STUDENT LOANS

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(A Followup to “So Much Eloquence”)

I always enjoy comparing US arrangements on various money matters with the parallel arrangements in other countries. So many surprises! This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, isn’t it? And a land of opportunity to boot?

Here is some material from comments to a newspaper column on student loans.

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Student Loans Here

Student loans are made to students by banks at a rate to be determined later, by consulting prevailing interest rates  as of  about six months after the student graduates (which is when the student’s payback period begins) and adding a premium to that. The bank receives a government guarantee of the loan when the bank makes it, so the bank runs no risk in making the loan. Nevertheless, interest rates are not commensurate with the complete absence of risk on the part of the lender.

Student loans are not dischargable in bankruptcy. And whatever loan rate you got at the outset of your payback period, you’re stuck with it. A special law passed a few years ago prohibits the debtor from refinancing at any time later in his or her life when prevailing interest rates go down.

Oh yes, each school chooses which lender will be allowed to offer student loans through the school, offering great opportunities for the banks to bribe school administrators for access to a captive clientele of students.

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In Australia

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/06/04/opinion/04collins.html?permid=29#comment29

“In Australia, all student loans are granted through the Federal Government, with no interest, except for increases in inflation. Paying university/college fees upfront makes you eligible to a discount of 20%. There is simply no rational purpose for “private” student loan operators.”

— Obiter, Melbourne, Australia

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In Great Britain

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/06/04/opinion/04collins.html?permid=27#comment27

“I have experience of a government student loan scheme; when it came time to choose colleges I had the option to stay in the UK and go to college as a ‘UK resident’. And I am so, so glad that I chose to do that and didn’t go and get sucked into student loans in the US.

The UK does have a much lower fee structure – about like state colleges. They have some grants for low income students. They have assessed parental contributions. But most students will pay for most of their college by using a government loan.

The interest rate on the loan is subsidized – it’s kept at 1% above the current inflation rate. So right now, students here are repaying less than 2% interest. Interest isn’t charged until you leave college. And because the government organises it, they can take the repayments by garnishing your salary, like a payroll tax. Oh, and did I say that if you take a low-income job (below £15,000, or about $26,000), they don’t take any repayments out? Same goes for being unemployed.

The net result is that while you may have a pretty big student loan, repaying it is never a nightmare. You only repay when you’re earning an above-average salary. The repayments are automatic unless you’re self-employed, and if you are, they get calculated when you pay your end-of-year taxes. The interest rates aren’t punitive. If I leave the country, they’ll work out a repayment plan with me.

I had freedom of choice – and I chose the government loan system.”

— Pip, London

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PALIN REDUX?

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I received this collection of quotes today from a friend:

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“There was a surprising announcement over the weekend. The governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, is leaving office. She’s stepping down. Something I said?”

– David Letterman, referring to his feud with Palin

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“President Obama right now is in Russia. Obama went there because from Russia you can actually see Sarah Palin cleaning out her office in Alaska.”

– Conan O’Brien

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“I was talking to a lady here in the audience, she was from Alaska and we were wondering about this. How does a thing like this work? She steps down and she’s no longer the governor of Alaska. And we figured it out: Miss Congeniality steps up and is now the governor of Alaska.”

– David Letterman

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“A lot of public figures do this. When you have trouble, you blame the media. And today as a matter of fact, Sarah Palin was up in a helicopter shooting Wolf Blitzer.”

– David Letterman

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“Over the weekend Sarah Palin shocked the country by resigning as governor of Alaska. Yeah, Republicans aren’t sure who is going to fill her role in the party, but they are in talks with several of the Real Housewives of New Jersey.”

– Conan O’Brien

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“This is weird, in her resignation speech, Sarah Palin said she polled her children on whether she should resign and the count was unanimous. Yeah, even her children thought she was in over her head.”

– Conan O’Brien

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“Well, according to a new post-election survey, people want Sarah Palin to run for president in 2012. It says she’s been getting thousands of calls from people pleading with her to run, all Democrats.”

– Jay Leno

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“I have said Sarah Palin’s political ambition combined with her intellect is like putting a jet engine on a golf cart; lots of horse power and no steering capabilities. Today she proved it.”

– Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore, whom Sarah Palin is threatening to sue

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“Sarah Palin decided to chuck her responsibilities but still wants to have an impact on public debate. So what does that make her, a community organizer?”

– NPR’s Michel Martin

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“Watching Sarah Palin’s press conference on Friday was like watching a drunk seal trying to land a plane, or in basketball terms (which Sarah prefers) like watching a grade-schooler try to score on Kobe while jabbering inanely.”

– Huffington Post blogger David Stemler

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“Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.”

– New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd

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“I think Sarah Palin is on the verge of becoming the Miami Vice of American politics: Something a lot of people once thought was cool and then 20 years later look back, shake their heads and just kind of laugh.”

– Republican media consultant Todd Harris

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Could Sarah STILL be elected to high office? Some people compare her to Reagan, who back in 1980 lots of people swore could never be elected President because he had been an actor.

But when he ran for office Reagan had never made a fool of himself like this.

…Well…there WAS Bedtime for Bonzo…

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BUSH = PALIN

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I know I’m a liberal, and hence biased, but for a while back there I really tried to understand why anyone would have voted for Sarah Palin for anything. Today I got the crucial insight from a comment a reader made to Gail Collins’ column in the New York Times about Ms Palin’s recent resignation as Governor of Alaska:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/opinion/04collins.html

In her column Ms Collins guessed that in part Palin had probably resigned as the first step in a long slog to collect the money and bona fides she will need to run for President in 2012. A commentor to that column then added this explanation of why that plan just might work, even though Palin is—well, the kind of thinker and speaker we all know her to be:

“July 4th, 2009

6:37 am

Palin’s incoherence and lack of concentration are her political strengths. The segment of the electorate to which she appeals does not value intellect or eloquence. In fact, these qualities are feared because they imply a lack of faith. A person who is well educated, thoughtful, and can answer questions directly, in complete sentences, is exactly what Palin’s supporters do not want.”

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I had this insight earlier about George W. Bush’s inexplicable election victory. If you are not well educated or well spoken you are likely to prefer to hear from people who have the same deficits as you do.

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It’s just human nature.

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Elsewhere, human nature might be tempered by culturally-ingrained respect for education and the educated. Not here. The USA is well known for having a strain of anti-intellectualism of mammoth proportions.

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I don’t know why I keep forgetting these simple facts. After all, largely because of them, lightening struck twice for George W. Mushmouth.

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And, except for the difference in sex, Sarah Palin is just George W.’s doppleganger.

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THIS IS CHILLING

(especially if you’re OLD like me)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v8_BnZSBQo&feature=channel

Here’s the original:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x20vxi_talking-heads-road-to-nowhere_music

INTERESTING MINI-HISTORY OF COMMUNISM

(Reviewing a very maxi scholarly history of same)

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/03/communism/

WHAT IS MAGIBON ?

The question seems a bit off the beam, since Magibon is a woman, not a thing. But her videos are also a major phenomenon on YouTube, so “What” fits the phenomenon, if not the girl. Go to her channel, here, and see the phenomenal numbers of views her videos have gotten:

Magi’s Channel

What does she do to get all this interest? If you’re thinking talk sexy or shake her booty, you’re wrong. Booty shaking is rife on YouTube, as exemplified here:

Suzy Scuzy

and here:
UrMissSunsine3

And these sites and many others like them have only moderate numbers of views at best.

No, Magibon offers us something different. I suggest that you go look at a few of her videos and then come back and I will try to explain her popularity. Luckily I am Old and so have nothing better to do than try to get to the bottom of cultural phenomena like this.

…time alotted for perusal of some Magibon videos…

Magibon is a cute American girl of 22 with immense eyes. You could get lost in them. And because in most of her videos she just stares at the camera and speaks in Japanese (her main intended audience) while various pleasant expressions flit across her pretty face, it is hard not to keep watching. Experiencing a Magibon video is like coming home after a day spent up to your elbows in shit and leaping into a cool blue pool. She is the place where sweetness negates the sour, apparent attention to you and your feelings negates the world’s indifference, and fantasy involvement with the spirit of a gentle woman negates the grinding utilitarianism of the American economic world.

