PHILOSOPHY WORKS !

In the contemporary world (USA version) I wonder if the name

Søren Kierkegaard

is known by anyone any more, except by a few philosophy professors. And from what I hear of the state of American higher education these days, I think that even those professors may no longer be allowed to teach Kierkegaard’s work to anyone but philosophy graduate students.

But college was different 40 years ago, and difficult old philosophers were thought then to be worth undergraduates’ time, so I walked into the third meeting of my Existentialism class in the early spring of 1968 absolutely ignorant of philosophy and ripe to be snared by the mere first paragraph by Mr. K’s great book The Sickness Unto Death.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a philosopher with a twist–a pioneering analyst of despair whose description of the many varieties of that state later became, I believe, the source of one of the most familiar truisms of our present place and time:

Be yourself!

aka

High self esteem is good for you.

We didn’t know about “self-esteem” back in 1968. And if I had ever made enough progress in the first reading assignment for that class in  to discover the original progenitor of that self esteem concept lurking in The Sickness Unto Death I wouldn’t have understood it anyway. Mr. K’s description of the various kinds of sorrow that can come to one who does not accept himself* would have fallen on deaf ears for me then for one very simple reason—I couldn’t stand myself.

I had no self-esteem at all. In its place I had grandiosity. After a lifetime of abuse of various sorts, I saw myself as simply a kind of unwanted and inchoate mess….

…”but that’s OK”, I always thought back then, when I was forced to take notice of what an unsavory creature I seemed to be, “because I’m going TO DO GREAT THINGS SOMEDAY…”

…”because I’m SO SMART!”

Could there be any kind of person in the world better prepared to be stopped dead by the following gaudily incomprehensible  introductory sentence of The Sickness Unto Death?

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation.

Nope. Someone with vast intellectual pretensions constructed on a foundation of nothing, like I was then, was maybe never going to get past that sentence.

And I never did. I was the guy, after all, who was so smart that I could understand anything if I only put my mind to it! I exhausted myself pondering the meaning of K’s impenetrable introductory sentence and a few very abstract pages following it, and never read further into the book to discover the much more accessible, and very insightful, dissection of spiritual despair in all its varieties that was to be found there.

Too bad! Because it was information that I could have used, and at that time in fact desperately needed. I might even say that if I had absorbed what Kierkegaard had to say and realized how much it applied to me then, the experience might have changed the rest of  my life for the better.

So don’t  you be the same as I was! And don’t be the opposite kind of person, who yells “BORING!” and runs away in panic when confronted with anything “hard”, either!  Instead, take a look at this brief appreciation of Søren Kierkegaard:

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/kierkegaard-on-the-couch/?em

As for me, 25 years after that first abortive encounter I got out my old copy of The Sickness Unto Death and skipped the hard first part and read the perfectly accessible remainder.  The experience was instrumental in making me what I am now — very odd, and OK with that.

The desire to be some other self than one’s own sweet, inescapable one-and-only self wears many disguises, and Mr. K. describes them all. Some of them you wouldn’t guess in a million years.

Who knows? You might be wearing one of  those right now. Buy the book and see.

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*Kierkegaard wasn’t writing a self-help book. He was proselytizing. His purpose was to show that a human self, being partially a spiritual being, had to be “grounded” in God to avoid falling into despair. Without that connection, the self would be unstable, and would be forever pursuing things to complete it that could not complete it. Anyone who watches the antics of the powerful people of the earth for a while, as they display this “seeking” behavior in various forms on a huge scale, would have to agree. See, most recently, American investment bankers.

JUNK FOOD TURNS RATS INTO ADDICTS!

This has truly rocked my world:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48605/title/Junk_food_turns_rats_into_addicts

 

Cordially,

Nightman1 (major junk food addict in my youth)

SCREWED BY THE RECESSION? HERE’S WHY.

Knowledge is when you have ideas.

Ideology is when ideas have you.

At the url below you can see a history of a period in the late 1990s when one lady in Washington tried to go against the prevailing economic ideology of the last 30 years — which we later saw crash and burn so spectacularly in October of 2008.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/#morelink

MAD CAPITALISM

A couple of decades ago, certain wealthy interests began buying up radio stations, stripping their staffs down to the absolute minimum needed to function, removing local programming from them, and then borrowing money against them to buy still more stations to add to their collections — and so on, ad nauseum. The cashflow from the stations was very nice for those rich folk, and no-one much cared about all the laid-off employees to whom much of that money had once gone to in the form of salaries.

The radio broadcasting version of the story of American business over the last 40 years, in short.

Later, after this consolidation had gone on for a long time, radio began losing listeners because only a few broadcasting formats were allowed by the amalgamation masters, and younger people were bored with them. For God’s sake, even I, a crusty old bably boomer, don’t want to hear songs from the past over and over and over again, daily and forever.

