, in especially pungent form, in the book of 1 Samuel, wherein Israel's sky god—still sore about that business in the Sinai—instructs their first king, Saul, to pop on over to Amalek and "destroy them utterly<sup class="yiv6218318001">3</sup>." In fact, this is a point on which he's fairly specific:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="background-color: white;">[G]o and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.</span></span></span></blockquote>
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</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">Now you or I might think, (D)ude, that seems a little severe... But no, YHVH (some consider the tetragramaton to be an unusual misspelling of 'S-A-M-U-E-L' in this case) still has an axe to grind with this crew and he appreciates attention to detail. Alas, the original King of Israel decides to be a bit creative in his interpretation of YHVH's commandment:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">But Saul and the people spared Agag [according to tradition, Agag was the hereditary name of all the Amalekite kings], and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.</span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As with any unlicensed good deed in such a superstitious climate, Saul's rather dubious clemency (if "all-but" counts as mercy) goes neither unnoticed nor unpunished. His reluctance to comply with YHVH's edict to the very letter turns out to be costly indeed. When Saul returns from his shoddily prosecuted genocide, the high priest Samuel confronts his star-crossed king. Of course Saul tries to play it off at first:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">Blessed be thou of the Lord: I have performed the commandment of the Lord!</span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">Oh yeah? says Sam,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="background-color: white;">What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear? </span><span style="background-color: white;">[I kid you not, that's what it saith—rather amusing, one might suppose, in any other context]</span></span></span></blockquote>
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</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">Oh, that... goes Saul.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">They have brought them from the Amalekites: for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice unto the Lord thy God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed.</span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;">After a bit of back-and-forth in which Saul tries to pass the buck, he is more or less asked "what part of 'genocide' have you failed to understand?"</span></span></div>
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<span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">And Samuel said, Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee from being king.<br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" />And Saul said unto Samuel, I have sinned: for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord, and thy words: because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice. <br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" />Now therefore, I pray thee, pardon my sin, and turn again with me, that I may worship the Lord. <br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" />And Samuel said unto Saul, I will not return with thee: for thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord hath rejected thee from being king over Israel.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><br class="yiv6218318001" /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> But you know, as the adage goes, when you want something done right...</span></span><br />
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<span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither to me Agag the king of the Amalekites. And Agag came unto him delicately. And Agag said, "Surely the bitterness of death is past."</span></span> </blockquote>
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<span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And Samuel said, As the sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women. <b class="yiv6218318001"><i class="yiv6218318001">And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal</i></b>.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Atta boy! One imagines Samuel resting easy on that night, the requisite human sacrifice—culminating in regicide-by-dicing as the coup de grâce—properly discharged, secure in the knowledge of a job well executed.<br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" />So, where were we... Oh yes: this self-righteous memory of the total extermination of an entire people, down to the last helpless animal under their care—men, women? children? Infants? oxen? sheep? camels and donkeys?—is the image Bibi's crew is inviting modern, semiotically-aroused Israel to entertain vis-a-vis its current relationship with people by whom it feels threatened. You’re either for us or you’re burnt toast. It pointedly suggests not only a war of extermination, but a war in which mercy is a sin that can cost you your job. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">While some might protest that the historicity of the Biblical account is highly suspect (to put the matter charitably), that objection perfectly misses the point. An awful lot of scared, angry and pious people actually believe it’s literally true. And here’s the terrifying part: they believe it <i class="yiv6218318001">approvingly</i>. The fate of the Amalekites in this account is their perfectly just and unexceptionable penalty for messing with the Chosen People—so much so that, should even a leader of Israel fail to carry out the prescribed annihilation with sufficient assiduity, he might find himself inscribed indelibly on the Lord’s shit-list. Natanyahu's invocation of this episode from the shared history of his people is nothing short of criminally insane. If there were any justice in our world, this man would be socked away in a safe, antiseptic, cozily padded room for the balance of his days.<br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" /> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup class="yiv6218318001"><span class="yiv6218318001" style="line-height: 115%;">1</span></sup></span></span><span class="yiv6218318001" style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> See chapter 17 of Exodus; chapter 15 of 1st Samuel, through verse 33, as well as numerous passages in the books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, Judges and 1st Chronicles<br class="yiv6218318001" /><br class="yiv6218318001" /><sup class="yiv6218318001">2</sup> Lordy, it's the divine tetragrammaton! Just don't say it out loud in the Auld Holey Lande. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but this word got you snuffed. For heaven's sake, of course.<br class="yiv6218318001" /> <br class="yiv6218318001" /><sup class="yiv6218318001">3</sup> To enact <i class="yiv6218318001">cherem</i>, or "total destruction." Like, in the kill-iest way imaginable. As in "Cherem if they got 'em." Crazy as a fly in a fucking drum. The next time you hear somebody say “we’re gonna get Biblical on their asses,” you now have the picture.<br class="yiv6218318001" /><br class="yiv6218318001" /><b class="yiv6218318001">An important distinction</b>: in modern times, cherem 'merely' means complete exclusion from the Jewish community - the highest current ecclesiastical censure available. However, in early Israel—back in the tribes—the term denoted the practice of "consecration by total annihilation" at YHVH's command. Israel visited this special form of worship on a number of ungrateful indigenous peoples, e.g. those of Midian, Amalek, and Jericho. Our dubious accounts do not recall whether or not the annihilatees felt any particular spiritual elevation during their participation in this sport as they were consigned to oblivion. To be fair, it appears not to have been their game.</span></span></div>
SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-51551132719351842392013-01-28T21:29:00.002-08:002013-05-01T12:07:57.898-07:00Endgame Chicanery: On Death, Taxes and the Moochers at the Top<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In an earlier post, we talked about a remarkably vicious and destructive species of wetware hackery called the "<a href="http://wetwarehacks.blogspot.com/2012/09/is-your-newsroom-breeding-fuckweasels.html" target="_blank">fuckweasel</a>," which is essentially a viral form of organized irrationality. Some of the most dangerously effective GOP shenaniganeering in this area to date deals with the process permitting wealth to migrate, largely intact and undiminished, through succeeding generations on a schedule of extremely expensive funerals. Wildly enthusiastic campaigns of disinformation have been mobilized over the years to promote the hare-brained conceit that inherited assets should be accorded some super-sacred pride-of-place in the hurly-burly hierarchy of capital. The arguments put forward for this privileged status range from clever sophistry to shameless lunacy, but they all seem to share in common a certain rank obliviousness to even the most elementary attributes of financial inheritance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here's what happens: somebody you either know or have received hand-me-down genes from has clocked out while sitting atop a massive pile of financial resources, and you've made the short-list for its redistribution. It's like winning the lottery, only slightly less respectable. If you've inherited a boatload of money, you've simply won a lottery in which somebody else entered your name—either by default, in the form of a birth certificate, or for various other reasons of relationship and/or affinity. The question of whether or not these winnings should be heavily taxed is a remarkably trivial one. Of all the possible paths by which one might acquire financial means, this one lies the furthest from any activity that could even remotely be thought of as "earning it." You never had any "skin in that game" (to repurpose a particularly nasty little fuckweasel from our contemptuous, tax-dodging gravy-trainrobbers); you only came by that windfall because you had a guy on the inside — one who died getting it to you. Some serious economic thinkers have suggested that such inheritance not be permitted at all. But if we are going to let you harvest the fruits of somebody else's labor at no expense or inconvenience to yourself, we are absolutely obliged, under any sensible conception of fairness to those who legitimately work for a living, to levy taxes on that form of income at higher rates than we do on any other. While such ethically sound notions of economic justice have been dying a slow and excruciating death for some time, a few weak and feeble vestiges do still cling to life in some quarters. And so, at least for absurdly exorbitant sums of inherited money, our government continues to insist on some pittance of tax responsibility on the part of these newly endowed beneficiaries. It's called the "estate tax." While the thresholds are far too high and the rates too low, we do at least still pay some meager respect to the irrefutable logic of this duty.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the beneficiaries of our recently-reaped financial royalty and their courtiers say "Not so fast!" And they've got something we don't have: a high-performance, lab-cultured, lizard-spec fuckweasel — and it's so elegant its almost guaranteed to work. It operates by way of a simple and thoroughly gratuitous terminology swap. They merely replace the words "estate tax" with "Death Tax!" — and watch the gooseflesh bloom... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And that really is both the genius and the imbecility of it. Never mind that common sense might suggest that we actually raise the rate significantly and call it the "Murder Tax," given the number of suspicious deaths related to this type of wealth transfer that have to be investigated every year — at considerable public expense — due to obvious motive. It's a remarkably tasteless and unfunny joke to suggest that such unearned, posthumously awarded largess ought not be taxed out of some vague, implicit sense of sympathy for the deceased or respect for their wishes. We've all got wishes, but the departed can own nothing more than their imprint on our memories, and their heirs have just been paid dearly for the luck of some form of association with them — the original "money for nothing." Clearly, the living must not be permitted to reap the wages of the dead without so much as minimal public responsibility attached. This is an insult to even the flimsiest notion of merit, and a transparent attack on the foundational value of actual human enterprise. It offers free lunch—and in many cases free room, board, and lavish entertainment in perpetuity—to well-connected "takers" for generations to come. The inimitable Warren Buffet put it this way: "The idea that you get a lifetime of privately funded food stamps based on coming out of the right womb strikes at my idea of fairness." Indeed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Exempting the inheritance of private wealth from public responsibility also consolidates already overwhelming financial advantage in an ever smaller number of hands, and increasingly enables them to yank the "socioeconomic mobility" ladder up after themselves and their posterity once they've used it to shinny up to that opulent clubhouse on the top floor. Well guess what — that ladder was never theirs to begin with; it has always belonged to us all. Once they've been accorded every other advantage of privilege imaginable, why they gotta steal our ladder? Perhaps they have a hard time imagining a world in which they're not exclusively entitled to pretty much anything that strikes their fancy, even when laying false claim to it destabilizes the very system that allowed the wealth to accrue to in the first place — and even when they know they'll never need to use it themselves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then there's the old canard about the renamed tax being an underhanded attempt at "double taxation" — the notion being that these superhumanly industrious and enterprising tycoons had already rendered unto Caesar quite enough on the loot they'd amassed by the time they punched out, thank you very much, and laying on any additional responsibility following the transfer would just be extracting a punitive additional chunk from wealth that has already been properly trimmed. But even if it were true that all of the wealth that qualified for the estate tax had already been subject to a round of taxation, the estate tax would still be perfectly unexceptionable given that this wealth is now somebody else's completely unearned income. If I buy a car, I use income that I pay taxes on to acquire the right to call it my property. If I pay a mechanic to fix that car, I likewise use taxed income to do so. Yet the car dealer and the wrench-man also pay taxes on the income they take in from that sale or service. Do we call that "double taxing?" Of course not; that's simply the dues we pay for the privilege of citizenship, life and commerce in the society in which we live. Our government quite rightly taxes income acquired, say, through the sale of physical commodities, that are purchased using income that is also taxed; ditto for labor or service. We'd certainly better tax income that the recipient has simply mooched (or "won," if that still feels more palatable) through the demise of their well-appointed relatives or benefactors. So there you have it: even if we suppose this claim (that tax on the wealth was already paid by the person or entity previously holding it) to be generally true, it would still be a demonstrably fatuous and irrelevant objection to the estate tax.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The kicker? It's a rubbish claim to begin with. Most of the estates that are big enough to be subject to this tax consist, to a surprisingly large degree, of "unrealized" capital gains that have never been taxed at all! In fact, one of the more compelling reasons for the creation of the estate tax, back in 1916, was to make sure this stealth wealth didn't get unfairly shoveled through the cracks untaxed, and thence back into the pockets of parties propitiously connected to the obscenely prosperous departed. These unrealized, untaxed capital gains amount to more than a third of the assets held by estates of sufficient size to qualify for the tax ($5.12 million per person at the current exemption level, up from $3.5 million in 2009), and a full 56 percent for estates worth more than $10 million. Moreover, if the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center is to be believed on this point (and it most assuredly is), the exemption bar is so high that 99.87 percent of the estates in this country comprise too little wealth to owe even a dime of the estate tax in question. Make no mistake, repealing the laughably mislabeled "Death Tax!" is really about squirming out of any tax responsibility at all for a vast share of the wealth changing hands here, not about being spared any tax treatment that could be sanely viewed as unfair or punitive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But ethically, the issue is even clearer. It is precisely those parties who have prospered most in our economy who owe the greatest debt to the necessary economic and political system — as well as the public infrastructure — that both enables and safeguards that success. Teddy Roosevelt summarized this point succinctly in 1906, pointing out that "the man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the State because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government." This observation is much truer today than it ever was in TR's time, given the far greater role of government in creating, maintaining and protecting the vast and complex landscape in which commerce and corporate activity take place in our current age. But don't get them wrong, these takers are perfectly content to soak the government for every conceivable public advantage that makes their wealth possible; they just reserve the right to pitch a first-rate hissy-fit if that government looks askance at the prospect of being stiffed by their broods and bros at the end. Now that's a pharm-grade dose of chutzpah right there. But , miraculously, if you just slap a tag like "Death Tax!" on the enormous bill justly owed to their country upon their passing, one could almost be forgiven for imagining that the lucky winners are the ones getting shafted. Such is the power of shrewdly-crafted fuckweasels: sometimes they can even convince people that you're getting hurt when you're getting over. So the next time the term "Death Tax!" turns up in polite conversation, do us all a favor and explain — calmly and politely — to the agent propagating this mindless malware both that they're full of shit, and why. Do it for your country.