What man could resist? Or, rather, what OLDER man could resist? We Oldies can love her right away because she answers to a type in the back of our minds that has never died. The Young, on the other hand, may have more trouble.

I’ve known for years through online discussions that many American men want Asian wives, even to the extent, in the case of some old, affluent guys, of going to, say, the Philippines to get one. And I’ve also always thought that of course we would! And Magibon, though she is not Asian, exemplies the precise reason why.

Today in the US media women are generally portrayed as attractive or sexy in a “formidable” way — physically beautiful, desirable, highly competent in whatever she is portrayed as doing, but a bit unreal and distant, certainly never friendly or forthcoming. I think this situation has arisen because the industrial manufacturers of our popular culture decided to support the women’s liberation program some years ago, and, being incapable of subtlety, they have done so by just giving us countless images of beautiful women being tough like men. (Query: How many women of a degree of beauty that you know damn well would never be found in a police station have you seen portraying cops on TV?) Our standard of beauty has become founded in this slightly Gorgonesque type.

But I would bet anything that it is natural to many, perhaps most, men to be drawn to someone who looks gentle and sweet instead! I know I am. And I know that way back in the 1960s that was what most men wanted for sure.

I think this disconnect between current American culture and the natural preference of most men is why Magibon is so popular here. No one else on YouTube comes across as that gentle and vulnerable! (At least no-one who is an adult and has limpid eyes you could get lost in!)

But, interestingly, many young men who comment on her videos are furious at her. They have come to expect formidable women in the real world and in-your-face-sexy women on YouTube, and they “know” that that’s what they prefer. Then they find Magibon and they can’t stop watching her videos because she is giving them something they’ve always wanted but didn’t know they wanted.

Every new medium creates the opportunity for new kinds of art within it, and by creating such a new form Magibon has illuminated a chasm in the public culture of the USA that the mainstream media are probably blind to and, even if they are not, would never mention or manifest on their channels because to do so would highlight their manipulativeness.

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PS: Check out the Magibon FAQ, which is full of good information about her, here:
MRirian – Magibon FAQ

PSS: And here’s a great interview with Magibon. I learned a lot from it!

http://pingmag.jp/2008/12/26/magibon/

IS IT TRUE WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT SWEDEN?

Some time ago I had the good fortune to meet on the Internet an actual citizen of Sweden. Since the place has always fascinated me (Thank you, Ingmar Bergman!), I peppered him with questions about it. I mainly asked about its social welfare protections.

Here are his answers. I am presenting them verbatim, with just a bit of  boldfacing of Swedish terms, etc., for clarity of presentation:

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A SWEDE TELLS ALL

“I got a bit paralyzed with all your listings, but decided to “start somewhere’”. Such a comparison I also find interesting, here in Sweden we have a general bad impression about the social system in US, can be interesting to find out how much of that is prejudice….

MEDICAL

Medical aid in Sweden, is not free, but we pay mostly a symbolic sum of money. For instance an operation to remove the appendix (not personal experience, asked a friend) costs nothing at all for the operation, but we will have to pay a little sum when you come in, and a little sum for the room you take up after operation and food. Even a poor person in Sweden would have no problem Getting through that, around 70 – 100 dollars if you don’t need to spend more then 2 days in the hospital, my friend says.

If you need medical aid for a long time we have högkostnadsskydd (attempted translation: ‘high cost protection’). If your medical aid costs more then about $120 dollars, that’s all you would need to pay, the state pays anything above that. This is for the year. Next year its another $120 etc. This includes medicine, if in need of large amounts over a year.

SOCIAL SAFETY NET

When a person loses his job we have something called A-kassa (not sure how to translate, A-cash or A-fund, the “A” stands for the Swedish word for unemployed anyway, so “U-fund” perhaps then in English). You have to have been working steadily and paid the ‘A-kassa’ for 1 year to get it.

What you get: 80 percent of your wages (but with a roof a little less then 100 dollars a day), after 201 days you get 70 percent. After 300 days you only get “A-kassa” if you have a child or children aged less then 18.

[That's almost a year of high-leve unemployment payments, folks. - Nightman1]

If you were paying into “A-kass”’ less then a year, you still get a base amount of MAX 45 dollars a day. Of course you have to consider what things costs before valuing the amount. Having high taxes here in Sweden [Yes, folks, your editor reports the bad as well as the good! - Nightman1] means everything costs more. One LITER of milk is a little more then one dollar, a loaf of bread is 2.8 dollars etc. Gasoline costs so much more that a visiting American would get nightmares (or so I have heard)

After that its welfare. I’m not to sure about the rules here, but in principle you have to do things to get it, enroll in some kind of educating program, search for job, go through medical examination. We do not have food stamps (Don’t know how that works in USA, but if you have to go to a shop and use food stamps, that seems to me immoral. Why should someone have to “advertise” their problems and poverty??), but we get one sum of money each month from welfare that should cover the costs, and the rent is added on top of that basic sum of money.

If you are long term sick [presumably "disabled" - Nightman1.] we have försäkringskassan (social insurance office), which gives you the same amount of money as if you were old and on pension. There is no problem to survive on that, and its clearly more then welfare. It easily covers all basic needs and still have enough to buy things that are secondary to survival.
We also have bostadsbidrag (housing allowance). If you fulfill the required demands to get it, it pays most of your rent, and you get more or less depending on your rent. There is a roof, when you pass the roof (too expensive apartment) you do not lose it, but you get only aid up to the roof level, as if.

WORK, EDUCATION, AMENITIES

Your new questions:

1) In Sweden we have by law 5 weeks 100% paid vacation every year, I don’t know how it is in other countries in Europe [Nightman’s Note: I believe every major European country has such a law. I know France and Germany do—both providing 6 weeks’ vacation, I believe.]

2) Higher education is free in the sense that you don’t pay the university or higher schools any money, but you still need a loan to cover food, rent and books. Some take part time jobs while studying. If you are the poorest of the poor you still can take a ’study loan’, no problem. To my experience you can in some cases even get the whole education for free (including rent, food, books) while being on welfare, but I don’t know how or why, so that’s a vague footnote.

3) We have homeless people here in Sweden but I am not sure why, cause we have a proper social security structure that shouldn’t allow it. Maybe people who gets involved with drugs? No idea…
I have a friend who has been on welfare for more then 10 years, I don’t know to be honest if they can have welfare indefinitely, but what should we do, let them live on the streets? I think that is beyond Swedish mentality. He has been forced into some “educational” programs from time to time. Long ago he also had some stray jobs… To be on welfare is a stressful and depressing situation also in Sweden.

4) English is a natural second language to many here in Sweden and I love English. I Have cultivated my elementary school English by reading hundreds of books by now, and when I write down thoughts I mostly use English.
Thanks for the compliment!

—

(I think I forgot to mention one thing in the last PM, here in Sweden people cannot get fired just like that, we have strong unions. To kick someone they will need a really good reason. This also goes for hiring people, they can’t just hire anyone they want, anyway they want. Everyone is supposed to have a chance on the available job.)

Cheers!”
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Thank you daSpinoza!

As one born in poverty, who has spent much of his life “one paycheck from homelessness”, and who has chronic health problems, I would love to have lived under the Swedish regime.

And, no, folks, Sweden is not a Socialist dictatorship. It’s a functioning democracy. It’s also economically successful. (Wikipedia is your friend.)

My commentary on the above appears below.

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THIS AMERICAN’S ANALYSIS

There:

For me, the most striking aspects of the Swedish way of life are:

Essentially free health care for all people!

Generous payments PLUS housing allowances for the disabled;

Generous unemployment compensation lasting about a year;

Protection against arbitrary dismissal from a job (Here the usual statement of the common law rule  on employment is that an employee may be fired “for any reason or no reason.”),

A STATUTORY right to those wonderful long vacations;

FREE higher education; and

Generous welfare.