Now one of those eaters of stations, Citadel Communicatons, seems to be headed toward bankruptcy. Here is an interesting discussion of how the company’s immediate future is likely to play out, from a commentator on the radio business who has been prescient on the future of radio under the amalgamators for years:

http://insidemusicmedia.blogspot.com/2009/10/pre-packaged-bankruptcy-for-citadel.html

NOT ALL NOSTALGIA IS LAME

I am 61.

I recently ran into a woman I went to high school with whom I hadn’t seen in 40 years. She wasn’t an old girlfriend, or one of the people who were my really close friends, but I always liked her. Back when I was in high school, though, I also looked down on her, for some reason I can’t now define. I liked her, but I didn’t value her as much as she deserved for her sweetness of temperament, which even I could perceive even back then, and which she still has. That was a bad  mistake, since that is one of the greatest virtues a person can have — and I could  really have used a wife like that over the last 40 years!

I’m becoming one of the uncountable multitudes of folks who have begun to grow old and upon doing so have noticed that they had really poor judgment about lots of things for most of their lives.

Still, it’s an interesting and pleasant process. Many a stubborn person must have had this experience before me and also said, “Hey, the world’s way bigger than I thought!”

Some of you boomers may remember the song “Clouds” by Judy Collins, which was popular around 1968. It ended with the refrain:

“I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose, and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all.”

Now I understand that song.

WE HAVE ENOUGH OF THESE ALREADY!

It’s rare to read a story about something that I consider not only deplorable in every present detail, but also bad in all of its implications for the future, and positively frightening in some of them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8287740.stm

We seem to be a species whose instincts and most basic cultural tendencies still fit the sparsely settled, tribal world in which homo sapiens evolved. Unfortunately that ancient world is as far in condition from the present one as it’s possible to get.

Thank you Mr. Malthus for raising the alarm on this whole matter some time ago.

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

BEWILDERED WORKERS

When I was a little boy growing up in a poor family WAY back in the early 1960, I was really into learning things. My stern mom always gave me a smile when she signed my report card.

Later I became a teenager and began to wonder just why we were so poor and others in town so clearly weren’t. What did they know or have that we didn’t, that condemned us to be perpetually one mortgage payment away from the streets? I became then and remain to this day furious at that disparity, well expressed for me in 1966 by the Doors in these two lines:

Some are born to sweet delight,

And some are born to the endless night.

Still later I went to college and some of this mystery was dispelled…but that’s not what this post is about.

No, this post is about how I’ve always been able to see over the past two decades why Rush Limbaugh et al. appeal so strongly  to poor people — poor white people in the South particularly –, even though the fundamental program of the Right has always tended to work to the advantage of the rich, not the poor.

This lady (commenting on an article in the New York Times that I’ll cite later) expresses my understanding of this strangely self-contradictory phenomenon perfectly:

“I don’t know whether to call it nostalgia or anachronism, but this idea that there is some “working class” or “blue collar class” in this country does not fit the times. Outside of the wealthy we have a remnant of what used to be the true middle class. At this point, these are mostly sales people who can manage $100k plus along with a few remaining professionals, technical workers and some managers. If you don’t fall into one of those two categories, you’re just poor.

The poor are the people with the $10 hour jobs, if they have jobs. No benefits — no paid vacation, no paid days off, no paid sick time, no health insurance. If you show up and work, you get paid. If you don’t show up, you hope you don’t lose the job. If you’re part of a family and live in a home together, probably most people living in the house have one or more such jobs. You’re never sure you can get enough money to pay the rent, electric, gas, water, sewer, garbage collection, medical bills, credit cards, etc., etc. You feel under siege most days.

The poor generally do not have the thinking ability afforded by a good education. In a country with a failed basic education system, they may be high school graduates, but they cannot read well enough to clearly understand meanings in things like newspapers and magazines. They are large consumers of “free” media — broadcast television and radio. Without critical thinking ability they are the rabble being roused by hucksters with nothing but their own self interest at heart. Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, and Rupert Murdoch care only about possessing power and the money that comes with it.

Consuming that media, the poor are angry because they see themselves as being left out. Every show, fictional or otherwise shows people they believe are like them as being far better off than they are. The TV characters have better cars, nice houses, and they have no real worries outside of the scripted drama that is resolved so easily in the denouement. In the morning, the poor have to get up early, hope their 12-year-old car will start and make it to work if they can afford to put gas in it. This is a harsh and bitter reality that is almost a cognitive dissonance in contrast to the way they believe life is for most other people.

When they drive too fast on the way to work, police give them a ticket for speeding and the fine amount rivals their weekly take-home pay. Meanwhile they see politicians accused of crimes, and years later nothing has been done about it. They see police officers shoot apparently innocent people, and they get away with it. They hear about corporate executives being released from their responsibilities (fired) and given $25 million to take home with them. And when the poor don’t have the money to pay their speeding ticket a warrant is issued for their arrest. That leads to the loss of the car and the job and perhaps everything else they thought they had worked for.