</span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-36540102984619136312012-09-12T15:11:00.001-07:002012-09-12T15:52:05.190-07:00You And I and the Parking Lot Mendicant<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>How does she recline on this delible day</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In those ribbons of bruise her back </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Creased by the vertex of car sandwich tiers</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These stacked slabs of slots--the periodic </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Numbered accommodations of this year's </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Motto of mobility? She runs down </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Done in outside the locus of brand royalty </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Awaiting the accumulation of lunchtime.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whatever else I'm not </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Am I not as her as me? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> I pray to doubt.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can't find the space to leave to lose </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These roots to tender the truth about me </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I try this is not me I try again</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Is it nothing again breaking outward </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dispersed with the crucible suspended </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whole on hot tongues? Remind me </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">How my consequences funnel light.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hold up these fire-worn branches </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Know the unsung numbers</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Of our secrets through this soil.</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span> <br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Give us back</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span> <br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Home.</span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-57090968703866103232012-09-03T16:35:00.000-07:002012-09-09T04:51:59.220-07:00Is Your Newsroom Breeding Fuckweasels?<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There’s an infestation plaguing the newsrooms, publishing houses and web-feeds of America. The minds of many of the people we all rely upon to provide reporting, information and perspective on the events that affect both our lives and our future have been severely compromised by one of the most diabolical threats we’ve ever faced as a nation. They are succumbing in droves to the ruthless onslaught of ravenous, mind-mulching fuckweasels. </span></div>
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</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The fuckweasel is an invasive species purpose-built to devour reason and excrete confusion and nonsense; to sniff out our fears, consume and consolidate them, then bind them selectively to the most sensible and helpful ideas on offer. They subsist—nay, thrive—on a steady diet of seed-corn, scrambled brains, and fear. To make matters worse, the cognitive viruses these malignant memes carry induce hallucinations that paint horrifying death's-heads on those who think and act out of compassion for their fellow human beings while elevating the avatars of avarice, whose ends they serve, to the status of heroes and royalty. Their sole function in the world is to recycle unwary brains for someone else's profit.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you’re like most Americans, you probably feel like things have slipped for you pretty badly over the past few years, but you’re still holding onto a fairly sizable reserve of hope. Hey, this is capitalism, you might be thinking; they’ll sort it all out for us sharpish just as soon as the smoke clears! Yet maybe you’ve also noticed that this sorting and re-sorting has been going on for some time now, and that somehow you keep getting shifted further and further from any arrangement you might consider reasonably “sorted” in each round. At the same time, a tiny subset of citizens—the very people who were best situated to begin with—just keep finding themselves levitated higher and faster every time you look. It’s like somebody keeps handing them winning lottery tickets every day of their charmed lives! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The wires and the WiFi are awash with explanations for why you’ve pitched up at this sorry turn. Many of these voices will instruct you to believe that it was inevitable, or that your government is preventing the winners from coming to your aid—or even that it’s your own damned fault. Narratives like these are pressed into service on behalf of a set of institutions and interests that political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson refer to as “organized money.” The mouthpieces of organized money often speak of even the most meager concessions to any reasonable idea of equality with the kind of contempt normally reserved only for the most scurrilous and contemptible of scandals. But these aren’t “evil” people; rather, they are profoundly ill. Their systems of thought have been compromised, corrupted by fiendishly sophisticated malware that subverts or disables their capacity for sustained contextual analysis and sound ethical reasoning. That is to say, their meme-space is infested with fuckweasels. Consequently, they consistently confuse excuses with explanations, rationalization with ratiocination, and emotionally-charged assertion with telling evidence. And the longer these scripts run against their brains—their wetware, if you will—the more extensively the wetware gets rewired, and the more susceptible they become to more comprehensive infiltration. It’s a rabidly vicious cycle. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are rules, of course. To do its job properly our fuckweasel has to summon your inner lizard: that gallingly primitive security system deep in your brain that handles threat detection, sirens, klaxons, flashing red lights, and of course soiling your undergarments. Therefore, these pernicious chunks of viral code don’t carry out their destructive hacks by way of clever reasoning, or by any other legitimate means of rational suasion; instead, they accomplish these feats by gate-crashing your cognitive party under the guise of opinion or thoughtful commentary, then taking to the trees. Once inside, they brachiate<sup><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: xx-small;">1</span></sup> gleefully through the dendritic branches in your lush, unguarded brainforest, chopping away meaningful associations; cross-wiring<sup><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: xx-small;">2</span></sup> your lizard-class limbic alarm system; suppressing the paths to those pesky critical thinking circuits in the neocortex; and generally reducing every complex, multivalent issue to a simplistic, bivalent schema of right versus wrong, good versus bad, pro- versus anti-everything-that-matters. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This last, reductive feature is perhaps the most insidiously effective function of fuckweasel code. Under the gentle ministrations of our work-a-day fuckweasels, every sophisticated proposition (or even any targeted feature of a larger proposal) gets mashed down, its useful complexity bitten away, until—like a simple, household toaster—it admits of only two states: right on, or way off; toasty warm and safe, or chillingly cold and terrifying to the point of incontinence. They don’t even bother to say why in any coherent or compelling way; they just grab our complex issues, chew them up, shape the resulting bolus into these ridiculous wank-toasters, then trot them out on the evening news and flog them like they’re the only mental products that any right-thinking person must judge indispensable. And lo, they’re selling like gold-plated love-batteries with a lifetime guarantee! How do the fuckweasels accomplish this? Branding and labeling, dear reader—and exhaustive repetition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Another crucial point to bear in mind is that the fuckweasel isn’t designed to be viewed straight-on; rather, it uses misdirection to induce you to haul your head sideways and let it hump your ear. Because the minute you start passing notes to your cortex or making like you’re actually trying to rationally understand something, those little contacts that it has clipped into your fear circuitry start to lose their purchase and the lone fuckweasel begins to lose its mojo. In fact, once properly comprehended, this tiny, doomed blighter will simply explode (or “pop,” if you must…) in a diminutive puff of applied horse-sense. For this reason, they seldom undertake solo operations at all, but are nearly always to be found in roving packs of close-knit family members.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For example, have you noticed that a woeful lack of both meaningful regulation and reliable enforcement has rendered our economy dangerously fragile and brittle, permitting fraud to permeate the world of finance to the point where even the most powerful institutions in the sector are now regularly complicit in gaming the global system in ways that sabotage its future sustainability and threaten the very credibility of its present foundations? Wait, did you just say that out loud? Heaven forfend—already I fear I detect the patter of tiny paws, the gnashing of razor-sharp incisors ravenous for the rending of reason! Oh dear, here they are, and right on schedule...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“You wretched, job-crushing cretin—why, you’re anti-business! Regulation Bad! How dare you offend the tender ears of our innocent citizens with your anti-employment heresy! Pipe down for God’s sake; you’re scaring the job-creators!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But wait, you protest, if a practice is unfair, fraudulent, anti-competitive and unethical—resulting, say, in the elimination of quality jobs and the looting of hard-earned pensions—and done merely for the short-term gain of unscrupulous investors, how is making it against the law anything other than necessary? After all, if it’s legal then those who do engage in the unethical practice gain an unfair market advantage over their competitors who suffer the inconvenience of a conscience! I’m only opposed to certain particular, unrestricted applications of business practice, which are actually themselves bad for business! And by the way, what are you even talking about? All I’m saying is…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Oh we hear you loud and clear: 'Elimination of quality jobs!', 'Opposed to ... business practice!' and 'Bad for business!' (See, you’re doing this to yourself!) Market scold! Business-hater! Job-killer! Nanny-state socialist! (We’ve got a million of ‘em—what are you still doing here?) If markets want regulating, they’ll send us a memo with their next prezzie!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You see? How can a calm, coherent and carefully-reasoned argument ever hold a candle to an incendiary label that’s engineered to simply scare the pickled bejeezus out of anyone who might be tempted to listen to you? You can’t dispatch them with cogent counterargument. These little vermin burrow and cling with deer-tick tenacity. Their notional content is crafted in advance and hard-coded. Any effort at earnest sense-making is likely to be futile; the fuckweasels' carriers will just keep methodically lobbing the same resonant, focus group-tested, semiotically-charged word-bombs and catch-phrases into your rebuttals—often through distracting interruptions—until your own bemused weariness and incredulity begins to seem more and more like resignation, like concession to the implacable logic of their strident abuse. That’s the genius of this malware: fuckweasel code doesn’t have to “think”; it just has to prevent anybody else from thinking. It often does so by preventing them from even finishing their sentences.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While some random fuckweasels are born in the wild, so to speak—on some factually-challenged blog, say, or in a newspaper column by one of the usual stable of "Fair and Balanced<span class="Unicode"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">™</span></span>" meme-ponies, or occasionally on one of those “analysis” shows that feature a motley collection of blowhards talking shit at each other at the top of their lungs—that’s not where most of the heavy lifting in this highly selective breeding process gets done. Many of the most brutally effective specimens are in fact carefully designed, decanted and tested in the specialized laboratories I alluded to above, called (apparently without irony) “focus groups,” which often reside in (wait for it…) “think tanks.” These dedicated environments are like wind-tunnels for the professional streamlining of industrial-grade fuckweasels for optimal assimilation by the thinking impaired—usually people whose wetware has already been invaded and "softened" by virtual armadas of the bristling varmints well in advance. Because that’s the demographic that offers the most powerful vector, reproducing and propagating these lovingly-crafted strings of organized and highly viral irrationality to the broadest possible audience, and repeating them ad nauseam until they acquire the familiar texture of common knowledge.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Take the “<a href="http://www.nationofchange.org/labor-day-without-jobs-exposing-job-creator-fraud-1346678884" target="_blank">Job Creator</a>” fuckweasel—please! This one is widely deployed and swimmingly successful (never let it be said that there are no amphibious versions available). Its frustrated detractors often refer to it as a myth—and like many myths of old, it contains a grain of truth. That’s one of its strengths as a first-rate scrambler of brains. Tennyson once wrote that a “lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.” But myths also generally contained moral guidance: tropes and themes that signaled strength of character and nobility of mind. This “Job Creator” fuckweasel is no myth; there’s nothing ennobling about the way it lays waste to any meaningful discourse about power, privilege, income inequality, or the current structure of our economy. Sure, wealthy individuals generally have more people employed under them in the hierarchy than above—hence the term ‘hierarchy’—and they are also the ones who often make the decision to take on more labor as it becomes expedient to do so; but that doesn’t mean they got there by increasing hires (the opposite is often true). Nor does it mean jobs would decrease if you added to their tax responsibility (this is the fraternal fuckweasel that usually arrives in tandem with the “Job Creator” type). Indeed, empirically, </span><a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/tax-reform/news/2011/06/27/9856/rich-peoples-taxes-have-little-to-do-with-job-creation/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the opposite is generally true</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">! The wealthy do not "create jobs"; demand for goods and services creates the expediency of hiring more labor to meet that demand. Paying customers create jobs. The idea that even slightly increased taxes on the wealthy might somehow make that fact less true is not a legitimate point raised for thoughtful consideration; it’s just the knobby, lofted middle finger of our super-rich prima donnas raised in unconcealed contempt for their supporting cast. Period.