In addition, I have read of other countries in Europe providing a statutory right to at least 6 months PAID maternity leave, and state-subsidized good-quality day care for when mom has at last to go back to work. They probably have those in Sweden too and my informant forgot to mention them because he’s not a parent.

Versus Here:

In the USA, by contrast, in the way of help for the unemployed we only have, for all people, food stamps and 6 months or less of LOW unemployment compensation (And these days the wretched employers often challenge the payment of the unemployment and win, on the basis that the employee was actually fired for good cause.).

And food stamps are a joke. I was on Social Security disability for 5 years, and even for a certifiedly disabled person like me there was only $650 per month disability payments plus — get this! — $125 month in food stamps. That food stamp figure was the MAXIMUM entitlement for a single person. If your income was more than my paltry $650 per month they would reduce the food stamps pro rata.

Oh yes, the food stamp entitlements had not been increased for many years–ten or twelve, I think– despite inflation –, until Obama had them increased as part of his stimulus package.

Beyond those things, in the USA there is nothing more for needy adults but welfare, and it is only for custodial parents of minor children. And it is time-limited to a maximum that varies from state to state but I believe amounts in most states to 5 years of welfare in your whole lifetime.

Further, though we have Medicaid for some of the poor, it is again only for the cetifiedly disabled and for parents of children, in most states. Beyond that, Medicaid is actually of little value, because it pays so little to doctors that many of them won’t take Medicaid patients at all.

I know all of the above facts about our “safety net” from direct, personal experience. I got through my disability period without becoming homeless only because I owned my home outright. (I had once made a good salary as a lawyer and saved most of it and then bought a modest house.)

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UPDATE (5-02-09).

For a look at life in another Scandinavian country, Finland, click here:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0501/p09s02-coop.html

I AM AN OYSTER

In the sense that irritations sometimes do me good. They tend to cause me to bring forth pearls — if not of wisdom, at least of interest.

Today in his inaugural address Barack Obama (my hero) explicitly dissed “those who prefer leisure over labor”. My feelings were hurt! I most definitely prefer leisure over labor, so long, at least, as the leisure is leavened with learning.

Seeking learning, I looked up Epicurianism on Wikipedia. I expected to find that famous and ancient school of philosophy to be almost congruent with my basic attitude toward life, but incapable of justifying my love of leisure, because I thought Epicureanism exalted intense sensual pleasure, most of which I never have any of, due to illness.

SURPRISE!

Please stick around long enough to read this quote:

“Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of Epicurus (c. 341–c. 270 BC), founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. …Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear (ataraxia) as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia) through knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of our desires. The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form. Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism, insofar as it declares pleasure as the sole intrinsic good, its conception of absence of pain as the greatest pleasure and its advocacy of a simple life make it different from “hedonism” as it is commonly understood.”

OMG, said I, Mr. Epicurus you just described my lifelong philosophy to a “T”!

So I hereby declare myself to be an Epicurean. I might add that since I have never seen the slightest evidence that we survive death, at least as our own sweet selves, it makes sense to try to find a way to live pleasantly, while we live.

DESSERT

(Epicurus, that exponent of modest pleasures, would probably have you skip it. But wit is a pleasure too!)

“Epicureanism emphasizes the neutrality of the gods, that they do not interfere with human lives. …

The Riddle of Epicurus or Epicurean paradox is the earliest known description of the Problem of evil, and is a famous argument against the existence of an all-powerful and providential God or gods. As recorded by Lactantius:

God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, then he is weak — and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful — which is equally foreign to god’s nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?^[1]“

DOES STIMULATING THE ECONOMY WORK?

It did once, until President Roosevelt lost his nerve.

Here’s the text of a letter I wrote to the NPR radio program “This American Life”, which let the anti-Keyesians run riot over the historical facts:

The Letter

“I just heard your show of the weekend of January 31 on John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian fiscal stimulation of the economy. What a hatchet job!

First you attempt to call into question Keynes’ character by having one of your reporters talk about his sometimes arrogant personal behavior. Then you FAIL to mention that President Franklin Roosevelt, from his election in 1932 until 1937, followed policies that resulted in Keynesian stimulation of the American economy, resulting in turn in  a  robust recovery of the American economy over that period, including a strong rise of Wall Street stock prices.

I have just been reading a history of the Depression called The Dark Valley by Piers Brendon. It is well researched and doesn’t seem to have an axe to grind. Mr. Brendon explains that after that initial partial recovery through stimulation by governmental deficit spending, President Roosevelt, with the advice of his Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau, lost his nerve, began longing for a balanced budget, and cut government spending by 2 billion dollars ($28.6 billion in 2007 money), in 1936, whereupon another stock market crash ensued in 1937, and the Depression got worse again*, until the USA went into that most stimulative of all American experiences, World War II, whereupon recovery took off.

With an accurate historical predicate unlaid, you then turned to opinion. As I heard the presentation, monetarist opinion dominated this section, including that of an economist who claimed that Keynesian intervention had “never” been tested, which claim would have seemed true to listeners who lacked knowledge of  the abortive, and successful ’til aborted, test in the early 1930s.

You went on to give that misrepresenting commentator the last word, allowing him to claim that his opposition to Keynsian stimulation was based on its being dangerous “because its an experiment that’s never been run.”

I realize that NPR is largely funded these days by corporate handouts. I understand that accordingly you have to let the intellectual justifiers of laissez faire capitalism take the floor unopposed every once in a while, but really–this program went over the top in that line.”

To My Blog Readers

Please take a look at the Wikipedia articles on the “New Deal” and the “Recession of 1937″, and particularly the graphs of employment and Gross Domestic Product during the 1930s that appear in those stories. Both articles are short.

Update 4/17/09

Paul Krugman made this same point in his New York Times column of Friday, April 17, 2009:

“History shows that one of the great policy dangers, in the face of a severe economic slump, is premature optimism. F.D.R. responded to signs of recovery by cutting the Works Progress Administration in half and raising taxes; the Great Depression promptly returned in full force. Japan slackened its efforts halfway through its lost decade, ensuring another five years of stagnation.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17krugman.html

FIVEANDAHALFGIRLS

How I envy the kids on YouTube! Even when they make clumsy dumb videos they are having a great time. And I in turn have  fun imagining being young and having such an immense and lovely toy to play with.

And they’ll have it, and the whole Internet and its successors, for a lifetime!

…

Every once in a while YouTube produces something really special. Today:

http://www.youtube.com/user/fiveandahalfgirls

Hint: Watch several of the videos, preferably starting with the first one, to allow the funness to fully ripen.

THE MAGIBON SCHOOL…

…of YouTube video making:

I discussed the wonderful cutie pie / YouTube personality known as Magibon back in July, and her YouTube channel is in the list that appears to the right of my blog.

Here is my analysis of the Magibon phenomenon:

http://nightman1.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/what-is-magibon/

And I’m glad to report that others are now following in Magi’s footsteps. Just think how much confidence in your beauty and/or charm it takes to go on YouTube and present yourself in the Magibon minimalist way!

The two best practitioners of the Magibon style I’ve stumbled upon are cotorich and jeerawan. I think if you are a man (or a woman with a keen appreciation of feminine beauty) then you will enjoy checking out these two YouTubers. I’ve added them to the list of fav YouTube channels to the right of my blog.

Oh yes, almost forgot. For an example of the OPPOSITE style of femaleness from that displayed by  Magibon and those who follow in her footsteps, check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8JGxClU4w&NR=1

Some men like their women hot. Others would prefer that they be sweet.

GEORGE W. BUSH…THEN BARACK OBAMA…WTF?!

Surely two more different people are hard to imagine. In fact I think they represent the two extremes of the American male personality: the good old boy and the analyzing intellectual.

Bush is — or more likely chose at some point in his life to act like — the classic Texas shit-kicker. I remember those guys well from growing up in Texas! They are strong and silent. But underneath that they are explosively emotional. They don’t know much about anything except business (which they often know a very great deal about indeed). When put in a tight spot they can be vindictive, even dangerous.