These poor people are angry. They have a right to be angry. They were told in school they were being prepared for the “American dream.” Life was going to be the pursuit of more happiness today than yesterday. But they didn’t understand that their education was woefully inadequate to comprehend the current world. They weren’t told that corporations care about profit and nothing else, least of all them and their lives. They can’t accept that what they see and hear in the media they consume is a fantasy meant to take advantage of them in a hundred different ways. I could compare them to lost children wandering aimlessly around huge shopping malls angrily screaming at people in the food court who somehow have enough to eat.

We adults who have figured out how to get some food are at a loss to understand these people at their rallies saying the president is a monster. And calling them the working class or blue collar makes no more sense than labeling them “conservatives” or “patriots” or loose cannon for that matter.

They are simply poor. They are without hope. And they cannot understand what’s going on when they look at the Mercedes next to them at the stoplight and a black woman is in the driver seat. So they turn up the radio and Glenn Beck tells them Obama is causing it all. It has nothing to do with either work or class.”

— Tracy

If I had stayed in East Texas and  stayed uneducated, and there had been a Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck on the radio then, I would have believed everything he said!

___________________________________________________________

The comment quoted above was to this article:

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/working-class-zero/

WHAT DOES DEPRESSION FEEL LIKE?

If it’s the disease “major depression” it feels just like THIS:

http://anothernobody.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/more-badd-rantings-anti-depressants

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.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

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:

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-level unemployment payments, folks, over a year and a half if you have kids! - 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!”

AND NOW, BACK TO OUR SPONSOR!

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. (Check it out Wikipedia is your friend.)

My commentary on the above appears below.

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 — again, PLUS a housing allowance.

In addition, I’ve 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 and saved most of it and then bought a modest house.)

__________________________________________________________________________________________

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]“

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

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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/

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?

I’M RETURNING TO MY ROOTS

There’s some funny stuff there!

http://redneckcommunity.com/articles/_date-my-daughter-.html

DON’T TOUCH MY RICE BOWL!

Here’s a link to a nice short article about the current state of health care in the USA, and what real reform of it might look like:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/business/economy/22leonhardt.html?hp

I cannot imagine how such reform will ever come about. As one of my bosses used to say, the income equivalent of  “not in my back yard!” is the rice bowl expression that appears at the head of this entry. I assume the expression comes from some Asian country.

Here are the just a few of the groups that can be counted on to mobilize their vast assets to block any filching from their rice bowls over the next decade:

Health Care Reform

This is A Big One:

doctors, drug makers, pharmacies, medical equipment builders, for-profit hospitals, and, above all, insurance companies.

Legalizing Marijuana Use…

(and maybe relaxing some penalties for USE of other drugs)

the Drug Enforcement Administration and all its contractors, supporters, and employees and all their families — along with a great many police departments that love the money that flows into them from seizing and selling the possessions of drug dealers.

Cutting Back on the $$$ We Give Our Military!!! *

This is The Biggest Rice Bowl of All:

We don’t have the mighty Soviet Union to kick around any more, so do we really still need ALL that military stuff? What about all those nuclear submarines? Do terrorists have submarines?

But think of all the military contractors, and all of their investors, managers, suppliers, and employees! Military contractors are known to spread the construction of their multi-multi-billion dollar projects around to most of the states in the Union in order to create supporters of each project in each Congressperson’s district.

Add all the military careerists, present and pensioned, and you might as well give up on this one before starting.**

Limiting Unwise Speculation by Big Banks:

The fattest cats of them all. Watch them spend and spend and spend some more to stop any such limitations over the next few years.

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And So On…

The USA is in a set of multiple binds because of the combination of the universal human rice-bowl protection instinct and the fact that in this country a politician must raise many millions of dollars to win a federal office. As reform after reform is suggested, folks who would be adversely affected by each prooposal rise up in turn and spend millions on lobbyists and direct gifts to Congresspersons to stop it.

Oh well, it was a nice semi-democratic Republic for a hundred years or so.

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*The Department of Defense budget approximately = the arms spending of all the other countries in the world combined, and about one half of all US discretionary spending.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_Of_Defense#Expenditures

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**But take a look at this amazing development:

http://www.slate.com/id/2223287/

Is it just the exception that proves the rule?

So THAT’S Why You Both Have to Work!

Anyone who reads this blog will notice I’m always upset about something. I have done you readers a disservice by picking out things on the margin to fulminate about, and never getting to the heart of the matter.

That heart is the steady decline of the working middle class in the USA since 1980, and the concomitant continuous march of more and more of the country’s wealth up the class ladder to the wealthiest Americans.

I haven’t written about the heart of the matter because it was extremely difficult to pull together all the data that substantiated these changes — data that I had heard about in bits and pieces over the years.