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Or how about that exceptionally vicious fuckweasel that maintains that massive income and wealth inequality is the result—and not the enemy—of freedom; or its sibling that suggests that this is a country of equal opportunity, not equality of means? Hate to piss on your fireworks, boss, but if you’re actually blissfully unaware that nearly all of the examples that are summoned to mind when we speak of “opportunity” in this country are profoundly mediated by money, that is, by financial means, then there are almost certainly a number of doorknobs in your immediate vicinity with a more formidable intellectual endowment than your own. In fact, the one you just used to enter the room is probably twisting in a fit of pique at the comparison. This kind of dishonesty is hardly worth dignifying with a proper rebuttal. But, thankfully, very thorough and rigorous refutations have been made (</span><a href="http://www.howardism.org/appendix/Cohen.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e.g.</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">), and they are quite unanswerable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the sillier companions to the two rodents of irrationality mentioned in the foregoing paragraph is the idea that people who argue for greater socioeconomic equality are merely jealous of the “success” of the obscenely wealthy: the recently popular “Don’t Hate Us Because We’re so Goddamn Awesome” fuckweasel. This is a critter that fairly howls with imbecilic risibility. As if, had you an ounce of initiative, you too could have contrived to be born into a family with a lifetime ticket on the gravy train. It’s not their fault that they entered the world pedigreed with multiple generations of power, privilege, influence and entitlement in their silk-lined pockets. You think it’s easy carrying a wallet that heavy? Show some compassion! Uh-huh. Nobody hates them because they’re rich; we may, however, think they (or more to the point, their besotted courtiers) are rather tedious fools for denying the countless lifetimes of grueling labor on the part of those in the strata beneath them that were required to place them where they are. The tragedy here is not coveted wealth but mind-numbing stupidity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But it gets worse. You can’t donate your head to the care and feeding of fuckweasels for very long before you begin to lose your mooring in the rational and observable world. You lose the ability to make—or even acknowledge the significance or validity of—crucial distinctions. And you lose the capacity to reliably apprehend the empirical domain. Like the Bush operative in that classic Ron Suskind piece who proudly spoke of <em>creating reality</em> in their new, high-powered “culture of assertion” while contemptuously dismissing the apparently outmoded “reality-based community.” Like Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, who recently waved aside those who noted absurd fabrications in their campaign copy by sneering “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” Or how about that amazing sub-three hour marathon that Paul Ryan never ran? Apparently facts are such impossibly stubborn things that some candidates have entirely given up trying to work with them. Imagine feeling so besieged by—or disdainful of—reality that your last line of defense is to downplay the very idea of facticity. There’s a creepy thread of unhinged solipsism at work in their bizzaro positions—the notion that the hacked, ad hoc version of reality between a partisan’s ears is somehow preferable to any version that insists on recourse to observation or rational critique. It’s a thread that begins to unravel in a frayed tangle of beleaguered identity at the first off-hand tug.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes, it’s so much more exciting to be afraid than to be informed. That’s the principle fuckweasels operate on. So they dig away at the core of our identities and plant explosive fecal matter at the foundations. They tell us that <em>who we are</em> is being stolen by <em>who somebody else is</em>. They whisper that heterosexual marriage is being burgled by "the gays," and that if we don’t stand up and graffiti our constitution with bigotry, they’ll abscond with the very meaning of our sacred family union. They shriek that Muslims are making off with our “way of life,” whatever that means, and warn us that if we aren’t prepared to defend it, by force of arms if necessary (oh, and it will be!), we’ll all wake up one morning way-of-lifeless—which apparently is a pretty big deal to any life-ectomy survivor who actually believes it. So maybe you <em>do</em> wake up on the wrong side of the bed one morning before that fateful day, with one of these nattering monsters in your ear, and decide to give your soul the day off. Maybe you determine it’s finally time to round up your all-too-easily-acquired assortment of necessary firearms, nip off to the public space of your choosing and start pumping projectiles into anybody who’s committed the inexcusable indignity of failing to be you. Hell, maybe you get on a real tear and even decide to take out the one guy present who got <em>that</em> right in the end. You just can’t be too careful these days, as any self-respecting fuckweasel will tell you. Because these things are about fear, and fear controls; fear rationalizes; fear makes the senseless appear sensible—even necessary. But most importantly, fear drives us to the polls, to vote for the party that stands the best chance of keeping it alive.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A couple of final notes:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fuckweasels are flexible travelers. Primary distribution usually takes place via cable television, radio and Internet; but after infecting their initial carriers they can easily be transported with no loss of potency via sneakernet to the bar-stool nearest you. They are commonly found in densest proliferation on the systems of people who can’t be bothered to wrangle their hapless rummage sale of ideas into any semblance of coherence or consistency. These meme-beasties thrive on intellectual laziness. And though fuckweasels may sound fairly innocuous—or even patently stupid—when first encountered, they acquire considerable strength through repetition. They also crash every system they compromise, converting them into mindless relayers—a kind of crowd-sourced bandwidth for the transmission of bullshit on behalf of the well-heeled saboteurs who pay their makers. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don’t ever let them intimidate you! When confronted with even the most casual interrogation, they crack like a cheap pair of shoes. While fuckweasels are not always easy to identify, it helps to keep your eyes skinned and your ears tuned for simplistic buzzwords and phrases—strings of words that sound too glib and facile to actually explain anything, but which are suddenly too ubiquitous to ignore. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can kill them with anger or by force. They can only be deactivated through careful, calm reasoning and well-formed questions—and even then, only if you're dealing with a relatively intact mind of sufficient breadth and complexity to compute the contradictions. Keep in mind that some mental systems are simply too small to hold both the fuckweasels and their effective countermeasures. Don’t let that get to you; just let them go—because man, they’re gone. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, in closing, be careful: don’t let the fuckweasels in. Don’t entertain them as guests and don’t let your kids keep them as pets. They’ve done enough damage already. But don't blame their victims either; they ain't mad atcha, they're just scared out of their minds. Literally.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: x-small;">1.</span> <span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Yes, the wily fuckweasel, once inside your wetware, displays an almost preternaturally superb adaptation to neural brachiation. Some have even suggested changing the taxonomical designation to “fuckmonkey.” This would accord nicely with the defining question that currently guides GOP policy and debate: “What Would Rhesus Do?” But no, too many other features militate in favor of the fuckweasel classification, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rodentia bohica</i> (from the U.S. Armed Services acronymic vernacular “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bend Over, Here It Comes Again!</i>”).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">2. Most likely by jacking your amygdala with your subcortical auditory and visual processing circuits using pre-primed linguistic and visual input.</span></span></div>
SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-36804704459272291642012-04-25T19:07:00.000-07:002012-04-27T17:21:01.418-07:00Terminal Freedom<div style="text-align: left;">
You know America's collective bad trip has taken a turn for the surreal when it dawns on you that a sizable gaggle of your compatriots have taken that decisive, "one-too-many" pull from the Big Brother bong and are now convinced that the delusional crackpot in the front yard--that guy in the sandwich boards, standing on the violets and muttering insults at the host--is the most enlightened soul at the party. Our political system here is now so broken, so polarized and so ethically bankrupt that, for a large and growing chunk of our electorate, even extreme and alarmingly simplistic libertarian ideas have begun increasingly to seem like a welcome improvement. </div>
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Of all of the bizarre characters that have held our attention during this Republican primary season, libertarian Texas congressman Ron Paul is perhaps the most peculiar. Reedy and resolute, "Dr. No" maintained the same positions he's held throughout his entire political career in every debate. In a sea of makeovers, pandering and closely-supervised molding of public identity, this personage stands alone as a singular island of unyielding public consistency. The man is immutable. In the interests of his personal vision of "Freedom," his stated aims never vary: slash taxes at every opportunity; return to the gold standard; kill any market regulation that still breathes; physically secure all borders and coastlines; dramatically reduce defense spending (a lovely idea if he'd agree to use that vital revenue to create new jobs, but alas...); end the Fed and the IRS--in fact, eliminate any federal agency big enough to draw a bead on (Education, Interior, Commerce, Energy, FEMA, and HUD, to name a few disfavorites). His idea of freeing America is to balkanize it: in short, to give states maximal sovereignty while stripping away the overwhelming majority of the already fraught connective tissue of defining national institutions and oversight that permits us to cohere as as a "united" entity. In Ron Paul's America, the federal government has no business being anywhere near your life, not even to set minimal standards for your health care, your safety, or your education--and certainly not to maintain the stability of our national economy. The man is honestly trying to work himself out of a job.</div>
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While I've always been impressed with Mr. Paul's ability to hold the same views on an astonishing range of issues year after year, and to vote accordingly, I'm not at all impressed with the actual views themselves. The fact that he hasn't bothered to update these opinions in light of all the new data and exceptionally cogent analysis that has emerged in the interim is shamefully tragic. As Emerson once noted, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." If Paul could legitimately plead ignorance, I'd be inclined to view him more charitably. The fact is, he made up his mind forty years ago about how the world works, and he hasn't considered a single compelling counterargument since. During that time, his spartan economic ideology has not merely been disputed, it has been roundly and irretrievably refuted. From a few simplistic notions of narrowly-defined responsibility, individual liberty and minimal government, he has fashioned a single tool--one that does few things at all well, and breaks far more meaningful freedoms than it builds. This is a classic example of Maslow's "Golden Hammer" ("I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."). Building and maintaining a complex, modern society is a bit more sophisticated than just banging the lumber together. That kind of constructive work wants all the tools you can get your paws on. But you won't get far with any single one of them--especially not one designed for demolition.</div>
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The libertarians' concept of freedom--both their popular rallying cry and their intellectual albatross--is hopelessly impoverished. It is <a href="http://howardism.org/appendix/Cohen.pdf" target="_blank">impossible</a> to sustain even a minimally coherent contention of equal freedom in a country where (1) every option to exercise this putative endowment, from the minimal necessities of subsistence to the most absurd extremes of extravagance, is mediated by money; and (2) both the allocation of this medium and the disposition of opportunity for its acquisition are vastly and increasingly unequal among individuals at the outset. Without the means to exercise a claim of freedom in any given situation, or even the viable opportunity to acquire the means, that claim is a cruel lie. Yet whenever anybody publicly disapproves of the extreme inequality in America they are immediately set upon by these faux freedom fighters, who dutifully remind them that it's not the job of government to ensure equality of outcome, only equality of opportunity. But this assertion takes as its implicit premise the assumption that equality of opportunity is actually a current feature of American life. This popular misconception is not only laughably preposterous, it's also deeply insulting. Opportunity is an empty word without the means to use it, and true equality of opportunity requires that such necessary means be equally shared. But "education isn't a right," Dr. No insists, "medical care isn't a right--these are things you have to earn!" Indeed. Presumably the children of affluence "earn" their enviable privileges by the simple, repetitive act of continually hoisting their hands to accept the proffered bounty. </div>
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While simply increasing government funding for the poor won't meet the challenge alone, that's not an argument against it; in fact, it's a point in favor of much more than mere dollars. There is some legitimacy to the claim that merely providing financial assistance can create dependence on the part of recipients over time, though this objection should apply with equal validity to the much more substantial assistance supplied by the wealthy to their own dreamy little write-offs. If you want to see what real "entitlement" looks like, have a quick peek at that end of the financial spectrum. (You're gonna want to tip your head back all the way--that's right--and use this spotting scope. No worries bruv, just doin our job...) See, we don't simply need a more refined sense of noblesse oblige. Quality education must be a right enjoyed by <em>every</em> citizen if the process of democracy is to move beyond the mere servicing of moneyed interests, punctuated by shallow seasonal pageants. Without a decent baseline of both knowledge and opportunity, a little sympathy bump in spending once in awhile provides little more than a dollop of salve on the festering wound of social injustice and a cheap analgesic to dull that brief prick of vestigial conscience in our elected representation while they leg it out of the projects to collect their gold star. It preserves the existing structures that created the problem while permitting a hollow claim of remedial effort. The deferential affirmation of privilege is woven into the fabric of our institutions and our identities. Without a dramatic increase in both the quantity and quality of available jobs, and a matching increase in educational investment, our democracy will run aground on its own insecurity, ignorance and paranoia.</div>
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We've done better in the past. The time of this country's longest longest interval of broadly-based prosperity, from the end of WWII into the Seventies, was also the time when it was most deeply regulated economically and most vigorously taxed at the top end--a libertarian's gooseflesh nightmare. Since the seventies, our economy has become increasingly libertarian and deregulated, and also insanely unequal. In fact, the graph of household income for each percentile of our population increases fairly gradually until the last decile, then approximates a freakishly climbing <a href="http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~aaronc/courses/7000/csci7000-001_2011_L2.pdf" target="_blank">power law distribution</a> that approaches vertical near the top end. The wealth distribution curve is even more extreme, and at both ends: a full quarter of us have zero or negative net worth This isn't because anybody in those last fractional percentiles is working correspondingly harder or doing anything significantly better; it's simply an artifact of the way our economy and our financial system is set up. Those who are already ahead get further ahead, and faster, than those behind them--even the nearest lagging players whose wealth is increasing in the same way. </div>