On the other side is a classic type from back east: articulate, elegant, widely-knowledgeable, and highly self-controlled. Many of our best technocrats are probably like this. And so are lots of people with Old Money (some of whom I met many years ago in college). Yet, through a delicious irony, Bush, having chosen to doff his inherited persona of Old — or  in his case Middle Aged — Money, has been succeeded in the highest office in the land by a man who comes from the lower middle class yet acts like a gentleman.

How could one People have elected two such different men in succession? I think the answer in the case of Bush is very clear. He was what a bunch of very scared and angry Americans called out for to save them. After being traumatized by the 9/11 attacks, we wanted someone tough to go somewhere, anywhere!, and whip some Arab ass. Bush, having chosen much earlier in his life to portray primitive American manhood, was just the man to embody our rage. He proceeded to act as ragefully as we could have wished, so we re-elected him in 2004.

Easy to understand.

But what about Obama, the cool, elegant, mixed-raced, smart guy? How could a country with a history of racism, and a streak of anti-intellectualism as wide as the Mississippi River, possibly have elected him President? I’m 61 years old, and the only time I remember our picking such a president in my lifetime was when Jack Kennedy (a Catholic, and therefor arguably unelectable at the time) was elected in 1960, whereupon his urbanity proceeded to charm the nation.

Needless to say, I have a theory about why Obama made it. Read my next post on this subject and see what you think about it.

BUSH…THEN OBAMA, WTF?! II

Why Obama?

A Relevant Story

Eleven years ago I moved into an historic little house downtown. The area was then a middlin-high crime area, so I took occupancy with trepidation. About a year after moving in, I was going to sleep around midnight when I heard the empty cans I had in a low box outside clunking against each other. Then I heard someone turning the doorknob to my kitchen door back and forth. I realized I had a prowler!

I called the cops immediately.

By the time they got there I was hearing the slithery, then cracking, sound of someone applying a pry bar to the back door. A minute or so later the cops drove up with their lights out and sirens off, and went back into my small yard. I heard yelling, and a scuffling sound, and soon the cops emerged at the front of the house, frogmarching a young guy in handcuffs. They were rough as they stuffed him in the back seat of the police car. I enjoyed seeing that.

Both of the cops were large men, taller and in much better shape than me. They looked like recently-retired, slightly-deteriorated athletes. I am a short guy who has always been overweight, and so never played any sports when I was a child. Probably for that reason, I have always disliked, and sometimes even hated, big, athletic men. But when those two beefy guys drove up, I was never gladder to see anyone in my life. And I loved the ease with which they subdued that prowler!

Why Obama.

Again, as in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, the American people were scared during the election just past. But, unlike last time, we were scared of something almost none of us could pretend to understand. Economics has been called “the dismal science”. It is boring and very hard. It takes a very determined and smart man to understand it. And here, in Obama, was a man who was calm and resolute, and who, above all, was obviously THE smartest of all the candidates who appeared before us during the long election season.

Lots of Americans don’t normally like intellectuals — for exactly the same reason I detest athletes. I call this phenomenon “cross-bell curve resentment”. But, as my little brush with crime taught me, when you desperately need the abilities of folks on the other side of a bell curve from you, those folks suddenly become as welcome as your long-lost best friend!

And that’s why Barack Obama was elected.

Update: Every once in a while some media person who is paid big money to do what I do for free agrees with one of my points. I am of course delighted. Please see this:

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/the-off-brand-presidency/

THE SORROW AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD 1 A!

Only the Blues could produce a song with this title that wouldn’t either be ironic or heavy metal. Check it out:

ETTA JAMES sings “I’d Rather Go Blind”.

UPDATE: Here’s a contemporary YouTube version of “I’d Rather Go Blind” by a singer from far distant Sarajevo who looks like a star from a 1940s French film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkrCrhxcje8

MAKE BIG MONEY IN RADIO!

I have a collection of correspondence courses in radio and electronics from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Those were a viable way in those years for a poor or isolated guy (They always speak of the “radioMAN” in the course advertising.) to learn a trade that could give him a highly saleable skill. And throughout all that period radio was as new and cutting-edge as computers are now. Many young men would have been fascinated by it.

Electronics is a hard subject! As I read through these courses I imagine the jaunty determination with which the student who first owned the course would have cracked that first lesson booklet, and then the long, hard slog he would have had through the many lessons that followed.  And when I come to some of the harder lessons I imagine the student’s wrenching struggle to learn to think in a new way that is really ultimately understandable only with fairly advanced math, of which so many people have a horror. Not surprisingly, some of the courses in my collection were never finished. Those that were completed tended to show, by the records of exams sent in and graded and sent back, that the student took over a year to complete the course.

My imagination especially dwells on the courses from the 1930s. I can picture how very much passing this course could have meant to, say, the young father with no job, who had somehow managed to scrape up the price of the course.

It would have been all or nothing for some of those men–their last shot: learn this strange body of knowledge and have a chance at a real job, or watch your family get poorer and poorer and eventually be put out on the street. There were no food stamps, unemployment compensation, or welfare then, so every responsible man had to support his wife and kids no matter what. And that responsibility was normally his alone.

What shame the husband and father who found himself failing such a last-ditch course would have felt! Or if not shame, perhaps terror. Those were deadly serious times.

It’s easy for me to imagine the negative side of all that because was born a pessimist. I wonder, though, what  the guys who completed the courses and got the good job in radio that the course advertising had promised felt? Joy, pride, or just simple relief—every man must have felt some or all of these.

But whatever they felt they would then have had to buckle down all over again–for years–to actually learn to do their new jobs. The abstract knowledge they’d acquired in the course, it turns out, would have served only as the most basic foundation for the actual manual and procedural skills an electronic technician has to have. I know that from experience, just from doing radio as a hobby.

My hat is off to those long-dead men. They really had what it takes.

MY HEROS LIST (ONGOING)

2. Nobody Does It Better

http://letters.salon.com/db1a08c56bd641402c5c200d64c889a8/author/index1.html

1. Argentinian Statesman

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7975788.stm

KOOL-AID IN THE DESERT

Not too long ago a friend said I had “drunk the kool-aid” by voting for Barack Obama for president. “No way”, I said, “He’s the candidate of The Little Man!”

That’s what my father used to call Democratic politicians. He had been a young man during the Depression, and he had plenty of direct reason to know how much The Little Man needs help under capitalism.

The reason for that need is obvious: Capitalism works by Capital paying for and organizing the work of Labor. The two social classes are symbiotic. But there are very few people around who are wealthy enough to be important capitalists, and there are many millions of laborers. It’s easy for the few capitalists to reach and enforce a consensus among themselves about wages, working conditions, etc., and extremely hard for the millions of working people to do so.

So capitalists have a terrific bargaining advantage when they go looking for labor. They set the terms of employment essentially single-handedly. If you don’t like the pay they’re offering, there’s always another person around the corner who will. And if you turn down x job at pay $y, chances are you won’t find it paying more anywhere else.

In the 1930s unions, aided by a Democratic federal government, balanced the power levels a bit more equally, but that has long gone by the wayside. Republicans have been elected and re-elected, and have indeed gotten “the government off our backs”. So for decades people who are not wealthy have been losing assets and income. The increasing ability of business over the last decade to export jobs to the cheapest possible foreign labor markets has greatly exacerbated this problem.

Against that background I, a lifelong worker, can be excused for hoping that a Democratic president would redress the imbalance. What I forgot was MONEY. With American labor unions moribund, there’s now nowhere for Democratic politicians to get all the money it takes to run for office except from wealthy people — and that is what the Democratic Party has been doing for the last twenty years.

The Little Man, in short, can no longer finance a whole campaign, so now we have government by and for the rich. Sure, Democrats when in power improve things a bit for workers on the margins, but they always know which side their bread is buttered on. This is gradually being made obvious to me by such sources as this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/business/27geithner.html?pagewanted=1&em

and this:

http://miami.indymedia.org/news/2008/05/11008.php

and finally this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/opinion/28herbert.html?_r=1

I thought I’d found the edge of the desert. In fact all I’d found was an Obama oasis.