Now, happily, I’ve found a site that poops these facts out, as drawn from census and othe data through 2005:

http://www.demos.org/inequality/index.cfm

It’s a wonderfully clear site, with charts and graphs to clarify the straightforward discussion, so please take a look.

In case you don’t, here’s perhaps the most cogent data set in that site:

Note the steady rise of the incomes of ordinary working people from 1947 through 1979, and the leveling out since. In case you ever wondered where the Ozzie and Harriet world of the 1950s and ’60s, when one worker could support a family, has gone, this graph contains your answer.

The usual accoutrements of middle class life — many of them functional necessities, like more than one car per family — have multiplied, while the average earnings of those aspiring to that life  have stayed the same. Since all Americans tend to believe that they are at least middle class, or soon will be, this disparity has resulted in desperate efforts by many families to either earn more money (working two or more jobs per family), or, failing that,  access and spend first their savings and then any credit they can get.

And where has all the money that used to regularly increase the incomes of working people gone? I’m sure you can guess:

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By the Numbers Income | Wealth | Executive Compensation | Wages | Data Banks | Download PDF Version Income The top one percent of households received 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income in 2005, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s. (The top one percent’s share of total income bottomed out at 8.9 percent in 1976.) This is the greatest concentration of income since 1928, when 23.9 percent of all income went to the richest one percent. (Piketty and Saez) The above figures include capital gains, which are strongly affected by the ups and downs of the financial markets. Excluding capital gains, the richest one percent claimed 17.4 percent of all pre-tax income in 2005, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s. (It bottomed out at 7.8 percent in 1973.) This is the greatest concentration of income since 1936, when the richest one percent received 17.6 percent of total income. (Piketty and Saez) Between 1979 and 2005, the top five percent of American families saw their real incomes increase 81 percent. Over the same period, the lowest-income fifth saw their real incomes decline 1 percent. (Census Bureau) In 1979, the average income of the top 5 percent of families was 11.4 times as large as the average income of the bottom 20 percent. In 2005, the ratio was 20.9 times. (EPI, State of Working America 2006-07, Figure 1J) All of the income gains in 2005 went to the top 10 percent of households, while the bottom 90 percent of households saw income declines. (EPI Snapshot, March 28, 2007) Unprecedented levels of capital income are fueling inequality in the current business cycle. In the third quarter of 2006, the share of corporate income going to capital (profits and interest) hit an all-time high of 23 percent, with the remaining 77 percent going to employee compensation. Since capital income disproportionately goes to the top of the income scale, this shift towards capital income increases the income gap. (EPI Snapshot, Jan. 17, 2007) Source: Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 2003. Updated to 2005 at http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/saez. Download high resolution TIF Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables, Table F-3. Download high resolution TIF Source: Congressional Budget Office, Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2004, Table 1C, December 2006. Download high resolution TIF Wealth In 1962, the wealth of the richest one percent of U.S. households was roughly 125 times greater than that of the typical household. By 2004, it was 190 times (EPI, State of Working America 2006-07, Figure 5B). The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation’s private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent. The top one percent also owns 36.9 percent of all corporate stock. (EPI, State of Working America 2006-07, Table 5.1 and Figure 5F). The total inflation-adjusted net worth of the Forbes 400 rose from $470 billion in 1995 to $1.25 Trillion in 2006. (Arthur Kennickel, Federal Reserve Board, Currents and Undercurrents: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth, 1989-2004 (pdf) and Forbes Magazine.) The U.S. Personal Savings Rate declined from 11.2 percent in 1982 to NEGATIVE 1.1 percent in 2006. (Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 2.1) Source: 1989-2004: Arthur B. Kennickell, “Currents and Undercurrents: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth, 1989-2004,” Federal Reserve Board, Jan. 30, 2006, Table 1. 2005-06: Forbes.com. Download high resolution TIF Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 2.1, Personal Income and Its Disposition. Download high resolution TIF

WORK SUCKS ?

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Here’s a good column from the August 2, 2009, New York Times by economist Paul Krugman. It’s on the latest excesses of some of the more rapacious of our major banks:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/opinion/03krugman.html

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to which one smart commentator responded thus:

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8.
George O’Conner
Paris
August 3rd, 2009
6:14 am
“Fascinating read Prof. Krugman. Why do we allow this happen? I understand it is hard to write a good enough law to stop it, but they should at least try. It is unfathomable that they don’t.
In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude La Boetie says: “For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him…” (The quote is too long to continue it here but it continues in an interesting discussion on Pandalous on voluntary servitude of hostesses).
I think the reason we allow this to happen is we feel weak. Each person alone is weak. We see the hugeness of what we are facing, but not the hugeness of all of us together. We get upset, but we feel powerless in face of such prowess.”
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Mr. O’Conner’s answer probably goes a long way toward answering a question I put to a friend recently:
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“Having lived a more normal life than me, what do you think of Thoreau’s famous saying,

‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation’?