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Of course, the wizards of Wall Street have crafted instruments to insure canny investors against downside risk. But the rollback of the meaningful regulations (in the name of "Freedom!") that served to prevent broader systemic risk created a situation in which even those devices were not sufficient to prevent disaster. And as we recently discovered, at that level of play the scale of the conflagration was so great, the potential fallout so dire, that the very government that let them write their own rules had to summon every lowly, unwashed, tax-paying hand in the country to man the fire brigade.</div>
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So what did we do then, change the building codes? Oh go on! No self-respecting believer in the sanctity of markets could ever agree to such an abridgment of "Freedom"--and organized money was spot on point to make sure no seriously relevant or binding changes occurred. We let them rebuild everything pretty much just like it was. Moral hazard? Check... Perverse incentive? Check... Systemic risk? Check... </div>
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Blank check? Check.</div>
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They're flush again now (in truth they were never not) and they can afford all of the shrewd political machinations and the brilliant campaigns of disinformation that may be required to defeat you should you disagree with the wisdom of their regime. When life gave them lemons, they promptly had them bronzed and stitched them into their scrotums. Yet even these luminous beings are not the most exalted spirits in the heavens; they are mere avatars of ethereal powers beyond accounting in the transcendent logos of logo. The names and potent sigils of these ineffable effers adorn every available surface of their earthly places of worship, every official letterhead, and every object fashioned in their interest. And praise be to their holy names, they're more efficient now than ever!</div>
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But no, you protest, these are just names and symbols that identify, you know, like, official sources of goods and services. T'yeah, no--not after the Citizens United decision entered holy writ. In conferring personhood on these branded interests, the stunted souls of SCOTUS have deprecated the very meaning of that term beyond recognition, robbing it of its last essential breath of empathic entailment. Gone is the element of sentience as sine qua non; gone is the assumption of discrete and uniquely experienced identity; gone is the implied responsibility of a living agent among living peers--the conscience of consciousness--or even the merest presumption of sane fellow-feeling. These newly-naturalized, titanic toddlers exist in a domain beyond feeling, and know only one overriding directive: the infinitive of grow. We've even given them voices--the loudest ones in the country, by all accounts--in the only language they know.</div>
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That wage-slave job you humped at week in and week out for ten years to prop them up? Silly camel, that was never your job--it was theirs all along! And they gave it to some other poor sod even worse off than your luckless self, in a country that won't complain if it kills them, for an annual salary you couldn't live on for a fortnight. Only the misplaced loyalty and confidence you brought to that work was your own--an overvalued product of marginal futility. It'll happen to your successor too if the numbers look right--this isn't a popularity contest. And your struggle isn't special; it's just another used-to-work-a-day externality for this freshly-minted being, on the path to some optimal market nirvana. They're the very Gods of job genesis--don't you dream of causing them to knit their figurative brows at the prospect of an insulting increase in tax responsibility, or a more respectful relationship with the labor that allows them to persist. It was your staggering good fortune to have them smile upon you for that enchanted, sweat-filled decade--you're so welcome!--but, mercifully, your services are no longer required. Just don't let's think they've "terminated your employment" or "fired you"--that kind of frankness is for defeatists and disgruntled former associates. No, they've simply "let you go." Did'ja catch that?--the script, she is flipped! You've lost nothing, poor thing; they did you a solid. You've been liberated from the cruel shackles of your meager means. The discarded world is now your oyster. Henceforward you can arise proudly each morning from your gifted blankets, bedizened with still-moist pearls bestowed by generous pigeons and perfumed with the invigorating redolence of rat spoor, secure in the knowledge that you are now officially, utterly and deliriously free. Welcome to WTF-istan. Don't take any wooden nickels...</div>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-67002561908154927832012-03-09T18:47:00.020-08:002012-04-22T14:51:44.671-07:00Unequal by Design<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In case you just beamed in from Mars, there's an awful lot of bad blood about right now between Americans and their government. While the reasons for this are varied, one major factor is that we have a shocking number of decent citizens who have played by the rules and worked hard, who now find themselves either without a job or working their fingers to the bone in dead-end employment for a smaller and smaller piece of the <a href="http://currydemocrats.org/in_perspective/american_pie_chart.html" target="_blank">American pie</a>. These people can't help but notice that this pie is actually growing very quickly once again, but that that growth is almost entirely reserved for others who are better connected or <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-27/wealthier-people-more-likely-than-poorer-to-lie-or-cheat-researchers-find.html" target="_blank">less ethical</a> than they are. Consequently, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer---Turned/dp/1416588701" target="_blank">not without some justification</a>, many blame their government. But very few of those who are hurting most have any real sense of the root cause of this disease at the heart of our political system. To compound the problem, those who <em>have</em> zeroed in on the diagnosis are being accused of waging "class war," or trying to kill jobs or undermine the freedoms of "ordinary Americans." The reality is that they're merely trying to win back opportunities for these very Americans and to rebuild a system of responsibility, accountability and broadly shared prosperity that has been systematically dismantled over the past thirty years. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The entities that have brought about this massive unraveling claim to be operating on behalf of businesses and commerce at all levels, but the changes their influence has wrought have channelled an accelerating majority of our growth, in increasing wealth, advantage and preferential treatment, to those at the very top of the income distribution. The parties that expend the most resources on framing our national narrative are well aware that if you say something loudly enough, and repeat it sufficiently often, it can very easily achieve the status of truth among a passive electorate—even if truth bears no relation to it at all. Today, we find huge and angry swaths of the society who have been convinced that the very government programs that are keeping them afloat—and that could, if wisely built upon, help them move beyond mere subsistence—are actually their worst enemies. In a grotesque parody of thoughtful protest, many of these citizens now get themselves up in colonial garb, fasten disposable beverage infusers to their clothing and accessories, and take to the streets to declaim their bizarre received wisdom of indignant slogans and nostrums: sentiments that undermine the few remaining features of their social architecture that actually redound to their benefit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When we say that we live in a nation of laws, we're essentially paying lip service to the fundamental constitutional principle inspired by John Locke (whom our framers rightly admired a great deal), namely that the individual is free to do anything except what's forbidden by law. Any complex contract or legal system can be gamed; all you need is a sharp eye for holes you can shovel money or unfair advantage through, and a regular dose of bad faith. But once these holes are identified, they should be closed. That's one of the most important and under-appreciated roles of the legislative branch. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our financial royalty currently spends (literally "untold") billions on lobbying, both to keep existing holes open—called "policy drift"—and to create new holes. This spending constitutes their most successful investment to date in terms of their bottom line. Often, these new holes are ostensibly promoted for other reasons that seem unexceptionable at first glance, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that they license behavior that rigs the framework to the advantage of those who promote them. These <a href="http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/an-interview-with-josh-kosman-on-the-embeddedness-of-private-equity-in-the-tax-code/" target="_blank">loopholes</a> pay massive dividends to the people who spend the money to create them or keep them in place, but they also undermine the social contract in insidious ways. When both your threadbare framework of rules and your lax regimen of enforcement preferentially rewards "legal cheaters," what message does that send to those who are trying to play fair? I think we can sum it up in one word: "Suckers..." It doesn't take a <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/inequality_crises.pdf" target="_blank">Nobel Prize-winning economist</a> to point this out, but few seem to listen <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105" target="_blank">even when they do</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As citizens, our job is to do our homework and keep close tabs on this process, then use the ballot box to make sure the grifters don't take over our country. But who has the time, the education or the discipline for that task when we're too busy working overtime to keep our families healthy and fed? The tiny minority that the game actually favors can afford to pay handsome salaries and benefits to the professionals who tilt the table on their behalf. And we have more pressing matters to address in our discretionary time—like figuring out who the Antichrist *really* is, or discovering where Lindsay is blowing lines this week, or making reproductive decisions for women we've never met. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Genius, I tells ya...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The question of whether or not we can retrieve our country from the clutches of organized money remains very much up in the air at the moment. The dollar is a powerful reinforcer; it's not easy to find public servants who are resistant to its allure. It will very much depend on our willingness to tear ourselves away from our trivial entertainment for long enough to fulfill our own civic responsibility to hold our elected representatives to account for whom their legislation legitimately represents. If the framers of our constitution are to be believed, that was supposed to be us. And the people waging class warfare are the ones trying to destroy this compact, not the people trying to uphold it—that's the critical difference. It's time for the latter voices to find a thoughtful audience. You can help make that happen.</span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-31992513845705221462012-03-07T10:59:00.027-08:002012-10-25T16:19:52.727-07:00Nanny and the Freeloaders<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All of this teabag-smoking, pea-poddy, pity party talk of liberals getting all "redistributy" with other people's money while the indignant-but-longsuffering conservatives try to reel them in (so as to let them keep a little more of "their own hard-earned money," we're told) is a hilarious little pant-load of pungent poo. The red states are the undisputed <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/the_red_state_ripoff.html" target="_blank">Welfare Queens</a> of the United States of America. The blue states "redistribute" billions of their tax dollars to these states every year just so they can squeak by; yet the recipients are continually wringing their hands in poutrage and whinging about how unfair and "socialist" America is—all while raking in these massive handouts from their malevolent "big government" benefactors. They owe their very subsistence to redistribution from the blue states, and they're so irrepressibly grateful that they all put their fiercely independent little heads together every other day to cut us these lovely, broken records of cheeky abuse. We have to wear earplugs now when they hit us up for cash just to preserve our dignity when we capitulate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And speaking of "illiquid and insolvent," some of these states are actually our equivalent of Greece! But not to worry, the blue state "nannies" have always got their backs, because that musty old scrap of parchment—the one that noted (among other things) the reasons our country was actually "constituted" back when Adams wore knee breeches—listed things like "to form a more perfect union" and "promote the general welfare" and "insure domestic tranquility," and some of us are foolishly convinced that those reasons still matter. Maybe they've read it, these states that are perennially in the red? Yeah, I doubt it too. In fact, non-partisan publications like the UK's Financial Times have speculated that the only way Greece is going to be able to stay afloat as part of the eurozone is if the EU adopts structural measures similar to those of the U.S. and agrees to start treating it like we treat some of our red states. I shit you not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No, seriously, "Reds," don't mention it. In fact, nanny thinks maybe you could use a little time-out. Yeah, we're gonna need you to just stop talking until you have something intelligible to say—like "thank you!" or "we're not worthy!" or "golly, this socialism sure tastes mighty fine!" ...Or until you can sink your own stop signs, patch your own roads and fight your own goddamn fires without the hitherto uncomplaining largess of the blue states. Maybe take a break from Fucks' News and do a little homework? Seriously, there's a reason why those "fairly unbalanced" drama queens can't tell their heads from their asses; it's because the two are concentric. There are bags of pounding tools with more formidable reasoning skills—and better manners. What was that old line you used to give us, "God helps those who help themselves?" You thought that was in the Bible somewhere—I believe that was in the book of Tracheotomy, if memory serves... Well I'm not sure "help yourself!" means what you think it means here. You see, some of us know that the minute we let your vaunted "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire" target="_blank">Lazy Fairies</a>" begin working the invisible hand without adult supervision, it starts digging graves—and it starts with yours. Yes, even with all of the flaming ordure you pile on our doorstep year in and year out, and despite the <a href="http://www.alternet.org/visions/154338/ayn_rand_worshippers_should_face_facts%3A_blue_states_are_the_providers,_red_states_are_the_parasites/" target="_blank">parasitic relationship</a> you've carved out with us, we still have a hard time viewing your destruction as "creative." Lucky you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What? Oh nothin', never mind—nanny was just venting (I suppose you could say she's in a "blue state." No, no, stop, that's not... that's just not funny at all). Go back to sleep. The check is in the mail again, per usual. Yeah, just whistle us that Chet Baker song while you drift off—you know the one: "Everything-depends-baybay . . . awn yeeew!" (And don't we just know it.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ZZzzzzz...</span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-40657513789123768472012-02-22T21:04:00.005-08:002012-09-07T13:41:30.311-07:00License to Fail<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We're beginning to hear a lot more cheek of late from the anti-regulation circus. The rhetoric pretty much all centers around a fundamental error of bivalent thinking: "Regulation bad! Freedom good!" As if that were a reality-based dichotomy.... This post will serve as a kind of final pass through that territory for me, with maybe a couple of asides, before I try to put it down for awhile. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Before the the financial system got wrapped around the axle of the global economy, this kind of naïveté might have been understandable, given the money and effort that was sunk into the propaganda organ of deregulation's beneficiaries, but not today. What most people didn't seem to remember before the crisis--and still seem to have difficulty getting their heads around now--is that in order to have a robust and sustainable economy, you need both a sensible rulebook and a consistent, reliable system of enforcement. We hadn't been bitten this hard since the thirties, so people had forgotten how bad it could get. (Many were also apparently laboring under the impression that their social security, medicare and medicaid assistance were brought to them via the beneficence of some kind of heaven-sent, currency-laying waterfowl, so maybe that's not such a surprising lapse.) There seemed to be no appreciation of the concept that if something is not forbidden by law, then it's permitted here (thank you John Locke); and if people can make money at it, they'll be lining up to do the hell out of it--even if it torpedoes the system that underpins their livelihood. But hasn't that lesson been duly delivered by now?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To take just one well-known example, The Banking Act (Glass-Steagal), which passed in 1933, was put in place for good reason. The financial system had just taken a dump on America's dinner table, and people had understandably lost their appetites. Among the smarter things that legislation did was to erect a barrier between commercial and investment banks. Customers who deposit money in their trusty Main Street bank don't want it jeopardized by, say, the activity of crack-fueled speculation in Manhattan. And since the FDIC wasn't designed to cover the bets of the casino capitalists, guess who catches the tab when we drop that fence and those yutses scramble in and start breaking things? A clue: not them. The capital gains tax is still at a measly 15%. And on top of that, the <em>serious</em> royalty can afford to retain small armies of well-compensated tax and finance lawyers (preferably poached from the IRS) to find creative ways to exploit the loopholes their lobbyists have thoughtfully purchased for them with the coin they banked from their last tax "rescue."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not so awfully long ago, we lived in a country where the more successful among us were contributing back to the system that made that success possible at a level at least *arguably* commensurate with the up-tick in their (still briskly increasing) fortunes. That allowed others to come up from below and emulate their inspiring example. Not this time. They've pulled the ladders up after themselves over the past couple of decades, so they can sit in their penthouses and smoke the spliffs they've rolled with the social contract.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The </span><a href="http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-how-big-banks-are-rewriting-the-rules-of-our-economy/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial;">repeal of Glass-Steagal</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in '99 was indeed part of what did us down, but that was just one of the more visible pieces of a huge, unprecedented and astonishingly well-funded campaign to roll back vast swaths of safeguards and protections. This effort wasn't launched to secure any additional or substantive freedoms for you or me, whatever the rhetoric may have sounded like at the time, and it certainly hasn't done so. What it did accomplish was the consolidation of financial--and consequently political--power among a much smaller and wealthier cohort and solidify already challenging barriers between socioeconomic strata. Of course, it also supplied that much-needed little boost of confidence for the small minority of nervous winners whose fortunes were already climbing so quickly they had to yawn every thirty seconds to equalize the pressure in their ears. That's where the benefits of this new-found freedom went and continues to go. Real wages have been stagnant or decreasing for most Americans for decades, and social mobility is a receding dream to anybody who cares to run the numbers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Poor lending standards and lax enforcement were also a big part of the dumfuquerie that compounded our vulnerabilities leading up to this recent shitshow. But think about where that "anything goes" climate blew down from. What do you tell the suits upstairs when they need more paper for their mortgage Cuisinart (it slices, it dices, it wipes away risk...). "Don't you worry your little pomaded pompadour about the niggling trivia of employment or credit history--when Wall Street sees the ribbons and wrapping paper our rating agencies are gonna slap on this stuff, they'll be stepping on their dicks to get a piece!" Turns out that's exactly what happened.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And if you mumbled unseemly dissent while that pipe was making the rounds you were promptly disinvited to the party. Nobody likes a buzzkill. Come on, show some perverse incentive...</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Smart legislation provides both the structure and immune system of a healthy economy, much in the way that the sensible bits of the rest of our legal framework protect, say, our bodies, our voices, and our right to feed and exercise our personal beliefs unmolested by pitchfork-wielding heretics who think we're the Antichrist--or worse still, socialists! Like the immune system, regulation has to keep pace with threats to the health and integrity of the economy. Like the immune system, misplaced or excessive regulation can deprive an economy of its vitality. But smart regulation fosters robust and healthy competition, innovation and broadly shared rewards. Strip it out and you get what we enjoy today: runaway systemic risk, anti-competitive practices, frozen socio-economic strata and astronomical rewards shared by a tiny sliver of the productive population while the rest of the country withers on the vine. That ain't even a little bit ethical. Maybe we're ready for another round of vaccinations....</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-44809231498595387582012-01-25T10:11:00.000-08:002012-01-26T09:57:07.960-08:00Head Like a HoleIn today's NYTimes, Friedman <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/opinion/friedman-average-is-over.html" target="_blank">goes</a> all "Bad News Bear" on U.S. job prospects. He buttresses his argument with an approving quote from Sunday's Times Magazine on the superiority of the <em>MadeInChina</em>: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’</blockquote>As a commenter points out, The Guardian also has <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/24/apple-factories-china-independent-audit" target="_blank">a new piece</a> on the <em>MadeInChina</em>. It kicks off this way:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">The man's hand is twisted into a claw, crushed, he says by a metal press at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, where Apple's luxury electronics are assembled. He is looking at an iPad – he has never seen one switched on. His mangled hand strokes the screen, bringing it to life.<br />
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Back at the factory, where the buildings are swathed in nets after 12 workers committed suicides in a single year, a young girl emerges from the gates. Her job is to clean the iPhone screens before they are packaged. She says she is 13.</blockquote>And here's another bit from a recent NY Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html" target="_blank">article </a>on Apple's Chinese labor:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning. <br />
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“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.” <br />
... <br />
“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred. <br />
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“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.</blockquote>Bottom line is one thing; perspective is everything. Puts me in mind of one of Reznor's Nine Inch Nails songs – as a lot of things do of late:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">God money's not looking for the cure.<br />
God money's not concerned about the sick among the pure.<br />
God money let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised.<br />
God money's not one to choose.<br />
...<br />
You know who you are.</blockquote>Indeed.SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-45711289748743931472012-01-12T13:04:00.001-08:002012-09-07T13:51:00.544-07:00Pimping Our Huddled Masses<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When a pimp turns out a new sex slave, the common practice is first to get their victim hooked on something powerfully addictive. The next step usually involves saddling them with a mountain of debt at larcenous rates, sometimes just for the basic necessities of day-to-day living such as room and board, or the fraudulent arrangements by which they've managed to transport them from their familiar environment in the first place; but always for the addiction. Finally the pimp coerces the victim, with both misleading monetary inducements </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and threats to themselves and their families, to demean themselves at the whims of men with sufficient financial means to pay a minimal sum for their services. And they do this for the duration of their victim's capacity to do the work. Years of fun for all involved—minus one. There's an analogy here if I could just get my finger on it...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The next year will be a critical one for both our country and the world. I don't think any of us can afford to be mere spectators during this next election. There are things that need saying clearly and forcefully, and we owe it to ourselves to try. Social welfare is an essential component in any sensible national survival kit. You can't call "home" a truly representative democracy without it. Yet even the laughable framework we've had in place here in the U.S. is gasping for breath in the current political arena. We're quickly becoming a nation of "have it alls" (a tiny fraction of a percent of us) and ''have nothings', where the former buys the legislation that keeps them having more, the middle class continues to slip through the cracks, and 15.1 percent (and growing) of America now huddles under the floorboards below poverty line. That's not the country I was born in. The legal framework that lets this happen has been hammered together with billions of dollars in political persuasion and a formidable army of well organized lobbyists and operatives over the past thirty years—and they've gotten amazing returns on that investment. If you can buy the privilege to swoop in whenever you like and jump the line, you can take home a lot of cake. But that's a nasty little game—some might even say uncivilized! So maybe it wants some talking about.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Politics turns out to be a very reliable transducer for the conversion of money into legislation. All too often, through the meretricious alliances it engenders, it despoils the soul in the process. Over the next few months, we need to both emphasize the purpose and <a href="http://robertreich.org/post/11753807617" target="_blank">necessity of smart progressive taxation</a> in maintaining the polis (Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond and his colleage Emmanuel Saez currently <a href="http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/diamond-saezJEP11opttax.pdf" target="_blank">argue</a> for a top rate of 73%), and also to decisively counter the dangerous and virulently anti-tax kleptocrat narrative that has gained traction with the ascent of the extreme right-wing media Juggernaut. And of course, we'll have to draw attention to the hideously skewed economic baseline that results from the pollution of the political dialogue with money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Executive pay is one interesting index of the absurdity of our spendthrift financial aristocracy that has gained mainstream media attention over the past few years—though perhaps the most interesting thing about this attention is that it has accomplished sweet fuck-all in terms of putting an end to that insanity. The pay-without-performance "compensation" packages that have become customary at the top are surreal even by the standards of obscene avarice. In 2007 Home Depot's CEO Bob Nardelli skated with $210 Million while HD's stock tanked. Stanley O'Neal famously peaced at Merril Lynch with "no severance pay" while his company was plummeting through the basement. Not so famously, he left with 161.5 million and an executive assistant, gratis, for the next three years. What more they could conceivably have stuffed into his vest upon departure in the name of "severance" is a question too ridiculous to contemplate. Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo split with $120 million in compensation and stock sales—and we know all about Countrywide financial. The list grows longer and loonier by the day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So how does this nonsense even happen? Well, it depends on whom you ask—and whether they've done their homework. If you ask the Wall Street cognoscenti, you'll meet with the usual suffering shibboleths and duck-billed platitudes about the free market, about the right of shareholders to pay their royalty whatever they feel like paying them, or about the increasing value of the CEO in today's world and the increasingly competitive process for acquiring star performers. What you won't likely hear about (given that most of the "cognoscenti" know next-to-nothing about it) is the wildly imbalanced bidding wars where the execs hold all the high cards. Nor will you hear much about the perversely distorted system of corporate governance that lets CEOs ratchet up their own pay. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The financial system has been hacked from the inside, and it's hemorrhaging from thousands of massive holes—into the pockets of those who payed for the job. The tide has gone their way for decades now, and it will be a hard dynamic to shift. They've gotten used to getting-over; it's hard to get over getting used to getting-over.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nearly all of us recognize that progressive taxation is the fairest way to ensure that the social contract remains intact. But how many of us noticed when Baby Bush knocked a hole in the capital gains tax that you could drive a tanker through—and that the beneficiaries of this largesse have been frantically shipping mountains of money through ever since. How many of us noticed the way the wealthy (and corporations like <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?_r=1">GE</a> and <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-13/irs-auditing-how-google-shifted-profits-offshore-to-avoid-taxes.html" target="_blank">Google</a>) finesse the regulatory shell game to shift billions of dollars in profits offshore, presumably to await another "tax holiday" when they can sneak it home under the radar of public opinion—though even that is now an almost quaint idea: the U.S. is "home" to these entities only in the most abstract and strained sense of that word.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/147881/americans-divided-taxing-rich-redistribute-wealth.aspx" target="_blank">57% of Americans</a> believe wealth should be more evenly distributed. Seven in ten Democrats think government should address this by increasing taxes on the wealthy. About the same percentage of Republicans think it shouldn't. The way government in general—and the issue of taxation in particular—has been increasingly framed over the past twenty years is surely a major factor. Taxation has been viciously demonized as oppressive and punitive, with little emphasis on what it gives back to the citizen. The remaining 43% could be forgiven for supposing that all of the government programs they take for granted (social security, medicare, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kantrowitz/congress-proposes-15-cut-_b_822653.html" target="_blank">financial aid</a> for college, etc.) are simply a product of our God-given rights rather than the result of legislation that courageous lawmakers fought for tooth and nail against furious and well-funded opposition. The list of pejorative terms popular on the right for these programs, along with all of the rest of our anemic attempts to do right by our citizenry, could go on for several lines, but they could much more accurately and succinctly by described as "mildly giving a rosy rat's ass about your fellow human being." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Opinions in the absence of relevant information are more an indication of who is winning the struggle to frame these issues than of how important the issues actually are, or what should be done to protect our investment in them. For example, there's plenty of <a href="http://blog.ted.com/2011/10/24/how-economic-inequality-harms-societies-richard-wilkinson-on-ted-com/" target="_blank">compelling research</a> on the devastating impact of <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/13eb8cee-2bf9-11e1-b194-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1hXV61sQq" target="_blank">extreme inequality</a> on everything from mental health to violence to infant mortality. But few people have any real sense of how extreme the inequality actually is. A surprising percentage of poll respondents in the U.S. actually believe the middle class is growing. The percent of all people living in poverty has increased from 11.3% to 15.1% between 2000 and 2010. This is not a problem solves itself if we all sit on our hands and wait for the magic of markets save the day. Markets don't even work that way. The incentives markets operate under consist largely of variations on the theme of “return on investment,” not social stability or security in our twilight years—or any of the other indices of a healthy nation. For that conversation, we would need to begin a deep and persistent inquiry into, say, what benefits and advantages derive from various investments; to whom these advantages accrue; and how these benefits enhance or erode the fabric of a “free and just” society. Profit doesn't care. That's <em>our</em> job.