BUSH-SPEAK V. OBAMA ORATORY

(I’m lifting another comment from an online news story.

It’s a bit further down here.)

I grew up in East Texas in the 1950s and ’60s. My mom was a Scottish immigrant, and, under her influence, while making my weary way to adulthood in Texas, I read a lot of classic novels from England.

My dad, meanwhile, was a classic Texas farmboy redneck.

So it was nasal slang all day at school from my peers, and again at home each night from my dad — as against my mom’s orderly Scotch English and the elegant British English of those old novels. The cognitive dissonance was stunning. The linguistic dissonance was worse. My dad and my peer-group lost the battle for my soul (a poor prize at best, I guess!) because I disliked them both. My mom and those English novelists seemed to share certain ideals of honor, gentlemanly behavior, and economic disinterestedness. My peers and my dad, on the other hand, posited a world where toughness and business success were the only recognized manly virtues (aside from going to church a lot, of course).  I joined up whole-heartedly on the side of my mom and The Sceptered Isle, and gladly brushed the dust of Texas off my shoes (not boots!).

I went to college in the North and majored in English.

Only those who have grown up in poverty in the sticks, speaking the stripped-down language of a place and time where “danger is double and pleasures are few”, can appreciate how desperately such a person may struggle to leave behind not only the benighted place and time, but also its characteristic dialect. Even if one does not have a fine ear for language, the associations with the dialect are all bad.

(I think of James Baldwin here, for some reason.)

In light of the above, imagine my disgust eight years ago when I heard George W. Bush’s twangy malapropisms begin emanating from Washington and the Highest Seat in the Land! Conversely, imagine my pleasure eight years later as I’m beginning to hear the cultivated tones of Barack Obama from that same lofty seat!

I listened to Mr. Obama’s third news conference Wednesday night and immediately decided to post something on this blog about the way he speaks — which meant that I spent quite a while thinking in detail about why I felt enlightened after listening to him. (Yes, ASIDE from the fact that he was saying mostly things I agreed with!)

And then, today, wonderfully!, I was spared the trouble of trying to figure it all out in detail when I read the best description I’ve ever heard of the difference between the ways Bush and Obama talk. It is a post commenting on the Leonard Cohen column in the New York Times of 4/29/2009:

Link
“Mr. Cohen, it is not the language, it is the quality of thought that is wonderful in a politician. What people see in this president and did not in Mr. Bush, is the ability to express his own high caliber thinking in his own words which he has thought about before expressing them publicly. His language makes clear that this time around the presidency is not a committee of oligarchs for whom the president is the spokesman.

President Obama talks, listens, thinks, answers and sometimes rethinks. This is new for this generation. You just have to listen: Bush wanted to be obeyed; that was clear. And he refused to take responsibility for errors. In 9th grade language his speeches were either lies or excuses. President Obama, on the other hand, wants to be right and he lets the people in on his plans and ideas. Nevertheless he can also be deceptive because he uses language as a painter of fine art uses his palette of colors  and his fine brushes to achieve shadow and shading. Mr. Bush did the best he could with his box of seven crayons.

— Moishepipik34, NYC”

(My thanks to Moishepipik34 for explaining so well and to the New York Times and Mr. Cohen for creating the occasion for him to do so.)

ALL PEOPLE MAY BE CREATED EQUAL, BUT…

They are born into different economic classes, and those classes have different ways of life, different opportunities, and, above all, different economic interests. They also have far different degrees of political influence. Ideas for human betterment that don’t take account of these differences can go spectacularly wrong.

How one did is nicely explained here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/opinion/05herbert.html?_r=1

If your economic life has been getting worse for years, I especially hope you’ll check this out.

IS IT TRUE WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT SWEDEN? II

And check out Norway and Denmark:

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/05/15/happiness_taxes/index.html

(Scandinavians found to have “highest level of life satisfaction in the world”)

Whereas we, the beneficiaries of our much-touted economic “freedom”, are overweight, overstressed, prone to overdrinking, credit-addicted, nutcase-religion addicted, liable to break out in workplace killfests frequently, and becoming jobless at an alarming rate!)

Revolution Never Comes With a Warning

by Michael Franti and Spearhead

Here’s the YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1gIOqJzCDw

(which takes this very strong rap and visualizes it perfectly. But don’t watch it if you’re a right winger!)

Now the Lyrics:

    

A revolution never come with a warning

A revolution never sends you an omen

A revolution just arrive like the morning

Ring the alarm we come to wake up the snoring

 

They tellin’ you to never worry about the future

They tellin’ you to never worry about the torture

They tellin’ you that you’ll never see the horror

Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow

 

Three piece suits and bank accounts in Bahamas

Wall street crime will never send you to the slammer

Tell all the children in the arms of their mammas

The F-15 is a homicidal bomber

 

TV commercials for a popping pill culture

Drug companies circling like a vulture

An Iraqi baby with a G.I. Joe father

Ten years from now is anybody gonna bother?

 

Yell Fire, yo, yo, yo

Here we come here we come

Fire, yo, yo , yo, yo

Revolution a comin’

Fire, yo, yo, yo, yo

Fire, yo, yo, yo, yo 

 

Everyone addicted to the same nicotine

Everyone addicted to the same gasoline

Everyone addicted to a Technicolor screen

Everybody tryin’ to get their hands on the same green 

 

From the banks of the river to the banks of the greedy

All of the riches taken back by the needy

We come from the country and we come from the city

You play us on the record, you can play us on the CD

 

All the shit you’ve given us is fertilizer

The seeds that we planted you can never brutalize them

Tell the corporation they can never globalize it

Like Peter Tosh said Legalize it

 

Girls and boys hear the bass and treble

Rumble in the speakers and it make you wanna rebel

Throw your hands up, take it to another level

And you can never, ever, ever make a deal with the devil    

 

Yell Fire, yo, yo, yo

Here we come here we come

Fire, yo, yo, yo, yo

Revolution a comin’

Fire, yo, yo, yo, yo

Fire, yo, yo, yo, yo

—

—

Kind of reminds me of Alan Ginsberg’s poem Howl!  Or the leftest ferment of the 1960s. But none of that did any good. Nothing changes. Did the serfs ever manage to revolt against the feudal lords?

 

 

 

 

GETTING LUCKY

(No, not that way!)

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in a family that always had minimal cash flow, and never had more than $1000 in the bank. My mom and dad owned a series of classic “ma and pa”  stores. (You know, the old precursors to 7-11 where the people who served you were the actual owners of the store?) Our living quarters were usually attached to the store. Both store and living area were usually poorly made. In fact, two of the places where we lived and worked had been constructed personally by the original owners — classic jackleg carpenters, I presume, judging from the strange floor plans and crazy walls. Needless to say, none of those places were pretty.

…

Jump ahead about 30 years.

…

It was 1997 and I had just turned 50 and actually had a bit of money in hand due to having practiced law for a while in a small way.  I was not married and didn’t expect to be, and it came to me that, to provide for my future, the best way to use my limited fund of capital, while I had it, was to find a way to live in it for life! So I went looking for a small house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I’ve lived since 1981.

I looked at some real dumps! Then one day I saw in the real estate section of the newspaper a dark little picture of a modest gingerbread-fronted house in downtown Baton Rouge. For other reasons too detailed to go into here, I had earlier studied downtown and come to love it, so I bought the house and fixed it up. It’s something you find a lot of in South Louisiana — a “shotgun house”. I.e., all the rooms are in a row, so if you stood in the front door you could fire a shotgun from the front of the house all the way to the back without hitting an intervening wall.  Such houses were where poor people often ended up. Nevertheless, this particular house was well-made and had a charm for me that even now I can’t define. As I later learned, it had been built in 1927.

I still live in that house 12 years later. My house is  tiny, only about 675 square feet. It’s a one-person house! I still love it as much as I ever did, and I still don’t know why.