I believe I see signs of that desperation in many of the people imprisoned with me in that big state office building downtown. Many of them/us do unimaginably boring clerical duties. In addition, the place is run like a prison camp. You are never consulted as they move you around physically, and in terms of administrative placement, at will. And they do so often, and for no good reason beyond mere whim.

Few of the workers ever resist these arbitrary changes. It is the oddest thing! We have civil service status and so are not easily fired, yet we all consent to be treated like emotionless tools. I am tentatively guessing that this incongruity is due to the fact that this is the deep South, where most people have never worked in a union setting, with a shop steward to complain to, etc. In addition, this is a very poor state, and these jobs are oppressive but fairly secure.

So the cubicle dwellers only know one model of employment — strictly a paternalistic one, requiring unquestioning obedience from employees, especially low-level ones like me.

But I’ve seen attorneys who work there treated in essentially the same way!

The convention of daily interaction is that the boss speaks to you respectfully, but it is exclusively at his discretion whether, beyond how he speaks to you, he takes any pains to consider what you need or want.

And this is America, the self-proclaimed land of individualism and “freedom”. The irony is immense.

Since I normally want things just the way I like them, I am constantly becoming miserable over this extraordinary supine employee behavior.

I wonder if things are different in a small office/organization?”

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I didn’t get any answer from my friend. I suspect the answer is too obvious to need stating. But I’m a bit dense about things like this. Can anyone out there give me a bit of clarification?

Is it, “I have to work to live, so I have to put up with a certain amount of shit.”?

Is it, “Hey, stop being a mope! That’s just the way life is.”?

What other reasons are there, folks?

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KNOWLEDGE v. NO-NOTHINGISM

People on the Right have been known to scare us into doing dumb things (Think Iraq war!). A sad current  example of that practice is discussed in the article referenced below. The article explodes the myth that some on the Right have recently created about this one doctor and the larger issues he has taken positions on. The article also explains succinctly why scaring folks works so well so often.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090812/us_time/08599191583500

And, no, the “Frightening” that the Right has used in the health care debate and elsewhere is NOT paralleled on the Left by warnings about global warming. The difference is that our warnings of global warming are based on the work of LOTS of reputable scientists, while, at least in the case of the doctor discussed above, the Frightening practiced by the Right has generally been accomplished by distorting the facts.

For an authoritative look at the science behind global warming, visit the site of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

http://www.ipcc.ch/

I always give scientists at least the benefit of the doubt, and I usually believe them when their pronouncements make sense in light of the moderate-to-good scientific knowledge I have.

I grew up in a world where extreme moralists were incessantly claiming to speak authoritatively about every aspect of life–from what happens to people after death to whether dancing should be prohibited.

I was troubled by all this hectoring, because I was serious about being a responsible guy, and I wanted to know who to believe. Then I learned about the scientific method and I realized that scientist don’t just make up their pronouncements or take them from ancient books. Instead, scientists actually TEST their hypotheses with real-world experiments, and change their ideas when experimental results require.

And then there is the fact that the child of science, technology, routinely produces new, wonderful things that we can each test for ourselves, and in the process  see the device’s underlying scientific theory  actually working, often spectacularly,  in the real world.

Since its inception around four hundred years ago, experimental science has increasingly routed the practitioners of the traditional “our ancestors believed it so it must be true” school of analysis.

What a relief for any thinking person!

KNOWLEDGE v. NO-NOTHINGISM: UPDATE

A journalist has done a good job finding the people who started the “death panel” nonsense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/policy/14panel.html?_r=1&hp

Republicans, and especially conservatives, have specialized in scaring people at least since the 1980s, most memorably in the “Willie Horton” scare that helped to defeat Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign.

The Wikipedia article on “Willie Horton” is informative:

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

The misrepresentation concerning Horton and Dukakis was intentional on the part of the Republicans. Look for the name “Lee Atwater” in the Wikipedia article.

I’ve seen this kind of scare tactic used repeatedly by Republicans over my 61 years. Each time the Big Scare is successful I am amazed that people could believe the lie of the moment. Lots of Americans are either stupid and ignorant, I once concluded.

But I think I was unfair in that. Americans can only know the information they’re given. We have a poor education system, and above all a set of media that almost always goes for the most sensational story, and seldom bothers any more to provide background on anything. Go to the websites for major European media, like the BBC (England),  Deutsche Welle (Germany),  and Radio Nederland (Holland), and read and listen for a while. You’ll see the difference.

Why this difference? Why its our old friend PROFIT, of course. In the 1980s and ’90s, as all of US society became much more business-oriented, owners of big media began to adopt the idea that their News Division should become profit centers — no longer the unprofitable public service that they had once been. More profit requires more viewers. More viewers are gotten by showing or printing more sensational,  and less informative, material in the News.