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, champion of deregulation and lobbyist for Swiss Bank USB, can rhapsodize all he likes about Wall Street as a “holy place” while the middle class is sacrificed before the Sacred Bull, but only because he knows who butters his toast. He dares not utter the name of his <a href="http://www.elyrics.net/read/n/nine-inch-nails-lyrics/head-like-a-hole-lyrics.html" target="_blank">True</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV2EUUF47Ms" target="_blank">God</a> in polite company. The founder of the religion to which Gramm's adopted party pays lip service had his own ideas about people <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple" target="_blank">messing about with money</a> in a “holy place.” The phrase “den of thieves” derives its origin from that narrative. It's right there in the New Testament—four times: in all three synoptic Gospels, as well as the book of John. I suppose it could be important. Jesus is also <a href="http://bible.cc/matthew/19-24.htm" target="_blank">reported</a> to have said things like "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." <a href="http://bible.cc/matthew/25-40.htm" target="_blank">And</a> "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Apparently, God only knows what that means. Somehow it never seemed dreadfully ambiguous to me, but there must be a loophole somewhere, what with all of these <a href="http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910" target="_blank">God-bothering fuckwits</a> in our political system soaking the "chosen" for their last thin dime while they legislate against the interests and trust of these goodly people—and sleep like babes at night with women other than their wives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course Rand Paul would have you believe there's "no such thing as the rich." Indeed, those we call "the rich" and "the poor" have ever so much in common: lo, they're both carbon-based, they both breathe oxygen, and they're all well over six inches tall! As usual, the venal tools of our oily overclass equivocate most on matters of degree (as in "order of magnitude") when degree matters most of all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Newsflash: the percentage of even middle income families in Cali just <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_19493664" target="_blank">dipped below fifty</a>—that's down from over 60% in 1980. Income in the poorest families—who can least afford the hit—dropped more than 21% since just 2007.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In fact, <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/12/census-says-48-americans-are-now-low-income/46281/" target="_blank">146.4 million Americans</a>—a full 48% of us—are now "Low Income" (defined as people earning between 100% and 199% of poverty level) or below—up four million from 2009. Sadly, those with the most thoughtful ideas are seldom the ones most motivated to whip up catchy slogans. "We are the 99%" may be a step in the right direction (and I'm not complaining abouut that), but where's their plan? I think they're helpful in drawing broader attention to the problem, but what we need are jobs, jobs, jobs to make up the terrible gap in our basic coverage of necessities for a huge and growing number of Americans.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We need dramatically increased spending on infrastructure (which is circling the drain all over the country); we need massive new educational investment and increased investment in science and technology; we need tax incentives that reward *actual* job creation, especially for small businesses, rather than mere tax breaks for a demographic lazily labeled "job creators" by their hardly-disinterested mouthpieces. We need dramatically higher tax rates on the highest incomes. We need to deny the ilk of the laughable Laffer all access to the halls of power unless they're carrying a mop or a broom (thank you <a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/" target="_blank">Charles Pierce</a>). We can't fight our way out of this slump by squeezing government spending and crushing the slumpin' proletariat indiscriminately. It's about <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/KeynesianEconomics.html" target="_blank">Keynesian multipliers</a>. They work. And when the private sector can't—or won't—do that spending, the public sector needs to step in and pick up the slack. If we want growth in the near term, we're going to have to increase internal demand, and that means jobs, not deficit reduction, must be our first priority. Not a single economist in my acquaintance at Treasury, the Fed, or the IMF disagrees on this point.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The number of Americans living in poverty is simply mind-boggling for a country that pretends to any measure of decency. The percentage dipped respectably during the Clinton administration after a fairly long and persistent climb. For this we should set aside a little love for Pappy Bush, for having the courage, after a smart peep at the numbers, to break his "No New Taxes" promise—to the eternal consternation of his party purists. But the figure has been rising ever since.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For the celestially well-to-do, it's been a different game. They've been steadily hauled up by their Burberry hats past the tippy-top of Jack's magic beanstock. Nowadays, most of the country couldn't see these people's bottom lines on a clear day, with a pair of astronomy binoculars and a neck ache.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course it's just plain goofy to hate somebody merely because they happen to be rich. But it's just as pathetic to heap <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-christmas-message-from-americas-rich-20111222" target="_blank">scorn and derision</a> on the less well-off simply because they correctly point out that their government—and consequently their economy—is rigged to keep them there. If you massacred every one of the poor tonight and quietly buried them away from polite society, there would only be more of them in a year. The legal and regulatory framework that girds (or ungirds, really) our current flavor of capitalism produces them in droves. It's not a bug, it's a feature. It has always been thus to some extent, but never, <em>ever</em> to this degree.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now that reasoned critique has been rebranded as class warfare, optimism for the near term is a little naive. Even with the best of outcomes next November, we're still in for a bone-jarring ride. Why is it so hard for those at the helm to see America as family, rather than as marks in some sordid con? The impact of big money on policy is a matter of public record, and it is not a pretty one. When you can effectively buy the passage or blockage of legislation, then good government merely means "good for you."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the structure and functioning of our political system has also evolved to make it even more resistant to change—e.g. just note the way the use of the filibuster has risen over the past couple of decades. This means that policy can no longer keep pace with economic exigencies, creating what Walter Lippmann called "drift," which militates in favor of the status quo and exacerbates existing inequality. (See Lippmann's flawed but seminal volume "Drift and Mastery," an influential attempt to get to grips with similar unrest in this country back in 1914.) Also note that if one party chooses not to play the filibuster game—say, in the interest of fair play or good faith—this creates a ratchet effect in the direction of the policies of the side that does use this stifling tool. So: polarization and impasse—or "the Divided States of America."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We need to get the word out. What we are up against is organized money, and what that money buys them is a lot of noise—noise that conflates sentimentality with compassion, and rationalization with reason. Organized money is remarkably proficient in using institutionalized irrationality to sway vast armies of religious fundamentalists—no one is more susceptible to simplistic zealotry and sophistry than people whose minds are so peculiarly constituted as to both expect and enjoy its deployment. I hasten to add that these are often very decent people; they are not to be scorned for being they way they are. The distinctive modes of mass delusion and specious reasoning to which they are accustomed are the product of very sophisticated and pernicious <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex" target="_blank">memeplexes</a> that have been evolving resistance to rational scrutiny for hundreds—and sometimes thousands—of years. These modes of non-thinking are baked into the wetware from a very early age, and nothing will ever shift them once those habits of mind have annealed in that configuration.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But there's hope for the rest of us—the young and the passionately curious of all ages and stripes. And here's the bottom line: there are more of us than there are of them, and we know something. We know that social justice isn't just a good idea; it's also the smart money strategy for sustainability in complex iterated games—particularly where the relevant agents are these "human being" thingies. That means we also know that if they win, everybody loses; that species survival may well depend on the triumph of curiosity over dogma, and of empathy over narcissism. Perhaps most importantly, we know that the only hell we need fear is the one we build for ourselves, or allow to be constructed in our name.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So let's get to fucking work. There's simply <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16058-prophesy-of-economic-collapse-coming-true.html" target="_blank">too much lo lose</a> to justify passivity.</span></div>
SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-88939888057535598692011-08-11T10:29:00.000-07:002011-08-16T09:43:11.538-07:00It's Go-Time (actually, it's go-thirty)<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's not a standoff if you begin to stand down before you've really stood up. We desperately need to be seeing a lot more of our President right now. That is to say, we need to be seeing much more of the version of the man we thought we elected, and much less of the man we have increasingly begun to suspect that he actually is. That's what frightens me: the identity issue. Did somebody catch their forty winks next to a pod on inauguration night? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's not just the number of press conferences he holds, or how many interviews he sits for; it's also the tone of those appearances, and the behind-the-scenes "negotiations" which thoroughly misunderstand both the dynamics of the game and the role of a leader. In the context of recent negotiations, he seems to have neglected what I would call Rule Number One: NEVER make concessions to bullies and expect them to compromise in return. They will always view it as a simple victory, another validating stamp for their superior position, and keep trying to push you even further. To the bully, it scans as weakness. If you don't seize the discursive field decisively with such people, you will never gain any control over the flow of play. And as our leader, if you let them play you, you've let them play us. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It has been said—and I suspect there's something to the notion—that not even the President can change the public's mind if it's already made up. But he ought to be able to at least get out in front when public opinion is squarely in his corner—surely that couldn't be construed as going beyond his brief. (Minimally, this means immediate job-oriented stimulus and letting the "dumb then and dumber now" Bush tax cuts for the oligarchs mercifully expire.) And were he to make a valiant and concerted effort to that end, he would almost certainly find that even his enemies would accord him a grudging respect. To be fair, that <em>is</em> why we hired him. The idea is to move the ball as far as humanly possible, with the passion and eloquence that becomes a leader, in the direction you believe to be right—<em>before</em> you begin negotiating. But his tentativeness makes us question both his commitment to his position and his resolve--two things you don't want to have up in the air when you come to the table. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It takes a lot of strength and inner intensity, not to mention resilience, to hold such a line. There's no shame in not possessing these qualities; you just don't want to be the guy running the ball if you lack them. Charisma and deep intelligence will not suffice without the fierce courage of your convictions. That courage tends to work even when those convictions are misplaced; it becomes even more critical when the convictions are arrived at rationally and thoughtfully, and when the world is in crisis mode. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Obama's greatest asset, given his rhetorical skills, is his pulpit. If he is hoping that the GOP will overplay their hand and leave him ahead at the end of next year, well, then I fervently hope that he's right about that. I fear that will not be the case. And I pointedly question any decision to rely on that sort of too-clever legerdemain rather than stepping out in front and nailing his theses to the church door. One of your most powerful perquisites, when you hold the office of President, is that it offers you the opportunity to establish a new frame, a new narrative. Sure, your natural enemies will oppose you vociferously—that's what they're there for—but they aren't the POTUS. And don't think that they (and everybody else) don't know that too! <em>Unless you, yourself, forget...</em> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Obama is the greatest campaigner I've ever seen. I will always love the man, come what may. But my esteem for him as an advocate for America is dwindling by the hour. I am ashamed that he seems so constitutionally averse to making enemies, because effective leadership so often demands just that—and because the nature of your enemies can be just as telling as that of your friends. Calculating a clever strategy is also important, as far as it goes. But if, in the clutch, that strategy does not involve getting out in front powerfully and decisively to oppose those who are pushing in the wrong direction, and staying there with his jaw set and his back unbowed, then He. Is. No. Leader. He may be a lot of splendid and charming things, but if he lacks that iron will and that sense of moment when the moment is dire, then he lacks what the moment requires. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm afraid it's time to step up or step off. A lot of lives and livelihoods depend on it. I believe he that <em>can</em> do it, but that's not the point, is it?. He needs to do it now—because while we have already lost much, we could always lose much, much more.</span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-47628576171217047722011-07-19T18:16:00.000-07:002011-07-25T12:05:48.792-07:00No New Taxes?! (Take 2)The GOP's obvious allergy to any sensible tax structure, combined with their claimed infatuation with the Constitution, has to rank near the top of the list of the most ridiculous things I've seen in my short, happy life. One of the crucial driving forces behind the creation of the Constitution at the outset was the government's need to collect excises and levy taxes on individual citizens when necessary. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had little recourse in the collection of revenue beyond reliance on the good faith of the states. The country was up to its eyeballs in the debt we'd incurred in the birthing and administering of this new experiment in democracy, and we needed to be able to service this debt if we were going to remain viable as a nation. So a small group of insignificant troublemakers—shameless "big government" types with names like George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams—began to push for a stronger central government to oversee commercial and fiscal policies directly, and thereby maintain the stability of the U.S. economy. The result was our Constitution.<br />
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Bizarrely, we have a surprising number of people in Congress today who purport to be rabid for the Constitution, yet utterly fail to recognize the necessities that gave rise to it—necessities that remain in force today. In many respects these intellectual poseurs are anti-constitutionalists. Because it's still true: you cannot pay down the debt without raising revenues. In fact, I believe Alexander Hamilton may have said it best back in 1780: "Without revenues, a government can have no power. That power which holds the purse-strings absolutely, must rule."<br />