Despite being rather cramped, it is my opinion that I have ended up in a very nice situation indeed. Essentially, I live in a unique downtown neighborhood that has the look of a traditional tree-canopied small southern town. The streets are narrow and have so little traffic that even the littleist neighborhood kids routinely ride their bikes  in the middle of them. The houses are clapboard, pier-and-beam construction — not a ranch-style house in the bunch! Instead there are lots of bungalows, and other wooden house styles* that you would instantly recognize if you saw them. Most are standard Southern styles from before 1950, so familiar from my early childhood that they are  like the faces of old friends to me. The neighborhood even has a name — Beauregard Town*. It was originally laid out back in the 1806, for goodness sake! Mine is the only shotgun house in it.

This pretty, small Southern town is in turn situated in the center of what I consider to be a howling wilderness of standard, traffic-ridden American urban sprawl. The Baton Rouge metropolitan area has a population of over 700,000. Yet this little town-within-a-city I inhabit is not much bigger than tiny Overton, Texas, where I was born and spent my early childhood.

This place is so restful, and so insulated from the surrounding car-dominated city, that it makes my lifelong dislike of driving bearable. It also, incidentally, makes me happy every morning when the weather’s nice and I sit on my front porch and listen to the birds singing and look out at the neat clapboard houses of my neighbors nestled among the trees.

And sometimes even say “Hi” to my neighbors as they walk by!

Beauregard Town was gentrified in the early 2000s, so all the decaying houses were fixed up, but it was not so gentrified as to drive out all the long-time Black residents, or to bring in snooty people who are actually rich. The houses are just too small for them. It remains a mixed area where the two races get along.

On top of all this, the place where I work is within walking distance!

I love this place. Everyone gets a few really lucky breaks in his life. Finding this house was one of mine.

________________________________________________________________

*See Beauregard Town Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauregard_Town

And here you can see some photos I took of downtown Baton Rouge:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/plinytheyounger/sets/72157608814957159/

POLAROID, THE PICTURES ARE INSTANT!

Here’s a wonderful article about some people trying to start up making Polaroid film again:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/technology/26polaroid.html?em

Thanks to good old eBay, I have three Polaroid cameras — two SX-70s and one of the SX-70’s cooler descendant, the SLR-680. They stopped making film for the SX-70 in 2006, and for the SLR-680 last year, but luckily I spent money I couldn’t afford to stock up on the film.

These cameras all fold up into a convenient, nearly flat, rectangle, yet when you open them up and use them you get your actual, physical pictures instantly! Here’s a fine site called Photoethnography.com, with good pictures and information on it’s SX-70 page:

http://www.photoethnography.com/ClassicCameras/index-frameset.html?PolaroidSX-70.html~mainFrame

Why do I like these features?

1. I’m old, and it was the super technology of my youth.

2. I’m a contrarian. If most people like X, chances are I’ll like Y instead.

3. I’m sorry, young people, but even though I love my computer and love to learn about it and its software, I cannot deny the fact that every time I start messing with it, it invariably eats up my time LIKE A STARVING PIG. Go to do X, and you find out that — Oops! — even though you used to know how to do that last month, now there’s a new format or codec for it, named Y. So you go learn about Y, or buy a program to handle it. But to clearly understand Y, or more likely the new piece of software you’ve had to buy to work with it, you must search on Google for the necessary information, or — Horrors! — read your new software’s manual.

So of course you instead start right in fiddling with the software. Unfortunately, there are way too many functions lurking in most programs for their own good, and the programs express their discomfort at this state of affairs by breaking out in octuplets of windows and menus, palettes, popup things, unsolicited helpful instructions, and, as you finally grow desperate and turn to it, A Help menu that’s as massy and impenetrable as that manual you didn’t read. (Microsoft, you who created the infamous “ribbon” interface for the most recent expensive iteration of Microsoft Office, are you listening?)

Much as I like to sit down and fiddle with things, it’s not good for me. I’m closing in on old age, and I need to stay out of the rocking chair for as many hours per day as possible. For this reason, I don’t want to take photos with a digital camera, sit down at my computer, download the pictures, decide if they need cropping, improving, or decorating prettily with a nice border, and then, at last, MAYBE, be able to output them to physical form, by the methods you well know, one of which takes a while to get them back!

…

You know where this is going. In the GOOD OLD DAYS, when transistors came 5 or 10 at a time rather than a million, designers could make electronic products do only a few things. That meant that the operation of those products was truly intuitive. For example, if I take one of my Polaroid cameras out into the sunny world and snap some pictures, I get pictures effortlessly, thoughtlessly, and essentially right away.

Above all, the pictures develop in my camera bag WHILE I KEEP WALKING!

So Polaroid can keep a photography-loving oldster on the streets. For that it deserves to survive.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD TV ! – MAYBE

TV functions as the modern equivalent of the fire that thousands of generations of people sat around each evening for as long as we were us. My guess is that a lot of storytelling always went on in that setting. Most of the stories were probably told by the elders. The stories would be funny or dramatic or sad or uplifting, and many times they would be instructive about how to live in the surrounding society — even if the lesson was only implied. And other members of the family could tell stories too, even the children — getting to be the center of attention and feel important in the family in the process. Storytelling explained the world and passed cultures on in a warm, community-building way.*

Commercial TV, as practiced in the United States since the 1950s, took all that away from us. A brand new kind of mesmerizing ever-changing light for the family to stare at in the evening darkness, it might have been a worthy replacement for the old ways, except for the differences in motivation of the old and new storytelling. American TV has always told stories that were motivated by one single desire — the desire to grab and hold your attention in order to sell you stuff. That means that every aspect of the storytelling art became meretricious. There is little or no “art” per se, left, in fact, because creators don’t get to make decisions freely about what will be in their stories. Choices are dictated mostly by the need to sell, sell sell!

The worst aspect of this is that TV stories have increasingly tried to show the most extreme aspects of everything, because that’s what the manipulators behind them know will grab your attention. That’s why we have so many shows about inherently disgusting things, like serial killers, and how to figure out who killed decomposing dead people. (“CSI” comes to mind.) Cumulatively, this has the subliminal effect of making people believe that crime is much more of a danger to them than it is. We become nervous, ever-watchful, and ever more eager to buy guns to defend ourselves from the unlikely “dangers” that have been made to seem to surround us on every side.

TV stories also routinely misrepresent society, because no-one will be in a buying mood if he’s reminded that he lives in an economically perilous society that cares nothing about him.  So all stories on American TV take place among the upper middle class or the wealthy. Poor people are never mirrored positively, and the reality they live is therefore marginalized. On TV they are nothing, zeroes. That is not good for their self esteem. And their excision from the TV world also subliminally mirrors our society to us in a falsely positive light, promoting right-wing politics.

In the last and worst place, by taking over all storytelling, traditional, non-Internet TV took away from children, and in fact all “everyday” people, the chance to shine in an extended, creative way by successfully telling complete stories. There are only so many pleasures to be had in the course of a human life. We couldn’t afford to lose one that cool.

…

Now, luckily, the age-old gathering around the fire has been rekindled in the form of the Internet. On sites like YouTube, Twitter, and untold millions of blogs, we can all participate in telling stories again. True, the people who want to “drive” us (as they are tellingly fond of saying) to their selling sites still predominate, but before we could not turn away from their offerings without turning off that hypnotizing central light — a very hard things to do. Now we can flit away in a moment to another web page or video. It is a golden age of information, interaction, and participation.

But unfortunately, in the USA at least, the “driving” power of greed is immense and ever-renewing. We’re seeing ever more elaborate ways being developed to track us as we navigate the Internet, so that, though we may now escape junk programming as we never could while watching TV, we cannot escape advertising**. In addition, watch for sites like YouTube to be increasingly morphed toward the top-down model of program creation. The history of American electronic media is a story of ever-increasing narrowing of the fare that the people who run the media will offer us. (Listen to commercial radio — a selection of stations — for a few days, and you’ll get the idea. In the early years of broadcast radio it offered everything from farm reports to soprano recitals.)

This narrowing reflects the practice of “programming to the lowest common denominator” — meaning only providing stuff that the most unsophisticated viewer could love, on the assumption that everyone else will turn off half his brain and watch it too, rather than have nothing to watch at all. The great virtue of this approach for content producers is that they only have to produce the entertainment equivalent of burgers and fries, yet they will still get big audiences.