That means there’s not much time for facts in our most of media anymore. It’s as simple as that.

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UPDATE:

“Two minds with but a single thought”:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sue-wilson/its-war-media-war_b_256115.html

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ANOTHER UPDATE:

Another interesting reaction to this story: This one is by the feisty economist / Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/opinion/14krugman.html

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PARTING SHOT:

Democratic politicians consistently fail to anticipate the viciousness and sneakiness of Republican attacks (with the notable exception of Mr. Obama in the last election). My favorite theory as to why most Democrats are so dense on this subject is that they fail to step back and take an analytical — in fact, anthropological –, approach to the problem.

If you don’t step outside the American Cultural Box and look at its rather jumbled contents dispassionately, you are likely to consistently miss the fact that Republican laissez faire economics overlap to a degree the most basic form of the foundational myth of American culture, namely the “American dream” (which says that ANYONE who works hard enough can access the opportunities the USA offers and thus become affluent or wealthy.)

If I am poor but believe with almost religious fervor that one day I’m going to be rich, then I won’t be grateful if you create social programs to make the life of the poor easier. I don’t expect to be in that wretched group long enough to enjoy such programs!

And if you tax the rich to pay for such things, then I’m really gonna be pissed off. That’s my future income you’re taking!

You just can’t trifle with a society’s foundational myth without sparking a lot of righteous anger….

Except at those rare times when lots of people wake up and realize that said myth is probably never going to come true in their lives. That happened on a massive scale in the Great Depression. It happened again to a lesser degree during the Viet Nam War in the ’60s — when a lot of draftable young men took notice of the fact that the war could very well kill them before they could even begin their climb toward wealth.

It may be happening again today. Working people may be waking up and noticing the true grimness of their futures in current America. See my post below titled “So THAT’S Why You Both Have to Work!”

This unpleasant awakening from the deteriorating American Dream may be why a lot of people voted Democrat last year.

And it may also be why this year a lot of other people are mobbing health care discussion forums and chanting, “Give us our America back!”

They are in the anger stage of mourning.

WEEKEND SNIPPETS

1. Opponents of Health Care Reform starting to flail around, looking for anything about it that can possibly be made to seem threatening.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1916589,00.html?xid=rss-topstories-cnnpartner

2. The mendacity of their last effort highlighted by one of the Big Boys:

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/08/13/oh-those-death-panels/

2. All power to the pornographers!

You might need to have grown up in the Bible Belt back in the 1960s to find this little porn story delightful:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1916567,00.html?iid=tsmodule

HEALTH CARE REFORM HUMOR

The American Medical Association has weighed in on the new Obama health care proposals.

The Allergists voted to scratch it, but the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves.  TheGastroenterologists had sort of a gut feeling about it, but the Neurologists thought the Administration had a lot of nerve.

The Obstetricians felt they were all laboring under a misconception.  Ophthalmologists considered the idea shortsighted.  Pathologists yelled, “Over my dead body!” while the Pediatricians said, “Oh, Grow up!”

The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, while the Radiologists could see right through it.  Surgeons decided to wash their hands of the whole thing.  The Internists thought it was a bitter pill to swallow, and the Plastic Surgeons said, “This puts a whole new face on the matter….”

The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists were pissed off at the whole idea.  The Anesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and the Cardiologists didn’t have the heart to say no.

In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision up to the asses in Washington .

hEALTH CARE ALARMISTS’ INCONSISTENCIES

HERE’S AN INFORMATIVE COMMENT I GOT TO A RECENT POST

It Deserves Highlighting:

Submitted on 2009/08/16 at 6:30pm Who ARE these “death panel” people? Nincompoops and lamebrains ??? Its obviously a scare tactic used by the republicans…insurance companies, hospitals and HMOs already use terms like “End of Life” to describe this consultation…Blue Cross, Humana, Catholic Healthcare West, Kaiser Permanente, they all use it!!! It’s as if these halfwit GOP sheep just started looking into healthcare for the first time in their lives….of course they could be just flamin’ hypocrites like Sarah Palin, who now hysterically cries out “death panels” despite the fact that she declared a “Healthcare Decisions Day” in Alaska just a little over a year ago. “WHEREAS, Healthcare Decisions Day is designed to raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions, related to end of life care and medical decision-making whenever patients are unable to speak for themselves and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important healthcare decisions. WHEREAS, in Alaska, Alaska Statute 13.52 provides the specifics of the advance directives law and offers a model form for patient use. WHEREAS, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of people in Alaska have executed an advance directive. Moreover, it is estimated that less than 50 percent of severely or terminally ill patients have an advance directive. WHEREAS, it is likely that a significant reason for these low percentages is that there is both a lack of knowledge and considerable confusion in the public about Advance Directives. WHEREAS, one of the principal goals of Healthcare Decisions Day is to encourage hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, continuing care retirement communities, and hospices to participate in a statewide effort to provide clear and consistent information to the public about advance directives, as well as to encourage medical professionals and lawyers to volunteer their time and efforts to improve public knowledge and increase the number of Alaska’s citizens with advance directives. WHEREAS, the Foundation for End of Life Care in Juneau, Alaska, and other organizations throughout the United States have endorsed this event and are committed to educating the public about the importance of discussing healthcare choices and executing advance directives. WHEREAS, as a result of April 16, 2008, being recognized as Healthcare Decisions Day in Alaska, more citizens will have conversations about their healthcare decisions; more citizens will execute advance directives to make their wishes known; and fewer families and healthcare providers will have to struggle with making difficult healthcare decisions in the absence of guidance from the patient. NOW, THEREFORE, I, Sarah Palin, Governor of the state of Alaska, do hereby proclaim April 16, 2008, as: Healthcare Decisions Day in Alaska, and I call this observance to the attention of all our citizens.” Dated: April 16, 2008