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Of course you don't want to raise taxes on those who would be rendered destitute by it, or in a way that will adversely impact the health of the economy. One of the more thoughtful early comments on this comes directly from noted anti-federalist Patrick Henry: "the oppression arising from taxation, is not from the amount but, from the mode — a thorough acquaintance with the condition of the people, is necessary to a just distribution of taxes." That's why progressive taxation is such a vital idea. People who insist that the rich will stop spending if you raise their income tax a bit are—how to put this delicately—talking out of the wrong end of their digestive tracts. That is to say, such utterances smell funny for pretty much the reason you'd expect. One of the more robust behavioral findings of the last few decades is the recognition that the spending habits of the astronomically wealthy don't change much at all when you slightly decrease the rate at which they're growing astronomically wealthier. In fact, pretty much the <em>only</em> thing that changes under those conditions is the size of the bequests that they leave to their broods. <br />
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Surely the ones who have benefited most disproportionally from the way our economy is structured and regulated are the very ones who both (a) owe that system the greatest debt of gratitude and (b) ought to bear the greatest responsibility for its continued stability. Eisenhower understood this, as did Nixon and Ford—and to some extent even Reagan and Bush the Elder—so it's not really a traditional Republican blind spot. This is a madness of relatively recent vintage.<br />
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In any event, I certainly have little time for anyone who claims to worship at the altar of the Constitution, yet asserts that raising taxes is anathematic to the American way of life. Even in terms of history alone, that one is a non-starter.SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-83662086696582613572011-05-14T19:42:00.000-07:002011-05-15T00:31:34.991-07:00Tortured Logic<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">Here’s something that has frustrated the crap out of me lately: this sudden rush from right to legitimize torture after OBL's execution. The general arguments--explicitly or implicitly--all take some variation of the following form: <br /><blockquote>[a] Some of the information we used to locate OBL was obtained through 'enhanced interrogation' techniques; therefore such techniques really do work.<br />[b] Since they work, we ought to accept that they're simply a necessary part of doing business in the rough-and-tumble world of questioning suspected terrorists.</blockquote>This argument is a mess on at least three different levels. The problem is not that a premise is inaccurate or that some term is misleading; rather, the reasoning does not compute at all. It's counterfeit logic--and a lousy knock-off at that. This is the rational equivalent of a wooden nickel. As the physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say, “no, no that’s not right--that’s not even wrong!”<br /><br />First, (from [a]) it is not legitimate to conclude that a technique "works" merely because it has produced a reliable result in an unspecified percentage of instances. A stopped clock, as they say, is right twice a day. In order to show that a given approach is even comparatively useful, one needs to evaluate its success in the context of alternative approaches. One of the most glaring practical deficiencies of our charitably labeled 'enhanced interrogation' approach is that it consistently </span><a href="http://www.military.com/news/article/exinterrogator-torture-doesnt--work.html"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">under-performs other known methods</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;"> of information gathering. Individuals under such duress are as likely as not to produce any narrative they imagine might please their captors, irrespective of its accuracy, thereby introducing noise into the communication that's even less productive than deliberate and expected disinformation. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of this whole torture issue is the breadth of professional consensus on the point that it in fact </span><a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/09/hbc-90005768"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">does not work</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;"> at all. As they say in the South, "that dawg don't hunt." [a] doesn't even represent a fallacy worthy of the name. You want to dignify it with a label like "hasty generalization," say, or "fallacy of exclusion;" but no, mostly it's just lazy, fatuous assertion.<br /><br />Secondly, the rest of the argument at least purports to rest on that first premise, which is illigitimate; therefore, the sum of the reasoning--even if it were structurally valid--is unsound.<br /><br />Lastly, and most embarrassingly haywire, is the bizarre disconnect between [a] and [b]. In the fallacy business, this is our old friend </span><a href="http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/irrelev.htm"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">Ignoratio Elenchi</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;">. The premises are unrelated to the conclusion. The question of whether or not something "works" has nothing <em>necessarily</em> to do with whether it should be deemed ethically acceptable or in any other way desirable. To see how the wheels come off here, we need only consider the same argument with one modification: substitute a different value for the "technique" variable. Suppose it were discovered that whenever we wanted perfectly honest and reliable answers to any question we might think to ask of a suspect in custody, all the interrogator need do is execute his own mother. Quick, simple and efficient! By the flawless illogic of our lovely formula, we should then view such workaday matricide as a perfectly unexceptionable "technique" of interrogation. Its chief drawback might be that you couldn't use the same interrogator twice. Lots of things <em>work</em>. A .44 magnum discharged in one's mouth as an orally administered pain reliever is 100% effective. It's just that the question of efficacy is distinct from the question of appropriateness or desirability.<br /><br />Clearly, even if [a] were completely accurate on its own, when we combine it with [b], we’ve still got the howling absurdity of that classic informal fallacy to deal with: a premise and a conclusion that aren’t even on speaking terms.<br /><br />For godsake, QED already… </span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-43211252669355858312011-01-27T18:16:00.000-08:002011-05-14T23:57:08.753-07:00Bad Weather for Good ScienceGetting a little weary of all the armchair science-phobes using recent heavy weather as an excuse to try to whack sound climate science. Erm, kiddies, this unusual weather is a *feature* of global climate change (the net effect of which is "global warming") not counter-evidence. Many casual observers seem to have a spot of trouble distinguishing between weather and climate. This is just fine, provided that these "observers" are responsible enough to withhold their opinions until they've done their homework. But sounding off from a place of benighted misconception only serves to advertise the cluelessness.<br /><br />What has been happening with the weather, of late, is that unusual deviations in the jet stream are producing uncommon local weather events; this is precisely what the models predict as well. The topography of the changing temperature gradients is shifting and bending these currents in new ways, and instances of unseasonable, unprecedented or extreme weather are the inevitable and expected result.<br /><br />The planet really is heating up--and in a hurry. Indeed, the science behind global climate change has never been more robust. A recently released World Meteorological Organization report shows that 2010 will likely be among the three warmest years on record--and the period between 2001 and 2010 the warmest decade on record--for our planet.<br /><br />All of the GCC models emphatically *predict* erratic and extreme weather in the process of climate change. An enormous and diverse majority of the scientists who think carefully about such things for a living consider the evidence overwhelmingly compelling. And make no mistake, if somebody could supply a piece of counter-evidence that could take the whole edifice of theory down around our ears, it would be a career-making move for them. Trouble is, there isn’t any one assumption in the climate change argument which one might conceivably undermine or disprove to make the whole game collapse. There’s a whole matrix of relevant perspectives, observations, and analysis--a shocking number of which point clearly in the direction of human-caused warming.<br /><br />But even more frightening than the implications of the science is this simplistic campaign of disinformation that conflates weather and climate, and thumbs its nose at the stunning body of research and careful analysis that both measures and models this unsettling trend toward (decisively) increased warming. The fact that so many are unable to make even simple distinctions between the basic terms of the argument (e.g. between climate and weather, or between single data points and broad trends) should be a source of considerable embarrassment. It well may be emotionally satisfying to congregate with like-mindedly un-, ill-, or misinformed friends to take potshots at the overwhelming scientific consensus, but when this jeering pointedly misunderstands its subject at such a fundamental level, one has to marvel uneasily at the ease with which fallacy displaces reason in such a high-stakes debate.<br /><br />If our crackpot lay opinion-makers weren’t so enamored of their role in telling hardworking scientists how silly they are, perhaps they would be less inclined to mistake ignorance for perspective. The "negative team" seems to pose, in some sense, as the repository of reasonable counterargument, but they simply don't possess even the most elementary tools that might be required to deliver it. For example, that tired chestnut about "ruining the economy" over climate change is a perversely misleading sack of badger bollocks. Research into alternative sources of fuel--as well as new modes of energy acquisition and deployment, increased efficiency, etc.--could quite conceivably <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/rules-that-improve-the-business-environment-27535/">pump our national economy like nothing ever has before</a> (even the Internet boom) if we promote it right. Strict environmental regulations trigger innovation and motivate upgrading. The countries that take the lead in patenting and exporting more efficient means of producing and consuming energy will carry the day economically. But it's going to be "get in front or get in line." We'll need to push pretty hard to position ourselves at the bleeding edge, as we did with the World-Wide Web, or it could blow right by us. (China already has an early advantage here, and they're playing a shrewd game.) In any event, a positive impact on the economy seems every bit as likely as a negative one, on balance, as a result of taking action to reduce the destructiveness of our tenancy on this pretty rock.<br /><br />As the rug is increasingly tugged out from under the climate change scoffers, I expect them to become more and more shrill. This is what often happens when people commit themselves to an increasingly untenable position or belief in a public way as these folks have done. (see "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sociology-Belief-James-T-Borhek/dp/0471088951/">Sociology of Belief</a>" by Borhek and Curtis.) As the evidence against their position continues to mount, so will the volume and acerbity of their disparagement of the science. Their rhetoric will become more vague, simplistic and ambiguous, but more emotional. They will increasingly insulate themselves from sources of substantive dissent in their daily lives, choosing instead to surround themselves with true-believers. They will hone their rhetoric until any anomaly can be marshaled in support of their vague, contrarian cant (Unusually cold winter in region X? "Al Gore is a fool!" Snow in Florida? "Those goofy Climate Change sheeple!"). They will attempt to replace rigor and cogency with volume and authoritativeness on the assumptiuon that nobody will notice--and often nobody will. And they will rehearse the rhetoric of indignation and beleaguered rectitude endlessly and emphatically within their reference group, as this is what insulates them against evidence. Even normally rational people can shoe-horn all kind of nonsense into their heads if it's packaged, lubricated and reinforced just right from a psychological standpoint. It's hard to see your own fallacies--and especially so when you're pre-committed to a belief that requires them for its sustenance.<br /><br />But our climate scientists are not arguing from the occasional anomaly; they are making careful predictions, from very detailed (and often conservative) models based on vast vaults of constantly accruing data. *All* of these theories actually predict increased volatility, wild local swings and anomalous behavior. It's a complex system fer Chrisakes. That's how they behave when they're pushed away from equilibrium.<br /><br />Here's a short list of other "<span style="color:#cc0000;">issues</span>" that are often raised out of ignorance, where the <span style="color:#cc0000;">answers</span> reveal simple misunderstandings that could have been cleared up with five minutes of due diligence:<br /><br /><span style="color:#cc0000;">Not all of the glaciers are melting--and besides, glaciers are always growing and receding!<br /><br /></span><span style="color:#009900;">Of course "not all the glaciers are melting," but that's not even the question, is it? The smart kids ask what is happening to glacier mass globally. On balance, the pervasive and accelerating trend is in the direction of increasing loss. The global glacier mass balance is decreasing every day. The annual loss from Greenland's massive ice sheet alone is passing the 100 gigaton range.<br /><br /></span><span style="color:#cc0000;">The temperature record relies on readings from differing equipment, technology, locations, altitudes, etc. How can you rely on that?</span><br /><br /><span style="color:#009900;">We don't. That's just one angle--one that's constantly being tweaked and corrected as new sources of potential error are identified. But the globally averaged trend is clear. It's the same trend as the one identified using (for example) sea level rise, declining arctic sea ice, analysis of boreholes, increasing ocean temperature, data on glacier mass, satellite measurements in the troposphere, weather balloon data and proxy reconstructions. Pick one or pick them all, the implication is the same.<br /><br /></span><span style="color:#cc0000;">There's no consensus!</span><br /><br /><span style="color:#009900;">Yuh-huh. And it's not just the IPCC either. The conclusions of their most recent assessment was endorsed by these lightweights too: </span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">National Academy of Sciences (United States)</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Royal Society (United Kingdom)</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Academia Brasiliera de Ciências (Brazil) </span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Royal Society of Canada, </span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Chinese Academy of Sciences</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Academié des Sciences (France)<br />Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Indian National Science Academy, </span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Science Council of Japan, </span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Russian Academy of Sciences,</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Australian Academy of Sciences</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Caribbean Academy of Sciences</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Indonesian Academy of Sciences</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Royal Irish Academy</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Academy of Sciences Malaysia</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"><span style="color:#333333;">Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences....</span></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;"></span><br /><span style="color:#009900;">How much censensus is required before one feels obliged to wake up and take action? Of course, the deniers don't care if there is consensus or not. As soon as you demonstrate that there is, in fact, such a surprising degree of consensus, they flip the script and suggest that consensus = collusion. In the pathological denier narrative, the rules are whatever they say they are--and they're free to change them whenever it's convenient to do so. The constraints of reasoned debate find no traction in this fluid discursive environment. Best to restrict our efforts at persuasion to those who find data and careful analysis persuasive. Those who are unconvinced because they've not yet seen the light are within reach; those who have kitted themselves out with heavy blindfolds (apparently as some sort of contrarian fashion statement) are not.