For the foreseeable future there will be tremendous pressure from powerful interests to control the Internet and narrow its options so that this time-honored approach can be used on us again. I will fight against that, and I hope you will to.

The best way to do so, IMHO, is to support net neutrality.

________________________________________________________________

* See this review of a really interesting book:

Review: How storytelling shaped humanity

• 25 May 2009 by Kate Douglas
• Book information:
• On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction by Brian Boyd
• Published by: Belknap Press
• Price: $35/£25.95

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227091.900-review-how-storytelling-shaped-humanity.html

________________________________________________________________

** That is, unless you use Firefox with the add-on called AdBlock installed, in which case you don’t have to see much advertising at all.

OH I WISH I WEREN’T IN DIXIE!

You have to live in the place for a few years and watch our legislators in action to see what an ignorant and mean-spirited place it is:

10. Our governor’s ideology-driven indifference to working people doing its inevitable harm (but not, unfortunately, to his political career–yet):

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/legislature/49055021.html

9.  On the first page of the Internet version of my local paper 6/18/09. Note that Randy’s sports chat is first under “Today’s Headlines”. The picture speaks for itself.

Today’s Headlines

Chat: Randy Rosetta talks LSU Baseball & CWS

Live, from Omaha, Advocate sportswriter Randy Rosetta is participating in an online chat about LSU baseball today at 1 p.m. The red-hot Tigers are one win away from the College World Series, championship series. To ask a question in advance, fill out the form on the chat page or check back at the scheduled chat time to join the conversation.

8. Anyone remember “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia?

Four former governors of Louisiana met yesterday with our current right-wing twerp ideologue governor to remind him that it would be unwise to ruin the state’s higher educational system in his zeal to cut the state budget.

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/47814247.html

7.  Unemployment Compensation? We don’t  need no stinkin’ unemployment compensation!

From public radio show, “Marketplace”:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/04/pm_ants/

“Employers pay the taxes that fund unemployment insurance. States set the tax rates. And lawmakers are often under pressure from business to keep those taxes low.

And that’s just what happened here. [a Southern state. Are you surprised?] Remember the “ants and grasshoppers” fable? South Carolina’s a grasshopper; it failed to save for an economic winter. Back in 2000, its trust fund was more than $800 million in the black. Business leaders worried that money, money collected from employers would be diverted to pay for other state programs. So the legislature cut taxes, and the unemployment fund headed down, down, down.”

________________________________________________________________________

6.  Sock it to me, you big strong insurance industry, you!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/09/mary-landrieu-opposed-to_n_213211.html

________________________________________________________________________

5.  Think of the rich people (6/02/09)!

This one’s complex: Back in 2002 a Louisiana state representative named Stelly pushed through a change in the state income tax that made it more progressive. I was amazed. He must have been a closet liberal.

Now we’re back to the usual. Last year the Louisiana Legislature rolled back one of Stelly’s changes, making our tax law be kind to the rich again. In this newspaper story they reject any going back on that, though this year the state has an unprecedented budget emergency.

Louisiana, thy name is Guatemala!

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/46681172.html?index=14&c=y

_________________________________________________________________________

4.   Amazingly, this one (pushed by the state dentists’
organization) failed (5/20/09)

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/45456832.html

_________________________________________________________________________

3.   Extended unemployment benefits in a recession are actually
BAD for us (5/19/2009)

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/45411062.html

_________________________________________________________________________

2.   Bill to allow guns on campus (5/18/09)

http://www.2theadvocate.com/opinion/45268152.htm

These Louisiana folks either think they’re living in the West in the 19th Century, in which case they’re fools, or want to, in which case they’re dangerous throwbacks.

_________________________________________________________________________

1.   State tax holiday for guns proposed (5/19/09)

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/45373872.html

BE A MAN!

Here’s a very intelligent discussion of why many Caucasian men are primarily interested in Asian women:

http://letters.salon.com/books/review/2009/06/16/east_west_sex/view/index8.html?show=all

Buried in the middle of that discussion  — which is fascinating in itself — is this jewel of a comment:

“Speaking as a white female who has always been attracted to sexy East Asian men, I have a few thoughts about this dynamic.

Generally speaking, women always have a lower social status in their own society than men. As a result, within their cultures, women are much more oppressed than men — but paradoxically, if they should venture outside their culture, they may have a lot more freedom to experiment than men from their society would.

For example: in Western societies, men are esteemed above women, and this situation penalizes women in many ways with one huge exception: as children, girls who are “tomboys” are tolerated, encouraged and admired (for “aspiring” above their lowly female status), while boys who are “sissies” are despised, rejected and often brutalized (for disrespecting the Sacred Masculine and transgressively choosing a lower status). Hence, girls have much more freedom to explore their personalities as they grow up. Boys are mostly condemned to force themselves into a narrow box of “Not-Feminine” qualities; if they are gentle, or artistic, or intellectual, or pretty much anything that’s not loud, coarse, violent, aggressive and dominating, they are branded as “faggots,” irrespective of their sexual orientation.

In East Asian societies, women’s lower and men’s higher status is even more exaggerated than in the West. As a result, Asian women may have quite a bit more freedom to explore the world outside their culture of origin, and unsurprisingly, many Asian women have enjoyed exploring Western men and have found beloved partners from foreign cultures. Asian men, on the other hand, are often paralyzed by the expectations of their families to the point where, no matter how attracted they might be to a woman from a different culture, it is simply unimaginable to become involved.”

….

(In other words, “Yes Virginia, it is possible to be a male heterosexual and yet be gentle, sensitive, artistic, imaginative, creative, and not interested in football.”)

Set in boldface in the quoted  language is nothing less the story of my childhood and youth. I never heard anyone else describe it ’til now. But for some time I’ve known that the deviation from the norm (of East Texas) described in the quote was a large source of the ostracism I received as a child. For a long time I’ve also understood that that deviation was normal, etc.  Still, to hear, at last,  someone else state a truth that one has unearthed all on one’s own somehow makes its truth more substantial.

As I get older I am repeatedly amazed that I understand and can articulate truths about society and myself, that, if I had been able to understand them at 20, would have changed my life infinitely for the better.

CUBICLE HELL

Friday Night I Wrote This:

“As I left work (the last worker to leave, by chance), on my way to the door I passed through the gray and disorderly space left behind by people who do boring and/or irritating things for most of the hours and days of their lives. I felt great pity for us all. Cubicle dwellers are the modern equivalent of the millworkers who sweated their lives away for peanuts a hundred years ago.

I’ll never understand how they stand it. I’ll never understand why they don’t rebel, like the more educated portion of the people of Iran are doing now. Working Americans live in “the richest country on earth” (as our media propagandizers never tire of telling us), and these same workers watch on their TVs every night those Americans not incarcerated like them fling money around like water for fun, and destroy peoples’ lives in the process. They accept it all.

I guess the Poor have always done this. My fellow Poor, modern American variety, are kind and friendly to each other as they serve out their life sentences in their little gray cubicles. Maybe they make a statement of a kind by doing that.

But I think it’s more likely that “the most social animals on earth” (as I have heard humans called), simply accept whatever pecking order they live in as natural, without ever thinking about it. They only rebel when society become so oppressive that they can’t kid themselves any more that its structure is fair.”

On Saturday, I Think I Know

How They Stand It:

1. Most go home to families, unlike me, and forget the day’s work as soon as they enter their front doors. During the day, when they’re stuck at work, the knowledge that they have no choice but to go on enduring the boredom and irritation if they and their loved ones are to survive economically keeps them numbed.

2. Many never saw any other way of life growing up, so they never question their working conditions at all.

3. A lot never question the standard American ideology: The USA is “The Greatest Country on Earth.” And we alone have “Freedom”, and “the American Dream.” Moreover, the USA is totally a meritocracy, so we all have the “Opportunity to Get Ahead” and realize that dream.

a. So those whose jobs offer good prospects of advancement know that they are on the right track in doing their boring work, and they buckle down!

b. Ditto those whose bosses have DECEIVED them into thinking that their jobs have good prospects of advancement.

c. And the rest have to conclude, if they’re still sitting in little cells shuffling papers, then it must be their own fault, and they should just shut up and endure it.