BACK ON MY HOBBYHORSE!

HERE’S A GUY WHO’S AS MAD AS I AM ABOUT

WHAT WE’VE BECOME.

(And he’s on the front line–out there in the world of the young and  still hopeful, unlike me.)

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“Dr. Krugman’s nuanced assessment is correct, but regardless of the details, the US economy faces serious danger that will not easily be overcome. That’s because the true basis of the economic catastrophe here is cultural— the undermining of compassion, fair play, and the most basic sense of proportion in favor of outrageous greed, viciousness, and corruption in high places. Our economy is now a cruel, exploitative, predatory system of excessive crony capitalism.

As an old engineering professor, I’m on the front lines of this horrific debacle— my field has been eviscerated with particular ferocity. I teach a young American generation condemned to dismal indentured servitude- outsourcing and the H1B have decimated engineering in North America, since foreign grads, as in India, finish schooling with little debt and much lower cost-of-living.

My students by contrast, are inevitably saddled with staggering debt in their grueling years of training. Those drowning in student loans are “lucky”— if they also suffer injury, auto accident or crime (as victims, not perpetrators), then the vultures in our corrupt financial, health care and legal systems prey upon them relentlessly, reducing them to virtual serfdom (aggravating our recession by draining capital away from consumers and true producers). The brightest graduates suffer the most, and if they slip at any point, rather than being helped, they’re kicked harder and harder while down— apparently the highest “virtue” in our plutocratic Potemkin economy. As a further insult, they are confronted with usurious interest rates and then denied employment due to their credit ratings and unavoidable debt just to be trained— practices so outrageous, they are harshly punished as felonies elsewhere in the world.

Unsurprisingly, my students vote with their feet— by the spring of 2009, 40% were inclined to emigrate from the USA. They leave for engineering hubs like Korea, Japan, China, Belgium, Holland, Germany, France or Sweden, but also places like South America. Why? These are far better places to raise kids, and they cherish talent and creativity rather than squandering human capital in the neo-feudalism that now rules the USA. Only Britain and Australia suffer similar brain drains, mainly since they have adopted much of our own brand of neoliberalism and predatory capitalism.

My parents, immigrants to the USA decades ago, would weep if they saw what we have become. For young engineers, the future global languages of our field (and the sciences in general) will be Chinese and German, and anyone in the field would be well-advised to learn one (or both) of them to technical standard, write your papers and even found journals in them, whether or not you emigrate.

Commonsense and maddeningly obvious reforms, thus far stifled, are needed at once for these outrages and excesses that have stolen so much from the American populace. Our moneyed elites fail to realize that revolutions have started over far less.”

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This post is to New York Times column of Paul Krugman of 8-28-09, and may be found here:

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/opinion/28krugman.html?permid=7#comment7

LEARN ALL ABOUT WHAT MAKES OUR ECONOMY TICK—IN ONE POST

I KNOW, ITS THE “DISMAL SCIENCE”, BUT THIS GUY IS ALSO A GREAT WRITER

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?pagewanted=8&_r=1&hp

The greatest thing I’ve learned over my 61 years of life is that if you think you’re totally right, you have just become wrong.

The above url leads to a clear description of how the immense example of this truth that all of us have just undergone came to be. Check it out!

DECEPTION ON THE HORIZON

Conservatives haven’t given up trying to kill the remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society–i.e., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare (what’s left of it), Food Stamps, and maybe even unemployment compensation.

In the coming 20 or so years, as the baby boomers (one of whom I am) age and die, Conservatives can be expected to step up that struggle, since only people boomer age and older remember the kinder world America was before the Reagan Age.

And when we consider that everyone who turned, say, 15, in 1980 when Regan was elected is 44 now, those conservatives might succeed handily. I believe that most people absorb their basic political assumptions around the time they develop favorite songs — and then remain loyal to them for a lifetime.