</span><br /><br /><span style="color:#cc0000;">Gore's "Hockey Stick" didn't hold up on the ice.</span><br /><br /><span style="color:#009900;">There were issues with the original hockey stick showing sharp increases in recent warming: it was a prototype and it had some bugs. But with the ever-increasing barrage of data and proxy reconstructions rolling in from the trenches, we now have enough hockey sticks for the entire league. They aren't as straight or uniform as the first one (that's exactly what made it seem a little dodgy), but they have precisely the same general shape. Read 'em and puck off:<br /><a href="http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/16/hockey-stick-paper-mcshane-and-wyner-statisticians/"><span style="font-family:arial;">http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/16/hockey-stick-paper-mcshane-and-wyner-statisticians/</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span><a href="http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/27/science-temperatures-atlantic-water-arctic-unprecedented-2000-years-linked-to-arctic-amplification-of-global-warming/"><span style="font-family:arial;">http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/27/science-temperatures-atlantic-water-arctic-unprecedented-2000-years-linked-to-arctic-amplification-of-global-warming/</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span><a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/progress-in-millennial-reconstructions/"><span style="font-family:arial;">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/progress-in-millennial-reconstructions/</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6016/450.short"><span style="font-family:arial;">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6016/450.short</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span><a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/"><span style="font-family:arial;">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /><br /></span></span>The list could go on for some time.<br /><br />Are we really so thoroughly science-illiterate, as a country, that a thoughtful and intellectually-legitimate conversation on the most urgent topic of our time is completely outside the realm of possibility? Oh, I think we are. I dare you to prove me wrong. In fact, I'd love you for it...SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-58537241520070169382011-01-06T10:09:00.000-08:002011-07-20T09:24:36.575-07:00Legion: Stream of Subconsciousness<span style="font-family: arial;">I own few things in my life like I own my demons. I think it's mutual. We're made for each other. I'm sure yours are endlessly fascinating, and sometimes I may even envy you them--they're probably much more interesting than mine--though they'll seldom have much use for me. Perhaps you call them by many of the same names I use for my own, but they are distinct. Even the demons we share are no more alike than are you and I. Their identities are defined by our own. Some are as protean and labile as quicksilver; some are as stolid and immutable as stone. But they all have voices. They all tell us who we are. Just not all that we are. Surely, I'll allow, they are too much at times; but they are not as enough as all that--all this. Me. Me and whose army? Mine, alas, all mine.<br />
<br />
Sometimes, when I feel like clocking myself in the eye, I wish I had somebody <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">else's</span> demons. But I know: they'd never fit. Mine are made or grown, wrecked or spoiled locally. Yet sown or reaped, sewn or ripped, these dark little bastards are my own bespoke bastards and are, in my way, quite legitimate. So why deem them demons? Oh, make no mistake: their dual citizenship in hell is amply attested by the many trips they've made there with me. There was never the slightest fuss at the border. They are known. They vouch for me and I am welcomed with unsettling alacrity. I am never charged for passage or for lodging; they know that I always will pay in full measure. They will never starve. Their hunger is my own.<br />
<br />
Of course it is not that simple. Of course it is simpler than that. That's the problem with communication: there is always another distinction to be made. There's always another layer of viscous descriptive membrane over the mirror. At each successive level, former opposites pair bond and marry ecstatically. Push through it and they repulse like magnets confronting like poles. Difficult, to be sure. Sure to be difficult. Sure difficult <em>to be</em>. Intermittently, I am assured that faith is necessary in order to locate my own meaning--as if it were a fixed point in a static landscape. I am admonished not to think, but to know. Don't I know? I don't know. <em>Know</em> I don't. But that's neither here nor wrong. Distracting abstraction. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Clamora</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">obscura</span>, lensing the grave dance of the quotidian pinhead. What was my point? Only that what happens is always part accident; a failure or triumph of will; a firm resolution that never completely resolves. Forgive me, I was too flexible; I untied myself in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">nots</span>. Not you too?<br />
<br />
No, thank you, I will wait in my own cocoon. These demons are changing. This is so laborious--yes, I am in labor. I am being born. It is the only birth that matters: the birth from sleep. I grow in slow spirals into the ground, into the air,whether in resonance, resplendence or remorse. Temporary. By turns, I am an argument, then a song. I sing, I am sung; I wring, I am wrung. I am at home in this tangle, roiled and coiled and fastened and sprung. This is the only honest lie I know, the lying in wait for some patent, insoluble truth. Each withering ambush is beaten back by friendly fire. There is dissension in the ranks, insurrection by competing <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">episteme</span>. Capture, sequester and then: cell division. A virulent case of me-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">osis</span>. Divide and conquest; re-parse and re-posit. I am A and not-A. Permute me to introduce <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">myselves</span>. System failure, then careful diagnosis. By nightfall, I am only a flag, indicating the momentary direction of capricious winds above a citadel besieged. I will look the same tomorrow. The song will be new.<br />
<br />
But I will retrench for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">revanche</span>. I will try this again.</span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-16795517013829309872011-01-05T21:00:00.000-08:002011-01-06T12:32:20.926-08:00Have You Slugged Your Teacher Today?<span style="font-family:arial;">Okay, honestly, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">WTF</span> is this about?<br /><br />http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html<br /><br />This is the third scare-piece I've read on this topic, but, look as I might (and have), there's no there there.<br /><br />I just don't understand what these people are talking about. There's not one mention in this piece of a single instance of union activity that is putting the unsavory squeeze on one employer in the current (or <em>any</em> specific) context. Let me say that again: Greenhouse gives not one solitary example of a threatening gesture on the part of labor. (Whatever happened to supporting assertions with examples? Has journalism finally gone so hopelessly <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-error">fuckwit</span> that mere assertions now suffice to anchor an opinion or a point of view <em>in the New York Times</em>?) Rather, he simply plays scribe while the GOP paints "<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-error">YOUUU</span>-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">NYUNS</span>!" in those big wiggly letters that signify "spooky" on the side of the kids' haunted house each October--presumably to the accompaniment of some gleeful, Tea-Partying <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-error">theremin</span> player just off-stage. Even the title, "Strained States Turning to Laws to Curb Labor Unions!" just seems carefully calculated to simply shriek "BOO!" to a distracted audience. Curb them from doing what? Exactly? Making you shudder at the swoon-inducing prospect of their doing something remotely curb-worthy at some alarming point in the near or distant future? The only evidence on offer here is that of fear-mongering about the idea of even the most anemic labor representation.</span><br /><ul><span style="font-family:arial;color:#003300;">“They’re throwing the kitchen sink at us,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “We’re seeing people use the budget crisis to make every attempt to roll back workers’ voices and any ability of workers to join collectively in any way whatsoever.”</span></ul><span style="font-family:arial;">There's talk of Republicans being miffed about Unions wielding undue influence in elections, but <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-error">shutthefuckup</span>!--that's idiotically absurd. While unions are pretty savvy about where their political dollars go, they've been outgunned in that domain for decades: business and corporate political organizations were outspending Labor more than five to one late in the Carter administration, and Labor is now just a speck on the landscape--financially and organizationally. There were 224 labor <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-error">PACs</span> in '76; a decade later there were 261. Looking at the other side, we saw an increase in corporate and trade <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-error">PACs</span> from 922 to 2182 over that same interval. And it only got worse from there. The tax-cut-and-spendthrift Reagan made sure of that. The GOP just wants to put the final nail in the coffin of the American worker <em>right now</em>, the second they get hold of the fucking hammer--no waiting!--and silence forever the traditional voice of our working middle class. But please, for the sake of appearances, couldn't they at least have waited for some cheeky, strapped worker somewhere to pipe up and ask for a living wage?<br /><br />And what's this--what fresh hell is this?!:</span><br /><br /><ul><span style="font-family:arial;color:#003300;">“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech.</span> </ul><span style="font-family:arial;">Oh dear. Seriously, those insufferable, no-tax-paying elementary school math tycoons and their <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-error">bling</span>-encrusted <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-error">Bentleys</span>--don't they just make your righteous fucking blood boil? This is a pathetic example of the proverbial (rumored) tempest in a (hypothetical) teacup, and it's pissing me further off than I've been pissed in some time. It's like the privileged bully in the schoolyard kicking the malnourished kid in the teeth after stealing his lunch money for an entire year--just to make <em>absolutely</em> sure he keeps his mouth shut about the whole affair for the foreseeable future. Rich.</span><br /><ul></ul><ul></ul>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-2160317361952778712010-12-15T13:59:00.000-08:002011-01-06T12:58:29.554-08:00No New Taxes?!<span style="font-size:85%;color:#000000;">How about the old taxes? Can we have the old taxes back? Please?<br /><br />The top marginal tax rate was at its highest under Dwight Eisenhower (R), at 92% when he took office in 1953, and dipped only slightly to 91% in 1954. There it remained for ten broadly prosperous years until the Johnson administration, where it only dropped to 77% in 1964. It did not dip below 70% again until Reagan<span style="font-size:78%;">[1]</span> took office, whereupon it dropped to 50%, then 38.5%, then to a jaw-dropping 28%(!) with the transition to Dubyadaddy. It shot back up under Clinton to nearly 40%, when we started thinking about paying our bills again, but W put a period to that silliness in a hurry.<br /><br />In our current climate of entitlement, we all want the benefits without the responsibility, and taxes are routinely spoken of as a "burden" or as "punishment." You hear all manner of absurd propaganda posing "government" and "regulation" as evil monsters inimical to a healthy economy, hilariously oblivious to the obvious fact that without government, without regulatory structure, without reliable enforcement, well,<strong> there is no fucking economy</strong>. Period. The question ought to be "which version of these necessary structures works best for the greatest number." We speak as if our safety, our security, our health and our quality infrastructure (i.e. the "blessings of liberty" spoken of in the preamble to our Constitution) were privileges bestowed from on high, and not shared necessities to which we all have a duty to contribute significantly, as a meaningful function of the resource$ that we derive from this generous system of government that permits us to do so. Isn't that what "sustainability" means? Yet "from on high" increasingly has come to mean "from China" as we mortgage more and more of our future and the prosperity of our grandchildren with this dubious "friend."<br /><br />If freedom has anything at all to do with financial independence--or even solvency--this nation is slipping increasingly into a state of bondage most dire. We've been reduced to groveling before a country that won't even permit one of its own citizens to accept a Nobel prize, merely to keep our ramshackle ship of state<span style="font-size:78%;">[2]</span> afloat. We can't even muster the stones to stand up and look the obscenely wealthy<em> in our own nation</em> in the eye without blinking. "The land of the freeee and the home of the brave" my fucking ass. Outside of the narrowly circumscribed lock that lifts the yachts of the superrich to ever more vertiginous heights (and where could they ever possibly hope to sail to, once the gates open at their absurd zenith? It had better be another planet, for their sakes.), this is increasingly the land of penur-eeee and the home of the slave. Oh, the "American Way Of Life" (AWOL)? Just put that on our tab. We can explain it to the Class of 2040--they'll understand.<br /><br />So, where is our President<span style="font-size:78%;">[3]?</span> He has the rhetorical chops to make this case quite compellingly, yet his thumbs appear to be otherwise engaged at the moment as suppositories. I don't think that's what we meant by "Thumbs-up." I know that he's in a difficult spot--some even say this latest deal is the best we could have hoped for (m'kay...). What makes me grit my teeth right now is: <em>we didn't even get to see him try</em>! He didn't once stand up, like FDR, and make that "Old Enemies of Peace" speech<span style="font-size:78%;">[4]</span> ("business-and-financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering!") explaining what we have to do and why.<br /><br />He can still do it. We're still waiting. If it isn't time now, it never will be.<br /><br />S<br /><br />--------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:78%;">1 - 3 from Douglas Adams (R.I.P.):<br /><br />1. "Humans are unique both in their ability to learn from the mistakes<br />of others, and in their extreme disinclination to do so."<br /><br />2. "In real life it wasn't a ship he would have set foot in for all the rice wine in<br />China. "Extremely rickety" was one phrase that sprang to mind and "Please<br />may I get out?" was another."<br /><br />3. "He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive<br />incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."<br /><br />------------------------------------------<br /><br />[2] continues to be relevant:<br /></span><br /></span><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:78%;color:#000000;">"This is going to fly?" said Arthur, giving gaunt looks at the<br />lashed- together pipework and wiring that festooned the cramped interior of the<br />ship.<br /><br />Slartibartfast assured him that it would, that they were perfectly<br />safe and that it was all going to be extremely instructive and not a little<br />harrowing.<br /><br />Ford and Arthur decided just to relax and be harrowed.<br /><br />"Why not," said Ford, "go mad?" </span><span style="font-family:arial;"><br /></p></span></blockquote><br /><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:78%;">Nyuk.<br />...<br /><br />4. "They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere </span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized </span><br /></span><span style="font-size:78%;color:#000000;">money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."<br />~FDR </span>SignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4214398055241476994.post-17005100586566712342010-07-27T13:30:00.000-07:002011-01-12T08:33:44.504-08:00Wetware Hacks Launch PartyContent, context and reflected light from the most dubious name in tentative truth. Be of good cheer! Eternal Verity has a new name: it is "Sometimes, Probably."<br /><br />STNSignalToNoisehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00550188647822539295noreply@blogger.com0