4. Some like the work! (I even like a small part of mine.)

5. Some are not smart enough to do any better-paid work, and they know it.

6. A lot know that they are smarter than their work, but also know that for various other, apparently-unchangeable reasons they CAN’T do any better-paid work.

a. Of these, a minority (unlike me) are temperamentally able to accept and live with perpetual boredom and wasted brain power in return for economic survival.

b. And the rest aren’t, so they suffer each and every day of their working lives.

7. And some, of course, are simply people born with a sunny temperament who are not bothered by much of anything.

My personal problem is that I belong in the 6b group.

The problem of America, IMHO, lies in groups 2 and 3. In their thoroughly-propagandized heads, they are still living under the ancient “root hog or die” economic regime that now prevails only in underdeveloped countries.

These group 2 and 3 folks, who I think make up the majority of us, do as they’ve been taught to do in order to live in a world of perpetual scarcity. They ignore the vast sums generated by this society and then squandered on unneeded military junk, and they also dutifully refrain from envying or coveting the vast wealth of their betters.

No “spread the wealth” for them!

So, for a lot of us, no hope of escape from drudgery either.

CONTACT SENATOR LANDRIEU PLEASE

Here’s a quote about the upcoming health care fight from economist Paul Krugman’s New York Times column for Monday, 6/22/09:

“The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.

What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.

Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/opinion/22krugman.html

Mr. Krugman is referring to the element of the proposed new insurance-based national health care plan that would establish a public insurer for people to go to when they couldn’t get, or afford, private health insurance. Without the necessity of throwing off a constant stream of profit to shareholders, the public insurer could presumably provide cheaper and better insurance than the private health insurance companies we’ve all learned to know and hate.

The competition thus provided might even cause private insurers to cut their rates!

But the good old “Blue Dog” democrats, among them my own state’s Senator Mary Landrieu, are trying to kill this eminently reasonable provision.

Without the public insurer, the new health care plan will just be a windfall for doctors and private health insurers, since the former could bill as optimistically as they do now, and the latter would have to be given subsidies to make their profit-hungry insurance products affordable to the poor and lower middle class persons that the government is trying to extend coverage to. And so overall medical costs would continue to grow fast, just as they do now.

If you are a fellow Louisianian, or even just a concerned person anywhere, you might want to read up on this subject. Here’s an interesting set of poll results to start with:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/policy/21poll.html?fta=y

And then perhaps you would contact Senator Landrieu about her pro-insurance-companies position through this url:

http://landrieu.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm

THANK GOD!

(and I don’t even believe in Him)

Supreme Court Lets Stand a Central Provision of the Voting Rights Act:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23scotus.html?ref=us

As someone who lives in the South and was brought up here, I can assure you that without the Voting Rights Act, the states down here would be back to poll taxes (You had to pay a substantial tax just to vote!) and open harassment of Blacks at the polls so quickly  even fast-talking Yankees would be amazed.

I grew up in the South when segregation was the law in all Southern states. I know how routine, heartless, and nearly universal racism was in Southern Whites. You don’t change a whole culture in one generation.

Even if racism is in retreat in the minds of some white people in the South, our legislators routinely provide the “lowest common denominator” of  political representation. If they were freed of the restraints of the Voting Rights Acts, those legislators would not hesitate to play to the worst instincts of the yahoo element of our Southern White folk, as they did for 100 years before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.

IS THERE ANY ABUSE OF AUTHORITY JUDGE THOMAS WILL OBJECT TO?

Note his dissent in this case:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/politics/26scotus.html?_r=1&hp

HOW DAMN SLOW IS A ZOMBIE OR A MUMMY!?

REVEREND B.

THE IPHONE, THE KINDLE, ETC.

(Watch out for those carrier charges!)

http://www.cio.de/news/cio_worldnews/890762/index1.html

THE DEAD PARROT SKETCH

From

MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS

c. 1970

Thanks to David Brown, www.davidpbrown.co.uk

A customer enters a pet shop.

Customer: ‘Ello, I wish to register a complaint.

(The owner does not respond.)

C: ‘Ello, Miss?

Owner: What do you mean “miss”?

C: I’m sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!

O: We’re closin’ for lunch.

C: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

O: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue…What’s,uh…What’s wrong with it?

C: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. ‘E’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!

O: No, no, ‘e’s uh,…he’s resting.

C: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

O: No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

C: The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

O: Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!

C: All right then, if he’s restin’, I’ll wake him up!

(shouting at the cage)

‘Ello, Mister Polly Parrot! I’ve got a lovely fresh cuttle fish for you if you show…(owner hits the cage)

O: There, he moved!

C: No, he didn’t, that was you hitting the cage!

O: I never!!

C: Yes, you did!

O: I never, never did anything…

C: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) ‘ELLO POLLY!!!!!

Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o’clock alarm call!

(Takes parrot out of the cage and thumps its head on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)

C: Now that’s what I call a dead parrot.

O: No, no…..No, ‘e’s stunned!

C: STUNNED?!?

O: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin’ up! Norwegian Blues stun easily, major.

C: Um…now look…now look, mate, I’ve definitely ‘ad enough of this. That parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not ‘alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein’ tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.

O: Well, he’s…he’s, ah…probably pining for the fjords.

C: PININ’ for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got ‘im home?

O: The Norwegian Blue prefers kippin’ on it’s back! Remarkable bird, id’nit, squire? Lovely plumage!

C: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

(pause)

O: Well, o’course it was nailed there! If I hadn’t nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent ‘em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!

C: “VOOM”?!? Mate, this bird wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it! ‘E’s bleedin’ demised!

O: No no! ‘E’s pining!

C: ‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker!

‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies!

‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig!

‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!!

THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

(pause)

O: Well, I’d better replace it, then.

(he takes a quick peek behind the counter)

O: Sorry squire, I’ve had a look ’round the back of the shop, and uh, we’re right out of parrots.

C: I see. I see, I get the picture.

O: I got a slug.

(pause)

C: (sweet as sugar) Pray, does it talk?

O: Nnnnot really.

C: WELL IT’S HARDLY A BLOODY REPLACEMENT, IS IT?!!???!!?

O: Look, if you go to my brother’s pet shop in Bolton, he’ll replace the parrot for you.

C: Bolton, eh? Very well.

The customer leaves.

The customer enters the same pet shop. The owner is putting on a false moustache.

C: This is Bolton, is it?

O: (with a fake mustache) No, it’s Ipswitch.

C: (looking at the camera) That’s inter-city rail for you.

The customer goes to the train station.

He addresses a man standing behind a desk marked “Complaints”.

C: I wish to complain, British-Railways Person.

Attendant: I DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS JOB, YOU KNOW!!!

C: I beg your pardon…?

A: I’m a qualified brain surgeon! I only do this job because I like being my own boss!

C: Excuse me, this is irrelevant, isn’t it?

A: Yeah, well it’s not easy to pad these python files out to 200 lines, you know.

C: Well, I wish to complain. I got on the Bolton train and found myself deposited here in Ipswitch.

A: No, this is Bolton.

C: (to the camera) The pet shop man’s brother was lying!!

A: Can’t blame British Rail for that.

C: In that case, I shall return to the pet shop!

He does.

C: I understand this IS Bolton.

O: (still with the fake mustache) Yes?

C: You told me it was Ipswitch!

O: …It was a pun.

C: (pause) A PUN?!?

O: No, no…not a pun…What’s that thing that spells the same backwards as forwards?

C: (Long pause) A palindrome…?

O: Yeah, that’s it!

C: It’s not a palindrome! The palindrome of “Bolton” would be “Notlob”!! It don’t work!!

O: Well, what do you want?

C: I’m not prepared to pursue my line of inquiry any longer as I think this is getting too silly!

Sergeant-Major: Quite agree, quite agree, too silly, far too silly…