The best way to kill all those New Deal and Great Society programs, of course, is to pretend to be a pragmatist and declare that we can’t afford them. Here’s one of the first such  shots over the New Deal’s bow:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opinion/08brooks.html

And here are the three liberal arguments in response (which ought to work but may not, given the aforementioned loyalty humans have to stuff imbibed as teenagers):

1. It’s Republicans — largely that last, most inept President — who have been the most wasteful:

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opinion/08brooks.html?permid=3#comment3

and

http://www.skymachines.com/US-National-Debt-Per-Capita-Percent-of-GDP-and-by-Presidental-Term.htm

2. Hey, why don’t  we cut that huge military budget first?

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opinion/08brooks.html?permid=6#comment6

(The US military budget is now about 1/2 of all the military spending in the world combined.)

and, finally, liberals should make the following point, which would be unanswerable but for the existence of the strange doctrine of American exceptionalism:

3. How come all the major European countries can have lots more benefits for their people then the USA does, and they don’t build up huge deficits?

See my earlier post, “Is it True What They Say About Sweden”, here:

http://nightman1.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/is-it-true-what-they-say-about-sweden/

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The answer to liberals’ question number 3 is implied in question number 2, about our mad continuation of the military spending that our government, and especially conservatives, justified during the Cold War as necessary to deter the Evil Empire…

…and then just kept up, unabated, for some strange reason, indefinitely.

Even if we need a strong army to fight in Afghanistan and future similar places full of Muslims who hate us, we don’t need all those super weapons we bought to deter the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear war or a conventional State v. State war. These are two very different kinds of war, requiring different approaches. Fighting irregular troops like the Taliban requires boots on the ground, and only enough air power to maintain control of the air, which is pretty easy when dealing with folks who don’t have an airforce. We don’t need a new line up of super-duper and super-expensive airplanes, missiles, etc., every few years.

But hey, we need to keep those defense contractors fat and happy, right?

AN EASY WAY TO DO SOME GOOD

Hello, Honored Reader of My Blog,

If you or someone you care about has had a brush with one of the many disasters that can be caused by our current health care system*, then you know it needs to be changed. Here’s any easy way to try to get it changed. Go to the site given below and sign a letter that will be sent to your representatives in Washington in your name.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hcsignon/?returnlink=false

There’s a place there to add your own personal comment to be sent the the Representative or Senator. Here’s what I wrote:

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to give US citizens something EVERY OTHER FIRST WORLD COUNTRY provides for its citizens. I recently heard in a radio discussion that even the Czech Republic has national health care! I am an old guy, and I know how much a person can find to regret at this time of life. I truly believe that if you successfully oppose President Obama’s health care plan you will come to regret it when you’re in your 60s like me. A lot of people will suffer and die** for want of medical care they can’t afford if things go on unchanged.”

But you say whatever you want. It’s a chance to be heard — maybe even a way to counter all those ridiculous excesses we saw at some congresspersons’ town meetings over the summer.

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*Bankruptcy caused by uninsured doctors’ bills may be the most common. How many sad notes requesting a donation to help pay for, say, a battle against cancer have you seen in your workplace over the years? I’ve seen plenty. Why should people fighting a terrible disease have to fight with insurers and bill collectors at the same time?

•• See, for example, THIS: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13kristof.html

NUTRITION INFORMATION THAT’S EASY TO SWALLOW

This is such an important subject, but like anything that’s “good for you” it’s hard to concentrate on. You guys out there should find it easy to concentrate on THIS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZlVpthaYEs&feature=channel_page

ONE ANACHRONISTIC WEAPON DOWN…

AND THOUSANDS TO GO!

The story of the recent cancellation of the F-22 fighter plane:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/215825?from=rss

This weapons system was conceived in the 1980s during the Cold War to go up against the finest fighters the militaristic Soviet Union could create. It was a plane built to achieve air supremacy in a major conventional war between large, technologically-sophisticated nations with huge military budgets.

The Soviet Union went away in 1991. We took delivery on the first of these planes in 2003. Congress recently capped procurement of the planes at 187 units after a big fight.

Here’s how much the F-22 cost the USA, all told:

“By the time all 183 fighters have been purchased, $34 billion will have been spent on actual procurement, resulting in a total program cost of $62 billion or about $339 million per aircraft. The incremental cost for one additional F-22 is around $138 million;^[18] decreasing with larger volumes.^[16]“

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor

Who needs universal health care? We have super-duper fighter planes!

BEYOND THE MAGIBON SCHOOL

Just as cute, and she is also funny, and getting funnier every day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oplx7rNG7do

HEARTBREAK NUMBER 1

Herewith the song of my very first heartbreak.

At age 16 it was devastating.

Please ignore the lame stagecraft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSAvVRgHzl8

HE’S A BETTER SPOKESMAN FOR MY POLITICS THAN I AM!

Not only is he clearly very  smart — of course! because he agrees with me — he’s also handsome:

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